Soldier's Heart Part Four: Brotherhood Protectors World

by Ilsa J. Bick

  She could see it. She could see Hacker reviewing all the records and thinking, That McEvoy. So, he inputs an automatic routine, one she can’t stop. She didn’t like thinking that, though. Made her wonder what other components Hacker had mucked with. Would Jack be able to tell?

  “Whatever they’ve done, it’s not perfect, Jack,” she muttered. She was distant enough from the main group that no one would hear. “You are able to shut it down. Sometimes, I get in.”

  “But only for seconds at a time, Kate. They’re quite…determined.”

  They. A shiver rippled up her spine. Jack was referring to a collective, a them. It was like that old Next Generation two-parter her dad just loved and said made the whole series worthwhile, the episodes where Picard is transformed into a Borg and becomes their mouthpiece. We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Substitute biobots for Borg, and she really wasn’t any different from Picard now, was she? Not really. She’d said the same to Gabriel not three days ago when she uncoupled her legs: Do you know Star Trek? She’d meant to lighten the mood, find an analogy.

  No analogy now.

  God. She wasn’t truly a she anymore then, was she?

  No. She was a we.

  They’d headed north-northeast while it was still dark. Wynn had them follow the fractured northern rim of the valley into which Dead Man had tumbled. The way was more of an enormous rock scramble than a true path. Still, better this than the valley which was choked with rubble, some of which were the equivalent of stone icebergs. The valley looked as if someone had upended a gigantic wheelbarrow of rubble. She could see why it was largely impassable, especially in an area where the ground shook. While trees struggled out of wide gaps between boulders, many gaps remained and some seemed as deep as a glacier’s crevasses. Fall into one of those, and it was hasta la vista, baby.

  The snow kept on for a good long while, scurrying around trees and over the rocks. Good news for the wolves, who fell in and followed, though well back. Smart. She liked Dax, and it would be bad for the shepherd as well as the wolves if they got into it. Though she also wondered, would the wolves try to follow her through Dead Man? How could she stop them? They weren’t her pets. She might sense things from them and vice versa, but they were free agents. She had no control.

  A recurring theme, that one, wasn’t it? Control.

  She thought about that as they moved toward Dead Man, as she was acutely aware of her tracker having fits. She kept coming back to the moment Jack said he was only doing his job.

  Doing his job. Substitute performing my mission and the words might have come from a HAL 9000 computer: I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm for the mission. And just what was Jack’s job, his mission? He was the phantom of a dead lover. He was her conscience, the voice of her own doubts. And yet, Gabriel had found her on the rocks and saved her life—and he’d done that in the dark, in the snow, with gear he shouldn’t have known how to find.

  Was looking out for her and keeping her ticking Jack’s job, too?

  Maybe so. If she died, Jack and whatever made up the construct that was Jack died with her. Well, unless he downloaded himself or something. Not such a crazy idea, really.

  She reasoned the biobots would try to protect her, too, though their motives might be different. Jack probably wouldn’t turn on her to save himself.

  The other biobots? Maybe. If push came to shove. Just look at what they were doing right this minute, trying to get out a signal for Vance and Hacker and party to pick her up before the crazy bitch got them killed.

  It really did all come down to who was willing to die and for what.

  Heck of a time to get the blue screen of death. Closing her eyes, she went through the access code again. Got the equivalent of a big fat raspberry. Come on. She keyed in again. Come on, open up.

  “You know that even if you or I get in, it won’t last for long, Kate,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she muttered then gasped as the tracker flipped off. Now, we’re—

  The tracker blipped on again.

  Shit. She ground her teeth so hard her jaw complained. It really was Star Trek, wasn’t it? Resistance was—

  “Are you all right?”

  “What?” Startled, Kate opened her eyes to find the electric-blue eyes of an older woman on her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your head.” Face wreathed in coffee-scented steam, Jean sipped from an enameled camp mug. Jean had never given a last name, which was fine. Kate hadn’t exactly been the picture of honesty, either, and it wasn’t as if they’d be sending each other Christmas cards. Besides, Kate thought Jean had plenty of worries of her own. Like, how the hell she was going to stay out of jail when this was said and done. No way Kate believed Jean hadn’t known something was up with those girls way back in Canada. “You keep playing with it,” Jean said. “Your head.”

