I heard pounding heels behind me. Camera scans and a glance over my shoulder showed nine Ghosts coming out of the elevator in the central tower. A laser clipped my heels with a nasty sizzle. I snarled and put Bugkiller on full blast. Lang was right. Running hard and aiming a pistol did not really mix, but I could wide-beam an EPC-1, aim behind me, and hit the side of a barn.
An unearthly scream made me stumble as I ran up three steps to the hall level. I looked long enough to see one of the Ghosts writhing on the ground with eyes and nose streaming blood. I felt a chill, remembering the piercing pain when the same happened to me at Icarus, and then I was glad, because it meant that at least some of them were vulnerable to electromagnetic pulse. There were no more lasers, at least. I reached the windows and paused. This was the tricky bit.
I took a deep breath and everything slowed. Seven Ghosts were still coming toward me; I steadied myself, aimed, and shot down two. One Ghost was meters ahead of the rest. It held a slab of thick glass scavenged from a downstairs window as a shield and ran fearlessly against the bullets while the others took cover. I shot at the glass twice and clinically observed the crumple and shatter. Then, when the Ghost was still flinching and distracted, I ran toward it, shot it in the knee, and drove my foot into the other knee. While it was still screaming, I took it down and dislocated both shoulders. I grabbed it around the waist with my free arm, looked west to the windows, and carefully emptied my magazine into the corners of one large window. Throwing the gun away, I clutched the twitching Ghost tightly to me and began to run.
We hit the weakened glass with all the speed and mass I’d hoped for. The crushed window bowed out and fell away from the building with us on top of it. We fell free for three full seconds, an eternity of terror, while I spun override codes in my head, sent out commands, and braced myself for the crash.
There’s really no soft landing to a hopper in flight, even with three centimeters of glass and a Ghost’s body to cushion you. I hit hard enough for the blood to well up in my mouth, hard enough for my ears to ring louder than the passengers’ panicked shrieking. The side door opened at my command, and I tilted the hopper slightly so we could slide safely in.
The passengers scattered from nearby seats and cowered as far away from us as possible. I barely glanced at them. I spat blood and sat on the floor next to the moaning Ghost with the wind from the open door clearing the daze from my mind.
“Why are you here?” I asked quietly.
It moaned and turned its head away. I lost patience and leaned my palm on one wrecked shoulder. It gave a bubbling scream.
“How long have you been here on Earth? What’s the plan? Answer me!” I started with a shout, but my voice lost power and breath by the last word. I pressed a hand to my ribs and winced.
“You are the plan,” the Ghost whispered.
“Explain,” I demanded. “Don’t speak riddles or I’ll throw you out the door.”
“Raw DNA,” said the Ghost. “Your DNA. This is the tool we use to master the empty reaches, to spread life throughout the universe. Human DNA, it is so, so sweet. Such a sharp tool, such a marvelous prize. You waste your life here on Earth. We can mold you to do so much more, send you to so many places. The Accordance knows it too. There is a high price on the indigenous blood of Earth. You are the very cream of the doomed, but you still think you can fight us.” It bared its bloody teeth at me in a smile of weary defiance.
I was momentarily shaken. “That’s a lie. You’re human. Use your own DNA.”
“I am but a small sample of something much larger. The Ghost is zealous to become all things. Our present form is useful to the whole, but it is just a small part. And no matter what happens here, we have already won. The solar system will be reshaped. We will have our breeding hives. It is our destiny to fill the universe with all forms, changed to fit their places in the great universal order. You stopped the Hive once, and now we know your tricks. You cannot stop us this time.”
My head was spinning again. The Ghost saw my distraction and lunged up. I couldn’t believe its tolerance for pain. It flung an arm up desperately and somehow got a grip on the emergency override near the door. Sparks flew from the lever and the hopper lurched. I threw command after command at the hopper, and all I could sense was the dying of the control system as circuit after circuit faded out.
I seized the Ghost to pull it away. The open door and the turbulence made it easy to bring the Ghost over the edge and let it fall.
