He threw himself into my arms. “Abbymom! Abbymom! Mom! Mom!” Piercing cries, but I couldn’t answer.
I didn’t have the breath.
* * *
“I woke up!” His face was alight with excitement, pride, glee. All but bubbling with delight. “I woke up and you weren’t there, and I thought—”
“I went to check on…” I had to ease up, I was squeezing him too tightly. “All our gear was there, Geoff! How the hell did you wander off?”
“I didn’t. I was below, it’s the first time it happened. They…” A quick flicker of his tongue, wetting pale lips. He needed fluids soon. His eyes danced, and he hadn’t lost weight at all. “Well, they helped. Told me you didn’t know.”
“They?” I shook my head when he opened his mouth to explain, and I couldn’t stop smoothing his cheeks, touching his dark hair. Sand all over him, and you could tell he hadn’t bathed — a healthy heat-haze hung on him, filling my receptors with absolute proof he was alive, and whole, and safe. “No. Listen to me. You could have been hurt. You could have been killed.”
“I was fine.” The scar on his chin quivered a little. “I just went below.”
“Want something to eat?” Sam hadn’t moved. Still crouched on the other side of the small fire, he was very pointedly not studying us. As if he wouldn’t be gulping in all sorts of information through his panoptics and scans anyway.
“Sure.” Geoff glanced at me, the question evident in those wide dark eyes. I shrugged, and made my fingers loosen on his arms.
He’s taller. Had he really grown so much since we’d left the City, and I was just seeing it now after an absence? Or was it that he’d grown even since New Vega? The shape of his face seemed… different, too. Cheekbones higher, eyes a little smaller, his shoulders subtly changed. Broader, maybe. I began brushing the sand away from him as he shuddered and turned like a fourpad, my fingers testing the little bits of grit.
Below ground. Of course. It makes sense, that’s why they didn’t carry the shocktroopers out. All those stories. Fairytales and whispers, locked away in the dusty regions of pre-implementation memory, when the entire world was a warmbody’s confusion instead of the clarity of implemented senses and intake feeds.
Just like the whispers about the Collective, those silver-eyed cyborgs without an agent’s freedom of will. Some of the old stories called them Borrg, a word nobody knew the meaning of anymore.
I yanked him forward again, hugged him as hard as I could without hurting him. Still so fragile. Thin bones, an un-implemented skull.
But the shocktroopers were tough. If I can keep him alive long enough, will he be?
Alive and free. One was no good without the other. Or was that greedy of me? There’s no use in dealing yourself into a game like this without it, though.
The silent weight of Sam’s presence killed whatever I would have said. A facilitator might think he was seeing a weakness. A vulnerability. Something to exploit.
I wasn’t about to confirm.
I finally was able to hold Geoff at arm’s length, scanning him one more time just to make sure. “You could have been hurt. You could have been killed.” My throat felt dry, even though there was no reason for the sensation. “I shouldn’t have left you.”
“They told me where to find you.” He was smiling, those pearly, perfect teeth gleaming as full dark descended. “And listen, they’re happy.”
Wolfsong rose again, a net of wild spunglass howling. What did they live on, out here? Probably the brothers and sisters of the small once-furry thing roasting on Sam’s fire, and if there were trees nearby there was bound to be bigger prey. “Did you go through the township? Did anyone see you?” The thought of him wandering right where I threw a bunch of hackbombs and brought down all sorts of attention made everything inside my skin feel like it was crawling into a different configuration.
“I traveled at night. Stayed away from the lights and the people, they’re not safe. The worms, well, they have tracks. Like roads. I followed those.” He shook his head, peered at me through his sand-stiffened hair. A slight movement, like he wanted to hug me, but I kept my arms straight and stiff. Get him back into routine, he’s still just a kid. And Sam’s watching.
“Good. Get some fresh clothes, the gear’s right there. Then it’s time to eat.”
He nodded, his face firming up. Darted another glance at Sam, who stared at the fire like it contained a Control directive.
