Embedded

by Dan Abnett

  His mother kissed him and allowed him to be led out of the room, away from the window with its view of the city, twinkling like polished teeth.

  He was taken into the hall, which smelled of floorwax, and asked to sit on a bench under a window where the sunshine streamed in. A young woman brought him a juice box and a piece of fruit. She showed him the box beside the bench where there were picture books, and a woodblock puzzle, and a plastic tank with an SOMD logo on it, and a windup toy spinrad made of tin.

  He didn't like the fruit much, so he put it on the window ledge. He was still hungry, though. After what seemed like a long time, the young woman was called away, and the toy spinrad lost its appeal. He wandered along the echoing halls, through patches of sunlight falling through the tall windows, brushed by the soft voices.

  Outside, on the steps in the sun, he saw the ProFood counter that his mother had hurried him past on the way in. Workers were queuing for their beverage cups and chocolate sticks. He went over and looked up at the photograph menu displayed over the counter, the glossy coffees and sugar-dusted pastries and cheese-and-spinach slices.

  Then the man at the counter told a woman in the queue that she had a sweet little kid, and the woman replied that the child didn't belong to her, so whose child was it? The little boy was lost. A lost little kid in the middle of a busy city street. Where were his parents? Oh, the poor thing. He must be so scared.

  He wasn't scared, not until they started to fuss around him. They asked him where his father was, and he didn't know, and they asked him where his mother was, and he realised he didn't really know that either. She was in the big brown building with the steps at the front, but there were big brown buildings with steps at the front all around them, and he couldn't tell them apart.

  So that was when he got really scared. He wanted to know where his mother was. There was no sign of her. He didn't really understand what was going on, except that somehow he'd got lost, and his mother wasn't there to find him or explain any of it.

  And neither was his dad.

  The man who worked the ProFood counter came out, and took him round to the side of the stand, in front of the big, brightly coloured die-cut picture of Bill Berry the Astronut, and gave him a NoCal-Cola ice-pop to lick while someone called the police.

  He ate the lolly, and gazed up at the die-cut picture of Bill Berry. Bill Berry, in his shiny silver suit, was holding out a chocolate stick and smiling his trademark Berry Happy Smile®.

  The smile was a big smile. It filled the sky up. It was a cheerful smile, a smile full of big white teeth that were so big and polished, one of them was actually catching the light. There were dimples at the corners of the mouth, smile dimples.

  "What's your mother's name?" the ProFood man asked him.

  "Mrs Carmela Bloom," he said.

  "Good, okay. That's good. We'll find her for you, don't you worry. We'll find her right away. So what's your name, son?"

  "Lex Falk," he replied.

  The blackness came and went again, came and went. A couple of times, during the blackouts, he was sure he could hear a slooshing sound, like someone moving around in a bath tub. Each time his vision returned, the smile was still there. Bill Berry's giant Astronut smile. It hadn't gone anywhere, it hadn't stopped smiling, even when he hadn't been able to see it. It was all still there, the smile, the voices and the rain on his face.

  The rain was weird. He didn't understand the significance of the rain. Standing beside the ProFood stand, sucking his lolly, looking up at the Berry Happy Smile® and trying not to be really scared, it was sunny. It was hot. It was a sunny, sunny day.

  Why was there rain on his face, cold and prickly like little dressmaking pins? Where was his mother? His hip hurt. His head hurt.

  When the man from the ProFood counter had asked him his mother's name, he'd said it was Carmela Bloom, but that was patently ridiculous, because his mother's name was Elaine, and she'd died when he was two years old, and his stepmother, the woman who'd raised him, her name was Clare Chavest, later Clare Falk, and neither of them had ever taken him to a brown SO building on a sunny day to discuss funeral arrangements and industrial accident comp with regards to his father, because his father wasn't in orbital construction, he worked for LowmannEscaper, and he wasn't dead either. He was living on Twenty-One with a new family, a family he'd left Clare to create, a family Lex had never met because he'd never really been prepared to make the effort and ride a driver all the way to Twenty-One, even if they were his halfbrothers and sisters.

