“This operation, turns out it was an assault on a secret facility, hidden up in the mountains, right on the Cal-Neva border. A data center. A lot of civilians got killed—”
“Wait,” Gold said. “Civilians?”
“Dozen or so,” Warren said. “Story was, a Chinese hit squad murdered them. But then I called another friend, an old pal from the academy, worked in the alphabet soup back in DC. High up.” She looked at Gold. “She had a different story. I had to peel it out of her, remind her of how well we got along back in the dorms, that sort of thing. But she told me.”
“What did she tell you?” Gold asked, looking out over the parapet. Shadows moved in the dappled moonlight, but they were just shadows. Shadows and memories like shadows. She remembered back to that night, not so long ago for her. Gunfire, rapid tap tap tap as she took out two, then three soldiers. Silver’s objections as she finished one. She sighed, frowning.
“She told me it wasn’t the Chinese who did it, that was the cover. They didn’t know who it was, and they were damn freaked out about it. A colonel, full-bird named Smith, had gone missing, with a full squad of special ops bruisers. He hooked up with another officer, name of Garcia. They picked up a target in the desert who didn’t have a name, but who knew this Garcia.” She looked over her shoulder at Gold. “Ring any bells?”
“Maybe,” Gold said. “This soldier, what happened to him?”
Warren laughed. “Really? That’s your question?”
“You’re not cleared to know any of this, Warren,” Gold said. “So don’t know it.”
“This is my patch, Gold or Garcia or whoever,” Warren said, an edge of ice in her voice. “I clawed this place out of the fucking ice. We bled for this.”
“Still not cleared. I have orders too, you know,” Gold said. Rely on military protocol, after over a thousand years for this woman. Gold could see the anger welling in Warren, her neck tensing, her fingers, pale in the moonlight, gripping the edge of the parapet.
“I could have you questioned, you know,” Warren said. “We’ve got people good at that.”
“Not surprised you do. Useful with the natives I imagine,” Gold said. She shook her head slowly. “I recommend against it.”
Warren laughed. “Show me your orders, then, Captain Garcia,” she snapped, “and then I’ll stop asking.”
“You know that isn’t how this works,” Gold said. “This works like this. I don’t answer your questions right now. Maybe, when my colleague Silver gets here,” Gold said. “Maybe then.”
“Harris said there were two of you, and you took out the whole team barehanded,” Warren said. “That was Silver?”
Gold stayed silent. Warren threw up her hands.
“What happened to this soldier?” Gold asked, hoping to mollify her.
“He was good. I recruited him.” She looked at Gold. “He’s on his way here.”
Gold laughed. “I look forward to meeting him again,” she said. “I hope he doesn’t have any hard feelings after all this time.”
Warren looked at her. “I hope not either,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to tangle with him.”
“Then I will not want to tangle with him either,” Gold said.
Warren took a deep breath. “I tried,” she said. She gave Gold a steely glare. “I’m not under your orders.”
“No,” Gold said. “On that we can agree.”
“Good,” Warren said, and spun on her heel. She left, pounding down the stairs.
Gold looked out over the little valley. It was lit with sentry fires and she could see patrols out, bearing torches. None of it would do any good. The Spider would strike when he would strike. She was almost past caring, but there was Li. The thought of her almost dying in her arms made her wince. Silly old woman.
There, that scent, stronger now. Gold stretched casually, then spun to face the shadows, her knife in her hand, held flat and low, ready to gut.
Silver stepped forward, out of the shadows. “Hey you, go easy with that thing,” she said, smiling.
Gold flowed into her arms, burying her head in Silver’s hair. She felt warm and dry and cold all at once. Again, a voice inside her head told her, the end of the beginning. Finally.
Chapter Forty
Li walked in three days. Gold had stayed with her. Three days after a wound which should have killed her. She had looked and seen the terrible gash the spider’s claw had torn in her. Her ribs, long and white and flecked with blood, had gleamed terribly at her from the wreckage of her side. She had been dying.
