by R. Z. Held
“Some of us surmounted the blow to our self-identity,” Pyrus murmured, dry. Genevieve wondered how old he actually was, given enhanced healing. Both of them appeared to be in their thirties, a little past physical prime for cutthroat competition sports, but not for career military. Pyrus at least must be well beyond that, being first-gen—had he really been an Install for twenty or thirty years? Pax Romana must have started small, building up numbers, as their expansion push and internal propaganda had really only started in the last ten years. And the Installs and their capabilities had certainly come as a surprise to her home frontier planet of Idyll.
“You’re just genetically civil,” Eriope said, and led the way out of the elevator.
Pyrus guided Genevieve out the back of the building, to a rather respectable swath of green. Wilder than the fields that took up much of the space between settlements on Idyll, but more sedate than the gullies and mountains left to their own devices there. Park-like, with a lawn mowed down to a length good for strolling, though that ran quickly into the brush and trees over a rapidly steepening foothill.
Somewhere in the walk, Genevieve came down from the Sweetheart with a thud, or at least her good sense caught up with her thoughts and actions that had careened off under the drug’s influence. How could she, dirty fronti herself, possibly have even thought about attraction to one of the Pax Romana she was here to kill, if she was lucky enough to succeed? Even more impossible, incomprehensible, how could she have remembered her dead sister so easily, so happily?
Worst of all were the medic permissions. Maybe it would have seemed more suspicious if she’d denied them, but what if he watched her vitals to hint at whether she was lying?
“It tells you what data I’m getting as I get it,” Pyrus said, tone mild. “You don’t have to lock me out so comprehensively.” His phrasing was irritated but when Genevieve checked his expression, she found sympathy instead. “The alarms are set ridiculously high, I assure you. It alerts me to full cardiac arrest, not when your heart’s pounding because you’re pissed at someone.”
“You really are a civilian,” Eriope said. She continued before Genevieve could bristle, even internally. “Might make a nice change around here. Remind us that we can take back a little privacy if we want.” She gestured to a bench, one of a few placed around the building’s park. Or back yard. Or whatever it was.
“Sorry,” Genevieve told Pyrus. Hard to be formal in one word. Focusing on her speech was a nicely concrete aspect of focusing on her mission, and focusing on her mission meant she wasn’t thinking about her sister, or Pyrus. At least he seemed to be ignoring her manner while high. She sat on the bench without looking, turning her attention to the medic permissions as she allowed them back online. They seemed to match what Pyrus had said, but then she’d never been a coder, after the basic stuff everyone got in school. And it wasn’t the raw code she was dealing with in any case, it was more of that half-instinctual sensation of cause and effect that the nanite system seemed to run on.
Eriope tugged at the zipper on her jacket, which Genevieve hadn’t even realized was a jacket until that moment, and settled it about halfway down. The jacket closed up the back, though the impeccable tailoring of the front made it clear that was purposeful. Her wings unfolded easily, elegantly, metallic non-metal with a copper sheen to the gray, and black nowhere to be seen. “I doubt you’ll have to worry about it for several days at least, but after that, careful you don’t charge too long, or you’ll end up amped,” she remarked. Her lips quirked up, amused at the idea, or perhaps some memory of the experience. “And you’ll have a hell of a time sleeping that night. You can dump into the building’s grid if you really need to, though. I’ll show you how to handle the hookup.”
A new man strode up, glower practically preceding him. Carex, she presumed. “A civilian?” he demanded. Perhaps glowering was too mild a word for what he was doing. His skin was even more of an ancestrally sunny shade than that of the other two, though he wore his beard much like Pyrus did, in a single line along his jaw. Compared to Pyrus’s, his shoulders hulked. “She’s not on any list of TH employees I can find, current or former.”
Genevieve had anticipated shakiness, facing this first challenge to her story, but things felt solid again for some reason. She’d expected resistance, not Eriope’s offhand job offer—and sympathy from the both of them, for that matter—and now she had it, out in the open. Carex’s manner snapped her mission into focus. “Of course not. Illegal experiments are removed from the records before they even start.”
Carex seemed to be trying to stare her down. She met his eyes and held them as his system prowled around the outside of hers. It began with the sensation of being stared at from behind her back, and grew worse with the feeling that wherever she looked, she couldn’t find the source of the gaze. She didn’t know what he was looking for, but she refused to appear afraid that he might find it. She had the nanites. He couldn’t argue with that. Finally he snorted. “I’m Malao Carex. And now I have to do something with you, it seems, a scientist in a security firm. Hope you like playing receptionist.”
“No!” The word slipped out and Genevieve scrabbled to find some justification for it. She’d never get the access she needed if they essentially quarantined her from the soldiers, behind a desk. “I have no wish to die of boredom. What I do not yet know, I can learn.”
Carex treated her to a light sneer. “Have you ever held a gun before in your life?”
“Yes,” Genevieve said. She let the word come out hard. Every child on Idyll learned to shoot, beginning at the point when Pax Romana’s first conquest in the region hit the interplanetary communication networks.
