Someone with an unfamiliar core of copper was sitting beside Avery, reading to her. The person with the copper core had the same frightened coloration as the rest of the hostages; as Rachel watched, Avery patted them on their leg to comfort them.
Rachel turned her scans away and kept her hands well away from her gun.
She followed Josh, who followed Nicholson, up a loading ramp and into the near-blackness of the building. The lamps from the cops and the news crews had turned the parking lot as bright as day; inside, the light was transformed into an otherworldly blue from the tinted film across the windows.
The building was huge. Whole football fields long, maybe a quarter-mile or more from one end to the other. The light couldn’t keep up with them, and it wasn’t long before there was nothing before them but the dark. Nicholson didn’t acknowledge it; he walked the halls with the surefootedness of a king who had grown up in his castle. This was why he had waited, Josh mused through their link, and she agreed. With the sun almost down, the factory was dark, strange, dangerous. Nicholson had assumed he would take the lead and keep the Agents off-balance as they struggled to keep up with him in the factory’s great hostile voids.
Rachel chuckled to herself as Josh slowed down to walk beside her. She brought her scans down to their most basic settings, and let her friend use her senses as his own.
Josh began to point out interesting elements within the factory—the large pipes crisscrossing overhead, the woven metal catwalk beneath their feet—and Nicholson’s conversational colors picked up some orange-red irritation around the edges.
They walked for what seemed like forever through the bones of the factory. The walls, mostly cinderblock and veined in girders of steel, were the same sturdy ones she had seen from the news report, but now she could also see the water damage seeping into them, the rust and rot beneath… There were holes in the ceiling, and the concrete floor was beginning to crack from neglect.
This place is dying, she realized, and wondered what kind of music Phil would bring to her scans if he were here. Something sad, maybe, or classical, or both. Chamber music for a funeral.
Josh pulled his senses away from hers; there was light ahead.
“Hope’s in the office,” she said, and used her mind to direct him towards the room on the catwalk above them.
“I know. Pat and I went out-of-body to check in with her as soon as she woke up and let him know where she was,” he said. “There were two men standing guard.”
There was just one man now: he was keeping well away from the windows, and had a core of fresh-made iron. Hope’s core of twisting blue-black was beside him; she was seated on the floor, her arms and legs bound together.
Nicholson stepped into the single pool of light.
There was a meal waiting for him. Waiting for him and Josh, rather, a small table draped in white linen and set in matching fine china for two, with a main course of steak and potatoes kept hot beneath silver covers. Rachel picked a spot a few feet behind Josh and settled into parade rest, and tried to not think about what kind of person would host a candlelit dinner as part of hostage negotiations.
“Can you tie me in now?” Josh asked.
Rachel took a quiet breath, and gave herself over to poetry.
As she let down her walls, her friend’s mind came into hers. It was a different kind of link than the one she had shared with Phil. There, they had become a single mind. Here, she and Josh maintained their separate senses of self. And those two identities? Their competing self-awareness? They caused problems. No one else in the collective could do what she could do: no one else had had cause to learn. A deeply merged link would have allowed Josh to have access to her full range of senses and the knowledge that came along with it, but he would have no longer been Josh. A shallow link would give him access to both senses and knowledge, while also allowing him to keep his own personality. She just had to get the hell out of his way.
Poetry helped. On the drive over, she had chosen “Prayers of Steel,” a lesser-known poem by Carl Sandburg. It was a tiny piece barely nine lines long, and no less beautiful for its length and obscurity.
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Simple. Image of metal, raw. A plea from something that wanted to become more than it was. She felt her mind slide sideways as Josh inspected the room. Beyond the halo of candlelight, there were men everywhere, crouching in the dark like predators. They used the machinery as cover. They were all heavily armed, their guns trained on the Agents.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Becoming more through hardship. No pain—metal didn’t feel pain—but it took shape through fire and strength and skill. Without the hammer and the anvil, there would be no tools. Without tools, there would be nothing… None of the men were an immediate danger. She wouldn’t have allowed Josh to enter the candlelight if they had been. They crouched over their guns and radiated hope.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Hope? Yes. Not the blue-black core color of the woman in the office above them, but real hope, the kind that Pandora had managed to slam the lid on. The most complicated emotion of them all. Yellow, red, blue, all primary colors, braided into each other, supporting each other. Yellow for joy. The blue of relief. Passionate red. And through these ran strands of OACET green. Colors that wanted a purpose. Wanted to be validated… Although maybe that was just the crowbar talking.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
Tools were needed to shake off the old. To break up what no longer worked. To make way for the new. The hostages were at the other end of the structure. Not in a different room, not really: factories were single rooms with partitions, office furniture for giants. The hostages were uninjured but scared, so scared, yellow fear pouring from them in great sick blobs, with Avery at their center.
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Back to the anvil again: Sandberg loved the syncopation of repetition. Nicholson was yellow-white energy now, excited and excitement both as his plan unfolded, cutting into his steak and drinking his wine as if he and Josh were dining at the best table in Mastro’s.