“Don’t worry.” Softly, just barely audible, I said it as reassuringly as I could. “He’s on our side for now. The instant he isn’t, I’ll kill him again. And he’ll stay dead.”
“I can hear you,” Sam replied, mildly. Nothing on his face but the usual indifference, moonlight and fireglow working together to turn his skin a sickly shade mine probably matched. “Come on, kid, if we leave this any longer it’ll burn. Consider me your guardian angel, now.”
It was absurd… but it did make me feel better.
* * *
We rode abreast in the cold breathing unquiet of a desert night, fourpads chuffing a little among themselves, my own carefully between Sam’s and Geoff’s. A blurry inkstain on the horizon drew no closer no matter how we plodded, and Geoff swayed in the saddle. I decided I didn’t want to question him any further until we were alone, and Sam didn’t make any inquiries either.
Wise of him.
Geoff didn’t ask where we were going, and neither did I. If Sam was leading us into a trap, well, it would hardly be worse than going back to Carsona. The locals there were about to get an influx of City types, and maybe it would do some of them a little good. Hard bitcoin would shower down, because even agents liked to eat.
So did other things. Maybe it would balance out the throat-ripping shocktroops.
After an hour of steady motion, I decided it was time. “Sam.”
“Hm?” He kept his fourpad a little further away from mine than absolutely necessary. Also wise of him.
“The shocktroopers. Second-gens.”
“Yeah.” He scrubbed at his face with one stiff-bladed hand, as if weary. The faint amount of gold stubble rasping against his palm was intentional; probably habitual camouflage. “Helixes packed with anything they could scrape from your boy there.”
I figured that much out, I’m not stupid. But if he wanted me to pull it out of him a piece at a time, I would. “Without nanos.”
“They had to find the right recessives. Otherwise the packing slagged the experiments. The holy grail would be a breeding female, but they haven’t figured that out yet.”
“A breeding…” I glanced at Geoff, who looked supremely unconcerned. “Military applications, of course. But—”
“It’s not just military.” Sam took a deep breath. “It’s evolution. Paxton was one of ours.”
What? “An agent did this? I thought corporations wouldn’t take implemented scientists.” At least, one carrying implants that weren’t done in their own bays, under close supervision. Too easy for a competitor to sneak a tattletale into your processes and walk away with profitable secrets.
Was it the light, or did he actually look pained? “Not Agency. One of us. Nikor’s.”
“Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?” I didn’t even bother to keep the disgust out of my tone.
“Stranger than fiction,” he muttered. “Do you ever wonder what the Agency’s long-term plan is?”
I shrugged, knowing he’d catch the movement on panoptics. “Settled for just surviving, Sammy.”
“One of these days I’ll tell you my actual name.”
“Don’t care.” I urged my fourpad closer to Geoff’s. He swayed even more, a tired little boy, and it was a moment’s work to lift him onto my saddle, settling him in front of me and grabbing his beast’s lead-rope. My hands worked, paying out the lead so the shaggy beast wouldn’t have to crowd. I could have just let it go, it would follow its furry friends, but better to be safe. “Shhh, kiddo. Rest.”
“They said you were looki
ng for me.” Slow and sleepy, Geoff slumped against me. My autonomics finally settled, their subroutines nice and even. “Sorry, Abbymom.”
“It’s all right. Just glad you’re safe.” I didn’t ask who told him that. Worms or wolves or whatever, it didn’t matter at the moment, especially with another pair of ears around. I settled for arranging my reins again, breathing in the smell concentrated at the top of his head — dust and boy, and that faint astringency. Almost caustic, a familiar echo of gray rings and rotating teeth. “Rest.”
“Shit.” Sam’s subvocal grumble disturbed his fourpad, but he shifted with the beast’s motion. “You really like this kid. Is that it?”
“Long-term plan.” I kept it barely audible. It really only took a moment or two to fit the pieces together, and even less than that to decide to ignore the rest of Sam’s poking and prodding. “To profit from implementation as long as possible.”
