“You don’t like nanites, so you won’t use a HUD.” Robert pretended to consider, wouldn’t do to appear too smart. “A data pad?”
With a bit of a flourish, Faustus extracted if from inside his long coat.
Oh yeah, he was gagging for it.
The data pad and his clothes were predictably black. All he lacked was the thin mustache to twirl. Who had failed to notice this guy was hip deep in bad?
I can try to access—
No! Robert was a bit surprised he hadn’t yelled it. This guy hates nanites. Just stay away from him.
Danger, Will Robinson.
Blynken had to provide the link to Lost in Space for him. It did seem to fit the moment and the situation. Weird it had a Dr. Smith, too. If I lost you… It didn’t bear thinking about. The nanites will know what to do. All of time, all of everywhere would be hosed without Blynken.
Faustus finished tapping on the screen and turned it, with another flourish, so Robert could see. He likes drama. Probably why he’d dumped Smith for Faustus and he knew no one in this galaxy would get the joke. Not sure how knowing this helped, but he filed it with everything his conscious—and sub-conscious—had begun to assemble on the man. This is partly how she does it. Observe, assess, act. The first two he could manage, it was the third that worried him. Would he know when and how? He would do all he could, die even to save the two remarkable women he loved. Better to make him die for his cause. He could almost hear Delilah’s dry tone and Em’s ebullient agreement. Together, as if somehow they’d sent support, Robert felt his insides steady. The fear was still there, but shunted off to another thought line. His perceptions sharpened and data flowed in.
Faustus held his weapon with confidence but his stance was wrong. He didn’t stand like a soldier or a cop. He was a scientist, a geek, first and foremost. Didn’t meant he hadn’t taught himself the skills, but they weren’t inherent to who he was. He wouldn’t be able to react on instinct when the time came. He’d have to think and that split second of hesitation could give Robert the edge. And he should never have taken his eyes off Robert, even if he wasn’t the Chameleon. Robert didn’t use the opening, something in his gut cautioning, not yet. The right moment would come. Faustus might not know it, but he would relax his guard even more as time passed. A soldier wouldn’t. Chameleon wouldn’t. Faustus—who was he looking for? Smith? Robert considered telling him Smith wasn’t coming, but right on the heels came a to-the-bottom-of-his-gut feeling that telling would be a bad idea. A guy pretending to be someone who sold his soul to the devil might be threatened by the person he thought was the Chameleon knowing he was really plain old geeky Dr. Smith, threatened enough to start shooting. Faustus might not be a soldier, but at this range, he didn’t need to be.
Something flickered in Faustus’ eyes. Something not cold. Robert looked where he’d looked. Nothing. No, not nothing. The air shimmered and for an instant, he thought he saw someone. A woman.
“What’s her name?”
Faustus jerked, his aim wavering. Would Delilah have grabbed that moment? Still didn’t feel right and if he jumped him, then what? The evil plan was in motion. The man’s face was cool again, but Robert felt an undercurrent of something.
Faustus hesitated, gave a small shrug. “Halane.” The lack of emotion was more revealing than he knew. “She used to live here.” His expression hardened. “And then she didn’t.” The cold gaze slithered across Robert, as if he’d almost forgotten Robert was there or he saw something else. “But soon she will again.”
* * * *
The clouds gathered into one spot, as if drawn there, then began to spin, like a cyclone trying to form. If Doc didn’t always resist expecting the expected, she’d have expected the air to move, too, instead of going dead still. Scary dead still. The horizon flickered faster, the pattern of it no longer regular. It made the automatons jump forward in jerky leaps as they blinked in and out of view. They should be stopped. She felt that to the bottom of her gut, but how did you shoot at something that was and wasn’t there?
And if that wasn’t freaky enough, there were the shadows on the other beach. People or ghosts? They were more indistinct than the automatons. Or the airships. Airships almost made sense when added to the automatons, though Doc didn’t make the mistake of saying that out loud around the general. He was too good a soldier to look freaked or worried. Grim was acceptable, so that’s where he’d made his stand. He didn’t even blink when Fyn offered his advice on how to take down an automaton. She let them work on the problem while she studied the airships.
