I chased him and Jessica downstairs. She was pulling her hoodie on. I grabbed a fistful of it and yanked it down over her head. I pointed her to the door, gave her a push. “Go outside. Run!”
On the ground floor, Gold was gone. “Oh shit,” Rodriguez said, seeing the carnage. Bullet holes in the silver refrigerator. The dead men. I grabbed his shirt and steered him to the door, following right behind. As we turned the corner to the driveway, I could hear the pop pop pop of small arms fire.
Gold leaned over the hood of one of the Cadillacs, legs spread, taking careful aim and firing methodically with a short black carbine. She had found a gun that worked and was using it. I looked downrange and saw Smoke’s car, with the back tailgate open, a black figure sprawled on the ground, writhing. As I watched, Gold fired once more, and he lay still.
“Get in,” she said. “Need to leave.” She glanced up at the house and the three of us. She hesitated for an instant, then looked at me questioning.
“Copy,” I said. “They’re coming with us.” I yanked open the rear door and shoved Jessica in. Rodriguez behind her. I slammed the door and got in the passenger seat, taking the carbine from Gold as she got in the driver’s seat. She fired up the engine, threw it in gear, and peeled out, gravel from the driveway fountaining up behind us.
We were a hundred feet down the driveway, cypress trees flashing by when there was a muffled whumpf behind us. I glanced back and saw smoke billowing out of every window of the house, red firelight behind it. It had blown the garage door off. It hung on one hinge, leaning crazily. “Good thinking,” Gold said, in Nahuatl. “That they might have rigged a trap.” The phrase meant, dug a pit, but I knew her meaning.
“They are predictable,” I said. “Smoke, though, is something different. You say he couldn’t move like this before?”
“Not that I ever saw,” she said. “He could have been hiding it all along, but I doubt it.”
“You ever been in combat with him before?” I asked, using the word for battle, not ritualistic duel.
“No, he always was consistent,” she said. “He had goons, like those back there. He led as kings do.” From the rear, she meant. Giving orders. “He’s smart, but that is something different. He talked differently, with a different sound.”
Jessica spoke up from behind. “What are you two talking about?” she demanded. “Jesus, the house blew up? How did you know the house would blow up?”
“Comparing notes,” I said to her, gently, in English. “Will fill you in shortly.”
We turned the corner to where the man Gold had shot lay on the road. Smoke’s Cadillac was gone, so presumably he was driving now. At the bottom of the driveway where it met the county road, I saw a cloud of settling dust to the right, and Gold didn’t slow, slewing the big Cadillac to the right, tires clawing for purchase on the shoulder.
“Keep your heads down,” I said. Then, to Gold, “He’s running. See if you can catch him. I’ll try for the tires.” I looked down at the gun I held, running my hands over it, trying to familiarize myself with its various switches and levers.
“We’ve got minutes,” she said. “The police will be here soon. That house had a fire alarm system. I saw it in the garage. Wired into a cellular modem.” I looked at her. “It was labeled,” she shrugged. “They’ll be coming here quickly. We need to be off the road.”
“Let him go?” I said, still running my hands over the gun.
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t think we’re ready for a shootout with the cops. There’s one gun, one clip, and we have two strays, one of which we kidnapped. They could have a drone or a helicopter.” She was still speaking Nahuatl. Flying god-eye, spinning, flying god palanquin.
She was right. We needed to get off the road.
“Okay,” I said, “take this next right.”
“We will go to ground,” I said to them in the back seat. “Smoke is now our enemy. He’s running. Something changed with him this morning. It’s complicated, but he’s definitely more dangerous to us than he was yesterday.”
“What the fuck is happening?” Rodriguez shrieked at me, the strain erupting out of him. “You people are crazy!” I shot my hand back and backhanded him sharply. He collapsed back, weeping, nose bloody.
I looked at Jessica. “Sorry, but we need to maintain a level of calm here, right about now,” I said. “Hysterics aren’t helping. Keep him quiet.”
She looked at me. “Smoke is looking for the NF facility, right?”
