by Russ Linton
Dad thumps his forehead against the cinderblock wall. Silence isn't the reaction I'd expected. My "oh shit" thermometer about to burst and he seems to be maintaining his newfound chill. Since his own powers were stripped away, since Mom returned, he's been a kinder, gentler badass.
I'm not sure where this guy was my whole childhood. But spending a week at this covert base, experiencing my own operation on foreign soil—I now know exactly where he was. I feel the cold calculation in his next question.
"Can she control it?" He asks. "Has she been compromised by Charlotte?"
I don't have a definitive answer but I sure as hell am going to sound like I do.
"As far as Eric and I can tell, Charlotte is tripping around the internet as Chroma. There isn't any connection between her and Mom. It might be why the cloak didn't completely disappear after she digitized her brain and let Mom walk down off the roof. I've got a theory Mom has had access to these powers all along, they were just tied up with subconsciously maintaining the cloak. It took some extreme stress for them to surface."
"Stress?" he asks.
I point to the gore.
He accepts my on-the-fly diagnosis and shuffles to his feet. We make our way up the hall, a reassuring and comforting hand on the back of my neck. These changes, I realize, began long before even Mom came back. They've been happening since he surrendered to the Beetle. An accumulation of gift-wrapped second chances set aside on all those Christmas mornings he' missed.
Mom's already awake, on the edge of her bed. Their brief, silent exchange carries more meaning than anything spoken. Nascent psychic powers are made redundant. A sigh, an embrace, and we're on to Eric's room.
Eric's crashed. Unlike his preferred contortions, he's curled on his uninjured side.
"We need to get him to the infirmary," I say. "We didn't want to...because..."
There's no reason to believe Chroma won't murder anybody in the kill box again. But with Dad here, as idiotic as it sounds given the circumstances, I feel safe.
"Right." Dad reaches down and scoops Eric off the bed. Again, both arms.
"Wait. Your shoulder?"
"It's better." A half smile fades into his operational mode. "Your mother already knows. Don't you?"
She grits her teeth and remains downcast. I was too busy to challenge her earlier silence. It wasn't all just her withdrawing and trying to cope. Seems she might have made contact with the team. Or Dad at least.
Eric sleeps like a baby the entire way to the infirmary, slobbering on Dad's spotless black and crimson uniform. I'm a grown ass man, and while many dispute that point, there's a twinge of jealousy seeing Dad cradle Eric.
Once Eric is tucked in, I give Dad the rundown of exactly how fucked we are. Mom listens and moves in to see what she can do to help our patient. She's holding an ice pack to the lump on his head when Hound shows up. Our designated medic doesn't interrupt the briefing, just sidles up to Eric and gets to work.
"Ember almost done?" asks Dad.
"Yep. Figure you'd need the help. 'Sides that, can't stand the smell. Gettin' soft."
"You and me both," I say. "Thought I was going to lose it in the hallway."
"That's bad enough," says Hound, pressing against Eric's side and getting a yelp. "The Viking funeral out there is worse. Carried 'em a quarter mile. Told her to wait and let me clear out. I can still smell it."
"How could it be worse than the lobby less than a hundred feet away?"
"Sure, ain't as off-puttin' as the raw stuff," grumbles Hound, reluctant to answer. "One'll make you lose your appetite in that moment, maybe your lunch. The other'll ruin dinner for a lifetime."
That makes more sense than I want it to.
"We'll need Ember to scrub the base," says Dad.
It takes me a second to catch up to the lingo. Eric's whimper tells me he's one hundred percent up to speed. He thrashes against Hound's triage attempts and makes a lunging grab for Dad.
"You can't!" he says.
"Eric, we always knew this would be a possibility. It's part of our operational security."
"Maybe Chroma can help keep the place secure? Do a cloak thing from inside the system. Mrs. H?" He regards Mom pleadingly. "Can you do the memory part? Chroma can do the signals part."
Hound arches a tufted eyebrow. "By 'Chroma' you mean our former antenna?" He huffs. "Kinda hoped we’d gotten rid of her."