  “Oh.” She roped back the urge to snatch her hands from the base of her skull. Damn. “I’m fine. It’s nothing.”

  “You sure?” A tiny woman an inch shy of five feet, Jean could’ve been a Hobbit’s stunt double if she’d had elfin ears and hairy feet. A fridge of auburn hair framed an angular face which was deeply creased on either side of the nose and disappointed frown lines at the corners of her mouth. Kate had pegged her at mid-sixties, though the woman’s intense blue eyes made her look both younger and yet somehow ancient, as if she’d seen it all before. If Jean’s past life as a nun were true, she’d probably been the type to crack a ruler over young knuckles. Now, she inhaled a noisy slurp, though that blue gaze never left Kate’s face. “You keep playing with your head back there.”

  “Well, I got hit pretty hard.”

  “Yeah, I thought they mighta killed you. Blow like that would have cracked anyone else’s skull like an egg.”

  “I guess it pays to be hardheaded.”

  “Uh-huh.” Those blue eyes darted here and there as if trying to prick holes in Kate’s face to get at all the good stuff underneath. “You want an aspirin or something?”

  “No, I’m good. Really, I’ve got a little headache is all.” Looking past Jean, she eyed the girls huddled around a portable camp stove. They were passing mugs of something hot, either soup or tea, around. Wynn really hadn’t liked that: Hot water’ll only make them need to take a dump. Well, those kids needed food and water and to get away from all this craziness, so she really didn’t give two shits, ha-ha. One—An, the Asian girl who’d helped Kate earlier when Miin was dying—flicked a look up and their eyes met. Kate read curiosity there, and then…surprise? Hard to tell. Jumping her gaze away, An stared down at her hands, her forehead wrinkled in a sudden, deep frown.

  “As if she doesn’t like what she sees,” Jack mused. “You and Jean?”

  Or just Jean. Aloud, she asked, “How are the girls doing?”

  “How do you think?” Jean’s mouth pulled down into an unhappy half-moon. “We just want this to be over. I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you Wynn is doing this out of the goodness of his heart.”

  Neither are you. She remembered all that crap in Miin’s vomit. What kind of person just watched a starving kid chow down on a tree? “So what’s your excuse?”

  “For what?”

  “Come on. You drove the van. You expect me to believe you didn’t have a clue?”

  To her credit, Jean didn’t throw what was left in her mug in Kate’s face. Or, Kate supposed, it might just have been an awesome cup and the lady liked her caffeine. Instead, the older woman drained her mug and smacked her lips. “You mean, that the girls are stuffed with heroin and diamonds? No, I didn’t know. They say drive, I say where to. I don’t ask questions. You don’t believe me, that’s not my problem.”

  “If you had known, would it have stopped you?”

  “No. I’ve done it before, I’ll do it again. The pay’s good.”

  “There are no other ways to earn a living?”

  “Not for what I need.”

  Other than an expert dye job
—this lady had to be pushing sixty-five, maybe even seventy—Jean was a plain woman, who didn’t seem to take many pains. “And what’s that?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Try me.”

  “All right. How does cancer strike you?”

  “Cancer?” Interesting. She remembered the oily black funk that was Gabriel’s depression and, after he’d nearly succeeded in killing himself, the mingled reek of burnt metal and meat gone bad that was the odor of fever and sickness. She wasn’t getting that from Jean, and she thought she should. Dogs knew illness when they smelled it, and she’d heard stories of cats in nursing homes choosing to spend an afternoon in the bed of someone who would be dead by midnight.

  “You think she’s lying?” Jack asked.

  She couldn’t tell. No peppery reek, not like Wynn, and nothing to give the lie, though to be honest, she’d not paid much attention to the woman. Too many other things on and in her own mind. If she had to put a name to Jean’s scent, it might be…a window coated in hoar-frost. Jean’s scent was cold and just as opaque.

