Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  After a few minutes of slowly working her muscles to warm them back up, she stood and made her way to the storage room nearest on her right. Far from the surge of energy she felt when approaching the hatch, Beck now discovered a lead ball forming in her belly. Its weight tried to slow her, vague dread that she would find the room empty or worse radiating from that heavy center until it wrapped around her brain stem with an unshakable grip.

  Everything going forward rested on this moment. There were forking paths, waveforms waiting to collapse into reality, and the difficulty of the journey ahead rested firmly on what she found inside.

  With a hand displaying a tremor she attributed to dehydration and the long walk—because no one was fully immune to a need for self-delusion—Beck punched in the universal access code given to her by Bowers all those months ago.

  The door popped open with the barest hiss of pressurized air equalizing with the hallway, and the interior light winked on. Its stark blue light fell upon a dark shape. The armor was scratched and scuffed in a hundred places, full of odd welds and her small additions. Not just any armor, but hers.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  Thankfully there were supplies stocked in the other storage rooms as they should have been, because it took her fourteen hours of nonstop work to make sure the suit was good to go. The long-term emergency supplies also fit handily into the empty compartments on her suit, which was good since she couldn’t carry around her pack without drawing attention. Once the deep dive of system checks and other errata was complete, Beck stocked the thing full of meal bars and topped off the water reclamation system. Her tablet and other gear went into their own slots and linked up with her computer.

  Stepping into the back of the suit and feeling its clam shell close into place felt strange. Like a deeply familiar embrace from a family member she hadn’t seen in years. So many months of living inside one of these things followed by more months without its protection messed with her perception.

  The HUD lit green with a good seal, so she released the power cable from the suit and let it snake back into the wall. Full charged Brick with another in reserve. Dangerous if she got into a fight. The spare sat in a compartment with no shielding to speak of, and the storage spaces were detachable primary because of how often they were damaged in fights.

  The good news was that if the spare Brick was breached, she would be dead before the light from the explosion could be translated by her eyes and the information sent down her optic nerve. Silver linings were her specialty.

  “Power saving mode, invisible mode, destination locked in,” she said as she made her way down the length of the tunnel toward the undercity proper. Every Rez had one of these access tunnels, and every local chapter of the Watch knew people used them to go outside. Bowers had explained it as something of a pressure relief valve. Pen the curious malcontents up too long and when they finally exploded, the damage would usually be directed inside the Rez. Whatever shape that might take was almost universally bad.

  But give them an outlet, monitor them, and you could control and direct their energy.

  Not that Beck was overly worried about being monitored. Her mantra, drilled into her by Eshton, was not simply a repetition of states of being. Power saving and having a destination were necessary reminders to think about the costs of getting where she needed to go while staying on course to get there, but her electronic cloak would make the trip possible.

  The cameras capturing the ID tag from her suit would automatically go on loops to eradicate every trace of her presence. The ID itself was false, one she’d set up when Bowers technically made her part of Special Projects. She had a dozen false Deathwatch identities to choose from that he’d helped her craft, and three the old man had no idea existed. She would only use one of the latter if things got truly desperate. The one option she had to reserve for a worst-case scenario was moving around with no ID at all. She’d done it before, but that drew attention. Few Watchmen were given clearance high enough to move about that way. It would mark her. Make people suspicious. As it was, her armor wasn’t different enough from standard to be noticed by a casual observer. Her changes were relatively minor.

  Anything that might cause someone to take a closer look should be avoided at all costs.

  The trip felt longer than it actually was. Approaching the Loop station was the tipping point. Once she shifted over that fulcrum, there was no going back. Even now she could back out. Turn around and put the armor back where she found it. Stock up and head out the hatch toward Canaan. The idea was one that haunted her every step of the way here. No matter the strength of her conviction that Bowers would err on the side of stodgy, conservative caution when it came to spreading necessary information, doubt remained solidly rooted in every action she took.

  After all, wasn’t his absolute belief in the rightness of his actions the flaw in Bowers as a leader? Shouldn’t he operate with the same sliver of doubt every person who dared to resist greater powers needed as a necessary check on their ego?

  It was the foundation of Protectorate society. They as a people—and the Deathwatch especially—had crafted their institutions around the idea that blind acceptance of old norms was ultimately fatal for any society. Whether those norms were the sweeping kind that existed on the level of organizations and whole communities or singular to the individual, the point remained the same. The Watch taught careful examination of the self to root out personal bias.

  It taught her to think about more than just stability. Beck couldn’t be sure other Watchmen took that lesson to heart, but for her there was no question. Bowers firmly believed in working solely behind the scenes and within the confines of what the Watch was allowed to do by Tenet law. At least publicly. His belief that the boat should never rock tied the hands of the Movement now more than ever.

  Beck believed that in the right circumstances, the boat could and sometimes should rock so hard it might feel like it would capsize. The trick was knowing exactly how much force to impart to keep everyone from drowning.

