Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

“What do we do now, Sarge? Tag ’em for pickup?”

“Can’t. Orders. Prisoner pickup has to be cleared at the battalion level.”

Li remembered that particular order. Or thought she did. Good sharp solid block of soft memory of some blowhard bird colonel standing in the drop ship’s cavernous briefing room yakking on about crèche production schedules, and the impossibility of getting a draft resolution through the General Assembly in the current political climate, and how this was a war of attrition in which the key to victory was “draining the bathtub” faster than the Syndicates could fill it up again. Her lawyers, even the ones Cohen hired after she fired the idiot UNSec assigned her, hadn’t been able to dig up a shred of evidence that the guy had ever existed, let alone been deployed to Gilead. And when it came to he-said-she-said, machine memory beat meat memory every time.

“So what are we supposed to do if we can’t raise battalion? Take them with us? Gonna be like herding fucking cats. And there’s only eight of us.”

“Seven. Pradesh didn’t make it up the hill.”

Long pause there. Pradesh had been well liked.

“Has the medtech gone back to check on him?”

“Medtech didn’t make it up the hill either.”

Which feed was Li’s? The captain’s? The sniper’s? Had she been giving the orders that morning or just following them? If it had ever been possible to know, then the full-court press UNSec had put on for her court-martial had muddied her decohering memories beyond any hope of recovery.

She could just have been the sniper, she told herself for something like the eight thousandth time. She’d dropped into Gilead as a sniper. It was the best way to go to war if you had the skill and nerves for the job. You sat up above the carnage, too far away even to smell it if you were lucky. You did your breathing exercises, and you kept your trigger finger warm, and you let yourself float into the cool blue readout-flooded world behind your glareproof goggles. And if you were well and truly fucked up you could even convince yourself for pretty long stretches of time that you were just playing a bootleg beta release of a really kick-ass video game.

As long as the killing didn’t bother you.

Except that after a while the fact that the killing didn’t bother you started to bother you.

The shofar blew again. Li jumped as if someone had set off the air-raid sirens.

“You understand,” Ash said, “that this offer is off if you tell Cohen about it.”

“I guessed as much.”

Li knew what was supposed to happen next. Hell, she could have scripted the next scene single-handedly. She was supposed to protest that she couldn’t lie to Cohen. Ash was supposed to offer her justifications, excuses, and ultimately money. Li was supposed to say that the money didn’t matter, that it was a matter of principle. Then Ash was supposed to ask her to think about it, just think about it. Whereupon Li would agree. Reluctantly. Because of course she was almost completely entirely sure that she was going to have to say no…

All hypocritical nonsense when they both knew that everyone took the fall eventually.

And the money.

It was amazing how no one ever, ever, ever turned down the money.

“Fine,” Li said. “How long do I have to think about it?”

“As long as you want,” Ash said.

She offered the lie so sweetly that it was almost believable.

As Li stepped into the wet street, she almost collided with an old man hurrying home or to synagogue or to wherever normal people went on the last night of the year in Jerusalem.

“May you be inscribed in the Book of Life,” he said, bowing and touching a withered hand to his hat brim.

He couldn’t see her face, she realized; the lobby was too bright behind her, the street too dark; and the fine drizzle scattered the electric lights into a misty halo around her head and shoulders.

She returned the gesture, instinctively turning her wrist to hide the fine gunmetal-gray tracery of her wire job.

“May you be inscribed in the Book of Life,” she repeated numbly.

The only thing Arkady ever remembered about being interrogated by Turner was the vomiting.

“Tell me again?” he kept asking Osnat over the course of the next several days and nights.

And she kept repeating to him again and again, with a patience that seemed touchingly out of character, how they’d flown to Tel Aviv and landed on the roof of GolaniTech’s corporate headquarters in the research park over near the university’s science campus—surely he remembered all the grass? And the “little pipes coming out of the ground” (his words) which were called sprinklers and from which the Israelis actually threw water away every night.

Ash had come out to meet them herself. She’d been very nice, very polite. She’d apologized for the inconvenience, warned about possible side effects, which were supposed to be mild. And then she’d turned him over to Turner.

Arkady remembered none of it.

“Some of the talking drugs do mess with your memory. Supposedly the brain shuts down to protect itself, same as after a strong head blow. But nothing like this. Either you’re a lot more biochemically tweaked than the average UN construct, or it’s interfering with some prior conditioning.” She gave him a dark look. “That’s what Turner seemed to think. He got pretty steamed about it. Wanted to know what Korchow had done to you, and why.”

“Did I say?”

Osnat snorted. “You were a fucking zombie. If Korchow meant to rig you not to be able to talk under drugs, he did a pretty bang-up job of it. Maybe too bang-up. You don’t want to be drugproof, Arkady. Not in a world this fucking full of mean people.”

This sort of pronouncement was part and parcel of Osnat’s new attitude toward Arkady, which seemed to be best summed up by the proposition that he was in need of some seriously fierce mothering whether he wanted it or not.

He knew it didn’t mean anything. He knew that Osnat and Moshe were running a good cop bad cop act on him. But it still worked. And he couldn’t stop it from working. In the absence of any other alternative, even a friendship founded on lies is better than solitude.

And in the meantime Arkady’s sense of isolation was broadening and deepening. Raised in the close-knit world of the Syndicates, he had never truly had to come to terms with solitude. Days passed during which he felt no point of contact with the world of living, thinking, feeling beings outside his prison cell, as if his skin were tens of thousands of kilometers wide and he was gazing at them across a Green Line of the heart that no touch, no words, no feeling could penetrate.

“So. Arkady. Answer a personal question for me.”

They were sitting in Arkady’s little cell over the remains of the two dinner trays Osnat had brought in from wherever the food came from. Osnat had taken to eating at least one meal a day with him most days. Again, Arkady knew it was part of a calculated plan to win his trust. And, again, it didn’t matter; it worked anyway. He was too lonely for it not to work.