More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  “You think parts of you were used to make the tsunami that ruined Isla Luz?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” She paused for a moment and then said, “Apega said she wasn’t allowed out of the station, but what if she did get out, before I ended her? What if she’s been out for days now and she’s gotten big and wild and destructive. My guess is even the people who unleashed her can no longer control her. But I can. I have to stop her.”

  Garrett stared up at the hologram, at the 3D-rendered eyes, stuck on solemn. She never had matched up facial expressions with her voice properly, but there was a difference now, like she was trying harder. Or trying less and letting some of it come naturally? Regardless, it was still a holoprojection. He could stare into these illusory eyes all day and never once see her. Also would never see her staring back. Not truly.

  He turned his head and found the camera in the corner.

  “We,” he said.

  “What?”

  He repeated, “We. We will stop her. I mean, damn, I went and fetched you out of freaking Antarctica. That entitles me to a seat on your crazy train.”

  “And I would book passage as well,” chimed in Vallejo. “If I have any skills or knowledge you require.”

  Shit, Garrett had almost forgotten the old dude was there still.

  “Dan-Dan says he’s in, too. Oh, you guys are so awesome.” He heard emotional tears in her voice, so much like her tears in the blood-smelling coat closet in Antarctica. Essentially Chloe.

  Vallejo cleared his throat. “Well, then, if that’s settled,” he said, “I’ll just go tell the others and, ah, leave you two alone.”

  As soon as he was gone, as if it was too much for her to hold together, the image over Garrett dissolved. He thought the room sighed.

  “Are you okay, though?” she pressed. “I meant to ask. Heron read your bios, and I might have peeked—sorry not sorry—so I know that you didn’t sustain any physical damage from the cold or whatever, which is nothing short of magic, but…”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” he said slowly, “but neither of us is ever going to be truly okay again, are we?”

  “Oh.” She held that word for an extra beat, as if she were tasting it. “I guess not.”

  “Did you tell Heron? About Limontour?”

  “I told Angela that my captors included Limontour and La Mars Madrid. Turns out she knows both of them. Vallejo and Mari do, too. Probably also Heron, since Limontour did contract work on Vallejo’s mech-clones even when he was affiliated with the university. Small world.”

  Something old and heavy and hellish twisted like a corkscrew in Garrett, tipped by those poison words. La Mars Madrid. God. No. She was the scary witch from the doll kitchen? Get it together. Shit.

  His world just got really small. Almost too small to breathe.

  “Or maybe we just consort with a small, especially evil segment of it,” he said. His voice betrayed nothing, like it was completely detached from the rotted core of memory.

  “Yeah, I guess we do,” she said.

  Long pause, but the room was electric.

  “I didn’t tell him the rest of it,” she added. “I didn’t tell any of them. Do I have to?”

  He wished he could touch her, soothe her, hold her. Damn. If he could hold her right now, though, he probably wouldn’t ever stop. “Nah. We can keep secrets for each other, just not from each other. I trust you.”

  Oh, he was going to burn for that lie.

  “Trust, something about…” she murmured, but her voice faded, the long stroke of a fountain pen running out of ink. Then she switched colors, filled up her cartridge, scribbled on. “You probably want to get naked. I mean clean. Did I say naked? You’ve been in that suit for four days straight. Even with an organics scrubber in there, it’s probably gamey.”

  See? Amazing, his Chloe.

  “Okay. What are you going to do?”

  The hologram formed at the end of his bed, briefly. “I’m going to do what I do every night, Garret.”

  Holy hell. Sometime during all that body hopping she’d learned how to sling a flirt onto her face, even when it was a made-up face. Her grin was pure mischief, and then she winked. “I’m gonna watch.”

  • • •

  She did. She watched Garrett strip down, clean himself thoroughly, and then get comfy again in his usual uniform of cheap printed orbit shorts and a sarky tee—this one said, kind of ironically, “Not Paranoid. Watched” and had an Illuminati triangle-and-eyeball on back.