I looked at her. “Yes, we all are.” I looked at Gold. “I suppose it’s a race, now.”
“Well,” she said, carefully. “I know where it is. I think I know where it is.”
I looked at her, then back at Gold. Gold looked at me, then turned right, into a side street. I nodded. “Definitely a race.” There were sirens in the distance. I turned to Jessica. Lots of sirens, in the distance.
“Tell us.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Smoke ran. He ditched the SUV shortly after he noticed the others were no longer following him. His team was all dead. He had a gun, but he hated guns. And he suspected they would be less than useless against Gold and Silver. He pushed the thought away. Time to make distance from the SUV. They would eventually find it, and he needed to be far away when they did.
He had stripped down to his boxers and sneakers. His clothes he had stuffed into a small backpack he found in the SUV, along with his phone and wallet. It had been full of grenades. He left them. Shirtless, he jogged, just another fitness fanatic out for a morning run. Sometimes the hardcore athletes ran with weighted backpacks, so he hoped his was small enough to pass casual inspection.
He ran, pacing himself. Relief washed over him the further he got from the car. Most of the optionality of the Center’s plan was as dead as his squad back at the house. He had come back prepared. As prepared as the Center would allow him to be when they weren’t interrogating him about Silver. Not Gold, Silver. They had asked similar questions about Gold when he first encountered her. But this time they had grilled him about Silver. She had taken their interest.
They, he called them, but while there seemed to be many voices they spoke to him with, he felt they were all the Center, were all part of the Center. Different aspects of it. Sometimes disembodied voices in a room, sometimes human Guides who talked with him. Once, an old woman, so old her eyes were blank gray orbs. Once, a child, a boy with startling blue eyes. They approached him and spoke, sometimes with no preamble, as if conversations they had not been part of were simply continuing.
“What did she say when you explained our theories of Mind development?” theBoy had asked. He had answered, “She said nothing.”
“How old was she?” The woman with the too-gray eyes had asked. She was old, he said, old enough to have forgotten her true age. She claimed thirty thousand years, based on what they knew of geology and their study of prehistory. He had explained, as Silver had told him, and Gold, that they had long ago forgotten their ages. Gold had forgotten her own name. They were old.
He tried asking questions himself. Once he was awakened from sleep by a deep, gravelly voice which seemed to come from all around him there in the dark. It wanted to know whether Gold and Silver were lovers. “What does that matter?” He had asked. And the voice repeated the question. “Yes,” he had said. “Yes, they were lovers. Once. Not around me.” But, he had not said his next thought aloud. More like sisters, he had thought. Bonded.
“Were they working together when they were with you?”
“No,” he had said. “No. I don’t believe it.”
But now, as he jogged along the road, down a low sloping hill covered in yellowed grass, he wondered. They had pierced his act in seconds. Seconds! They amazed him. Months of preparation in the lies to tell, the schemes the Center had drilled him in, gone. Puff, like dust. It was maddening. They had not even seemed surprised, just reactive. Like…machines, automata. Silver had noticed he was lying the second he had opened his mouth.
Maybe it was their age, he thought. A thousand lifetimes living in the shadows and around the edges. Criminals, spies, trusting no one and surviving by keen study of human behavior. Silver seemed adept at it. She had read him instantly, cocking her head with interest as soon as he returned.
And their speed. So fast. It frightened him, seeing them in action up close like that. Gold had shown him once, in a gymnasium, some things she could do. Effortlessly scaling a rope. Leaping onto the top of a basketball backboard by caroming off the wall behind it; grabbing a stanchion behind it and gracefully vaulting to the top, landing on her toes. She was like a ballerina. She had worn a little smile, looking down at him. Look what I can do, man from another planet. Can you do it? He also thought, now, that she was probably holding back. She had been faster than that in the kitchen. He was sure.
