Quick flash of something, then a nod. “It is.”
“Get the augments, tie Upton to Champ and … to Allure18, I suppose, and the Kinze? Clear Ember. That’s the play.”
“Okay! We’ll try it.”
“No more high-flying, death-defying stunts for a while? Promise?”
“Promise.” Frankie opened her coat, handing Maud two grenades. She pulled the pins on two of her own, dropping them on the seething undead crowd still foaming around the walk-up apartment. “But.”
“What?”
“It might not be enough.”
“I don’t care.” Maud fingered one of the grenades, declining to pull the pin. “You cut it too close this time.”
“All right.” Frankie’s grenades exploded among the zombies then, sending severed cartoon arms and legs and heads, all with comically surprised facial expressions on them, disappearing into the flames as the whole building went up, and the chopper rose into the sky. “We’ll try it your way.”
She didn’t add for now.
Even without sweet harmony or augmented comms, Maud heard it just the same.
CHAPTER 19
THE SURFACE: NORTHAM RESETTLEMENT ZONE
HAUDENOSAUNEE TERRITORY (TORONTO DISTRICT), LAKESHORE NORTH
The prosecutor’s office gave Champ three options for waiting out the sabotage investigation: he could locate in East Euro, NorthAm, or Greater Pretoria. Grungy, undesirable locales, in other words, far from the cool hubs in Asia and South America.
But hey, nobody was fitting him up for a noose in advance, right?
He took NorthAm, gigging as a submarine pilot in the Great Lakes, chauffeuring biologists who were checking saline levels and particulate. Same sort as Maud Sento, tunnel-visioned slimeheads who got jazzed up over healthy freshwater mussels. Humankind was literally colonizing the solar system, and here they were, maundering about Asian carp stocks.
The submarines were big and complex, as much fun to pilot as any vehicle could be … unless you’d been an FTL saucer. Once you’d blown an anyspace field out in front of you like a bubble, felt yourself shooting between the seams of reality, everything else was beneath you.
At least the shifts made for dull viewing, which kept Champ’s realtime follows in the mere thousands.
He spent his downtime lifting weights and doing gymnastics with his eyes shut, staying fit and denying visual input to the lookyloos. His social capital account was frozen until the case was resolved. Nobody could give him strikes or tank his Cloudsight rating until his case was heard. He couldn’t earn strokes from sympathizers. Couldn’t get himself a bump with good deeds.
Accusation hung on him like stink. Other submarine pilots and even the slimeheads sent polite declines when he offered himself up for after-shift drinks. Forget about any chance of a sex opp—he was persona non grata.
A week after the spectacular collapse of his mission to Emerald Station, Champ found himself surfacing from one submarine shift, stretched out on a smartcouch in a lounge overlooking the greentowers that fronted the edge of Lake Ontario.
He counted his unanswered pings on the private pilots’ channel. He hadn’t expected Hung to answer—but he also hadn’t got so much as a whisper from Indigo, Rastopher, or Yuri. Owello had sent a string of neutral moji: cloud with a silver lining, a running icon to indicate she was busy.
He glared out at the view. Lake Ontario had a slate-grey quality that hinted at incoming snow. The air was crisp, clear as if Champ was looking through a magnifying glass. People strolled the waterfront in front of the greentowers, enjoying the views—a nice walk on a clear day didn’t cost anything. Ironic thing was, they probably had ample luxury credit to spend. But with the Kinze continuing to buy up the niceties of life—coffee, nicotine, booze, premium slots in gaming sims—the Solakinder couldn’t access treats of their own.
Meanwhile, he was sidelined, courtesy of Frankie Barnes. Languishing under his own personal cloud of suspicion.
What was the Hedgehog up to? He brought up a realtime follow, finding her and Maud in a Mars hospital, doing tissue-compatibility checks for quantum comms.
Champ wasn’t sure he agreed with Aunt Irma and Upton that folding Maud into the quantum-comms project was a stroke of genius.
