by RS McCoy
Dasia shook her head.
“Did I hurt you?”
“No.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
There was no use in lying. “Of course.”
“Then what’s there to freak out about?”
Dasia wiped at her forehead and shrugged. She didn’t want to offend Mable, not after last night.
“You can tell me.”
After a good inhale for strength, Dasia said, “I’ve never been with anyone else.”
“You feel like you betrayed Cole?” Mable’s brow wrinkled with concern.
Dasia nodded and answered, “I know it’s dumb and he’s gone and all, but, I don’t know.” She shrugged as the words failed her.
Mable closed the gap between them and looked up at Dasia, her ice-blue eyes as intense as ever. “It’s okay. Tell me what’s wrong.”
The tears stung her eyes. “I loved him.”
Mable winced as if the words hurt her, too. “You still love him. You’re allowed to love him even if he’s gone. And this isn’t love. It’s just sex. Love is crooked. It steals and takes and twists you. Sex is easy. You can love Cole and be with me or whoever you want.” Mable smoothed a hand over Dasia’s shoulder, protective and comforting all at once. “You haven’t betrayed him. This is your life and you have a right to live it.”
Dasia wanted to believe her, but it wasn’t the only thing that bothered her. “I never thought—”
Mable smiled. “You’d be with a girl?” When Dasia nodded, Mable continued, “You’re over-thinking this. It’s not that complicated. Just do what makes you happy. Who gives a fuck about the rest?”
Dasia nodded and tried to think of what to say. She was so mixed up inside she couldn’t begin to figure out what made her happy. She returned to her fighter’s stance and raised her fists.
Mable shook her head. “That’s enough for today.”
“Already?”
“Yeah, I have someone to see. Same time tomorrow?”
“I’ll be here.”
“And you should talk to Osip. You never know. Maybe he’ll be someone who makes you happy.” She wiggled her eyebrows and they both laughed.
Walking back to the facility, Dasia considered Mable’s words. The prospect of talking to Osip terrified her, though she knew it was irrational. As much as Mable confused her, there was a certain security there. It was only sex, like she said.
Men, on the other hand. She didn’t have such a good track record there.
But, if she could be intimate with a girl she barely knew, she could work with a guy as her partner. It wouldn’t be that bad.
Dasia kissed Mable’s cheek as she left her at her room. Then, she walked across the corridor and tapped her knuckles on Osip’s door.
It opened a moment later. “Priv—Hey D.” Osip was quick to catch himself out of his accent. Still, he offered her a vibrant smile.
He was a full four inches shorter than her so she had to look down, a position she found awkward. “Hey, I, uh, just thought we should get to know each other a little before we start working together.”
“Really?” Osip beamed as he moved to the side and let her in, shutting the door behind them.
Dasia fought the urge to dash back out the door. “What was that you were saying? Priv?”
“Privet. How we say ‘hi’ back home. Nick wants me to lose my accent, so I can blend in better. I just slip sometimes.” Pink filled his cheeks, as if he’d been caught stealing candy.
Dasia tried to think back to the few times she’d seen Osip, and the even fewer times she’d talked with him. “You’re from the underground?”
Osip’s face lit up as he spoke. “Yeah, Dacha sits just below the city. It’s been there hundreds of years and spreads out over dozens of square miles. The subways were targeted during the wars, and the original founders settled in the ruins.”
Dasia pictured something out of ancient Greece, a subterranean Parthenon. “Ruins?”
“Well, not anymore. Now it’s completely rebuilt, its own city. An oasis.”
“Why’d you leave?” As soon as she asked, she regretted it. Not only did she ask him to dredge up some horrible tale from his past, he’d no doubt ask about hers. She didn’t know if she was ready.
“Oh, we went up to the surface every few weeks for supplies. Mostly high-tech gear we couldn’t make. Last time I got caught. Since I don’t have a ‘file’ on the surface, they said I could go to one of the prison nations or come here.” He shrugged his shoulders as if he’d planned on this quarantine all along.
“You okay?” His hazel eyes were soft and kind.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” For the first time in a long time, she thought it might actually true.
MABLE
CPI-RQ2-05
AUGUST 16, 2232
Mable knocked on Theo’s door with her tablet in hand.
When he opened the door, he stood back, as if afraid of her. “Hey, do you want to go over the files?” She put on her best sweet smile and batted her lashes at him. Theo liked the beauty-queen type, after all.
“Uh, sure. You want to do it here?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.” He stepped back and let her in to his room. His was more plain than hers even before her attempt at decorating. The furniture was all the same, all metal and straight lines. The bed had a white comforter, white sheets, white pillowcases. Theo’s room really did look like a hospital.
“Uh, here. You can have the desk.” Theo pulled out the metal chair and stood behind it, waiting for her to sit.
She did, but only because she thought he would take offense if she didn’t. “How far have you gotten?”
“Not very.” His head lowered as if he was ashamed.
Between her daily sessions with Dasia and arguing with Arrenstein, Mable had still managed to read the files cover to cover. What the hell had this kid been doing with his time?
There was only one possibility, and she had dark hair in a prissy little bob.
