Lyra gently admonished her to go easy on the poor dears. But she trusted Emry to wield her sexuality responsibly and to consult with her parents before taking each new step. Overall, Lyra enjoyed hearing of her daughter’s exploits and experiments, dishing with her like a sister over the ribald details, vicariously amused by her tweaking of Greenwood’s taboos—and pleased that she was finally getting along better, after a fashion, with the other children. Yet she advised the teenager to be cautious with older males, since there were those who felt threatened by women’s sexual power and sought to twist it against them. But Emry had learned her lessons well, and the one college boy who’d tried something she hadn’t invited had gone home sorer and wiser, though with no broken bones.
Her quarry today was younger, a cute, shy black-haired boy her own age whom she’d decided to bring out of his shell. The poor thing had jumped halfway to the axis when she’d pinched his adorable buns, and he’d turned out to be a runner—though he let himself get cornered so easily that it had to be intentional. She was just about to undo her top and give him the thrill of his life when his eyes suddenly lifted from her chest, looking past her in terror. Oh, hell, Emry thought, figuring a parent or teacher was behind her, gearing up for a Stern Lecture on Morality.
But then the explosions began.
Emry whirled to behold the kind of scene she thought only happened on the news, and only on other habitats. Over in the town, symbot-suited people were shooting at each other, using big, heavy weapons to try to punch through each other’s armor. They didn’t seem to be going after the Greenwooders—but they didn’t seem to care who got in their way, or whose homes or businesses got wrecked. The curve of the habitat gave Emry an overhead view, her enhanced vision letting her see the townspeople running desperately for cover—and some of them not moving at all.
She had trouble accepting the sight at first. How could anyone act so irresponsibly? The fires, the destruction, they could endanger the whole habitat. Every hab-dweller was conditioned from infancy to make safety a priority. But she remembered the lessons of her father’s rescue work: people sometimes sought release by trashing others’ habs the way they never would their own. And many people who came from Earth or the Sheaf or other large habs had never needed to learn such discipline at all.
Emry suddenly remembered that her mother had been going into town today. Alarmed, she checked her bracelet selfone for Lyra’s locator signal, and saw it flashing along with her father’s on the edge of town. Good, Emry thought, she was with him. That meant she was safe. Now Emry just had to reach them and she’d be safe too.
But she took a moment to talk the boy past his panic and get him headed off for home, in the other direction. And as she raced toward her family, she kept an eye out for other scared kids who might need her help. It was what the Emerald Blaze would do. She was confident that, once her father made sure his ladies were safe, he’d go out and make those bad guys stop fighting. And then he’d save all the hurt people lying in the streets. The Blaze would stay to protect her mother while he did it. So she had to get there soon. Her hero needed his sidekick.
As she rocketed forward, she saw the fighting moving toward her parents. But she saw something else too. One of the armor-suited fighters wasn’t using lethal weapons, and was trying to keep the bad guys away from the townspeople. Emry recognized the symbot from the news—it was one of the Troubleshooters! Here! Wow. With her dad and a Troubleshooter on the case, the bad guys would be in jail in no time.
Once she got into town, the buildings blocked her view of the Troubleshooter and the battle. But those were secondary concerns; she knew where she needed to go. But as she got close, she needed to leap over piles of burning debris, and saw a lot of wrecked buildings and vehicles. The battle had passed right through here. She thanked the Goddess that her mom was with her dad, who would …
Then she saw him. It took her a moment to recognize him. He was down on his knees, shaking. He looked so small, so weak. That couldn’t be Daddy, could it? What was that he was leaning over? It looked like … No, it couldn’t be.…
…
No.
…
No. No, that couldn’t be her. It had none of her vibrancy, her energy, her warmth. It was just …
…
Emerald couldn’t understand what she was looking at. It looked like Mommy … but it couldn’t be … couldn’t be a person … It looked like Mommy’s face … but only half of it was there.… There was a hole and she could see a fire behind.…
Where was Mommy?
Why wasn’t Daddy looking for Mommy? How could he just kneel there, bawling like a little baby over this … that … mound of … that thing.…
Why wasn’t he stopping the bad guys? Why didn’t he stop them from breaking things, and … and that.…
Something knocked her forward, a sound she almost heard over the rushing in her head, and she fell and rolled and that wasn’t in front of her anymore and there was a metal monster pointing something at her, yelling something … and Daddy just bawled … and Emry closed her eyes.…
And then she woke up and strong arms picked her up—Daddy? But no, they were hard and cold and they whirred. She looked and it was the Troubleshooter. His helmet was retracting, folding back behind like origami, and there was a kind face behind it, craggy with a bushy moustache. “You’re safe now, little one,” he said. “Uncle Arkady has caught the bad guys. It will be all right now.” He looked past her, to something behind her, and grew sad. “No … not quite all right. I’m so sorry.”
Emry tried to stop herself from turning, but couldn’t. There was Daddy, rocking back and forth without a sound. And there was that.…
Mr. Arkady took a tentative step toward him. “Sir … I’m sorry for your loss, but you need to come away with me. The building may not be stable. And your daughter needs you now.”
