She fired again at the shooters as the speedboat drew closer, readying herself to take the leap. As her opponents neared, she took a quick step up onto the gunwale then leapt forward, just as both boats cut through another rough wave.
The speedboat was longer and faster, and it shot up into the air with ease. The path the smaller, slower seataxi took was not nearly as angular. When Mesa leapt, she barely caught hold of the speedboat’s metal cleat. Her shoulder howled in protest as her weight jarred the still-healing ligaments and fresh muscle before she smashed into the boat’s hull. Her feet briefly touched down on the seataxi’s gunwale as the speedboat crested the wave. Then it settled back into its natural buoyancy.
Scrambling for purchase, her flat-soled shoes slid across the slick hull. She raised her other arm to the next cleat, thinking of all the pull-ups she’d done for fun and exercise over the last few years. The haul would have been much, much easier if she hadn’t nearly lost one arm a few days ago, and she gritted her teeth against the strain, forcing herself to work through the pain.
C’mon, goddamn it, she screamed at herself, her biceps bunching and shoulders aching as she edged up over the gunwale. The shooters were on track to smash into the taxi once more. Her options were either get up, over, and into the speedboat or be pulverized between the boats.
A gunman hurried to the gunwale, looking down at her. A wicked smile crossed his face, owning her dead to rights. Then he glanced up, startled.
Rameez was running across the stern of the seataxi, ducking behind the backpack as if it were some kind of shield. He built up speed then jumped between the two boats and landed clumsily on the stern of the speedboat. He slipped and barely had time to hook his fingers onto the back of the bench seating to save his life.
That stupid distraction saved Mesa’s life. She raised her gun, fired a round under the gunman’s chin, then put a second one through his Adam’s apple. As Mesa hoisted herself up and over the gunwale, the second gunman took aim at Rameez. She dropped to a knee, bringing her gun up, and fired.
A line of bullets chewed through the stern before the assault rifle jerked up. A surprised yelp cried out over the gunfire. Two more pulls of her trigger silenced him for good.
Mesa rushed to the stern. Tackling the bench seat, she pulled Rameez toward her.
“Behind you!”
She barely dodged the butt of a machine gun intended for the back of her skull. The speedboat’s captain took another swing at her, and she jumped back, just barely out of the gun’s arc. As the momentum of the wild swing pulled the man’s torso away from her, Mesa stepped into the opening and clobbered him with her own gun, as he had intended to do to her. He stumbled back, in a daze. She stepped to his side, sending a quick kick into his knee. She heard a satisfying crunch of the meniscus and articular cartilage being destroyed under her blow. He collapsed to the ground, in too much shock to scream, and she wrapped one hand around the underside of his jaw. After clamping the other hand on the opposite side of his skull, she twisted, fast and with no remorse. She heard, as much as she felt, the vertebrae being torn apart as his neck snapped.
He dropped to the floor, paralyzed, but not dead. Not yet. She had severed the spinal cord between the fourth and fifth of the seven vertebrae in his neck, paralyzing the nerves that controlled the man’s diaphragm, which controlled his breathing.
She moved away from the soon-to-be corpse and pulled Rameez to safety. Somehow, he’d managed to hold onto the bag, which she was grateful for. She tugged him into a firm hug.
“That’s the second time you saved my life today,” she said.
He blushed and turned his attention to the bodies scattered across the stern of the boat.
“How did you do all this?”
“I guess you could say I’ve picked up a few things here and there. That’s for later, though. First, we need to get scarce before we put any more people at risk.”
“Is that all of them, do you think?”
“I have no idea,” she said, gutted at the prospect of more corporate goons chasing after them.
She took to the wheelhouse and steered toward an open dock of the closest island. She wasn’t even sure where they were. Fuck it. Any port in a storm, she thought.
Sirens wailed across the silent channel.
“We’ll be keeping the police busy today,” she said.
Rameez didn’t seem to see the humor, but that was fine.
