by Ron Bender
Concerned voices rise. “Momma why is she crying? Why are you crying lady? It’s okay, don’t cry.”
I have no answer for them and am grateful when I’m rescued by a caregiver. “This is Maggie’s mommy. She’s sad because Maggie can’t be here right now.” She scoops up one of the smaller ones and drops a hand onto the shoulder of the tallest. “All of you come on, come along and let’s go look at our tadpoles.” She leads them away, random faces among them turning back to glance at me as they go.
As I look for Picasso I’m surrounded by nomads. I can see that they want to help me but are holding back. I’m led into a carefully retrofitted cargo hauling trailer, the inside of which has been built to resemble a primitive wooden building.
Brightly colored blankets, and old photographs are hung on the walls, nestled tightly between shelves filled with yellowed paper, and bound books.
Picasso is stepping away from a shrunken old woman whose dark eyes burn with life.
“I’m Eldest Tessa, I lead this family.” Her voice is strong given her limited stature.
“I’m pleased to meet you. I’m Doctor Vanessa Hildebrandt.” I fumble social niceties. I don’t know what a proper greeting is for these people. She solves my problem for me. She takes my hands, pulls me down and touches her forehead to mine.
Our eyes meet.
I’m unnerved by the intimacy of the contact. For years Maggie and David have been the only ones who have been that close to my face.
“Well met,” she says as she releases me. “I’m told that Baylen is with the one called Wolf.” She motions for me to sit, and then she drops cross-legged onto a deep bench. “That they’ll be working together. They will rescue little Maggie.”
“Wolf?” I realize that she means Basillio. “I’m not sure of their plan but yes they are working together.”
“Baylen is a strong man. A good man.” She smiles. “And even though I bargained well with him, I’ve heard that the Wolf can be cunning and has many teeth.”
I can only nod.
“Baylen has spoken of you.” She lifts a cup of water, drinks deeply. “He told me that you dislike his life choice to be here with us.”
“Forgive me Eldest I don’t see how that can matter.” I’m shocked that he even spoke about my concerns to these people.
She cuts me off sharply. “It matters. It matters because you have a child with him. Maggie is not yours alone. And nor is she his alone. Can you not see that shunning half of her life, the life given her through him, is wrong?”
“I can’t be here. Excuse me.” I step to the doorway. As I place my hand on the latch my anger bubbles up. “Baylen always says that he isn’t welcome here either.”
“The offer has often been made for him to live in the camp with us. It is an offer that is still extended. He has told me that you would disapprove even more if he were to accept. That you would rather he be alone.” She purses her lips. “He hides his decision from the others by instead saying; because of who he is, how he is, that he would be a burden upon us.”
I hesitate and she finishes with, “But, family helps one another, his being among us is no more burdensome than your next breath. Go out if you will. Or stay. You are strange to us. But as Maggie’s mother you are one of us as well. Be welcome here.”
As I clench my teeth and storm out of the trailer I can see that everyone outside giving me distance. I can see questions on every face, unspoken, and I ignore all of them.
In anger and belligerence, I storm out alone into the forest. I don’t have to go very far before I realize that this isn’t like a park, that’s it’s not VR. Its real and may be even more dangerous than I know.
Turning I look back down the path toward the trailers. Someone in the distance laughs aloud and I know they’re laughing at me.
I spin and storm along the flattened pathways lined with scruffy grass and ridiculous patchy flowers until I find a watercourse sparkling in the sunlight. I make my way along it and drop onto a rock. A small group of fish flicker about inside a sturdy metal pen sunken into the water. Rocks stacked on its hinged lid are dappled with the spray of water churning past.
“Well,” Picasso says from behind me. I stifle my jump. I never heard him approach through the mangrove and trees. “You sure know how to fuck up a party.”
“I’ve never been to a party so I can’t tell you if it’s a habit or a one off,” I snarl. “Who does she think she is anyways?”
