She Wolf and Cub

by lillith saintcrow

  If I could incapacitate him, I could take at least some of the clothes. The boots wouldn’t fit me, but I’d make it work.

  I had to.

  “Then I figured it out. My girl, my little stone-cold killer, my favorite flex liquidator, just had to have somewhere to hang all her frustrated feelings. You play it so close. You always have.”

  Keep talking. I grabbed onto the console. Fingers slipping in gel, nanos fighting the numbing as well as the toxins. See if I care. I hauled, a short sound of effort escaping me.

  A warmbody grunt. Weak, and stupid, and useless. Right now, though, it was all I had.

  Scans started to come online, patchy and rough, handicapped by no available energy and also by the thunderous fuzz of the Trapp core. Now I was hoping that all the rest and relaxation I’d been in the habit of giving my nanos was going to pay off. That they would be fresh and ready to fight, so to speak.

  “I’ve got a system flush for you, Abby. And while they’re occupied, we’ll slip out. I don’t trust that motherfucker as far as I can—”

  I spat another wad of processed gel. It hit him square in the face, and I concentrated on pulling myself up. If I could just get vertical, maybe I could balance. From there, the rest would be easy. I would find wherever they had Geoff, and if he was hurt, if they had done something to my kid…

  Well. I could crawl, and I could kill. It would have to be enough.

  Sam wiped his cheek, solemn. A long pause.

  I made it to my feet. Hooked my fingers around a transvital lever, ground my implemented teeth together as I focused on standing upright.

  The world turned over again.

  “So fucking stubborn.” A heavy sigh. “I can carry you out of here.”

  I looked up at the console. There had to be something I could use to keep myself upright.

  Fuck it. I spasmed onto hands and knees. Drying gel peeled off me in sheets. I closed my eyes, hair hanging down, dripping fat plopping pieces of almost-liquid. First step, getting out of this hole. Then scanning for Geoff. Or getting one of those silver-eyed bastards and making it tell me where he is.

  I began to crawl.

  “Shit.” The shocktrooper gear creaked slightly as Sam rose. “Why won’t you let me help you?”

  You bastard. “Geoff.” It was all I said. My kid.

  “He’ll serve a purpose taking down the Collective. And seriously, sweets, did you really think I’d let them have you too? You give me more trouble, Abby.”

  “Fuck… you.” Don’t waste your time talking.

  “Since we’re both implemented, we’ll probably have to express our affection in other ways.” He was close, but I ignored him. Something wondrous had occurred.

  I’d seen stairs. Going up.

  “But for you, I’ll certainly try my best.” He sighed again, and his foot flicked out, taking my arm out from under me. Before I could fall he was on me, and I struggled as a spear of ice buried itself in my right glute.

  A familiar warmth spread from it, though, and I froze.

  System flush? What?

  “Listen to me,” he whispered, hot breath in my ear. His arms were hyperalloy bars again, but as soon as the flush spread and consumed the toxins, I’d be strong again too. “I am about to fuck up my entire existence for you, Jess-Abby-sweetheart, whatever you want me to call you. So listen.”

  I kept still. The warmth spread, down my right leg. The most useless place to stick a system flush in, of course. He wanted me incapacitated for just a little longer.

  “There’s more players in the game than you realize. Corporations, Agency, Nikor and his alliance, some of the bigger townships. All of them want this crazy motherfucker dusted, but not before they get specs on what he’s done. Those silver-eyed bastards are warmbodies infected with all-purpose nanos. He made the Collective real.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Another fairytale.” It made sense. Their specs weren’t even close to implementation norms. And those voices — all one voice, from several throats.

  His voice.

  Collective… we will spread. We will burn the world down.

  “Whatever. In any case, he was a warmbody genius too, and the Agency’s salivating to get their hands on his process. I have the specs, I could walk out of here while you’re keeping them busy. Secondary directive was erasing the Collective, and that’s what your little friend is for. He’s poison bait, only that bastard Paxton had to go above and beyond. Couldn’t help himself, we don’t even know what he did or where he found whatever he spliced in to make the kid. You were the best bet to get our bait out of town. And then you had to go get attached.”

