Romulus stood in the park and took in the sight. He could feel the sunlight's warm hum as it trickled sparsely over the clouds. The trees surrounding him reached up to it in their longing as the grass spanned the area between them. He closed his eyes and breathed in the life. The air was sweeter here, cleansed by the green as it swept the grunge away. The park absorbed the sounds of the city beyond. He could actually hear a bird singing and the call of a crow above.
He. . . existed. For a moment, that was all. No thoughts, no confusion, no pain. He existed. He simply was.
He'd done this before, but not since the farm. Sometimes he'd found himself in the fields, just watching the life blowing and swaying like simplicity in the wind. Thoughts and cares vanished in those moments, surrounded by the bounty that could spring from what impossible force lay within a single seed. Not from will or desire, but from the pure and simple nature of what it was. It was a kind of magic, and it brought him as much peace now as it had then.
It was peace he needed. He had woken from a troubled sleep in the floater that morning and been unable to rest anymore. When they had returned after the meeting with the vigilante, it was sheer physical fatigue that had allowed his slumber, but once the sun had risen and the basic needs of his body were minimally satisfied, a clutter of thoughts swarmed his mind. His future, his mentor, his entire view of the world. Uncertainty and unwanted choices had chased each other around in his mind. Diomedes had been his anchor, his only solid ground since his uncle had gone. Was that crumbling now? Had it ever really been solid? Or was this just a storm that would pass and leave everything as it had been? Storms rarely left things unchanged.
He'd followed the knots of reason and emotion that such choices had woven until he could take it no more.
Diomedes had taken the floater across the city to a place near the park, and upon seeing it Romulus recalled the relaxing feeling of the trees in the wooded theater they had landed in the night before. He'd gone for a walk, and, for a time, his troubles remained behind.
Yet now, something was wrong. The sense of it came inside him like an alarm going off, even before he heard the crack of the branches or the screams and sirens that came moments after. Yelling followed: a mix of screams, shouts and a bellow of fury. Romulus stood in a long clearing lined by bushes on one side and trees on the other, poised on a winding path that forked ahead of him. He turned towards the yelling. The bushes literally exploded fifty yards ahead of him.
Romulus dropped to the ground immediately. Someone screamed out of the smoking hole in the brush and hurled himself into the clearing. It was a man, in a rage, literally throwing his body about in a fury of frenetic movement. He wore no clothes, and even from the distance the hardware on him was clearly visible. A thin metal exoskeleton clung to the back of his body. His entire scalp was metal, and both legs and one arm had been replaced and were now bristling with pop-up weapons and other hardware. He screamed again and raised his arm to fire a grenade across the clearing where it ripped apart an evergreen in its wake.
Romulus remained pinned to the ground. Three projectiles launched toward the man from where he'd come. One sped past him as he turned; the remaining two made contact with his hip and shoulder where they flared in a tiny storm of electricity. The man's right leg gave out and he fell like a collapsing building to slam down on his side with one arm flailing wildly and the other completely limp.
Four people rushed into view. Each wore the uniformed red and black body armor of CPMC. They sprinted as a team towards their screaming target who, though he now lay crippled, had not ceased his flailing. As he thrashed around and turned a weapon on the approaching officers, they split formation as if rehearsed. Two broke off in an arc around the man's left, the third arced to the right. The fourth raised a bat-sized tube and fired a mass of wire that expanded into a net and knocked the struggling man backwards where he screamed and began firing. Bullets sprayed the area, and as Romulus watched, two of the officers returned the fire as they darted in front of the man. Romulus swore a bullet hit the man in the net, but he showed no sign of pain and kept firing at the two as best he could. The remaining two officers completed their end-around to sweep in and blindside him, thrusting stun rods into the netted man's back. There was another electric flare as he screamed again, struggled briefly, and then collapsed to the ground, motionless.
Romulus got to his feet as the officers unwrapped the net. The two holding the rods stood a vigilant watch over their captive's unmoving form.
"You know, from what I hear, those stun rods aren't as pleasant as they look."
