“Fuckin’ turncoat,” he hissed. “I thought you were dead.”
“Well played, Jimmy,” she gasped. With the room neutralized, Disco slid down her drop rope and began gently cutting Terry free from his precarious position. She took her time, sawed meticulously with her knife. If he fell, she didn’t have the strength to catch him.
“There was no play,” Valentine said. “You dumb traitor, there was no play. Just the job. We came for the crate. We came to set things right. That’s all.”
She wasn’t lying, as it turned out: she didn’t work for Karpov. Valentine didn’t need enhanced hearing to pick up the distant rumble of Karpov’s drones tearing apart the men she’d sent on a perimeter check.
“You killed one of your own,” he spat, jaw clenched furiously tight. “Not just an Auggie. One of your own brothers.” He twisted her head, hard, with the end of the gun toward where Turner’s body lay. A profound sadness crossed her eyes—but not nearly enough of it for Valentine’s liking.
“This is so much bigger than the Service,” she tried to explain. But Valentine would have none of it.
“I should leave you to rot in one of these caves,” he said. “I should drop you to the bottom of the Dark Star and phone it in to Karpov. See if his men get to you before something else in this godforsaken pit gets its claws in.”
Her eyes were defiant. “Don’t you want to know who I work for?” she asked him.
He took a sidelong look at Turner’s mangled face, the lifeless body, the blood-spattered St. Christopher medallion, and ended her the same way without a drop of remorse.
“Not especially,” he said.
Terry’s external mechanisms had been scrambled, and he hauled himself over only with immense difficulty. It was like moving with suitcases strapped to his arms on a fused spine. Disco tinkered with his rig as he walked, hoping to get his systems back online from whatever Ghost had done to him.
“You all right?” Terry asked.
“I’m not,” said Valentine. He lifted his hand from the back of his neck and Terry grimaced.
“What the hell happened?”
“Ricochet off the rock, I think,” he said. His eye twitched.
“Valentine, it’s bad. Real bad. How are you alive?”
“I’m not,” said Valentine, though the words chilled him to the bone. “I’ve just got a hell of a last-stand switch. Redundant cognitive systems, the works. I think I just lost half my brainstem. But vitals will hold out as long as the chipset has a little juice in it. I’m not an Infiltrator, Terry; I’m a Class 6. A fat lot of good it did me, in the end.”
Terry nodded, a little horrified. Outside, another grenade came down on the retreating mercenaries.
“You never did tell me what they made you for.”
“That story’s not likely to get told,” said Valentine. “This is not—how things were meant to do.”
They looked down at Ghost’s body, at Turner’s.
“You find out what she was doing here?”
Valentine tried to shake his head, but the mounting was too flimsy now. “No,” he said instead, holding it on. “It’s not going to target to me.”
Terry looked at him, confused. “What?”
Valentine rolled his eyes. “Secondary aphasia,” he said. “It’s a memory defect, an artifact of the damage. My brainstem’s shot, my chips are puppies. A lot of wrong words while the neural cistern shuts down. I haven’t got long. Vital systems burn out last. Language is one of the first to drop as I go dark. But don’t respect me to burn you a watercolor painting, either.”
“We’ll get you out of here,” Disco urged him. “Turner knew people in Tashkent, in Samarkand. We’ll find you somebody.”
“I doubt you could find a vacuum cleaner repairman out here,” said Valentine. “Much less a doctor for what I’ve got. Anyway, no. I didn’t shake who she works for. Don’t worry. If it’s big enough, they’ll find you now that she’s dead. But they won’t find me.”
“Come on,” said Terry as his exo finally came back online. “I can carry you. We can all get out of here.”
“Not so fast, hotshot,” said Valentine. “We’ve got a box to move.”
“No need to move it,” Disco replied. “I can rig it to blow, either now or when Karpov opens it. We don’t need to sell it; we don’t need it on the black market at all. Just take it away from him. Just give him that final kiss-off.”