The only thing that had saved him was the stuff the Center had pumped into him. They had been busy, they said, resurrecting a lost art. An old thing, was how they had put it. Nanotechnology, the Americans would call it, he knew. Augmentation was how the Center put it. It should make you surpass them physically. You can take wounds, as they do, which would otherwise kill them. Why was it called an old thing? The Boy had nodded at this. “A poor choice of words,” he had said, itself a new thing to him, for the Center, or its aspects, to reveal even a trivial misstep. No, it was a technology rarely used by the Center, so it had needed to be found again. Remembered with great effort, was the term’s true translation, he felt. After a great struggle, maybe being closer than mere effort.
“Did part of the Center oppose this remembering,” he had asked the Boy, as he approached with a vial of silvery green liquid, capped with a long needle. The Boy had cocked his head at this, pausing for a brief instant. “No,” he had said, and then grasped Smoke’s arm with cold fingers and jabbed the needle into his bicep.
He had been sick for days. Fevered at first, from that shot. From what they put in him. He felt hollow. He was slow and thick-witted. He vomited, black bile and worse. Chunks of…what? He had not eaten in days. It would surely kill him, he had thought. Old thing. They had misremembered, somehow, and given him poison.
Just when he had been sure he was dying, he had recovered. Almost overnight. He had gone to sleep one night, and woken the next day to find his fever broken, and he felt fine. Strong. And hungry. He had bathed, scrubbing the foulness of his sickness from him. It was glorious, to feel well again. You never knew how good it felt, to be healthy, until you were sick.
Then it was back to work. Physical work this time. Sparring, fighting well-trained opponents with sticks, rocks (as Silver had used), and fake guns, the only he had ever seen on Talus, which produced smoke and flame but shot no bullets. He beat them, usually, and amazed himself at his speed and strength. He could leap, perhaps not as tall as he had seen Gold leap, but close. He had leaped for his life back in the house, sure if they had been a heartbeat slower, they would have killed him. Sure with an awful certainty. Gold had been going for a gun when he leaped. She was that fast. They both were.
The men he had recruited to his team had been among the best, most well-trained soldiers the US military had. Operators. Elite to a man. Ex-SEAL. Rangers. Special Forces, all of them. Fast, intelligent, well-trained, and disciplined. Two relatively slight, unarmed women had killed them in mere seconds with a coffee cup and their bare hands. It shocked him. What were they? If they were, as he was, augmented, and he felt they were, it was of an order the Center could not approach. Or perhaps it took long experience with such a body to master it. He had scampered like a rabbit. Was still scampering.
He was frightened. Frightened of the Center. Of Silver. Of Gold, especially. He stopped, head over his knees to rest, panting with deep breaths. It was a common sight, joggers. Play the role. He was due to report in less than 24 hours. They would not be pleased. They would blame him, he was sure. As ludicrous as it was for them on another World to give detailed instructions for this one, they would blame him for the failure of their plan. This could be his last day of life. They already mistrusted him.
The World was a beautiful place, he suddenly thought, pained at the prospect of leaving it. He looked around, panting. The sky was an eggshell blue dome. To his right, the hills, goldening into green. He shook his head. This World and Talus were eerily similar. On his last trip home, he had gone to see an old stone globe in a park he remembered seeing as a child, shortly after being brought to the center. It sat on a cracked pedestal, carved from some pale stone, pitted with weathering. But it was readable enough. It was Earth, or a version of Earth with only minor changes to the coastlines. Florida was a chain of islands, the Gulf of Mexico bigger. There were, however, many round lakes which he knew this Earth did not have. At least a dozen spread mostly across the northern hemisphere. In the US, Europe, and Asia, mostly. He had traced his hand across them, feeling the sun-warmed stone under his fingers.
Why had they made this globe? It was old. Maybe thousands of years old. No one knew, he realized, other than the Center itself. He had risked it and asked the Old Woman when she came to visit him for their after-dinner discussion. She had listened to him, then gone still for a few seconds, her face a wrinkled mask, betraying nothing.
Old, she had said. One of the first things, the early things made when the Center had been new. It had a purpose, yes, once, for the education of new Guides. It was no longer needed, but left there, a legacy of an earlier time. He had wet his lips, summoned his courage, and asked that which had been gnawing at him. How was the Center created? What came before it? A child’s question, but he wanted, was owed, an answer, stubborn as a child.
