Virch code, p.2
Virch Code, page 2
“Garcia and Chalk aren’t back yet either. Once we get them here, we’ll start looking.”
“What if she was grabbed?”
“It’s a possibility. One of several, I want to stress. We’ll figure it out. After we get your face patched up.”
“You two done with your little chat now?” Jimenez asked, shouldering the door open. He had a huge caddy in hand, marked with one of those big red medical snake things. “’Cause I’d like to get his face closed up now.”
Lee nodded and got up. “I should go check on June anyway.”
“She’s sleeping right now. But Lee, she does need follow-up care. More that l can give.”
“I called her brother,” Lee said, standing in the doorway. “He’s already on his way up here.”
“Good,” Jimenez said, and pulled a syringe off the tray. “Now, Argo, let me get you numbed up and—”
“Can we wait?” Argo asked quickly, realizing what was in there. “Until Lee’s back?”
“Security clearance stuff?” Jimenez asked.
“This is already going to be awkward enough to explain to my security manager without adding this on top of it.”
“What, you in one of those fields where you can’t take anesthesia without an escort?” Jimenez said and squinted at the syringe. He flicked it gently. “Air bubble.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“Don’t worry, Argo,” the doctor said with a smile. “I’ve still got my clearance. Very high level, let me assure you.”
“You aren’t read into our security program,” Argo protested.
“How do you know what I’m read into?” Jimenez asked cheerfully.
“She’s still asleep,” Lee said, coming back out, and looked at them. “Steve, what are you doing? Fix his face already.”
Jimenez shrugged. “Security clearance shit, he says.”
Lee rolled his eyes. “Argo, you know there are exceptions for emergency situations, right? Let him do his job.”
Argo sighed and let his head fall. His head was pounding.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was horribly wrong with Daelia. And why her father was being so damn glib about it, he had no idea.
3
The AR was thick with chatter. Kugus were everywhere. More than Daelia had ever seen in her life. Some were decidedly autonomous, being puppeted by higher-level emergents for their own purposes. Others were more toy than tool, extensions of predictive apps operated ultimately by humans, or lower-level emergents having a bit of mindless fun.
It was fascinating, it really was.
But no matter how many kugus there were around, no matter how exotic the design or how crowded the AR overlays, they still stood out.
Mom and daughter.
Bellona and Daelia.
They’d stopped at some food truck selling craft coffee. Mom had bought Daelia some sugary drink with ice cream in it. She never let Daelia have that kind of stuff, and Daelia had gotten a horrible stomachache later, but right then, it had tasted amazing. Vanilla and cream and the faintest note of spice.
The owner hadn’t let Bellona pay, insisting that it was his gift to them. And as they continued on down the street, Daelia realized that people were stopping to look at her. Talking to each other. Whispering.
“Why are people staring at us?” she asked her mother as they walked.
“The human mind is attuned for pattern recognition. They notice the discordant and unfamiliar,” her mother told her. “Despite the last decade or so, we still have a long way to go to full integration.”
“So what, you stick out?” Daelia wrinkled her nose. “But there are so many abiota here.”
Her mother shook her head, synthetic blue hair moving like a wave across her AR features. “No, my daughter. You.”
“Why me?”
“They know all our family, of course.” Mom laid a hand on her shoulder. “But they see you as a symbol, if you will. A signpost for the future.”
Daelia had a sudden urge to throw her off. It wasn’t like this was Mom. It was just a damn kugu. Mom was back home, in the hangar, deep inside that MQ-9 machine body. A fundamentally different creature.
Daelia had never had a real hug from her mother, never any shred of actual contact. It just wasn’t possible.
She choked it down. This was her mom, and her mom loved her. That emotion was real. She knew it. She did. It wasn’t fair to be having these thoughts about her mom. They’d been like a plague since the accident, since the hospital.
Since Mom had so casually suggested amputation.
“What kind of future?” Daelia asked. “One where Dad and his industry buddies are going to put a bunch of weird mechanical shit in my arm and make it work again?”
In the past, in the memory, her mother had started talking about it. How Frank Tamm and Dad were probably talking to investors right now, to keep the money coming in, so they could finally get the neurolink tech working, get Daelia’s arm working again. Mom had been so cheery about it all, which had only put Daelia in a fouler mood.
Now, though, now, Mom just looked thoughtful. “You know what they want, daughter of mine,” she said. “You’ve always known.”
Behind them, something chimed.
Daelia turned to see what it was and very nearly fell over.
She wasn’t standing. No. She was leaning against the wall in the little apartment, lost somewhere between memory and dream. She must have dozed off. Just a bit. Just for a moment.
Beyond the huge window, the sun was still rising over Austin.
What was left of it, anyway.
The city hadn’t always been like this. Back when she was a kid, the place had been so full of life. There had been a saying back then. Keep it weird. If Houston was the city in Texas where people went to make money, and Dallas was the place people went to be seen, Austin was the place people went to party. To let their freak flags fly and revel in the chaos.
