She Wolf and Cub

by lillith saintcrow

  The smell was familiar. I inhaled sharply, no need for chuffing to distinguish one thread of scent-molecules from another. Not with the thing so reeking-close and streaking closer.

  It humped along the surface with oily, terrifying speed and drew itself up, foot after foot of ringed gray flesh. The sun striped it with steam — was the UV damaging it? Or was it just moisture loss from the oven of daylight, hammering us both flat in this cup full of shattered metal?

  Only rags of the bodies left. Probably ate them. Might eat the skimmers too, look at those teeth.

  Closer. Closer yet. Roaring. It exhaled all over me, and I saw those teeth actually moving. Revolving, ready to grind anything it could into a pulp.

  That mouth looked downright painful. And it could take me in one gulp. Still, when you are very small and facing something very large, maneuverability counts. I had already calculated its trajectory.

  Noise like an Egress Train crashing as it roared, the sound fuzzing across several different bandwidths. A jolt. I went flying, already tucking and rolling, skidding on the slimy residue still not dried by the heat. Tumbling, sand spuming, and the thing went over me, its bulk more sensed than seen, more felt than heard. Like taking a drop off a roof, knowing the wave of flying projectiles from the rival druglord’s cannon mounts was a breath behind you, you’d done everything you could and the next few moments you just relaxed and fell. You’d done all your planning, judged all your distances, and now it was time to see if you were really that good, or if you deserved to be splattered.

  Adrenaline against my tongue, bright copper. Sand and more of that goop showered down on me, small rocks, crystalline bits, tiny glittering things.

  It could have swallowed me, I suppose. It was fast enough. But instead, the worm went right over, and dove deep. The thunder of its passage faded, leaving me standing in the middle of a skimmer junkyard, rolled in slimy sand, and breathlessly laughing at the sheer impossibility of the whole thing.

  * * *

  I reached the rocks after noon, checked the fourpads — happily chewing on those succulents, now growing larger and larger the more southwest we tended. More plant life probably meant more refugees and castoffs from the Cities — or more Cities themselves, squatting like toads on resource veins—

  I froze.

  There was the sleeping-roll, the light blanket. The packs he liked to rest his back against. The scent of my dusty little boy all over the material, and watermaker, put together perfectly, set right by my own spot across the ring of stones containing ashes of the morning’s fire.

  “Geoff?” Even as I said it, I knew he wasn’t eliminating in the back of the cave, or curled in a dark corner.

  He was, quite simply, gone.

  Chapter Six

  He’s Taken

  Carsona was a corporation town. It was also close enough that the skimmers could have been raiders picking through its refuse, or even inhabitants out for a joyride. Geoff and I would have avoided the place, but whoever had taken him would have come through here.

  Or at least, so I hoped. Whoever it was, they hadn’t left a trace. Not even a thread of scent. Had Geoff surfaced from sleep and gone outside to find me? Unlikely in the daylight, but it could have happened. I hadn’t even left him a note — not that we had any paper, anyway.

  I shouldn’t have left him.

  To top it all off, he’d been right. It started raining.

  The clouds raced in like greased cargo containers down a magchute, and a wall of water crashed down on the desert. Rivers poured off slanted solarcatch panels, gullies opened up in the sand, the three streets — because Carsona was bigger than Vega by a long shot — became quagmires, and the entire township staggered under the weight. The late afternoon was a steam-hell, the sun doing its best to reassert its primacy but unable to reach through a pall of heavy, blackening skyveil. Thunder rolled, and it was my first time hearing sky-collisions without a City’s muffling dome of stat-veiling.

  It was also my first time feeling raindrops untainted by City smog or condenser-wash. The reflexive chemtesting in my skin returned some interesting results I might have wanted to explore, if the furious little black worry-mice hadn’t been running around inside my head.

  I should not have left him.