She nudged the boat against the dock then disembarked sprightly without bothering to tie it off. She helped her friend up and onto solid land once again.
They hauled tail back to the closest city square, where they were able to melt into the pedestrian crowds. Word of the assaults was buzzing through the collectives, and the individual states were ramping up security. Police presence had grown very visible surprisingly quickly, and the men and women of the security units seemed quite vigilant.
Mesa was grateful that her dress and shirt had dried quickly beneath the bright afternoon sun. She was still a mess, her hair wind whipped and salty, but plenty of women had similar fashion staples. By luck, they had wound up near a waterpark.
Mesa took the backpack from Rameez and went into a private changing stall. The bag was ruined: the straps had been shot clean through, and a long tear crossed the back. She rummaged through it, dumping out the MREs and bottles of water into a nearby garbage can. Having guns and ammunition on her was too risky, particularly with harbor security on high alert. All of it went into the garbage. She kept a few mem chips, false IDs, and a few tiny scraps of universal currency.
She gathered the chips into her palm and contemplated them for a few long seconds. They were her last ties to her father, the last vivid memories of Jonah and her time with him. A few were his mems, recollections of her as a child in Los Angeles. The small fragments of data were all she had of a life she had no direct memory of and no other connection to. With a sigh, she snapped the chips in half, one by one, then released them into the recycler, burying them beneath the ruined bag and the detritus of previous visitors.
Back outside, she gave the paper money to Rameez to pocket, along with the fake ident chips. He stuffed them in his pants without a word.
Rameez took a long time getting his shakes under control and figuring out how to walk straight. He looked dazed, drugged. She spotted an open seat at a patio-side coffee shop and led him to a chair. She brought him water and hot tea, remembering Alice’s words about the beverage being soothing.
She carried her coffee and sat. He sipped the tea, shutting his eyes against the steam, and for the first time in a while, he seemed to be at peace.
“Thank you,” he said.
She reached across the table to squeeze his hand. They sat for a while, saying nothing, sipping their hot drinks. After twenty minutes, he seemed to be getting himself together and no longer visibly started at the sight of the roving foot patrols. A trio of police passed nearby, and Mesa nodded at them. They nodded back and continued on.
“Nothing to worry about,” she told Rameez, worried that his pale complexion and intense interest in the tabletop would draw undue attention.
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
She’d been thinking about that, but she was at a loss and admitted as such. “Obviously, we can’t stay here,” she added. “We’ll head over to the central harbor and catch a ride back to the mainland. After that, I don’t know. I’m done running, though.”
He nodded silently. A small measure of color seemed to be returning to his face as he finished the tea.
They took their time walking to the central harbor, passing over the bridges joining the cluster of city-states that encircled the port city’s outer edges. “Central harbor” was a bit of a misnomer, as it wasn’t actually the center of anything. It was, however, the main port for embarkation and de
barkation of passenger liners heading to and from the seastead.
The lines to purchase tickets and for boarding were long. After another half hour of moving through a circuitous path to the automated teller, Mesa secured passes under the names Juliet Landreau and Abdulrahman Sufi.
While the line moved slowly, Mesa passed the time by reviewing Rameez’s data on Schaeffer. She’d been over it half a dozen times, debating a course of action. Eventually, she settled on a plan, and after finding Schaeffer’s secure contact information, she cobbled together a delivery packet.
Rameez spent most of his time in the line shuffling forward, thinking to himself, and it was rather late when he realized their destination.
“LA?”
“That’s right,” Mesa said. “We have some unfinished business to attend to there.”
“We do, do we?” He arched an eyebrow at her. He’d never even been to LA before.
“I’ll explain when we’re on board. Be cool. Don’t bug out, OK?”
He grumbled, but his face softened, and the perpetual worry lines of his brow smoothed a bit.
She hooked her arm through his and rested her head against his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Rameez.”
“For what?”