That hadn’t really changed, she supposed. If anything, Austin had just gotten weirder since the Chinese had flattened it in the Five Days War.
It wasn’t the same place she’d visited as a kid.
Austin had always been the place to come for the big tech conferences. Local, international, industry-specific, general, didn’t matter. Austin had thrived on the convention scene back then. That was back when Bellona Robotics had been big into the mechatronics scene, out there on the cutting edge of everything. Dad spoke sometimes, leading panels about human-abiota cooperation, giving technical talks, that sort of thing.
Daelia had thought her dad was the king of the world back then.
But then Mom had vanished, and Dad had too, in his own way.
Mom had vanished not long after.
She hadn’t lost her arm in the accident.
She’d lost her whole family.
“Good. You’re up. How are you feeling, Miss Hall?”
Daelia blinked away the afterimages of the rising sun, burned onto her retinas, and tried to focus on whoever it was who had just come in. Big, male, broad-shouldered.
“Sean?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, Serket doesn’t need my services right now, does she?” He stared at her, eyes dark, expression unreadable. Daelia felt a swell of panic. She was alone in a locked apartment in a booville residence tower with this guy and a useless left arm.
Nobody would hear anything. Nobody would come. And she wouldn’t be able to do anything.
She stepped back.
His face softened into worry. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
“What the hell did you do with Argo?” Daelia snapped.
“I didn’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt you,” Robinson said, and reached out for her. She flinched, backed away. He sighed. “You’ve opened up a few of the cuts on your face. Does it hurt?”
“Fuck off.”
“Like I said, I—”
“Yeah, you care a lot, don’t you? You and your demented boss,” Daelia replied. Her mouth was on autopilot. She couldn’t stop the words. It was stupid. First rule of this sort of thing was to shut up and not antagonize your captor. She knew that. But she couldn’t stop the words. “All these people, all these people Serket’s killed over the past few weeks… is it not enough? You want to fuck with me too now? She’s dead. I shot her myself. It’s fucking over and—”
“What?” He blinked. “No. I brought you here for your own safety.”
“Yeah? I bet you tell that to every girl you kidnap.”
“Miss Hall, whatever you’re thinking, I’m not going to hurt you.”
“This is starting to sound like some horror movie shit.” Dammit, why couldn’t she stop the words?
Robinson sighed and walked away, hands behind his back, looking out at the sun. It was day now, the sky returning to its waking blue.
“We’re still arranging transport for you. Moving around is a bit tricky right now, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”
“Transport to where?”
“To see Unity,” he said, like it was a self-evident fact. “What else?”
“What else? What do you mean, what else?” Daelia asked, that fear creeping back. “Unity? I’ve seen it. Why the hell would I want to see more?”
“We will, of course, get your face patched back up and allow you to change into some clean clothes, if you’d like.” He indicated a small bundle by the door. He must have brought it in with him. “Local PT uniform only, but it’s better than that bloodstained dress.”
Daelia started to protest, then held it back.
Her panoply was still working. He hadn’t noticed. He couldn’t see her right.
That was something.
“There is a medical facility in this residence, of course, but they can’t address your arm. We’ll take care of that when we get you to your final destination.” He smiled at her. “Considering your state of mind last night, I thought this might be a better place to wake up than a—”
“What, a prison cell?”
“Like I said, this is for your own security, Daelia.”
Daelia narrowed her eyes. “I don’t need medical attention for my arm. Or didn’t you notice, the damage is already done?”
“I meant your brace, of course. That is part of your rudiment core, isn’t it?”
A sudden swell of rage threatened to overwhelm the fear. Her right fist clenched up of its own accord.
Robinson sighed again and sat down on one of the room’s small hip-height bookcases. “Daelia, I know what you must think of me—”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
“—but I promise, I am not going to hurt you. Nobody here is going to hurt you.” He smiled again. “They’re going to fix you up, better than new.”
“Yeah, this definitely sounds like a horror movie,” Daelia grumbled, and pulled her left arm tight across her body. She hated this, hated the useless weight of her dead limb. Maybe Mom was right. She should have just gotten it taken off, gone with a prosthetic. Then maybe she wouldn’t be here in this shitty little room in one of Austin’s booville towers with some nut job staring at her.
Robinson shook his head and walked away from her again. “I know this whole thing probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. You’ve seen all the nasty bits of it. But Miss Hall, believe me, Unity is beautiful. Unity is vital. You’ll get to see some of the better parts here soon.”
He was heading for the door, she realized, and followed. Maybe if she was fast enough, she could slip out and run.
“It’s not aliens, you know,” she said, following him.
“Of course not,” he replied, and rapped on the door with his knuckles. “But the deception is necessary.”
“For what?” she said, getting as close to the room’s only exit as she dared.
The door opened. Just enough for somebody outside to pass him a tray with a square cloche on it. He took it with one hand and grabbed her good wrist with the other, pulling her back. The door clicked shut.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he told her, voice firm now, “but you are going to stay here.”
There was nothing to say to that, although Daelia’s traitorous brain offered her plenty of useless retorts. This time, she managed to keep them from coming out.