  It finally made sense. “I’m going to kill you,” I whispered.

  He let go of me. The warmth was crawling up my naked back, spreading rapidly now as the nanos recognized the chemprofile and began utilizing it.

  “We can sell the specs, Abby.” Quiet and reasonable. “You and me, anywhere in the world. There’s so many things you don’t even know about.”

  You know, that might have sounded halfway appetizing before you turned out to be an absolute fuckwad. “Where. Is. Geoff?”

  Another long pause. Soon, very soon, the flush would be complete. Tendrils of heat creeping up my back, a fire lit in my belly, masses of nanos swarming.

  “They’re going to try to add him to the Collective, they don’t know his gene matrix will eat theirs alive and kill the nanos as well. He’s prepped for harvest. They’ve already administered an eliminex round to get the sap and the narco-mist out of his— ulp!”

  Even if it’s just your legs that can work, you can do what you need to. I swept his feet from under him, losing skin all up my right side, and knotted my fingers in his hair. The flush, propelled by muscles firing, exploded through my torso. We were nose-to-nose again, Sam and I. I had time to study every fine thread of pigment in his irises up close, time to breathe in his breath.

  “Where?” A harsh, guttural syllable, right at the lowest range I could produce audibly. It tore out of my raw throat, but he didn’t blink. He just stared into my eyes as well. Was he memorizing my irises? Did he see anything behind my pupils, some spark even implementation couldn’t capture?

  He told me. I let go of him, closed my eyes, shook my weakened arms. My side burned, skin swiftly healing. Nothing excreting through any pore or orifice, though, the nanos eating toxins and leftover sedation to fuel me.

  Up the stairs, agent. Get moving.

  I got to work.

  * * *

  Every township or district has an underside, and it’s there I usually end up. Liquidators work best under the surface. Little subdermal conveyers of havoc, it was what we were made for.

  I was deep underground, the thumping of the Trapp core working its way into every muscle and bone, grimy dark tunnels lit with red, no litter or waste in sight. There were statrepellers to take care of the dust, probably cycling through daily but dead and dark right now. The tech in the warren was old but serviceable, again, and it made me wonder how Black Hat had pulled off the trick of making nanos that didn’t need implementation parameters.

  Of course, an agent retains higher brain function, and has functional immortality. The implementation parameters are there to ensure both. Without, you get tumor-ridden death or complete shock as the process destabilizes the physical matrix beyond repair.

  Or, you get… them. Many eyes, many hands, but one voice. The first experiments with nanos, in the dim last days of the Gene Wars, had produced brain-melted, creeping automatons that eventually succumbed under the weight of fast-growing tumors — cell division run amok, personalities shredding, no shutoff protocols or balance equations. They taught you as much in primary school, explaining why full implementation wouldn’t work for everyone, and that’s why it took me so long to remember. Everything before I woke up implemented is… darker, less easy to access.

  I’d only had warmbody senses then.

  Black Hat had been an agent, maybe, and his own nanos
kept the other crop of little bastards in check? Who knew? I didn’t care to figure it out just now.

  I was too occupied staying out of sight. Clinging to pipes on the roof of the tunnels, feet on either side and my thighs burning as the splits stressed knees and hip joints in novel ways. Underneath me, a group of almost-agents moved in lockstep, without even scanning their environs. My own scans were minimal, to keep from alerting them. The system flush was doing its work, but impatience beat behind my reinforced breastbone. Eliminex round meant they were ready to start surgically harvesting.

  Maybe Geoff could heal like the second-gens. But alone and afraid, strapped to a table and dissected… no.

  No.

  Muscling through the tops of corridors, clinging to pipes to dodge discovery, hoping Sam hadn’t lied one final time just to twist the knife. Hoping I hadn’t lost too much time before he used whatever he’d picked up to break me out of the restraint tube. He could have just started the cooldown process and administered the system flush — but he’d wanted me vulnerable.

  Weak. Why?