  Why was it raining in the sunshine? Why did he hurt? Why was he so confused?

  He wanted to get up. He was lying on his back. He wanted to get up, but he knew that would be a really difficult thing to do.

  However hard that was going to be, he knew it was going to be much much more difficult to remember exactly who he was.

  Lex Falk opened Nestor Bloom's eyes.

  SIXTEEN

  The smile was a big smile. It filled the sky up. It was a cheerful, happy smile, with dimples at the corners of the mouth, smile dimples. The smile was full of big white teeth that were so big and polished, one of them was actually catching the light, like a cartoon glint.

  No, not like. An actual cartoon glint, a deftly rendered ting! of dazzle.

  Falk blinked away the cold rain. That smile. Though he was seeing it from a funny angle, it was definitely a Berry Happy Smile®. It was weather-faded, flaking in places, but it was positively the classic old Astronut brand image, not that shit, bland Rooster Booster thing ProFood had brought in about fifteen years back as part of their big corporate makeover. Fuck do they do these things for? Bill Berry, with his retro silver suit and his purple bilberry skin and his giant, cheeky smile, complete with cartoon glint, he'd had real character. The Astronut logo was a classic piece of commercial design. Booster Rooster was just a colossal cock in a suit.

  The smile was looming over him, three yards across. It was a section of fibre sheet cut out of an old billboard and repurposed as a wind defender. It was part of a whole row of windbreak screens made out of old display hoardings, or adboards, or even the metal-skinned sides of bulk shipping containers, slightly corrugated and flecked with rust. They trembled in the path of a stubborn hilltop wind. The frames creaked slightly. The drizzle pattered against their slightly inclined surfaces.

  The sky was low cloud, frothy white like retardant foam. He was lying on his back in the mud. His hip hurt, and so did his head. He was soaked through and cold. In the distance, behind the wind and the spatter of the rain, he could hear the low throb of spinning wind turbines.

  Behind that, he could hear another sound: voices.

  He craned to hear. He couldn't even move his neck. Opening and closing his eyes was as much motor control as he could manage. He felt trapped, completely claustrophobic, the way he'd felt when the reposition had first installed him as a powerless passenger inside Private First Class Nestor Bloom. He was paralysed. He was stuck inside a body that didn't obey his demands, no matter how frantically he willed it. And now, Bloom wasn't moving them both around.

  Falk began to panic. He tried to control that, but it was virtually impossible. It was like being stuck in a lift with an incendiary charge. The combustion source was burning up, getting hotter and brighter and more fierce, and he couldn't get out to get away from it, and it would consume him along with itself.

  He made a sound. He felt a raindrop pinprick his lip. He managed to make a sound, a moan, a murmur. He remembered being back at Camp Lasky, looking at Bloom's unfamiliar face in the restroom mirror while Bloom introduced himself. He remembered freaking out because of the sense of total paralysis, and trying to do something, anything. He'd made a sound then, just a throat noise, but he'd managed to wrest control away from Bloom for a split-second. Bloom hadn't liked that at all. He'd torn Falk off a strip over it. Well tough titties to you, soldier boy. Where are you now? Why have you left me lying here in the rain in the dead weight of your flesh when–

&nb
sp; The girl. The mystery girl with the scalp wound and the curious lack of emotion. She'd shot him. Well, she'd shot Bloom, but it amounted to the same thing. Falk could remember the Colt in her hand, the action snapsnapping almost in slo-mo, the bright gas ignition of the discharge.