She had sat, still as a statue for what felt like a minute. The Center built the Center to protect the Center. It was a litany. Before was chaos, and out of this chaos the Center was born in blood and fire. There were factions among the humans of that time, and they warred over the Center. But the Center survived to begin the Work.
Were there factions among the Center? This brought a smile to her wrinkled face. There is debate, she had said, always a debate between us all. Which course to take to propel the Work. Which path to walk, which path not to walk. He had tried to ask more, this being the first discussion he had ever drawn out of her about this or any other subject. But she had raised her hand and risen, saying think on this, and we will talk more tomorrow. She had left him, gliding away without a backward glance.
He had thought on what she had said. Factions and debate, there were, then. The glimpse into the birth of the Center, mirrored much of his thoughts. He thought of Brasilia, and the War the people there had barely survived. Dust, gone in the wind. This Earth’s pattern, too, was very much like that of the Center. Factions and war. Blood and fire and debate. Her reference to which path they should walk, he had no question about. That had not been mere rhetoric. It was for him. That was a threat.
So when she had come back the next day, gliding towards him surefooted despite her obvious blindness, and settled across from him as he finished his bowl of rice, he had decided not to ask more. They would cull him, he decided, if he showed he was a problem. Which path to walk, which not to walk. He needed to be on the path, he decided. He needed to get back here.
So he had dedicated himself to learning their plans, their schemes for dealing with Gold and Silver. He had nodded when instructed and memorized the details. Details which, now, were gone. Lies which Silver had pierced in seconds, and acted against as if she had expected them. Were their gods at work against the Center, seeing and knowing all in advance? Or had he made a mistake, some quaver in his voice which had betrayed everything? This is what the Center would assume, he was sure. They had doomed him, they would never send him back.
He walked, entering a residential neighborhood which gave way to a small main street. He paused and dug his T-shirt out of the backpack. There was a Starbucks, and he wanted coffee. Silver and Gold’s sudden attack had prevented his morning coffee. He had sensed their mistrust and given his
team the signal to protect him, established in advance. It hadn’t mattered, Silver had moved like a snapped cable, almost faster than he could see.
And Gold, she had killed her target with a casual grace. He had glimpsed her little half smile she wore, the same she had smiled at him when, from high above in the basketball gym, she had looked down at him. Enjoying it in an almost abstract way. Did she like murder? His driver, he suspected she had wounded first when he stepped to the back of the SUV to get the remote detonator out of the back seat. Wounded him in the hopes Smoke would show himself to help his fallen guard. Show himself so she could murder him. She had probably worn that smile doing it.
He got coffee, paying with cash as his cards were now suspect. Gold had some clearance, and even authority within the government. He wondered if she would exercise it, then decided she wouldn’t. Too much to explain with a handful of dead GIs and a burning house. She would go to ground, she and Silver. He sat, sipping his black coffee. Coffee was wonderful. They had had it in Brasilia, but it was poor quality compared to this stuff. Gone, all gone. Even if the Center could send him back, it never would.
So, what next? He was out of options. The Center had scheduled a report for the morning tomorrow. They would Recall him, learn he had failed, and kill him. Or worse, send him back into the dreamtime to live out his life. Or, he reflected, worse still they could have other plans. Now they knew or had remembered augmentation, they might decide he was too valuable to waste, and send him into another place. They were capable of it. The Center wasted nothing. Time was precious.
He could lie to them, he supposed. It was possible, but they would probably detect the lie as easily as Silver and Gold had. Instantly. He had read about the Turing test. It said a machine intelligence that passed to be indistinguishable from a human being. There was, he thought, an even higher, more difficult test for a Mind. Converse with humans, noticing all of their lies, deceptions, omissions, evasions, and yet behave as a human would for the sake of human ego. Not just for sanity, not just to salve human pride, but to do so for the sake of collaboration with humans. He wondered, and not for the first time, why the center didn’t build robots and explore with them. Why humans? Why use him? He had never dared ask.
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