  The convoy station was a tall, ramshackle affair, drips and rivulets working through its presswood ceiling and falling into a sad collection of slop-pots in every conceivable shape and size. Crowded, too, because a convoy — bellowing fourpads, shouting people, a collection of feral township youth selling snacks and small cheap things — had just arrived. It was the perfect time for me to infiltrate and blend, and it was also the perfect time for whoever had taken Geoff to exfiltrate.

  Assuming I wasn’t too late.

  The corporate logo was a red globe on a blue background, not one I’d seen before. GeoNara. Pasted on everything, from the bleached buildings lining the thoroughfares to the sodden pieces of trash chucked into rusting cans. It took me less than two minutes to figure out the town was part of a mining and prospecting constellation, and that its last boom cycle had been a while ago. The veins for precious metals might be tapped out, but there were other layers in the strata around here that might be worth something.

  Whoever took him was good. Damn good.

  Agent good.

  It was a fine time to wish I had some Agency backup. Running trace on someone in the middle of a desert is a thankless fucking task.

  That was what I’d been counting on to help us. Probably what whoever snatched him was counting on too.

  How didn’t matter at this point. What mattered was finding out who. That would give me where, and when it did, they would see just how creative a flex liquidator could get at taking apart everything in her way. And if they’d hurt him…

  …well. Best not to think about that just yet.

  I drifted through the town in the heavy rain, sop-soaking and alert even though any onlooker would have sworn I was blind drunk. There were a few watchful predators, but none of them quite managed to catch up to me.

  No breath of an agent in town. Nothing out of the ordinary. No encrypted commchatter, not a hair out of place. It was just a sleepy collection of out-City trash scrabbling away at surviving.

  That was the biggest joke of all. No Ingress, and limited Egress, that was the rule with Cities. Couldn’t let any contaminants in, and if you weren’t on a sealed train who knew what you were carrying? The mystery was, why did so many people stay?

  On the other hand, there was a whole collection of dreamers and scammers in-City who said when I make Egress as if it was something to look forward to. I could have told them outside wasn’t any better than in, from what I could see. Still, if the Cities didn’t want to lose plenty of their cheap workforce, the limits on Egress made sense.

  Where is he?

  I’d almost suspect a thopter had come down and whisked Geoff away. I’d torn apart every piece of gear, but there were no tracers in anything. No sign of a struggle, no sign of him. Just disappeared into thin air.

  Someone had to have taken him. Sam, maybe? But where?

  Doesn’t matter. Going to find him.

  Really, it was laughably simple. I crouched in an alley, the rain thrumming every surface around me, and ran over my plan once more.

  Risky. Almost-stupid. Minimal chance of success.

  All I had.

  Okay, agent. Time to get arrested.

  I got to work.

  * * *

  Corporations run townships differently than in-City enclaves. In a City, you’ve got the hub-belt — the Ring, where the skyscrapers rise and the security troops patrol — and the Ring suburbs where those who earn out or claw their way into corporate grace have their climate-controlled homes with little strips of genengineered monoculture weed masquerading as lawn. Then there’s the Projekts where the industrial cogs rent their holes by the day or week, and the Cirquits where the heavy machinery throbs and the only thing left to fear is slidi
ng even further down on the ladder because at least you don’t live in the Slags.

  The Projekts were rough, but the Slags were worse.

  Corporation townships don’t have Rings. They’re only there for one thing: maximum efficiency in extracting cash or resources. Whatever doesn’t serve that extraction doesn’t get built. Nothing gets repaired, either, unless it’ll improve that efficiency. Nobody survives unless there’s a use for them.

  All of which means one thing: the security offices have top-of-the-line gear; productivity requires the armored fist and the stat-rifle.

  Also, it’s easy to get hauled in, when you’re in a corporation township. It can even be fun, if you like that sort of thing.

  When you’re looking to start a fight, you don’t pick the biggest place — they deal with stopping chaos before it starts on a daily basis. You don’t pick the smallest, either, because that won’t make enough noise. You want the juicy center, the place just big enough to make a ruckus and small enough to overwhelm.