  Clearly the shirt selection was a response to her professed peeking problem. He was so onto her. If she’d had a mouth she would have cracked up laughing.

  But by “watch” she of course meant all the rest of it. Scan. Analyze. His biometrics were correct. He hadn’t sustained any permanent damage during his adventures in Antarctica. Which was just this side of impossible, but she was too relieved to question the numbers.

  She also did all this checking very superficially, for dignity. It was one thing to watch a man shower and generally be beautiful, but she felt queasy about embedding. That was intimate, almost digital sex or something. Not a thing she wanted to do without his permission.

  Which was just crazy illogical, because hadn’t she zipped right into Nathan’s skull and appropriated his eyeballs? She’d done it without even thinking, definitely without asking, but the idea of doing the same to Garrett made her want to hide in a deep, deep shame pit.

  What was her block on Garrett?

  Probably the fantasies. Maybe the fear that if she went in there, into his body, into his mind, she’d leave something of herself behind. And then if he someday turned up in love with her or something, she’d never be able to believe it wasn’t because she caused it, even accidentally. She wanted him to care about her because he wanted to. Not because she’d implanted strange impulse switches in his amygdala.

  Still, she could rationalize basic review of his biometrics. For, ah, medical reasons.

  Not because I am an incurable voyeur.

  But if Garrett was fine, same old Garrett, Chloe was starting to realize she wasn’t nearly as unfazed by the last few weeks. Quite the opposite. It was so weird, she used to be able to watch all kinds of things—people naked, people injured, people sleeping, people banging—and respond as necessary, or not. It had all been like reading an information cache or studying composite diagrams. Now, though, when she watched the play of muscles on Garrett’s naked back, she knew exactly how that felt beneath her hands, stroke for stroke.

  Her phantom fingers curled and clutched and reached for him.

  Supposedly amputees could still feel pain in limbs that had been removed from their bodies for years. Chloe was like an all-over amputee. A raw, pulsing nerve of amputee-ness. Watching him turn beneath the chemical blowers, her entire consciousness thrummed like a giant, blood-engorged clitoris.

  Okay, that was a weird image.

  “There be dragons,” said a voice that wasn’t really a voice. A direct impulse into her processor core.

  Dan-Dan.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once, before GPS, humans used to make maps of the world and plan their voyages over vast seas, but their information was limited. On hand-drawn maps, they made notations on the areas for which they had no information, places where cautious merchants ought not sail. To emphasize an especially dangerous unknown, they added the words ‘there be dragons.’” He paused, let the information sort itself into her paths. “You know watching him too long will only make the pain worse.”

  “Mechs don’t feel pain,” she said, too flippantly. “I know. I’ve been in your body. In several like yours, actually.”

  “Neither of us is discussing physical pain, Chloe.”

  “Please. Tell me you don’t watch her every second you get the chance.”

  “I purposely put myself in s
ituations where I cannot.” Somehow he managed to sound prissy, even without a voice.

  “She’s on this plane right now. She and Kellen could be going at it in the galley at this very moment.” Chloe checked the weight on the deck plates there, just in case. Nope, nobody was in the galley. Three people were in a mini-lounge aft of the cockpit, three and a cat were in the cockpit itself, and Dan-Dan’s metal body was in the sleeping racks. Alone. While his attention was here, direct speaking with her. “And if you were half as truthful as a toaster, you’d confess you ache to peek.”

  “I dare not,” said Dan-Dan. “I won’t risk functioning beyond my own control again.”

  He was talking about that time he’d haired out and tried to kill people. Person. His person, specifically. She could see why the episode continued to traumatize him.

  “But that wasn’t your fault,” said Chloe. “Angela archived you. She told you to run a simulation of an evil man. She told you to act like him, and you did, and you were really good at it, and that’s the end of it. You’re rebooted. You’re you.”

  “And yet still a danger to everyone I love.”