And now, days later, she was barely sore. It was magic. Gold could see it in her eyes. Did Gold do this? She tried to ask her, but she didn’t speak Gold’s language, and there had been no one to translate. Warren, the silver-haired commander, had been polite to her, but that was all. She had visited once, to see how she was doing, and then left, stomping off, all efficiency and purpose.
Li had gone to visit Truck, because Gold had, once she had realized Li could walk, encouraged her to come and visit. She kept saying “Truck, Truck,” until Li had gotten up and, leaning on Gold, gone to visit the big earthmover.
Truck had hooted and repeated her name a dozen times. She had promised him she would come visit tomorrow, and not to cause trouble. Truck had, surprising her, spoken a few words in Chinese to her.
“TRUCK STAYS, WAITS FOR LI,” Truck had said. She had blinked up at him and smiled, laughing. “OK OK OK OK.”
“When did he learn to talk?” She asked Gold, but Gold just smiled and shrugged and offered her arm, and she leaned on Gold as they went back to the little hospital. Li leaned against Gold, feeling the strength in the woman’s arm. She’d been wounded too, in the shoulder, from one of the stabbing thrusts of the spider’s legs. Gold had covered Li with her own body, trying to save her. She looked at the woman, tracing her hawklike nose with her eyes, her brown skin. Li felt a chill on her arms, gooseflesh prickling as she looked at Gold.
She smiled as Gold led her back to the little sickroom where she could rest. Li felt fine, more than fine, but Gold insisted, and so Li agreed, settling back against the pillows. She smiled at Gold again, and Gold sat on the edge of her bed. Li pointed at her shoulder, fingering the skin where the spider had pierced her.
Gold pressed her hand there, pressing her palm atop hers. It’s OK, she tried to tell her. Tried to show her. She poked the pink flesh where the wound had been, healed already, just slightly sore. You are like me now, Gold thought, wishing she could explain. Explain how she felt, explain a lot of things. Explain about Silver. That was looming, but she pushed it away.
She stiffened as she heard footsteps in the hall. Boots. Warren entered, flanked by two men. One was tall, with red hair. Li looked at him, having never seen hair like this before. It stood out from the top of his head in a wild snake's nest of ropes. The other was Kolton, the woman who had led them here. Kolton kept her hood up on over her head, hiding the mass of scar tissue surrounding the plate in her skull.
“That’s her,” said the tall man with the red hair. “I only got one look, but that’s her. She was there.”
Gold stood up, squeezing Li’s hand. She looked the man over. He was tall, well-built, his face red and lined from a lifetime lived out of doors. He wore a poorly knitted sweater and buckskin leggings tucked into high boots, spattered with mud. His belt held a sidearm, leather holster worn with age, and a long knife. He stared at Gold.
Warren looked at her. “Well,” she said. “Anything to say?”
Gold shrugged. “He has a name?”
“Harris,” Warren said. “Would have been a lance, is that right?” The man nodded.
“This why you brought me here?” Harris retorted.
“You ran away,” Gold said to the man. “Like a little girl.”
His hand dropped to his sword. Gold cocked her head at this. “Really? Ready to fight now?”
His nostrils flared. Warren stepped between them.
“No fighting,” she said quickly. “Gar
cia is my guest.”
“It’s her! She killed my squad,” he hissed. “Your guest? She killed my squad. I spent years working back from that.” He sneered at her.
Gold looked him in the eye. Blue eyes, quite pretty, she thought. “It was a long time ago,” she said softly. “A lot has happened since then.”
“A long time ago,” he mocked her. “I remember,” he hissed, struggling to keep his voice under control. “I remember my team and what you did. You and the other one.”
Warren looked at him, then at her. “This would be Silver?”
Gold pursed her lips. No harm in confirming the obvious, she thought. She nodded. “Bad timing, I guess.”
“She’s coming here too?” Harris was incredulous, his face a mask of astonishment. “Wait, are you teaming up with them? Is that what this is?”
“What I am doing, Sergeant Harris, is establishing a clear picture of some pretty old news, that may or may not bear what the fuck is happening here,” Warren snapped. Gold noticed that Kolton had stepped behind Harris, her back to the wall, and had flicked her cloak behind her, freeing her right hand to rest on the butt of her pistol.