  So I stamped into the middle-sized cantina, the one with a bead curtain that rattled every time someone came in, and the statfield was turned down all the way. No dust to keep out, not with all the water hanging in the air. Mud coated the peeling plas-lino floor, barely drying before boots smeared a fresh layer down. It was crammed with steaming warmbodies gulping down ersatz or grain alcohol before climbing back into the convoy transports, celebrating their safe arrival or imminent departure by poisoning themselves. Locals would be here to fleece the newcomers or get a bit of excitement, and the whole place was as crammed and blurry as only an afternoon of hard drinking could make it.

  I shoved my way up to the bar, careful to bump into several of the warmbodies — not too hard, but not too softly either. The mood in here was just right, a desperate, bleary fermenting, nerves not as sodden as they would be later but inhibitions nicely blunted.

  Wet and draggled as I was, nobody paid me a second glance except those I stepped on during my trip to the bar.

  It’s always easy to start a fight. All you have to do is spill someone’s drink.

  I jostled a big bear of a man — probably a mechanic, carrying a powerful fug of lubricant, sweat, and burning metal — with just enough force to slop his glass of grain alcohol. He growled an obscenity, but he didn’t have enough dominance in him to start a melee. Still, I trod on his toes as I staggered past, all the warmbodies now marking me as drunk and witless.

  By the time I’d made a complete circuit of the cantina’s main floor, I’d antagonized just about everyone who was likely to have a temper. That wasn’t what had the whole place on edge, though. It was the carefully balanced pheromone mist I was pumping out, saturating the warmbodies with uneasy aggression. The roar of conversation had turned saw-edged, but the bartender — only about half as intelligent as Madam B back in New Vega, with the vicious green eye of a looksee implemented on his withered left shoulder — was too busy mixing and pouring to notice.

  Walls of glazed mud, shored into place with pressed pulpfibre and scrap, dripped with condensation as dusk rose and the temperature dropped. I waited just a little longer, letting the pheromone mist work and take on a darker, sharper edge.

  A knot of caravaneers loudly but genially arguing over some arcane bit of trivia at one end of the bar didn’t notice when I sidled nearby. Twenty seconds of fine-tuning the mist, hearing the pitch and timbre of the argument change, and I struck, all but throwing myself against the biggest of them. His cornglass mug went flying, grain alcohol spilled, and he bellowed, lashing out.

  From there it was simple. Feinting and ducking, blurring to different flashpoints in the crowd, adding just enough pressure to keep everything boiling. I even helpfully threw one or two of the warmbodies who tried to restore order out through the bead curtain into a sea of gritty mud.

  By the time the security detail arrived with shock batons to sort everything out, the entire cantina was a shambles, the bartender cowering in the only shelter he could find — the malodorous pit they charitably called a restroom. It was no great trick to get shocked or cuffed, I just had to go rigid before going limp, and pretend that it hurt. They assumed I was just another caravaneer, and within fifteen minutes I was stat-locked in a cell hollowed out of crumbling sandstone, in the basement of the security detail’s nerve center.

  Just where I wanted to be.

  * * *

  The head of security was a hard-bellied male warmbody with white muttonchop whiskers and a shiny fist-shaped alloy badge. The blue and red of his uniform had only faded a little, and the rest of his salt-and-pepper mane was slicked back with rancid fat mixed with cheap synthesized cologne.

  The shockflex restraints at my wrists hummed slightly as I shifted my weight. Rolled in mud and splattered with both ersatz and grain alcohol, no doubt I looked sorry indeed. I’d heard them taking out the flotsam of the fight in ones and twos for a couple hours now, sorting through the mess now that everyone was reasonably sober.

  The nameplate on the desk read Berry, its mellow brass gleam no doubt lovingly polished every week. The lino was glossy, though it had been patched in places. Leaning back in his dangerously creaking chair, the big man in town regarded me from top to toe.

  The door closed. Subroutines over every autonomic. They had security measures, yes. But all the scanhops, triggervalves, pressure sensors, and bioscanners in the world won’t help when they’re not even switched on.