“All of this,” she said, her voice low. “This is all my fault.”
“It’s not,” he said. “This whole thing is fucked, yeah, and you’re caught up in the middle, OK. But, it’s not your fault. You didn’t cause any of this.”
She gave his shoulder a soft kiss, grateful for his friendship and kindness. He’d always been a shoulder to lean on, literally or otherwise. Despite that, she could not convince herself that he was right or that he was saying anything other than kind, undeserved platitudes.
They navigated the rest of the winding line quietly. Then the tickets and biohacks gained them passage to the boarding ramp. A short time later, they found their cabin.
“Why LA?” he asked, after they’d spent a few moments getting settled.
“While we were in line for tickets, I skimmed through your info on Schaeffer. I hacked into his comm line and delivered him a message.”
“You what?” he shouted.
Chapter 21
Schaeffer watched the data scroll in, cursing himself. Eight dead. But that was why they were the B team. He set the pad aside and stared at the decrepit form of Alice Xie, lasering her with a look of pure scorn. He should have known better than to give them the go-ahead to initiate. He’d let his eagerness get in the way.
In the long run, the consequences were minor. Each man’s death would have signaled the nanos jetting through his bloodstream to begin rapid cellular decay. Medichines were powerful tools for healing, but with a bit of reverse engineering, they could be used to wreak severe trauma. The machines would begin by destroying fingerprints, facial features, teeth, and retinas.
The process was surprisingly quick, and by the time authorities responded, little information would be left to glean, and linking the corpses directly to Daedalus would be impossible. The violence at the hotel would create confusion and chaos, and authorities would chalk it up to a terrorist attack. With a few words in the right ears, it wouldn’t take much cast suspicion on organization like the Earth Liberation Front or Al Qaeda, which had carried out similar attacks. If Daedalus was ever mentioned in the same sentence as the assault on the hotel or the chaotic shootings in the channels of New Venice, the discussion would quickly devolve into nonsensical conspiracy theories. So the company was safe in that regard.
Still, the loss of eight more troops stung, and his professional pride was deeply bruised. He salved his conscious with a glass of scotch, reminding himself of the pointlessness of self-recrimination. He had other matters to attend to.
He put his feet up, resting his heels against the edge of the thin mattress, near the woman’s frail legs.
“You’ll be glad to know your security protocols are functioning.”
Alice’s eyes flicked toward him, but she said nothing. The susurration of the assisted breathing machines pulsed.
“I had no idea you were that adept,” he told her. “You really should have told me.”
“She’s still alive?” the speech modulator croaked.
“Oh, yes. Very much so.”
The old woman’s eyes closed, but he detected a subtle uptick to her lips. The hag was smiling at his failures.
He moved quickly, snatching her hand in his. Although a stroke had left Alice’s entire body paralyzed, two fingers still managed to function properly. He grabbed her index and middle finger and savagely yanked the digits back. The scrape of bone and the snap of tendons stretched far beyond their natural elasticity was pleasing to his ears. Her eyes scrunched closed, but her eyelids were unable to stem the tide of tears. Rather than releasing her hand, he twisted the two broken fingers, applying a downward pressure to grind the bones of the proximal phalanges against the metacarpals, rolling her knuckles beneath his meaty fingers.
The corners of her jaws flexed, her mouth tightening against the respirator, her face screwed up in a horrendous grimace while she whimpered and cried. He dropped her hand then swiftly backhanded her face.
He tried to collect himself, but the anger was overwhelming. She was laughing at him, in spite of the pain he’d inflicted upon her. He straightened but thought of how easily he could wrap his hands around that frail neck and squeeze. He could rip that tube right out of her face, taking her throat with it, then choke her. He imagined her face empurpling, her mouth gasping for air, her eyes wide, while he squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.
This fucking bitch.
