by Jody Wallace
“They’re coming after Chanute,” Kravitz said grimly. “In attack formation.”
“No.” Claire denied it. “That’s not happening here. We only had a few incidents.”
“Look, Lawson, I don’t like this any more than you do. Check the hits around Chanute.” He pointed at the areas on the map. “The pattern’s not as consistent, and it has larger gaps than Acapulco, but it’s there.”
“You think they’re targeting us.” Her unease grew. And grew. “They’re learning. Like that game Battleship—sending probes to find where the food is and then sneaking a horde into the area.”
“I thought the entities used daemons to find food sources,” Adam commented, speaking for the first time. “The news reports indicate daemons show up all over the globe.”
“The daemons can find population centers, sure, but now that our soldiers are properly armed, we stop the entities along their front lines.” Kravitz remained focused on the map, though he was speaking to everyone. “Six months ago, we were driving ’em back. The buggers can’t reach the food that the daemons find. But now we got these shade infiltrations creating havoc, weakening morale.”
“It’s obvious they’re evolving. Who knows what else they can do?” Villa said mournfully. “We’re doomed.”
Claire placed her hands on the table, more firmly than necessary. “We need to bring the Shipborn into this. I can get Niko and his best people here in an hour.”
“That’s what we need to decide,” Elizabeth told her. “How to tell them and everyone else on Terra. If it’s handled wrong, this could cause even greater anarchy than we already have to deal with.”
Claire stared at the mayor with a scowl. She hadn’t had a lot of time to monitor the news in the past week, but Adam had kept her abreast. He and Ship had developed some kind of camaraderie during his late night study sessions. “It’s not like people don’t know it’s happening. The shade deaths in the buffer zone have been all over the media lately. Keeping these convergences to ourselves under some bullshit fear of anarchy would be criminal.”
“Calm your tits, Lawson,” Kravitz said. “Until last week or so, nobody could confirm any of this. My informant’s been compiling the data, not me, and the convergences only just became verifiable with the…recent incidents. I don’t think anybody here wants to hide it from the rest of the world.”
They hadn’t seen or heard from Kravitz in a while, so he could be telling the truth. “Have your informants confirmed how the shades are entering the buffer zone or where they go after the small hits?” Claire asked.
Kravitz shook his head. “They’re clueless about that, too, though smart money’s on the pods. Don’t suppose you have anything to add to that, Alsing?”
“Nope.” Adam’s face betrayed none of the worries he’d shared after the scientists told him where they thought he’d been. Must be his innate acting skills. “My memories begin when I exited the pod.”
“For all he knows,” Claire added before Adam could confess anything, “he could have been sheltering in the empty pod. We haven’t found people in or around other pods.”
“Well, you guys better put a guard on Alsing.” After a brief perusal of Adam, he continued. “Some of the survivalists think he’s involved with the entities, maybe in charge of them or some crap. You know how they can be. There’s been talk of an assassination.”
“Not gonna happen,” Claire said. “If they try, they’ll be sorry.”
The big man grinned and sank stiffly into a chair, reminding her he lived a rough life with the survivalists. She guessed he was well into his forties. “No doubt. Anyway, I got this predictive model on a laptop that some geek can probably understand, and I stole back one of their arrays. The Shipborn can upgrade their sensor settings like Parks’s people did and find more of these sneaky bastards. I tell you, the damned aliens should have taken advantage of good, old fashioned Terran know-how in the first place.”
“They’re aware of that,” Claire said, feeling defensive for her friends.
Though it was totally true.
“Only time will tell if this predictive model works.” Elizabeth steepled her fingers in front of her lips. “Though I don’t like that we’re one of the predictions.”
“Most population centers don’t monitor their outlying people like you do in Chanute.” Kravitz leaned back in his seat, hands laced over his stomach. “Bless your little control-freak hearts. This is the first time we’re going to be able to get ahead of a swarm.”
