Heir Ascendant

by Matthew S. Cox

  The drone tilted forward and picked up speed. Boxes and junk raced by on the ground. The settlement neared in seconds, and right in the middle of it stood Pope.

  He came looking for me. Oh, no. “Pope!” she shouted.

  She shot overhead before she could tell if he’d reacted to her yell, though several denizens scattered like roaches in the light. The drone tilted along in a gentle left turn, orienting itself to the east, and climbed higher. Her fingers went numb from the cold air and tight grip. She wanted to close her eyes and wait for it to be over with a safe landing, but terror refused to let her trust not watching.

  A field pockmarked with scattered fires glided underneath, probable evidence of recent Brigade attacks on Authority outposts. They used some of these fields for training, and the news often featured stories of the Brigade attacking ‘children.’ By children, the AuthNet meant eighteen and nineteen-year-old rookie officers.

  The drone made an angry sounding buzz.

  Maya gasped. What was that?

  Ahead, the New Baltimore Sanctuary Zone rushed closer at a frightening speed. Her chariot altered course a little more to the left, heading for a swarm of other drones in a perimeter orbit. Three minutes after takeoff, the drone appeared to have resumed its normal programming and entered a lazy patrolling path around the city outskirts. The machine gun on the bottom swiveled back and forth, matching the motion of the sensor ball at the nose end scanning the ground.

  “Hey. Mr. Hacker? Are you still there?”

  The drone buzzed again. “Unidentified voice print.” It tilted back, stopping in midair. The gun spun in a 360 turn, searching for her. “Proximity fault. Unidentified individual, you are hereby ordered to show yourself.”

  “Hang on, kid. I’m trying to―” The speaker cut out. A second later, the drone erupted with flashing red lights and a warning siren. “Unauthorized access. Unit 1359 compromised.”

  The fans cut out to an instant stop. She screamed as the drone fell like a brick. Whirring deafened her again in a few seconds; the abrupt midair halt crushed her into the fuselage, the doll’s plastic foot stabbing her stomach. Her chariot levelled off and spun in place, hovering for an instant before zipping to the right, clearing the wall by only a few feet. A handful of blueberries walking the top dove for cover.

  So many things could go so wrong at that moment her brain blanked from sheer terror. Maya screamed and wailed, begging the hacker to let her down. She held on with all the strength she could force into her hands and thighs, and then some more. Her flying machine swerved back and forth like two men arguing over one joystick.

  “… fighting me for control… not sure how long…”

  “Stop! Help!” Snot smeared out of her nose, driven around her cheek by the onrush of wind. She didn’t dare let go to wipe her face.

  “… bail out when… water.”

  The drone again plummeted in a vertical drop. Her vice-like thigh grip began to slip away from the fuselage, but she managed to hold on long enough for the drone to halt again. Chicken nugget vomit slime went flying as she smushed against the drone for the second time. When the drone stabilized, Maya coughed up more bile.

  A flash of fading sunlight at the ground caught her eye. The drone lurched into motion again, careening like a drunken moth toward a huge, rectangular artificial lake of grey, one of the reservoirs of drinking water. Six spherical tanks arranged along the near edge thrummed with machinery; she passed so close, the vibrations of the pumps resonated in her bones. The drone went into a flat spin, bucking like an angry horse, and dipped to within fifteen feet of the surface.

  “Now!” yelled the voice from the speaker.

  Maya let her legs loosen. Her body glided upward, a meat flag moored by her white-knuckled grip on the thin fan struts, waving as the drone climbed and dropped. It dipped down, closer to the surface. She pulled her knees to her chest, planted her feet on the body, and forced her fingers open. With a thrust of both legs, she jumped clear of the deathtrap. She took a great breath and closed her eyes a second before plunging into the icky-looking water.

  The high-pitched whine of fans muted to a blurry swirl of sound.

  Once she felt as though she’d stopped going down, she risked looking. Much to her surprise, the water wasn’t opaque as it had looked from above. A haze of blonde doll hair formed a cloud at her chin. Steady, mechanical thrumming filled her ears from unseen turbines. The bottom, at least three stories down, appeared farther away than the surface. She kicked to orient herself vertical and reached one hand up.