Daddy looked up at that. At first he didn’t seem to know where he was, like he was sleepwalking. But then his eyes focused on her. He was like a statue for a moment, and then he shook himself and stood up. “Ohh, Emerald … my jewel … it’s just us now … I’ll take care of you now.…”
But as he talked, something welled up in Emry, something terrible that burned her inside and tore out of her as the loudest scream she’d ever heard. “NOOOO!!!!!!!!” It went on for ages, and seemed to echo through the whole sphere like thunder.
He reached for her, but she punched at him, struggling in the Troubleshooter’s arms. “You didn’t save her!!! Why didn’t you save her? You were supposed to protect her! You let her die! It’s your fault! I hate you!! I hate you!!!!”
The look in his eyes was like the one he’d had before—a look of terrible loss. But she didn’t care. He’d betrayed her. He’d failed her when it counted the most. She’d never hear her mother sing again, and it was his fault, and she knew she would hate him for the rest of her life.
4
Trouble Shared
July 2107
Pellucidar habitat
In orbit of Vesta
Emerald Blair took great satisfaction in punching herself in the face.
Not that it was actually her face, or even a reasonable facsimile. Rather, it was the face of the overearnest, underweight Vestalian starlet who’d played her in that unauthorized vidnet biopic last month, the one they’d rushed into production to capitalize on the Chakra City incident. They could’ve gone virtual, but apparently figured the starlet’s fame would be at least as big a draw as Emry’s own, since they couldn’t legally use her likeness anyway.
Of course, that hadn’t stopped Pellucidar’s control cyber from morphing the starlet’s likeness onto an android’s soligram skin and sending it to attack Emry. But Sorceress didn’t seem to have much use for human laws right now, including the ones about not killing people, or rather using her animatronic puppets to kill them. You’d think a cyber programmed with every work of fiction ever made would know how clichéd that is, Emry thought.
The s
hamdroid’s head snapped back far enough from the punch to warrant an obituary had it been the actual starlet. Emry’s fantasy to that effect was marred by the fact that the soligram layer had been smashed in, leaving a fist-sized hole in the middle of its face. But the smart-matter gel re-formed into the starlet’s celebrated features—Hell, I’m prettier than that—and the neck quickly returned to normal. “You can’t keep the Banshee down!” it cried. These androids were built to withstand a lot of punishment from the patrons, and Sorceress was no longer bothering to make them play dead.
It helped, though, that the cyber had picked such an ill-conceived opponent to stop her from reaching Pellucidar’s brain center. Sorceress seemed to think this was all a game, and apparently had decided it would be entertaining to pit Emry against an alternate version of herself. The starlet bot was dressed as the mod-gang member she’d been at seventeen, or some costume designer’s exaggerated notion thereof. She acted tough, but was too slight of build to pose much of a challenge, durability aside. Which was proving a disappointment to the gathering spectators.
Damn it, I don’t have time for this! Emry thought as Banshee charged again. Don’t these vackheads know they’re in danger? It wouldn’t have surprised her from Earthers; they spent most of their lives immersed in their online world, interacting with virtual playmates, even conducting business transactions through gaming analogies. But Striders, ironically, tended to lead more grounded lives; spread out over cubic light-minutes, they didn’t have the option of real-time onlining, except on the local scale. And even there, they preferred to live in reality as a matter of cultural preference.
Yet Vestans tended to be eccentric. Vesta was in the “desert,” the ice-poor Inner Belt, its habitats only able to survive on imported water and carbon; but Vesta’s giant size and planetlike, differentiated geology gave it a mineral wealth unequaled in the Belt. So its civilization was heavy with entrepreneurs and elites, those who could not only afford to make the desert bloom but could do so in style. Here was the home, not only of the Striders’ cybernetic and metallurgical industries, but their jewelry industry, their entertainment industry, their gambling industry, their erotic industry. Here were the wealthy elites accustomed to having their way, and here were the prosperous Terran emigrés who sought the kind of luxuries they knew from home. Thus, Vesta was not as centralized as Ceres despite being nearly as populous. Instead of one united cluster and various outliers, Vesta was circled by multiple large, independent habitat-states and their various tributaries—the latter of which included Pellucidar, a theme-park habitat built by a Vestalia-based entertainment conglomerate but jointly managed by several Vestan states. It was an Earth-style immersive cyberfantasy with a Strider twist, relying as much on soligrams and bots as virtual projections. But there were still those who let themselves get too caught up in the illusions.
Emry threw Banshee over her shoulder, but the simulant rolled smoothly to its feet, wearing that patented Pout of Fury that made up half the starlet’s repertoire of expressions. “You dragged me down into this life!” she intoned, lunging at Emry with a flurry of inhumanly fast blows, keeping her busy dodging and blocking. “You made me a criminal! But no more, Javon! I’m free of you now! And I swear to the Goddess, I will devote the rest of my life to making amends for what you made me do, by fighting scum like you wherever—”
“Oh, shut up.” With a thought, Emry set her laser pistol to shock mode, then drew it and discharged it into Banshee’s scrawny torso, holding it there long enough to make sure the android’s circuitry was thoroughly fried. She’d been reluctant to waste the power on this petty obstacle, but damn, did it feel good. “You don’t know a vackin’ thing about it.”
