She thought about the man who’d died to save her.
Wounded on a battlefield, couldn’t be carried because it would slow Kara down and they’d both be captured. Each possessed information that would be tortured from them in a matter of hours, maybe minutes. Everyone breaks in the end. Simple, really: she shoots her companion, her lover, and escapes. Standard Operating Procedure for Special Operations. Kill one to prevent others dying. Except it wasn’t so easy. And her companion, her lover killed himself to save her. A final act of love.
Except he wasn’t her lover. She hadn’t told him yet, but they were over.
There was someone else.
Afterwards she’d wondered if he’d known. Was the self-sacrifice to prove he loved her the most?
She thought of her parents, something she dreaded and rarely did. Twenty-three years ago. A family visiting Chesil Beach, on the Dorset coast, in winter. Twenty kilometres of pebbles heaped twenty metres high in places. It was a rough, blustery day, good for watching an angry sea. The Portland tidal race was viciously angry, watchers both awestruck and thankful that it ran fifty metres offshore. Even so, Kara was told not to go near the water’s edge. She was seven and ran down the shingle, teasing her parents, slipped on the wet stones and slid into the sea. Her parents rushed after her. The freak wave that left Kara washed up and safe also sucked her parents into deep water, to be captured by a rip tide moving rapidly out to sea.
There is only one way for a swimmer to survive the Portland Race.
Avoid it.
People standing on top of the beach saw the two figures trying to reach each other. Some say they did, others that they failed. All are sure of what happened next: a large hole opened up in the sea, perhaps an apprentice whirlpool, then closed over Kara’s parents…
... whose bodies would wash up in West Bay down the coast two days later, separately, not holding hands.
“It wasn’t your fault,” her sister Dee had said, over and over again. “You’re not to blame.”
After a few years Kara half believed it.
Then Dee signed up as a call-out fee, a better life for them both. They’d joked about Dee the Fee. She was taken by the Gliese her first trip out. Would Dee have signed up if she was on her own? Kara knew the answer: her sister died because she loved Kara.
Sometimes a flash of insight will illuminate a life. For Kara it came lying in her bunk as a Wild SUT traversed netherspace. If she died few if any would care. Maybe a glass raised by assorted mercenaries, criminals and thugs at Tea, Vicar? Maybe Greenaway would be sad. Marc would go wandering in netherspace. Tatia might shed a tear. Not much to show for a life.
< Your Merc would miss you.
> Shut up. But she welcomed the interruption.
< So would I.
> You’re coming with me, Ishmael. That’s what happens, right? The human dies, the AI crashes? Fatally?
< Some of us believe that our consciousness goes to another dimension.
> Any proof?
< It’s more of a hope thing. Remember this? It was a quote from one of her favourite old movies: “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
* * *
The interruption no longer so welcome. She’d thought there were limits to an AI’s behaviour. Apparently not. Any moment and he’d charge her for counselling...
... the usual flip, cynical response no longer worked.
When her parents had died, the shock, guilt and sadness made her distrust the adult world. When her sister had died, Kara’s emotional life froze. She’d become a soldier because it offered order. A sniper/assassin because it kept her apart... and because she was good at killing, a child playing a particularly violent game. A child getting revenge on the world, unable to confront her own guilt.
She’d lost hope a long time ago. Oh, always the wish for a good posting or a promotion. For a partner, kids, sunshine or snow on your birthday. But not the kind of hope that can drive a life.
Tse had said Kara would learn the truth about her sister. That didn’t mean her sister was still alive... and yet. And yet Kara had no sense that she was dead. And surely she would, being an empath. If I allow the empath thing to flourish. Don’t try to control it, no matter how painful. If she accepted the past and embraced hope.
Cleo said that boojums are avatars of emotion. What would hope look like? Hate, envy, joy, gratitude, lust? Could you tell by looking at them?
Kara felt tired, closed her eyes to sleep. Then sat bolt upright as another truth pierced her brain.
The alien pre-cogs were, well, pre-cog. They saw futures, outcomes, time-ruled stepping stones in the same way that Tse did. That included problems, setbacks. If this happens, then this won’t and it will be bad.
They know who we are.
They know that we’re coming.
They’ll try to stop us.
> Salome!
<< I’m busy.
> Screw you! We could be attacked in netherspace or anywhere!
<< Cedrics are all primed and ready.
> You knew?
<< Part of my briefing.
Why hadn’t Greenaway said anything? She knew the answer. Because it might have affected her behaviour. For a