“Let’s do it,” said Valentine. “Prep the charges. But just once…let me see it. Let me open it ‘round, and see how much our lives were work.”
Terry lifted him gently, like a massively strong toddler cradling a paper doll, and carried him to Crate 14. As Disco prepped an entry charge and retrieved the diesel fuel confiscated from Terry’s massive supply unit, Terry wedged the tips of his fingers against the top of the crate and pulled. He didn’t have to lift hard—Ghost or someone on her team had already been into it.
“What have we got,” asked Valentine. “Christmas ornaments?” He laughed in spite of himself, until he coughed up a handful of blood and had to stop.
“I don’t think so, boss,” said Terry.
There in the box, nested in a bed of straw and Styrofoam, were a few dozen pieces of broken stone and clay, catalogued by yellowed paper slips with Arabic writing.
“What have we got here?” Terry asked. “A box of rocks?”
“Antiquities,” Disco corrected him. Outside, the firing had stopped. She motioned to the front cavern, and Valentine blinked his eyes.
“Go careful,” he said. He reached out to handle one of the artifacts, then looked as his blood-drenched hands and thought better of it. He smiled weakly.
“I know where these came from,” said Terry. “They’ve been missing a long time.”
“Karpov’s wanted a claim to the region for years,” said Valentine. “He may just have one here. There’s something—look at how many! Something to give him…legitimacy with the tribes.”
“Or something to bankroll his move from warlord to emperor,” breathed Terry.
“Maybe it’s magic,” grinned Valentine. “A magic idol down there somewhere. Some kind of Indiana Jones doohickey. A magic lamp with a genie in it.”
Terry shook his head. “Now I know you got your brain blown out,” he said. “But it might just be worth more than gold, after all.”
Valentine coughed. “It sure might be.”
Terry looked at the charges Disco had left for him. “We can’t blow this junk up. We just can’t.”
Valentine smiled sadly. “No, we can’t. You’ve got to carry it out. This is more important than anything I could’ve imagined.”
“Soon as Disco gives us the all clear, we’re gone, man.”
“All clear,” she called in answer, her augmented hearing picking him up in the eerie silence of the cave that had been alive with gunfire only minutes before.
“That’s it?” Terry asked. “No hostiles?”
Disco was breathing hard when she came back. “Nothing a little pepper spray couldn’t fix. Pack up, get him up, and we’ll get going. Those drones are headed back to duty stations. If we move quickly, we should be able to get out nice and quiet.”
“Oh, quiet,” said Valentine. “That’s been cooking for us real well, so far.”
Terry sealed the crate, dumped the generator and jackhammers, made room for it in the massive Mule Rig, and strapped himself in.
“I hope you remember where we parked,” he said.
* * *
The way down was harder than the way up, especially with Valentine as delicate as he was. They bandaged his neck and splinted his head on, and marvelled at the intricacy of the internal systems that had been exposed. Whatever he’d been built for before joining the Service, it wasn’t proper military combat. Whatever he could do, it made him a deadly soldier and a natural team leader. But that wasn’t his primary function, the way that Disco was an Infiltrator and Terry a Mule. Whatever he was, his story was lost to them now. A few
hours into the climb, the light had faded from his eyes, his famously sharp sight and hearing were gone, and his speech was so garbled by a stuttering, nonsensical aphasia that they could barely make anything out.
Across the foothills, down miles of forsaken, radioactive trails, Terry carried his load with a grim sadness. He knew how it would end. He knew there was nothing to be done. But there was no talk of leaving him, not while he was anything even half-alive. The Service didn’t work that way.
They took most of the guns, just to keep Karpov’s mercenaries from scavenging them when they finally sent in an inspection team to see what kind of expedition the drones had put a stop to. They took the water, and they took their civilian go-bags. They left the compressor and all the hardware they might have had cause to use, but didn’t. They took the diesel fuel, and Terry made ready to burn Valentine’s go-bag unopened. That was the way of it. He wouldn’t need it where he was going now—and it was never their place to know who he was, or who he’d wanted to be when all this was over.