  A series of lances broke the surface, a graceful row of silver icicles plunging past her on the left. Heavy thudding slammed into the water from overhead. It took her a second to realize the beautiful sight came from large-caliber bullets entering the water. Maya almost screamed the second time the drone fired, but managed to keep what little air she had inside. She flailed her arms and pulled herself around in a twist. A rapid search locked her gaze on a wide concrete pipe near the surface on her left. She swam toward the distant wall, not going up or down.

  When another spray of gunfire hit the water where she had been, failing to correct for her motion, she pulled herself upward, wanting to breathe. Panic rose and fell, dueling with her need to stay alive. More bullets splashed into the pool somewhere behind her. She didn’t look. It seemed like only an instant later her body demanded air; she found herself climbing. Her head breached the surface and she let out a great gasp. Overhead, the drone circled, evidently having lost track of her. She gulped down two more full breaths, took in another huge one, and ducked underwater again. Skimming about five feet beneath the surface, she swam hard until she had to come up for air again. The drone spotted her and whipped around. Maya got only one breath before she forced herself down.

  Spiral cavitation paths rained like the spears of an angry god all around her. She pushed herself deeper and deeper and kicked forward. It fired another volley, again failing to correct for her underwater motion. Proof that it evidently couldn’t see her when she submerged gave her a little scrap of hope. Each swipe of her hands pulled her inches closer to the salvation of the great pipe. A shadow shot overhead and she surfaced behind the drone to breathe. Maya managed four long strokes without diving before it came around to face her. She ducked under before the gun could finish swiveling toward her.

  More silver spirals streaked by, plunging with muted, whooshing splashes. She kicked and pulled, inching away from where the drone pelted the reservoir. After one more bob up to breathe, she swam down and glided into the great pipe. Its elevation on the wall relative to the reservoir surface let water fill it three-fourths of the way. She skimmed the bottom until she felt she’d gone far enough in to put tons of concrete between her and the drone. Once she felt relatively safe from gunfire, she surfaced inside the pipe and kept swimming. The unexpectedly loud echo of her coughing and sputtering scared her quiet.

  A few yards farther in, she swiveled and peered at the opening. The shallow angle didn’t let her see the drone, but the angry whirring in the air left no doubt it continued hunting her. Wavering light glimmered along the top of the pipe, reflected off the water. She swam deeper in to a right elbow turn and a T-junction about twenty yards later. To the left, it went upward at a shallow angle. In the distance, a metal grating platform jutted out from the side by a door, with a ladder hanging from the edge into the water. On her right, the pipe angled downward and the water came up to the top a few feet away from the turn. Maya thanked circumstance for such an easy choice of which way to go, and fought to swim against a mild current until she reached the ladder.

  She scrambled up out of the water and collapsed on her side. The reality of .50 caliber bullets being fired at her crashed down hard; she trembled, dry heaving and sobbing. Maya curled into a ball, clutching the doll. Minutes later, she got her fear under control―somewhat―and sat up. A catwalk made for work boots didn’t treat her butt with much tenderness, so she scooted across the deck and sat on a four-inc
h concrete curb by the door.

  There, she huddled with the doll in her lap. Hiding underground seemed like a really good idea at that moment. The drone couldn’t have scanned her, or it wouldn’t have fired at her. It had to have detected someone too close to it and reacted as if attacked. They didn’t mark me as a criminal, did they? She closed her eyes and tried to stop shivering. Of course not. If they did, it would have said my name and told me to surrender.

  Echoes of sirens and warning buzzers continued to drift in from the pipe. Would they find her here? Who would even think anyone would do what she had done? A hacker got into the drone; they’d probably think he’d made it go nuts and sensed a person where none had been. No way in hell would they expect a drone to carry a passenger. The drone’s operator might not have even realized he’d been firing on a child in the dark, with only a head poking up out of the water. The reservoir had been grey, the same color as the sky―a giant mirror. No wonder it couldn’t see her when she submerged. She’d wait for things to quiet down. Maya held the doll out at arm’s length and stared into its blue, plastic eyes.

