him with hands visoring their eyes. He waggled the wings and aimed for the ocean.
Not that it was ever going to be that simple, of course. They had not been in the air for more than ten minutes when two airpods closed in, one on each side, pincering the Cessna with only a wing’s width to spare. Geoffrey took his eyes off the horizon just long enough to confirm that it was the cousins. They were flying in the same two machines that had been parked on the ground near Memphis’s body: Hector to starboard, Lucas to port.
‘I think they want to talk,’ Jumai said. ‘Someone keeps trying to push a figment through.’
‘They can fuck off. We’re long past the point of reasoned discussion.’ He had been rebuffing figment requests since he had taunted the cousins from the air. There was nothing he wanted to hear from them now.
‘They’re getting pretty close. I know airpods can’t collide with each other, but . . .’ She left the sentence hanging.
‘Don’t worry,’ Geoffrey said. ‘If they do anything that even
‘That’ll be a great consolation as they’re scooping me off the ground.’
‘We’re not going to crash. Anyway, this should be a walk in the park for you, the queen of high-risk data recovery. You laugh in the face of explosives and nerve gas.’
‘Geoffrey,’ a voice said, cutting through his thoughts like an icebreaker. ‘I’m sorry to use this channel, but you’ve left me with no option.’
‘Get out of my skull, Lucas.’
Jumai looked at him in dismay, not hearing the cousin.
‘I would,’ Lucas said, ‘if I thought you’d accede to communication through a more orthodox channel.’
‘What’s happening?’ Jumai asked.
‘Lucas has found a way into my head,’ Geoffrey said, having to shout to drown out the voice that was still droning on between his ears. ‘Don’t know how.’
He didn’t. Even Memphis couldn’t reach him when he didn’t want to be reached, and there was no reason to suppose that the cousins had any secret voodoo that offered them a back door into Geoffrey’s mind. They’d have used it already if that was the case, when they were trying to contact him about Memphis being killed.
‘It’s simple enough,’ Lucas was saying. ‘You’ve fled the scene of a high-level intervention before a risk- assessment team had the chance to interview you. The Mechanism takes a fairly dim view of that. They’d shut you down again if there wasn’t a risk of endangering both you and your hostage.’
‘She’s not my hostage,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Tell that to the authorities, cousin. The Mech’s given me direct-access privilege because I’m kin and I might be able to talk you out of making this worse for yourself.’
‘Well, you can tell them you tried. Now fuck off.’
‘Geoffrey, listen to me. We understand that this has been a difficult and emotional time for you, but don’t compound matters by behaving rashly.’
‘Don’t blame me, Lucas. You started this, by sending me to the Moon.’
‘There are things best left in the past,’ Lucas said. ‘If you cared about this family, and its obligations, you’d understand that. There are millions of people who depend on us, who depend on stability.’
‘Our stocks barely faltered, Lucas. Other than us, no one gives a shit about Eunice.’
‘Which is exactly why none of this is worth what you’re doing. She’s history, Geoffrey. A ghost.’
‘Leave it to the Mechanism. This isn’t your problem any more.’
He hadn’t expected Lucas to take him at his word, but after a few moments the cousins’ airpods peeled away, leaving the Cessna alone in the sky. Geoffrey was surprised at how shaken that left him feeling. He twisted around in his seat to watch the two vehicles dwindling aft.
‘Lucas is gone,’ he said softly.
‘There was nothing they could do,’ Jumai said. ‘You said it yourself – knocking us out of the sky was never an option.’
But eventually the Mechanism came, as he had always known it would. They were over the ocean by then, and the fuel warning had sounded three times. Two Civil Administration vehicles approached, official blue-and-whites garbed in aug-generated EAF and AU insignia, vectoring out to sea from Nairobi or maybe Mombasa, bigger and faster than the cousins’ airpods, blunt-hulled, stub-winged, barnacled with duct-fans, rhino-ugly with angular chiselled hull plates and the hornlike black protuberances of weapons systems. Quite something, in this day and age, to be confronted with such an overt display of peacekeeping authority. Geoffrey couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything like it, on Earth at least.
‘Maybe quitting the day job was a mistake,’ Jumai said.
‘They think you’re my hostage,’ Geoffrey said. ‘At least, that’s the stance they’ve decided to take, so I wouldn’t worry if I were you – they’re not going to say or do anything that might put you in danger.’
‘Until they dig around in my background and decide, hey, maybe his Nigerian ex-girlfriend might be an accomplice after all.’
‘They’re still not going to do anything stupid. I haven’t committed any crime. I just fled the scene of one I didn’t succeed in committing.’
‘Tell that to the judge.’ She was looking through the windows, jerkily alternating between starboard and port like someone following a vigorous tennis match. ‘I’ve seen some mean machinery in my time, Geoffrey, even driven some of it—’
