“Dan-Dan,” she said, her voice breaking. She repeated it, louder, his name, the code. Was the back door still there? Could she get through to him? “Hibernate.”
He paused. It was slight, that pause, not even a full second, but Angela grasped at the shard of hope. “Dan-Dan,” she repeated, louder. “Be still.”
He lurched, but something inside him fought back. He raised a foot to continue, but then froze with it poised in the air, not completing the step that would bring him closer. His face contorted, and his movements jerked. Unnatural. Nothing about this creature belonged in nature.
Vallejo might have grown a clone body to stick the machine inside when he made mech-Daniel, but the result was pure monster. Horrible. Wrong. Angela wanted to vomit.
But she wanted to live more.
“It’s okay, Dan-Dan,” she said. “This is just a software glitch. We can fix it. I can fix it. Be still.”
Her hands were shaking, slipped on the shovel handle, and she had no idea how she was still holding onto it. But at least she’d gotten some control over her voice. She had trained that voice, practiced wielding it like a weapon. It was good. It was strong. It was working.
“Angela.” In a keen this time, sliding up into falsetto. His head cocked to the side, violently, like switches were resetting themselves but only after an epic internal struggle.
“I’m here, Dan-Dan,” she said as calmly as she could, though her throat was still crammed with sobs. “I am safe. You are doing a good job.”
His foot came down. One step toward her. The expression on his face shifted from one second to the next: hate then hurt then fury then horror. “No, no… My programming is bad,” he said through lips that refused to cooperate. “All I ever wanted was to serve you. Angela! My programming is bad.”
“Yes, it is. But I can repair it. Just be still. Hibernate.”
He didn’t.
She had never seen her mech-clone weep. There had never been a need. But that might be what his face was doing, his version. He didn’t have the back-end connections to his tear ducts, so they didn’t work, but blood vessels that had been attached to his cyber eyes ruptured from their connectors, and the subcutaneous blood seeped out. Like tears, pinkened sleet stuck to his face. “I cannot…”
A blur of movement from the elevator, a ding, and then Kellen was striding out into the morning. He wielded something long, like a sword.
Knight. Shining. Armor. She almost cracked into hysterical laughter.
And then, all powers help her, she did.
Kellen raised the glinting swordy thing, touched it to the back of mech-Daniel’s head, and the mech-clone collapsed to the ground like a sack of neutron stars. Heavy. Just like that.
There were words. Kellen’s words, and some others. Girl’s voice, woman’s. Saying things. Things things things. Angela might have contributed some of those things herself, but mostly she…laughed.
Oh man, it was the silliest thing, the worst, stupidest thing. She had survived a goddamn bombing and kept her shit together, but she was losing every thread of composure right now. Losing it like a virgin on spring break. It was all gone, unspooling there in the mud and ice.
She was alive. And somehow, that was fucking hilarious.
She let the shovel fall, and then she collapsed beside it, crumpled really, holding her face and laughing on the exhalations, snorting on the intakes. Mad as a hatter. Loopy as a shoelace. Non compos mentis.
And then gentle hands were stroking her head, her back. The kind of hands that promised no one would see, no one would judge. She could melt, disintegrate, and it was okay.
“Shhh, princess. I got you.”
His arms were right there, too, on the far end of those hands. She leaned into all of him, still laughing like a goddamn hyena. Because something about that perfect safe space in his arms? Reminded her that she was, in fact, powerful. Hunted, nearly dead, but still somehow a princess to this man. She had to be doing something right, to earn a title like that. From a person like him.
“No, not a princess,” she said after a long time, wiping the tears on his pointy-tipped shirt collar. “I am the fucking queen.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m not crying, either. Just so you know.”
He didn’t stop holding her. “I know.”
“Actually, I’m laughing.” She snuffled, settled herself slowly.
“I know,” he said again.
“Really? What the fuck? How can you possibly tell?” She pulled back and looked at his face. His face. That face.