“I’m not a tool. I’m not a thing. I’m a person!” I yelled after it.
The hopper began to spiral down, down. Cursing long and loud, I scrambled to an empty seat and secured myself. I looked apologetically at the panicked passengers. “Brace yourse—”
15
* * *
I tried not to wince as the EMT pressed the edges of the laceration together and applied a liquid seal. My skin tingled for a couple of seconds, and that was it. “Head wounds always look worse than they are. Sit for a while if you need to, but get the hell out of here.”
I murmured thanks, looked at the continuing gridlock, and sighed. “Easier said than done.”
The hopper had crashed on the riverbank, spun, slid, and pushed up a twisted dune of mud, which luckily made a great makeshift emergency slide. By the time the walking wounded left the wreckage, most of us were smeared to anonymity—not that anyone cared to turn me in. The piers were visible at walking distance and there were hovercraft ferrying people away more swiftly than ground transport and more safely than air. Those who could move joined the crowds surging westward toward the ferries.
My destination lay east, and I had no choice but to walk.
I got slowly to my feet. Bugkiller was still on my back, only slightly battered but dangerously choked with mud. I’d have to do a deep clean and full maintenance check before I could risk firing her again. I tried to shift her strap slightly and grimaced as pain crescendoed in my left wrist.
I left the river-washed tail end of West Seventy-third Street, managed two blocks more inland, and then it hit.
I was caught by surprise. I was dazed from the crash and so focused on getting back to Ken and Devlin that I’d forgotten about Newark. I was also completely unaware of the effect of a single bio-bomb in an oxygen-rich atmosphere with plenty of stuff to kill. First, a puff blew through the air, far softer than a shockwave, then another and another as displaced air rushed from the bomb’s ground zero and was replaced instead by a spreading, roiling darkness. It moved faster than mere smoke, as if obeying some other laws of physics. The sun dimmed. The screaming around me gained a new terror and a far higher volume as the strange wind whipped in all directions.
I dragged my hair out of my face, fighting the pounding of my heart and a desperate impulse to run, and squinted southwest at the shadow. “Dammit, Slate,” I muttered. “Eight kilometers. I’m in the clear, there’s no need to run, we’re well beyond the danger. Eight K, eight K, eight K . . . come on!”
The shadow slowed. Miniature lightning glittered at its boundary. I had the vague sense that, if the blast from two bio-bombs combined, things would get rapidly and exponentially worse, but this one was solo, isolated, and the biosphere fought back, compressing the stain to a standstill.
I carefully leaned a shoulder against the nearest building and exhaled, shaking. My forehead rested on cool glass. I drew back and focused on my reflection. One-third blood and two-thirds mud, both half-dried and mingled. The stripe where the EMT had cleaned and dressed my forehead stood out like a bar of sanity peeking through nightmare. I drew back further and read the sign PHARMACY.
“I gotta eat,” I said to myself, and went into the store.
When I say “went,” I mean I quietly reset the entry codes, opened the door, and slipped inside. It would take a lot more than an evacuation order and a couple of bio-bombs to shut down New York commerce. The store’s sensors easily accepted my ID and credit as I took up first aid supplies and soap for myself, and cleaning su
pplies for Bugkiller. I found a bathroom at the back and washed my hands and my face, strapped up my wrist, shrugged in resignation at my torn, stained clothes, and gave Bugkiller a quick wipe-down before rolling her up in a towel and stashing her in a packable duffel. Inside my mouth was still tender, though no longer bleeding, so I swished some antiseptic mouthwash before sitting in the pharmacy’s small cafe and settling down to a meal of yogurt and pudding. I ate slowly because my hands were still shaking.
The staff had evacuated too quickly to lower security shutters, so I was able to look though the café’s window at scenes of slow apocalypse. Slow traffic became stalled traffic as people abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot to the soundtrack of wailing EMS sirens. Above the streets was no better. The city’s overburdened autopilot air control was dealing with the rush of flight plans by enforcing holding patterns. I saw a couple of illegal and risky ultralights darting through. West and south no longer appeared to be desirable, only north, and the river was the path to follow.