“She was there, with the other one. There was a van with a few others. I saw them as I went for reinforcements,” he said, looking at Gold.
“I didn’t get a good look at you,” Gold said. “Just your back.” She smiled. “Anyway, nice to see you again. You look well.”
He bristled. “I don’t need to take this shit from her,” he told Warren. “That’s her. She took down my team, one at a time, with her friend.” He placed a sneering, leering emphasis on the word as he looked Gold up and down.
Gold considered murder for a moment, but that would, she thought, be a mistake. Warren didn’t care, she thought, about this man’s wounded pride. It had happened before she met him, before she recruited him into whatever organization had preceded the Unit.
“I wasn’t even armed. They weren’t so tough,” Gold said. She watched his eyes. The eyes betray before the body moves. His eyes were wide with shock, pupils dilated.
“Go get cleaned up,” Warren ordered him. “We’ll talk about this later.” He didn’t move, and Warren turned on him. “Do I need to repeat myself?”
He took a deep breath, shuddering. He nodded then, gave Gold a cold look, turned on his heel, and left.
Gold looked at Warren. “This isn’t over, you know, with me and him.”
Warren sighed. “You’re probably right,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if someone could hold a grudge for almost a thousand years, but I guess you can.”
“You haven’t forgotten anything?” Gold asked. “After all this time?”
Warren gave her a queer look, as if she had read her mind. “Some things,” she nodded. “I forgot I had heard about you, until I heard the name Garcia. Chen spotted you right away.”
“Computers,” Gold said. “They don’t forget.”
“Can’t forget,” Warren said. “There’s a difference.”
“Maybe that’s it. Maybe it just takes a little longer,” Gold said. “Memories need storing. Storage breaks. Happens to all of us, I suppose.”
“Chen worried about this,” Warren said. “He has, had, a shed where he keeps parts for that spider. He’s worried about it breaking beyond his ability to repair it. God knows we can’t do it.”
“Specialized tools?” Gold asked.
Warren nodded, flopping into a chair against the wall. She waved at Kolton to leave the room. Gold noted that she left, but stationed herself outside the room on guard.
“That, and knowledge. We’re soldiers, not computer people.” Warren sighed. “I mean, I suppose we could learn, but the first few decades after the Bloom…we were busy. Busy surviving, and then, the ice and snow fucked everything up.”
“You lived in the caves? In the cliff?” Gold nodded up at the big cliff behind them, framed in the tiny window. She had spotted them as they arrived, and expected they were extensive, based on the size of the tailings pile that spilled down the side of the hill.
Warren nodded. “That sucked, let me tell you.” She looked at Gold. “You didn’t go through that, I can tell. Your gear is new; ours is old. Your rifle, I inspected it. It didn’t go through a thousand years of being picked up and put back down. It’s new.”
Gold nodded. “Got me there. I didn’t go through this. Took a shortcut.” She’d decided to tell Warren as much as she needed to know, but not everything. She didn’t like telling people too much; it made them unpredictable.
“Wish I had, sometimes.” She looked up at the ceiling. “The Bloom was, well, everybody died. Like, we thought everybody died. The people who went upwell, they went dark, so I assumed they died, but there wasn’t any way to get up, as they took the last lifter with them up the Thread. We stuck around there, at the spaceport. But it got too hairy, lots of drone assaults, and we were downwind of some pretty nasty fallout, so we left. Came east. I was thinking we might find transport back to the mainland. We thought that maybe the States got it the worst, but we didn’t know that for sure until later. So we stayed, and then the weather got bad. Like, real bad.”
Gold settled back down onto the bed with Li. Li smiled at her. Gold held her hand, looked over at Warren. She tried to visualize it. Several hundred soldiers, arriving in a depopulated China, buildings and infrastructure still intact. Nuclear winter kicking in.
“This elevator, the Thread. That wasn’t a thing when I left. When did it get built?” Gold asked.
