She Wolf and Cub

by lillith saintcrow

  Blinking, slowly. The dripping was sedation tubes, the standard five-tower complement. I couldn’t see past them and a circle of red glow I was trapped in. My tongue had turned thick and slow.

  I still managed a word. “Bastard.”

  They drew closer, the shadows looming over me. Black Hat’s irises were luminous, the pupils vertical slits, fine silvery threads all through the white. Not the flat metallic orbs the others had. Was that why he sounded like himself, and the others were all one voice?

  His voice?

  My scans were completely nonfunctional. The nanos were struggling to keep me conscious.

  Sam, still in rags and covered with crusted blood, sap, and various other things, smiled at me. It was a rather gentle, diffuse beaming, strange on his thinner-than-in-the-City face. “Nice to see you too.”

  “Young love.” Black Hat’s snigger grated across my nerves. The stinging was the sedation lulling my nanos, a chemical restraint. Sooner or later the little silver motes would eat through it, and bring me fully online. Then I could figure out getting free of the wrap. “Jess, is it?”

  No, it’s not. “Who… are you?” I sounded drunk. A few times in my warmbody youth I’d gotten wasted on water-clear glivorny; this was the same slurring, the same pause, the tongue not obeying.

  “We are Rebellion.” The thin lips lingered over the word, almost lovingly. “We are Collective.”

  Great. That doesn’t tell me a fucking thing I didn’t already guess, you holotale bastard. I could feel my face moving, unmoored from my control. What was my expression giving away?

  “She doesn’t look impressed.” Sam, helpfully. I didn’t glance at him.

  There would be a point, very soon, when I’d talk to him up close. It would be a short conversation, and when it was done, his head would not only be separated from his body, but I’d find something that could destroy an agent’s braincase. It might take me a while, but I’d figure it out.

  It was what I would call worth the fucking effort.

  Black Hat shrugged. “We could flood her with our little friends. She would be an asset, once we finished. Such dedication.”

  Sam made a slight movement. Was it a shrug? “The risk of failure is about eighty percent with the new models. More importantly, this would also conclude our business relationship in a very unsatisfactory fashion.”

  I made my mouth move again. I know who you are. ”Nikor.” Not a real man. Nikor’s a myth. Was this man just using his name?

  They both stilled, an agent’s uncanny quiescence.

  Black Hat gazed at me. The dripping kept going, each little drop another brick landing on me. I finally placed the chemical smell filling my nostrils.

  Restraint gel. And a lot of it. How do they have that here? Where do they get this tech?

  Black Hat decided it was time to pontificate a little. “The Cities are dying. The corporations are strangling each other. Liberation is around the corner.” That stretched smile, spreading those thin lips. “When we harvest the zero-gen, the Collective will spread. Tell me…” A pressure on the wrap, faint and faraway. He was stroking my belly. “What would you give, to have a child of your own? A true one, not that facsimile? We could make it happen.”

  You motherfucking piece of shit. “My… kid… Fuck… you.” I am going to kill you, too. You can’t hold me forever.

  “Charming.” Polishing the wrap over my belly, rubbing it in small circles. “You’re angry. So am I. Don’t you want to burn their world down? Didn’t they lie to you, the same way they lied to me? You’re a machine. You’re expendable. You belong to the Agency now.”

  “Collective.” I croaked. “Just like… a corporation.” You are what you hate, didn’t Barlowe always say that? “You are what you hate, Sara, so be careful.” Why he called me “Sara” I never knew.

  Barlowe’s body hanging from the railprobe, a good clean sudden death.

  The agent-implemented don’t inadvertently blush. Still, his face twisted and darkened, and I realized, with a certain chemically blunted satisfaction, that I was seeing rage so intense a subroutine couldn’t clamp it.

  Good.

  Black Hat stilled again, his expression smoothing out. Sam didn’t move, but I could feel his tension. If Black Hat wanted to Dismiss me, now was the time, and it would force Sam into doing… what?

  Probably nothing.

  Hate is stupid. Even some agents don’t ever figure that out. They think practically invulnerable means go ahead and waste resources. Plus, you’re never going to earn your way out of the Agency’s investment in you and subsequent upgrades, so some don’t bother being frugal. Already owned, might as well use it. They let petty one-upmanship and vendettas bloom.