They were banking an awful lot on the fact that she’d never betrayed Upton. Irma thought it meant Maud could be wooed into rejoining the family. That she could be groomed into keeping tabs on the Ferals and would sell them out to the @Visionary cause. Wishful thinking, Champ thought, but that was Irma. She never gave up on any of her kids.
The Bootstrap Project had initiated this experiment to drill down into an unintended side effect of the pilots’ interface surgery, the sacral implants’ ability to synchronize in a way that allowed off-Sensorium comms.
All well and good, except the syncing wasn’t an accident.
The tech had come, naturally enough, from Allure18, who’d lavishly assured Champ and all the @Visionaries that nobody would notice the implants’ comms functionality. It’d let Champ talk, off-book, to Scrap and the rest of the Kinze. But Hung discovered it—and named it the @ButtSignal, and told everyone on Sensorium all about it. Upton’d had to move in with a rebrand before anyone looked too close.
So, suddenly, the pilots’ channel was the biggest serendipitous science accident since the discovery of penicillin! A bona fide interesting phenom! In need of analysis!
What was rebranding, after all, but clusterfuck management?
So, as the augmented pilots all figured out, one by one, that they could message through the implants, bypassing Sensorium, Upton had suggested seeing if the system could be expanded, folding in members outside the pilot cohort … and trying to transmit across interstellar distances. They’d polled pilots’ families for volunteers to join the channel, and greenlighted Maud as the first experimental subject.
The docs would wire Maud up with the core of a sacral implant, grafting all the relevant augment tish into her cochlear and vestibular nerves. They’d teach her how to use the channel and send Frankie off on a short FTL hop.
The trick would be to see if the women could text across a distance of three light-years.
Champ leaned forward into the view of the Lake, giving his back a hard scratch. He ran a finger over his sacral augment, opening a channel.
Scrap, he texted. Scrap, you there?
Scraaaaaapppppp.…
Something came back, just for a second. Babs-Them …
Then nothing.
Irritated now, he pinged Irma.
Her face filled his augments, toon in black and white, sketched in front of the view of Lake Ontario. “I’m on my way to rehearsal, darling—I can’t talk for long. How are you holding up?”
“I want to get back to work,” he said.
“You are working, darling!”
“Any old clod can drive scientists out to count mussels,” he said. Punching down at those lower on his career track would normally get him strikes, but what did it matter now? “I’m an elite, highly trained—”
“As soon as you’re cleared, you’ll be lead on Hopscotch again.” Her mouth pinched in apparent distaste—they had to make a big performance of disagreeing about his career path, since she was in so deep with IMperish and the anti-Bootstrap cohort.
“Is my name gonna get cleared in time for me to test Heyoka? I don’t think so.”
“I’m sure it’s frustrating, darling. To be accused when you’re innocent!”
“I need to make a contribution.”
“Champagne, given your situation—”
“You want me to sit pretty and let others handle it? That’s the attitude knocks you off the leaderboard, Auntie.”
“I don’t know what you think I can do about it.”
Pastured. Were they going to let him languish in this state of suspicion forever? “You know if I’m just left hangin’ here, I’ll start making trouble.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t dare.”
/> Champ leaned back in his chair. “Try me.”
She rang off without another word.
Champ returned to his contemplation of the hospital feed of Frankie Barnes and her Maud, letting a dangerous lick of an idea run through him. He tapped his augment again, resetting, bringing in Frankie on the pilots’ channel.
Hey, Hedgehog! Maud ever tell you Glenn Upton was her daddy?
It wasn’t a message Champ could send in the clear. Admitting on the record that he knew such a thing was practically signing a confession. But what did he care if Frankie knew he was guilty? She already believed it. Champ might as well puncture her obnoxious true-luv-always bliss. Hoist her on the petard of her own goddamned trust issues. Really, he’d be saving the @Visionaries from making a tragic mistake. Irma was an idiot to think Maud would sell out her weird passel of spouses—
Faraway on Mars, Frankie’s face froze. She glared up into the nearest camera.
—but if Irma would believe it, maybe the Hedgehog would too.