Desperate, Eric pulls Dad's arm. Instead of drawing him closer he merely elevates himself on the bed. "She helped us! Tell him, Spencer. She helped."
I hadn't exactly mentioned the part where Chroma augmented Eric's leet hacking skills.
"Fine, she helped. She did. Right after murdering a guy in the lobby."
"A guy that put a gun to your head," Eric counters.
Okay, there were several parts I left out. Time to reroute the conversation. "You said yourself this place was burned, Eric. You know we're done here."
"Whatever. I was...owww! Could you watch it?"
"Gotta figure out how bad it is," says Hound. "Nothin' out of place, I don't think. Gonna need you to cough." There's hesitation as Hound rummages through a drawer, turning in time to see Eric rotate his head and weakly cough. "Into this, jackass," he says, tossing him a white strip of cloth. "Nice and big. Hack up some snot fer it."
After a few painful spasms, Eric provides his sample. Hound scrutinizes the phlegm before giving it a sniff. Lobby carnage, you have a new contender for grossest thing I've witnessed today.
"No blood," Hound declares. "You got a handful of simple fractures and what's gonna be one hell of a bruise. Best I can tell without an X-ray. Yer lucky." He plants his palms on the bed rail and addresses Dad. "Now what?"
"Wait a minute." Eric's incredulous. "I need a cast or something. Observation. R and R. Here in the infirmary a few days."
Hound yanks open the cabinet, disappearing behind the door. Unseen contents clank hollowly around the metal cavity almost drowning out his "kids these days" diatribe. Swatting the door shut, he rattles a container at Eric before tossing it in his lap. It's gotta be the oldest bottle of aspirin I've ever seen. Clear with a once yellow label now the color of spilled urine, the bottle is full of round, white pills minted from some original mold of the first pill ever made.
"Take two. Still hurts, take two more. After that, I gotta bottle of Bourbon stashed away. I'll consider sharin' if yer in need." He leaves Eric staring at the chalky pills. "Next move, Sean?"
"Let me get you some water, hon," says Mom and goes to the sink.
Hound scowls his disapproval. At least one guy hasn't let the deeply ingrained machismo wear too thin. Dad gives a slight gesture, and he and Hound head into the hallway. I slip out after them. Eric's gaze follows, sulking.
"We've got no leads. Shortwave's base was empty and no sign of Aurora or Danger. I've got to know, Hound, and this can't be easy, but do you think Danger told them we were coming?"
"Could've," Hound spits and the way his eyes dart, he seems uncomfortable but quickly recovers. "But Danger's nose don't sniff that far. A few minutes, maybe. Not long enough to clear out an operation that size. You said what, hundreds?"
He's talking to me. Hound getting an intel brief from Spencer. Mom's right, we were never a normal family. This, this is my new normal. "A whole village."
"Did they leave any clue where they might be going?" Dad asks. "Maybe something you saw in the cyber offensive."
What didn't I see in the cyberwar? Every bag of tricks got opened, spilled on the table, and was revealed to have a recursive loop of more tricks. Hack-ception. A mad cloud of chaos from old-school phone phreaks to guys using zero-day vulnerabilities of software released during the attack, real time. It was crazy, it was exhausting, and I forgot how damn much I missed it.
"Anyone we could track in that cluster fuck wouldn't be worth finding. He's got no reason to have a secret base. Resources are spread across the globe and from what I could tell, the cells of The Collective work autonomously. However,
they made a focused attack on ICANN. Dropped it faster than a newb at a spawn point even though Polybius was busy tearing down the financial infrastructure. We could go through the logs and see if there's anything to trace."
Not a question, not a word of doubt, Dad's decisiveness kicks in. "Hound, round up Ember and let her know we need a full nova here as soon as everyone's clear. Spencer, get those logs you mentioned and anything else we may need from the system. Wheel Eric in there with you if you need to."
"Got it."
"And son. Good work here."