Romulus jumped and spun around. It was Felix. The short man waggled his eyebrows briefly in greeting. "I talked to a guy once who said it's got all the pleasure of being hit by a train, but without the unpleasant after-effects. Once the twitching stops, anyway."
Romulus looked back to where the officers worked around the body. "And he got two."
"Unless I'm wrong, he just got one."
"Sure looked like two to me," said Romulus. Two of the officers had pulled out tools and were rapidly performing some sort of work on the man's body—or the metal attached to it. He couldn't see well enough to tell which.
"No, just one would be enough to stop a rhino. Trouble is, there's never a rhino around when you need one. One of those was a stunner. The other's an EMP rod."
Romulus nodded. It made sense. An electromagnetic pulse would short out most of the cybernetics on the man's body.
"Standard procedure," Felix said, "even if he's already on the ground. The EMP knocks out any remaining hardware in or on him, and the stunner knocks the rest of him out, even if he's working off boosted adrenals or just simple PCP or Jack. 'Course, sometimes the system can't stand the shock, but when a guy's gone hardcore CP like that and is gardening with grenades. . ."
"They hit him with a lot of EMP, then," said Romulus as he continued to watch. "At least I think that's what it was. They fired these things at him, and that's what got him on the ground."
Felix nodded. "I didn't see it. Probably EMP grenades, though. They have to be pretty low power to be shot like that, so they take him out a little with those until they can get the rod to do the rest."
One of the officers now held the man's detached leg in his arms. "God," Romulus whispered, "they just take him apart now?"
"They get rid of all the hardware they can strip quickly in the field. Then they take him back and see if they can rehab him."
"Does that work?"
"Sometimes," Felix said grimly. "Sometimes they don't even get this far. I saw a guy go full bore in the middle of a mall once. Just snapped. He killed over a dozen people before CMPC just put a railgun slug through his head from two hundred yards." Felix grimaced and massaged his temples with one hand. "Having a photographic memory isn't always a good thing," he whispered.
Romulus swallowed hard. What might he have seen if CMPC hadn't arrived in the park? A blink of what Felix just said gave him an excuse to push the thought away. "You have a photographic memory?"
"Guess I let that slip, huh? Yeah, I do. Mostly photographic. Bit of a side effect of a memory experiment I participated in a time ago, when I was a little more reckless."
"If that was a side effect, what was the experiment?"
Felix paused. "Keep a secret?"
"Okay."
"Memory transfer. They were playing around with taking someone else's memories and encoding them onto a device that would interface with a host's existing brain tissue." He turned his head and peeled back a small flap of artificial skin. A small connector sat behind his right ear. "It's built into the side of my skull."
Romulus boggled. "So you've got someone else's memories?" God, if they could extract memories like that, and store them? It was both fascinating and frightening.
"The transfer wasn't perfect, but yes, most of them." He replaced the skin flap and smiled. "Pretty damn cool, huh?"
"Is it from someone who's, well, still around?"
Fel
ix shrugged. "He could be. He'd be about seventy-five now."
"You haven't tried to find him?" That would be a remarkable conversation to have.
Felix shook his head. "Nope. I mean, I'm curious, but I know this guy quite intimately. From what I can tell, he's a very private person. I don't think it's a meeting that he'd want."
"If he's so worried about privacy, why donate his memories?"
Felix paused. "I don't know. The memories stop before any idea of being an experimental donor shows up. I suppose it could be that he was killed and had been an organ donor. But if that's the case, I don't think I would've had to sign a non-disclosure agreement about his life. No writing a book about the guy or selling his story."
"What's his name?"
Felix grinned. "Oh, what's in a name?"
"Not going to tell me?" Romulus found himself smiling back.
"Nope. As a result of all this, though, I'm scared to death of EMP. I don't know what I might lose."
At the mention of EMP, Romulus looked out at where the man's body was being taken away. "They did a good job," he remarked as he watched them.
"Some say you have to be crazy yourself to work the psycho squad."
Romulus shook his head. "That's the sort of thing I want to do."