They appeared and disappeared at a different rate than the ghost people or the automatons, as if they were all on a different frequency. The ships didn’t jump as much as the automatons either. When they were in sight, the almost placid chug of the engines indicated a slow forward speed. When panels in the sides retracted, in a sort of surreal slow motion, and cannons slid into view, it seemed more interesting than threatening. She felt an urge to giggle. She tried to remember if she’d ever giggled, let alone felt the urge, but her brain was already onto analyzing the flight vectors. What could possibly be the target?
“Delilah?” Hel sounded a bit bemused, even with access to her limited data on steampunk and early Earth history. “What are they?”
“Airships,” she said.
“Dirigibles,” the general added, sounding a bit awed.
“They’re spreading out, not concentrating their fire.”
“Lousy strategy,” Halliwell said, but Doc felt his unease match hers.
“For cannon fire, I agree.” Her brain produced the memory of the nanites hitting the barrier on the underside of the metal bug. “If they were preparing to fire gas—”
“—and if we shoot them down—” the general took her thought and continued it.
“—the crash could explode the canisters anyway,” Hel finished.
Not to mention hard to shoot down something blinking in and out of their reality. And if they shot one down and then it crashed where it was supposed to, it would be a win for the bad guy. Even with her remaining nanite help, Doc felt her head start to ache. In the end, there was still one place to stop this attack: the future where it had started. Doc didn’t like interrupting the peeps, but if the twit was having trouble out there, securing the lab should help. How many more labs to secure?
We have reached the last one. It is more resistant than the others.
Doc’s gut didn’t just twitch, it clenched. That’s the one. Be careful.
We are always careful.
Doc tapped into the data stream, found them working almost dead center of the island, somewhere around the funky little gazebo thing. The hill. The only real hill on the outpost. She should have wondered about that.
You did wonder about it. It just got lost in all the other things you wonder about.
Oh. Right. Doc pushed at the spot between her brows, wishing she’d had time to find out more about the Garradians. It all felt so random and odd, having hidden and not-hidden labs, some locked with genetic keys and others not. Where was the pattern in it? They knew so little about the outpost hierarchy, even with the Gadi on board for the research—
Sirens started to shriek outpost wide. “Virus detected. Containment protocols initiating.”
No! Don’t try to contain it! The thought screamed through her brain, driven by gut level instinct. It’s a trap—
The blow was as physical as punch to the jaw. Doc staggered, dropped to her knees, pain exploding inside her head.
* * * *
Landing in the middle of a bunch of zombies seemed like adding insult to injury and Emily couldn’t see Robert anywhere, doubling both insult and injury. The zombies scrambled up, their movements well into the clunky zone, and began to form into a messy mob. Too many for going whoop-ass on, even with nanite assistance. It seemed wise to go low profile until she found a way to lose them—
We are on the outpost.
That meant exactly nothing to Emily, but
she sensed the two peeps felt happy about it.
Something is wrong.
Emily thought of several responses, all of them sarcastic, but all of them ended with a question mark, so she went with a neutral, we’re surrounded by zombies. Of course something is wrong.
It is more…the outpost is under attack…
The sudden scream of sirens seemed to confirm this, though the whole outpost thing still baffled her.
We are sorry, Em…
And just like that she was alone inside her own head. It hadn’t been that long, but she’d gotten used to the little…bytes. Like having pets. Pets smarter than her and able to do amazing things. Okay, so maybe she was their pet, but she still missed them. Felt forlorn and hosed, and now that she was finally ready to ask a question, there was no one to ask, because she sure wasn’t going to ask the zombies—who seemed to be shambling inland. Didn’t seem to care if she shambled with them or not, so she edged away, then struck off at an angle, picked up the pace, and topped the rise off the beach well ahead of them.