“Not quite.” Sam sighed. “Imagine everyone on the planet, even the Waste-bred, with a basic level of implementation. Immortality for a price. That’s been their game ever since the first nano breakthrough in ‘48. They’re close to doing it, too. Clouds of nanos released, self-replicating, merging with human tissue and—”
“More fairytales. Borrg. Complete assimilation.” I swiped at lank hair against my forehead. My thermal signature spread out, covering Geoff’s. “Didn’t they have holoshows about this?”
“Jess, we’re going to get exactly nowhere if you keep that up.”
“We’re already nowhere.” I pointed at the horizon. “Been nowhere since Egress. Don’t mind it.”
“How did you swing Egress? I can’t figure it out.”
A good agent never has just one card. I scanned the surroundings again. I was almost beginning to believe my kid was safe in front of me.
Sam sighed. “Anyway, they’re close to completion, but there’s an unexpected kink in the works. That kid. Paxton did something, and Nikor sent people to bring him and the kid in. Someone else jumped first. Paxton ended up dead, the kid got moved—”
“Doctor Pax,” Geoff piped up, helpfully. “I remember him. He was nice. He wasn’t like you, though. Cyborg.”
I wished I could see Sam’s expression. Would he wince at the word? We prefer implemented. The other, well, it means mindlessness.
The Collective. I wonder… Not enough data to tell.
“Do you remember what happened to him?” Sam, soft and cajoling.
I gave Geoff a warning squeeze, and he lapsed into silence, becoming boneless against me.
“The kid got moved,” I supplied, “and you decided to send me after him, gambling that I’d feel like I was in over my head and come crying to you for some kind of help.”
“The Agency sent a kill order through. It was lucky I was in rotation. I picked you because I thought… well, you were always my favorite, Jess.”
“You keep saying that.” I patted Geoff’s arm, smoothed his hair. What was it like, for a kid, to hear someone say kill order just as if they were noting the weather, or the state of the fourpads? “So Nikor owns you.” If I could believe in… what Geoff was, I could believe someone had dusted off the name of Nikor’s Rebellion for their own purposes. Maybe there were even unicorns or holotrolls out there somewhere.
Or even Libera, that shining free city.
A long silence, swallowed up by the desert night, the fourpads breathing clouds of steam, their footfalls in a steady jog-jangle rhythm. I let Sam wait before I took the conversational bait. “What does your fairytale want with my kid?”
“We still don’t know how Paxton did it. If we can decode him, even if the Agency goes ahead with Omega we’ll have recourse. Kid rejects nanos wholesale, and there’s got to be a way to replicate it, pack the helixes with his capabilities. Imagine, no more cancer, no more slag mutations, no more of the Agency having a lock on living and breathing in-City. You think the corporations own everything? Didn’t you get the memo about who owns them?”
My arms tightened fractionally. Not sure I ever cared to follow the whole stinking trail that far. There never appeared to be any point.
Sam continued. “The only reason that kid’s still alive is because CoreTech provided cover for what Pax was doing. Agency used Niful as catspaw to nab him, since Operations wanted to study him before they liquidated; Control found out and sent through the kill order. You were a bare twenty minutes ahead of a capture team from Control’s research side. Turf wars, you have no idea about the sodding turf wars.” A shake of his pale head. “The only place you’re going to be safe now is—”
“Spare me.” I smoothed Geoff’s hair again, stroking away sand and a thin crusting reflexive chemtesting gave me that familiar profile on. Something damp had smeared the grit against the strands, then dried. Look at those lovely peptides. ”Paxton was either from out-City or he had Egress license. Which was it?”
“He had black-card research clearance.” Did dear old Sammy sound surprised? “Full Egress whenever he… why?”
Huh. “Where are you headed?”
“Last communication told me to head into the Vines. We’ll be picked up.”
Not sure I want to be “picked up.” I wasn’t sure of a whole lot in this current situaion. But I let it go, for one very basic reason.
It’s always good to have a little cannon fodder around.
