The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

“Captain Moreau’s a puppet. Literally. The body you saw was just being tele-operated by orbital disciples. They murdered the Ultras; commandeered the ship.”

“Rafael… Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

“My position was too vulnerable. I was the only anti-Ormazd agent my movement managed to put aboard the Voice of Evening. If I’d attempted to warn the Turquoise authorities… Well, work it out for yourself. Almost certainly I wouldn’t have been believed, and the disciples would have found a way to silence me before I became an embarrassment. And it wouldn’t have made a difference to their takeover plans. My only hope was to destroy the ocean, to remove its usefulness to them. They might still have destroyed your cities out of spite, but at least they’d have lost the final thread that connected them to their martyr.” Weir leaned closer to her. “Don’t you understand? It wouldn’t have stopped with the disciples aboard the Voice. They’d have brought more ships from Haven. Your ocean would have become a production line for despots.”

“Why did they hesitate, if they had such a crushing advantage over us?”

“They didn’t know about me, so they lost nothing by dedicating a few weeks to intelligence gathering. They wanted to know as much as possible about Turquoise and the Jugglers before they made their move. They’re brutal, but they’re not inefficient. They wanted their takeover to be as precise and surgical as possible.”

“And now?”

“They’ve accepted that things won’t be quite that neat and tidy.” He flipped the globe from one palm to another, with a casual playfulness that Naqi found alarming. “They’re serious, Naqi. Crane will stop at nothing now. You’ve seen those blast flashes. Pinpoint antimatter devices. They’ve already sterilised the organic matter within the Moat, to stop the effect of my weapon from reaching farther. If they know where we are, they’ll drop a bomb on us as well.”

“Human evil doesn’t give us the excuse to wipe out the ocean.”

“It’s not an excuse, Naqi. It’s an imperative.”

At that moment something glinted on the horizon, something that was moving slowly from east to west.

“The shuttle,” Weir said. “It’s looking for us.”

Naqi scratched her arm again. It was discoloured, itching.

***

Near local noon they reached the next node. The shuttle had continued to dog them, nosing to and fro along the hazy band where sea met sky. Sometimes it appeared closer, sometimes it appeared farther away. But it did not leave them alone, and Naqi knew that it would only be a matter of time before it detected a positive homing trace, a chemical or physical trace in the water that would lead to its quarry. The shuttle would cover the remaining distance in a matter of seconds, a minute at the most, and then all that she and Weir would know would be a moment of cleansing whiteness, a fire of holy purity. Even if Weir released his toxin just before the shuttle arrived it would not have time to dissipate into a wide enough volume of water to survive the fireball.

So why was he hesitating? It was Mina, of course. Naqi’s sister had given a name to the faceless library of stored minds he was prepared to erase. She had removed the one-sidedness of the moral equation, and now Weir had to accept that his own actions could never be entirely blameless.

“I should just do this,” he said. “By hesitating even for a second, I’m betraying the trust of the people who sent me here, people who have probably been tormented to extinction by Ormazd’s followers.”

Naqi shook her head. “If you didn’t show doubt, you’d be as bad as the disciples.”

“ You almost sound as if you want me to do it.”

She groped for something resembling the truth, as painful as that might be. “Perhaps I do.”

“Even though it would mean killing whatever part of Mina survived?”

“I’ve lived in her shadow my entire life. Even after she died… I always felt she was still watching me, still observing my every mistake, still being faintly disappointed that I wasn’t living up to all she had imagined I could be.”

“You’re being harsh on yourself. Harsh on Mina too, by the likes of things.”

“I know,” Naqi said angrily. “I’m just telling you how I feel.”

The boat edged into a curving inlet that pushed deep into the node. Naqi felt less vulnerable now: there was a significant depth of organic matter to screen the boat from any sideways-looking sensors that the shuttle might have deployed, even though the evidence suggested that the shuttle’s sensors were mainly focussed down from its hull. The disadvantage was that it was no longer possible to keep a constant vigil on the shuttle’s movements. It could be on its way already.

She brought the boat to a halt and stood up from her control seat.

“What’s happening?” Weir asked.

“I’ve come to a decision.”

“Isn’t that my job?”