She paused to catch her breath and look around. She didn’t exactly know what an outpost should look like, but outpost implied a defensive something or other, not this placid place. It was green and lush and had some sort of cool looking buildings nestled in among the trees. Kind of British looking. Winding paths and a gazebo thing on that rather pitiful hill. Em had always had a weakness for gazebos, though she wasn’t sure why. They were just so gazebo-ish and cute. Like something out of a novel or a movie. A place to sing and dance, or just read. She headed toward it, because she didn’t know where else to go, and because it looked fun and she had a vague feeling about the high ground being good. She’d have liked to have a gazebo in her museum, keep the lacy stuff and just add a few steampunk embellishments—
“How did you get here?”
Regrettably, the voice was familiar. But Emily still hoped it wasn’t him, until she turned and saw it was. Last time Emily had seen him, he and his sidekick girl friend, Carig were being hauled off by the zombies. Seemed they’d managed to escape, too, which was a surprise. A shock actually. Neither looked like they could fight their way out of a paper bag, let alone away from a gang of zombies.
“The sign said this way to the ladies.” They both looked blank. “The bathroom.” Emily wasn’t surprised when they didn’t get that either. Clearly the joke gene got left out during their conception.
“This is a secure facility,” Carig said, in a very snotty tone.
“Of course it is. That would be why this outpost is under attack, zombies are dropping in like flies, and the sirens are shrieking like a bunch of little girls.”
“We are experiencing a virus—”
Virus? Did that explain what happened to Wynken and Nod? Em felt a chill around her heart. They couldn’t be gone, could they?
“—not a physical attack—” He broke off when he caught sight of the zombies.
Not that they looked all that threatening, other than the scary shamble. They weren’t armed, well, they had arms, but not weapons—
We are pins.
You pin time?
He’s planning to do something with time and the pins…
She may not be a genius, but she’d read books about geniuses. There were lots of them, geniuses and books, in the science fiction and steampunk genres. And she’d been hanging with a really smart, if not a total, genius. Some of it might have rubbed off on her and if hadn’t, who would know inside her head? Okay, genius time, Em. If someone pinned time, then unpinning time was probably a bad idea or they wouldn’t try to pin it in the first place. Or second place. She wasn’t sure of course, but she sensed that time probably should stay pinned. Cause unpinned time sounded messy. Messy was bad. Everyone knew that. She almost wished she’d asked the nanites about how unpinning worked. That seemed like a question she could get behind—if you removed a real pin or a nail, it wasn’t there, it was gone until or unless you put it back—could unpinning involve dying for the pin? Didn’t seem to be any other way to remove a person from time that she knew of, so she’d have to go with dead. Dead wasn’t good, whether pinning was involved or not. If they were pins, then the evil overload might not need weapons, because they were the weapon, if they were pins, which they had said they were, at least the un-zombie ones said they were. Only what were they aimed at, if they were pins?
“What are they doing?”
Em was glad Carig asked the question she couldn’t get out. One by shambling one, they topped the rise and started across the wide lawn toward…nothing she could see—the horizon did a shimmy and then there was something they were aimed for.
Automatons. And these had arms and arms.
Unless the pins had serious ninja skills or a good supply of wrenches, they might be in trouble. Hard to get behind the notion of them having wrenches. Or ninja skills when walking involved the zombie shamble. All the ninjas she’d seen never shambled, they, well, ninja walked or something.
Both Carig and Glarmere reeled back from the automatons, thus confirming they were total girls. Being an actual girl, Em felt a need to reel with them, but if the zombies kept on their current course, they were going to shamble right into that line of automatons and get hosed. Hosed was bad and could result in pulling, i.e. dead. Crap on a cracker. She had to save the zombies. A violation of every steampunk rule she knew and how was she supposed to—
Double crap on a cracker. She had to get out the bug.
* * * *
“Delilah?” Hel sounded far away, a galaxy at least, kept there by the pain, though she felt him grip her arms. Only two warm spots on a body turned to ice. Her muscles cramped. A brief silence inside her head. And then a thousand demons loosed from peep restraint yowled into the void. They were back. She tried to expect the unexpected, but she hadn’t expected this—
He shook her. “You are strong enough to fight this, Delilah. The Chameleon did it once, she can do it again.”