Champ winked and sent, Upton adopted your precious Maud when she was just a sprout. She’s @Visionary, sweetpie, through and through.
“Frankie?” Jermaine Mwangi was doing the tish injections “Unfist your hands, hon.”
Champ’s sacral implant buzzed. Not Scrap this time. Not a pilot, either—a stranger.
Text came in: You little shit! What did you say to her?
That wasn’t Irma, or Allure18. Get me back in the game!
You can’t handle the game, Chevalier.
Letting his eyes glaze, as if he was talking to himself, Champ said, aloud, “I am up for anything.”
Seconds ticked by. Then: Increased commit means increased risk.
He shrugged.
Fine. I need a couple hours. Go for a walk. If you pull any more stunts, I’ll have you minced.
Champ closed the feed of the Fraud and rose, stretching. He wasn’t worried; killing him would attract attention that nobody wanted.
Savoring the bomb he’d thrown into Frankie’s personal life, he made a conspicuously boring afternoon of it all, trying to shake his follows. He found an in-the-flesh tour of a twentieth-century water treatment plant, of all things, attached to the Lake Ontario reclamation project. He hadn’t expected much from that, but it was legit historical, with stunning marble and ornate art deco finishes. It put him in mind of the structures he would build when he ended up atop the global pecking order, when he finally ended up rating a permanent house of his own.
A palace. Rulers get palaces.
After all he’d gone through for the cause, it better be a big one.
Eventually, he took a pop-in apartment, collapsed into bed, and threw a blanket over himself. Closing his eyes, he tried not to think about all the people, lookyloos and investigators dogging his feed. Algorithms measuring his every breath and heartbeat, rating the chances on whether he was drifting off or masturbating.
When the Kinze finally liquidated the earth government, Champ would bring back the right to an unmonitored night’s sleep—for the right people, anyway—faster than a jackrabbit on the run.
Never mind. He kept his breath steady as a new message finally came in.
Go into hibernation. Book three weeks at the North York ration center, floor 2, pod 97. Order maximum doses of Grizzly and ping Irma just before you go under.
He replied: This better not be a way to put me out to pasture.
You want to kneecap Barnes, don’t you? Do a little more than poking her in the metaphorical eye?
Yeah.
I’ll send you after Barnes.
That’s more like it. He took one more moment to dream of a palace with art deco finishes. Maybe with a dungeon. Frankie Barnes needed locking up for a few decades, didn’t she?
The thought brought at least a hint of a smile.
“Pidge,” he said to his sidekick app, “I’m gonna go on a carbon fast for a few weeks. Show me rationing pop-ins?”
CHAPTER 20
BOOTSTRAP PROJECT RESEARCH HOSPITAL, MARS
Did she tell you Glenn Upton was her daddy?
When Maud had told Frankie that Jerm’s surgical mentor was from Manhattan, she’d been excited.
But then Jackal had profiled Upton. The results had been underwhelming. A former runaway raised by the @ChamberofHorrors, he wasn’t an innocent, exactly, but there was nothing in the evidence to suggest a criminal mastermind. He’d been one of a host of baby medics working in their life-extension operation, keeping the billionaire founders of the organization alive.
After his arrest, Upton spent five years working in the Arctic, studying medicine and eventually specializing in surgery. He’d done residencies on Europa and Mars, back when the colonies were dangerous, newborn enterprises, accident-prone, full of IMperish ghosts.
This guy looks rehabilitated to me, Jackal had told Frankie via Braille tape.
Frankie had been hoping for a wild-eyed, well-connected anti-Bootstrap speecher. Instead … well, Upton had followed the project with interest from the start. When the pilots had discovered the comms connection within their implants—Hung had tried to get everyone to call it the ButtSignal, but the owners of the Batman franchise immediately sent a cease-and-desist, and now the pilots privately called it @ButtSig—Upton wrote a paper suggesting an exploit. The possibility of using tish resonances to send messages across interstellar distances was the basis of the quantum-comms experiment they were conducting now.
Upton was Maud’s adoptive father?
Adoptive, my rosy ass. That’s a euphemism. He’s her bloody kidnapper.
