Virch code, p.11
Virch Code, page 11
“My retirement date’s not for another six months.”
“I’m flexible on start date. It’d be good to have somebody else who knows Ellington on the team. Send me your CV,” Lee said. “Ah, here we go.”
They had just stopped in front of one of the old bunkers. The Bellona Robotics name and logo were stenciled on the metal in marine-grade red paint. Its flaking appearance and the obvious age of the door made Argo feel like he was in some spy movie, about to stumble into some secret Soviet bunker.
He looked at Lee. “When you said you had some private storage in the armory, you weren’t kidding.”
“It’s Bellona’s,” Lee said, and ran a hand across the old metal. For all the security to get in here, though, these bunker doors were held closed with only a small length of chain and a big combination lock. Lee got to work on that. “Sapient-class abiota are afforded the same rights as any human, under the 29th Amendment, including the right to keep and bear arms. Commensurate with their machine body’s operational capabilities, of course.”
“So what, this is her personal gun safe?”
“We can’t exactly store Hellfires at the Scrap House,” Lee said, making one last twist of the dial and popping the lock open.
Twohy and Owens waited outside, talking quietly, as Argo followed Lee into the gloomy bunker. It smelled of damp and dirt, but was obviously dry, clean, well maintained. A few lights hung from the ceiling, but other than that, the main source of illumination was the open door. Their bodies cast long shadows into the gloom, almost the full length of the bunker.
The place was stuffed to the gills. Argo walked through it, marveling a little. Heavy-duty metal shelving, set in two rows, just off the walls. Some of the equipment on the shelves here was oversized—blade servers, diesel generators, tires, big spools of old Cat 5 comm cabling—but most evidently fit in boxes. Big plastic bins, all marked with the same careful handwriting.
And neatly set up in the center of it, stacked up in a two-by-two configuration, were four Hellfire missiles.
Argo skirted those carefully, heading for the back wall.
Where a set of cages ran the full length, filled with guns.
“Nice collection, huh?” Lee asked, coming up alongside him.
“It’s thorough, that’s for damn sure,” Argo replied, taking it in. Lee had everything here from pistols to a .50 caliber. Argo tapped the cage door for that. “How do you have this, anyway? I know Bellona wasn’t flying with this.”
“That’s Dingo’s old gun,” Lee said, and smiled a little. “I convinced the Army boys who captured him that we couldn’t be sure he didn’t extend into the gun, so we had to bring it all back to the States with us.”
“The Army believed that?”
“This was early enough on that nobody really knew what to think. Even I wasn’t sure. He can control it, after all.” Lee shrugged. “It’s harmless without ammo in it, anyway.”
“Uh-huh. So what, did you just want the gun?”
“No, I wanted Dingo to be okay.” The older man grinned. “Once I got it off him, though, yeah, I wanted it.”
There were other things here, other things that were clearly bits and pieces of weapons. Argo walked down the line of cages, taking it in. “Are these all components you’ve taken off abiota?”
“A lot of it,” Lee said, and started spinning the combination lock on the cage with the more conventional stuff. “Some of them are my own pieces I’ve collected over the years.”
“I thought you said this was Bellona’s.”
“Those are,” Lee said, pointing behind them at the Hellfires. “But it’s our bunker. I can do whatever the hell I want with it.”
Argo looked at the wall. “Do we really need this stuff to get into Austin?”
Lee snorted. “I’d sooner walk through Manila unarmed. Now come on, what’s your preference?”
Argo started going through what Lee had a little more seriously. It was a nice collection, it really was. “You know, Lee, I remember seeing your name pop up in articles we had to read at the Academy.”
“That so?”
“Yeah, Mechatronics Today and all that shit. A couple of my engineering instructors were big fans.”
“I was working on all kinds of R&D initiatives. People have always considered me an ambassador for the abiota. Made sense to me to lean into that. We had a consulting arm at the time, helping people figure out where they could leverage abiotic talents in their own companies. That was down in the Galleria. And, of course, we were just starting to explore biomedical…”
“Before Daelia’s arm, right?”
Lee sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, before that. I’d been in that for almost two years, something like seventy million dollars already invested with a hell of a lot more coming down the pike.”
“And you just walked away from it?”
Lee paused. “Yeah, Argo. I just walked away from it.”
“Why?”
Lee pulled a duffel bag off the lower shelf. Laying it down, he went back into the cage for a pair of AR-15s hanging on metal pegs. “What difference does that make?”
“It sounds to me like you burned your whole business to the ground after Bellona left.”
Lee grabbed a shotgun, checked it carefully, barrel pointed at the floor. It too went into the bag. “I had a daughter to take care of. I scaled back for her,” he said, irritated now.
“If we need all this just to drive through Austin, how’s Daelia going to be okay on foot, alone?”
Lee snorted and grabbed an ammo can. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t underestimate her. She’s a resourceful girl, and she never stops until she gets what she’s after. Just like her mom.”
“Oh, we could just let her rescue herself then,” Argo said sarcastically.
