by Linda Nagata
Gideon followed a path down to the water and waded in, thigh-deep. Ava followed, so wet already it didn’t matter. She felt clouds of fine silt rising from the bottom with every step.
The houseboat had a flat deck with a little plywood-walled cabin occupying the middle half. The cabin’s flat roof extended out to cover the open deck on both sides. The nearest side was furnished with a tiny round patio table and a matching chair. And at the edge of the deck, a pile of . . . something.
Gideon tugged at the something. It spilled over the side: a ladder made of plastic-coated cable and three plastic steps. Still clutching his tablet in one hand, he climbed up with practiced grace. Ava followed more awkwardly, grateful to get under a roof. Across the water to the south, she saw the dark wall of another heavy rain band moving in.
“Welcome to my former base of operations,” Gideon said quietly as Akasha and Matt came aboard. “I don’t know where I’m going to rebuild, after, but it won’t be here. The boat won’t survive and the peninsula is gonna get scrubbed into an empty mudflat again, if anything’s left at all.” He sounded dejected—a display of emotional vulnerability that surprised Ava after all his bluster.
A moment later, he shifted back to chipper cynicism. “Okay, so who wants to drive the jelly while I finish up here?”
“I’ll do it,” Matt said, taking the proffered tablet. He scowled at it. “But your jellyfish is moving damn slow.”
“High tide and storm surge. What do you expect? Just keep hitting it. Big jellies can move against the current.”
Ava eyed him, trying to imagine how he’d survived on his own . . . how he’d protected himself. “Have you always been by yourself out here?” she asked.
“I like it that way.”
“You’re not worried about . . .” Her voice trailed off. She didn’t know quite how to phrase it.
“Creeps and weirdos, like me?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
A flash of teeth. “I know. You’re a lot nicer than Akasha. It’s actually been good here. Quiet. No one comes in by land and the handful of people like me, living on the water, are here because they don’t want anybody’s nose in their business. And anyway, there’s a rumor along the shoreline that the one time a zombie thought it would be fun to mess up my boat, he left with a nasty dose of Angel Dust eating at his lungs.”
Ava considered this, considered what she’d already seen, and then asked, “That’s just a rumor . . . right?”
“You asked what else I had.” He cocked his head toward the cabin. “Come inside.”
“Hey,” Akasha said. “You’ve never let me inside.”
“And I’m not letting you in now. Wait here.”
Ava wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to see what Gideon kept hidden, but neither did she want to piss him off. And if he had another device that might be useful against Denali, she needed to see it.
So when he opened the door—just a few inches, clearly determined to frustrate Akasha’s attempt to peer inside—Ava slipped past him, into the lightless interior.
She heard him follow; heard the door close. A dull red overhead light came on.
“You like red.”
“Saves the night vision.”
The day’s heat lingered in the interior. No windows looked out. No source of ventilation. A second door, on the opposite side, would open to the houseboat’s back deck. With both doors open, there would be the hope of a breeze, but the doors were closed. Despite her wet clothing, Ava started to sweat.
A glance around showed her everything there was to see, which was mostly nothing. A wide wooden shelf on one side had probably served as a workbench, but it was empty now. So were the two bracket-mounted shelves above it. Underneath the bench, small circles and lines of dust on the rough plank floor showed where other objects had been recently removed. A couple of raggedy hand towels hung on a laundry line. She wondered why Gideon had brought her inside.
“God, it’s hot in here,” he said, over a sudden clatter of rain on the roof. “The AC unit went with the rest of the equipment. It’s all stashed in a village dome house—and I’m planning to ride out the storm with it. Only one thing’s left here.”
Ava cocked a skeptical brow.
From him, a slight, anxious smile. “It’s hidden.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing clever. Call it a mistake. I was going to leave it. Let Huko chew it up. But hell, we’re talking nukes now. My mistakes don’t seem so bad.”
Ava did not like the sound of that.
“Is there any way you or somebody else can physically get to that submarine?” Gideon asked.