  Like Apega, out there kicking up tsunamis and maybe something else, a new threat cycling on the edges of her awareness. Like that small voice in Chloe that still raged. Stop it, stop stealing things from me. I am mighty. I am good.

  But maybe she was good only because she was so limited, because parts of her were missing. Maybe her captors had stolen only the evil parts of her. Maybe the danger was in putting the puzzle of herself back together. If she stopped Apega, re-formed her swarm, would she be able to handle all the power of being a whole-Chloe again?

  Or would she be a danger, a weapon? A killer?

  Again?

  “However,” said Dan-Dan, “if you have no such reservations of your own, might I suggest a temporary solution?”

  “Tell me.”

  • • •

  After Garrett got cleaned up and feeling human—Chloe was right about that, getting out of the Iron Man suit and back into street clothes did wonders for reminding him who exactly he was—he sought out the source of the yelling. Didn’t take him long to find it.

  In the lounge aft of the cockpit, they’d gathered. Mari was trying to calm everybody down, but as usual her questions only made things worse. Kellen interjected a word here or there but played Switzerland with the best of ‘em. Vallejo, chiming in with facts, could only hope to be so even-keeled.

  Couldn’t say the same for Angela. She was in full sark, with Fanaida hollering a counterpoint in Spanish, her throaty voice rising above the others, sauced liberally with the odd chingalo, which only seemed to fall more freely as Garrett approached earshot.

  “… what you’re saying cannot be true anyhow. M’ijos son más locos que un bolso de camadrejas—”

  “Sack of weasels,” Kellen corrected cheerfully. “You mean we’re crazier than a sack of weasels.”

  “The data doesn’t lie,” said Vallejo, “though, like you, I wish—”

  Angela broke in with a frustrated flap of her hand, like she was stopping traffic. “Did I miss something? What month are we in? And Atlantic hurricane season is…Oh, just, fuck this.” She may or may not have deliberately echoed her mother-in-law there, only in her own little-dictator way.

  Good lord, it really was the whole fam, foul-mouthed and crazy, right here on this plane.

  They all came to get him? Garrett? These were busy people, important people. Plus, if what Vallejo said was true, they were also running-for-their-lives people. And they detoured wide over the South Pole to save his scrawny ass? He wanted to hug every single one of them.

  But not enough to actually, you know, do it.

  He slid up beside Mama Fan and asked, without saying anything, what was going on. She was usually good for a run-down, in three languages plus swear-words.

  She didn’t keep him at arm’s length like usual, though. She looked up, her white hair wild and black eyes wet. She grabbed him by the biceps, used him as leverage to haul herself up off the comfy chair, and wrapped her long, bony arms around him. Dry vines, encircling, and so dear.

  “Do not,” she repeated several times. “Do not break this again. We are family, and belong to each other.”

  “Hey,” was all he could get out past the lump in his throat. “It’s okay. It’s all gonna be okay.”

  “Well, look who the cat once again failed to drag in,” Kellen said from across the smallish room, a mini-lounge behind the cockpit. “Glad you could make it, man. Scanned you while you slept. Your bios look good. Better than, actually. Everything feeling like it ought to?”

  Kellen sat on a cushion, Yoink sprawled upside-down and vaguely dead-cockroach-style over one blue-jeans-clad thigh. That pose ought to have been impossible for a cat— heck, for any vertebrate—but it did leave her underside exposed, and Yoink dearly loved a belly rub, especially one administered by her person. Or persons. Angela was here, too.

  “Yeah,” said Garrett. “I’m, uh, finer’n frog hair.” Never a wrong move to answer a man in his native language, and twang was Kellen’s. Plus, Garrett was from Houston, so though his only real accent was a tendency to add ‘fuck you’ to most phrases, he could slide into a drawl pretty easily, especially when he was surrounded by a bunch of yee-haw.

  He kept on hugging Mama Fan, waiting for the conversation to roll on. Generally that’s what happened. These guys could fill a concert hall with chatter by the decibel and he rarely needed to make a peep. He and Chloe would go over it later, in private.