  The real reason not to hate is just that it’s so inefficient. It lets things slip, like the fact that one of my ragged nails had been working at the bottom of the cramwrap steadily now, picking and shearing a few molecular strands at a time. The longer I could keep him talking, the more chance I had of making some sort of move, even with the sedation. Just put your head down and get the job done. Like waiting, it was the most efficient way, but also the slowest.

  “A pity we won’t keep her.” Black Hat was back to sardonic. “Smart and vicious. I almost envy you.”

  “Can the Collective envy?” Sam sounded only mildly interested. I focused up past them, at the glaring, ruddy light — neon tubes, just like in the Cirquit or the Projekts. In-City they were blue, because that was a soothing color. A cold color, too, to keep people shivering and turning their thermservers up. Red was too dangerous to bathe a whole population in. “Or is it just a warmbody response?”

  “They feel nothing.” Black Hat’s fingers sharpened, digging into my midriff. My slight movement, dragging the sharp broken point of one fingernail through the cramwrap at just the right angle, didn’t cease. He’d probably think it a nerve oscillation. “The burden is mine. Would she share it, if we took hold?”

  Sam shrugged, filthy cloth rasping and flapping slightly. “The weight of rule, old man. Let’s get this over with.”

  “You prefer to be aboveground.” Another bitter little laugh. “Very well. Goodbye, Jess. Sweet dreams.”

  Anger is inefficient, too. So is flailing. My mouth opened, but anything I could have said was drowned as the sedation spiked and the gurney tipped. No numbpatch — had Sam had it for this moment, and used it early?

  So I was awake when they tipped me into the restraint tank. Burning on faraway drowsing nerves, time slowing down, the thick green fluid closing over my head, the reflex of holding a breath irresistible because when it ended and my body expelled the air, the gel would slide down my throat, fill my lungs, and suffocating, trying to breathe, trying to breathe—

  Mercifully, I grayed into anaerobic reserve mode. It didn’t halt the inevitable.

  I drowned.

  * * *

  Green glow. A vertical restraint tank is a tube of shatter-resistant plasilca; it cradles and cushions. The cramwrap dissolving in floating gauze veils, so slowly. Time stretches, slows, limbs heavy and clumsy with sleep. Just enough oxygen and glucose to keep you right above shutdown, and the veils of chemical restraint turn the nanos all the way down. Pulse, respiration, metabolism all throttled back to deepcycle norms. It’s not like a stasis tank, blissful oblivion floating in blue narcofluid. This was for the treatments that required an agent to still have some baseline activity, not the absolute blankness of stasis.

  The worst part was trying to think. Urgency pressing on me, the soupy half-sense of something wrong, struggling against the weight. Shadows moving outside the tube — the pressure equalized and I floated, veils of dirt, sap, dried blood unwinding too as the gel passed through the corelli filters and returned.

  I’m in a tank. Something happened. Am I upgrading?

  The gel tasted wrong. Agency restraint gel actually has no taste. This had a bitter green undertone.

  Trees. The trees are part of it.

  Trees? The Ring an
d the suburbs had them, with statrepellers to keep the soot and pollution off. I’d crouched in one, moving with the limbs, a camo-suit blurring my outline, as I watched a group of—

  Little boy, dark hair and a scar on his chin…

  —of schoolchildren walking home.

  Hey freak! A flung stone, the taunting. The child’s thin shoulders, defeated and yet somehow expressing arrogance…

  There had been a job. A restaurant full of fauxsmoke, and the brown paper envelope. Sam across the table. I don’t do kid jobs, I told him.

  The important thing I had to do floated with me, just out of reach. Restraint gel does funny things to your perceptions. The two shadows in the room outside faded, and the light was wrong too. Agency restraint bays are lit with cold clinical whitebars, pitilessly exposing every stain and crack in the world.

  I’m not in the City.

  My body knew better than I did. My left hand, now free of cramwrap, curled slowly, so slowly, into a fist. Pressure against my wrists.

  Restraints. Why cinchfilament? That’s not right.