He was smiling, but it was a cautious thing, hesitant, like he was sizing her up for a possible tranquilizer. “The queen of my world don’t cry.”
She wanted to kiss him. Put her mouth all over his body, ingest his sweetness, and then baste it all back over him. There wasn’t a damn thing sweet about her. There never had been. He was all the good that she ever was, and together, they would be even better. Best.
“No, you’re right,” she said. “This queen doesn’t get scared. She gets vengeance. Er, if she doesn’t die laughing first.”
“Such a badass, you.”
She was beyond silly now, but given what had just happened—the last fifteen minutes, the last fifteen weeks—she gave precisely zero fucks what anyone thought. “Good, bad, you’re the one with the…what was that thing you were wielding?”
“Cattle prod. Nine thousand volts, right to the diodes. Never got to use one before, but I’d say it came in fairly handy today.”
“Yeah, fairly.” She hiccupped. “You pacifists get all the best death toys.”
• • •
Angela stood inside a technological nightmare marble—okay, the room wasn’t actually a marble. It was the Vault, the Pentarc’s command center, a round-walled, armored enclosure four stories underground. She was willing to bet there was a Faraday shell behind those curved black panels with all the lights and blips and screens and always-shifting free-fae-lit data graphs.
Fat ropes of electrical cord wound along the floor, snakes perpetually threatening to strike an unsuspecting visitor. In the center of the viper pit was a command chair with a swivel base, so its occupant could pretend to know all and see all, like the guard in a digital panopticon.
Three curved doorways led off in various directions, but she didn’t go exploring.
Kellen had come into the Vault behind her. She knew it even without turning, and she wasn’t surprised when he set his hands atop her shoulders, wordlessly. Supporting her but not holding her up. As much as she cringed away from most people’s touch, his was different. Familiar. His microbes were her microbes. Someday he might even get it if she told him he had sexy-as-hell cooties.
He’d hauled a portable hydraulic calf table from the veterinary up at the barn. It might look like a medieval torture cage, but Kellen assured her that ranchers used these things all the time to restrain and transport cattle. Several people had come up to the barn to help load mech-Daniel’s body onto it. The thing weighed in excess of 180 kilos, and nobody wanted to dead-lift that. While Kellen had been checking out Angela to make sure she was unhurt—not holding her or stroking her or making her feel safe, right—Mari had whipped out a scary-looking knife and dug a trench in mech-Daniel’s head. The sounds of her ripping out wiring had been…well, they’d been gross. Presumably, now mech-Daniel either could not wake, or if he did, he wouldn’t be able to hurt anybody.
They’d taken him down to the Vault in a service elevator, and then, because this day’s fucked-up-o-meter apparently wasn’t pegging its max yet, Angela watched as Dr. Farad stripped insulation off a cord, wrapped one wire-end around the mech-clone’s exposed in-skull electrical, and plugged the other end into a SIP port on the back of his own head.
The nest of sleeping snakes on the floor shifted, waking.
In his command chair, Heron Fa
rad closed his eyes and breathed in time to the slither.
“All right, Senator, I see your subroutines, recent iterations. He has been busy lately, hasn’t he?”
Busy becoming Daniel. Busy resisting the transformation. Busy saving her life. Busy trying to end it.
“He’s always busy,” Angela said, “even when it looks like he’s just standing there. His neural uses pattern analysis to learn, so he’s constantly sifting data and altering himself to better perform his tasks. But if you mean the planning to kill me thing, yeah, that’s new.”
A slim frown formed on Farad’s forehead. “You installed a back door to access his behavioral profiles.”
“He was a gift from my mentor, and neither of us trusted Vallejo’s base-model programming. We had him wiped and reset, and my programmers added the back door then, for privacy. But it must be corrupted or something, because I tried to access that subroutine over and over, and he just kept coming.”
He just kept coming. A deep shudder started at her sternum and rolled through her body, and she had to close her eyes and wait for it to pass. She endured it, like the memory of the hotel disintegrating around her. The universe could stop putting her through these convulsive events any damn time now.