* * *
Of course even a desert would have a suburb full of greenery. Which might make the sand-glare the Ring, with its own stacked-stone skyscrapers and aristocracy. Except in-City, royalty is never that threadbare.
Or are they? Maybe the true aristocracy rumbles under the sand, just like it moves invisibly through a City’s human tides. A corporation gets to a certain size, and it stops behaving like a “group” and starts being a crowd — an organism with a mind of its own. A sort of basement sentience fills its tentacles, and there’s no going back. Despite Sam’s hints, I thought it goddamn likely it was that foggy artificial intelligence that made all the moves, and the rest of us just scrabbled to keep up.
The only way out was just what Geoff and I had done — opt into the wilderness. If everyone else did, the makers and breakers in their offices would have nothing left. That was something for them to fear, and the large, terrible tumors we called corporations would react with furious activity to every vanishing prospect of such a demise.
“I’ve seen maps.” Sam frowned at the steaming green wall at the edge of the sand. “But… ugh.”
A carpet of already-wilting wildflowers, briefly blossoming after the rains, unraveled a discreet distance from a steep slope. Their starry little faces full of cheerful color stared, surprised, at the sun that would end their small freedom soon enough.
Looking up from their dying beauty, the first thing you noticed was a mist, exhaling in loops and fringes from a mass of inchoate, sinuous shapes.
The Vines. They don’t move, they only seem to when the wind ruffles the thready masses at the tops of their snakelike stalks. Brown creepers loop crazily between them, encasing the trunks in a web like a spinwool sweater — cut one knot, and the entire thing unravels. Further up the slope the… trees, I guess you had to call them, started to grow taller. The jagged demarcation was the same in either direction — wilting flowers petering out, a narrow strip of darker sand, probably mixed with a stratum underneath, thin-fingering vines clawing at the beginnings of soil. Then the shrubs, growing mathematically taller as they receded from the killing heat of the desert pan.
A shy, secretive breeze slid past us, the desert breathing into the Vines. I sniffed deeply, testing.
That much greenery meant moisture. The fourpads snorted, a little unhappily, so I swung down from the saddle. I toed the dark sand and realized the creepers were secreting a chemical cocktail to keep any desert vegetation a comfortable distance away. Thick drops of clear moisture collect on the undersides of the fingering vines, and it soaked into the sand to prepare for the greenery to spread itself.
I glanced u
p at Geoff, who looked a little sallow in the moonlight. The greenery would mean more mammals, maybe even some large ones to whet his thirst. So far we hadn’t had to sacrifice a fourpad… but it was close.
I suppressed a sigh. Remounted with a creak, and eyed Sam. He wasn’t keeping a tight lid on his autonomics, or on his mouth. Maybe he thought I’d trust him if he chattered, or if I could hear his buffered pulse loud and clear.
In any case, he said there was a township a few days into the Vines. Once we got there, he would ping for pickup, whether by his fairytale or by the Agency didn’t matter. Since Carsona would be crawling with those hunting Geoff, all I had to do slip us both free of Sam at the right time, and let them chase their tails and his, too.
My handler probably mistook my look for interest, or for needing direction. “There should be a path a little north of here.”
I nodded. Geoff’s face was a white dish. He asked no questions. I didn’t know whether to be happy about that.
I pointed my fourpad north, and Geoff’s followed.
Two hours later, we plunged into the night under the Vines, lit only by faint fungal phosphorescence. The fourpads didn’t like it, and neither did I.
We went anyway.
Chapter Nine
I Think She’s Serious
During the day, the canopy turned everything below into aqueous green shimmer that didn’t raise blistering welts on Geoff’s skin. He avoided the faint specks and columns of unfiltered sunshine, but I caught him holding his hands out in the green glow more than once, marveling at the shadows rippling.
There was enough in the light to capture a bit of solar, and an agent can live even on poisonous greenery if she has to. It wasn’t necessary, the solar was enough. The edge of the Vines is scattered with small townships, a necklace of stragglers living in moss-covered shacks — but we avoided those.
She Wolf and Cub Page 14