Distress

'She's under guard. For what that's worth now.'

'And Buzzo?'

'Apparently his scan was clear.' De Groot snorted, angry and bewildered. 'He's unmoved by… all of this. He believes that Nishide simply died of natural causes, Violet has some harmless pollutant in her body, and your cholera analysis was some kind of forgery for the sake of a media beat-up. The only thing he seems worried about is how he's going to get home at the end of the conference if the airport is still closed.'

'But he has bodyguards—?'

'I don't know; you'd have to ask him that. Oh—and Violet asked him to give a media conference himself, announcing the flaw in his TOE. The antiviral drugs are debilitating; she's so nauseous that she can barely speak. Buzzo made some vague promise to her—but then he muttered something to me about looking at the issues more closely before he retracted anything. So I don't know what he'll do.'

I felt a stab of anger and frustration, but I said, 'He's heard all the evidence, it's his decision.' I didn't much want to think about Buzzo's enemies, myself. Sarah Knight's body hadn't even been found yet—but the possibility that her killer was on Stateless unnerved me more than anything else. The moderates had let me walk free, once they'd reasoned that they could still get what they wanted. The extremists had nearly killed me, once already—and they hadn't even been trying.

I said, 'Even if this weapon is about to go off at any moment… there's nothing anyone can do on Stateless that couldn't be done in an air ambulance. Right? And… surely your government would be willing to send a fully equipped military hospital jet—'

De Groot gave a hollow laugh. 'Yeah? You make it sound so easy. Violet has some friends in high places— and some sworn enemies… but most of all, a lot of fucking pragmatists who'll happily use her in whatever way they see fit. It would take a small miracle for them to weigh up the pros and cons, take sides, battle it out, and make a decision, all in one day—even if Stateless was at peace, and the jet could land right at the airport.'

'Come on! The whole island's as flat as a runway! Okay, it's soft at the edges, but there must be a… twenty-kilometer radius in which the ground is hard enough,'

'All within reach of a missile from the airport.'

'Yeah, but why should the mercenaries care about a medical evacuation? They must be expecting foreign navies to start moving in soon to take their nationals off the island. This is no different; it's just faster.'

De Groot shook her head sadly; she wanted to be convinced, but I wasn't making sense to her. 'Whatever you and I might think about the risks, it's just guesswork and wishful thinking. The government is still going to assess the situation from their own point of view—and they're not going to make a decision in thirty seconds. Tens of thousands of dollars for a mercy flight is one thing. A plane shot down over Stateless is another. And the last thing Violet—or any sane person—would want is three or four innocent people blown out of the sky for no reason.'

I turned away from her, and crossed to the window. From what I could see of the streets below, Stateless was still at peace. But whatever bloody havoc the mercenaries were planning… surely the last thing their employers wanted was a world-famous martyr for technoliberation?. That was why EnGeneUity had never really made sense as her would-be assassins: her death would be as bad for them as her highly publicized emigration.

It was a delicate proposition, though. What would they be admitting, if they made an exception for her? And which scenario would they consider most damaging to the anti-boycott push: the cautionary tale of Mosala's tragic death from a reckless flirtation with renegades—or the heart-warming story of survival when a mercy flight whisked her back into the fold (where every gene belonged to its rightful owner, and every disease had an instant cure)?

As yet, they probably didn't even know about the difficult choice they were facing. So it was up to whoever broke the news to sell them on the right decision.

I turned to De Groot. 'What if the mercenaries could be persuaded to guarantee safe passage for a rescue flight? To make a public statement to that effect? Do you think you could start things moving—on the chance of that?' I clenched my fists, fighting down panic. Did I have any idea what I was saying? Once I'd promised to do this, I couldn't back out.

But I'd already made a promise to swim faster.

De Groot looked torn. 'Violet hasn't even told Wendy or Makompo yet. And she's sworn me to silence. Wendy's on a business trip in Toronto.'

'If she can lobby from Cape Town, she can lobby from Toronto. And Violet's not thinking straight. Tell her mother everything. And her husband. Tell Marian Fox and the whole IUTP if you have to.'

De Groot hesitated, then nodded uncertainly. 'It's worth trying. Anything's worth trying. But how do you imagine we're going to get any kind of guarantee from the mercenaries?'

I said, 'Plan A is to hope very hard that they're answering the phones. Because I really don't want to have to walk into the airport and negotiate in person.'

Most of the island's center still appeared untouched by the invasion— but four streets away from the airport, everything changed. There were no barricades, no warning signs—and no people at all. It was early evening, and the streets behind me were abuzz, with shops and restaurants open for business just five hundred meters from the occupied buildings—but once I'd crossed that invisible line, it was as if Stateless had suddenly given birth to its own Ruins, an imitation in miniature of the dead hearts of the net-slain cities.

There were no bullets flying, this was not a war zone, but I had no experience to guide me, no idea of what to expect. I'd kept away from battlefields; I'd chosen science journalism happy in the knowledge that I'd never be required to film anything more dangerous than a bioethics conference.

The entrance to the passenger terminal was a wide rectangle of blackness. The sliding doors lay ten meters away, in fragments. Windows had been broken, plants and statues scattered; the walls were strangely scarred, as if something mechanically clawed had scaled them. I'd hoped for a sentry, signs of order, evidence of a coherent command structure. This looked more like a gang of looters were waiting in the darkness for someone to wander in.

I thought: Sarah Knight would have done this—for the story alone.

Yeah. And Sarah Knight was dead.

I approached slowly, scanning the ground nervously, wishing I hadn't told Sisyphus fourteen years before to lose all junk mail from weapons manufacturers looking for technophile journalists to provide free publicity for their glamorous new anti-personnel mines. Then again… there'd probably been no helpful tips in those media releases for avoiding being on the receiving end—short of spending fifty thousand dollars on the matching sweepers.

The interior of the building was pitch black, but the floodlights outside bleached the reef-rock white. I squinted into the maw of the entrance, wishing I had Witness to rejig my retinas. The camera on my right shoulder was virtually weightless, but it still made me feel skewed and misshapen—about as comfortable, centered, and functional as if my genitals had migrated to one kneecap. And—irrationally or not—the invisible nerve taps and RAM had always made me feel shielded, protected. When my own eyes and ears had captured everything for the digital record, I'd been a privileged observer right up to the moment of being disemboweled or blinded. This machine could be brushed off like a speck of dandruff.

I'd never felt so naked in my life.

I stopped ten meters from the empty doorway, arms stretched out and hands raised. I yelled into the darkness: 'I'm a journalist! I want to talk!'

I waited. I could still hear the crowds of the city behind me, but the airport exuded silence. I shouted again. And waited. I was almost ready to give up fear for embarrassment; maybe the passenger terminal was abandoned, the mercenaries had set up camp on the farthest corner of the runway, and I was standing here making a fool of myself to no one.

Then I felt a gentle stirring of the humid air, and the blackness of the entrance disgorged a machine.

I flinched, but stood my ground; if it had wanted me dead, I would never have seen it coming. The thing betrayed a flickering succession of partial outlines as it moved—faint but consistent distortions of the light which the eye seized upon as edges—but once it halted, I was left staring at nothing but afterimages and guesswork. A six-legged robot, three meters high? Actively computing my view of its surroundings, and programming an optically active sheath to match luminosities? No—more than that. It stood protruding halfway into