He sent a quick jab into her face, crumpling her nose beneath the large knuckles of his hand. Blood and snot flew from the pulped flesh. The bulbous cartilage of her already-deformed bridge had not quite healed from the last time he had broken it. The bruises circling her eyes were fading, but they would soon re-bloom with brilliantly dark shades of black, blue, and purple.
“Why do you always have to make things difficult for me, Alice?” he asked.
Of all the iterations of Alice Xie, the woman before him had been the most stable. She was temperamental, though, and prone to fits of uncooperativeness. For the most part, he had broken her. She was also proof that body-shifting could work, if applied with the right measures, under the right circumstances, with a specific protocol.
They had tested the procedure under various circumstances, with different variables, different drugs, and different degrees of mnemonic imprinting on brains of varying degrees of erasure. A complete template of Alice Xie had been implanted on a test subject who had not undergone a full-scale brain wipe, but the results had proven disastrous. The individual could not cope with multiple, fully cognizant personalities inhabiting a single, shared brain. In a fit of psychopathy, she had ripped out her own throat with her bare hands.
After that, Schaeffer and his team experimented with ZIP solutions, but in the end, it became clear that only a blank slate could handle the imprinting process.
And the old beaten hag was their greatest success. For all intents and purposes, she was an exact replica of Alice Xie. Mentally, at least.
Daedalus had attempted to replicate a more mobile and youthful Alice Xie, but those had all been mistakes. Schaeffer still bore the scars along his abdomen as a reminder. He was slightly proud of them, in fact. That Alice had tried to gut him with two shards of broken glass. Kaften had shot her twice, point-blank in the skull, despite Schaeffer’s protests. That had been their earliest success at revivification and their largest failure. That was not to say, however, that the experiment had been a disappointment. Rather, it had been a teaching moment.
“You could have been much more than this,” he said to her. He watched as her tears, blood, and snot dribbled down the crags of her ancient face, pooling betw
een the strands of the crow’s nest that was her hair and stain the white fabric of the pillowcase.
He couldn’t help but feel that the wrecked woman they had transformed into Alice Xie had, in fact, been his largest failure. All her cunning and intelligence was wasted inside the frail body. Before the Daedalus experiments, the woman had been clinically brain dead, but they’d sparked a fresh life into a dead soul clinging miserably to a pointless existence. The shell was unfitting, too unbecoming, for a mind like Alice Xie’s.
Mesa Everitt, on the other hand… the poor girl probably did not even understand what was happening to her. It was certainly unlikely that Alice would have shared everything, openly and fully. That was hardly her style. But the Alice inside Mesa was merely a shard.
Mesa, though, was beautiful, agile, and graceful—certainly a far more worthy host than the dried-up husk before him.
“Jonah,” the modulator croaked. The translation came with a noticeable hitch as the software stumbled over the mental and physical anguish of the old crone’s thoughts.
“He’s dead,” Schaeffer told her.
And again, the hag laughed at him. The electronic warble was like nails on a chalkboard, zipping an uncomfortable shiver up the length of his spine, bunching the muscles in his neck and shoulders. Her lips pursed around that damnable breathing tube, forming as close to a smile as she would ever get. The enjoyment was clear in her eyes, though, beneath the pool of tears.
“She’ll kill you,” she said.
Schaeffer wondered which “she” Alice was referring to—Mesa or the data packet that recognized itself as a small measure of Alice Xie.
It made no difference, he decided. He stood, feeling more drained than usual but no longer angry. She had sapped him of that raw emotion, and he’d inflicted the pain he had so very much craved. He smoothed out the tangles of hair across the top of her skull and kissed her forehead, feeling the balance of power shifting between them. He’d broken her nose and two of her fingers, but he still felt as if she had somehow gotten the better of him. He could punish her further, but he knew it would accomplish nothing. This Alice Xie was waiting for her death to arrive, and he refused to be complicit in that. She wanted to goad him, to push him over the edge. Instead, he stood and left the room. Another Alice Xie was out there—one who wanted desperately to live. Killing her would be reward enough.
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