  “Why am I holding on to you? You can’t help me.” She flashed a wry smile and neatened the toy’s hair. “Your head’s all full of drugs.”

  Maya cradled the doll anyway, unable to explain how it made her feel better―but it did. She leaned her head back against the metal door, waiting for her heart to slow down and the shaking to stop. As soon as it got quiet outside, she’d continue. She coughed and wiped her nose. Droplets crept down her back and legs, hitting the water below the grating with faint plonks.

  She tried not to think about a ginormous machine gun trying to kill her.

  She refused to remember jumping off a flying drone.

  She forced herself to believe she could find her mother.

  She conjured the mental image of Genna holding her tight.

  I did it. I got inside.

  aya continued shaking long after any audible hint of activity ceased echoing down the pipe. Her soaked hair draped like a dead animal against her back, but she refused to move. She cradled the doll the way she wanted Genna to hold her following such a terrifying ride, but stopped short of speaking to it. It wouldn’t do any good telling a hunk of plastic everything would be okay, not to mention an echoing voice could attract problems.

  Over the course of an hour, her mood eased back from heart-exploding fear to paralytic depression. What if Genna had already been discovered as Brigade and executed? Maya had made it over the wall into the Sanctuary Zone, but that also meant she couldn’t easily stroll out the gate and go home. All the entrances had checkpoints, and if the Authority got her, she’d never see Sarah or any of her friends again. She wiped silent tears from her cheeks and concentrated on keeping them quiet while stifling a coughing fit. No trace of daylight remained in the tunnel she’d entered from. Enough time had passed for notice to die down, and yet still, her ass remained planted.

  She scratched at the top of her foot. Barnes didn’t think she could get this far, and here she sat. Missy Hong thought it impossible for her to get inside the city, yet inside the wall she was. She tilted the doll side to side, listening to the glass vials shift inside its hollow head. Hiding down here in silence for so long, her mind wandered, and the appeal of the Sons of Jeva made some sense to her. Not that they did, but she understood how people could fall for it. Hoping that some magic power had control over fate made not knowing tolerable, like an adult craving the security of being a child again with a parent to protect them.

  Maya combed the doll’s hair with her fingers. “It would be nice if there was something up there. Then I could ask it to make sure Mom’s alive. Maybe I’m doing that right now… or maybe I’m talking to a toy.” She shook it. “What do you think, doll? Pretty silly of me to talk to plastic.”

  Bright blue fake eyes regarded her from a lifeless face bearing an innocent, empty smile.

  A beep came from above and to the left. Maya peered up at a card-reader box on the wall beside the door she leaned on that had no knobs or handles. Her spike of fear faded at the realization no one tried to open it. Its built-in clock read 22:00:13, so it must’ve chirped at the hour changing. She’d been down there for hours and not heard its clock beep before. Maybe she’d not noticed due to her fear or because of all the noise outside.

  “Well.” She stretched her sore legs before standing with a weary whimper. “Mom isn’t getting any freer.”

  Nothing she could think of to do to the panel opened the door, so she crept to the edge of the grating and lowered herself back into the water. A few minutes of swimming brought her to another T-junction. Sounds of traffic echoed to the right and a constant, mechanical whirr came from the left.

  One of her e-learns had gone over how the Sanc collected rain into reservoirs, treating and cleaning it before sending it back into peoples’ homes. She grinned at having fallen into the brackish artificial lake. That meant she’d hit a pre-treated pool, so this passage had to lead right out to the Sanc via the storm drains that collected rainwater.

  She hurried to the right, swimming about sixty or seventy yards to a spot where a narrow rectangle of light shimmered on the water’s surface. She set her feet down, the level of the water even with her chin, and stared up a shaft to a street-level drain. Headlight glare washed over the slot every few seconds, casting moving shadows from dangling strands of plantlike muck.

