by Watts Martin
What are those? She’s seen them before. Recently.
“Gail. If I get the databox back to New Coyoacán, there’s a good chance they’ll get word of it here before we can get back to you.”
“I know.” She runs a hand through her hair. Think. Everything here’s old except for what they brought with them, right? The infrastructure they’re using has been thrown together ad hoc. So it’s full of single points of failure.
Also, even though it’s just two of them, they both have biomods, and Jack’s right: there’s a good chance nobody they’re going to face will have any. At least some of them will know she has biomods, and the smart ones will figure Jack does, too—but they’ve still got an advantage.
Assuming he’s going to be on her side.
“Look, you still have to convince them you’d have joined them without being blackmailed, and that’s going to be hard enough without worrying about what’s going to happen to me. Maybe there’ll be some chance after their guard is down to—to do something. But if you have to leave me behind, do it.”
“Gail—”
“You know I’m right.” She stops, and looks back toward the cargo ship, toward the nodes clinging to the mesh. Dull metal tanks mounted on triangular frames.
Drones.
“Mara’s Blood.” She grips the closest bulkhead. “Those are fertilizer sprayers.”
“What?” He squints at them. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.” She wraps her hands behind her head. “They’re going to attack the Ring.”
“Wait. That’s too big a leap. Drones need atmosphere to fly. It can’t be that immediate. They have to get them into place—”
“They just have to get the cargo ship through the Ring’s top. Fly close to Ceres, then come up into the atmosphere.”
“They’ve got to have defenses against that.”
“They do, but…” She runs a hand through her hair. “That’s why it’s broadcasting the wrong metadata. Traffic control won’t know until—”
Someone bangs on the outside hatch.
This was never just about Jack’s daughter, never just about Sky, not in the long run. But dammit, couldn’t she be handed only one impossible problem at a time? Figure out how to save Laurie, then figure out how to save Sky, then figure out how to stop them from deploying the bioweapon? No, it has to be all or nothing.
She lowers her voice. “Opening gambit time. Get out your gun, go to the hatch, and I’ll open it.”
He sighs, pulling his pistol out of its holster. “Hands behind your back.”
When she moves her hands, she expects a cord to be wrapped around her wrists. Instead she feels the cold steel of handcuffs clicking into place. “Jack!” she hisses.
“She has the key,” he whispers, then raises his voice. “Open the door.”
What? She tugs on the handcuffs. She can probably break them at her full strength, but she might snap her wrists in the process. If she has to fight people by beating them with her broken hands, so be it. When she speaks, she’s growling. “Kis, open the door.”
“Yes, Gail.”
Two unsmiling pale cisform faces, one man and one woman, look down from the other side. They have guns, too, each pointed at Gail’s face. Why doesn’t she carry a gun herself again? She knows how to handle one and with her biomods she’s a pretty damn good shot. Of course, having one right now wouldn’t do her much good, would it?
“Easy.” Jack shoves her forward until the man can grab her left arm, the woman grabbing her right. They’re wearing positively retro clothes: subdued pastel colors, squared-off shoulders on both his shirt and her blouse, cinched waists, a definite frilly look to hers. A third man floats nearby, middle-aged, handsome, trimmed black hair and tailored grey suit.
The docking spindle doesn’t look like it’s in much better shape inside than out, but she gets an image of what it might have once been like: sections of a long mural still remain, predominantly the same golden hue as the outside. The style shifts from section to section. What’s it all trying to depict? Libraries through the ages? Museums? A quick history lesson as you head from your ship into gravity?
“Ms. Simmons,” the man in the suit says, nodding once. “And Mr. Thomas. Put away your gun.”
Jack looks between them all, then holsters his gun.
“After you.”
Gail’s “escorts” pull her along; the man in the suit takes up the rear.
“I’d rather not drag this out,” Jack says. “I can take the databox, leave Simmons and be on my way.”
She clenches her teeth. Stalling for time would be a lot better for her.
Suit laughs. “It’s nearly a week until the next flight to Earth. Do you think we’re just going to leave it in your care until then?”