Elizabeth folded her hands on the table and addressed the group with her typical imperiousness. “With this evidence, I want to begin evacuation of Chanute immediately.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Claire growled. “Let them come. Better that we tackle them in Chanute than have them cruise somewhere else—somewhere that’s not ready for them. We can shut down this convergence and keep it from hurting anyone else.”
“We will need to discuss arrangements.” The mayor rose and gestured at one of her aides to bring her a packet of papers. “When do you expect this convergence to occur?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask,” Kravitz told her. “Get a geek to figure out the predictive model. My informant assumed you’d have more than a few hits by now. The little attacks increase exponentially, and she thought you’d get the big hit pretty soon. That’s why I took a huge risk and came now.”
“We’ll move the children, pregnant women, elderly, and wounded,” Elizabeth ordered, handing around the papers. “Any able-bodied volunteers can guard our homes, but we need to get the rest of our people to safer ground.”
“I would like to bring my people into the fight,” Fox said gravely. “Not many of us wish to remain in Fort Berthold with all of its ghosts.”
“Your help would be invaluable.” Claire rose, too, signaling the end of the meeting. “After we tell the Shipborn what we’ve discovered and they warn the rest of the planet, we’ll bum some shuttles to transport everyone where they need to be.” Claire wasn’t looking forward to the conversation she was about to have with Niko, and she wasn’t looking forward to her town transforming into a battle zone. But if she could save these people, she’d do just about anything.
“As for our soldiers,” she continued. “I’m going to get the Shipborn scientists on this predictive model. We’ll increase patrols, monitor all future hit sites for activity, and take out any shades we can find. Maybe we’ll catch them in the act of appearing and figure out how they’re doing it. We’re not letting these fuckers creep up on our town in the middle of the night.”
Chapter Fifteen
Claire spent the rest of the day consulting with the Shipborn, the United States government, and the Global Union ambassadors, leaving Adam at loose ends. It wasn’t that he couldn’t have lurked in Claire’s conferences—she might have let him—but he took the opportunity to have unfettered access to Ship via Claire’s terminal. Kenna remained outside his door, armed with a gun, a radio, and an officious attitude.
He’d learned a lot from Ship each night after Claire had gone to sleep, but he’d always been wary about what he could ask. Now he wouldn’t have to censor himself, at least not from Claire.
He flicked the terminal on and called up his last study session about daemons and their abilities. “Ship, are you busy?”
“Never too busy for you, Adam Alsing,” Ship answered with some degree of promptness. “What shall we research today? The Eurasian governments have undergone many changes in the past two years. Several have united to handle the influx of refugees and daemon attacks.”
The more he communicated with Ship, the more he’d figured out how to decipher its emotions. It was a matter of paying attention to word choices and volume instead of tone. Right now, Ship was glad to hear from him. Could a sentient computer get bored? And if so, why was he less boring than any of the other sentients it connected to on a daily basis?
One thing he hadn’t asked much about was himself. Granted, Ship had shown him t
hat fateful video of him jumping into the nexus on the day he’d failed the planet, but it had generally abided by Dr. Sarah’s restrictions against plastering him with unnecessary history.
He’d watched the video a few times. It was definitely him, not a camera trick, not a body double, not a robot. That was the closest he and Ship had come to discussing the mysteries of his past. According to Ship, the only robots sophisticated enough to have been the guy in the video were androids, but those only functioned if connected to Ships. Ship had never had such an android, much to its disgruntlement, and if it had, it would never have sent it into a nexus.
“I thought we could discuss the enhancement process today,” he told the AI. Some thought of Ship as female, but he didn’t feel right assigning it a gender. “We found out my enhancements aren’t dormant like Dr. Sarah said they were.”
“Switching enhancements into a dormant state requires the assistance of a specialist like Sarah,” Ship agreed. “It is assumed you did not have access to such a specialist when you were on the other side of the void.”
