“Well, she isn’t now.” Typing became easier, faster. He was finding his voice, at least digitally. “The alarm on her com is screaming. How long have I been offline?”
“Nearly sixteen hours, and we got just over six left till that space elevator comes up and the station moves.”
“Damn it.” Fussing seemed like the only thing Heron could accomplish at the moment.
Panic congealed into frustration. He found the data stream that led to the cables and followed it all the way to the edge of his body. His mind. His self.
But he couldn’t get in. It was walled against him.
He almost told himself to breathe, to steady, but he had to acknowledge the ridiculousness of such a command. His body was breathing fine, was completely relaxed. It was his mind that hurt, that flew in wild hysterical arcs around the space station computer.
He attempted login via a software back door but again encountered failure.
His communications log showed that he’d attempted to log in remotely almost constantly since he’d started this process, but something had blocked him every time. What the fuck was going on?
As he scanned the log, a new message came in. From Angela Neko. Because Mari being in Texas wasn’t nearly bad enough. The universe had a sick sense of timing. He couldn’t endure a conversation with the senator right now. He accepted her message but pushed it to the side.
As if she felt his touch on her com signal, the queen opened her eyes and stared straight at the camera. At him. “Heron,” she said. “Good you are awake. I require your help. Come back.”
He attempted to reply to her com signal and encountered no obstacle. All data lines connected to her were wide open. Huh. The glitch must be only in him. Something the nanovirus had done?
“Logging back into my body is problematic,” he told her, feeding the message directly into her processor.
The queen didn’t need visual or audio inputs. Ones and zeroes were sufficient. Most of the time, he found such scaled-down interaction a challenge and preferred the intricate dance of words and gestures and facial expressions and innuendo that amalgamated to form human communication. None of those methods were available to him right now, though. He would have to concentrate on choosing the proper words.
He missed Mari, who always seemed to understand what he was thinking, or at least what he was feeling. Or maybe she didn’t understand, only made it seem like she did. She made him feel like she had his back. Like he wasn’t alone.
The situation he found himself in right now would be a ton less frightening if she were here. And not just because he would not also be worried for her safety. Even fragmented, he suspected her physical nearness would make him feel complete.
“Why problematic?” asked the queen.
“I have been glitchy ever since the mercenaries cut into my head in the Pentarc.”
“Your remote login and scan were supposed to remove said glitch,” she reminded him.
If he’d had a mouth, he would have sighed. “Before I can fix the transmission, I need to fix whatever is locking me out of my own body.”
“Very well,” she said. “I will help.”
But, inside the station computer, he could see her activity. Her whole network was red, pulsing with alarms. The queen was working too hard already.
“Heron?” Kellen asked in a low voice, darting a glance from the monitor to his inert body on the gurney. “If you got any ideas on how I can help, just let me know.”
Heron forced himself to think, to plan. He typed to Kellen, “I will need a holographic diagram of my brain. Also, how about satellite feeds for Texas?”
He still needed to stop the nanite-induced transmissions—he hadn’t forgotten—but the queen was helping with that right now. First things first. He would get his consciousness back into his body where it belonged.
And then he would get Mari the hell out of Texas.
Chapter 14
They drove all night long. Once—in between rebel camps and validation checkpoints probably, since Mari hadn’t seen any lights—she kind of came to. She was lying on the leather bench seat, and her head rested on something firm and bumpy. She turned her face and smelled laundry detergent and stale cologne. A pearl-faced snap dug into her chin. Nathan’s western-style shirt. Her head was in his lap.
“You shouldn’t be waking up yet.” He shifted, rolling her head up against the bottom curve of the navigation panel. No steering wheel, she remembered. This truck was self-driving. She wanted the other one, the other car. The other him. The vision of Heron that rose in her mind was so solid, so real, that she raised a hand, reaching for him.
And then felt the sting of Nathan’s injector-tip syringe against her neck. Darkness curled in on the edges of her vision, and the last thing Mari saw before falling into it was Heron’s face. She might even have said his name.
She drowsed awake again only when predawn bled unrelenting all over her eyelids. She tried just squeezing to keep her eyes shut, but the damn sunlight was too bright, even in its infant state. Something drew her hair back from her face. Somebody shushed her.
It did occur to her, as recent memories organized themselves in her waking brain, that Nathan had situated her so that if she were wearing a dentata, the business end would be as far as possible from him. He had her head in his lap instead. Mari almost smiled. It felt good to be feared, even if she was out for the count.
“Waking up again?”
“Looks like.” Her tongue felt heavy and bigger than normal. She wanted a drink real bad but didn’t trust Nathan to give her an untreated one. “You gonna chem me asleep again?”
“Not this time. I need you to get up on your feet and climb.”
In a truck? They were still in that giant fugly truck, right? Mari sat up, grimacing against an eyeball-splitting headache. She was still dressed, though the eyelets on her corset were off by one. Somebody’d undone it and then hooked it back up, and she knew it hadn’t been her.