“Okay, let’s just start at the beginning then.” Mable flipped through the files and found the first. GL-15 (E).
“The letters, GL for this one, those are the host initials. The number is the year, and the type of bug in parentheses. Make sense?”
“Yeah, I figured out that much.” Theo looked insulted. His shaved-clean head had just started to show the first signs of new growth. She thought he might look half decent with hair on his head.
No good to think that way.
“The first fifty or so were all Echoes. Here’s the extraction vid Arrenstein gave me.” She tapped the holograph and set the vid to motion. The footage was shot POV so that they couldn’t see more than the occasional arm of the agent. The room was a lab, Mable guessed botany. Dozens of potted plants sat on every surface and a series of large windows occupied the only visible wall. Below the windows, the early-thirties Scholar in the typical indigo body suit worked at his metal desk.
“Can I help you?” The Scholar failed to mask his annoyance at having his work interrupted.
The agent approached the desk and leaned forward. In his/her hand was a small silver canister, no larger than a finger. The depressed top of the canister shot out a pale blue gas in the Scholar’s face. He passed out immediately.
Devoid of consciousness, he slipped to the floor hard enough he would surely have a mild head injury. Heavy boots appeared on either side of the host’s shoulders. His face illuminated in the beam of a strong light.
When the hands appeared again, they were gloved. The agent placed a jar of golden fluid beside the Scholar’s head and reappeared with a metal device in one hand, some sort of rudimentary clamp.
Theo squinted as he watched one hand hold open the mouth while the device and gloved hand went in, clear up to the wrist. Several wrenching turns complete with the agent’s grunts produced the bug, an Echo, clamped in the device. The agent dropped it in the fluid and slammed the lid down.
Caught.
Mable almost felt bad for it. She
hated to feel trapped. The agent spent a few minutes sealing the jar with some sort of liquid sealant followed by a strip of sticky plastic. There was no way the bug would ever get out.
“You think you can do that?” Theo asked. He swallowed hard.
“Yeah, but it won’t be like this. I’m not sure why, but the later ones don’t use the gas.” On the vid, the agent collected the jar and placed it in a padded bag. Then they reproduced the canister, but this time, flipped it over. Depressing it again, a green gas emerged.
They could only see the host suck in a heavy breath before the agent left and the vid ended.
“I’m sure they only gave us the vids of the ones that went well.”
“Yeah, I think so.” Mable had noticed a certain lack of vids showing agents dying or becoming infected. Those were the ones she really wanted. They would show her what not to do, which in most cases, was far more valuable than the best case scenario versions.
“You think they vid each one? Or just the ones they know will be in and out?”
Theo walked across the room and pulled a device from the drawer of his nightstand. “Nick had one for you and one for Georgie. He called it a cam but it has comm capabilities as well.” He held open his palm to show something that looked like a dead spider. The central portion was little more than a black cube, but from it, five spindles emerged.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”
“You wear it, behind your ear, here.” Theo approached her left side. His fingers were gentle despite their size. He pushed back the fallen bits of hair and positioned the cube an inch behind her ear.
Then her head caught on fire. She screamed out in surprise and pain, swiping at her head until the pain subsided.
Mable pushed out of the chair and darted across the room, eager to be away from whatever the hell that thing was.
“Sorry. Mable, I’m sorry.” He held up his hands to protect himself should she lash out, but he was clearly the dangerous one. He set the cam on his desk and said, “I should have warned you. He said it would hurt, for a while. You just have to get used to it.”
Mable could only stand with her hand covering the area where the device had been. When she pulled it away, there were dots of blood. “What the fuck?”
“He didn’t really go into it, but now that I’ve seen it, I think each of these is connecting to your skull. They certainly punctured the skin layer.”
With the pain receding, Mable tried to get herself to calm down. It wasn’t Theo’s fault. Sure, he was about as spineless as an oyster, but Nick and Arrenstein were the real culprits. She walked back to the desk and sat, pushing the cam to the farthest corner. “Don’t touch me with that ever again.”
“You got it.”
THEO
CPI-RQ2-05, NEW YORK
AUGUST 18, 2232
Working with Mable wasn’t as terrible as he expected. Sure, she was prone to sudden outbursts, sometimes violent ones. She rarely slept and kept him working at a break neck pace. She’d cursed him out and screamed in his face once or twice, but between those moments, there was an uneasy peace.
In the space above his desk, another extraction vid played, but it revealed little. Where before the agent had used a gas canister to disarm the host, this time, there was a considerable struggle.
The host, an early thirties woman with the South Asian package of features, saw the agent and began a string of harsh words in a language he didn’t know. Without wasting a moment, the agent approached, fought off the meager defense of the host, and began a several second struggle. Then the lifeless form of the host appeared on the floor.
The agent began the extraction.
“Hey, have you seen the vid for—” Theo scanned for the file name. “Uh, it’s UL-28(G). Seen it?”
“Yeah of course.” Mable didn’t even look up from her tablet, engrossed in whatever file she read directly from the screen. Her back was wedged between the two plush pillows on his bed, her knees pulled up against her chest.
