The Ghost and the Machine

by L B Garrison

  Dark shapes, like giant dragonflies, loomed directly ahead. Cisco locked the wheels and spun the T30. Bailey slid into Mandy. They stopped with the back end pointed towards the wisp on the outside of the formation.

  Before the T30 stopped rocking on its suspension, Bailey bolted from the door. She ran to the wisp, opening screens in the air as she went.

  Cisco popped the hatch.

  The siren lights flashed in the distance, shimmering off the wet tarmac. Mandy grabbed the crates and ran to stack them by the wisp, unloading three for every one Cisco did. Bailey was still working when they finished and the vehicles were closing in.

  “I’m going to buy us some time,” Mandy said. Shadows whirled. She stood in the path of the security vehicles.

  The first group slid to a stop on the wet pavement. Mandy held her hand up to shade the glare of the headlights. The dark forms of soldiers in flex-force armor fanned out to take up firing positions between the vehicles.

  A sergeant with bronze arm bands stepped forward, his rifle pointed at Mandy. “Drop to your knees, hands behind your head,” he shouted.

  Mandy raised her hands and cast her awareness across the base. Two more groups of T30s sped onto the tarmac. Gunships cut through the night air, heading in her direction. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Tires screeched on the runway and the second group arrived.

  “What did you say?” the man asked. The second group slid to a halt and began deploying, flanking the first.

  “Let us go, please.”

  “Mandy?” A woman stepped forward from the second group of soldiers. Mandy squinted. It was Lieutenant Liu.

  Mandy’s heart jumped. She clapped her hands together and bounced on her toes. “Lieutenant! Oh, I am so glad to see you. I need your help.”

  The Lieutenant’s jaw muscles tightened. “Mandy, I’ve been ordered by Colonel Fischer to detain you. He has agreed to turn you over to Admiral Pillado for the assault against the Kinderen stronghold. Will you come quietly?”

  Two Mobius ships deployed from Mother. The third group of vehicles arrived.

  Mandy suddenly became aware again of how cold the night was. “Lieutenant—I just realized, I don’t even know your first name.”

  The Lieutenant took a deep breath. “It’s Ems, Mandy.”

  “Ems Liu?”

  “Ems was my father’s ex-girlfriend, or so my aunt says. Mandy I need your answer.”

  Mandy tensed and she swallowed the burning acid that had worked its way into her throat. “Ems, you’ve seen what I can do and that wasn’t at full power. Please, please don’t make me fight.”

  “You can’t just ignore us. We have a lot of fire power here. I know we can’t stop you, but to get away, you will have to use considerable force and you will hurt some of us. You could kill somebody.” That turned some heads in the Lieutenant’s direction. “I think you’ll stop yourself, rather than do that. I suppose you have a decision to make.”

  “I can stop the Kinderen. Don’t just follow orders,” Mandy begged, just loud enough to be heard above the rain.

  “Colonel Fischer is a good man,” Liu replied.

  “I’m sure you’re right, but there are some things Colonel Fischer doesn’t know,” Mandy said. “When he gets a hold of me, Pillado intends to overwrite my mind. I’d like to avoid that, because I’m kind of used to living. He’ll use me to stop the Kinderen and he doesn’t care how much force it takes. A lot of people will die. Maybe everyone on Demeter. Even if he wins, he’ll only stop the Kinderen here.”

  “He can’t use antimatter weapons or anything more powerful on an inhabited world,” Liu said.

  “He has permission to use any level of force to win.”

  The Lieutenant stared at Mandy with a frown. “We knew the Admiral was lying about something.”

  Mandy swallowed. A knot in her throat made it hard to speak. “If my plan works, everybody wins. Except for Pillado, who’ll be embarrassed, but I think Colonel Fischer might like that. It isn’t about trusting Colonel Fischer, but whether you trust me more than Pillado. And you’re right. I don’t want to hurt anybody. So now Ems, you have a choice to make.” Mandy turned her back to the soldiers and tensed in anticipation of the coming pain.

  The wind picked up a little. Mandy took a shaky breath and walked, casting long shadows on the pavement. No shots came. She kept going until she stepped out of the headlight’s glare. The tension made her dizzy. She peeked over her shoulder.