"Dangerous job."
"I want to protect people like that. They stopped the guy, stopped him from hurting anyone, just swept in as a team. Neutralized him. They probably saved a lot of people."
"That was one of the cleaner 'neutralizations' that I've seen. It's not always so easy. Sometimes there's a lot more violence. Brutal. More often than not in this sort of situation, CMPC officers have to kill, and a full bore CP doesn't ever go quietly. That's a terrible thing to have to do."
"But they're protecting the rest of us when they do it," Romulus argued.
"Oh, I'm not saying it's not for a good cause. But killing for a good cause is still killing. I've seen what it can do to someone inside. It's damaging." Felix rapped his fist over his chest. "In here."
"Someone had to do it."
"Yeah, I know. That's part of the problem." He sighed. "I'll put it another way—and hold on, 'cause I'm about to go all philosophical on your ass." After a moment, he went on. "Malicious violence, hate—it's part of the nature of evil. It's destructive. Absolute best way to oppose that's with creation. Or, love, really, depending on how you look at it."
"Good and evil?" Romulus asked. "That's a little too black and white, I'd guess. If that guy came after us, a hug's not going to stop him."
Felix chuckled. "Valid point, but that's not what I mean. 'The world is gray' is something I've heard a lot. But what's gray but a combination of black and white, if you follow me?"
"Um?"
"Put it this way: it's like, say, cancer. Fifty years ago they treated cancer with radiation. Killed the cancer cells just fine, but also destroyed healthy tissue. Reasonably effective, but at a cost, destroying your own good cells to be rid of the bad. Now we have nanocellular treatments. Kills the cancer, leaves the good cells alone. It took longer to come up with, it costs more, but it works so much better."
"Okay. . ."
Felix went on. "Violence—evil, for the sake of argument—is insidious. One of its greatest weapons is speed and ease, and if we're not strong enough, it forces us to fight it on its own terms. Fire with fire, violence with violence, what have you. Even if we're successful, a part of us is eaten away.
"They took that man down without killing him, and now he'll be taken to rehab. With patience, time and care, his mind might be healed and he won't be the same raging thing that we saw here. But if he'd been too violent and forced them to kill him, he'd have been lost completely along with anything positive he might have ever done, and those agents would have had a death on their heads. Necessary—I'm not saying it's never necessary—but still a terrible thing. I count myself lucky at never having been put in the position where I've been forced to kill."
Romulus frowned, mulling it over. "They probably get used to it, though, at least?" he finally said.
"Some do, I'm sure. But those are the ones to feel sorry for. And to fear. Not caring about having to kill is one step closer to enjoying it. Why do you think cops get psych evaluations whenever they kill someone in the line of duty? You have to be careful."
"I wonder if Gideon's used to it," Romulus said quietly. They were both silent for a moment.
"Don't know," Felix said. "He's got to be CP. Not full bore, but. . . he's not well. If I had to guess, I'd say the killing either pushed him over or pushed him deeper. Maybe deeper given all his hardware, but it's hard to know."
Romulus thought of how the vigilante had saved the old man, protected the couple outside the apartments, and the way he had taken out five gangers by himself. He remembered the tortured look on the man's face as they had talked to him. Despite all the anger and rage in Gideon's eyes, he was trying to do good. He was trying to do what he thought was right. And yet. . .
"Flynn?" Felix asked quietly. "Was Dio the same when you knew him on the farm? Before he got his own implants and turned freelancer?"
Romulus felt where the question was leading. He heaved a sigh. "It's hard to remember things clearly, anymore."
"How many people has he killed, I wonder?"
Shut up! Romulus nearly said it aloud. The CPMC officers were taking their man away. "Let's go somewhere else."
He strode a distance up the path and Felix followed. Again Romulus walked in silence, seeking solace in the green. Felix simply walked beside him and remained quiet. Given how talkative the man was a moment ago, he guessed it was intentional. At first glad for it, he soon began to feel rude for not speaking himself. Troubling thoughts of his mentor still pressed at him, so he asked. "You never told me how you heard about Diomedes and Wallace."