Barely.
“What’s this?” she asked instead. “Drugs or something?”
“What? No. It’s breakfast,” he said, and let her go. He took the tray over to the small table set into the largest blank wall. Daelia realized there must have been a couch or something in here. They’d stripped the room bare. Just for her?
Robinson smiled at her and lifted the cloche away. Eggs and bacon and toast and coffee. Her stomach grumbled.
“Is it poisoned?” she asked.
“Why would we do that? You’re important, Miss Hall.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard. Not discounting the fact y’all have tried to kill me a few times now.”
“You put yourself in those situations, not us.”
“And who is ‘us’ exactly?”
He gestured to the food. “It’s still going to be a little while before everything’s set up. Please eat. I’m sorry there’s nothing here to read, and we had to take your monocle, but it shouldn’t be too much longer.”
She just stared at him.
He shrugged. “See you soon, Miss Hall.”
Daelia waited for him to go, trying to ignore the food. It was steaming hot and smelled amazing. Instead, she watched the door. If they’d gone to this much effort to bring her here, then surely there would be some kind of security. Encryption on the lock. Maybe a guard outside.
“Who is ‘they,’ anyway?” she asked herself out loud, and shook her head. There were no answers here. Not in this room.
Maybe out there, somewhere, in the half-restored ruins.
She resisted the urge to eat for a few minutes, then thought about her dad. How skinny he still was. How slowly he’d been moving. Not like himself at all. And she hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday afternoon, a sandwich from the hospital’s cafe she’d gobbled down on their way out to meet Ivan.
Daelia sniffed the plate. It didn’t seem poisoned. Maybe the coffee, but that was cold anyway.
If they were going to feed her, it was probably a good idea to eat.
She left the coffee on the table and took the tray over to the window. She sat down again, craning her neck for a better view of the streets below, hoping she might see something that would help her figure out her exact position.
They’d only included a flimsy spork with the meal.
Daelia ate and thought.
She had zero interest in whatever Robinson and they—whoever it was—had planned for her. Tamm? Ulrich, maybe? Some other asshole from SAAL she’d never heard of? Didn’t matter. She wasn’t about to let them fix her up. Whatever that meant.
The hack at Ware had been an unmitigated disaster. But she had all her body’s bits, still attached and mostly still working. She had a panoply, battery nearly drained but otherwise functional; Sean clearly hadn’t seen it.
And now, she had a spork. A disposable wood spork.
Non-conductive.
4
Rover lived far closer to base than he would have liked.
Back before the war, the whole area between NASA’s Johnson Space Center and Ellington Field had been suburbs. Growing, healthy, middle-class suburbs. For reasons nobody had ever been able to determine, the Chinese hadn’t targeted either NASA or Ellington. A stray warhead had detonated north of them, up in La Porte, but the critical infrastructure here had been left alone. Strange. But not the strangest thing that happened in the Five Days War.
The demand for housing had risen sharply after the war, and in a neighborhood like this, prices had risen steeply. Working-class people had moved out. Professionals moved in. Lawyers and doctors and engineers, a lot of folks from out of state paying out cash from insurance settlements or bank buyouts. Shit like that.
Rover had preferred the way it had been before. Better fireworks during the holiday season. Friendlier faces. But this house was the house where his children had been born and moving was almost as expensive as staying, so he’d hung on to the place.
Made it easier when he had to stay late at the unit, like he had last night.
What a clusterfuck. One of the guest kugus had gone missing in the early evening and then the air traffic control tower had gotten a notification from Emily that she was launching, and only minutes after the first Unity flight had taken off. They couldn’t refuse her, not really, but she’d taken off without so much as a word about where she was going or why.
It looked suspicious, and the duty officer for the First MAB detail had told Rover so, in no uncertain terms.
“I don’t tell her what to do when she’s off duty,” he’d replied.
Not that he wasn’t pissed about it as well. While Emily had freedom of movement, the right to fly whenever the mood took her, exercising that freedom during an FAA ground hold was not a good look. Rover was pretty sure the only reason he hadn’t already gotten an ass-chewing for it was that it was Sunday, and Cactus was at church. Phone off. As usual.
A problem, then, for later.
It was quiet this morning, at least. Peaceful, Rover thought, leaning on his kitchen counter, prodding the coffeemaker. The thing was ancient and took forever to heat up, but just like the house, he didn’t want to get rid of it. Sentimental, his wife called him.
Maybe he was.
Church was in an hour and a half or so. The kids were upstairs, still sleeping probably. Teenagers. He could still remember back when they were toddlers, refusing to nap, crying after bath time because they didn’t want to go to bed. Right now, all they seemed to do was eat and sleep and give him lip over—
There was a knock at his door.
No. Not a knock. More like a bang. Something big and heavy, hitting the fiberglass composite.
Definitely a bang.
It came again. And again.
“Shit,” he muttered.
His gun was in the table next to his bed. He retrieved it quickly, checking the chamber on his way to the front door. The banging continued, loud and resonant.
