There were no defenses. No statcannons, not even a guard perimeter. Geoff and I plunged into a labyrinth of passages on the outskirts, and a fine mist drifted down from sprayers far overhead. My vision blurred slightly before the nanos analyzed and blocked it. Interesting. Chem signature there… they make this from the resin too. No wonder they don’t need defenses. A few minutes of this and any warmbody will be too happy-dappy to fight.
“It smells funny.” Geoff’s nose squinched up. “Wet. Nasty.”
“Mild narcotic.” A shudder ran through me as the nanos finished dispelling it and began manufacturing blockers. “Do you feel sleepy?”
He shook his head. “It just smells weird.” But he yawned, hugely. A tired child, the tips of his sharp white teeth flashing once. “You think they’ll kill him?”
“Maybe.” And I won’t be there to put him back together. The commchatter kept going, and I squinted. Crowd noises, but I saw nobody. My scans came back negative, too. The confusing haze from the resinous windows, refracting and filtering scans in weird fractals, didn’t help.
“I don’t…” Geoff swayed. I put out a hand to brace him. “Huh. Funny.”
Fuck. This was all wrong. There was crowd-sound, and commchatter, but my scans didn’t show a blessed thing. The lack of litter began to bother me even more. Not so much as a wrapper or a dropped spanner to mar the vine-tangled forest floor. Moss hung in great sheets, and the further we penetrated the tangle, the more my unease sharpened.
It was almost a relief to come around a corner, Geoff straightening and shaking off the narcotic haze, and see a human shape.
Except it wasn’t. It was an agent, all in black, with a black wide-brimmed hat straight out of Cris Zifter holos. Male, a little taller than Sam, wide shoulders and my scans pinging on weird valleys and mountains in his nanoprofile. The tingle of being scanned in return slid over my skin, and my fourpad pushed forward, Geoff halting and staring at this apparition with the dark, fear-dilated eyes I thought we’d left behind in the City.
The agent spread his hands, and his wide white smile was enough to warn me. I yanked back on the reins, reaching stupidly for where my statrifle would have been on my own saddle, my fingers closing on empty air because my favorite fourpad had been vaporized.
Shit. Time to get creative.
Geoff made no sound when I hit. I tried to be gentle, both of us down and rolling into a manky, close side-passage. Vines shuddered as I tumbled over them, my arms and legs a cage around a child’s thinness. Half-rotted cloth ripped, my shirt and utility vest shredding against the abrasive husks.
Get some height. What the hell are those mods in his profile?
Now my scans were alive with movement. I hadn’t heard them before because they were agents in basemode, and they were all… strange.
The commchatter, part of it thick datastreams, sharpened as I launched myself, Geoff clinging to my neck and resin-windows shattering. They were everywhere, encrypted and not, the entire township-sized structure resonating with sonic wash to pinpoint my location and fog my scans.
“I dreamed him!” Geoff screamed into my neck. “I dreamed him, Mommy!”
We’re going to have to talk about that. Just hang on a second. The fourpads could shift for themselves. If I could just get high enough, I could get through a section of the Trapp field that wasn’t locked-down from stat discharge—
BOOM.
Falling. Arms and legs suddenly numb. Curled around Geoff, a thin shell for such a precious thing, what the hell was that? Sonic, plas, what?
It burrowed inside my head, overwhelming intake feeds and shorting out reflex loops. Another crunch as I hit the ground and the pain, great swelling breakers of it, nanos trying to cope with disaster, emergency sealing and repair.
Too slow. I was healing too fucking slowly.
“Careful.” Footsteps, too light or heavy to be just-plain-warmbody. Why wasn’t I healing? “This one’s a hellion.” A short, unamused chuckle. “Give her a jolt if she starts again.”
“Abbymom?” Geoff’s whisper. “Mom?”