He doesn't stick around. The doors clack shut as Dad returns to the infirmary. Hound belatedly walks away but not before he's ruffled my hair and snickered. Framed through the little window, I see Dad walk up to Mom and drape an arm around her. She leans her dainty frame against him, top of her head barely clearing his forearm. A new family portrait. A thing we weren't allowed to have. Schedules never coincided long enough or too many risks to a past littered with aliases. Somehow, at the utter peak of weirdness, we've found stability.
I don't know how long it can last.
Chapter 36
OF COURSE, THEY WOULD have wheelchairs in the former retirement home. I mean, it was originally all a cover, but some of the Augments held here had been pretty banged up. They needed full medical facilities, as much as a covert budget and staff would allow. About the time Eric and I first found it, they'd stripped down most of the good stuff. But, much to Eric's delight, they still have the wheelchairs.
"Ya! Ya!" he exclaims, urging me onward.
When we get to the ruined hallway, I make sure to not-so-carefully skirt the edge of the debris. After a few gnarly bumps, he decides his own two feet are a safer bet.
A sigh escapes as he steps into the command center. Screens have resumed their feeds, and they're all talking about The Collective. Chat rooms, message boards, news channels, channels which never show the news. Everyone is debating the transition to this new world order. Government officials vow a war on digital terrorism. Anarchists express joy at an unstable world.
Financial centers have been hit the hardest. The NYSE is offline. Every major bank has been hacked, their websites and card readers pointing to Salarium exchanges or offline permanently. All incoming transactions are being routed to the cryptocurrency market. Retailers that can't afford to rely on the dwindling supply of paper money, the value of which is skyrocketing, are being backed into a corner.
The message? The world can keep their modern conveniences if they simply start accepting the new currency and new leadership. A distributed leadership. Parceled out to man and machine.
"You see that? A loaf of bread sold for three hundred dollars," I say. The same loaf goes for a fraction of that in Salarium.
Eric stays deep in his forlorn haze. "Huh?"
"Let's get started," I say, smacking him on the ass. I manage to slip past without the expected complaints about sexual harassment in the workplace. He hasn't moved. "Eric, we have to. Ember might include us in the barbecue."
"Don't bother," he mutters. "Everything's already backed up. Constant torrent into the cloud under encryption that was foolproof. Until they snagged Polybius." He rotates his shoulders and his face scrunches in discomfort. "What are we fucking doing, man?"
I've been asking myself the same question a lot lately. Counting tiles on the ceiling doesn't add up to the answer. "We're going to check the final logs. See if we can find where those attacks were coordinated from."
Eric brushes by and plops into the captain's chair. He runs his fingers along the wood-grained armrest. "This was the dream, you know? Working side by side with Augments. Making the world a better place. And the tech," he moans, halfway between pleasure and pain. "We're going to sic a Diamond class incinerator on all this. Cremate it."
"We did our best. Dad will rebuild, I'm sure of it. And he couldn't operate without you. He'll find a way to get you everything you need. Right now though, this place isn't safe."
Eric wags his head as though he's trying to prevent himself from disagreeing. His whole life has led to this moment in the same odd way mine led to a reunion with a family I thought I'd never have. His loss, I get. But he regards me with a neutral expression before he asks, "What about you? You staying?"
Awkwardness once more between us. I can tell there is a right and wrong answer, but I don't know which is which.
"Yes," I say uncertainly. He remains unreadable and bows his head, nodding this time. I don't want to dwell on what may or may not have just happened. "Let's check the logs."
A twitch of his chin and he retrieves his mouse, stopping to caress it and lightly touch each button. He clears his throat and dives into the work. I offer support at the secondary keyboard, mostly following his lead.
It doesn't take long to figure out he's right—there's nothing to trace. Shortwave and his team used a variable spread of addresses so thoroughly jumbled that any pattern is hard to detect. A possibility shows up from a data center in the Midwest United States, but we can't confirm it or narrow down the locations. We can utilize alternate domain servers, routing around ICANN. What we can't do is follow trails which no longer exist.
"Boys." Ember is at the door, arms crossed. "Time for me to play."