  He couldn't remember feeling the rounds hitting him. It was just blackness until Bill Berry started to smile down upon him. Shit, he'd been lost there in the darkness, shut up in Bloom's unconscious mind, wandering blindly into memories that didn't belong to him. A memory of getting lost as a kid, being rescued by a guy at a ProFood counter. That had probably been triggered subconsciously by the old sign on the windbreak. The resulting experience had been very peculiar. The memory was acute, and clearly significant, but it had held no value for him. Bloom's recollection had adhered to Falk's mind. Falk had merely viewed the memory, like someone being shown a snapshot of someone else's childhood. The content, the detail, the meaning, they'd all been attached and complete. Falk had understood it all because Bloom understood it, and they were sharing brain function.

  But it had carried no weight, no emotional content. Falk hadn't engaged. It was like being obliged to watch the latest episode of a situation opera you hadn't been following.

  He couldn't remember the rounds hitting him. They must have hit hard. A Colt PDW was a high-powered weapon, and at that range. Fuck, maybe this wasn't unconsciousness. Maybe Bloom was dead. He fucking ought to be dead. 2mil slugs at close range? Fucking dead as. Falk was trapped inside a fucking corpse! He was inside a dead body, just left there–

  Wouldn't that make him dead too? Surely, the trauma would have killed him or, if not the trauma, the biological death itself? Wouldn't that shock have killed him? Clearly not, but why hadn't the link been severed? Why wasn't he back home, coming around inside Lex Falk's crappy physiology, with Ayoob and Cleesh winching him out of that fucking Jung tank?

  Why hadn't they aborted and pulled him out?

  Bloom had to be alive. Injured, maybe critically, but alive. His brain still had to be functioning. Falk was no fucking expert, but it stood to reason you simply couldn't maintain sensory reposition when something was dead and therefore had no senses or brain function.

  But Bloom himself had left the building, and Falk was stranded inside a cooling body that absolutely refused to answer any voluntary commands, a body stricken by tonic immobility. Locked-in Syndrome. Falk had read about that shit. Total physical paralysis. Just the mind awake inside a shell of dead meat, unable to communicate.

  The searing panic came back, squirming in his gut like a snake. Fuck, fuck, fuck–

  Wait. He was able to blink. He'd made a sound, a croak. He'd made a sound when Bloom was still on board and in charge, overriden Bloom for a second. If he'd been able to do that, and he could blink and croak, for fuck's sake, he could do something.

  Falk strained. He willed so hard he felt he might blow a blood vessel or rupture something. He felt like he was going to burn out all muscle memory. At the point where he could strain no more and he felt as though he was going to explode, he made a sound.

  Another croak. A little gasping groan. Simultaneously, he farted.

  The fuck? That titanic, superhuman effort had achieved the grand result of him cracking one off? Fantastic. Fanfucking-tastic. That pretty much summed up the abject fucking head-on between effort and outcome that was Lex Falk's life.

  It was so fucking tragic it was funny.

  It made him laugh. He began to laugh. He laughed, seriously laughed, for almost a minute straight, until he realised what he was doing.

  He hadn't tried to laugh, and he'd laughed. He was trying too hard. What was required was quite clearly something more subliminal.

  He relaxed. He turned his head to the side. Nestor Bloom's head turned to the side. In extreme close up, he saw the mud he was lying on, splashing up little detonations as raindrops hit it. Right there in front of him was his SOMD-issue earbud, his link to the secure. It had fallen out. He could hear it. It was where the voices where coming from.

  He strained to hear. A lot of fuzz and pop. A voice, repeating the same words.

  "Mil-secure system is down. Mil-secure system is down."

  Falk sat up.

  There was a delay that felt like whole seconds, but was probably only the time it took for a synapse to fire, and Nestor Bloom's body sat up too.

  Balance was an issue. The head lolled on slack neck muscles. Pain increased, in his hip and under his right eye. Falk felt woozy.