  Lieutenant Liu was outlined against the headlights. She had her hand on the Sergeant’s rifle, holding it down. “Don’t make me look foolish.”

  “Thank you,” Mandy whispered. She skipped back to the transport. Gold and olive running lights lit the tarmac. Cisco lifted the last cube into the open door.

  “We have to leave,” Mandy said.

  “Just waiting on you.” Cisco climbed in and headed to the pilot cabin up front.

  Mandy turned back to the doorway and put her hand on the latch. Strong winds whisked the glowing auburn clouds. Icy fingers slipped down her spine. The ships were close.

  “It’s going to get rough,” Mandy said. “Buckle up.”

  “Oh?” Bailey glanced at Mandy, secured the last cube and strapped herself in.

  The wisp began to rise and turn.

  A flash shattered the night, rocking the wisp. Burning chunks of the runway ricocheted off the armor. From the swirling flame rose the figure of a ten-year-old girl with a freckled face and a black ponytail tied with a brooch that looked like a tangle of silver fern leaves. This was a girl from another task force Rin knew from training. Katana.

  The wisp accelerated, but not fast enough.

  Katana hurled a probability wave. Mandy countered with a surge of chaotic realities of her own. The two waves met, superheating the air and ripping into blue plasma. The concussion wave pummeled the wisp. Bailey released her safety belt and went for her sidearm. More than useless, if Bailey got in the way, Katana would swat her like an insect.

  Mandy stepped to the middle of the doorway to shield Bailey. Katana surged through the swirling chaos and struck Mandy, throwing her back into the cabin, rocking the wisp.

  Katana pressed her forearm into Mandy’s throat. “You’re not as tall as I remember.”

  Mandy pushed and loosened Katana’s hold. “I don’t want to fight you, but I will.”

  Katana scrunched up her face. “I’m just delaying you an itty bit till Mother gets here. She’s pissed about her hand.”

  Mandy pivoted to the left. She swung her right arm down dislodging Katana’s grip and snapped her head back with an elbow to the face. Katana staggered. Mandy slammed her palm into Katana’s belly, detonating a probability wave. Katana was hurled from the wisp by the blast. Mandy dropped to one knee.

  Bailey watched Katana tumble from the hatch. “Okay, that’s new.”

  Mandy panted. “I wasn’t just rooting around in Rin’s memories. I copied her combat files, you know, just in case.”

  “Smart.”

  Mandy felt a huge mass, skipping in above them and threw out her hand, casting a blazing blue null probability shield. Hypervelocity shells shattered against the shield. Mother had arrived.

  Mandy pressed her palm to the cold metal deck. Trident had managed to expand her stealth field, so it was possible.

  Shell fragments cut through Mandy’s shield with enough remaining kinetic energy to shatter the tarmac and heat the evening air. Turbulent winds tossed the wisp.

  Bailey grabbed the handle and slammed the hatch shut.

  Static sizzled through the cabin and across Mandy’s skin as she formed and expanded her stealth field. She ignore the rocking deck and pulled her awareness away for Mother, which was like not looking at a bat being swung at her head. The stealth bubble encased the ship. Mother fell behind. They banked and tore through the night toward Alex and the waiting Kinderen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  T

  he wisp’s main cabin had been de
signed for troop transport with rows of seating along the walls facing each other across a center aisle. Crates blocked part of the aisle, giving Mandy about twelve linear feet to practice in. This time she tried to keep her eyes open.

  She imagined standing near the forward bulkhead and pushed probabilities to absurd levels, sending tingling electric needles across her skin. Shadows shifted around her as reality broke. For a dizzying instant, she stood in two places at once.

  With a pop, she appeared in the front of the cabin and bumped into the wall. Better than last time at least.

  “Mandy,” Cisco said.

  A partly-assembled rifle sat on Cisco’s lap. He had brought more guns than he could possibly use and had spent most of the journey to Artemis checking and rechecking them. His version of Mandy’s obsessive teleporter practice. It would have been kind of cute, under less dire circumstances.

  She sat on the edge of the seat by Cisco. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

  A schematic of the capitol building floated in the middle of the walkway.