Nano reset pulse. Ouch. It was a relief to figure out what had happened — a focused magno-lectric pulse, from a piece of Agency-strength tech. The first iterations of nanos were prone to going a little weird, and the resets were needed every month or so to keep everything functioning and the agent tumor-free. That didn’t happen anymore, and when you were buffered a pulse wouldn’t kill you.
It would only incapacitate you for a little while. Already my nanos were shaking off the reset, each one a star in the river of constellations that made up me. Each one spreading the message — hey, we’re not in a stasis tank, we’re fine, pass the word along, will you? Let’s get back to work.
Agents. Closing in. Footsteps — the agent in the black hat. Caught in a bad holo. Emergency measures.
Arms and legs shaky, with only warmbody strength. Bones creaking as the nanos shook off lethargy and swarmed. A low humming under the noise of the Trapp field locking down again — were the idiots outside still firing at it? Morons. Where was Sam?
I levered myself up, my ribs snapping out and remolding themselves, a gout of clear red-tinged liquid coughing from my nose and mouth, all over my front like a drunken hax-sniffer’s bib of vomitus. Geoff’s fingers plucking weakly at me — he was trying to help.
I pushed him behind me. He didn’t resist. I swayed, a flood of adrenaline triggering other emergency cascades. Fight or flight? Can’t run like this.
Guess it’s fight.
Blood dripping in my eyes, nanos diving back under my skin to continue their work. Faithful little silver motes, crawling all through me. Sorry, that was a bad hit. Let’s see what we can do.
“Geoff,” I croaked.
“Mama?” So small, his dry little voice.
“If they put me down, run.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” he whispered.
“Do as I say.” I pushed myself up straighter, scans coming back online, flicking through alternatives inside my head. Combat capability at a ridiculously low percentage, but I’d had worse odds before, hadn’t I?
Not really.
All the tech, all the implementation, all the struggle and dead bodies and planning for contingencies, and in the end, a simple pulse was going to take me down.
I took a half-step forward. The other agents drew back, a collective movement. Kind of a compliment. Black Hat examined me.
He had a cruel sharp nose, cream-pale skin, flat silvery oculars, and a flat unamused mouth. No moss on him, no rotting. All of them were dry, and they all had the same silver eyes as the agents in New Vega. The same weird modding on their nanoprofiles, too. They all moved the same way — when Black Hat tensed, they followed suit, and when he moved, their balance shifted slightly. Those terrible blank oculars all focused on me, and I had the sudden weird idea that I was being examined not by a bunch of agents, but by one organism with several different eyes.
And hands.
“I’m going to make this simple,” Black Hat said, and pointed. Not at me, but past. “I want the kid.”
I had to clear my throat, and the crowd moved forward a few paces again. Where had they all been hiding?
Doesn’t matter. I made sure each one of them could hear me, nice and loud, no subaudible grumbling here. It was a proverb popular both in-City and out, because it expressed a basic philosophical truth.
“Want in one hand, shit in the other. See which fills up first.”
He showed his teeth, a horrid wide triangular peelback of those thin lips, and he probably would have jumped me. I was braced for it, ready, but another voice intruded.
“Careful.” Sam stepped out of the shadows at the rear of the crowd. His clothes were in rags, same as mine, and he looked like he’d been rolled across the jungle floor a few times. “He wants her alive.”
“He can go fuck himself,” Black Hat spat.
Sam shrugged. “Why don’t you say that to his face, then?”
&
nbsp; Now. Do it now, while they think you’re weak.
I lunged, my bladed hand crunching in the throat of the closest silver-eyed agent. Hooking and ripping, a gout of blackish blood full of silver motes swarming in an unfamiliar pattern.
Then my handler shot me. Or rather, he lifted a familiar black dial-box, and thumbed the switch while pointing the wand end at me. Another nano reset pulse crashed into me, and I went down hard.
Chapter Eleven
Black Hat Collective
They came from below.
It wasn’t any sort of Libera. It was just a shell, and it was clean because it was a decoy, a façade built over the entrance, booby-trapped and full of nasty surprises for anyone stupid enough to mount an assault. The Trapp field could lose the three aboveground generator-vents and still seal the entrance doors; there were secondary vents hidden away.