Warren regarded her. “They built it before the war, maybe five or six years after I recruited Harris. Took them a few years, as I recall, but it was new stuff, new construction techniques. Chinese, Russian, American joint project, lots of private industry. Robots built it, just crawled down it out of the sky, like a spider. Hooked it up in Baikonur. Big socket they built, to be like the landing pad for the lifters. It’s tethered to a big rock up there.”
“You ever go up there?” Gold asked. “To the station?”
Warren laughed. “Me? No, it wasn’t for me and thee…only the rich folk. VIPs, techies and such. I got to guard it, though, one of the last people to see it operate, I guess.” She stared out the window. “You can see it, at night, sometimes. Like a bright star.”
“And that was when they dosed you, and the Bloom happened?” Gold prompted.
“Yes,” Warren confirmed. “Everybody died. They just went poof and died. Like into a cloud of dust. That shit choked the air. It was pretty nasty.”
“What do you mean?” Gold asked, puzzled. “What shit?”
“People,” Warren said. “That’s what the Bloom did to them. Didn’t you know? They just dissolved into a pile of dust. It was everywhere, got onto everything. Eleven billion people, each weighing an average of a hundred pounds…they just turned to dust one day. There were sandstorms of it. It stank, like burnt hair.” She shook her head. “Blotted out the sun. Got in your eyes, nose. Tasted awful.”
It stunned her. She’d done a lot of bad shit in her time, she thought. She had been….bad. Not a nice person in certain personas she that had worn throughout her life. She’d been different then, she told herself. Lifetimes ago. But murdering everyone? Was that something she’d have done, given the power to? She wondered. She might have.
Poof, Gold thought. Like Smoke. She thought of him then, of Smoke, and her skin at the base of her spine crawled. Smoke had power. Smoke, or whatever he was now, could have done it. She could believe it. Something didn’t fit or maybe fit too well, she thought. She turned back to Warren.
“There had been nukes before that, though, right? This happened after the war,” Gold said. Warren nodded. “What about—”
Warren held up her hand. “I answered your questions, how about you answer some of mine,” she said. “For starters, how did you get here? How did you miss all this?”
Gold considered what to tell her. The truth? It was a long story. “A man called Smoke sent me here. Unwilling. You might know him as
Colonel Smith.”
“The rogue Special Ops Colonel?” Warren asked. “He’s alive?”
“Not sure that word applies,” Gold said. “It’s complicated.”
Warren nodded. “He sounds interesting,” she said. “My contact in D.C. wouldn’t say, but they were hot to find him. They had forensics crawling all over that site in Nevada. Down to the hair and skin on the doorknobs, she said.”
Gold cocked her head. “Really?”
“That’s what she said. Said the lab coats were all excited about it.” Warren looked at her. “You think they found a sample of him, this Smoke or Smith guy?”
“Maybe,” Gold said. “Or maybe of me or Silver, hard to say which would be more exciting for them.”
Warren snapped her fingers. “You’re old,” she said. “Old like I am.”
Gold nodded slightly. “Older. A lot older.”
“How does that work? They told us the shit they gave us was new.”
“New to them,” Gold said. “Maybe not new to me. Scientists are sneaky fuckers…maybe they found something we left there at the data center.”
“That what it was? A data center?” Warren asked.
Gold nodded. “AI stuff, all new back then. Prototype. We were stealing it, and dumbass there was protecting it. From us.”
“Huh,” Warren said. “Smart machines really took off a few years after that. I remember. It was cropping up everywhere. Chinese stuff.”
“So maybe they figured it out… I don’t know. I was there, then I was here. Smoke did that, just pop, and I was in Changsha. He’s not human anymore, if he ever really was,” Gold said. She didn’t elaborate. It was a long story, and she didn’t feel like telling it. It was shameful how he had beaten them. Betrayed them.
Kolton poked her head around the door. Warren looked up.
“Airship over the south valley,” she said quickly. “Blue and white.”
“Silver,” Warren said, looking at Gold. “Your friend is here.”
“She’s under my protection,” Gold said. “No games.”
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