  Don’t care. Don’t want to care either. Move.

  Creeping naked through the red neon glow, the flakes of gel rubbed free of my skin, I ghosted through Libera’s eerily clean tubes. Comchatter and short-e bounced around, only one or two streams encrypted now, the rest a tangle of feedback and information. I could, possibly, tune a couple streams and drop into them, just like hacking an uplink or a corporate system. It wouldn’t do anything, there was too much raw data bouncing around. No voices, though. They must have used audible just to lure me in.

  The tunnels sloped further down. A black heart beating in the center of the Collective, the Trapp core close enough to start fuzzing the edges of scanrange with its flux-heart.

  Except the heart wasn’t truly black. The closer I got to that diseased cardiac chamber, the more the red tubes were bleached by proper lighting. A soft forgiving rosy pink bathed each metal surface instead, and the tech was sleeker. There were a few countermeasures that wouldn’t be out of place in-City, but they were at least a year old.

  Child’s play. Except I was child-weak, and the system flush couldn’t give me extra calories to burn. It was warmer than usual, the therms were free energy, but I couldn’t afford to gobble them and alert everyone with a huge cold spot over their heads.

  What exactly are you going to do, agent? Look at you. No gear, no clothes, working off possibly bad intel and weak as a fluorox sniffer after a three-day bender. Pathetic.

  Finally, the mess of pipes and cables overhead ended. I had to drop a few meters down, hit a catwalk, skirt a bulge of sheeting that, from the heat it threw off, was a geothermal feed, and get through a scanlocked door of blank metal.

  I hung for a long moment, arms shaking as the flush finished burning through me and my nanos came fully online. Relief to feel the constellations inside me again, to scan for damage and decide I was operating at about forty percent capacity.

  It has to be enough. Drop, and — wait.

  I didn’t drop. I jackknifed and wrapped my legs around a handy pipe, ignoring the burning. Another exhaust, but a cheap source of power, I squeezed my knees together and the nanos crowded, turning the skin inside my thighs to a heatsink, drinking in the excitement thrown off by dancing molecules.

  My head hung back, my gel-filthy hair dried stiff. I heard a familiar silence in the space between ear and brain.

  Commchatter began to burst around me, the data-streams tangling. A disharmony in the Collective’s endless singing.

  Screaming. Static. Feedback.

  The second-gens had found a way through the Trapp field. Maybe they were after Geoff, or Sam. Either way, they were a welcome diversion. I hesitated, eyes closed, trying to track their progress with quiet, careful scanning.

  Fuck it.

  I dropped, my seared thighs giving a brief crackling flash into the visible spectrum as some of the heat bled off, and landed catfoot on the narrow strip of metal over an abyss. A hot draft rose from below — probably the Trapp core, or the geothermals that fueled its endless reactions.

  Two ways to open a scanlocked door. You can kick it down, but that’s often inefficient. Much easier if it just opens, because it thinks you’re one of the hallowed few to pass it.

  I didn’t think this one would. I couldn’t be that lucky.

  You know you’re just going to split yourself open on that thing. If you can get through you’re going to be critically weakened. It’s not worth it. Walk away.

  I skipped back, eating up the distance to the end of the catwalk. Stairs spiraled up into bloody light.

  Come on, agent. Walk away.

  The door got bigger and bigger as I blurred through space. Maximum speed, efficient strides, skin erased from my bare feet on the grill of the walkway, the pain bright spikes through me as the nanos hummed, throwing endorphins into my bloodstream, thickening the tissue on my feet, bracing for impact, flashing adrenaline and cortisol to jack me into maximum combat readiness — or at least the maximum I could hope for in my current state.

  I hit the door at full speed, and bounced off. Picked myself back up again, shaking the stunning noise out of my head, and was about to do it again, when it folded aside, lenticular layers blooming like a flower.

  Oh. Well. That was simple. I limped forward and nipped through before it finished yawning.