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
A spike this time, a tool of a different kind. The spike comes after the crowbar. Making comes after breaking. Josh, passing through the introductions, starting to test Nicholson’s boundaries, little pokes and prods to see how committed Nicholson was to his plans.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
She hadn’t given much thought to collectives outside of her own. Small parts that make a whole. That’s what buildings were—that’s what this factory was. And the militia stationed around them? A collective of a different sort. One that looked to Nicholson.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.
What would happen if she took out Nicholson? Right here, right now, one shot between his eyes. Brains everywhere. Dinner ruined. Would the militia collapse around them? No. Take out that one steel spike and the building would still stand.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.
But what happened if the great nail was gone? The collective wouldn’t be the same. The weight carried by that great nail would be pushed out, the others around it forced to carry the strain. If that great nail was important enough, if that nail had been a keystone made from steel, the collective would sag and collapse.
The center must hold.
As her meditation ended, Josh pulled away from her mind.
“Got what you needed?” she asked.
“Yeah. Nobody’s going to attack us, and this guy’s about as deep as a puddle,” he replied. “He’s a rich kid who was never told no.”
Rachel turned her attention back to the small dinner table, where the head of the militia was…pontificating? Yes, that worked. Nicholson was pontificating at Josh, all preaching and no point.
Josh, who lived for verbal jousting with a decent opponen
t, had begun to turn an irritated orange-yellow around his edges.
There’s something not right here.
She couldn’t tell if that was Josh’s thought or her own.
“We’re missing something.” That came from Josh; his mental voice was beginning to take on new flavors of concern. “Scout around.”
The request took her by surprise. “I have to watch your back,” she reminded him. “I’ll come back and scout when we’re done.”
“These guys aren’t dangerous. Not right now. You agree?”
She did, but…
“This is probably the only time you’ll have physical access to this building. I need your detective’s brain working. Get the feel of this place while you can.”
“Fine,” she said, and shoved her friend to the margins of her mind so he wouldn’t get in her way.
Walk the scene. She had learned this early on in her career with the MPD. Walking the scene allowed her body and brain time to process what her scans perceived. She couldn’t move around the factory, not without drawing attention to herself, but…
Rachel stepped out-of-body.
It was her least favorite cyborg trick, this business of projecting her consciousness into her bright green avatar while leaving her body behind. Out-of-body…itched.
Not physically. Some of the others swore that out-of-body came with sensations of its own, but she never felt anything except a general sense of wrongness, that she had been given one body and her soul should stay in it, damn it! She could scan whatever she wished, she could throw her mind across the planet if she wanted, but walking around in a digital copy of herself? Her scans at least kept her somewhat honest; they didn’t allow her to pretend she was physically present when she wasn’t. A New Age-y friend of the collective said that going out-of-body was merely astral projection, and assured them that monks had been doing it for thousands of years. Rachel thought that “merely” and “astral projection” didn’t belong in the same sentence, and that the cyborgs should have left it to the monks, who had probably trained for the stomach-churning weirdness of walking around without having bothered to bring your stomach along.
Her avatar pushed off against the cement floor and flew straight up in the air.
(Okay. That part was cool.)
Below was the table, with Josh and Nicholson staring at each other across their meals. She had no access to the emotional spectrum when she was out-of-body: Josh’s posture was screaming boredom, with his head propped on one hand; it was the opposite of the vivid electric whites and professional blues he had been wearing a moment ago.
Up, up. The darkness around the candlelit table wasn’t an issue for her avatar. The men stationed around the table appeared to be sitting in broad daylight. They had had some training; they held their posts around the table in silence, their weapons close at hand but not ready to be used. Some of them wore body cameras, recording everything that happened. She saw the uneasy glances among the militia members as they watched their leader lose face in front of OACET’s second-in-command, and Rachel told Josh to dial the disrespect down a notch. Josh’s head came up off of his hand as he pretended to agree with something Nicholson had said; the men noticed, and were pleased.
She allowed herself to be drawn over to a stack of crates positioned near the exterior wall. New crates, nearly two dozen in number, made of fresh wood with score marks across the top from where they had been pried open. There were no markings on the crates, no way to tell exactly what was in them, but she had seen hundreds of featureless crates when she was with Army CID, and they always held the same things.
Up again, and over to another stack of boxes. Smaller boxes this time, cardboard instead of wood, with an American flag and the initials MRE stamped on each surface she could see. Nearby was an open trash can; she peered inside to see familiar plastic bags, and the stomach she had left behind churned at the remembered taste of prepackaged slices of cafeteria pizza covered in moon dust.
Up, one more time.
Rachel landed on the stairs just outside the office door, and peered through the glass. The room inside was spacious and freshly scrubbed. There were walls up here: the front office had the only view of the factory floor below, but behind it was an entire second story. A china setting identical to the ones downstairs was on a cafeteria tray and had been tucked to the side of the door, dotted with the usual inedible shreds of steak and the skin of a baked potato.