Crap. That’s a giant gaping hole in her master plan she maybe should have seen before the villain pointed it out to her. Sure, the master plan didn’t cover anything after she got here, so it was always terrible, but—
“Isn’t the entire point of using me that I won’t attract attention heading back to Earth? If I disappear for nearly a week then suddenly show up back on Panorica, do you think there’s the slightest chance I’ll get on that ship without questioning?”
“So I should just trust you to hold the databox unsupervised for a week? You’ll understand my skepticism. I’ll have some associates discuss your unexpected offer with you in a few minutes.”
They reach the elevator to the rim. It’s as straightforward as the one in the Panorica Deck, just with handholds along the interior walls; riders have to be smart enough to be in a position where they won’t get hurt as gravity increases. Gail gets held in place by her captors.
Suit reaches for a physical button, pressing it in with an audible click. She doesn’t think she’s even seen one of those outside videos. “I’d like to claim that’s just for the old-fashioned aesthetic, but this base is a bit slapdash. Minimally viable, as they say.”
“‘Discuss.’” Jack lifts his brows. “Is that a polite way to say interrogate?”
“It is.” He gives Gail a measured look, a small smile. “And you, Ms. Simmons. Several people here want words with you. Your childhood friend Mr. Corbett wants considerably more than words.”
Her ears lower.
For the next ten seconds there’s no sound but the hum and grind of the elevator, pitch deepening as gravity increases. The platform stops with a clank and the doors slide open, moving with a shuddering hitch rather than a smooth glide. Now the two holding her drag her forward, not just push.
She’d seen pictures of Alexandria before the accident, but it’s shocking how grand the entrance plaza still remains. Copper walls—from the scent, it’s not paint, but a true high-copper alloy—soar behind her up into darkness overhead. High, long windows provide multi-story panoramas of space and the ships docked outside. The plaza itself forms a wide, tiled avenue running between buildings, and the buildings, full of unnecessary steps and too-high rooflines supported by grand columns, drip with the opulence of wasted resources. The closest ones, she’s sure, had been museums, the tourist destinations the platform’s owners had expected to be the primary draw. If she remembers right it never came close to breaking even. One conspiracy theory suggests the owners sabotaged it themselves for insurance money.
Now, though, the plaza must be the only inhabited section, a half-dozen canvas tents scattered around the cracked tiles. No light reaches whatever walls lie between here and the hull breach; they’ve got most of the street lamps functioning in the immediate area, but that’s it. With so much reflection from the plated walls, soft amber radiance enfolds everyone and everything.
Eight more people wait for them, lined up. All cisform, of course, but otherwise there’s a range of colors and gender. How nice for Purity to be so inclusive. Nelson stands to the far end, arms crossed, looking bored. He’s not even facing their direction. Corbett, though: he’s there, and he’s way too excited. He takes a step forward from the middle of the line, eyes
fixed on Gail.
Suit walks forward, reaching into his jacket pocket, and addresses the man at the closest end of the line. “I believe you and Ms. Ziff wanted to have a conversation with Mr. Thomas.” The man nods, and he and a dark-skinned woman step out of the line. Then Suit holds up a slim card: the databox. “What they tell me, Mr. Thomas, will determine both whether you leave with this and, if you do, under what conditions. And do remember our men are still watching your lovely daughter.”
“Fair enough.” Jack doesn’t betray the least bit of concern as he steps into a walk beside them, projecting every confidence they’re going to find him sufficiently reprehensible to send him on his way with the databox in short order. Two tents down, on the left.
“Now, Ms. Simmons. Gail.” Suit moves to stand in front of her and folds his hands behind his back, head tilted. “Do you know why we asked Mr. Thomas to bring you along?”
“Randall’s unrequited love for me.”
Corbett stalks forward. “You goddamn little—”
“Patience, Mr. Corbett.” Suit holds up a hand. “Care to try a serious answer?”
“Because you hate totemics, and you especially hate my mother. And you really hate that martyring her did more to turn the tide against Purity than anything else that could have happened.”