I scanned the news feeds. It . . . wasn’t good. Several cities and locations were designated targets, and most received some form of public warning beforehand. I suspected that the percentage of human population at the target might have influenced that decision. At zero hour, many of the bombs did not go off. Lang’s message and Ship 1’s example had counted. But in other cities where the bombs went off, the warnings came too late. Casualties were estimated in the millions. Quarantine containment shields were being put in place, and transport systems were disrupted all over the world.
“Targets were carefully selected to maximize alien deaths and destruction of Accordance capital without significant damage to the biosphere. Symbolic, and strategic . . . even when one key variable was wrong, the estimate of human deaths.”
I turned my head at the sound of the unexpected voice. Slate sat beside me with a blank expression, staring out at the confusion in the street. His face was gray and his khakis strangely faded, as if he were an aged Polaroid. I frowned at him in puzzlement.
“Slate? I thought you were dead.”
He stared at me impassively. “I thought you were the decoy.”
I woke up gasping with vanilla pudding smushed halfway up my nostrils.
+ + + +
I rushed back to the bathroom, gripped the sink, and stared at myself in the mirror. My hands weren’t shaking anymore, and my thoughts were sharp and clear. I had to get rid of my non-standard ink. Slate and Hideo had never really convinced me, but a pack of Ghosts hunting me by the scent of my ink was pretty damn convincing.
I filled the sink with liquid solvent and contemplated the purple of my hair. The color was not and had never been caused by dye. A pink microveneer of EMP-shielding nano-ink coated my hair, which helped protect the standard nano-ink in my scalp. I got it done in my early teens after my first run-in with an EMP pulse left me half-blind and incapacitated with chronic pain for weeks. It had cost me five months’ earnings back then, and I never expected to regret it.
I started to work. The oily solvent slicked my fingers as I gripped and pulled. Color unraveled from each hair shaft and plopped into the sink in a gloopy mass. I took my time and tried to be thorough. It was strange to see myself with dark hair again. That felt like a disguise, not the purple. The purple was my declaration, my warning of who I was and what I had done to become that person. Now I could have changed places with any of the ladies from the Gator hostel without anyone noticing . . . except I wasn’t sure I was like the concierge, able to work magic with a cardigan and a teacup and a ladylike little smile.
The drain was blocked. I ran the water, but the purple would not be diluted and refused to go down. My lip curled in disgust as I scooped the jellied mess out of the sink, mixed it with paper and tissue like papier-mâché, and hid it in the trash. Then I shampooed my hair thoroughly, washing it clean of solvent and Ghost-based tech. It lay flat on my skull and dripped water below my shoulders. I wrapped it up in a towel and stared at myself. I looked pathetic, lost, and unfamiliar.
No time to indulge in self-pity. I took off the towel, ran my fingers through my damp hair, and started a mental inventory. All my scalp and face ink was civilian or military standard, and so were my eyes and arms. That could stay. Before being drafted into the CPF, I had bootleg tech in my piercings and jewelry. Most got confiscated. I managed to save a few, but they were long gone—lost on the journey from the Moon to Titan to Earth again.
Some things I couldn’t be sure of. I’d had pins implanted for broken bones in the past, the kind designed to be absorbed and integrated into the healing bone. I was pretty sure I’d ingested something illegal and semi-permanent for the lining of my gut. I needed a full body scan and genetic screening to be sure I was clean . . . and if Slate was right, I might still be tainted. I might always be tainted.
I didn’t like feeling helpless. There was one thing I could do, so I did it. I took a sterilized blade, sat down, and carefully sliced out the ridged tattoo above my knee. The site was flayed raw when I finished, so I slapped a burn bandage on it and took a small breather until my hands stopped shaking again. For the first time in a while, I missed my power armor. I made do with a dose of painkillers and stim pills instead, promising myself I would sleep later. When there was time. When it was safe.