“If she’s not out by this point in the day, it’s ’cause she’s not looking to rescue herself,” Lee said. “If I know my daughter, she’s headed deeper in. Looking for answers. That’s the problem. Normally she’d be out, or at least would have found a way to contact us otherwise. And that’s why we have to go get her. Cause she’ll dig in so far she won’t remember how to get out.”
“What’s in Austin for her to find?” Argo asked.
“Who the fuck knows? If I’m right, and I usually am, then at least the kugu manufacturing facilities up there have been co-opted. Unity could be making anything. She might be after that. Or…”
“Or?”
“Or nothing. I’m going to get Dingo’s .50 cal, and then we can get going. Grab what you want.”
“Great,” Argo said, scanning the rifles. His eye settled on one, and he found himself reaching for it before he knew what he was doing.
Lee chuckled. “I don’t think they’re going to have any robotic bears for us to shoot.”
Argo checked the guide gun over. It was in beautiful condition. He’d never owned one, but one of his friends’ dads had. Taken them out hunting with it once. It’d bruise you up pretty good, but it would drop a rampaging bear. As long as the man holding it didn’t panic. “You got ammo for this?”
“Of course.”
“Why do you have a bear rifle?”
“A couple of my old partners like to go hog hunting.”
“And you kept their guns?”
“Company purchase,” Lee replied, like this was a normal thing around here. “Now come on. That little trip up to Hempstead is going to take some time.”
Ten minutes later, laden down with ammo and Dingo’s own gun, they were on their way out of the munitions field. Argo cast one last glance back at the bunker.
There was more to all of this than Lee was telling him. But what that meant, Argo had no idea.
16
Leaving the outreach, Daelia had two paths in front of her, at least according to Raven’s map: head north, deep into the manufacturing area, or go south to the river.
Neither was a good option.
Austin’s manufacturing hub was closer. The outreach was right on the edge of it. Two blocks to the north, Daelia could see the huge tilt-wall facades of the factories. The river was further away, a full mile at least. It would take her to the bridge quicker, though, whereas the northern route meandered through that concrete maze for miles and would require heading down through one of the outlying suburbs in order to reach another bridge and the west side of the Colorado River, where Aaru was.
The north route was the one Raven had recommended.
The old suburbs and satellite communities of Austin were notoriously paranoid, though, fitted with their own surveillance systems and independent police forces, backed up with citizen patrols. And here she was, a girl in a dirty panoply and a full visor. They’d probably think she was a tech-head and throw her in jail. Kill her, even. If there were emergents out there, maybe they’d recognize her, but that was a big if.
It was also a fifteen-mile walk, five of which ran through the manufacturing area, where the security system was tied back into the booville. Even with the panoply set to obscure her passing, if she ran into anybody who wasn’t lost in AR, she’d stick out like a sore thumb.
The southern route cut the route down to seven miles, and she could probably hot-wire a car in Tarrytown. But it took her closer to the agriculture fields and the ruins beyond those.
Still, all that was on the south side of the river. And on the map, the old park that wrapped around the banks looked fine.
Raven hopped on her bad arm, question marks playing across the bottom of Daelia’s visor.
“South,” she decided. “We’re going south.”
For a little while, Daelia’s path was easy, headed through the streets of the outer core. Everything looked the same. Old pre-war buildings still stood here and there, tucked in between their more brutish modern cousins. AR suffocated it all, wrapping the boxy facades in glory. Daelia left her overlay on, albeit with high opacity, just to keep an eye on what was going on.
There were no walls in Austin. Not really. The boundary between the inner Omphalos-owned core and the outer areas, where she was now, was largely invisible. But the difference between the core and what lay beyond was stark indeed.
Looking to the west now, following Raven’s map, Daelia could see a static illusion hung in the AR. Like the painted backdrops of a stage performance, the last of the core overlay showed a glistening, gleaming modern city, reaching as far as the eye could see. But when Daelia turned off the AR, everything changed.
Daelia had never been out this far. She’d heard the stories, like everyone else. But she wasn’t ready for it, not really.
The land here had been clear-cut. For three blocks there was nothing but empty streets, some repaired, some still broken from where missiles had fallen. Beyond that, the city—or what was left of it—resumed.
Out there were buildings, many of them prefab structures that had been dropped in, back when the city was still trying to reconstitute itself. Before the Omphalos buyout. There were pre-war buildings out there too, sticking up from the old streets like rotten teeth, but most were gone. Huge swaths of properties had been purchased, either from desperate homeowners or banks looking to recoup losses, and then leveled. Torn down, in anticipation of booville expansions that were promised but never came.
Maybe the city would have gone back to normal, given enough time, or less myopic investment. Certainly the success of places like Charleston or Seattle spoke to that. But Austin never had, caught between what it had been and what everyone dreamed it could be. It wasn’t a real city anymore, not really, but tens of thousands of people lived out there; it had to be somewhat functional.
“How far to the river?” Daelia asked Raven quietly.
A one-half emoji flashed up.
“Half a mile,” she muttered. “Okay.”
Soon, the boxy buildings gave way to community gardens, green space threading its way into the city. While a number of smaller parks on this northern side of the river had been reclaimed as community gardens, the park here, south of the old Cesar Chavez Parkway, had been left alone. The state Guard had used the place as a staging ground, back when they were combing the place for survivors after hostilities ceased, and a lot of their equipment had been left behind. Shipping containers, tents, things like that. Even now, they were in use. Daelia hurried on past the camps, towards the safety of the trees.