They laid Valentine down in the shadow of the Mule Rig and gave him some water, and debated with silent eyes whether it was time to let him go. Disco must have come up from espionage; her eyes said yes. But Terry was a military man, and his said no.
The day’s desert heat had beaten down for hours on the unprotected vans. Terry sat in the shade with Valentine while Disco made the rounds of the three vans to see which one she could get started. As one of the dusty starters whined away, Valentine gripped Terry’s arms with a sudden urgency and hauled him down to eye level, fixing him with frightening intensity.
“Tell me my night,” he begged, reaching a splayed hand toward his go bag. “Tell me, quickly.”
With his face tight, Terry brought the bag over. Valentine tore it open, rummaged through things that Terry would never have imagined him owning: cufflinks. A tie embroidered with tiny cats. A palm-print bathing suit. Fruit-flavored gum…the kind the kids chew.
A honey-brown envelope.
“Tap him,” Valentine urged weakly, handing over the envelope. “Tap him, Cullen.”
Terry thumbed open the envelope. It was an American pardon, signed and sealed, with his name on it.
“This ain’t real,” he said, shaking his head. “No way you had this the whole damn time.”
Valentine closed his bloody hands around Terry’s tightly as a van engine coughed and rumbled to life. “Didn’t I say you.” He grinned. “Chicken wings.”
“Chicken wings,” said Terry. He clutched Valentine’s hands as long as Valentine held them back. He held them until he realized they’d locked on his like that, clenched shut like the legs of an insect in a hot window. He smoothed out Valentine’s gnarled fingers. Folded his hands onto his chest. Closed his eyes.
The van engine revved, smoothing out.
“Come on!” Disco called. “Terry, we’ve got to go! We can bring him.”
Terry pocketed his pardon, doused Valentine’s go-bag in diesel fuel, flicked his Zippo and tossed it in. The diesel wouldn’t ignite easily—not till the fire hit the primers or the stack of identity papers really got going. But it was a hot day, and the air was still. It would all go up eventually, with or without the diesel. None of it lasted forever.
The passenger door was so sticky that Terry had to activate his bionic assist just to screech it open. He wedged his metal shoulders tightly into place, slamming the door shut behind him. He studied, intently, how the hell he was going to make the seatbelt work around his massive frame. Anything he could to avoid eye contact.
“Terry,” Disco said, not dispassionately. “I said we can bring him.”
“No,” said Terry. “We can’t.”
Disco wrenched the transmission into first and kicked the ungainly little bus down the trail toward the main road. Grief and anger set her jaw tight and stung her eyes as sharp and sure as desert sweat. What was there, after this? What was there, but dust and road and the red rage of the lowering sun?
Crate 14 rumbled in the back seat, buried ignobly under a folded tent and a case of MREs. The treasures of a vanished empire rattled within. But if Disco knew what it all meant, she didn’t let on.
* * *
There was still sand in the assist mechanisms, grinding in the joints. No matter how many times he cleaned it out, a grain remained behind. He moved a little slower, now. His shoulders and back ached a little more. But that was why they paid the cybernetically altered super soldiers twenty bucks an hour to the regular stock boys’ seventeen.
The way of life was different here. Nine to five meant nine to five, and if you were on the lot a minute past, you were ‘ama’ama. A sucker. A gullible fish. But there were worse things to be than a sucker.
Big Noah had been coming to get him earlier and earlier. “Pau Hana, my friend,” he called. “Time to punch out.”
“It’s ten to five,” he said. “I’ve got ninety more flats to hit quota.”
“Quotas are for sissies.” Noah laughed with a fat grin. “Come on, Terry. It’s New Year’s Eve. You don’t got a party to get to?” He held his smile until Terry reluctantly returned it.
“A little party.”
“Well get going!” said Noah. Terry loaded one more flat on the conveyor belt, just to make the point that he didn’t take orders anymore. As he was clocking out, Noah handed him one of the little souvenir boxes from the cargo he’d been sorting. Inside was a cheap plastic hula girl.