Hide, Sam had said. Don’t go below.
I began to surface about two and a half minutes after he’d hit me with the second pulse. Restraints — not flexcable either. You can’t immobilize an agent for more than a short while, we’re just too good at wriggling. But a good way to stretch that little while out is with a cram-cradle. Wrists and ankles bound, chained together with cinchfilaments and then roped to each other with more cinchfil, your elbows, knees, ribs, hips, and head caged too. The harder you pull, the less give there is. Then sheets of cramwrap, round and round, a swaddling robbing the agent of everything but a few centimeters of breathing space. Struggle, and the wrap tightens, cutting off your air and sending you into anaerobic reserve mode.
Uncomfortable, to say the least.
I came back online in bits and pieces, being carried down a long ramp. For a moment I thought I was back in the city again, in the critical second stage of implementation, gliding on a gurney through the bowels of one of the black cubes.
Wait. I’m already implemented. Am I being upgraded? What the hell?
Each tiny bump made the wrap constrict a little. I couldn’t get enough air in, and hovered between reserve mode and waking, struggling to cycle up. Little flashes, almost-dreams, on the half-lit border between consciousness and the soft fuzz of anaerobic.
Geoff, biting his lip a little as he concentrated on the watermaker. His head upflung, testing the wind, moonlight turning his young face into an adult’s for a single weary moment.
Sam on the other side of the tank wall, his face unreadable as I floated. He’d come by to check on me during upgrades, and often stood there watching, turned into a green ghost by the restraint gel or tinted blue by the narcofluid. Sam splayed in the sand, limbs akimbo, watching me contain Geoff’s struggles. What was that look on his face? There and gone in less than a heartbeat.
“He wants her alive.”
Who?
Flash after flash — running rooftops, dodging fire, the cold scrape-burning between my legs as I stared into a clinic’s harsh lamplight overhead, the cocktails of drugs and hypno to prep me for the first stages of implementation. The second, critical stage where the neural reshaping takes place, nanos differentiating and multiplying, a hyperalloy bath crackling with lectric force as the little things formed chains to reinforce bones, reshape muscles, make me stronger, faster, smarter. The third phase is all delicate work, fine-tuning metabolism and cycling parameters, making sure the nanos have the complex mélange of chemicals, metals, minerals, and proteins they need to finish implementation. Jolts of concentrated sucrose, glucose, tanchrymose, all sorts of vat-grown proteins — it takes a lot of energy to keep a body functioning through such invasive restructuring.
It was enough to make you wonder if you were the same person when you woke up, sore as hell and with twitchy trigger reflexes. Short courses of sedation while you’re taught to control your new body, hypno from the prep locking into place and making sure you don’t kill the warmbody support staff or accidentally walk through a wall. Learning to cycle effectively, how to conserve your energy, how to deal with basic biological necessities becoming nothing but amenities. How to pass for warmbody. The temperature fluctuations — until you learn to normalize, the bone-reinforcing can make you feel cold. Even after you find your norm physically, there’s the psychological impacts. Sometimes the coldness doesn’t go away.
You’re a machine. You’re Agency property. You are owned, and you will do your job or you will be Dismissed.
Finding out that being able to throttle your autonomics didn’t mean you didn’t feel it. The Dismissal rate spikes, we were told, between the first six and eight months after implementation. That spike is spurred by purely psychological degradation; even the best testing beforehand won’t show where an agent might go off the rails in those first few months.
After that, the Dismissal rate declines to near zero — but the threat never goes away.
The jostling stopped. The cramwrap relaxed a little as I was laid on a flat surface, and I heard the humming of a grav-gurney. So familiar.
Their eyes. Their nanoprofiles. Something there. Oxygen crept back in, I hovered on the borderline a little longer, then woke fully when the cramwrap was fractionally loosened again. Not enough, but at least I could breathe, and my nanos went into overdrive.