“She thinks she’s the leader of this family tribe, matron of the region, an Eldest of their fucking council.” He pulls off a dead branch and twists it between his fingers. “She can remember when the coastline of this country was miles away from here. When being free to speak, move, and act were things that every citizen had a right to, when just living on the land made you a citizen.” He strips off leaves, bark, and tiny branches. “And as crazy as all that is.” He flicks the bare switch over my head. “She wonders who you think you are.”
“I’m Maggie’s mother, Baylen’s ex-wife, and a certified cyber-psychiatrist.” I can’t help it. I go to the only thing that counts in my books. “I’m a CitOne citizen, unlike everyone else around here.” I run out of list. It sounds hollow, even to me. Out here my job is pointless. My divorce is just a symbol of my personal failure to apply my education. It’s a banner for my professional ego, my intensely self-centered drive. My citizenship is, framed as I have put it, only petty snobbery.
All I really have is Maggie. She’s all that matters.
I frown all of my anger at the fish pen.
“Woman, you’re fucked.” He throws the switch aside.
“Go away,” I hiss. “Leave me alone.”
“Naw,” he says. His tone hides a secret glee. “No one else is worth toying with right now. I’m a shark on the hunt. I love the smell of distress. It makes me feel more alive.”
“You have a lot wrong with you, Picasso.” I look up at him. “Do you know that?”
He laughs. “I stopped self-diagnosing long before I got my first implants. Don’t go there with me. It won’t help because I don’t care.”
I blink. “Did you go to university? Do you have a degree in something?”
“What? You don’t think I could sit still that long?” He moves closer. “I’ve sat thousands of lectures worth of time, waiting for my targets to get close enough to kill’em the way I like. Plenty of time to think, to analyze the fuck out of human nature.”
I struggle now as I try to form a different opinion about him. I go there. “So what is your assessment of my situation?”
“You asked so now there’s no dodging. You get truth.” He glares at me. “You fell in love with a client, took advantage of him while he was weak and under your care. You milked him for data to forward your career, accidently got pregnant by him, tried to force him to change, let your relationship fail when you realized that the father of your child would never fit in with what you perceived you needed in a man to make your career path smoother. Then you ignored him completely, and unless Maggie needed to be trotted out in front of your business associates like a performing pony, you probably ignored her too. Her nannies know her better’n you do. Stop me if I get too accurate for you to feel good about yourself.”
I feel myself falling apart under his scathing report.
“So what kind of a person do I think you are? I think—” The rest of his sentence is cut off by a chime.
My dv chimes a second time. I blink the tears hanging in my eyes away as it chimes a third time. I pull it out of my coat pocket. “It’s David.” My hands tremble. I’m torn between throwing the device into the water and answering it. It chimes a fourth time.
“Whatever.” He leans right down to my cheek and whispers. “Better answer it.”
I hate him. I hate his closeness to me, his assumption of intimacy, and what I feel is a betrayal of trust.
I picture David in my head, and breathe out. “David. Where are you? Are you at work?”
Picass
o straightens and walks off into the trees.
“No. Listen, Nessa.” He sounds like he’s been running. My head fills with imagined reasons for him to run. “I can’t talk for long. I couldn’t see you waiting for that damn corporate jerk to make up his mind. I’ve taken steps, Nessa. I went after Maggie myself. I went to Texas and called in some favors.”
I stifle my gasp. “Are you insane? David, that’s so dangerous. What have you done?”
“It doesn’t matter. It worked, Nessa. It worked.” I can picture his wide smile. “I’m on my way to get Maggie. She’s fine. I talked to her, and after everything to this point she’s in good shape.”
I ask, “Where are you now? How long until you’re with her?”
“It’ll be a while yet, Nessa, and as soon as Maggie is with me I’ll call you.” His tone hints at a subtle gloating superiority. He sounds like he’s justified not leaving a tip at a restaurant. “We’ll hurry back as fast as I can manage.”
Part of me is very worried about how much more danger he’s putting Maggie in. I have to trust him.