  A flash — a pair of big, wounded dark eyes. A salt-hot, concentrated smell. Soft, fragile warmbody arms around my neck.

  The cinches loosened, restraint gel easing them away. Even cinchfil gives up under the gel. Fuzzy awareness of something important, something critical, fighting through the haze.

  I saw it on a holo. You don’t have to.

  Pressing my lips to the curve of a fragile skull, and that smell. Of all the scents in the world, that one reached through the restraint gel and pulled on me, made my left fist curl even more tightly. The cinchfilament on that wrist was almost eaten away, and my arm started to bend, lifting, lifting.

  Reserve glucose. Emergency directive to the nanos, struggling against the sleepy warmth. Concentrate.

  One of the shadows came back. Just at the edge of my perceptions. Dangerous, but I had to try.

  Why? What’s so important? You’re in restraint, probably because a job went sideways…

  Light. Not outside, but inside my head. A plasma ball, searing-bright, and the brain activity ate up a significant part of the glucose stocks I needed.

  Geoff. They have him. Harvest, that motherfucker said. The nanos…

  The whole thing trembled inside my skull, and the realization that followed tightened my left fist even further. My arm was drifting, elbow almost near my ear — difficult to gauge distances, proprioception off because the gel had varying resistances. Had to account for that, if I intended…

  Don’t worry about the nanos. Don’t worry about the Collective. It’s simple. They have your kid.

  Floating. The gel began to eat at the rags of sodden, rotting cloth on me. That was the green tint in the taste. The sap, throwing off the chemical balance needed to keep me completely passive. Use it, then. Work fast.

  Except I couldn’t work fast. Hurrying would disturb the glucose harboring, and the gel would resist more the faster I moved.

  They have your kid.

  Strange. Floating, concentrating, the realization flooding me with clarity for a single moment. I wasn’t being efficient. Not anymore.

  Anger wastes energy. So does hatred.

  But they had my kid.

  Sooner or later, there is a place beyond rage.

  My arm drifted up further, and I braced myself.

  Geoff needs you.

  Get out of here.

  Hanging in the restraint gel, I twitched.

  * * *

  Thud.

  The long slow cycle begins again. Drawing back the arm, beginning the glucose harboring procedure again. The green taste fading and flaring as the restraint gel filtered and refreshed itself, bitter almost-freedom replaced with tasteless sludge and concurrent blunting of any mental acuity. The gel’s meant to give you some rest, especially if you’ve had the shock of dismemberment. Of course you know the nanos will seal you up until you can be put together… but your body doesn’t. The same stupid warmbody response that fills you with fear during combat doesn’t understand nanos. It only understands millennia of that ripping and tearing as meaning death, an end to all striving.

  Thud. Draw the arm back again, begin the conservation of glucose and mental effort.

  A star-shaped blemish in the plasilca tube, cracking from pressure it was never meant to contain. Complicated equations — fast enough to pierce the gel, slowly enough that the fluid wouldn’t constrict me, waiting until close enough and pow, the effort causing a blank spot inside my head as my arm used all the reserved stores of glucose.

  If they had a tech monitoring my vitals they might notice a pattern. It was a risk.

  Would they care? They had what they wanted—

  My kid. They have my kid.

  Past rage. Past fear. The place where you make a simple decision. Where complexity has been stripped away, and all that remains is your fist, drifting forward, getting closer, and—

  Thud.

  The star-blemish widened. Tiny threads of restraint gel oozed through it to splatter down in streaks. Not fast enough, and the green taste was fading. With it, my chances of staying conscious long enough to work my way free dimmed.

  Didn’t matter.

  My arm drifted back, again.

  Thud.

  And again.

  Thud.

  Chapter Twelve

  Who Owns You Now?

  Fading bitterness coating the tongue. Concentration guttering, a candleflame under monsoon assault. Chrono useless, no attention to spare for it anyway. Reserve the glucose, drift the arm up, drift it forward so slowly, then, the punch. The breakage-star widened, and a steady stream of restraint gel oozed out, steaming as it hit the air outside.