+ + + +
Lang found me twenty minutes later on Fifty-seventh and Ninth. I was limping along determinedly, navigating the busy sidewalks, and obsessively checking the frozen stain in the southwest quadrant of the sky. I was so distracted that she was almost in front of me when I noticed her. Out of breath, cheeks ruddy, eyes wide—her adrenaline was still running high. She’d looked older and more seasoned when I first saw her, but now I could see she was young, maybe five years younger than me. Seventeen . . . seventeen was young? But Devlin was only nineteen, and my own seventeen had been—I shook my head, dismissing the train of thought. There was no normal seventeen for anyone anymore.
“Your boys have the . . . thing. They sent me to find you because they’ve got duties and can’t get away right now. Said to tell you . . . Anais?”
I grimaced. “Understood.”
“So I’m to hide you until they can get free. Here, this comm is for you.”
She handed me a button comm very similar to the one Anais had denied me earlier. I tried to find a clean place to hang it and ended up plaiting it into my hair at my left temple. Lang lit up approvingly.
“Nice. I like your hair, by the way. Got tired of the purple?”
“Yeah. It was time for a change—wait, what’s going on?”
A squad of armored carapoids was literally clearing the road by pushing vehicles aside. Behind them, a troop of struthiforms armed with energy rifles was going through cautiously, stopping to apply a tag to every door of every building. They moved tactically, one struthiform tagging while another did the duty of watching and covering. I’d grown accustomed to the struthiforms in Biomed with their brusque but sincere caring, so it shook me to see a rifle butt used to club away a half-dazed man who didn’t move off the sidewalk fast enough.
“Shit,” Lang said. “They got here fast. Listen.”
The lead struthiform was broadcasting loudly through her translation collar. “Remain calm and return to your residences. A sundown curfew is in now effect. Transgressors will be shot on sight.”
“Once I would have called that harsh, but now I’ve seen what Ghosts look like? Makes complete sense to me,” Lang remarked. “Let’s get out of here. Not much further to go.”
I followed her silently. I was processing both old and new information. The civilian networks were buzzing about the curfew, the gridlock, and the inky void around Newark Spaceport. Over it all lay a desperation that suggested no one knew what was going on. That didn’t surprise me. If Earth First knew what the bio-bombs would do but still went ahead with the operation, or worse yet, if they were collaborating with the Conglomeration, that meant they’d lied to the Ships and nonviolent protesters who�
��d joined them. I could imagine quite a lot of organizational upheaval and infighting if that was the case, and there would be no unified voice for a while. But if Earth First was as clueless, if they were all only just realizing they had been duped by aliens while claiming to reject all things alien, that would stir up a different kind of fear and mistrust while causing the same disruption.
The military networks sang a completely different tune in two-part harmony. The CPF side was ordering all enlisted personnel to report to base for screening and reprocessing. The Accordance was sending out the alert about Ghosts on Earth and increasing security levels on all bases throughout the solar system. But there was another line in the mix: the joint CPF and Accordance public message which denounced Earth First terrorists, repeated the curfew order, and said nothing at all about Ghosts.
Lang stopped short. Every screen, every electronic billboard, had suddenly lit up with a screech of snowy static. The image settled and grew sharp. It was Rai again, full-face and larger than life.
“This is Mawusi Rai.”
At first I was expecting an Earth First rant, either gloating or shifting blame according to what the propagandists had decided, but in the pause that followed, I quickly reassessed what I was viewing. Something was wrong. A tension vibrated in her voice, the kind of tension that comes from suppressed terror. The camera view opened slightly to show that her hands bound in front of her and her clothing was streaked with drying blood.
Another voice repeated the words in the resonant tone of a translation collar. “This is Mawusi Rai of Earth First, who planted the bombs in Manhattan and Newark. The penalty for mass murder is death.”
The energy rifle off camera was too far away to transmit any sound. Both Lang and I jumped as Rai’s head exploded without warning into a half-cooked mess of bone and meat. Her body slumped down and out of sight. After a second, the empty frame faded and the transmission ended.
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