We exchange glances. Eric releases a sigh of resignation. "Can I have a minute?" he asks.
"Sure," I say. Ember doesn't appear quite as accommodating, especially when I add. "Take five."
"Better listen to the boss' son," she teases, running a hand along the stubble on the side of her scalp. "Guess I can wait five. Starting now." When I join her in the hall, she's against the wall playfully snapping her fingers and watching the sparks. "Got a watch? I can't wear one."
All I come up with from my pockets is my multitool. I gave Martin shit about this once, but with this gig I really need to consider paying for the insurance plan on my cell phone. "Nothing. So, what, you melt 'em? The watches."
She holds a hand out and sheathes her palm in flame. Heat ripples past, and I give her space when I catch a whiff of burning hair. I watch as the fire levitates and becomes a raised spectral appendage, quivering in the air.
"I've got control enough not to," she says. Flame flashes once then winks out. "But control's overrated." There's that faint smile again. Mischief ending in a sensual quirk of the corner of her mouth. She's beautiful in an Icarian way, a trip I don't want to take yet I can't keep the next question from tumbling out.
"Your clothes? How?"
She raises both eyebrows, shifting the broad strip of spiky hair. "Are you asking what I wear under the flame? That's not a question a lady would answer."
"No...I...uh..."
Ember presses close and a whisper of heat floods my ear. "Sometimes, just sometimes, I burn them right off."
She's lithe. Form-fitting spandex the color of raw heat. An athletic body that promises action along with the show. And she's giggling at me.
I tear away, nearly tripping over the unmissable mound of destruction. "I'll check the time."
"Don't go, boss's boy. I'm just messing with you."
"Yes. Yes, you are." I force myself to look into her laughing eyes. She came out of Killcreek, an experimental hell. As far as I know, Aurora is the only U.S. female Augment who didn't. Most of the other females are from the Russian program. Pioneers of equality who subsequently gutted their economy chasing mutually assured military annihilation.
I'm on a roll with the stupid questions. No reason to stop now.
"Did you know Charlotte, before?"
Those eyes darken. "I got lucky. Wasn't at Killcreek long. They'd been hoping for a replacement for Little Boy for ages. I got shipped out way before the brain slicing began."
"Why did you work for them? Once they put you in the field, you could just fly off, right?"
A chuckle forces its way out, and lips draw into a sneer. "I did. Several times."
"Really?"
"They always found me. Brought me home." She scowls, and I realize I'
ve dug too deep.
Time to end the probing questions. As uncomfortable as her flirting makes me, I'm more concerned by her brooding. Letting her get to me is a much smarter plan than me getting to her.
"Hard to believe anyone could catch you," I say, adding an unfortunate, "You're a beast out in the field."
I should just be gagged around women.
"They have their ways." She kicks off of the wall. "Loose ends. Gotta tie them up, or they'll hold them over your head forever. Ready?" It's a statement, not a question.
"Maybe," I say to her backside as she strides into the comcen.
"Time's up," she orders. "You and the kid need to clear out."
"Let's go, Eric."
He's hunched over the keyboard, and a screen flickers as I step inside. Quick to his feet, he makes no complaint about his injuries and runs a hand along the control panel giving an affectionate pat.
"What about the chair?" he asks.
Ember rolls her eyes. "And do what? Drag it out into the parking lot? Boss man isn't up to his feats of strength and our getaway ride is full."
"Will it fit in your car?" I ask, trying to sound hopeful.
"I had to rent a truck to get it here," he mumbles. "Whatever." He caresses the armrest once more and flicks the boatswain. The almost cheerful whistle drowns in the hollow space. "Burn it."
"As soon as I see you in the parking lot security feed." She tugs at her spandex and smirks at me. "I need my privacy. Might be one of those times."
Dejected Eric doesn't even notice. We stop by his room long enough to unhook Babe and carry her with us to the parking lot where the rest of the team has gathered. We've barely cleared the periphery of the security cam when a roar like the ravenous complaint of a dragon whose eaten his last remaining virgin issues from the building.