  He gazed down at his legs, at Nestor Bloom's legs, stretched out in front of him. Rain fell, tapping at his field kit. His legs were straight and limp. His glares, broken in half at the bridge, were lying on the ground beside his right thigh. There was blood on his lap and down the front of his tunic, blood that the rain was washing into the fabric. It was dripping from his face, his nose. He moved his hand to wipe it. His left hand wouldn't move. His right came up into view, clumsy. He almost punched himself in the mouth. It took a moment of adjustment to manage the fine control needed to operate the hand, to use the hand to wipe his face, to test and probe his cheek and mouth.

  Blood covered his fingers. It was Nestor Bloom's blood, and they were Nestor Bloom's fingers. Falk could feel damage to the face. It was sore, but numbed. Blood was coming from the nostrils, from the mouth, and from some kind of damage to his right cheek, under his eye. All of it ached and throbbed as he pressed: his cheekbone, his skin, his jawline and teeth, his sinuses, his nasal bone, his tongue, the orbit of his eye socket. He realised he was drooling blood and spit, and tried to wipe himself.

  Falk tried to move Bloom's left arm. He felt as though Bloom's body had stroked out, that only one side of it was working. His head throbbed, the pain reignited by his inquisitive fingers. His hip hurt. Weird, weird that Bloom's hip should hurt precisely where Falk's had done. He attempted to get up. That was a tactical mistake. He slipped and went over on his side, his left side, his strokeseized side.

  He came face to face with Stabler. She was stretched out in the rain beside him, face-up. They were lying side by side, like lovers at the top of a hill looking at the clouds or the stars. Her eyes were open. The back of her head was gone. The rain was pink where it dripped off her hair.

  Falk recoiled violently. He slithered and rolled away from Stabler's corpse, Bloom's body flopping loose and lumpen like a badly operated puppet, flailing in the mud. He made terrible, mewling, incoherent sounds, sobbing sounds.

  He was saying her name. He was saying her name with a mouth that had been damaged and wouldn't work properly.

  Falk fell still a few yards away from her, staring back across the dimpling mud at the side of her face. He'd simply reacted in disgust, the reflexive horror of finding oneself lying beside a head-shot corpse. The shock and pity and the despair hadn't come from him at all. It had come from Bloom. Bloom knew her. Bloom had been close to her, as a teammate and more. It had been Bloom sobbing her name in miserable recognition, not Falk.

  Bloom, or some involuntary part of him, was still alive inside somewhere.

  Falk tried to rise again. He spat out blood, and aspirated more along with spittle as he gasped and heaved himself up into a sitting position. He ended up sitting, leaning against one of the wind defenders, part of an advert for GM corn.

  The best Falk could tell, they were in a little alley beside the weather station, on the ocean side of the hill. A gale and driving rain were coming up off the sea, and the view was masked with white fog and spray haze. It felt later in the day, afternoon, perhaps.

  Below him, on the slopes, were store buildings and demountables, as well as several covered cultivation plots. They were all shielded from the weather's raw force by walls of wind defenders. The alley was a path, a mud walkway, leading through to a rear yard. Weatherboard sheds lined one side. The windbreaks, including the Berry Happy Smile®, lined the other, shielding the side of the station.

  It was a nothing space, really, an out-of-the-way walkthrough. Like the dead
space under the restroom window, it had been a convenient place to drag corpses and dump them. Both he and Stabler had been dragged there from the main buildings. Despite the rain, Falk could still see the grooves of the drag marks in the mud. There was another corpse too, a third SOMD trooper. Falk could only see him now he was sitting up. The corpse was the other side of Stabler's, face-down. Falk wasn't sure, but he thought it was the trooper called Martinz. There were three tufted exit wounds in his back, like little volcanoes of gore.

  Their side arms and main weapons had been taken, and there was some evidence that ammo pouches and pockets had been emptied.

  He dearly wished he could control his posture and balance. With his left side frozen and his motor control fucked, he was leaning against the windbreak board at a tilt, like some hopeless invalid propped in a hospital bed, waiting for an orderly to come and plump up his pillows and resettle him. His right hand flopped slackly into his lap. He could feel the spit welling at his lip and stretching down in a long string onto his shirt front.