by R. Z. Held
IDYLLIAN
Books 1 to 4 of the Amsterdam Institute Series
By R. Z. Held
Clean Install copyright © 2020 by Rhiannon Held
Dirty Burnout copyright © 2020 by Rhiannon Held
Fair Exchange copyright © 2020 by Rhiannon Held
Unjust Theft copyright © 2020 by Rhiannon Held
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by Kate Marshall
www.rhiannonheld.com
Amsterdam Institute Series
CLEAN INSTALL
DIRTY BURNOUT
FAIR EXCHANGE
UNJUST THEFT
To Erin, Erik, Yang-Yang, Randy, Stephen, and Emily
For continuing to adventure boldly with me through isolation
Table of Contents
Clean Install
Part I
Part II
Part III
Dirty Burnout
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Epilogue
Fair Exchange
Part I
Part II
Part III
Unjust Theft
Part I
Part II
Part III
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Clean Install
Part I
Genevieve had expected her first sight of a Pax Romana soldier up close to be a slam into her stomach, even worse than seeing recordings of them on a battlefield. Even if this particular soldier was supposedly retired and now working for a security firm, she was still Pax Romana. But the woman who motioned her into a conference room in Tsuga Security headquarters wasn’t wearing body armor, or even a sidearm. She had a hard face, under her burst of short, black hair, but smiling changed it.
The pleasantness of that smile made it harder to imagine her dead, along with all the others in what Genevieve had worked out must be Pax Romana’s reserves, but Genevieve had known that might be a danger, had prepared herself for it mentally. As much as she could with no formal training. It didn’t matter what pleasant expression this woman might paste on top, when the flesh and blood below teemed with technology tuned to nothing but violence.
The woman settled herself at her desk. “I’m Cusco Eriope. Call me Eriope. I hear you’re looking for a job with us? You understand, we tend to draw our personnel from a certain pool...are you ex-military?” She motioned Genevieve to another chair. Genevieve’s back muscles twitched in protest even just looking at the chair’s back, so she remained standing.
“No. But I am a nanite Install.” The words tasted wrong on her tongue. They might be wrong, but she’d built her cover story to allow those kind of mistakes. Assuming this woman and her superiors accepted the cover story at all.
Her communication system registered a ping and Genevieve allowed it to respond in kind, but blocked any further access. At least, she hoped she had. It wasn’t precisely like reading words in a status message on a screen, nor precisely like hearing sounds from an earbud. It was more…a wider understanding, like a visualization of a screen inside her mind that conveyed its information without any need to pause to read or listen. Maybe. If she knew how to work any of this, she wouldn’t be here.
“So you are,” Eriope said, and spread her hands flat on the table, rather than jumping to her feet to attack. Genevieve suppressed a flinch anyway, anticipating her next question. “How is that possible?”
Genevieve thought about touching the small data storage device masquerading as a post earring in her right ear. Thought about it and didn’t, because she at least knew enough to break herself of such a transparent tell. Still, the thought alone of the virus, waiting patiently to be released, grounded her with the weight of why her story had to be perfect. “I used to work for TendarisHerron.” They were the defense contractor that had developed the nanites, or so her research said. If her research was wrong, she was about to find out. Her back muscles spasmed and she set her teeth until the pain passed.
“So you’re, what, a lab accident?” Eriope stood and approached Genevieve, more curiosity than suspicion in her expression. “Even the early test subjects were military.”
“They wanted to develop civilian applications for the technology.” Genevieve deployed each word carefully, using as few as she could. To her own ears, her system allowed her to speak with a core planet accent, but she wasn’t sure she trusted that. Pay too much attention and everything she said sounded eerily wrong anyway, like listening to a recording, only it was coming out of her own mouth. “I was not...fully briefed, shall we say. Given that, I declined to continue my employment with TH.” And here, a dash of truth to season it all: “I left, I tried to lock it all down and live normally, but I was not successful. I need to learn the systems.”
Learn them, and be allowed onto the soldiers’ network, if the virus was to do any good.
“I hoped someone here could teach—” The next spasm was much worse than she’d expected. Was it the stress? She’d had a bad episode, the kind with screaming, sobbing pain, on the flight to this planet, and between most of the episodes preceding it she’d had at least a standard week’s grace. The background pain and the peaks of the episodes hadn’t gotten any better since she woke with the nanites, but neither had they gotten noticeably worse until now.
“Can’t say I blame you for not sticking around for the orientation when they installed on you without your informed consent.” Eriope’s brows rose, and she caught Genevieve’s forearms as Genevieve’s knees bent, instincts telling her to go fetal against the pain. She braced Genevieve up and examined the skin along the inside of one of her arms. “How much have you been relying on bio power, girl? Don’t know your regular color, but you’re looking sallow to me.”
Bio power? “As opposed to—” To finish the question, Genevieve tried to think of another power source her nanites could be using, and came up empty. It wasn’t like she plugged in, even after the installation process.
