knowing for sure that you were who you thought you were. It felt clean. On the other hand, a lot of people, most of whom she knew and had trusted her, had lost that innocence because she had fucked up. Maybe it was time for her to show she could take it, so that she could look them in the eye again. The third, and oddly enough the most conclusive, was the thought of more dreary trudging or phoning around the exchanges and more scornful looks from freelancers. This was the first person she’d met who thought one of the jobs was feasible and wanted to take it on.
‘All right,’ she said, her mind suddenly made up and immediately quailing, ‘let’s do it or die trying.’
‘It’s “and” not “or,” my dear,’ said Johnstone. He raised his drink. ‘Good health.’
After they clinked glasses he became instantly businesslike. ‘Who else do you have on the team?’
‘You’re the first,’ Carlyle admitted.
‘That’s good,’ he said, to her surprise. ‘It means we’re not cluttered up with artillerymen, grunts, scientists, and such, all quite redundant on this exercise. You’d have had to stand them down anyway. You, me … the pilot comes with the ship, fine, I presume you can hire one for a quick in-and-out’—Carlyle nodded—‘and one more person. A heavy-duty crane operator with archaeology experience and a death wish.’
‘A tall order.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ said Johnstone. ‘I know someone who’s just the ticket. You’ve come to the right place.’
He stood up, quite steadily considering how much he’d drunk, and threaded his way among the tables. He returned with the silver-haired woman from the window. Her face too was silvery, as though coated with aluminium powder. Her eyes were cameras, but more cosmetically effective and emotionally responsive than Johnstone’s.
‘Morag Higgins,’ she introduced herself, shaking hands and smiling. Teeth like steel. She sat down and helped herself to the single malt.
‘I know who you are,’ she added, raising a glass. ‘Well met, Carlyle. Your reputation precedes you.’
‘Not a very good one, at the moment.’
‘It is to me,’ said Higgins. Her metallic teeth glinted again. ‘I’m well up for a suicide mission. It’s the only way I can afford a backup and a resurrection.’
‘Why do you need one? If you don’t mind me—’
Higgins waved away the apology. She drew a finger across her throat, at the line between the silvery skin and the rest.
‘Last mission I was on—another pulsar planet as it happens, PSR B1257+12 c, the one in Virgo—I wandered off on my own.’ She tossed her silver hair back; it made a hissing noise as it settled. ‘All right, all right, I’m a lightning-chaser. I admit it.’ She swallowed some whisky, smiled wryly at Johnstone. ‘ “My name is Morag Higgins, and I’m a Rapture-fucker.” I got … infected. Optic-nerve hack, absolute classic, should never have fallen for… . Anyway. Then it makes me open up, some kind of needle gets in, right. Hours later I wander back sounding very strange. Team leader—one of your lot, Jody Carlyle her name was—she blows my fucking head off. End of story. Except it isn’t. Whatever it was had taken a backup of me, and stored it outside my head. Which it also had a memory of.’ She tapped her face with the glass. It rang. ‘
Carlyle felt as if her own head had turned hollow and hard. The room went cold and dim for a moment. She fought down a dry heave. A long slug of whisky burned along her throat and warmed her belly and brought some blood back to her brain.
‘Losing heads seems to be an environmental hazard on pulsar planets,’ she said, toughing it out. ‘Ever wonder if your other body’s still headless, Johnstone?’
‘I have indeed,’ he said. ‘I guess we’ll find out, huh?’
T
he DK Interests Section in New Glasgow maintained a quantum-entanglement comms link to the nearest branch of the Shipyard Twenty-Nine production brigade. Carlyle held out for expenses, which she had carefully costed: as well as the lead shielding, surprisingly expensive, there were the usual crew pay, backups and insurance, the hire of a ship. Normally that was implicit in the contract price, but you couldn’t be too careful with DK. To her surprise they agreed straight away, and topped her opening bid with an offer to pay 5% up front. She walked out of the building with a thick wad of AO kilodollars which every few minutes she checked again until she was sure they weren’t about to turn into dry leaves.
Sorting out the hire of a ship and the installation of the shielding took another couple of days, after which they were ready to go as soon as they’d all taken a last-minute backup. At the drily named Terminal Clinic just outside the gate complex the tech balked at first over Higgins; Carlyle frowned him down. He was just being awkward, she pointed out: reading a chip had to be easier than reading a brain. She tried to put the momentary unpleasantness from her mind as her own reading was taken. As always, it was overridden by the poignancy of such occasions, routine though they were; a feeling of sorrow for the person who would be resurrected, not the self who would have died. It was like seeing yourself in an old photograph. If they were lucky, they’d all make it back alive, take another backup and check out on a warm flood of heroin in the hospice ward. But they couldn’t bet on making it back. This might be her last saved self.
Outside she looked over her team. They could have been going on a skein hike. Not much food; this job was going to be quick or not at all. Suits, lights, emergency high-calorie rations, water, one Webster each just in case.
‘Keep the last cartridge,’ said Johnstone, stashing a charge, and Higgins laughed. They set off through the gate. Fifteen transitions later, they arrived at the planet where the ship waited. Beyond the terminal’s plate- diamond window it sat on a bright field under a black sky where only a vast circular occlusion of the stars showed the primary, a brown dwarf. They sealed their suits and trekked out through the airlock and across the field to the ship. Its name was lettered in stencil style on its side:
‘This’d better be worth it,’ he said, by way of greeting, as he fingered a jury-rigged control panel that looked like a games console. Carlyle flipped him what remained of her roll of advance money.
‘Call that a bonus,’ she said. ‘Lift and fittle, already.’
Johnstone patched him the coordinates. The pilot scrolled up the resulting stellar map, rolled his eyes upward, closed them for a moment in what might have been prayer, and fired up the drive. Twenty light-years and half an hour later, they were in the pulsar’s system. Another two hours of careful manoeuvring and they were at the site.
‘You really expect to die out there?’
‘No,’ said Carlyle stiffly. ‘We’ll just be walking dead when we come back on board. Like the zombies from the cities after the Big One. I’m sure your grandmother told you about them.’
The boy shivered. ‘Holy Koresh help you.’
‘Yeah,’ said Higgins nastily, ‘
J
ohnstone had guided the
