“It’s not ideal,” Brixa repeated. “I know that. Basq knows that, but he also knows how to keep his eye on the long-term goal. He tell you we’ve known each other for a while?”
“He said since university.”
Nodding, Brixa said, “Best of friends. That’s one reason why this is such an ideal situation. Could have been tricky if we’d had to get strangers involved, but once he’d done it himself he saw the potential.”
Ariel got the feeling that Brixa hadn’t paid much attention to the scrawled imitation of the painting on Basq’s wall. The cyborg leader was seeing potential, all right, but perhaps not the same potential Brixa was. Marketing zealotry was the same as any other kind, with the same tunnel vision. Ariel started to wonder not whether Basq and Brixa would fall out, but how soon.
“Who wouldn’t want to do this? Is it better to have people, children, die when we can save them? Of course it’s going to seem like the end of the world to people who are used to doing things they way they always have; hell, coming from Earth we know that better than anyone. But people have resisted every scientific advance in the history of humankind. This is no different. They’ll come around once we start saving kids in Shanghai and Greater Amazonia.”
“And along the way you’re going to make yourselves very rich,”
Ariel said.
Brixa stopped and turned to her, surprise and even hurt visible on his face. “Ariel. Don’t tell me you’re going to play the cynic here after everything you’ve seen. Sure, people will get rich. I’ll get rich. I’m not ashamed of that. I’ve worked hard on this, and I have no doubt that I’ll be rewarded. That’s the way markets work. If we can do some good—a lot of good, unimaginable good—and make ourselves some money along the way, how is that a bad thing?”
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“If that’s how it happens, it’s not a bad thing.” Ariel tried on her diplomat’s smile, found to her surprise that it seemed in good working order. “I’ve been a professional cynic for a long time, Zev. You didn’t approach me to gain a convert. You wanted someone who could tell you whether this would work.”
“Yes. Exactly right. So, will it work?”
“I have no idea.”
He threw up his hands in theatrical frustration. “This is what we get for not paying you,” he said, and laughed. “Okay. Let’s do this.
You come with me back to the lab. I’ll show you around the works, and we’ll talk to some of the people who are actually getting their hands dirty—well, metaphorically, anyway—and we’ll see how you feel then. Say yes.”
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The second Derec Avery broke the connection from wherever he was in local space, Masid forced himself out of bed and started looking for his clothes. His head felt like the robot’s hands were still squeezing his brains out, but he gritted his teeth and got dressed, wishing he had time to go back to the office and get his gun, if by some miracle local law enforcement had returned it. The gun, and whichever painkillers were the most illegal and powerful.
His nurse appeared when he’d just gotten his boots on. “You’re not ready to leave,” she said, standing in the doorway.
Masid looked at the bedside display and saw that by its testimony, he was dead. A tough proposition to argue, but if Kynig Parapoyos and a town full of militant cyborgs weren’t enough to get a man out of bed, he might as well be genuinely dead.
“Ready or not, leaving is what I’m doing,” Masid said. “Unless you’ve brought Detective Linsi with you to tell me they found the robot that squeezed my head.”
She didn’t move. “The fact that you think a robot attacked you is reason enough for me to sedate you again.”
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happened on Kopernik? I don’t have time to argue about this. People are going to die if I don’t leave here right now, and one of them might be me. I’d hate to have to go through you when I could go around you.”
The implication unsettled her just enough that when Masid stood, congratulating himself for not weeping at what the motion did to his head, she backed out the door. “I’m calling security,” she said.
Before she could make good on the threat, he was out the door, down the hall, and gone.
Once he’d gone a kilometer or so on foot, sunlight stabbing holes in his skull, Masid ducked under an awning that sheltered an empty storefront. He’d go alone if he had to, but if he could scare up some support, so much the better—and the first person he thought of was Mia Daventri. She’d seen Parapoyos. She’d understand.
“You can’t go out there,” was the first thing she said. “Where are you?”
He told her. “Don’t move,” she said, and ended the call.
Five minutes later, she stepped out of a cab and said, “I mean it. If you go out there, you’ll have more worries than Parapoyos. If that’s who really attacked you.”
“Now why would I invent something like that?” Masid said. “I don’t go out of my way to look like a lunatic.”
Mia held up a hand. “Never mind. Listen. What you need to know is that in another twenty-four hours there might not be any cyborgs.
Kalienin’s trying to get permission for a strike on the town, probably from orbit. He’s claiming that the cyborgs are plotting a violent takeover of the planet, and Lamina’s on board.”
This surprised Masid. He’d thought Eza Lamina was too savvy a politician to go for such heavyhanded and obvious reliance on military intervention. It would reflect badly on her control, after all, and control over her miserable surroundings was all Lamina had. Either she believed in the threat, or she was working an angle Masid hadn’t 190
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thought of. Which category, in his condition, was disconcertingly broad.