“Hate totemics? No.” Suit shakes his head. “In many ways, your Mara’s vision was correct. Prophetic. You’re all admirable. Every totemic is, by some measure, objectively better than a cisform, don’t you think?”
Randall spits on the tile.
“I think we’re all just people.”
Suit chuckles. “As much the diplomat as your mother. We knew very early on that wasn’t true. By now you’ve learned all about Shakti, no doubt. And Kali, of course.” He waves up toward the docking spindle. “When my father sold off Quanta’s transformation genetics group to Keces, the technology for Shakti was only theoretical. But we had internal reports—reports we’ve kept quite secret—about what happens if genes such as yours became inheritable.”
“You’re Thomas Burke, Junior, then. Sort of ironic for a company with ‘biotech’ in the name to be so against biotech, isn’t it?”
“The company has never been against biotechnology. We made a decision not to support the ideology of radical transformation, however. Improving the human race is laudable. Fostering its replacement is suicidal.”
“Just because totemic parents could give birth to totemic kids—”
“And mixed couples?” He tilts his head, waiting for her to give him the answer he already knows.
“How often do you think that’s going to happen? Or are you saying those internal reports of yours concluded most cisform humans want to fuck fox people?”
“Shut up!” The woman holding her arm smacks the side of her head, right on her ear.
“I’m sure the majority don’t. But by the time that majority fully understands the threat, it’ll be far too late.”
She can feel the incredulity spreading across her face. “This isn’t some kind of war.”
Randall growls, almost as well as a cat totemic would. A skinny, mangy cat. “It is a war.” He thrusts a finger at her accusingly. “My mother was a casualty already.”
“Jesus, Randall,” she snaps. “You do not want to go there.”
Burke looks pained momentarily, as if barely tolerant of Corbett’s outburst. “It doesn’t seem like a war to you because you’re judging by intent. You don’t mean to replace us. You simply will. It won’t be in my lifetime, or my grandchildren’s, or even their grandchildren’s. But by then we’ll already be the evolutionary backwater.”
“So what the hell do you think you’re going to do? Kill us all? Millions here, millions in the inner system?”
“All? No. Eighty percent, possibly even ninety, though. That should be enough to give those who come after us another generation or two to come up with a more permanent, stable solution.” He sighs, looking up toward the cargo ship.
Eighty or ninety percent. Between the inner system and the River, from all the full totemics through the far greater number of partial transforms, the true believers and the artists and the aesthetes and the ones who just grew up as animal-people because their parents made the choice for them, that’s at least five million. Maybe closer to ten. “How can you—even—”
“Again, you are at war with us, even if you don’t see it.” His voice is sharp for a moment, then relaxes again. “In countries on Earth we’ve tried pushing for legislation to restrict your breeding in simple, non-lethal ways, but there’s no traction there. It’s seen as far too regressive for today’s enlightened age. Eventually they’ll understand, although I suspect out here, they’ll be far more brutal.” The bastard sounds genuinely apologetic.
“So. To answer your original question.” Burke clasps his hands. “You’re here because symbols are important. You don’t mean very much to me, I confess. But to Purity, you do. And to Mr. Corbett. Mr. Corbett’s service means a lot to me. He wants to break you. The rest want a video record of your confession.”
She stares at him. “My confession of what?”
He furrows his brow, then shrugs. “Honestly, I don’t think it matters.” He turns and walks away.
Randall steps forward and grabs her muzzle, clenching it hard enough to hurt. “Your confession,” he hisses, “that it was your mother’s bomb. That it was you who started this. That we wouldn’t have to do any of this if it wasn’t for you.” He yanks her head down before releasing it, and she bites back a yelp of pain.
“Christ, Randall. All of you! Don’t you see what’s going on? Burke just said point blank that you’re all only useful idiots. And you know full well my mother never did anything more violent to anyone than scream in their face.”