  She stopped behind the final door leading to the Loop station, which was as wide as the entire hallway. From the other side it looked like nothing more than a segment of the station’s curving stone wall. She activated the monitor mounted on the side of the hallway next to it, making sure no one was in the station itself. Small chance of that, considering she’d slept well through the end of the day and worked most of the following one. It was night, now, and no citizens would be taking transport to another Rez.

  She tapped into the local Mesh and checked the Loop schedule. Nothing. No Watchmen needed to travel tonight, either. With a few taps she activated several programs stored in her tablet, which fed out to her suit and into the Mesh itself. The automated override took hold, awaiting her command.

  This was it. The last chance she had to turn back.

  To live in relative peace at Canaan, tinkering with machines as she’d always loved. Being someone not because of the faceless armor she wore, but for who she was as a human being. It was a more enticing experience than she’d have every guessed possible, and that was why she couldn’t do it.

  There was still a chance the Cabal would try to enact their plan to spread Fade B among the Remnants. Few people in Canaan were close to her, but she could respect the way of life. More to the point, she respected life.

  Her HUD blinked a question at her, a hovering green button awaiting an answer about whether or not she would commandeer a Loop carriage and move on to the next leg of her journey.

  Execute?

  She focused her attention on the button and blinked once. Yes. Go ahead.

  “Let’s go change the world,” she muttered.

  27

  Francisco Bowers was not, despite what anyone suspected, a man naturally inclined to plan for the long-term. For him it was a skill learned through hard lessons in a misspent youth. In those early days he had become a rarity within the Protectorate, a skilled thief who remained uncaught until the
age of fifteen by traveling to different Rezzes. It was only the cleverness of a single Deathwatch Guard, an old Enforcement agent named Grady, that his pattern was finally broken. Bowers was given a choice, and he chose the option that didn’t involve imprisonment in Block.

  In the years of his ascendancy to the top floor of the Spire and the High Commander’s seat within, he learned the value of playing the long game. The first threads of what would eventually become the Movement were spun during his days as a Guard, only finally gaining real cohesion upon his confirmation as Warden of his own Rez. From there he was able to influence policy in the Congress of Wardens, and so Rez Brighton was planned and built.

  Decades of work went into making sure a single man was retrieved from his stasis chamber beneath a forgotten power station. Which explained the beat of the vein against his temple as the emergency alert softly chimed at him from the terminal set in his desk.

  “So much for thinking you might turn back,” he muttered at the screen. In a louder voice, he commanded the computer. “Current location of asset.”

  A map of the Loop network appeared on the screen. It displayed the tubes as thin green lines, with a single red dot zooming along one of them at cruising speed. Bowers frowned. The system should have alerted him before the girl managed to get a carriage in motion. Part of him was disturbingly proud that she’d somehow managed to overcome his security measures. The rest was both weary and wary. The former at the long battle he fought to repair the damage done to the Protectorate by its ruling class, the latter directed at Beck herself.

  Coming back early and without his authorization was bad enough. Not communicating with him after her arrival compounded the issue. Far worse was the fact that she was actively avoiding any measures he might employ to track or stop her. From anyone else, Bowers might not have felt an ominous sense of dread. He knew Sentinel Park too well to doubt that if she was avoiding him, it was not for a good reason.

  It was of course possible Beck had a good reason for every action she had taken so far. Bowers was old and experienced enough to know anything was possible. Being able to predict much was not the same thing as knowing everything.

  Yet she tried to hide from him. That said much.

  He had received a notification when her armor was first activated. The tiny hidden camera in its storage space showed her strip down its operating system and peripheral software. The programs he’d had installed in the suit were lost. Every measure he had planned to use for tracking her upon her return, for logging her interactions and words, gone over the span of those long hours of work.

  Because Beck knew him nearly as well as he did her, she had suspected his eye would be fixed upon her. Once she found the additions he’d ordered installed in her armor, she knew it. There could be no real surprise at the tightness of his grip. She was part of the Movement. The girl—the young woman—knew perfectly well how closely he monitored his people.

  Bowers gently swept aside the handful of secure tablets he’d been working from and focused all of his attention on the terminal. It was foolish, of course. Watching her position shift along the Loop was like observing a kettle working toward a boil. Observation changed nothing. It only wasted his time.

  He watched anyway.

  After ten minutes, the red dot that was Sentinel Rebecca Park blinked off.

  Bowers stared at the moving green dot of the Loop carriage for a few seconds. “What? How did you…” He pressed the comm button set into his desk. “Brunsen, come in here.”

  The door opened as Brunsen, his assistant, slipped into the room. When the door was closed, the grizzled veteran stood with hands clasped in front of his waist. “Sir?”

  Bowers took a long, considering breath. He too was faced with a decision that couldn’t be easily taken back. Alerting anyone, even a man like Brunsen who was a decade into a second career in Special Projects as well as the Movement, that Beck had returned was a risk. Bowers trusted no one absolutely, because he was not a man of absolutes. Brunsen came closest, however.

  He did not deliberate long. Leaders, at least good ones, had to choose their course.

  “Park has returned,” Bowers said in the too-calm voice crafted from forty years of practice. “Not on my orders.”

