The drug gabber has the effect of unspooling memories so they collect at the base of the brain in a homogenous soup. Paradoxically, though, the effect is strongest with recent memories. The last few months, the last few years become a curtain you’ve just stepped through, faintly translucent but hiding all detail – which is what makes gabber the panacea of choice for soldiers coming out of battle.
But the effect isn’t uniform. There are always some moments, some memories, that stand out more vividly, and they can then become triggers for other memories that have faded or slipped.
Staring at Moon Sostenti across a scarred, stained table in the base canteen took Essien back to the moment in his prison cell when she removed her helmet and he saw her face for the first time. The memory came with a freight of strong emotion – the terror he had felt back then, the near certainty that he was going to die – and since strong emotion is the strongest retrieval cue of all, a flood of other memories came in on the back of that first one.
This was why he was so quiet when Moon was trying to sell him on the raid. His past was coming back into focus for the first time in years, and the effect was disorienting. He felt as if he was watching himself from a distance, like a character in a drama or a documentary that was playing on someone else’s array. There was a disconnect between who he had been and who he was now, and he didn’t have the equipment to join the two together again.
Would going back to Lagos – even if it was the wrong Lagos – fill in the blank spaces the drug had left in his brain and make him whole again? And if it did, who would he be?
When he told Moon yes, it was because a conviction had come over him that the answer to that question might actually matter.
In any case there was no time for second thoughts. He had a little over two hours to collect what he needed, which was mostly a few trail rations. As soon as he and Moon were off-duty for the day they grabbed their Sa-Sus, their packs and a four-wheel drive from the motor pool and headed out of camp, ostensibly to the rec station but actually on the first leg of a thousand-mile journey. Moon had forged travel papers for them that said they were transferring to another base on the continent’s north-western coast – a base that stood within a few miles of Topaz FiveHills’ origin and destination, the city known on Ut as Canoplex, on both Essien’s and Hadiz’s worlds as Lagos and on their destination world as Lago de Curamo.
“Got one stop to make on the way, though,” she told Essien. “To pick up the rest of the team.”
“They’re in-world already?”
“Nope. They’re Stepping in.”
“How will they do that? Any base we go to, the Step plates will be locked down tight.”
“Not a problem,” Moon assured him. “The little weasel’s got his own.”
The unauthorised Step would be logged, of course. There would be an investigation and all their movements would retrospectively be tracked. However this came out, there was no way they could worm or bluff their way out of any of it. Make or break, Moon said. They would come out on top or not come out at all. She grinned as she said it, as though there was something to savour in that thought.
Essien could see her point. Make or break was only a frightening proposition until you’d already been broken.