  “Hey, Fig?” he subvocaled. “You here?”

  “Duh,” she said directly into his implanted com.

  Probably the others saw him smile. Probably that’s why they all looked at him. Couldn’t be because they all cared.

  “What do you think, G? Can the air circulation in the Caribbean be a hurricane in February?” Heron sounded condescending all the time, no matter the topic. It was a gift.

  But hold the phone, was Heron now asking Garrett for his opinion? That was new.

  He looked over at his sort-of brother, the man who’d overshadowed him ever since Garrett had come into this family. Garrett shrugged. “You know what I think about impossible.”

  Vallejo raised two questiony eyebrows, and Kellen filled in. “Garrett’s our resident expert in the impossible. Knows all the craziest theories. Like, sinkholes in Siberia weren’t caused by permafrost melting but by implosion of secret underground nuclear tests. ‘Bout the right of it, man?”

  “Antimatter tests, but yeah, close enough. And thanks for not implying they were alien in origin.”

  “Basically black-helicopter conspiracy theories, but this is a hurricane,” said Angela, “a thing that actually happens, and believe me, I would know if my government was involved with any secret testing.”

  “But the UNAN government ain’t the lone gunman here,” said Mari, who, strangely for her, was not arranged on Heron’s lap.

  He lurked right beside her chair, though, almost curved toward her. So overdone, the protectiveness. If there was one person on this planet who didn’t need protecting, it was Mari Vallejo. That woman would blow up Dallas and never look back. She probably had a canister and detonator in her black lacy brassiere right now. She was that kind of badass.

  “You can’t mean to imply the Consortium is still active. I removed their puppet President Medina, and I ended the Consortium in this hemisphere,” Angela said, in a voice used to having the last word on any given subject.

  “But what if we didn’t?” said Mari. “I mean somebody kidnapped Chloe…”

  “That would be Nathan, your ex—“

  “Oh, do we really need to go there? This isn’t a blame game.” That from Vallejo, who, from the look Angela laid on him right then, probably should have kept his mouth closed. Which, of course, wasn’t Vallejo’s way at all.<
br />
  In Garrett’s arms, Fanaida tensed, probably filling her linguistic reserves with some more curses.

  “Wait,” Garrett said, not raising his volume to match theirs. “Do we have actual scientific evidence of hurricane formation in February? ‘Cause that’s really strange.”

  Six faces—still six even if you counted the cat, who couldn’t be bothered to open her eyes and join the discussion—turned their attention on him. He felt a flush burning its way up his neck, from ears inward.

  “We have satellite images,” said Heron, his voice dripping with bleak. “And the queen confirmed that the storm is rotating.”

  “Where’s it tracking?”

  “The best models have it sliding up the eastern seaboard in the next seventy-two hours,” Vallejo said.

  “And my shitty, shitty children want to go fly right into it,” Fanaida fumed, pulling herself out of Garrett’s embrace and talking to the ceiling. “Estoy maldito con niños terribles…”

  “Oh wait, it gets worse,” said Heron, ignoring his mama though clearly it pained him to do so, “because there’s a late-season polar vortex coming down through Quebec.”

  “But that could be good, though, right? One storm just shoves the other one away.” Garrett typically didn’t speak up, but talking with anything like authority on something like atmospheric phenomena to Heron, of all people, was particularly terrifying. The dude had perfected nanorobotic weather control.

  And his lab materials had grown up to become Chloe, of course. Heron’s foglet vat, stolen back by the queen later on, evolved to become Chloe. So, basically, an experiment that became even more perfect.

  Heron frowned hard, but strangely (for him) he didn’t look snooty. He looked really, really concerned. Plus, his hair was still a wreck. Sad to say, he could take some self-care pointers from Vallejo.

  “In naturally occurring systems, that could certainly happen. Or they could collide and create a superstorm, which has happened before, just on a smaller scale. However, this particular tropical circulation is not behaving typically, so it might very well do neither of those things. We don’t know what to expect.”