  Brunsen raised a steel-gray eyebrow. “Yes, sir. What would you like done about that?”

  Bowers sent over the information he had, the recordings from the storage room as well as her abortive Loop transit. “She’s off the system. Probably using some sleeper program she installed in the Mesh when I gave her full access. Here’s what I have. Find her and bring her to me. Alive and as unharmed as you can manage, Juan. I’ll give you the master codes to her armor, but she’s tricky. Don’t rely on them completely.”

  Brunsen nodded and left the room. He was a good man, a good Watchman, but Bowers knew how well trained they were. Years of encouraging aggression and training people to use it made reactions…uncertain, at times. Brunsen would no doubt attempt to bring the girl in unharmed, but put two well-trained dogs in a pit and let them fight, and no one could predict the ultimate outcome.

  Despite what his people in the Movement chose to believe, his world was much larger than any single one of them. However disconcerting Beck’s appearance back in the Protectorate might be, for Bowers she was merely a single piece on his board. A line of text in any given page of his day.

  He had given the order for her retrieval, and Bowers was a man who expected orders to be followed. Never mind the fact that his errant Sentinel had returned in defiance of such orders. Those things happened, and so long as they were corrected, his view of the world could remain unchallenged.

  The next hour was filled with furious work as he made up for lost time before his appointment. Today that included Jane Fallows, head of the Protectorate’s Infrastructure division. Bowers rarely met equals on their turf, and today was no exception. A scant two minutes after locking the last of his secure tablets away in the desk, a chime rang to announce her presence outside.

  “Enter,” he said, settling back in his chair.

  Fallows obeyed and took the seat across from him without asking. She was a tall, willowy blonde with hard brown eyes and a cherubic face seemingly untouched by years. At fifty she could pass for thirty, and though he would never say it out loud, Bowers envied her that. Not the appearance so much as the youthful grace and strength. He was old by Protectorate standards, and his body knew it.

  “Jane,” he said by way of greeting. “How can I help you today?”

  Fallows chose not to engage in pleasantries, which came as no surprise. “You’ve been avoiding me for months about the people I lost to your raids.”

  “Avoiding you?” Bowers said in a carefully buoyant tone. “I’ve done no such thing. You requested a meeting and here you are.”

  Fallows frowned. In the Watch, this would have been a sign of…not weakness, precisely, but of an undisciplined mind. Bowers trained his people to retain their unnerving calm as much as possible. An unpleasant response was far from the threshold required to elicit so much as a twitch. “Yes, I am. Which is my point. You’ve consistently refused to meet with me in my office. I’m a busy woman, Commander. More so since several of my key managers were unlawfully killed by your people.”

  Ah, so that was the angle here. He had to give it to her—or rather to Keene, who surely set this encounter in motion. This was a power play, one meant to both create more friction between the Watch and the other divisions while also testing exactly how far Bowers could be pushed. Fallows was a capable manager, but no politician. She was the honest, if quite angry, leader of a thankless bureaucracy she appeared to be. The move had Keene’s stink all over it.

  Unfortunate, really. He had chosen to prod a sacrificial lamb like Fallows precisely because he had nothing to lose from alienating her this way. She was not one of his. Not one of the Cabal.

  Damn Beck Park for making him think of the enemy by that name.

  “Jane, you must have ovarie
s of steel,” Bowers said conversationally.

  Fallows’ head jerked back. “Excuse me?”

  He showed no anger. No irritation. In the normal way of things, this would have been due to the fine control he marshaled over his emotions. Today it was because he didn’t feel those things to begin with. The woman in front of him was, as far as his extensive intelligence network was able to conclude, a fine person. A no-nonsense leader who cared for her people in ways Bowers was privately envious of given his inability to do the same. He respected her intelligence and ability. That she had no head for the sort of games Keene liked to play was a point in her favor. It made her much harder to corrupt if easier to manipulate.

  “You’ve no doubt heard my repeated statements that the raids were valid,” Bowers said. “It is a stance I hold now. The arrests and imprisonments were warranted, the executions not only legal but well-deserved. Yet you come here, into my office, and accuse me of…what, exactly? A cover-up? Of breaking the laws I have been safeguarding since you were in primary school? Do you have any idea how insulting it is to have my integrity questioned after a lifetime spent defending our way of life? And for what? I’ve read your request. You want Watchmen to fill in those critical roles while you train your own replacements.”

  “You’re goddamn right I do,” Fallows said, surprising him not only with the curse so rarely used in a largely and forcibly secular society, but with her fierceness. “You might sit here at the top of your tower and look down on me and mine, Bowers. That’s fine. Just remember who built it in the first place. Infrastructure isn’t glamorous or pretty. That doesn’t mean we’re not critical. A single day without my people would be enough to break the Protectorate in half. I won’t pretend to know a fraction of what your people do in a day, how you protect us. But don’t presume you understand the scope of our work. What we do keeps civilization running, and if it offends you that I need bodies who know what they’re doing, you’ll just have to fucking deal with it.”