“Prove it, then.” Carex’s com pinged against her own, and she reluctantly accepted the message. A map, showing the way to a range, a few floors up in the same building.
“She should be charging.” Pyrus stated it mildly, factually, body language remaining relaxed. Eriope must be right about him being genetically civil.
“She has enough to shoot, doesn’t she?” When Pyrus couldn’t deny that, Carex turned and strode back to the building. Genevieve jogged a few steps to catch up. This test shouldn’t be too hard to pass. She hoped.
In the elevator, everyone was silent, even Eriope, which Genevieve took to mean they were talking to each other privately. The voice over her com made her jump when it came—it was definitely a voice, too, with all the accompanying intonation.
<...she certainly wasn’t infected with them, or she’d be dead.> Eriope’s voice.
The range looked familiar enough, as only so many ways existed to serve the same purpose. Carex picked up a gun, handgun-sized, but lacking a trigger. Instead, when one side contacted his palm, the grip lit and it audibly powered up. “Make sure your internal aiming program is online,” he said, patronizingly. “And hearing protection.” As Genevieve watched, clear material rose from the skin at the sides of his eyes and settled across them to his nose, forming a shield without need for earpieces.
She didn’t know where her solidity was now. The Pax Romana will kill you, her fight or flight screamed, and accelerated her heart to the redline. But Pax Romana wasn’t the important part, she knew that now. Those had been Pax Romana Installs, stepping off transports and into camerasight of her planet’s recon drones. Carrying handguns, so small. Visors over their eyes with no earpieces. Utterly silent.
And now she was an Install, so if she feared them, she was fearing herself. She needed to breathe, to look calm.
Carex fired, and she flinched and scrabbled to find the hearing pr
otection program he was talking about. There. Her ears didn’t feel muffled, but an icon indicated it would damp down all input to a specified level. She left it at the default for now. That mistake gave her an excuse to look rattled, at least. And then Carex set the gun down and stepped back pointedly for her to take his place.
The target was circular, fortunately, not a human silhouette. Genevieve settled into the right stance, and imagined chewing on her lip. She wasn’t going to give Carex the satisfaction of actually doing it. Forget aiming, how did she pull the trigger? The grip lit, and she could feel the power drain of the gun pulling from her system because she had a sense of where to look for that, having charged. A little off the top like this didn’t sap her perceived physical energy, but Genevieve suspected it would begin to, when she got too low.
Eriope said. When Genevieve glanced from side to side at the men, laughter carried over the com.
All right. The targeting system prompted her to turn over her visual input. When she did, things looked no different for a beat. Her eyebrows itched fiercely as the shield crossed her vision, a leading edge of distortion that settled out, the material invisible once in place. She tried to tell herself if she couldn’t feel or see it, it might as well not be there, and she should ignore the idea of it. That mostly succeeded only because that was when her arm muscles twitched in their brace, deeper than a typical tic. In her shock, Genevieve, having expected projected crosshairs or something similar, didn’t fight the movement. Her arms settled into an artificial stillness, under her system’s control. It wasn’t…uncomfortable, she supposed. More like someone else’s arms along her own, firm grip on her wrists. Thinking of it that way let her relax into it somewhat, and she realized she wasn’t actually statue-still, she was simply compensating faster than her perceptions could understand. Twitch that way, twitch instantly back.
The last motion, to squeeze the grip, that was hers alone, at least. Genevieve hit one ring off the bullseye, paused with a heavy sensation of grinding calibration and computation at the back of her mind, then snapped half a dozen more shots grouped into the bullseye. No, not grouped, she realized, as her vision zoomed with a push of concentration much like squinting—that, at least, she’d already figured out how to do on her own. Into the same hole.
Carex half-growled something incomprehensible. “Even if she’s not hopeless, she’s still not trained.”
Genevieve blinked her vision normal, set the gun down, and stepped back. When she knuckled at her eyes, chasing the earlier itch, her fingers found the edge of the line of carbon material over her skin just before it disappeared. Creepy as fuck. She dropped her hands immediately. “Hold my wages until my training is finished, then,” she snapped at Carex. She didn’t need the money—doubtful that she’d be able to take it with her when her mission was done and she was running for it, after all. “I promise the training period will be of short duration. Surely that would not be such an impossible investment.” Best to pretend she wanted to earn a living eventually, so they didn’t question her purpose here. She kept her chin high and her gaze steady, waiting out Carex’s answer.
“She can still cover the desk while she’s in training,” Eriope put in, brightly. “Since everyone hates that duty. And hey! That’ll free people up for the time they’ll spend teaching.”
“Congratulations, you’ve just volunteered to organize all her training,” Carex said, batting it back to Eriope like maybe something in him actually enjoyed the banter, though his tone remained grim. He turned and disappeared off into the hall.
Genevieve almost had time to process that she was in, before Eriope swept her up on her way out the door as well. “Perfect. I’ll give you a few days to charge up and then send you a schedule.” She paused and turned back to Pyrus. “Do you need her for anything else? Otherwise I’ll take her to a room.”
Pyrus waved her off. “I’ll find her later for anything else.” His attention switched to Genevieve. “Go out on your balcony.”