“So Cullin told you,” he said.
“I have suspected as much for some time.” Ship helpfully displayed an image of a fully-formed nexus alongside paragraphs of indecipherable equations. “Cullin did not request my help with his numbers. He should have. I finished long before him and could have shortened his process by—”
“Probably don’t tell him that,” Adam interrupted, leaning his elbows on the console desk. Beside him, a single bottle of water sat on a coaster next to a photograph of Frannie. Claire wasn’t one for clutter. “He was pretty jazzed that he figured it out and got Raniya to agree with him.”
“Cullin KeshTaggart enjoys possessing knowledge that others do not have,” Ship agreed. “He is very conflicted about the fact he sexually desires someone he considers possibly more intelligent than himself.”
One thing about Ship—if Adam wanted to know private shit about somebody, Ship didn’t have the same personal boundaries as other sentients. It adored gossip and sang like a canary.
However, Cullin KeshTaggart’s insecurities weren’t the shit he wanted to know today.
“What enhancements was I given when I became the Chosen One? Can you show me my records?”
“The standard package.” Ship scrolled medical records on the screen, lots of big words he didn’t understand. “We also corrected a genetic defect or two.”
He tapped the screen to halt the scroll and puzzled over some of the terms. “Is this even English?”
“Your planet does not possess this level of scientific knowledge, so many of these procedures had no English correlations. Would you like me to explain more about enhancement technology? Your standard enhancements do allow for a form of rapid learning. It would require a sensor array and—”
“No, no, just describe what the enhancements did to me.” What if Ship confirmed he shouldn’t be able to punch a hole in a concrete wall or jump twenty feet while running from shades? “In non-scientific terms.”
“They allowed you to use our tech. It was needed for your assault on the rift to the other dimension.” For whatever good it had done him. Though, he supposed he could have croaked before he’d kamakazi’d his dumb ass into the nexus. Apparently he’d had to navigate a dangerous shade zone filled with entities to reach it. “The most basic form of standard enhancement is known as acclimation. You also received endo-organics so you could use sensor arrays.”
“But no wings, no super powers, no speed healing, nothing like that?”
“Native sentients expected to encounter shades cannot receive more than standard enhancements, or it could alter their DNA too much,” Ship said. “That would be against code.”
“Meaning if I got eaten, it would know a Ship was around somewhere and wake the leviathan.” So, he hadn’t been given superstrength…and yet, he had it. Humans couldn’t do what he’d done, not even with fear and adrenaline pouring through their veins. “Is there stuff you’re not telling me or not allowed to tell me because of the amnesia therapy?”
“If I were not allowed to tell you, I would not tell you that I was not allowed to tell you,” Ship said, almost gleefully.
Adam laughed. “You realize that’s not helpful, right?”
“It was also not helpful when I was not invited to participate in the conference with Daniel Kravitz today,” Ship said, changing the subject. “It is a good thing Elizabeth Newcome has not yet learned to mute her sensor array.”
“You witnessed the whole meeting, huh?” Good thing Claire and the others hadn’t decided to keep anything from the Shipborn. “Did it piss you off that they thought they were excluding you?”
“Organic sentients exercising their free will would hardly anger me, Adam Alsing.” Ship flashed a series of stills on the screen it had captured during the not-so-secret meeting. Adam grinned. Claire was beautiful to him, always, but she didn’t photograph well. “I have nearly finished processing the predictive model and will attempt to send unmanned drones that Raniya GelDan has been working on to confirm the alleged convergences. My new drones are a type of precursor to android extensions.”
A knock sounded on his door.
“Adam?” Kenna called. “I-I need to talk to you. When they sent patrols to some of the predicted sites, well… There’s been another shade attack.”
Adam stood, the legs of the chair barking on the floor. “An attack? Ship, do you know what she’s talking about?”
