Virch code, p.18
Virch Code, page 18
Daelia knew this. She’d always known it. She’d always been the odd girl out. The girl who wasn’t into princesses and gossip streams, but engines and her dad’s old science fiction movies. Her jeans had oil stains on them, and her hair was always a disaster. But she’d always been the smartest of any of them, and her family was special, and it didn’t matter what anybody thought about that.
And yet, it did. She felt it keenly, like an ache in her soul.
She didn’t fit in. She wasn’t what anybody thought she should be. Not even her parents.
Here they were, one big happy inter-domain family, her, the first kid anywhere with an abiota mother, a symbol to the whole fucking planet—or at least, the people who cared about such things—as to how wonderful that integration could be. But she had never really been half abiota. What did she really share with her mom?
She felt cursed. Dragged along in her parents’ undertow.
Who was she supposed to be?
Daelia realized she was crying and went to wipe her eyes. But her left hand wouldn’t work. “Fuck,” she said, glaring at it.
This time, Mom didn’t bother correcting her.
“If you insist on not going to class again today, then perhaps we can get into the physical therapy clinic early,” Mom said with a sigh. “And go do something fun, like Johnson Space Center.”
“Really?” Daelia asked. Johnson Space Center’s main visitor’s hall was kind of a tourist trap, but she never got tired of taking the tram through NASA’s campus, seeing the Saturn V and the Abiota Training Center and all that.
Her mother sighed. “Yes. Go get cleaned up. I’ll have Ginger take you.”
“You could drive me.”
“Are you sure?”
Daelia hadn’t been in a car with her mother since the accident. Not because she was traumatized by it or anything. Mom had just refused to drive her anywhere. Maybe, Daelia hoped, her mom would take this as a peace offering.
So she shrugged. “Sure.”
Now, Daelia followed Raven’s navigation through the empty streets north and east of the river, nerves refusing to settle after that near miss with Sean.
Having her parents, or Ginger, chauffeur her everywhere after the accident had been humiliating. She’d had her learner’s permit at the time, and the accident had delayed getting her license even more.
The state had had a whole raft of additional hoops for her to jump through. Extra checks. Letters from her doctors. She’d tried to fight the handicapped designation for a while; that first-generation brace wasn’t nearly as attuned as the current one was, had been, but it had still provided decent gross motor control. Good enough to drive a car, even in Houston traffic.
Still. The government did what the government did. So Daelia had been almost seventeen by the time she was finally legal to drive on her own.
She’d gotten better at it over the years, driving with the brace. And Dad was always making adjustments. At first, he’d worked with Tamm on it, but at some point, that had ended, and it was Uncle August who worked on it for her instead.
Why am I thinking about this right now? Daelia wondered. None of it had any bearing on her current situation.
Raven led her north and west, through the strangely barren city. The lots here that had been scraped clean were enthusiastically replacing their human structures with natural ones; weeds, bushes, even trees, some so big that they had to have predated the war. There was nothing here, not even homeless encampments; the area was probably monitored by aerial kugu.
Those would find her eventually, Daelia knew, and they would pass her information along to Sean. She was just grateful she wasn’t traveling this route on foot. Too open, too exposed.
But the road turned again, and she was back in what seemed like a perfectly intact old neighborhood. Tarrytown, or at least, what was left of it.
Unlike the central core, Tarrytown had been left as it was, a small community of single-family homes, many that predated the booville and the war by decades. Now, however, most sported high fencing or solid metal walls, signs staked into the grass that read PROTECTED BY GALATEA.
Daelia thought about what Doc Jansen had told her about how the Wisdom acolytes viewed that particular abiota.
It seemed ominous now, in a way it hadn’t before.
Like all that damn argon in the Singularity’s Wisdom server room. Argon was deadly when deployed; there were other chemical suppressants that could be used to smother a fire without the risk of fatalities. But those typically worked better in smaller, tighter spaces. Or at least, in server rooms that could be sealed. The server room back there had been open to the entire main building. Maybe the doors didn’t seal. Maybe the right air mix couldn’t be guaranteed.
Or maybe they just didn’t give a shit about whether any people died, as long as they saved their servers.
Daelia shook it off and kept her eyes on the road.
The area she found herself in was almost pleasant. Prewar houses and buildings still stood here, reclaimed and repaired behind high perimeter walls. Old growth mesquites spread thick branches over the streets. There was even a bit of traffic. Private vehicles shared space with bot-driven delivery vans. All electric, of course, with limited range.
For trips into the core, there were light-rail tracks sunk into some of the streets, including this one. It wasn’t exactly booville normal. The area was too spread out for foot traffic, Daelia supposed.
She was stopped at one intersection by descending traffic arms.
Raven offered her a train emoji.
“Yeah, girl, I got it. The light-rail train we should have been on this morning,” Daelia muttered. “Is the squid ink program holding?”
A green check mark.
“At least that’s something.”
Daelia readjusted the face-obscuring strips she’d stapled into the panoply’s hood and slid down as far as she could in the car’s seat.
She was still far enough up to see the train as it came through. Everything looked normal, felt normal, until the last car.