Some in the audience cheered, while others groaned, wishing for a longer catfight. A moment later, though, they started screaming as electric discharges began raining down from the sky. Emry shoved them all under the nearby trees, resisting an insane urge to tell the Cheshire Cat in the branches to run for safety. Then she reviewed her visual logs, enhancing her peripheral glimpse of the attackers’ forms against the patchwork landscape of the Bernal sphere’s far side. Damn, the Zelkoids are back! “Hey, Zephyr, any luck? I could use some backup here, you know!”
“I’m not exactly lounging on the veranda myself,” came a wry, mellow baritone over her selfone. “I’m hacking my best, but Sorceress is a grand-master player.”
“Zephy, baby, this isn’t a game!”
“In fact, Emry, that’s exactly what it is. To her, anyway. She hasn’t tried to harm me, just impede me.”
A lightning-gun blast set fire to the tree sheltering Emry, forcing her to break cover and run across the clearing. “Why can’t she extend the same courtesy to the rest of us?”
Zephyr switched to her transceiver implant so she could hear him over the blasts.
“Great, so she’s schizophrenic!”
“Come again?” She tucked, rolled, and fired skyward.
“I wish!” Emry shot back. But she supposed Zephyr knew whereof he spoke. Until recently, he hadn’t had a physical body either, serving as one of the top data-miners at TSC headquarters. Arkady had liked him and had often tried to talk him into becoming a Troubleshooter’s steed, ideally Emry’s once her apprenticeship ended, but he’d shown no interest in fieldwork. Perhaps Zephyr’s words now offered some insight into why. But after Arkady’s death, Zephyr had changed his mind, agreeing to honor his friend’s wishes after all. Emry hadn’t been sure she wanted a reluctant shipmind, but so far Zephyr had been nothing but reliable and dedicated, and charming company to boot.
“She doesn’t understand the difference between fantasy and reality. I get it. Now how the flare do we fix it?” She spotted the Zelkoid command saucer and began firing at it, knowing that destroying it would send the cyclopean green monsters back to their home dimension—or whatever the closest approximation would be in this setting. Who says Annie Minute wasn’t educational? The beam fizzled out, so she ejected the power pack and plugged in another from her belt. The gun was growing hot in her hand. “I’m almost to the brain center, Zeph. I don’t want to have to hurt her, but if you can’t lock her into autistic mode—” A basso roar hit the air. “Aww, vack, I think the dragon’s coming back!”
“Don’t worry, Emry, you’re not the target,” he said aloud over her selfone. “I asked Sorceress to find out how the Zelkoids would fare against it.”
“You mean—you got through to her?”
“We’ve been having quite a lively debate for the past few seconds. It took some doing, but I think I’ve persuaded her to accept my basic premise that reality and fantasy are two different things. Personally, I suspect she’s just humoring me. I think she likes me.”
Emry laughed, even as the dragon began tearing through the Zelkoid lines and sending them scattering. “You little Lothario! See, I told you that voice of yours could melt any gal in her boots.”
“Anyway, I’ve convinced her to take some time off to explore the philosophical ramifications of the idea. The simulations should be shutting down even now.”
“Yep,” Emry confirmed as the dragon, Zelkoids, and other manifestations began slumping to the ground and
reverting to raw soligram form. “They’re melting, they’re mell-tinnggg!”
“What a world.”
“And what a sidekick! What a team, huh?”
“Who are you calling a sidekick? I did all the work. You were just the damsel in distress.” His voice grew more serious. “And you know you could’ve avoided a lot of it if you’d stayed more detached about your virtual opponents.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just, Banshee clicked my buttons, you know?”
“And this is an excuse how?”
Emry winced. Sometimes Zephyr reminded her so much of Arkady. That brought her both pain and comfort. “You’re right, I—what the hell are you looking at?”
Some of the spectators had drawn near, gawking at her. A gangly teen dressed rather unconvincingly as Sam Murai, Private Eye, with a trench coat and fedora over a t-shirt patterned like medieval Japanese armor, tilted his head and spoke. “So—you’re the real one?”
“The one and only!”
“Hmp.” He stared some more. “You were cuter in the movie.”
Emry slowly, carefully holstered her sidearm.
* * *
Pellucidar’s various managing partners soon moved in to “secure” the theme park and began bickering over whether Sorceress should be reprogrammed or destroyed altogether—and over which Vestan state had the right to make that determination. Emry wasn’t exactly a fan of the cyber—she had killed six people, after all—but the thought of anyone being put to death because they had no legal rights outraged her, and she made that known to the Vestans. The one thing they could agree on, however, was that they didn’t let outsiders dictate their policies.
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