"I didn't, did I? Sorry for that. We got sidetracked, and I forgot," Felix chuckled. "Just because I remember things well doesn't mean I can't forget to recall them." Felix turned to him and grinned. "And when we think a thing the thing we think is not the thing we think we think but only the thing that makes us think the thing we think we think." He rattled it off so quickly that the words flew by before Romulus could follow them.
"Um, what?"
"Exactly! But to answer your question, I found out from a cutter."
Romulus nodded. Cutters were street doctors who specialized in quick procedures and very few questions, usually seen for illegal implants or getting patched up when a licensed doctor would either charge too much or ask too many questions.
"Did Diomedes go to see him?"
Felix nodded. "Yeah. Apparently he took a small time bomb off of your roommate's spine. From what he told me, Wallace had it put there to give Dio some incentive to do a job for him. Possibly double-crossing a previous contract Dio had, I'm not sure. I think Wallace had also paid him a small amount and promised to remove the bomb once Dio's loyalty was secured and the job was done. According to the cutter, it wasn't a promise he kept. Dio would've had his spine blown out if the cutter hadn't gotten it out in time."
"Shit," Romulus whispered. He couldn't blame Diomedes for his anger. "He didn't tell me a thing."
"He called me looking for the best I could send him to, otherwise I wouldn't know so much."
"What did Diomedes do for Wallace?"
"That I don't know."
Romulus thought about the other things Wallace had done and realized a part of him didn't want to know. Frustration welled up inside him. "What are you doing here, Felix?" he asked.
"Dodging goose droppings, at the moment," he answered and sidestepped a spot in the grass. "Gotta watch where you step around here."
"That's not what I meant."
"Still good advice," Felix returned with a grin.
"Hiatt. . ." Romulus had said it like Diomedes. The tone surprised him.
"Well, okay. So I got up late, went out for breakfast, spent some time with a very attractive woman I met last night, asked her out, go
t a very definite 'maybe,' and then decided to look for a friend of mine that I thought might be having trouble." They trudged through the grass for another few steps. "And I got a walk in the park out of the bargain."
"You don't need to look after me."
"No man's an island."
Romulus began to walk faster. "I came here to find some peace," he warned.
The smaller man increased his pace to match. "You sure you didn't come here to hide?"
"You can't take a hint, can you?" he asked through gritted teeth.
"Hiding from this doesn't make it go away, Flynn. I heard about the fight—about what Dio did to that guy. He's not who you thought, and it shows in your eyes. I could see it last night, and I see it now."
"He's what I want to be!" he whispered. Or used to be, he added silently. He couldn't look Felix in the eye.
"No," said Felix. "He's not. He's not and you know it. Like it or not, you know it."
"And just what the hell am I supposed to do?!"
"Get out of it. Get away from him."
"And do what?" he demanded. "Without him I'm just some homeless. . . jobless loser with nowhere to go!"
Felix grabbed his arm. "You're not a loser, Flynn. Unlike a lot of freelancers I've met, you've got a heart. You've got a purpose. I'm sure of that."
Romulus jerked his arm out of Felix's grip. "I thought I had a purpose! And now it's just a pile of shit!" Romulus lowered his voice out of pain and shame. "Just get out of here."
"Flynn, look—"
Romulus punched him across the face. "I said go away!" He turned and rushed across the park, leaving Felix behind on the ground and heading back to the floater. Shock and anger flared inside of him as he ruefully rubbed his knuckles after the punch. Maybe he wasn't so different from his mentor after all.
Hell, it was all he had.
XXX
Marette's attempts at stalling the second team bought her nearly another day. She sent requests confirming orders, sent counter-appeals through channels, even orchestrated a comm-system failure that would appear to be equipment malfunction if anyone checked on it. Every hour was more time the AoA had to sift through the data. The more the AoA knew, the more they could do, and the greater their chances became of finding what they were looking for, and of lowering the cost in lives.
A Shadow in the Flames (The New Aeneid Cycle) Page 25