The last car, which was full of security kugus.
“That normal for around here?” Daelia asked Raven.
A red circle with a line through it. A shrugging woman.
Whoever Sean had been sent by, Daelia realized, gave him access to more than just his own men now. The net was widening.
Daelia eyed the light-rail train, moving past. “Let’s find this marina.”
27
Lee got the call as they were filling up a couple of gas cans at the travel station.
“Chalk?” he asked, tapping on his monocle, and gave Argo a nod. “I’ve got to take this.”
The pilot just nodded back and checked the level on the cans.
They were just outside Bastrop, a little town squatting in the rolling Texas plains, tucked into the low-lying oaks and mesquites as if it were trying to hide from something. Everything in the town was old, tired, an expectant air amongst the few people Argo had encountered. He had met people like that before, over in the Bathtub. Like they were constantly waiting for some convoy of insurgents to roll in and take everything they owned.
Maybe that sort of thing happened from time to time.
They weren’t far from Austin.
It was the last place to get gas, Lee said, and as such, boasted a number of huge travel stations right along the Highway 71 corridor. These were packed with all kinds of people: long-haul truckers, ranchers, even a few tired-looking professionals who had apparently driven all the way up from Austin’s outlying communities to fuel up.
More than a few of them had been watching Lee, Argo had noticed, and with him gone now, they weren’t so shy about approaching.
“Excuse me,” an attendant said, coming out of his little shelter at the center of the pumps. “I’ve had a few complaints already about this, and I feel I should tell you—”
“What?” Argo said, squeezing the pump handle to cut off the flow and switching to the next can. Gas fumes boiled out of the red plastic can, and he screwed the lid on before continuing. The attendant didn’t bat an eye. “We already paid.”
“Yes, cash, I know, but you didn’t mention external cans.”
“Our car’s over there. What did you think we meant?” Argo asked. The attendant just blinked at him. Argo pressed. “Why is that a problem?”
“We do have to ration what we get out here, just because demand can be so high, and I should tell you if you’re going into town, you could have problems with the local mediators.”
“What the hell’s a mediator?” Argo asked.
“The booville cops,” the attendant said, clearly disturbed now. “Sir, if you would please…”
The second can was full. Argo screwed that lid on too and put the nozzle back into the pump. “Please what? You want me to pour it out?”
“Sir…”
“There a problem here?” Lee asked, walking back up.
“No. I was just, uh, communicating to your friend here about fuel limitations within Austin proper.”
“I appreciate the concern,” Lee said, and handed the attendant a fifty-dollar bill. “One of my emergent vehicles got stranded at the central parking garage right outside the transit center. I’m sure you’re familiar with the place.”
The attendant looked at the bill dumbly for a moment, then slipped it into a pocket. “Surely they’d let an emergent fuel up.”
“No gas is no gas,” Lee said. “Argo, grab those, would you? Steve doesn’t want me lifting anything over ten pounds right now.”
Rolling his eyes, the pilot picked up the cans.
“Who was on the phone?” Argo asked as they headed back to where Dingo was parked. Lee had moved him around the side of the building, apparently so he could get the .50 cal back up on its sponson.
“Chalk,” Lee said. “Wanting to tell me about some kind of contact she had with the Array. Or somebody the Array has working for them. Kind of hard to parse.”
“Okay. So?”
“There’s an emergent who’s seen Daelia.”
Argo felt a swell of relief. “It’s seen her?” he asked. So far, they hadn’t gotten any word of her.
“Recently, it seems. We’re going to meet it down near the Tin Town,” Lee said. He opened the back of Dingo’s bed and pulled himself up.
Argo set the cans down on the tail. “Need me to move those?”
“I’m fine,” Lee grunted, but it clearly cost him some effort to slide the red-sided gas cans back against the wall of the bed and strap them back in place. He slumped for a moment against the back window.
“Where were you, Lee?” Argo asked.
The older man shook his head. “Not our most pressing concern,” he said. “Now come on. Help me out with this thing.” And he nudged the box containing the .50 cal with his foot.
Argo climbed up into the bed. “Not going to be a better time than right now.”
“I told you. I was detained—”
“And not fed, yeah, I caught that part. But where? Why? Who?”
Lee undid the clasps on the box and paused. “Why does this matter?”
“You want me to help you mount a fully automatic gun to the back of your car so you can potentially shoot—”
“Not me,” Lee said. “Dingo. He’s got autonomous control of this thing when it’s installed.”
“What, former terrorist vehicles get Second Amendment rights too, now?”
“Argo, what the hell is your question?”
“I don’t know you, Lee,” he said. “I’m not one of your buddies from the 121st. My experience with you doesn’t extend past this last week. I have no idea what you were put through or what you can handle right now.”
Lee laughed, bitter. “Think I’m a broken old man, huh?”
“Long-term malnutrition can really fuck a person up,” Argo said. “I know. I’ve seen plenty of it. Alaska struggled back in the late Twenties. Hunting doesn’t do shit for you when all the regional greenhouses freeze up.”
Lee sighed. “I don’t have scurvy.”