  A shadow moved outside the tank. Doubled, tripled, or maybe it was just my perceptions blurring. The sap contamination had all but leached out of the tank now, caught in the corelli filters, and the gel level wasn’t dropping quickly enough and the times between punches were stretching.

  Running out of time. The shadow loomed closer, warped outside the column. Was someone standing there watching me—

  WHAM.

  The world turned over, a wet gushing, tearing sound. Sudden pressure-release, my body a thrown toy, a doll with heavy limbs. Blackness swallowed me, and the sense of falling, shrieking inwardly — had they figured out what I was doing? Sealed the tank and flooded me with near-toxic sedation again? Was I even now in a transport hold, carried further and further from Geoff, rocking in a narcofluid bath, conscious and screaming but unable to breathe?

  Time is a subjective thing, even when you have built-in chrono. It felt like forever, but it was probably only twenty seconds of thrashing, the freezing metal grating scraping weals on my gel-slick skin, before my body brought up all the fluid in my lungs and stomach, expelling it from every orifice with a massive cramping.

  Normally they keep you sedated while they drain restraint gel, and administer a slow system flush so you come online just like cycling up out of deep gamma into theta and above slowly and naturally. It means you don’t flop around like a clonetank fish pulled out for gene-testing.

  Restraints. Only they weren’t cinchfilament or cramwrap. Just two of them, hyperalloy bars with a softer covering. Noise, shrieking through every aural intake channel, red light and a welter of sensation.

  “It’s all right,” he kept repeating. “It’s okay, Je— ah, Abby. It’s okay. Shhhh.”

  Retching. More cramping. Nanos shocked back into life, the whole colony scattering like a herd of frightened fourpads—

  Not in the City. Restraint gel. Had me in a tube. I coughed up a last gout of gel, nanos swarming my lungs and heart, checking for damage, eating waste and toxins, normalizing metabolism but so slowly. Autonomics crazy but no energy for subroutines, I finally went limp, dragging in knife-sharp air and moaning.

  “It’s all right,” he repeated. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

  Bastard. Oh you bastard. Just wait. I didn’t waste any breath saying it.
Gel dried, crackling all over me. No clothes. No weapons.

  I’d make do.

  I heaved myself away from Sam, or I tried to. Until the nanos could finish, I was only warmbody-strong. Ridiculous to think I could hurt an agent, but I thrashed around and got a good solid punch to his cheek. His head tipped back slightly, but he just looked down his nose at me.

  So I hit him again. And again.

  Muscle movement makes the toxins float around. I needed a system flush and a half-standard hour to let the nanos work. I suspected I wasn’t going to get either.

  “Calm down.” And fuck if Sam didn’t sound calm. And a little amused, too.

  I’m going to wipe that right off your face. I am going to Dismiss you, motherfucker.

  Patience. He could wait, I couldn’t. Geoff. Where is he?

  A sticky wave of restraint gel washed across the metal grating serving as a floor. It was an agent’s medbay, the tech old but reliable — restraint tubes, gel mixers, piles of familiar bio-canisters. Baremetal stripchairs with high-arched spider-arms holding sharp edges and long capped syringes, now those belonged in a museum.

  I went absolutely still. Dragged in a deep breath, coughed again. A scouring pain inside my lungs. I spat a wad of partially processed gel, it splatted dully against the flooring and I immediately felt much better.

  Which meant I heaved away from Sam and actually managed to untangle myself this time. Or he let me go. I made it to hands and knees, surged upright, and fell against the restraint console, scraping my hip and almost opening my scalp in a long line as I slid on numb-tingling gel. The shit was everywhere, and sending up a nosewatering stench as it decayed.

  “You need a system flush, Abby. Then we can get you out of here.”

  “Don’t. Call. Me. That.” I tried again, fell again. Body just wouldn’t obey. The nanos were working, but they needed time.

  Time I didn’t have.

  “At first I wondered why you picked that name. Most agents never go back to their original, even camouflaged.” He rocked up into a loose easy crouch, barely wrinkling his nose at the smell. Loose-fitting dark navy shocktrooper gear, strange to see on my handler. He was usually clad in a rumpled suit or more recently in faded, frayed odds and ends to blend with the desert.