Her skin prickled, and she bit back a wave of sick. Nathan’d had her naked while she was unconscious. She hoped that her dentata threats had at least kept him from raping her, but she didn’t like one bit the idea of him groping her. Didn’t feel right, for all that he’d done it before.
“I found all your weapons,” he said, just as if she’d asked outright. Mari looked at the dash and saw the knife, a syringe, and a microfilament coil all laid out, too far away for her to lunge and grab ’em. Not that she didn’t think about it.
No, no, couldn’t kill him, couldn’t even hurt him. Her brain was still coming out of a fugue, so it took her a little while to remember why she didn’t want to hurt Nathan.
The transmission. She needed him to stop it. Oh, right.
She glanced down her arm, but her cuff com and rations bracelet were both missing. How long until the Chiba Station had to move and Heron’s nanite halo would go away? Damn it, she needed that number, that link to reality. But she also couldn’t ask Nathan for it. Then he’d know that it meant something to her.
It was never a good idea to give Nathan that kind of ammo to use against you. ’Cause he would.
As she watched, he rolled her holdout weapons in a cloth, taped the bundle closed like it was evidence, and slid out his side of the cab. He stowed the cache of weapons in a compartment behind the wide bench seat then locked up the truck.
“Come on out,” he said, holding a hand toward her. “I have to show you something.”
This wasn’t going at all according to Mari’s plan. Fact was, with her brain chem-fuzzy like this, she couldn’t recall all of that plan. Big parts missing, like what she ought to be doing now. Heron would know. He would have set it all up perfectly. He wouldn’t have to be making shit up on the fly like this.
And just thinking about him warmed her up inside. Was he awake yet? He might’ve had time by now to fix what was br
oken in his brain. She tried not to remember how pessimistic he’d been right before Kellen had sedated him. She failed.
Vida, estamos en paz.
She just hoped he’d give her a chance to make this right before he pressed Kellen again about rebooting. Hang on, partner, she thought, though she knew he couldn’t hear her.
When she didn’t accept Nathan’s offered hand, he grabbed hers and pulled her from the truck. She snatched her arm back but ultimately did as she was told. Damn it, she did. She had never liked taking orders, and she liked it a helluva lot less when those orders came from Nathan Grace.
Her boots crunched on gravel, but her first steps away from the truck were far from sure. She almost fell but steadied herself against the truck. Loose confusion from the chemicals still scattered her brain. She looked around in an attempt to get her bearings. No buildings, just bare Texas scrub and scorched rocks far as she could see.
She followed Nathan to the front of the truck and saw it, bulging up from the horizon like a giant pink wart on the landscape: Enchanted Rock.
Mari frowned. Why here? There weren’t any buildings around, no cells to hold her in, no soldiers to keep her in line. It was just a pretty, bald rock. Kind of looked like the sort of place a body’d take someone for execution.
“You been here before?” Nathan asked, all kinds of chatty. He grabbed a pack from the bed of the truck and slung it over his shoulders, clicking the straps and pulling them snug.
The morning was cool, and Mari’s plastene jacket had gone missing. Instead of asking for it or something else to cover up with, she rubbed goose bumps on her upper arms. This corset wasn’t going to protect much against the wind up there on the summit. If that was, in fact, where she was headed.
“When I was a kid,” she replied. “Why’re we here, Nathan?”
He flashed her a grin, but it looked like it hurt. “Following orders, per my contract. Just like the last time we went out on a job together. Remember?”
Not as well as she wanted to. Dang chemical haze. She wanted to reach in her skull and slap her brain around a bit.
“Nathan.” Mari paused, one hand on the grille of the truck. “I need you to tell me what happened. In Corpus.”
He’d started up a graveled path and was about ten paces away, but he turned around now and looked at her. Not smiling. He took a few steps toward her, and Mari felt small. Uneasy.
“You ditched me, angel. Near blew me up, along with those diversion charges. You really don’t remember?”
Mari shook her head. She wanted him to go on, to tell her everything, but he didn’t say another word, just regarded her with those electric-blue eyes, as if he thought she was lying.
“Somehow thought it was the other way around,” she said. “You went dark on me, the federales came, and then they… I looked for you. For a long time, looked for you.”
Nathan frowned, raised a hand, like he was reaching for her or something, and then he let it drop. He hunched a shoulder and turned back to the path.
“Summit in thirty. Better get walking.”
• • •
Mounted to the wall in the Chiba Station med bay was a holoprojector connected to a portable MRI. The setup was meant to show surgeons the internal pathways of a body as nanomachines worked to repair it.
Right now, it projected a human brain, enhanced by several degrees of magnification.
The projection tilted, zoomed some more, and finally resolved on an image that looked a lot like a medulla oblongata and its attached spinal cord. But this structure was different than the pictures in medical training simulators. Organic material was interspersed with mechanical bits, extra capacitors to direct neural activity, and deliberately arranged folds that enabled the parts of his mind to communicate and coordinate far faster than a normal human brain.