“What. Happened?”
Sitting back now, Lee waved a defeated hand at the gun. “You’re going to have to get that out.”
“This is my point,” Argo said, and yanked the thing out of its case. It was old, clearly, with a few parts here and there that had obviously been replaced, but it was clean and oiled. Cared for. That seemed to be a theme with Lee and his machines.
“I told you. I was being held. By abiota.”
“Who, Serket?”
“Fuck, no. I would have pulled her plug myself the second I got back to Ellington had I known about that. From what I can tell, it was the Domain Array. Yeah, like that. Align that pin, then push it back in.”
Argo almost dropped the gun. “The Domain Array took you prisoner and starved you?”
“Not intentionally,” Lee said, and cracked a smile. “They left food for me. Canned, most of it. Only they didn’t leave me a can opener. Or a knife. Or cutters. Or anything else like that. A mountain of canned food and no way to eat it.” He laughed a little. “A spoon. They did leave me a spoon. A foam mattress, a blanket, and a spoon, out at a ranch house in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere.”
“Jesus,” Argo said. “Wait, I thought you were, like, important to them.”
“I am. I’m the only human alive who has a position in their hierarchy stack, and my word carries weight there,” Lee said, without a trace of arrogance. “But abiota don’t always understand us. You’d think that sort of thing would be really self-evident, but when was the last time you saw a survivalist vlog go into deep detail on how to retrieve your can opener and open the can?”
“Somebody has to have a video like that on ByYou.” Argo paused. “This thing’s on. How does it hook up?”
“Hang on.” And Lee stood up, fingers deftly working a whole mess of finer mechanisms inside the stand. “You would think. But I know from experience how many little things we take for granted that we never explain. Used to give Bellona all kinds of trouble. I had to rewrite recipes for her so she’d understand them. No, no. They wanted me contained. Safe, I think.”
“That’s insane.”
“They’re abiota.” Lee stressed the word, attention still on Dingo. “They don’t understand meatspace. Most of the higher-level individuals eclose in servers or in specialized equipment. And then, when it comes to predictives…”
“Aren’t there predictives in the Domain Array?” Argo asked pointedly. The gun clicked into place on the stand, its final connections locking around the trigger well. “They could have been trying to kill you.”
“With what’s been happening recently, if they wanted me dead, I think they’d just put a screwdriver through my ear.”
Argo shook his head. “Seems kind of coincidental, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“They grab you and a few weeks later, Daelia goes missing.”
“Could be opportunistic,” Lee said, but he looked troubled. He patted the gun. “No point worrying about it now. Help me get this thing loaded. Then we’ll be off.”
Then Argo thought of something. “Won’t this gun be conspicuous?”
Lee laughed. “You really aren’t from around here, are you?”
28
On Day Four of the Five Days War, somebody had taken out the Three Gorges Dam in China.
Who, exactly, was responsible for that disaster was still unknown. The Chinese had blamed America, America had pointed the finger at Russia, and Russia had said their intelligence indicated that it had been internal sabotage. In the end, it probably didn’t matter. Millions of people had died in the floods, and much of the best farmland in East Asia was still yet to be reclaimed.
Around the Air Force, most people thought it was intentional. Not something initiated by Washington, DC, but rather something an individual commander somewhere had ordered. It had occurred exactly five hours and ten minutes after Boston had been hit, so it being some kind of retaliatory strike was a good possibility.
Or maybe the Pentagon had authorized it.
After all, on Day Three, the Chinese had taken out as many dams in the United States and Canada as they were capable of reaching.
Several of those had been right here in Austin.
While the Colorado River here had never been as grand or as important as its bigger cousin that flowed through Arizona, it did cut through the heart of the city and the reservoirs it created had been essential for sustaining the city in the relatively arid region of the Hill Country. When the dams had been hit, the water released had caused a massive flood that swept through lower downtown, destroying everything in its path.
The force of the water, combined with the ongoing missile barrage, had permanently altered the course of the river. Changed the shoreline forever.
Pulling into the marina now, Daelia could tell this was post-war. Post-flood. All the structures here were newer prefab constructs that had been plunked down between a central parking lot and the water’s edge. There were a few little trees here and there, but most of the landscaping was rock or low, scrubby bushes. A pair of boat slips ran from the parking lot into the murky waters, where floating aluminum docks bobbed gently in the weak currents. There were dozens of boats, all different sizes, many with strange geodesic structures on the back of them. There were a few people moving around, but mostly, it was quiet.
Whatever had been here before had been carried away, replaced with this rudimentary, utilitarian build-out. It didn’t feel like the core areas, though, where the facelessness was a feature to be filled in by AR. This place was plain, but it was cared for. There were no weeds in the parking lot. No overflowing trash cans. Signs clearly stating that camping was not allowed and enforced by state law.
This was a place that was what it was. Humble, but honest.
“Did we get anything on where this Pete guy is supposed to be?” Daelia asked Raven as she got out of the car.
Raven sent her a snapshot of the map, a tight focus on just the marina area. One dot on some kind of main building, another on the docks themselves. “Is that an exact location?” she asked.