“I don’t know. I mean, not me. Matt, maybe. Why?”
He knelt, put his finger in a little notch at the end of a floorboard, and lifted it up. Water glistened a few inches below. He reached in, felt around under the floor, and came up with a chain. Small steel links, clean and shiny. Couldn’t have been in the water for much more than a day. He pulled it up.
The chain was only a couple of feet long. Attached to its end with a locking carabiner was a small, squat, stainless-steel, wide-mouth vacuum bottle, the kind hikers use to carry whiskey or a cup of hot coffee. He unscrewed the lock on the carabiner, and unshackled the bottle, which looked as clean as the chain.
“What’s in there?” Ava asked uneasily.
“Nasty shit.” He grabbed one of the towels from the laundry line and used it to dry the bottle. “That zombie who died of Angel Dust? I didn’t kill him on purpose. He went after me. Beat the shit out of me for no reason. Then broke in here. Went through my stuff. Infected himself.”
“You were working with Angel Dust.” Her skin crawled as she stared at the bottle; adrenaline shivered her heart.
“I didn’t kill the zombie, but I was not in a good place at the time.” He tapped his forehead. “You know. Up here.”
Ava weighed her options as he unscrewed the top. The door behind her was probably locked, while he stood between her and the door they’d used to come in. Could she get past him before he released whatever was in that bottle?
He said, “I’m in a better place now. Like I said, I was going to leave it to Huko to take care of, but if you want to take it, if you can find a way to use it, it’s yours.”
The cap came off. Ava held her breath. She couldn’t help it.
Gideon dumped out the contents of the bottle on the built-in bench. Six clear-plastic ampules, an inch long, with snap caps. A dark substance half-filling each. Not a gel, because it flowed. And not a liquid. Only a powder could settle like that, at an angle within each ampule.
“Angel Dust,” Gideon said, the contrition in his voice letting her know he regretted the whole enterprise.
She gestured at the ampules. “How did you manage to collect all that without killing yourself?”
“How does anyone? I used a remotely controlled bot, of course, just like with the gunpowder.” He held up his hands, thumbs and forefingers tapping together. “Pinching appendages, controlled by gloves. The only hard part was harvesting ripe spore sacs without popping them open.”
“And the dust is viable?” she asked.
“Yes. I mean, I haven’t tested it on anybody lately, but the zombie popped an ampule and sniffed it—must have thought it was a designer drug—and went down hard.”
“I saw that report. The body turned up on the grounds of the old Waiau Power Plant. There was speculation about an infestation in the underground piping—but I guess nothing was ever found?”
“Probably not.”
“That had to be, what . . . eight or nine months ago?”
“Eight months. But I kept the dust in the freezer until I took the unit out a few hours ago.”
“And what do you think I can do with it?”
“Nothing, if you can’t get to that submarine. But if you can, if you drop it into an enclosed atmosphere like that, with all those jackboots rebreathing each other’s air, no one would last very long.”
&
nbsp; Ava’s skin prickled with the memory of Robert Bell on his knees, his shoulders rising and falling in short spasmodic jerks as the fungal toxin shut down his ability to breathe. “Put it back in the water. I don’t see how it could work.”
He gathered the ampules. Dropped them back into the vacuum bottle.
“No, wait,” Ava said. “What if that bottle survives the storm, or some of those ampules?”
“I don’t have a safe way to get rid of it.”
“Then give me the bottle. I’ll turn it over to hazmat as soon as I can.”
“Assuming there still is a hazmat, after the nuke hits.”
She hissed softly. “Right.” She took the bottle, secured it to her belt. It hung awkwardly against her hip.
Gideon kicked the chain into the water, replaced the floorboard, and then they went back outside.
Akasha looked around reproachfully. She was holding the tablet now. With a slight thrust of her chin, she indicated Matt. “He’s back online,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the rain. “And I don’t think it’s going well.”