  Bailey nodded towards the hologram. “When we cross the stealth fog, I’ll send a code to mislabel the information generated by our entry. The Kinderen won’t know we’ve traversed the barrier for half an hour. Alex has settled in the annex for the senate chamber. The public areas are covered by security cameras, though whether the Kinderen would use them, I can’t say.”

  Mandy traced a path through the administrative suites with her finger, creating fleeting rainbow trails through the image. “I can get to the balcony of the annex, if I go in through the third-floor window here. There’s no security in the offices. It overlooks the whole annex and from there I can quantum skip to anywhere I can see.”

  Bailey studied the map. “The window’s ninety feet off the ground.”

  “I can jump or skip to it, no problem.”

  Cisco pointed to the capitol’s front parking lot. “We’ll deploy the auto guns and create a defensive perimeter here. As long as we stay inside Trident’s stealth field, we shouldn’t need the guns. Trident’s nano probes haven’t found anything. The city appears abandoned.”

  Mandy stared through the hologram and shivered. It wouldn’t be a good trap, if it was obvious. “They’ll be bigger and meaner things than the hunters in the city. I’d count on it. What if the Kinderen finds you?”

  Bailey touched one of the white boxes from the T30. “Precisely why we brought three cases of auto-turrets and these. The garage’s printer had an antimatter cartridge, so I made twenty thousand kamikaze teensy-spies. I call them Doom Buggies. Once I complete their programing, they’ll attack autonomously.”

  “And isn’t antimatter dangerous?” Mandy asked.

  Bailey gave Mandy a perfect deadpan look. “That’s rather the point of weapons, isn’t it? Individually, they’re equivalent to an artillery shell. In total they carry about half a gram of antimatter tucked away in little anti-inertia bottles of my own design.”

  Cisco popped a magazine into a freshly printed rifle. “Anti-inertia bottles aren’t fool proof and that’s enough to level most of the city. You could have mentioned what we were carrying.”

  Bailey grinned at him. “The boxes were banging about so, I thought it might throw you off your driving.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Good call.”

  Mandy reached into the map and closed her hand on the annex. “As soon as I see Alex, I’ll skip in close, touch her to transfer the mind phage and this will all be over. I hope. I’ll meet you in the parking lot and we’ll evacuate her.”

  Cisco slipped the rifle into a rack under his seat alongside the other three he had built. “Is there anything else we should consider?”

  “Undoubtedly, there are unknowns,” Bailey said. “This is the best we can do with what we have.”

  “I guess that’s it,” Mandy said, though the pessimist in her whispered warnings. “What do you think the Kinderen will do when we hit it with the phage?”

  With a wave, Bailey closed the hologram. “That’s the glitch, isn’t it? Its intelligence comes from the sum of its parts. When the pieces are isolated, the nanomechs cannot synchronize. It will cease spreading and creating machines. How compromised Alex may be, remains unknown. She might stay Kinderen.”

  “But we can use the Tamashii to help her, right?” Mandy asked.

  Bailey reached across the aisle and patted Mandy on the knee. “Indeed, that is why we’re here.”

  Cisco took Mandy’s hand and caressed her fingers with his thumb.

  He seemed apprehensive, but unwilling to share. Mandy might be projecting her thoughts on him. She caught his fingers and squeezed, adding a shy smile as a bonus. Her stomach was doing flips, but at least she could try to comfort the others.

  Bailey broke the silence. “Well, then. Shall I relay the final details to the Tridents?”

  Cisco let go of her hand. “Yes. The wisp says we’re nearing the Kinderen stealth fog. I’ll be up front in case we need to pick an alternate landing site.”

  Mandy watched Cisco go and maybe let her eyes drift where they shouldn’t. With a start, she noticed Bailey was watching her.

  Bailey smiled. “That’s so adorable. You watch him and he takes little peeks at you.”

  Mandy’s face grew warm. “I don’t—he does what? How long has that been going on?”

  Bailey closed her eyes and sat back. “I don’t recall.”

  Mandy slumped against the cool metal wall. “Annoying isn’t a good look for you. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but I kind of like Cisco. It might be a little more than like, actually.”

  “Is he aware?”