She forced her avatar to walk through the office door, and ignored how passing through solid matter didn’t feel like anything. On the other side, Hope Blackwell was sitting on a pile of clean blankets, staring at her guard with eyes like lasers. The guard was also sitting on the ground, but the fresh finger-shaped bruises around his neck explained why Hope had been bound at her wrists and ankles with nylon cord.
“Hope?” Rachel said. She pitched her voice low out of habit; Hope was one of those rare people who could see and hear her without needing an implant of her own; for the guard, Rachel’s avatar might as well not exist.
Hope jerked, then settled herself. The guard spun his handgun towards her in a practiced movement before he realized she wasn’t about to squirm free and lunge for his throat again.
“How’s Avery?” Hope asked. She was looking at the guard, but her question was meant for Rachel.
“Shut up,” the guard growled, one hand pressed against his throat as if it hurt to talk.
“Eat a dick,” Hope snapped at him. “Hell, eat two. In your case, they’re probably small.”
The guard came up off of the floor, his gun snapping up to point at Hope’s head.
“Coward,” she said, grinning like a wild animal. “Untie me and we’ll do this all proper-like.”
The gun went down.
“C’mon, asshole!” Hope shouted. “You’re the only one here who’s not a waste of my time! C’mon!”
“Can’t fuckin’ wait ’til I get to kill you,” he muttered, and turned away.
The guard’s attention was elsewhere for all of two seconds before Hope—She’s untied? What? How?—was up and moving. Hope was right; the guard was decent in a fight. He saw Hope coming and met her attack with an arm block, then another while he tried to bring his gun into play, but she was coming from above and had the advantage of surprise. The weird woman grabbed him by the top of his too-long hair and then it was merely a matter of banging his head against the closest metal filing cabinet until his body went limp.
Hope stood, kicked him once in the balls for good measure, then sighed and knelt to check his pupils.
“Your mouth’s open,” she said to Rachel.
“Hope, what the shit?!” was all Rachel could manage.
Hope yanked the door open and began to descend the metal stairs. Rachel watched her from two sets of senses until she remembered to drop her avatar and put her mind back in her own body. She pinged Josh and updated him as quickly as she could, and he was standing and pulling out his chair for his boss’s wife as soon as Hope’s feet touched the ground floor.
“Thank you,” Hope said to Josh, and tucked into what was left of his meal. Then, to Nicholson: “Got any more wine?”
It took Nicholson a moment to recover. “Doctor Blackwell?”
“Yeah,” she said around large bites of mashed potatoes. “Hi. The wine?”
When Nicholson didn’t respond, she reached over and took Nicholson’s plate from in front of him, and scraped its contents onto her own. She started shoveling food in her mouth with the efficient practicality of someone unsure of when she’d get another opportunity to eat.
“The lady asked for wine,” Josh said to Nicholson.
“Of course,” Nicholson said, and gestured towards his men. Another bottle of wine appeared, carried by a man with a core of swimming-pool blue.
Hope took it from him and gripped the bottle like a baseball bat. For a moment, it seemed as though she was going to take a swing at Nicholson, but she read the label on the bottle and the bottle went from wea
pon to prize. “A 1990 Dalla Valle red?” she asked, her colors changing to a rather pleased pink. The bottle went onto the table, right side up. “This is some good stuff.”
“Only the best—”
“Yeah, whatever,” she said, and had the foil and the cork out of the bottle with a single practiced twist of her wrist. She set the bottle on the table to breathe, then returned to her steak. “Have you…hey, this is pretty good, too…have you realized you’re completely out of your depth yet?”
Nicholson chuckled. “Doctor, please. This—”
“You’re dealing with people who’ve been forced to take a stand against the U.S. government. For years. And they’ve won. The government keeps trying to break them, get them to fall in line and be good little civil service robots, but guess what? OACET loves it—they live and breathe politics! You push them, they push back. And my husband? The worst. Seriously, the worst of them. Total control freak. Going up against him is like kicking a nuclear missile in its junk.” She paused. “You should probably send an ice pack up to that tossmunch in the office, by the way.”
Hope wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and glared at Nicholson. “Here’s how this is gonna go,” she said. “You tie me up? I break out of it. You chain me down? I break out of it. You drug me? I’m out of action, but my husband’s gonna start calling surprise press conferences and he’ll ask to see me on camera.”
“True,” Josh said, nodding.
“Bet it’d look bad for you if your star hostage can’t testify that she’s here of her own free will.”
Orange annoyance started to drip from Nicholson’s pores.
“Now,” Hope said. “Here’s the part where I cut through the red tape and offer to buy this factory.”
The orange evaporated.
Could it really be this easy? Rachel thought.
“Nope,” Josh said. “Wait for it…”
Nicholson smiled. “I don’t think that’ll work.”
“Seems like a plan to me,” Hope replied. “You’ve already established the cover story. I’m your friend now, right? You made me say so in front of God, the media, and everyone. So how about I buy the factory from you, or… Hell, how about I just pay to get it upgraded? I write the check, you cash it, we all go home, and next April I write this bullshit mess of an afternoon off as a failed investment.”
Brute Force Page 10