I try to keep from pleading with him. “David, where are you?”
“I’m boarding a lift into orbit, the Liberty Transfer Platform,” he replies. “I have to go. I have to go. Love you.”
I choke. “Love you too.”
I hang up and hurl the device away from me. My face ends up in my hands.
Picasso says from a short distance away. “What’s goin’ on?”
“No.” The emotions rush. “You rip me a new one and then you’re here to try and be my friend? To what? To console me? To placate me?” My throat aches with tension. “Just … Just go away.”
His eyes roar with flames. “Sure.”
˜˜˜
I’m not surprised when the boss answers my com-link back to HQ.
“Report.” He sounds like he’s just waking up. He’s been pushing it like we were back in the jungle and he’s coming off a stim.
“Hildebrandt was just on a call with Hall.” I don’t waste time subvocalizing. “You guys get all of it?”
“Hold…” He’s got someone in communications looking into the call.
I watch a few of the tribals manhandle a massive flywheel ECS out of an old bus. It takes four of them and an overhead winch to swing out the heavy energy capture system. How the hell these people get anything done in a day is beyond my understanding. One man with a half decent set of upgrades could have done the job in half the time….
It’s only a second before Basillio replies. “The Tac-Psych report said David Hall has the markers of someone with repressed anger and control issues … so it fits that he’d try something. Damn it…. His timing is shit.”
“The kid’s in orbit with Bransen.” I look to the tree line. At this range, with thermoptics, I can see Vanessa hasn’t moved. I’m good with that.
“Picasso, give me a second.” I hear a soft chime over my internal speaker. “Jen, link me to Jimmy.”
I’m not surprised that she has a passive com-link to the boss’s line. I choke down jealousy. I’d be talking dirty to her all day.
“Moshi moshi.”
This specialist they’ve brought in sounds like he’s a kid. His voice warbles.
“James,” Basillio says. “I’m com-linked to one of our field operatives.”
“Oh? Cool.” His tone brightens. “Hey Operative, what’s goin’ on?”
“Jimmy.” Basillio cuts him down to a tripod. “Not a social call. Never a social call.”
“Right, right….”
I wonder where the boss found this guy. Under a dumpster? A youth shelter? Maybe he’s a classic in-his-g-ma’s-basement type…. Wolf wouldn’t have him on board if he didn’t have something to offer.
The boss asks him, “Have you got a line on any of the people I asked you to trace?”
“Um, yeah, about that… no, nothing.”
“Nothing?” I can hear the surprise in Basillio’s response. Last time I heard it that pronounced, we were in South Am and just found out we weren’t coming home.
“Nothing, nada. The system you set me up on is great…,” Jimmy says. “But even with start points for the search, I’ve got no hits. There’s a lot of other guys up on the Liberty Transfer Platform who could be mercenaries, but they’re not the guy you want.”
“Field,” Basillio asks, “Can you open a link for an optic feed?”
“Yeah.” I permit a sealed link to HQ.
“Jimmy, show us what you have.”
“Sure.” The kid sounds focused now. “This feed isn’t quantum so there’s a transmission delay. I’m on sixty or so cams posted around Liberty Transfer. My crawler program is active. I’m running real-time monitoring backtraces into the archive to see if anything pops there.”
I watch a bunch of guys looking suspiciously like a handful of fireteams. They aren’t making much of an effort to look less like earthside mercs. “Nice.”
“Jen,” Basillio interjects. “Have these people indexed through the Mercenary Repatriation Database. It’s a long shot but it might help.”
“Yes, sir.”
“There’s a database for that? Wait. I know … back to work,” Jimmy says. “Hey, the Russian, Morochevsky, in Control, wants me to look for this guy.”
Hall’s picture pops into a corner frame.
“Yeah, Alexander would have forwarded my request.” I can imagine Basillio scrubbing his face with one hand. “This is Mr. Hall. He should be at an orbital lift pad someplace in Texas.”