Farad went on, his voice sleek and clinical. “No, your Dan-Dan subroutine is intact. As is the other back door.”
“What other?” asked Kellen, his voice deep and resonant, wrapping itself around her.
“I’m seeing a secondary access key, the word Ashe. Not yours, Senator?”
“No.” The word was a tremble, drawn up through her throat. She swallowed, but her voice wavered when she said, “Ashe was Daniel’s name, before we were married. But he never had access to the mech-clone.”
“Interesting,” said Farad. “Perhaps exploring this subroutine will provide us with some clues about mech-Daniel’s motivation today.”
“Mech-clones don’t have motivations,” Mari piped up, her voice unusually brittle. “They’re machines, extensions of somebody else’s will.”
Angela thought of a goofy as-you-wish puppy with a three-year-old’s wave and an almost obsequious desire to please. Mech-Daniel had gotten none of his charming behaviors from Vallejo’s base model or the Daniel-impersonation programming. Wasn’t will defined as a purpose carried out? Calming her during that gala hadn’t been her purpose, and it hadn’t been Kellen’s… Had somebody else commanded mech-Daniel to do it? Or had he thought it up on his own?
“Dan-Dan’s unique,” Angela said, consciously using their private name. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he had developed something approximating a will of his own.”
If Dan-Dan was in that body somewhere, she hoped he heard. She wanted him to know that she’d seen how hard he had fought the instruction to harm her.
In his chair, Farad stilled more completely. If that was even possible. At the same time, in his calf-table trap, mech-Daniel twitched. His eyelids opened, breaking the crust of dried blood. Irises whorled as he came online.
Angela wanted to lurch for the door, but she took the hit, remained still. Kellen’s big hands slid down her arms, warm and steady.
“Breathe,” he whispered beside her ear.
Survivor. Queen. I am the fire.
She raised one hand and clasped his, not looking at him. Steady.
“I’m in,” Heron said. “You can take him out of the cage now. He is no longer a danger.”
“Wait. How can you say that for certain?” Angela said. This was important, especially to her. Any danger he would pose, if he was still dangerous, had a high probability of falling smack on her head.
The mech-clone slumped in its too-small cage, and in his chair, Dr. Farad opened his own eyes. “Because I have closed both back doors. He is secure.”
“Any idea where that other door led? The Ashe one?” Kellen asked, his voice tight. She could feel the tension in his hand.
“Not precisely,” said Heron, “but I can tell you where the last user was when he accessed it.”
“Where…” She let her voice trail to silence, didn’t really need that question answered. She knew.
Mari’s voice was venom when she spat, “Texas.”
• • •
Shit devolved fairly quickly after that to planning and packing. As shit tended to do. Emergency alerts continued to pellet Kellen’s blip board all the rest of that day, mostly casualty reports and a steady stream of offended and stern speeches from El Presidente. Medina sure could talk.
Responders were still calling the operation at that Minneapolis crater a rescue, but nobody had much hope. The land was scrubbed bare, like nothing had ever existed there. Mari started out roiling fury off her body like sun heat off macadam, but as the information kept coming and hope kept leaving, she calmed. Her mouth moved, and you could almost visualize the constant tether of communication between her and Heron. He never let her get out of his sight.
Around suppertime, another one of those drone-launched smartbombs found its way into an illegal-services rendezvous hub in Sammamish. Kellen knew some folks there, and watching their hub blow up squeezed something painful inside him. Watching people die hurt. Being unable to do anything about it hurt even more.
All over the country, intercepts had been popping off incoming bombs all day, and contracts for more were lighting up the darknet freelancer hives. Heron had talked Mari out of taking on at least two. Chloe’d been up in the sky since before noon, keeping the Pentarc hidden as only she could. She didn’t get tired like other folk, but she had to be bored off her nanorobotic ass.