  A rotting series of huge metal staples on the wall provided a passable, if not punishing, ladder. Maya pulled herself up and out of the water, scaling the crud-caked rungs. They led to a manhole cover she couldn’t budge, so she stretched left to peer out the opening.

  The storm drain had a view of an open area, a courtyard between office buildings rather than an actual street. Glowing electric light outside made her squint, but after a moment or two, her eyes adjusted. Men and women scurried back and forth in the shadow of massive high-rise towers bedecked with holographic advertisements. Traffic sounds came from the left, along with the occasional louder whine of an Authority drone flying by.

  Miniature umbrella-drones shadowed many of the people. The fist-sized floating spheres kept their transparent rain-shields in place over their owners, so many that all the little fans sounded like an army of bees.

  A spray misted her in the face, gusting into the opening on the breeze. Since she couldn’t budge the manhole cover, she slithered out through the storm drain onto the road and into the fresh (ish) air of the city and a light but steady rain. She’d already gotten soaked from swimming, so it didn’t bother her. Maya sat on the curb by the opening, taking a minute or five to catch her breath and wait for her feet to stop hurting from the metal ladder. People seemed too busy to notice her, and walked by without as much as a look of disinterest.

  A pair of Authority drones flew around the corner from the left, two blocks down where the concourse met a street. They glided along at about the level of the fifth floor. She didn’t know if their sensors would detect the drugs in the doll’s head, but perhaps losing the knife had been a good thing. That, they would have picked up. Of course, knives weren’t illegal, but a girl her age with one would prompt questions.

  Once she caught her breath, Maya stood and chose to walk off to her left at random. The clean metal sidewalks of the Sanctuary Zone felt strange underfoot after so much old-fashioned paving and dirt. At the end of the block, she merged with a stream of pedestrians.

  She didn’t think much of walking around in the open until a shimmering glow on the left regaled her with an eight-foot tall version of her own smiling face above the scrolling logo of Cendrolex, a liver-restoration medication. Her broad grin sparkled with teal lipstick as her white-gloved hand raised a cup of wine into the scene. A recording of her voice played.

  “Cendrolex… live life to the fullest.”

  Maya remembered tasting the colored water. She wondered if the same person who thought it a good idea to have an eight-year-old market a drug to alcoholics and appear to d
rink on camera had drawn the line at letting her have real wine, or if someone else had made that decision. With a huff of disgust at her video self, she grumbled and trudged off. Despite looking like a refugee from a battlefield, she kept her head down so no one could see her face.

  At the end of the block, she stopped to wait for a red light. Upon a giant video billboard mounted to the fourth floor of a building across the corner, a ten-foot-tall version of her pranced around showing off her shapeless body in a tiny purple bikini―an effort to get women to buy Adimera, a fat-destroying pill that ‘blasted the pounds right off.’ She squirmed, remembering how much she’d hated that thong, a wedgie she couldn’t get away from. One of the production guys called it butt floss. Her aesthetic technician lost her job that day for challenging the request to put such a skimpy thing on a girl her age. That ad, they’d only filmed three weeks before her abduction.

  “You can look like this forever with Adimera,” said a little-girl voice that sounded too much like hers.

  Yeah, Adimera… and two in sixty people suffer potentially fatal hemorrhagic diarrhea, or, if they’re lucky, heart failure. Almost no one who saw that ad would know Maya’s twig-thin physique came from custom genetics. How many people had Ascendant fooled into thinking a couple of pills could turn them from normal people into supermodels? Watching a giant image of herself prance about and wave her butt made her blush and look down. It had seemed fun at the time (except for the wedgie), but the finished advert mortified her. Had Sarah or her other friends felt that embarrassed after they’d been robbed? Maybe not. The giant Maya had a wholly different feel to it. Her handlers had coached her to act too much like a grown woman, showing off her next-to-nothing outfit. She held her stomach, sick at the thought of Mr. Mason watching that ad over and over.

  Please don’t let any of my friends ever see that! She blushed at the memory of Anton saying Marcus liked her. Maya closed her eyes and wished for religion to be real so she could ask some deity to make sure he never saw that video.