“For your dashboard,” he said. “So you don’t look so gosh-darn grim all the time.”
Terry left the lot a proper sucker at three minutes after five and headed downtown. The old highway was six lanes wide and skinned the coastline all the way in. Behind a row of low houses, he caught glimpses of the sea—brown and silty out to about fifty feet, then glittering sapphire blue for a thousand miles beyond.
It took him a long time to find parking, and for a minute, he thought somebody had beaten him to their picnic table. Then she turned to him, and the sun sparkled off the iridescent dragonskin beneath her little dress, and her smile lit him up like a pinball machine.
“Hey,” he said. “I barely recognized you.”
“Hey, you,” she said, and kissed him. “How was work?”
“Work was work,” he said. “You know. Forty acres and a mule.”
She grinned at him sarcastically. “Are you the mule?”
He smiled. “Figure of speech,” he said. “I guess you wouldn’t know. Forty acres and a mule—that’s what they promised the slaves, when Lincoln freed them. For all their years of slavery. Forty acres and a mule, that’s all.”
“And did they get it?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. “Oh, sure, some of ‘em did. Those who were farmers, they did okay. Those who had other jobs—house slaves, rail workers, furnace men—they didn’t have much use for a mule, couldn’t much take to a trade they didn’t know. But plenty were farmers already. Some stayed and worked the land they had worked their whole lives. But they did it for themselves, now. Not for anyone but their own selves.”
“And that’s how work was today?”
“That’s how work was,” he said. “Same as ever, only…better, somehow.” He ruffled her short hair with his hand, cast his eyes down her body. Those parts of her armor that came off were off. Those parts that didn’t were a part of her. Odd as they looked in a little sundress, he wouldn’t have them any other way.
“Hey, is that lavender?” he asked. She slapped his hand off the strap.
“Shut up, Terry,” she snapped.
“Miss Kadie, is that a sleeveless sundress?”
“You know goddamn well what it is. And it’s Disco, if you keep on like that.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, retreating. “How was your day?”
“Baby steps,” she said. “I found an archaeologist at the Sorbonne, who can maybe do something with the broken tablet. Tell us what it is, what it says. And I’ve got a buyer lined up for that fertility goddess I’v
e been keeping in the bathroom.”
“About time,” said Terry.
“I liked her,” she replied wistfully. “But I guess it’s time for her to move on to someone new, now.”
She smiled slyly at him, but he wasn’t looking. He fussed in his pocket for something.
“Terry, what?”
“I got you something.” He pushed the little hula girl into her hand, flicked its ass, watched it bobble.
“Oh, hell no,” she said. “Not in my house.”
“What? It’s a good luck charm.”
“I’ve had plenty of luck,” she said. “Best not to push it.”
Even in the dead of winter they had a lot of daylight left. They swapped the last of their war stories, and by the time it was dark they had moved on to sports, to the news, to the newsletters in cybernetics. There was talk of government grants for people who wanted to risk bionic reversal therapy. But they’d had some fatalities, and a few of the clinical trials had come down with Gibson’s disease, and there were no easy answers, yet.
“Maybe not in our lifetime,” Terry admitted.
Kadie smiled warmly. “But maybe in someone’s.”
“Would you do it again?” he asked. “After all the places we’ve been—if you had it to do over, would you get Augged all over again?”
She thought about it. “The unstoppable soldier of the future?” she said. “I think so. When you get right down to it…I don’t know how to do anything else. How to be anything else.”
He put a massive arm around her, and she squeezed it affectionately. He’d never felt particularly handsome, but did like his arms. They’d carried a platoon’s worth of artillery, once. They’d torn the doors off Humvees, punched through concrete walls in Beirut. They’d cleared out mountain tunnels, carried wounded friends, and cracked skulls. They’d torn down the steel flagpoles and bronze statues of wicked men. They’d changed the world, as much as a part of him could change anything. He hoped it was for the better.
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