  “You have cancer?” she asked aloud.

  Jean’s head moved in a sharp, short nod. “The bad kind. Advanced, already in the bones. Doctors say six months, a year, max, and I believe them on account of the pain. You think you know pain. Bash your thumb with a hammer, break a leg, maybe even get shot. But you don’t know real, relentless pain, not until you got a cancer eating you up from the inside. Feels like you got broken glass for bones or like a hunger, something beaky and sharp, only in your bones not your stomach, scraping and gnawing, gnawing, gnawing. That’s how bad it is and worse than you can imagine.”

  She might take issue with that. Wake up with no legs and no right arm and a head that’s more metal than bone…go through what felt like five trillion operations and revisions…don’t tell her she didn’t know pain. But at least hers had an end point. Jean’s would only end when her cancer killed her, although she didn’t smell sick. “I’m sorry to hear that. Really. But what does that have to do with ferrying those girls across the border? Money, you said that, but—”

  Jean cut in. “I didn’t mention money. You did.”

  True. “Then, what? Drugs? Painkillers?”

  “Pills?” A light derisive smile played on Jean’s lips. “Painkillers, I got, and plenty of medical pot smuggled in across the border on account of it being legal in Montana. I could float away on a nice high, if I wanted. Our Medicare system is real humane that way. But, no, that’s not why. I’m not feathering a nice nest egg, either. I wish there were better ways to get what I want, but there aren’t.”

  “And what do you want?”

  “Let me put it this way. Like I said, our health service is pretty good. But when you got a lot of sick people and a government-run system with only so many dollars, are you going to waste money on people whose odds are shit? No, you won’t. That’s only common sense. You’re not mean about it, but you don’t go all out. Instead, you’ll go for the cheapest, most cost-effective option. As it happens, painkillers don’t cost a lot. Chemotherapy, though, and a lot of those newer, experimental treatments do. People with cancer in England? They got that great NHS? Same problem. There are simply some drugs you cannot get for love or money because the government will not pay for them. You might could go get ’em in Thailand or something, but not in the UK and not in Canada. And there are a lot of people, just like me, holed up in hospices, waiting to die when, maybe, they don’t have to.”

  “That’s what you’re doing with the money? Giving it to hospices?” When Jean shook her head, she asked, “Then what? You buying chemotherapy?”

  “No,” Jean said. “It’s how I’m being paid.”

  Chapter 2

  Ninety minutes later, her tracker still had the yips, the alpha and the other two wolves were still with her, and she was out of time.

  The ruined hulk of Dead Man loomed. The mountain reared so high it seemed to blot out the sky—and worse, she was staring at the mouth of a cave.

  My God. She felt an almost-dreamy sense of déjà vu and dread. “What is this, Wynn? You said we were going to follow a rail line.” She’d envisioned big spaces, arched ceilings, something from North by Northwest. Stupid, of course. She’d been in plenty of mines as a kid. But this…this was… “What is this?” She didn’t trust herself to point. She was shaking too much. “This doesn’t look big enough to handle a rail car.”

  No, what the entrance looked like was the iris of a lizard, a gash in the mountain. A look that was, to her, all too familiar: a ghost from her past loosed from a vault of memory to haunt her present.

  “Well, the entrance has buckled, but yeah, the rail cars weren’t full-sized. More like a fancy tub, those mine cars they used to haul out coal or ore. The car would be just big enough to carry McGillivray and maybe a passenger or two, pulled by a small locomotive.” Scuffing a boot through a drift of snow at the mouth, Wynn pointed at barely visible length of brown iron. “Plenty of those old ties left. This is just like any of the cart and rail spurs running in and out of the mountain, only those were used to haul coal, supplies, people. McGillivray installed this track for his personal use rather than take any of the secret routes through the mountain he made his guests take. We follow the tracks, we’ll come out the other side, and then we’re home free.”