“She wasn’t behind it until just today,” Mia went on. “A call came in from some Auroran political advisor who’s on Kopernik. I overheard some of it; I think she wanted me to. This Auroran apparently used to work in Ariel Burgess’ office when she was posted to Earth. He was very clear that the cyborgs were interested in more than a legal pro-clamation giving them the vote, and suggested that Ariel was being used as cover to give them enough legitimacy to disguise what they’re really after. You know enough about Jerem Looms and Tro Aspil to know that’s not farfetched.”
This Masid did. “Let me guess,” he said. “Terran military has enough on their plate at home that they’re willing to erase the cyborgs just so they don’t have trouble on a Settler world to worry about.”
“That’s about right, apart from their own worries that more cyborgs mean more easily camoflauged supersoldiers. That’s the problem they really don’t want, and from what I heard today, they’re more than willing to vaporize both Gernika and the Nucleomorph lab to ease their minds.”
“So is this happening, or are we still talking about backroom strategy role-playing?”
Mia shrugged. “My guess is it won’t happen right away. For one thing, the Terran military won’t want to send a ship, especially not when destroying a big parcel of Nova Levis might look to the Aurorans like a show of force, which of course would need to be answered.
That was Lamina’s take this morning, in any case. This Hofton, the Auroran, he was very smooth about it. I’m guessing he’s trying to play it both ways, seem concerned and also suss out what the Terrans are willing to do so he can report back to his people in the Auroran government. Lamina knows this, and if she doesn’t, Kalienin will remind her; in any case, Hofton didn’t endear himself to her by mentioning Ariel. Nothing will happen until—I guess I should say unless—the cyborgs do something dangerous.”
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“You seem awfully sure about that, given the fact that you’ll be back here while I’m out in Noresk or somewhere worse chasing mis-anthropic cyborgs.”
>
She laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. The impact rang a razor-studded bell in Masid’s head. When it cleared, he realized that Mia had put a gun in his hand.
“Keep your sense of humor,” Mia said. “It’ll see you through just fine.”
So he was going, which had never really been in doubt.
Mia had rented him a transport, which would keep Lamina’s dogs off his trail for a few hours at least. He took a cab to the rental agency, declined their offer of a robot pilot—he’d had enough of robots for the moment, thank you—and lifted off to the north. He flew faster than was strictly legal, trusting to local authorities’ notorious disinterest in civil minutiae such as traffic statutes, and covered the distance in two hours. Thirty kilometers or so downriver from Gernika, Masid throttled down and descended to below the tree level, skipping along the surface of the river. He had no real illusions about walking into the settlement unnoticed, but at the same time he saw no reason to advertise himself. If stealth bought him enough time to spot Ariel, it would be more than worthwhile.
There were no clearings in this part of the forest large enough to land the flier in, so Masid settled it into a bend in the river where, according to his console map, the river made its closest approach to the outskirts of Gernika. Riverbottom sand crunched under the ship, but Masid deployed the landing gear anyway, figuring that the extruded feet would hold the flier in place. He left it on standby keyed to his voice, anticipating that the next time he passed this way he might be in a hurry, and with that done he popped the hatch and jumped across a meter or so of shallow water to the brushy shore. He found a trail almost immediately, and just as quickly stepped off it, moving instead parallel to it at a distance of twenty meters. Far enough that he ought to be able to see someone on the trail before 192
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they heard him, was his thinking, and fifteen minutes later he was proved right. Voices carried to him, and he saw three figures coming down the trail in his direction.
Masid stood still, the gun resting easily near his right thigh. It crossed his mind that he should perhaps just kill all three—he could have done it before they ever knew he was there—but he held himself back, waiting to get a better look.
All three were cyborgs, and recent ones. Their faces bore the telltale signs—fading scars and the granular sheen of recently reconstructed skin—and they moved uncertainly, as if still acclimating to the new-ness of their transformed bodies.
“We should have done this last time,” one of them said. “The meat keep leaving ships for us to steal, we should steal them.”
“Right,” another said. “Basq would have appreciated our initiative.”
Two of them laughed, and now they were close enough that Masid could see the resentment on the face of the first. Someone who had been used to making decisions, he guessed, and was now finding out that when you took the machine inside you, you were getting on your knees to Basq. Maybe not a bad trade, considering the alternative, but not easy to get used to.
The three cyborgs passed on their way to steal Masid’s ship. He took a moment to assess the situation. They were probably bringing it back to Gernika, which might work in his favor if he needed to make a quick exit. On the other hand, their presence meant he’d been spotted before he’d ever touched down. Did they know who he was?
Would they care? Would they anticipate he’d come for Ariel? Problem was, Masid couldn’t be certain that the real danger to Ariel was coming from cyborgs. For all he knew, they were protecting her.
But he didn’t think so. He thought that Ariel had become a particularly important piece in a game that neither of the players completely understood. It was up to him to make sure that she wasn’t sacrificed when she’d outlived her strategic value.
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was in danger from everyone—including, if Mia wasn’t overreacting to what she’d heard in Lamina’s office, the Terran military. As if cyborgs and corporate soldiers of fortune weren’t enough.