  Too easy. I dispelled impatience, settled into waiting.

  My awareness roved in wide arcs as the chair creaked. There was the terminal, sitting dead and dark. After so long in the damn desert it was a relief to see a rectangular black block with fitted input jacks and a pair of split keyboards. Looked like a PransTech 5806, not the newest but not entirely obsolete either. It would have linkup capability, and once I—

  “Ain’t you a pretty little thing.” The warmbody heaved himself up. His chair grunted. I had to replay the audio inside my head just to make sure he’d actually said that.

  I’m covered in mud and stink of fourpad and stale alcohol. Your oculars need adjusting, sir. All the same, it made everything simpler. Once again, a warmbody sank to the lowest possible level.

  Was there ever a time when they didn’t? After a while, when you’re so thoroughly implemented, you sort of… forget.

  “You ain’t got no ID, and no multipass either. So. What’s your name, honey?”

  I peered through filthy, matted strings of hair. The restraints at my wrists were stupid-simple flexcable with low shock capability. Easy. The warmbody was taller and probably thought he was heavier than me, and was most likely used to the desperate offering whatever they could. Good thing my gear was safely hidden.

  You thought Geoff was safely hidden too.

  That was a distracting thought. I shelved it and let the warmbody heave himself a little closer.

  “Now, you don’t look like you like being dirty. You tell me your name, and we’ll get you a nice bath. Hot water. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  I wondered how many times he’d said this to any female without ID unlucky enough to end up in one of the sandstone cells. I wondered how long ago was the first time he’d said it. So far, this was depressingly textbook.

  He was almost in range.

  What’s that? Footsteps. Running. My hormone balance shifted, my weight sinking into my left leg. If they’d scanned me — but I’d have felt it.

  Like you didn’t feel someone watching you and your kid? Move. Move now.

  I didn’t, though. A runner’s instinct, keeping me loose and ready because he was still just out of optimal strikezone. There was a thudding at the door.

  “Berry!” It was the same pimple-faced guard who had prodded me out of my cell. “Attack!”

  “For the love of—”

  The guard started babbling, something about bodies out at the Shalter place. “Everything busted up and there’s — you ain’t gonna believe this, Sheriff, but there’s blood, throats
torn open and everything. Whatever did it drank their blood.”

  The muttonchopped disaster stepped squarely into the strike zone, and I moved.

  Kick to the side, the pimpled guard’s knee cracking like a twig, and the flexcable of the restraints groaned as I looped it around Berry’s neck. The shock capability tingled pleasantly across my buffering, but turned the warmbody into a jitterlocked piece of meat. A quick yank to keep it snug, another precise application of force to the guard’s solar plexus with my other foot. Just like dancing, not even quarter-speed.

  Creaking as the small bones in Berry’s neck fractured. He kicked as the shocks jolted through him, but it was child’s play to keep him from regaining his balance, and motor function degrades almost instantly when the carotid is clamped anyway. I wouldn’t have saved him for Geoff, though — an acidic note to his sweat shouted some form of disease.

  I didn’t have time to slowly strangle him, so I gave another quick jerk, cleanly fracturing the cervicals, and let his body spill to the floor. Dragged the gasping, kitten-weak pimple-guard further into the room by his ankle, and heaved the reinforced door shut, priming the pressure sensors on the keypad with a quick tap.

  I didn’t want to be disturbed.

  The sheriff’s bowels had released. It didn’t matter, but I did drag the guard away from the mess. The terminal lit up when I pressed the corekey; the spectral light from the four screens — only four, this was the desert — bathing the entire room in a harsher glow.

  What I wouldn’t give for a nice KanthCoroCorp deck. Oh well. Adapt and make do, agent.

  “Here we go,” I muttered, more to give the guard something to focus on than out of any real need to be audible. His gasping and the irregularity in his heartbeat would need to be dealt with soon, because I wanted him conscious enough to question.

  Whatever did it drank their blood. My fingers danced over the split keyboards, splitting queries and narrowing down options. The linkup wasn’t even password protected.