  It was that easy? How could Wynn know that? They’d still be in the middle of a wilderness. “Where do we come out? At the old estate?”

  “If we’d been doing this about a hundred years ago, sure, but not now.” Wynn flapped a hand. “That castle’s long gone.”

  “How do you know that?” Jean asked. The other woman had been quiet after their rest stop, electing to trudge along behind Wynn and Dax while keeping a watchful eye on the girls. None of the girls seemed especially relieved at her presence, and Kate had caught An darting wary looks, as if the girl thought Kate might be in league with these people after all.

  “Lambert still has contacts in the military. You can get a lot of information if you know which palms to grease or how much damage you can do to a career if someone doesn’t give you what you want. Lambert got his hands on satellite imagery of the whole area. There’s nothing left. Pretty much sunk into the earth once the avalanche was done with it. I heard there are some artifacts you can still see, isolated pockets the satellites can penetrate. But that’s about it.” Wynn gestured toward the tunnel. “All we got to do is follow the tracks.”

  She doubted it would be that easy. Just a feeling. Or maybe it was all the bad memories dragged up by that sense that she’d been here, done that, bought the damn T-shirt. “If there’s no estate, that means the original terminus is gone. Where do we exit?”

  “East. About four miles. It’s a spur that didn’t get buried. We make it there, we, uh…” Wynn slipped a look at Jean. “We take care of business, and then we go our separate ways.”

  “Well, that was subtle,” Jack said. “Kate, you can still back out of this.”

  She wasn’t sure how, unless she took out all the adults.

  “You know you can.”

  But then I’ve got the girls and the same problem.

  “Unless Gabriel got through.”

  Which we won’t know for a while. If ever. Given that her tracker had several minds of its own, Vance’s people had to be on their way. They’d scoop her up and make her disappear.

  “And begs the question, Kate. What about you? Where do you come out on the other side of this mountain?”

  She didn’t know. One thing about which she was certain was that this has stopped being about her the moment Vance and Hacker and the rest of the project team slipped in the biobots. She just hadn’t known it at the time. They might not have, either.

  But this was now about them. The biobots. She thought it might be even more about Jack—or would be, once Hacker figured it out, and he would.

  Which didn’t give her much time as a free agent, if she’d ever been to start with. Maybe she a
nd Dax and Six were alike in a very fundamental way. Their masters said jump, and they were expected to say, How high?

  Moving a little closer to that slit of an entrance, Kate felt a warm exhalation feather past her cheeks. The air smelled of moist rock and…she parsed the scent…a feral funk. Guano? Quite possibly. An old mine would be a good place to hang, if you were a bat. There was also something else, though. A scent that reminded her of spent munitions and hot brass and made her want to bolt, turn around and run back into the forest, back into the wild, to the wolves. And then, just stay there.

  Stupid. Didn’t stop her from wishing.

  “Kate, if there’s air flow, there’s got to be at least one or two exits,” Jack said. “A lucky break, actually.”

  A two-edged sword, actually. If new connections had opened or this tunnel gotten cut off, she had to trust that Wynn knew alternative routes—and she didn’t, just as she was certain he saw her only as an opportunity, a happy accident. Getting her out of camp hadn’t been about saving her in any way. Wynn wanted her if there was a fight, either from Lambert and Oz or whatever waited when and if they came back into the daylight.

  “Okay, everyone turns on their light.” Toggling his headlamp to max brightness, he waved an arm like a tour guide. “And stay close. No one wanders off, understood?”

  Wynn led the way, with Dax on his heels, and they followed one by one, the girls slipping into the dark until only Chili Mac—Paulsen—and Kate remained. Paulsen gestured with a rifle. “You—

  From the right, to the east, came the roar of an explosion.

  Chapter 3

  “How’s the signal now?” Boone asked.

  “Steady for the moment, but…” Looking almost comical in a helmet and winter camo, Hacker gave his laptop an exasperated stab. “The frequency’s changed. There are at least three embedded harmonics and perhaps a dozen micro-harmonics.”