One of the other women, one of the ones who hasn’t spoken yet, glares at Gail. “That’s a lie. Everyone knows—”
“Everyone knows what they want to believe. But Randall knows the truth is his mother followed mine from New Coyoacán to Solera to be part of that demonstration. The truth is she believed everything my mother did. What do you think she’d think of you now, Randall? Think she’d be proud?”
Randall clenches his fists, then punches her in the stomach. The two holding her have the courtesy to let her double over. As her vision blacks out for a moment, she hears jeers, scattered applause.
She’s been here before—not to Alexandria, not with these people, but surrounded by zealots who want to do her serious harm. Back then it was a smaller number of zealots, though, and one of them turned out to not be a zealot at all, taking her side. Here, she has either one friend—off being interrogated—or no friends. Even if this is the whole group except for Burke and the two with Jack, if she tries to take them all on at once, she’s going to be creamed. That’s assuming she can break out of the handcuffs. If she can’t, or if she waits too long, she’s going to be tortured.
What she needs is a serious distraction. And a way to keep Burke from telling his operatives on Earth to go after Laurie, so Jack won’t be condemning his daughter to death by doing the right thing here. She needs to find—
—a single point of failure.
She keeps facing the floor. “Kis,” she whispers voicelessly.
“Yes, Gail,” the ship responds.
“Can you undock on your own?”
“Yes. There is no interlock that would prevent me from doing so.”
“Are you speaking to someone?” Randall says.
“Undock and knock out the high gain antenna on the docking spindle. Knock it right off.”
Kismet sounds mildly disapproving, in the fashion she always does when giving warnings. “That may damage the docking facility.” She doesn’t mention that it might damage her, too, but it might.
“That’s fine. Do it.”
“Yes, Gail.”
Randall yanks her head up by her hair. “Are you speaking to someone?” he repeats.
She meets his eyes steadily
, ignoring the pain from the way he’s gripping her, and smiles. “I’m praying to the rat god.”
A few people hiss derisively. “You think you’re funny?” the woman spits. Randall glares, shoving her hard. She sprawls on her back. Nelson snorts. Is he a true believer, too, or just being paid?
If Kis gets her job done, how long will it take them to notice? What else will she need to do? The ships have radios—she’s not sure about the cargo ship, given its state, but the other two have to be working. If things get chaotic enough in here, hopefully nobody’s going to think the most important thing to do is to race up there and give the order to kill Laurie.
Randall moves forward, keeping her within kicking distance. “We kept back just one vial of the anti-totemic poison.”
“Planning to force-feed it to me and watch me die?” She keeps her voice deadpan enough to dam the flood of fear, and surreptitiously glances to the side, seeing where Nelson’s gone to. Still in the crowd, still not paying attention. He knows she’s enhanced, he’s the one she’s going to have to take out first—
If she can bring herself to kill anyone. God. But if she doesn’t, she’s dead. Sky’s dead. So somehow she will.
“Not until you watch every other mongrel in New Coyoacán—”
A screeching sound comes from high overhead. Metal scraping metal, tremors racing through the entire outside wall, a low hiss of escaping atmosphere. Everyone looks up.
Everyone but Gail. She kicks in all of her biomods and strains against the handcuffs. They don’t budge.
Jack said she has the key. But she doesn’t.
Oh.
“Kis, can you unlock these handcuffs?”
“Yes, Gail.” The handcuffs chime and release with a mechanical snap.
She stands up, bringing her arms around to her front. “The rat god,” she says, “has answered.”
Chapter 25
The world slows to a tenth normal speed.
Before anyone’s even turned to look at her, Gail grabs the two people who’d been holding her, brings their heads together hard, refuses to think about what the cracking noise means. She charges toward Nelson before either of them hit the tiles, and just as he fully turns in her direction she’s on top of him, both of them skidding from the force. He meets her eyes with a look of surprise spreading comically slowly across his face. Does he have a gun? Yes, of course. He’s reaching for it. She takes it from him, scrambles to her feet, then brings her sandal down on his leg with the force of a war hammer. She knows exactly what that cracking noise is. By the time his scream starts she’s already meters away and moving fast.