My vision sharpened. The bouncing, effervescent sound in the corridor was the vibrations of the Trapp generator. Did they live with that all the time, humming in their bones?
Sam walked alongside the gurney. Four of the silver-oculared agents surrounded us, as if they were warmbody scientists and support staff accompanying a new agent. Their voices wavered, reaching me in bursts through the hum and my intake feeds fuzzing intermittent as I tried to shake off reserve mode.
Just let the nanos work.
Geoff. Where was he?
Aural intake blazed back into life. “—not going to be happy about this.” Sam, in one of his more patently reasonable, negotiating tones.
“That is beyond our control.” A female silver-eyed agent, the words passionless and uninflected even more than a facilitator’s just-passing-the-news-along.
“Sure it is, but if the Collective tries to implement her, we’ll lose a resource. And she’s a newer model, you might not be able to—”
“Too dangerous.” Male, now, from my left. Strangely, it was the same voice, the same tone, but filtered through a different throat’s dimensions. “Must be contained. You are useful. Do not press.”
Sam didn’t miss a beat. “You can understand my hesitation. I’m the one who has to take the news back.”
“The others have been captured. All is according to plan.” Another male, down near my feet instead of at my head. Again, same voice, different throat.
I ran the differences in the nanoprofile through my head again. Glucose levels in my brain spiked, almost shutting down my precarious hold on consciousness.
The differences weren’t really the odd thing. The odd thing was the overlapping similarity in each agent’s profile. Introducing your nanos into another agent will trigger a war between the two, the host’s body the battleground, and the invaders will die a swift death.
They replicate, sure, and you don’t run out of them… but it’s not pleasant to think about losing a massive number of the colony that makes you better.
Wait. Don’t look at that, look at the—
Driven into anaerobic again. I surfaced a bare thirty seconds later according to chrono, and spent a few moments getting as much oxygen as I could without triggering the wrap.
“Whose plan? No, I don’t want to know. I’m just a messenger, guys.”
“You have your part.” The female again. “You are useful.”
It’s not the nanoprofiles at all. They’re outside parameters. Measurements not even close to optimal, not even close to baseline.
That had been nagging at me ever since I’d tangled with the silver-eyed bastards in New Vega. Their measurements just hadn’t been right, and the satisfaction of figuring that out was only deep enough to make everything else that much grimmer.
These peopl
e shouldn’t have been implemented at all, and doubly shouldn’t have survived the process. Which meant… what? So hard to think when each fresh burst of brain activity threatened to shut me down into reserve again.
“Thanks.” A touch of grim amusement. Sam didn’t look down at me — I could only see him in quarter-profile.
“We are here.” The second male spoke, and a rosy light bloomed through my eyelashes. The gurney bumped just a little, and the wrap choked up again, but not before a faint, horrible idea occurred to me.
They have nanos, all right. They’re not agents? The measurements….
The Collective.
* * *
Swimming up again. A stinging all over me. Voices.
“—fighting the sedation. How is that possible?” That same voice, this time through a younger throat, its shades and nuances of individuality not yet erased.
“The will commands, the body obeys.” Black Hat, sounding grimly amused. “Leave us.”
“Sir?”
“Leave us.”
Sound of movement. Sam’s voice, then, swimming through the layers of gauze and wrap holding me down. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I didn’t tell you to. They’re useful, but we don’t want them getting ideas.” A slight ticking — the sound of a controlled drip. Chemical stink, familiar but I couldn’t quite place it. “Besides, you’ll want to make sure we don’t put any tiny gifts in this prize for your owner.”
“Glad you understand, and you’re not going to implement.” A bitter, sardonic edge I’d never heard Sam deploy before. “You do realize he wanted the kid too?”
“Fine. Take the kid, and we’ll keep this one.”
Silence.
“I thought so.” Black Hat laughed like a drug dealer doublecrossing a decoy runner. “How are you going to explain this to him?”
“That’s my problem. Hullo, Jess.”
She Wolf and Cub Page 17