“Yes,” Genevieve said, and by the time she finished chasing the intricacies of whether she should add a “sir” or something else, Eriope had nudged her to the elevator.
As the indicator numbers climbed, Genevieve glanced sideways at Eriope. The building had looked tall from outside, but she’d been examining it mostly from street level, among buildings of similar height. She hadn’t realized it was this tall. “What floor will I be staying on?”
“How far up does this place go, you mean?” Eriope laughed, though the sound had a sharp note compared to her earlier cheer. “Pretty far. There’s not much flat land good for building around here, and anyway they want it looking pristine for the tourists. So all the construction around the port went up. This was originally supposed to be a hotel, but we took it over before they did the interiors, so most of the upper floors are a couple suites rather than a dozen rooms. You’ll be on a floor with no one else on it yet.”
A beat of silence, in which Eriope pinched the bridge of her nose, all of her body language tightening down around that point. “Pardon me.” She withdrew another pill, from a different pocket than the Sweetheart had come from, downed it with a practiced movement.
“Sweetheart?” Genevieve said, having nothing better to say. To pretend not to have seen seemed disingenuous.
“Nah. I save the good shit for myself.” Eriope brought both hands up, fingertips at that same point at the bridge of her nose, as if she needed holding together. “With the nanites, it’s not like it can actually do any damage to your health. And it takes the edge off, given that—I’m sure you’ve noticed this already yourself—there’s a fucking lot of edge to being an Install.” A deep breath, and she dropped her hands.
Genevieve felt a burst of unwelcome sympathy, and immediately thrust it away. They weren’t on the same side—better she should write the woman off as an addict. But she couldn’t judge someone else’s coping strategy, given her own choices, she really couldn’t.
When they reached their destination, forty floors up, Eriope gestured them out into a bland hallway. Her movements had regained their earlier energy, perhaps even excessively so, as if she hoped to replace her moment of weakness in Genevieve’s mind. “The lower floors in this building are the communal spaces. Mess, gym, pool, theater. A whole base stacked up, practically.” Eriope sent a burst of data, a more expanded map than the one Carex had given her to the range. It unfolded before her mind’s eye and even had her name marked on the room they had just arrived at.
The door opened under her touch after a brief hesitation, like it had coded itself to her electronic signature. Now she had an electronic signature. She didn’t kid herself that it wouldn’t still open for someone like Carex, though.
She turned in the doorway. “Thank you.” Even if she’d been speaking in her native language of Idyllian instead of Lingua, Genevieve wouldn’t have known what more to say. She’d wanted the Installs to allow her in, but she hadn’t wanted them to be kind or apparently deserving of sympathy in return. Eriope was making her mission both easier and harder at the same time. Of course Genevieve hadn’t expected this to be simple, but she was only now beginning to comprehend the sheer scope of her naivete in thinking she knew in what form the challenges would come.
Unconcerned, Eriope beamed and returned a, “You’re welcome!” before heading back to the elevator.
The rooms were large, Genevieve had to give them that. And well-appointed. And utterly bland. Ready for someone to impose their personality on them, Genevieve supposed. She looked
at them and saw “Pax Romana,” but of course that was because they were built like thousands of hotels on dozens of planets that saw high interplanet traffic, whether the Pax Romana controlled them or not. She’d seen those traveling to a conference or two, in her graduate school days.
Genevieve ran out of momentum when standing on the dark blue-gray rug between the bed and the desk, and found she missed wood with so fierce an ache her throat closed up with the strength of tears she didn’t allow to gather. At home, it would have been everywhere—paneling, furniture, vessels, sculptures. She’d have been immersed in the feel of the grain, the richness of the variations in color, the warmth of touching something that had lived, rather than been manufactured. Not that Idyll was one of those agricultural planets that had eschewed technology for the principle of it, but they’d had the resources to surround themselves with that warmth.
Which was why the Pax Romana had arrived to conquer them, of course. Dirty frontis.
Genevieve aimed herself for the balcony, but the sight of the bathroom woke a realization of a plain old biological need. After cleaning her hands, she hesitated before the mirror, allowed herself to touch the earring. The one with the virus, not the matching inert one in her left lobe. She kept her thumb well away from the back, the end of the post. Stab that into someone’s skin and their nanites would self-destruct, taking the person along with them. Kill someone networked in with the rest of the Pax Romana Installs, and who knew how far it might spread.
That was the problem, of course—she didn’t know. That was why she needed to learn how the Installs were networked, whether a passive connection would be sufficient, or if an active one was necessary.
If it was even possible for her to tell without simply releasing the virus and seeing what happened. That wasn’t an option, however. She had no wish to die along with these Pax Romana, so she needed to know what connections to avoid herself at the crucial moment. But she wasn’t a software engineer. Nor a spy. Emphatically not. Just a soil scientist. One who, when the Pax Romana arrived on her frontier planet, had not the courage to fight on the front lines with her older sister, nor the training to staff the hospitals with her younger brother, and so drove an ambulance, steering bone-jarringly cross-country to avoid troops or cajoling or supporting or even dragging the wounded aboard.