They’d called in some favors, and the Chiba nonallied space station was moving into orbit, ready to retaliate if the Pentarc was attacked, so maybe she could get a rest soon. Pieces on the global board were lining up, too.
Damn, Kellen hated this part.
Garrett had rounded up a team and started moving all the valuables underground, just in case, and Adele and Fanaida were doing the same with the people and critters, respectively. Angela had run back to her room, with escort, to fetch her meager belongings for their trip. The Pentarc rumbled with activity, and maybe a touch of fear.
Weirdest thing, though: Kellen usually would be right in the middle of a soft evacuation like this, making sure all his wards were safe and healthy and happy. That’s the kind of thing that filled up his spiritual tanks. But right now, when other people were taking care of those tasks in his stead, he was…okay with it.
Because of her. Because she needed him. Because she wanted him. Most of all because he didn’t want her to leave this place without him, definitely not when she was a target and the whole country was on fire and she was heading to goddamned motherfucking Texas.
It was time to admit a nasty truth. He was smitten. Incurably so. Probably had never gotten himself fully unsmut after that first bout, years ago.
Huh. That confession should have felt scarier.
“We can’t go out in the plane, you know,” he called from the med lab back into the Vault. “We’d have to bust through Chloe, and I don’t want her to have to handle that kind of rearranging. She’s got a lot on her mind already.”
“Air travel is unwise at any rate,” Heron replied. “All air traffic on the continent has been grounded until further notice, probably so the interceptors can get a better bead on the attack drones. Landjets are down, pods too. Not sure exactly why. I’d give you my car, but the interface is kind of…unique.”
Kellen peeked down the short hall. His buddy was still sitting in that big-ass command chair, wired into the mech-clone, experimenting with controlling both his own body and the mech’s, even while he monitored the world and oversaw the evacuation of his home. Unique didn’t begin to describe Heron’s mind.
“You kidlets can take my dragon,” came a voice from the Vault door.
Kellen set down his unzipped bag and headed that way j
ust as Fanaida breezed in. She looked tired, stressed, and magnificent.
“Hey, beautiful,” he said, opening his arms and bending so she could kiss him on either cheek.
“Que Dios te bendiga, mijo.” She raised her eyebrows at the rest of the room. “What, no love from the rest of you lowlifes?”
“Hullo, Mum.” Heron acknowledged her without tearing his gaze off the bank of monitors. Mari nodded, then drew Fan aside and filled her in. Fanaida took it all like a champ, like she’d seen crazy stuff before. Kellen had too, but most disasters didn’t feel like they were aimed at him or folk he loved.
Angela arrived shortly after with one extremely self-important cat on her heels. She carried her overstuffed bag slung over a shoulder and sported a new pair of shoes. Plastic printed Mary Janes, possibly borrowed from one of the refugees. He had definitely seen Adele wearing that nut-brown peacoat a time or two. Definitely the same coat. Thing was so ugly nobody’d want to make another one, having laid eyes on the first. Almost certainly it was a loaner.
It struck him Angela hadn’t had a change of clothes since she’d arrived, had been wearing the same outfit for weeks. Months. They were good quality clothes, and her room was equipped with an organics removal unit so they didn’t smell too gamey, but she had to be feeling the lack. She’d always dolled up so pretty on the vids.
Why hadn’t she talked to somebody about getting new togs? It wasn’t like he was without resources. The Pentarc had a whole room full of additive fabricators. Had she not known who to ask, or had she just been reluctant to ask him?
At any rate, probably wasn’t wise to tell her she looked a thousand times more beautiful to him right now, even in those wrinkled clothes and borrowed shoes. It wasn’t even physical, the beauty he saw in her. She’d come to the Pentarc defeated, scared, but now, bent on vengeance, she looked fierce. Ready to ride the world. Something had shifted up there at the barn with the mech-clone bearing down on her. She wasn’t scared anymore.
She was his warrior queen, and he was prepared to follow her into whatever battles she waged. That was the price for being in her court. Fine. He’d pay up.
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