“I do, but the young lady seems to want to tell you herself,” Ship explained. “I believe she will need some comforting, which I am unable to provide since I have no body. Should you need information, though, please know I am always here for you. Farewell for now, Adam Alsing.”
…
Kenna had told Adam that some of the teams sent to check the predicted sites had encountered shades—and someone she’d known had died. Now that he and Claire were back in the room for the night, Claire was on a rampage about the day’s events.
“I’ll tell you what I don’t understand.” Claire paced their small room with nervous energy surrounding her like a beacon. “At some of the sites, there weren’t supposed to be people, right? We brought everybody in. But they found footprints. A man’s boot, smashed right into some cow shit.”
“Survivalists sneaking around?” Adam had experienced Claire in a variety of modes during their short acquaintance. This vehement, pent-up one, wasn’t exactly new. He had a few ideas that might help, starting with listening and talking.
“Maybe dregs made the prints, maybe not. No sign of a pod. I had another crack at Quentin today, and he didn’t know shit about shit. I’m going to keep him in case what he says about being a spotter is true. We’ll use him against Parks if we can.” Claire gnawed at a piece of beef jerky, swallowed, and continued. “The footprints are…I don’t know. Pissing me off. Like somebody else was there, checking the sites before us.”
He let Claire pace off more steam before broaching another topic. “Kenna told me you confirmed there was no evidence that the shade clusters had traveled here from the primary hordes.”
“Right.” Ten paces to the door. Turn. Ten paces to her bed. Turn. “We scanned everything, everywhere. Most of the shades just appeared and disappeared. No trails. The Shipborn have never encountered tiny globs like this, only big hordes and rivers. But at least now we can detect them because we know to look for them.”
“This is progress.” He patted the bed next to him. “Claire, sit down before you wear out your boots. Do you know how hard it is to find good boots during the apocalypse?”
She whumped down beside him, arms crossed. “I feel like there’s a huge raincloud of shades looming over us, and it’s about to storm.”
He scooted behind her, reached for her shoulders, and dug in.
“Oh, God, that hurts.” Claire groaned. “Keep doing it.”
“You’re more tense than…something really tense.” Her knotted muscles warmed under his grip, and her shou
lders began to slump. A movie quote would have been better here, but nothing came to mind. “I don’t suppose there’s any alcohol?”
She lifted her shoulders and dropped them. “I don’t have any wounds that need to be cleaned.”
“To drink.” He bent her head forward and started on her neck. The soft curls at her nape tickled his fingers. “To relax you.”
“That kind of relaxation is the last thing I need,” she grumbled, but she didn’t pull away. Her spine softened from rigid to curved as he kneaded and rubbed her shoulders, neck, and upper back. “I’m a horny drunk.”
“Good to know.” He didn’t say anything suggestive. He didn’t want her to think he was only touching her to get laid.
For several minutes, he massaged and she appreciated. Then she spoke. “I was drunk when I fucked Niko. I knew it wasn’t a great idea, so I got drunk first.”
“I’ve heard the stories.” He shifted on the bed until he was straddling her, which gave him better access to both side of her body. He squeezed his way down her taut back, finding the tension and leaching it out of her. The way she spoke of Nikolas, he had to wonder. He plucked at her shirt, pulling it up, finding skin. She leaned on her elbows so he could reach the small of her back.
When his hands slid along her spine, his palms practically tingled with the urge to undress her the rest of the way. But he had to know something first. “Do you love Nikolas?”
“Hmmmm. No.” She wriggled a little, adjusting on the edge of the bed. “Use your thumbs along the middle. Just like that. You’re good at this, my friend. Maybe you remember how to massage like you remember how to shoot.”
“Maybe.” He slipped farther under her shirt, and her head drooped. His hands, of their own volition, switched from massage to caress. He traced his thumbs along her spine all the way to her neck, lifting the fabric. “I remembered how to make you come.”
“Adam.” She straightened, fiddling with her clothes. “That was a mistake.”