“Right. Outside.” Eriope kept a grip on Genevieve’s wrist and used firm pressure on the back of her shoulder to turn her and escort her into the hall. Genevieve wondered if she should resist, but she was sure that if Eriope wanted to subdue her, with training above and beyond the strength enhancements Genevieve shared, not to mention being pain-free, Genevieve wouldn’t be able to do much about it. They ducked into another room, this one with a wall of windows.
The spasm in her back had eased enough for Genevieve to receive the full effect of the vista like a slap. Everything but the small area around the spaceport was mountains, magnificently visible from this height in the Tsuga Security building. Smaller ones, crumpled and green, eased into larger, white over creased stone. Between two of the closest, she caught a gleam of water, some icy lake perhaps.
“Recreation planet,” Eriope explained absently, as she slid a plexi door open and broke Genevieve’s spell as she urged her through. “Nothing worth the cost of mining, so they started the terraforming process when they built the fueling station and let it percolate along on its own.” The railing around the balcony was chest-high on Genevieve. She judged she’d have warning to fight back if Eriope tried to push her off. She couldn’t guess at Eriope’s real purpose, though. Vitamin D?
Eriope turned Genevieve away from the view and braced her hands on her shoulders. “Now. Wings out.”
“Why?” Genevieve asked the question more to stall than anything. She’d hidden the things for so long, it was hard to convince herself to unfurl th
em, instead of keeping them tightly clenched beneath the panel in her back, where no one could see. But this woman was a nanite Install. She had her own damn wings. Probably larger and more impressive ones.
The silliness of that thought broke Genevieve free, and she shrugged off her jacket. She’d gotten tired of ruining shirts, so she’d altered her current one to dip low in the back, like some kind of clubwear. The air was chill enough she bundled the jacket over her arms to at least keep those warm.
“Because bio power is inefficient, and it robs the rest of your body if you make the nanites run on it long term.” Eriope crossed her arms and waited. She eyed Genevieve. “You’re aware your wings are photovoltaic, I hope?”
“Oh.” Genevieve couldn’t find anything else to say. She was aware now. She’d known the things must have had some kind of purpose, since she couldn’t fly with them.
Unless she was doing that wrong too, and Eriope would be flapping out toward those mountains any minute. But the soldiers she’d seen in recordings had never done that, and they hadn’t seemed to bother keeping any of their other abilities secret.
She closed her eyes, because that helped her visualize the wings. Unfold, up and out, like stretching in the morning, thousands of little carbon composite scales snapping into larger panels until the wings moved like a bird’s—a central outside rib and panels that overlapped or stretched apart like feathers. She’d stared at them often enough, tablet up to make a double mirror with the ones in the tiny bathrooms of the shitty housing where she’d spent the first few months after leaving home, and then in the tiny cabins of cheap, dingy long-haul transports out here. In places the matte, steely color darkened to almost black as if tarnished, and it looked as smooth as metal, though of course it was much lighter in weight.
She started to feel jittery, like downing a borderline-illegal energy drink and having it hit all at once. The jitters transitioned into something near panic, her heart pounding so hard she could hardly hear anything else. With each beat, the irrational fear grew and grew: she’d been discovered. Eriope was going to denounce her any moment.
“Shit, girl,” Eriope said, and her face softened into unmistakable sympathy. “I called our medic, he’ll be here in a minute.” Genevieve had to pin down each thought with an effort—she hadn’t seen Eriope call anyone because she’d called using the nanite com system. And she could have called backup to capture Genevieve instead, but why would she need it when Genevieve was currently so distracted and weak? Genevieve hadn’t been found out yet; she needed to keep it together.
Eriope took one of Genevieve’s hands and rummaged in her pocket with the other. “Here.” She pressed a small object into Genevieve’s palm. Genevieve had trouble focusing on it at first, as her panic was mutating, becoming an awful foreboding that pain was coming, it just hadn’t arrived yet.
She peered at the pill, small, heart-shaped, and a powder pink shade that no candy dared use anymore. “This is a recreational euphoric,” she objected. She hadn’t fought this far and this hard to take refuge in street drugs, never mind the danger of blabbing something of her secret purpose while high.
“The nanites laugh at bigger and badder things than Sweetheart,” Eriope said, expression going briefly ironic. “Much to my frustration. Consider it medicinal. It’s not like real painkillers work, the nanites just burn them out of your system. With Sweetheart, you still feel the pain, you just don’t give a shit.” She pressed Genevieve’s hand with the pill up to her mouth, and she didn’t fight it. She swallowed. Sweetheart was hardly a truth serum. Consider this a calculated risk. Maybe she was a coward, but she didn’t want to hurt. She’d hurt so much already.
When the pain did hit, time stutter-stepped a little, dropping Genevieve in the middle of Eriope’s flow to someone else. “...so of course they’re updating all at once. I gave her a dose of Sweetheart to take the edge off.”
Genevieve felt...lovely. A perfect word for Sweetheart. How silly. She still had one of Eriope’s hands and she clasped it with both of hers because her muscles were shaky. The new man who had appeared had a very nice face. A bit undistinguished, maybe, but the thin black line of his beard trimmed low along his jaw helped strengthen it. If she were to kiss him, she’d run the side of her thumb along it until she settled her hand to cup the side of his neck.