“Do you know what happened? Why didn’t they use the gas?”
Still she stared at the screen. Her dark hair fell into her face so much he wondered how she could see anything.
“Not sure. Maybe it was damaged? All the rest are like that.” Her eyes continued to race across the screen.
“All the extractions after 2218 are this violent?” Theo didn’t want to consider what that would mean for their future assignments.
He should be the agent.
Mable could never render a person unconscious on her own. She was far too weak.
She wedged her fingertip between her teeth and clamped down lightly.
“What file are you working on?” he asked.
“I’m not. I’m reading.”
“I know, what file?”
Mable looked up, her eyes narrow. “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” She returned to her tablet. Theo gave up and went back to the extraction vid. He added the time of the struggle and Mable’s comments about the gas to his notes.
Once finished, he moved on to the next. AP-28(G). For whatever reason, the extractions during the 2220’s seemed to be almost entirely composed of the Gleam. Had the Echo vanished? Or had CPI merely changed their focus? He added his questions to his notes and opened the file.
HOST: AGATHA PARNELL. CRAFTSMAN, SHUTTLE PILOT
AGENT: FRANZ EIRLICH
LOCATION: SRF #221B, ISTANBUL
EXTRACTION STATUS: COMPLETE
“Hey, what’s SRF?” Theo called over his shoulder.
“Shuttle Repair Facility.”
How embarrassing. He knew the acronym, and given the host’s profession, it should have been obvious.
Theo mumbled under his breath and continued. He did his best to avoid asking Mable questions, pulling up info on the net as he could. Trouble was, the entire operation was locked down tighter than a geneticist’s embryo array. There was nothing he could learn about the bugs from anywhere else in the world.
His research was exciting in that capacity. If he worked hard enough and long enough, he might change the world. Not in the way he once planned, but it would still be something. It was enough for him to go on.
Theo hadn’t meant to stay up so late, but the urge to get through the files and learn everything he could was too strong. His virtual notepad spanned several pages. Once complete, he would take all his questions to Nick.
He tapped the icon for BC-33(E).
HOST: DR. BARTON CUTTERLY. SCHOLAR, RADIO-PROPULSION ENGINEER
AGENT: MARK LENNOX
LOCATION: SCEL, SAN DIEGO
EXTRACTION STATUS: COMPLETE/COMPROMISED
He read the word four or five times to be sure it was the right one. His tired eyes were surely playing tricks on him. Compromised?
“Mable, what happened on BC-33(E)? How can it be ‘Complete’ and ‘Compromised’?”
When she didn’t answer, he figured she was still involved in whatever she was reading. He turned around and said, “Hey, Mable!” quite loudly before he realized.
Mable’s slender figure lay collapsed against his pillows, lifeless but for her slow, easy breathing. The tablet was still clutched in her hands, and as she’d said, it wasn’t one of the case files.
Theo pulled the spare blanket from the shelf in his closet and spread it over her. Then he retreated to Jane’s room.
AIDA
LRF-PQ-291
AUGUST 21, 2232
Six days and still no data. Aida was going to lose it. She had no experience with idleness. Never in her life had she been so void of work.
She needed something to do with her hands.
Aida used to enjoy those days when she could be alone in her apartment. Without the requirements of her class and with no husband to gripe, she could dress how she liked. She could wear her hair down.
Not anymore.
One-nine-six was all she could think about.
Aida stood
before the floor length mirror attached to her wardrobe door and considered the shoes. With a strawberry-red tulip skirt, she paired a black kitten heel on the left and a nude pump on the right. She decided on the black, but they didn’t go with her top. Aida stripped out of it and tried on three more.
She needed to find something else to fill her time.
Aida adjusted a loose butter-yellow top when Sal came in. “Have a good day?”
“A little busy.” Sal started toward the closet, pulled off his shoes, and sat at his desk.
“Something go wrong with one of your colonies?” Sal kept up with the two-hundred or so colonies, many of them on the surface of the moon. Others were on ships in transit, circling the solar system to imitate conditions during long space travel. There was even one on Mars.
“No, just a lot of upkeep,” he answered with his back turned.
Aida tapped her hands against her skirt and tried to think of something to say, anything. She didn’t have much to contribute without data from 196, but still, she wanted to talk to him.
“Do they have any Planetary Colony facilities on Earth?” she asked.
“Not that I know of. By definition, a colony is off-world.” In the air above his desk, a spreadsheet of meaningless numbers rolled by.
“I mean the facility, not the colony. Could you maintain your position if we went back?”
“Why would we want to go back?” His voice was less monotone than before. She got the impression he might actually be listening, though he still didn’t turn around.
“It might be easier to get a Child Permit. We’re in range for both age and career. If we started now—”
“Maybe once you get Lead. And then we’ll see. I’m not in any hurry to go back.”
But she was Lead. It had all happened so fast, and in such humiliating circumstances, she hadn’t told him. Now that he wanted to wait, there was no point in telling him. It wouldn’t change his decision.
Sal stood and walked to the door. “I’m going to the galley for some provisions. Want anything?”