Is that what Maud would call him?
There in the Martian hospital, the two of them were in facing beds, separated by clear, nanorepellent curtains, waiting on Jerm to finish the install. Should Frankie veto the new tish upgrades—throw a big Hedgehog fit, make a fuss, quit quantum comms?
She’s @Visionary too, sweetpie.
Bullshit! This was a transparent attempt on Champ’s part to sabotage her marriage.
Jerm chose that moment to return from prep, holding a nanosurgery tray in one hand as he shouldered aside the sheeting. “Ready to do this?”
“Actually, I need a minute.”
He sat down obligingly, emanating warmth, solid and lovable and acting as if he had years to burn. In the days since Ember had been accused of IP theft and confined to their family pop-in, Jerm had lost weight. It wasn’t something most people would notice—he was such a big man anyway!—but the slightly drawn look around his eyes was a clear tell. “Unfist your hands, hon.”
“How sure are you about all this?” Frankie indicated the surgical tray, with its array of plugs and needles.
“I’m positive it’s going to lower latency in your implant … which you need if you’re gonna requalify for flight duty,” he said. “I’m sure today’s procedure is safe.”
“Safe by the standards of experimental augment tech?”
He mojied surprise, clearly thinking that anyone who’d consented to the insertion of a sacral implant shouldn’t even balk at having another milligram of tish nanografted onto her vestibular and cochlear nerves. “As for whether you and Maud are really going to be able to realtime text and talk once you’re three light-years from each other? I don’t know. The Dumpster’s a long way, and beta testing is…”
“Is beta. Yeah.”
“The offworlder races can do comms across these distances, so it must be possible.” Jerm put out one big hand, and she dropped hers into it, letting his fingers encircle hers. “This doesn’t have to happen today, Franks.”
She could feel Maud’s gaze on her, in the bed across the aisle.
“I do need the latency upgrade if I’m to go on flying,” Frankie said. “Don’t worry, Jerm—it’s just last-minute nerves.”
It’s rubbish, anyway—Champ’s playing mind games. It was Frankie’s last thought before Jerm plugged her into a diagnostic array, offlining her body below the neck.
Most of the other pilots d
erided the augment plug as a creepy but necessary evil. Frankie wasn’t troubled by the tech itself—the dead, plasticine weight of it in her back didn’t bother her, nor did the feel of the prongs sliding in to connect and disconnect her. But to be offline, all but disEMbodied, without the alternate sense of being a ship or a pegasus … that was stifling. She struggled for breath.
“Frankie?” Maud called from the other bed. “You okay?”
“Going to Kansas.” Forcing the words out, she glazed, sinking into Sensorium and selecting her therapist’s sim parlor.
A squeaky-clean US town, circa 1950, formed around her, its streets humming with huge, privately owned cars.
“Gameplay options,” Frankie said. “Knife work.”
The gun in her hand turned to a machete.
Maud appeared beside her. “Jerm’s running diagnostics on my receiver.”
Frankie nodded, not quite trusting herself to speak.
She’s @Visionary too, sweetpie.
Rubbish, Champ. She’s not!
Zombies—decayed, festering, and carrying a heavy pong of death on the breeze—emerged from the town’s city hall. They fell upon a small gathering of peace protesters, eating some, converting the rest.
“Do we fend them off here?” Maud asked.
“No. We run.” Catching Maud’s hand, Frankie fled. The chase was short—they ended up cornered in a vintage high school. Unattractive concrete building, grey in color, impregnable-looking. Prison for teenagers, Frankie thought.
Fleeing through the fluorescent-lit hallways, they took refuge in the science lab. Maud banged around, using found items to improvise a flamethrower so she could char incoming threats. While she played chemist, Frankie shoved two heavy lab counters into place, forming a kill chute: she’d let the zombies through one at a time. Maud could burn them in turn. Frankie would behead anything that survived.
“I’m still playing beginner level,” Maud said. “They’ll come in soft.”
Too bad: Frankie was spoiling for a real fight.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Maud said.
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