She began seeing people here and there. Regular people, normal people, people from the sprawl, going about their day. There were even children out here, playing among the rocks and scraggly bushes, climbing the side of what looked like a vast old impact crater, tumbling down, laughing. But to her surprise, it wasn’t just applicants and vagrants; there were plenty of people here in corporate leisure uniforms, out jogging or having lunch.
Daelia passed an outdoor market. People with grubby hands selling the last of the year’s meager harvest. Stolen goods on offer next to handmade crafts. Women advertising everything from firewood to companionship. One of those leered at Daelia from outside a large RV, offering her a bed and two meals a day if she was interested in a job. She shook her head and moved on.
“No abiota,” she observed to Raven as they walked. Raven’s map had indicated that the footpath down near the river was in decent repair, and passable. It was in the trees, out of view of the main surveillance drones. “Why is that?”
Raven cawed. Bike bells dinged behind her; Daelia moved out of the way just in time, an older couple riding ancient bikes zipping past.
“Thanks,” she told the abiota.
Raven, in reply, sent her an emoji of a power cord. A red circle with a line through it.
“No power?” Daelia asked. “No power anywhere?”
The map popped up. South of the river, beyond the fields, was all colored red. Between Tarrytown and the core, it was dashed.
“Oh. Sometimes in this area, there are blackouts?” Daelia asked.
A brown circle. A watch. A spiral.
“Oh, okay. Brownouts, all the time,” Daelia said, and looked to Raven for a nod of confirmation. “Seems weird. Fusion is supposed to stabilize the power grid.”
More emojis. Power lines. Factories. Broken wires. Question marks.
Daelia caught the meaning. Between the manufacturing complex and bad infrastructure, it wasn’t possible to supply reliable power to the sprawl.
“You’d think Omphalos would care about fixing that,” she commented. “Weren’t they supposed to continue rebuilding this place?”
Raven said nothing, her eyes keen in Daelia’s overlay.
Daelia sighed and kept walking.
The bike path meandered through twisted oaks, taking Daelia further and further away from the core. The scenery wasn’t beautiful; this late in the year, the trees were losing their leaves. The skeletal forms of those naked branches did nothing to ease Daelia’s nerves. Across the river, to the south, she could see the muddy expanse of the communal fields and the more desperate shantytowns beyond that housed the ag workers.
Only another two and a half miles. That was all. Two and a half miles and she’d be close enough to cut up into Tarrytown. From there, she’d still have to cross the Redwater Bridge on foot, make it up to Aaru, but maybe she could find a bike. Or get her panoply tuned up enough to get one of the local buses or even hitch a ride. Or hotwire a car, if she could find one that wasn’t abiotic and—
“Hey! Pretty girl!”
Raven cawed. Daelia clenched a fist.
Hell.
She kept walking, faster now. Maybe if she just got away from them…
No such luck.
“Hey!” the voice called again, louder now. “Hey, where d’you think you’re goin’?”
Somebody stepped out in front of her on the sidewalk. A big guy, heavy and thick, face tattooed heavily with the ash-gray of homemade ink. More noise behind her. Daelia turned. Three more there, one of them swinging a nightstick.
Shit.
She looked around, desperation rising in her chest. The path was at a little curve here, running through a particularly dense section of trees. The only other person on the path, up ahead of her, had already turned around.
Raven, sitting on her shoulder, cawed.
“Who, me?” Daelia challenged back, as forcefully as she could. Her heart was speeding up. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. No way could she fight four of them off. Maybe she could outrun them, but—
“Don’t think she know the rule, boss,” one of the others said.
“Rule?” she asked, still desperately looking for an opening, a way out. She started to back up.
“You pass our way, you owe us,” the big gang leader said, and grinned, revealing a mouth full of black and broken teeth. “What you got to pay with, eh?”
A noise. Her eyes darted over. Five. Shit. There were five of them now. “I’m just passing through.”
His hand went very deliberately to his belt. “Well, so are we.”
Just then, a horrible sound, like the screech of a dying bear, broke through the air. It was AR augmented, Daelia realized, as the men, all wearing visors, clutched at their ears, screaming.
Raven, she realized.
An emoji popped up on her own visor.
Sneakers.
She was already running.
Without tapping into the wider AR overlay network, the abiota’s projection range was limited. Daelia knew, somewhere in the back of her brain, that this wasn’t more than a hundred feet or so. The further she got from her would-be attackers, the less protection Raven’s screech would offer.
It didn’t matter.
The way in front of her was nothing but more wild parkland, nothing and nobody there to care about some girl getting caught by a local gang. She ran north instead, uphill, back toward what passed for civilization here. If she could reach a train station or some other enclave of people, maybe the gang would leave her alone. Even here, there was some minimal police force. Surely it would step in.
She could hear them calling and taunting as they chased her, then screaming again as they got close enough for whatever Raven was doing to reach them. Daelia glanced back just in time to see the leader rip off his visor.