The projected model was an augmented brain.
Heron’s.
He searched it relentlessly, looking for anything odd, any anomaly that would explain his predicament. And on his second pass over the projected image, he found it. In a fissure near where the pons and the midbrain met, tucked up tight against his pineal gland, was a slightly duller bit of metal, darker than the other augments. It was a microscopic oddity, and certainly, if he hadn’t had the benefit of magnification and a translucent cross section, he would never have been able to see what was connected to that dark metal disk.
Tiny strands of nanofibers led from it straight to the SIP port on the back of his head, specifically to the part the mercenaries in the Pentarc had hot-wired.
Whoever had marionetted him back at the Pentarc had either known about this access point or had created it.
For the first time, he was glad to be outside of his body, because this realization would have felt like a kick to the gut. Shocking, agonizing. How did the puppeteer know? Heron felt worse than exposed, worse than manipulated. He had been invaded, changed against his will.
However infuriating the knowledge was, though, it was also information. If the puppeteer had used that nanofiber strand to wrest control of his body, what was preventing him from doing the same?
“Kellen,” he typed. “Can you plug a cable into my SIP port? Like, an energy-conduit kind of cable?”
Kellen was looking over some medical readouts when Heron typed, so it was several moments before he glanced over and read the monitor. Such a frustrating way to communicate, but, Heron reminded himself, at least they could talk.
“That’s a lot of wattage,” Kellen answered at last. “If we got a power surge on the station or something, it would fry you.”
The buzz Adele had taken in her com back at the Pentarc was a grain of sand compared to this beach. He would be worse than knocked out. He would be ruined.
But that was only if the worst happened. In the best-case scenario, he might be able to get back into his body. That potential reward was worth the risk.
“I know the odds,” he typed. “I need to try it despite. Let me know when you’re ready to plug in.”
Kellen read the words, said something nasty under his breath, and went over to the body on the gurney. He looked down at it a long time, facing away from the security camera. Heron wondered what his friend was thinking. Kellen placed a hand on Heron’s shoulder, patted it a couple of times while shaking his head, probably muttering something unflattering about crazy stupid ideas. Ultimately, he made his decision, though, and knelt on the floor, rummaging through the pile of cables and wires.
Heron wished he could sigh in relief or smile. Instead, he went back to work.
The wonderful thing about existing in the space station computer rather than a limited human body was the speed. While Kellen hunted down the wiring, Heron had plenty of time to check in with all his resources.
First, he connected with Chloe. She and Garrett were on the spaceplane and still almost an hour away from Mari’s location but headed in that direction. Communicating digitally, they reviewed Chloe’s programming and made sure she had an emergency medical routine loaded, just in case.
Backups for backups, just like how he planned a job.
An unanswered message sat in his communication queue, and he recognized it as Senator Neko’s request from earlier. He read it. She was requesting haven, and something about the plea struck him, maybe its simplicity. Maybe its potential usefulness. In his ideal scenario, he would be back in control of his body, the nanotransmission would be severed, and Mari would be out of Texas and with him. But of course, she wouldn’t be completely safe so long as the continental government wanted her for murder. Angela Neko could help with that. He replied to her message with instructions to meet him at the Pentarc.
He checked in with Viktor, the bodyguard he’d hired to keep an eye on Mari in the event something happened to him. As it turned out, hiring Viktor was the most prescient thing he’d done in days. However, despite the bodyguard’s
vigilance, Viktor had been thrown off when Mari had gotten into a stranger’s truck back in Dallas, and he’d lost time in arranging a transport to follow her. He was approximately twenty minutes behind her but assured Heron that he would catch up.
Last of all, Heron checked in with his satellites. He’d accessed several feeds, but most were visual only, and with dawn about to break over Texas, those satellite feeds had only recently gone live. Except…well, that was odd. The feeds were still dark.
All of them.
That wasn’t right. The sun would be up completely in less than an hour. He should have a clear image of central Texas, awash in predawn lavender. He zoomed out, and a line of visuals appeared. Clean line, starting just outside a public park.
The satellite update blipped. Same ribbon of interstate, leading up to the same clear line of black.
No truck.
Where had she gone?
The first burst of confusion gave way to understanding. Someone had placed intrusion countermeasures—ICE—over the whole area. Whoever had done it clearly had something there to hide, probably something even more important than Mari Vallejo.
Well, more important to governments or geopolitics, maybe. Not more important to Heron. And he had a lot of experience busting through ICE like this.
Just not as a disembodied partial consciousness getting irregular satellite feeds. He waited the four seconds for the satellite to cycle and update its feed. Those moments felt like eternity.
The satellite showed a fresh image: still an empty road, still a giant, shielded nothingness where the park should be.
Under normal circumstances, Enchanted Rock would be a boneheaded place to take a captive. The centerpiece was an enormous igneous outcropping over four hundred feet high and half again as wide. It might offer some nice options for hiding from eyes on the ground, but it provided no cover whatsoever from overhead views.
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