Keep control over what you can, Masid thought. Ariel was last seen here, she’s probably still here, so proceed as if she is here and change the plan when circumstances demand it. Okay.
If he could no longer count on stealth, speed was the next best thing. Masid got back on the trail. He couldn’t be more than a kilometer or so from Gernika, a distance he could cover in three minutes.
As soon as he was free of the underbrush, he was running He was still running a few minutes later, when something came out of the trees and laid him flat on his back.
When he hit the ground, Masid’s first thought was that his head had broken open. Then he thought he’d been shot through the lungs.
Then his eyes started to focus again, and he realized that someone had a knee in his chest. He gasped for breath, struggling to get free of the suffocating weight, but the cyborg leaning on him pulled Masid’s gun out of his pocket and pointed it at him. Masid stopped moving while he tried to figure out whether it was better to suffocate or get a charge between the eyes.
As it turned out, he never had to make the choice.
“Ease off a little, Gorka,” someone said. Masid recognized the voice, and realized that some things were worse than having his head melted by a cyborg.
He turned his head to look at Filoo, standing a short distance away and brushing leaves from his clothes. The dealer finished primping and walked up to stand over Masid, his face lit up like he just couldn’t believe his good fortune.
“So, Masid,” Filoo grinned. “You missed Parapoyos once, he missed you once. Looks like it’s up to me to settle things.”
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“Okay, your first choice is whether you want to see the sick people or the ones who are getting well,” Brixa said as he piloted them over the forest.
That, at least, was easy. Ariel had seen enough sick people in her few hours in Noresk to last her the rest of her life. And even as she had the thought, she admitted to herself that it had been a kind of theme-park empathy. She would never experience what they had, which made it all the more important to do what was right…whatever that was.
Despite her quiet self-criticism, she said, “Getting well.”
“All right then,” Brixa said, and shifted the aircraft’s course slightly to the north.
They landed a few minutes later just outside a fenced-off complex of low prefabricated buildings with few windows and a large number of what appeared to be guards stationed at intervals between the buildings and the fence. Brixa’s craft was compact, and as Ariel climbed out of it she noticed a robot in the back, laid on the floor behind a thin partition that defined the cockpit. Part of the robot’s head was burned away, exposing the circuitry inside.
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From behind her, Brixa said, “Slag. It worked in some kind of factory in Nova City, and we bought it for scrap. There aren’t enough robots on Nova Levis that we can let one go to waste.”
“You must have been in quite a hurry to fly down there yourself,”
Ariel said once they were both on the ground.
Brixa hopped down beside her. “We were. Things move fast in our business, and if I hadn’t gone down there to pick it up someone would have stolen it off the transport on the way up. It all worked out fine; I was planning to check in on you, anyway.”
Two of the guards approached the fence upon seeing them.
Recognizing Brixa, one of them took out a black wand and traced a vertical line on the fence, which parted to allow them to step through.
He was already sealing it back up when Ariel looked back. The security arrangements struck her as excessive, but she deferred the impulse to say anything. Brixa would, of course, have a pat soothing answer, and she’d have no choice but to accept it, unless she delayed her questions until she had something concrete to ask.
; Perhaps a hundred meters of open ground separated the fence from the square cluster of buildings. As they walked, Ariel saw the pits of torn-out tree stumps; this land had been cleared hastily and left to grow over on its own. Was Nucleomorph worried that the cyborgs would break in, or recently transformed patients would try to escape?
This question, too, she put off, and when they walked through a Spartan lobby into the interior of the nearest building, she had more immediate concerns.
Ariel had been in hospitals before. Not so many as the average Terran, perhaps, but enough to know what to expect—and what she saw in this isolated complex out in the wilderness of Nova Levis was an intensity and sophistication that wouldn’t have seemed inadequate on Earth. Or, for that matter, Aurora. Each room was so dense with equipment that the patient was hard to pick out: chambers not unlike baley berths, with monitors crowded around and thick braids of conduit and hose leading up into the ceiling or down through the floor.
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“This is the first stage after transformation,” Brixa said, even his ebullience tempered by the scene. “Full life support, and pressurized fluid environments to speed healing and bathe the patient in anti-rejection chemicals. Constant monitoring from central nodes in every building. In addition, we do a complete rebuild of each patient’s immune system to purge whatever diseases they bring with them and decrease the probability of contracting new ones. Your friend Derec’s work has been invaluable there; we are frighteningly dependent on his inventory.”
Ariel glanced at him to see if there was more in this comment than admiration. He was looking into the nearest room, swept up in the grandeur of the work he oversaw.
“Is that why you put in a bid to engineer the animals he wanted?”
Ariel asked.
“Part of it. The inventory is public, but we also knew that if Nucleomorph could work with Derec, we’d find out about his progress before someone took the time to get it into the public databases. Plus, he’s very good. You must know that. And so are we. The organisms we designed for him are of premium quality.”
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