Matt didn’t even register their reappearance. He stood by the houseboat’s corner post, staring out over East Loch through the lens of his smart glasses, fist clenched as he demanded answers from someone not present. “I don’t care if you’re on the move! Get my comms cleaned now.”
“He’s compromised,” Gideon concluded, all his cocky bravado gone. “Idiot! Come on.” He crossed the deck, his glance taking in Ava and Akasha. “If you don’t want to go down with him, you need to get out of here now.” He slipped with hardly a splash into the water.
“Go,” Ava told Akasha. “Keep the tablet safe. I’ll be right behind you.”
Akasha nodded, and followed her brother.
Ava flicked on the red beam of her flashlight. “Matt!”
He didn’t answer.
She stepped closer. Touched his back. For just a moment she felt the heat, the hardness of the muscles beneath his shirt. Then he jerked away, half-turning to eye her with a dangerous gaze.
“Just me,” she snarled. “And we need you. So leave your gear and move out. Now.”
“I can’t leave the gear, but it’s being scrubbed. Let’s go.”
Rain fell hard as Ava slid first into the water. She waded to the shore, the red beam of her flashlight picking out Gideon’s well-worn path. Matt followed a step behind.
“What happened?” she asked as the blue beetle lights came on to show the way.
“The EmLoc—the Emergency Locator—responded to a rogue signal as soon as I went online. That access has been closed, but my position is known outside the circle of trust.”
Her feet slipped in the mud with every hurried step. “So what’s coming? Who’s coming?”
“My guess is, navy security. Not that they’re part of this. They’re just doing their job.”
“And Lyric? She’s still on the outside?”
“Status unknown.” Bitterness in those words.
“You’re kidding?” Ava blinked against the rain, moving as quickly as she could without falling down. “Who were you talking to then?”
“Tech support,” he growled.
An answer so mundane that doubt clutched at her again. She rejected it. This is real. Kaden had denied nothing.
Past the sound of her breathing, beyond the squish of her footsteps, and the fast patter of rain, a new noise reached her. A low hum, felt as much as heard, familiar from her years on the battlefield. A stealthed quad-copter. No, probably more than one. Large enough to contend with the weather, and no doubt well-armed.
Ava switched off her flashlight and unholstered her gun.
chapter
19
A voice boomed down through the rain: “Officer Arnett. Lieutenant Matthew Domanski. You are both ordered to stop. Stop now. You have been duped into cooperating with a highly skilled enemy agent. Do not continue. Turn yourselves in voluntarily, and all possible consideration—”
A gun went off behind Ava. She dropped into a crouch, looking over her shoulder. Another shot. Another. The muzzle flashes revealing Matt, firing slowly and deliberately in the direction of the voice as it continued to boom.
“—will be given to your motive for involving yourselves in this affair.”
The low hum surrounded them now, a vibration in the rain, in the impenetrable darkness. At least three quad-copters, Ava judged. Their lights off, utterly invisible.
“Don’t stop,” she urged Matt. “Keep moving. Keep under the vegetation.”
The tall cane and the rain would obscure their profiles, making it harder for thermal imaging cameras to track them, but even so, they were far from invisible. And it didn’t help that the blue sparks of the beetle lights advertised their escape route through the entangling vegetation. The only real question: How soon before the quad-copters started shooting?
The answer arrived without delay. A low buzz, a wet thwop! as if a water-logged towel had been dropped in a sink, and she heard Matt go down with a grunt.
“Knives out!” he barked. “They’re shooting webs.”
Instead, as a glint in the sky drew her gaze, she raised her pistol. Holding it in a two-handed grip, she fired three swift shots, each a few degrees apart. The second and third threw sparks and changed the frequency of the surrounding hum—but the quad-copter she’d targeted did not go down.
Thwop!
A painful slap against the back of her right hand, across her exposed wrist, and halfway up her forearm. The sleeve of her shirt did nothing to soften the blow. Sticky webbing: It writhed like a living thing, random motion meant to bind and seal. She yanked her left hand away, an instant before the webbing locked it down.