  * * *

  Searing white light. Clean surfaces. For a moment the past looped over to eat the present and I was in an Agency lab, sleek white enamel and quiet humming statfields, brushers and sweepers to keep dust away from delicate implementation tools. The two spiderchairs here were much newer, arms tipped with up-to-the-minute edgers, punctures, stipplers, and other tools to sculpt tissue and inject chemical — and other — cocktails.

  Most of the space was taken up with a massive fan-shaped control deck and an operating bay with a very modern, ultra-equipped medtable. The control deck’s screens were alive with floating code and video streams, their flickers lost in the bright lighting.

  A table that held a horizontal column of warmbody restraint gel, orange instead of green. Floating in it, naked, was a boy of about twelve, his dark hair moving gently on gel currents.

  I let out an involuntary sound, scanned the room again. Empty. Streams of data moved over the control deck screens. I spent a moment studying them all, and the layout of the entire complex bloomed inside my head.

  Bigger than I thought. This can’t be the only implementation bay, there’s too many of them for that. Ah, there, there, and there. Shit, there’s a lot of them. Probably bare-bones ones, like where they had me. This is where the tech’s concentrated.

  Possible escape routes flashing through my braincase, I studied the controls on the medtable. Punched a few buttons and was rewarded with a soft gurgling and lights changing from green to red, a row of them marching from right to left. The gel began to drain. No reason to break the tube and make him sick — he could go into seizure like I did, and had no nanos to shield him from the shock.

  The fuzzy thumping of the Trapp core blurred all my scans. It was annoying. I glanced at the screens again, straining to hear the datastreams and commchatter through the whitenoise.

  Shrieks. Moans. The Collective agents could probably drag the second-gens down through sheer weight of numbers, and the complex terrain favored the defenders even if the second-gens could move fast enough.

  Before they were dragged down, though, they would do quite a bit of damage. Did the entire Collective feel it when one of them was torn apart?

  No sound, not even a whisper, but that same tickle in the place that warned me of Geoff’s murderous cousins. The air pressure didn’t change, but I was already throwing myself aside, so he blinked through the space where I’d been standing and crashed into the control deck. His hat flew off, his limbs contracting and the top of his head a silvery dome etched with strange whorls, lank hair in a fringe around the edges whipping as he blinked aside.

&
nbsp; Fuck.

  Forty percent combat capability and a pissed-off agent jacked up on who knew what mods? And Geoff in the tube, slowly waking up.

  I was airborne, body reacting with the instinct of a thousand fights. Slammed into one of the spiderchairs, fingers curling around a trembling leg, pulling it free with a screech. Black Hat snarled, and I snarled back, not caring if it wasted energy. Subaudible growled as datastreams tangled — his followers were busy with the second-gens, he couldn’t get them in here to overwhelm me. Good news.

  Not for long. Come on, agent. Move.

  The restraint tube was draining, but too slowly. Black Hat leapt for me, I jabbed with the spiderleg and sprang for the control deck. Sparks flew, plasilca screens breaking, shrapnel piercing my thickening skin. The nanos could only do so much.

  I kicked one of the control deck’s processing towers. More sparks fountained, and Black Hat howled. He was fast even for an agent, stuttering through space to backhand me, sending me flying across the bay again.

  Got his attention. Good. Does hitting the processing towers hurt him? Let’s hope.

  No time for hope. Balance gained, and he’d knocked me towards racks of biocanisters. Sleek silver City-stamped bullets, chemical codes lase-labeled on sides and ends.

  All right, agent. Be smart.

  I hit hard enough to knock two of the frames over, lashing out with the torn-free spiderchair arm. The Trapp core below pulsed, sending out a shrieking wail — what the hell’s that? Ignore it.

  Black Hat leapt, and everything slowed down. Time stretched, twisting and turning like the cheap tachmose candy runner kids chew. Get a mouthful of that good and soft, you can stick your fingers in and pull out a wad, stretch it into all sorts of shapes, loop it over your fingers, flick tiny bits of it into another kid’s hair — if you thought that kid wouldn’t try to shiv you over the prank, because once it hit hair it didn’t come out unless you could wash in akketone.