“That was probably the right choice,” the new man told Eriope. “But don’t take that for an endorsement of long-term use. All right—” He paused, and Genevieve didn’t realize what he was waiting for until Eriope filled it in.
“She told Front Desk her name was Amsterdam Genevieve.”
“Genevieve is fine.” She smiled at him. She was glad she’d been able to give her real name—the Pax Romana empire was such a mixture, her family name didn’t particularly stand out. This way maybe she could hear him say it. “You are the medic, I presume.” She still had to be careful. Not silly. She had a sudden image of shushing her older sister as they snuck in late, and drunk, from a party, and her sister shushing her back, both of them getting closer and closer to giggles loud enough to wake the whole house. “I fear my installation process was even more incomplete than I had realized—”
“Even high, she talks like a diplomatic courier.” Eriope aimed an elbow well short of the man’s ribs. “You’ve made an impression, though. I think she sees something she likes.” Genevieve was staring at him, she realized. Really obviously. Oops.
The new man politely ignored her ogling, casting a quick frown at Eriope instead. “You’re one to talk. Don’t tease her.” When he turned back, his expression smoothed. “Okay, Genevieve. I’m Toledo Pyrus, and I act as the medic for these reprobates. Now, you’ll need to grant me medic permissions, so I can see your system vitals, all right? That’s all I’ll see.”
“Okay,” Genevieve agreed, echoing his cadence on the word. All her slang belonged to her home planet of Idyll; she’d have to start learning some soon to fit in. Or be more informal. She wasn’t sure how to be informal casually without sounding like she was trying too hard. Or maybe it didn’t matter. She suspected she’d care very deeply later.
Pyrus slipped around behind her and ran gentle fingers along the join between the wings and her skin. His touch was clinical enough Genevieve mostly managed not to imagine it straying farther. Her system informed her that medic permissions had been activated and he was drawing off data about her vitals, but it didn’t feel like rummaging, which she’d imagined it might, so she was grateful. “You had a clean install, right?”
Genevieve allowed Eriope to repeat her cover story for her, and rather admired the colorful language it gained. “So clearly those bastards didn’t tell her a damn thing.”
“I’m glad you were able to make it here,” Pyrus said. “Brace yourself, Genevieve.” He rapped the center of her back, between the wings, with the heel of his hand, and the pain she was too high to care about suddenly halved in intensity.
“I can’t ever rid myself of the nanites, can I?” Genevieve asked. Pax Romana propaganda said so, and she figured they’d probably get more takers for the program if they could promise people a normal life after their tour. She flexed her wings experimentally. Not so bad, though she’d probably need to reevaluate when the Sweetheart was completely out of her system. The peak intensity of the lovely feeling had passed, but all her sensations were still warmly comfortable.
“You get a cushy job here, though,” Eriope said brightly. “It’s extraordinarily exciting guarding warehouses and ships while they fuel, I assure you. Don’t get me wrong, we’re useful—some high-class shit goes through this shipping point—but we’re mostly acting as a deterrent rather than mixing it up with anyone.”
Genevieve gestured her lack of objection to that to the side, in Eriope’s general direction. All the better, in fact, to have duties that didn’t require her to hurt anyone until she got the access to the Installs’ systems she needed. This was perfect! She hadn’t thought they’d agree to hire her so easily.
&nb
sp; “We’ll need to ask Carex what he wants to assign her to specifically,” Pyrus murmured, and guided Genevieve’s wings to fold not into her back but against it. So she wouldn’t bang them on doorways, she realized when he nudged her toward the one back into the building. “Doctor’s orders are to sit outside in the sun for as long as possible today and the next few days. After that, you can do your daily charge with the rest of us, if you want. If your duties allow.” He held his arm out in invitation to the elevator, and Genevieve preceded the others inside.
“I’ll tell him to meet us down there, anyway,” Eriope said as they rode down. She shifted her attention to Genevieve. “Not that Carex is really in charge. But he’s the CFO. So you’ll have to sweet talk him if you want to get paid. And the rest of us will need authorization for any time spent training you.” She leaned close. “The thing with Carex is, when he’s looking you over and glowering and shit, remember he’s descended from dirty frontis, so he thinks the stick up his ass has to be twice as rigid.”
The confiding tone made Genevieve wonder why Eriope wasn’t using the nanite com. But then, she supposed Installs were human, Pax Romana or not. Which was a joke she probably shouldn’t make even in her head anymore. Technology didn’t replace chatter unless it offered advantages. Which it obviously had on the battlefield, leading to the Pax Romana soldiers’ reported creepy silence. And maybe Eriope was gossiping to Pyrus right now, behind Genevieve’s metaphorical back.
“Carex can’t help what his parents did,” Pyrus said at normal volume. He did not, Genevieve noted, object to the casual epithet for those from frontier planets. She was honestly grateful that didn’t bother her at the moment either.
Eriope continued merrily on, ignoring Pyrus. “That, and he’s a first-generation Install. Back when he had it done, several decades ago, he thought they could remove it when he retired. Finding out he’s stuck with it didn’t…improve his attitude.”