  It didn’t qualify as a fight, but they had been a little at odds the last time they were alone. “Well of course he knows. Almost probably.”

  “That’s reassuring. Hang on a moment I need to complete the doom buggies’ programing.”

  Mandy fidgeted and looked at the forward bulkhead again. On the right side of the wall, a short corridor led to the cockpit and Cisco. She didn’t go around announcing her feelings at random, but they had kissed. He certainly knew she felt something, but he might not know how deep it went. Mandy wasn’t sure, really. But knowing Cisco was on the other side of the wall, pulled at her guts like a magnet. Heat warmed her skin, like the summer sun shone from the pilot cabin.

  Bailey opened her eyes. “Will you go already?”

  Two seats and a deck formed the cockpit. Beyond the transparent walls, lay the misty night. Mandy peeked through the small window in the hatch and focused on the deck. She needed all the practice she could get. Shadows burst and she stood inside the compartment. At least skipping was getting easier.

  Cisco looked up from the icons floating in front of him.

  “Just me.” Mandy rested her hand on the back of his seat and let her finger brush his broad shoulders. His light, spicy scent hung in the air. “I guess you don’t have to worry about Bailey putting a criminal record in your file.”

  He laughed. “Yes, conspiring with a group of miscreants to steal a wisp did that. I suppose that’s the least of our worries now.”

  A shadow eclipsed the cockpit. One of the Tridents flew ahead of them. Its dark shape dwarfed the wisp. Trident’s other two elements kept pace on either side. Their stealth bubbles concealed the wisp and smeared the ruined landscape. The forest was gone, stripped to the muddy ground. Streams of matter, like tumbling floods of black tar poured uphill towards a gray smudge of nanomechs on the horizon. Behind the shifting stealth fog lay Artemis.

  They knew what they were doing. They did. But a feeling nibbled at Mandy’s gut, as if she had overlooked or forgotten something. Or maybe, like Rin knew something and the knowledge was gone. “The land looks so desolate. So lonely.”

  Cisco watched the darkness with Mandy. “It’s been like this the last few miles. It’s pulling matter from the forest to build something.”

  She shivered. It had a whole city at its disposal. How could that not be enough?

  On their own, her
hands had found their way into Cisco’s thick hair. She paused. The sensation of his soft locks running through her fingers calmed her. “You know I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, don’t you?”

  He closed his eyes. “I probably would have allowed it.”

  The nanomech stealth fog loomed, like a vast cloud bank.

  “You’re so good to me,” Mandy whispered.

  They plunged into the barrier. Indigo sparks crackled along the window. All was swirly and dark outside.

  She put her hands on his shoulder. His warmth drove the chill from her skin. “I want to tell you something. I’ve spent most of my life watching people, trying to figure them out. Trying to figure myself out and how to fit with the rest of the world. Then you come along and it just happens.”

  He looked up at her. “I have the feeling you’re saying goodbye.”

  They broke through the barrier. Buildings liquefied like chocolate in the sun and joined the viscous torrent that flowed towards the downtown district. Further in, the buildings were warped into gnarled black spines that jutted upward at random angles. A network of cancerous roots strangled the ruins, throbbing with purple light and trailing into the darkness.

  Mandy gnawed at her lower lip. Whatever the Kinderen’s purpose, the scale of it was frightening. It dwarfed even the Tridents to insignificance. How could they ever hope to win against this kind of power?

  Cisco tapped an icon. All the symbols flickered and vanished. The wisp banked toward the capitol building by itself. Cisco unbuckled his safety harness and slipped from Mandy’s grasp to stand in front of her. “Mandy, you worry me. I want you to promise you’re going into this expecting to survive. That you won’t take unnecessary chances.”

  He stood close enough that she would have to look up to see his dark brown eyes, but she didn’t. Mandy knew what death was like. At least she was pretty sure what it would be like for her. Between the scan at the hospital and waking in the forest, a thousand years went by and she had experienced nothing, not darkness or a sense of time passing. As much as she feared it for herself, she couldn’t bear it happening to anyone she cared about. “I know we have a plan. I’m afraid it won’t survive the first encounter with the enemy or however the saying goes. We have to be ready for that.”