“Got him.” The images flip to a stream of Hall holding a couple of hard-sided bags. Hall looks nervous as he shuffles along a crowded gantry.
“Seriously?” I mutter. I suddenly get why the boss brought the kid in to work with us. “That’s fast.”
“Yeah, it’s that fast. That’s what I mean when I say it’s weird I haven’t found this other guy. I had a client who was looking for a zero who’d been scrubbed from cam archives almost everyplace he went. It took two days but I found him. But shredded memory is different from scrubbed memory and maybe that’s what they’re doing. I guess I need to keep looking.”
“You do that, James,” Basillio says. “And follow Mr. Hall. Don’t lose him. I have other operatives who’ll need to know where he is. Get on it, contact me directly if anything changes.”
“Sure. I can do that….” there’s a long awkward silence.
“You should sign off now, Jimmy.”
“Oh, right. Sor….”
The boss waits a second. “I don’t have operatives available in Texas who can stop him from boarding that lift craft.”
“You’re thinking it’s not gonna work out, huh?”
“I’m not convinced Bransen’ll just hand over the girl. Good thing we have people ready to lift.”
“Baylen?” I ask.
“And Alex. You won’t have to work with either of us on Control if anything happens.” He sighs. “I have to go. Things are now moving on Hall’s timetable.”
I cut the line and stare into the woods. Vanessa isn’t where she was a second ago.
“Fuck,” I yell. The guys working on gutting the bus turn to look at me. I ignore’em and head back into the bush to find her.
3.17
Common Ground
Basillio sent me to find the Russian. The maglift from medical opens onto the lobby overlooking a training space.
The guy’s easy to spot on the floor below me; tall, blond, ripped, and graceful. Every movement is precisely what’s needed, no more, no less. Loaded with enhancements, and control systems, in Europe he’d have to register as a weapons platform. Around here no one cared as long as you fit in for your CitLevel.
My look fits with mine. Non-citizen.
I make way down a set of stairs and into the room. Heads turn as I walk by. Anyone who sees me understands that exercise, for this body, is a waste of time.
As I approach, he slows and stops his routine. He walks toward me.
“Morochevsky?
” I ask.
“Da.” After a second of wary hesitation, he extends a hand. “You are Baylen Lee?”
I nod as we shake hands. Simple things like this are what I miss the most. Almost everyone, even the tribesmen I live near don’t easily extend the courtesy.
“Basillio told me to find you,” I say. “We’re supposed to talk about options.”
His eyes crinkle at the corners. “He said the same to me. I admit I am curious about you. I understand that you are one of the first people outside Russia to have heavy cybernetic implants.”
I remember my surprise at the vidstick Nelson had left for me years ago, thinking back then that this was the future. I also remember that the first troops in Russia who had heavy implants installed were not volunteers. They had good flesh, bone, and organs removed by the state.
He talks as he picks up a towel and wipes sweat from his neck and shoulders. “I was Orbital Spetsnaz for many years.” His hands pause mid-movement, everything about becomes still.
I realize my involuntary tightening up has put him on guard.
He says, “We were on opposite sides of the conflict, you and I.”
He’s not the enemy now. Old reflexes die hard and it’s a struggle to relax. “That was a long time ago.”
“Agreed. Lifetime’s ago.”
“Orbital Spetsnaz?” He and I should be more alike than Basillio and I. But the differences here are hard to overcome.
Between propaganda, slanted mission intel, biased word selection as common parlance, and conditional acceptance of displays of hatred toward the enemy… any ground we share is more like a toxic swamp.
“How’d that work out for you?” My tone slips to sarcasm and I can’t bring myself to amend it.
“Very well, until a certain segment of the government decided that it was better to enforce loyalty by holding our families hostage.” If Morochevsky notices my tone, he doesn’t let it show. He has his own issues. “It ended badly all around.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I reply neutrally.
“It is part of history now.” He pauses. “At the time though, I studied many missions that we suspected your group undertook. If the briefs were correct, your unit was quite successful.”