Right. The Chameleon. She was…the chameleon. She’d functioned like this for most of her life, done the impossible over and over. And done it alone. Not alone now. Had Hel. Her nails dug in her palms. No peeps moved in to ease the pain. With some effort she uncurled her fists, forced herself to breathe in, to breathe out. She lifted her lids. Even that hurt. She used to know pain, not happy to know it again. Peeps had spoiled her. Every muscle in her body ached. Hel wavered in front of her, then her vision steadied as her breathing began to even out. She could do this. She had to.
“We have more urgent concerns than the nanites right now.” His hands dug into her arms, willing her to focus. “Outpost defenses are down. Shields. Weapons. Transport systems. Anything that uses nanites.”
His head angled toward his radio, listening, but his gaze was locked on her. Her radio squawked like a schoolyard at recess. She turned it down. Didn’t need chaos inside and out. Chaos. Her mind locked on that. She rubbed her face. It didn’t help, but it felt like it did, so she did it again. Data ramped up even more, the streams no longer tidy and organized, but coming at her from all directions, like multiple blows. A problem to sort helped some, would help more when she got control again. It was why she’d become the Chameleon in the first place. Out of the morass, she found a question she could ask, though she felt like a stroke patient trying out her first words. “Is this the attack?”
No HUD, no mental connection to the outpost’s defenses. No big picture to study. And a horizon that appeared to be pulsing…between two times? Or two realities? Or three? She’d done alternate realities and did not want to go there again. Might not have a choice. She hated not having a choice.
“Doc?” the general sounded almost concerned. And didn’t like it. Was better at annoyed.
“I’m fine, sir.” She rubbed her face again. If she said it enough, maybe it would be the truth. “You say the Doolittle’s equipment is still fine?” A sharp nod. “Can you get me on with someone who can feed me real time sensor data?” Eyes-on didn’t help that much withou
t the peeps feeding her raw data. He gave her the channel and a calm, somewhat apologetic—probably because of how bizarre the data was—voice began feeding her information.
Ground troops, Gadi and Marines, began to move into defensive positions, and the fighter squadrons buzzed past the central cluster of buildings, their sensors adding to the data flow provided by the voice. All that information didn’t help as much as she’d hoped. A shuttle landed on the lawn in front of the command center and a couple of geeks emerged carrying data pads. Doc grabbed one, glad to see something tangible, even if the data was whacked. The horizon appeared to steady, to come back into sharp focus, bringing the uneven line of people into focus, too. The airships had also stopped phasing in and out. Only they didn’t show up on sensors. Either her eyes were deceiving her or…she picked through the multiple hypothesis thrown at her by her hellhounds…latched on to one that made a sort of sense. What if they were looking into another reality? Could the twit have tried to split realities, tried to divert the incoming wave into one?
“Delilah.” Hel’s voice was quiet, down into his scary quiet range. “Look.”
She scanned the line of people, shambling toward them, or so they appeared. Granted, they were odd, but—her thoughts broke and reformed. “Your icky cousin and Carig. Are they involved in this—” She looked again. Their clothes were wrong. No one now wore anything like that. Though she wasn’t surprised the clothes were still pretty. A love of pretty was the most persistent characteristic about the Gadi. And who were they talking to? She looked…wrong, like a street person without the defeated look.
“What is that? Who are those…people? Why is the outpost down?” Halliwell was having a tough time staying in grim.
“The nanites accessed a previously unknown laboratory. It was—” Hel hesitated, perhaps unsure of the right standard word for it.
“Booby-trapped,” Doc said. “It was a trap.” Why? The twit had mentioned the anti-nanite stuff, but why here? Why now? Doc had the hounds circle the question. If it had been her op, she’d set a trap to stop someone from messing with any future plans. I should have thought of that. I’ve lost my edge. The silence, both from the peeps and Hel, seemed to mock her, while her hellhounds danced with glee.
Steamrolled Page 40