Ava had trained with webbing, both in the army and with the police. Keep a hand free and you could cut away the tendrils as they hardened. Right now, the tendrils were binding the pistol, keeping it secure in her right hand. Probably not the outcome the drone’s overseer had wanted.
She heard Matt moving, grunting. “You free?” she asked, shifting her position, moving a few more steps along the path to get deeper into the cane.
“I’m up. Run.”
A challenge, given the darkness, the rain, the mud, the downdraft from hovering quad-copters—or was that just the swirling wind? She fixed her gaze on the next blue light and bounded toward it, arms raised to protect her face in case there were low-hanging branches. She prayed she would not twist an ankle, break a leg, or impale herself on a broken branch.
Thwop! Thwop!
“You hit?” she yelled without turning back.
“No, the veg is shielding us!”
For now. But how long before the quad-copters shifted to hard ammo? The vegetation would be no defense against that, and with Huko coming in, no one need ever know that four bodies had been left behind in this swamp.
She made it to the next pinpoint of blue light, and the one after that. Then the lights went out. “Damn it, Gideon!” she shouted.
“I’m re-mapping!” he yelled back, startlingly close.
Then she saw him, his down-turned face and dancing fingers faintly lit by the screen of his tablet. She pulled up sharply so she wouldn’t run into him, at the same time yelling at Matt, “Hold up!”
An incoherent oath as Matt bumped up against her. His hand gripped her shoulder.
Panting, her heart racing, she tried to pinpoint the quad-copters by sound, but the wind-combed rattling and rustling of the cane drowned out their engine noise. “Where’s Akasha?” she asked.
“I’m here.” Her voice placed her on the other side of Gideon. “They went after the bikes, shot them full of webbing. So we’re on foot.”
Maybe it was better that way. Headlights would give them away, and riding fast in the dark was a damn good way to kill yourself.
“Where are they now?” Ava wondered as she worked to pry away the strands of webbing on her gun hand.
“Probably surveying the peninsula,” Matt answered. “They
know they’ve got us trapped, but they don’t know who else might be out here, and they don’t want anyone slipping away.”
“We’re not trapped,” Gideon said as the tablet’s light went out.
The blue beetle lights came back on at the same time, marking a path beneath the trees that angled away from the direction they’d been going.
“Go!” Matt barked.
Ava wrenched her gun free, though her arm still trailed strands of hardening gunk. With the tablet dark, she couldn’t see Gideon anymore—but she heard him up ahead: “You owe me big, Akasha!”
Akasha already sounded distant when she answered, “We’ll settle it after the storm!”
“Rain’s backing off,” Ava observed as she lingered in place, gazing up into the sky.
“Yeah.” Matt stood rooted beside her. “And here they come.”
The rain had eased enough that Ava could see low cloud bellies brushed with the gleam of city lights. Outlined against the clouds, two circular shapes moved slowly, black and humming, no more than ten feet above the trees. Fricking flying saucers.
“Westside’s mine,” she said quickly.
“I got east.”
They both fired multiple times. The low elevation made the quad-copters easy targets. Sparks fountained as bullets connected with the vulnerable rotor blades. The even hum became high pitched and discordant. One quad see-sawed erratically; the other wisely chose to retreat. No sign of a third drone.
“Let’s go,” Matt ordered.
Ava moved out, holstering her pistol as she did. Without breaking stride, she grabbed her flashlight and switched on the red beam. No time for groping in the dark. They needed to get out from under the foundering quad-copter and get off the peninsula before the navy shifted to more lethal options. Navy jurisdiction was limited. If they could make it to suburbia, they ought to be okay—for the next few minutes anyway.
Something popped in the air behind them, followed closely by a high-pitched shrieking whine and a double flash of golden light. Then shrapnel came flying, ripping through the brush. Ava shifted to a run, hearing the bulk of the damaged quad-copter hit ground with a crunching, grating noise. A final splash placed it at the water’s edge.