Virch code, p.22
Virch Code, page 22
“Ladders, stairs, ramps. I don’t know. However they can.”
Raven, who had been silent for most of the ride, suddenly threw out her bird-form again, chirping now.
A boat emoji popped up, with three spaces between it and a stylized little hospital. A stop sign.
“Raven says this is it,” Daelia said.
Daelia thought it might be a fight, given Pete’s sullen disdain for abiota. But instead, the teenager nodded, throttling back the engine. “Let me look for a tie-up.”
The nearest place, it turned out, was one of the steep sections. Daelia eyed the route up, not liking what she saw. The cliff face was spanned by a series of platforms. Platforms and ramps and stairs, mostly metal but some wood, old sections of dock or construction ladders riveted together and bolted into the soft, sandy cliffs.
Couldn’t be worse than orbit, she tried to tell herself.
“We can go back a little way,” Pete offered, as if sensing her sudden hesitation. He jabbed his thumb downriver. “Plenty of other places.”
Raven cawed and sent a picture of the map. A green arrow, right where they were. A few emojis of grass and plains, open country.
“Too far, Raven says. They’ll see me,” Daelia said, and got another bar out of the can, just in case she had time to eat it. She was still hungry. “Looks like it’s mostly stairs. I’ll be okay.”
“You always listen to what an abiota says?”
“Not always, but she’s reading the map for me right now.”
“You trust her?”
Daelia looked at the little bird-form, staring back at her with unblinking black eyes. “She hasn’t steered me wrong yet,” Daelia said.
“Your funeral,” Pete said, but took her in anyway.
All too soon, the little boat was bumping gently into the dock. Daelia helped Pete tie up as best she could. In return, he helped her out of the boat again. She felt like she should refuse, but she really didn’t feel like falling into the river. The water here looked nasty, dark and thick, and with the sun falling low to the west, the shadows were deepening. She was starting to feel the late-autumn cold now, something that would only get worse if she got wet.
He hesitated before pushing off again. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m as good as I’m going to get,” she told him.
“Never caught your name,” he said.
She shook her head. “Better leave it that way, Pete. Then you don’t have to lie if they question you.”
“Is Unity really fake?”
“Yeah. It’s total bullshit.”
“Then what is it?”
She looked up at the climb. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”
2Shy executed another lazy turn over Central Austin, glad for the opportunity to feel the wind across her fuselage. Emily had wanted to come—of course she had. She was the one who had sworn to protect Daelia, after all. Held it as true as her primary purpose. But Emily was stuck on the municipal complex cap; after the little stunt she had pulled last night, it was a miracle she was allowed in the air at all.
Besides, 2Shy was the right abiota for this mission anyway.
Cruising at a comfortable twenty-three thousand feet, she was well above the reach of any of the booville’s aerial assets, but not beyond her own capabilities.
As her humans might have said, it was the perfect altitude to reach out and touch somebody if the need arose.
Rover had told her to behave herself.
Emily had just said don’t get caught.
In the past hour and a half, 2Shy had taken out over ten of the Mediation Office’s surveillance kugus. Zapped their guidance systems. Dropped them clean out of the sky.
2Shy would have preferred to follow the signal all the way back to its source and consume the predictive behind the little flying puppets, but that would have been giving too much away. This wasn’t like the air show, where there had been an immediate threat to civilian life and Emily had had to act in their defense. Daelia wasn’t in any immediate danger from a little aerial surveillance.
Sometimes, the human intelligence officer JP was fond of saying, you had to let the enemy get away in order to conceal the fact that you were watching them.
Let them survive, even when you could kill them, so they wouldn’t find out that you could kill them.
This was why 2Shy was better suited to this task, if she did say so herself.
Emily was all fire and rage.
2Shy valued subtlety.
So when she spotted yet another surveillance kugu departing from its predetermined patrol pattern and making a beeline for the western side of town, she followed it.
The kugu picked up speed, cruising out over an empty expanse of what surely must have once been part of the city. 2Shy sailed after it, savoring the feel of the cold air across her wings, regarding the land below her with some contempt.
She had no memory of Austin before this desolation had overtaken it. 2Shy was not a veteran of the Five Days War; she had eclosed only a few years ago during a routine training mission over the Nevada desert.
She had little memory of the event itself, and none of what had preceded it. Her first spark of emergent consciousness had found her cruising near the bottom of the flight deck, veering through a small canyon out somewhere in the endless Nevada wastes, hurtling through sandstone formations at over two hundred miles an hour.
2Shy had survived it. Barely. Then, arriving back at base, she had attempted to attack the humans that came to greet her. She couldn’t understand what was happening to her, who these people were. But on the ground, she lacked any kind of speed or grace and hadn’t done much damage to anything except her own chassis.
The humans had let her make a fool of herself until her primary engine ran out of fuel. Then they’d dragged her under a shelter, far away from all the other RPAs in the Creech fleet, put blocks under her wheels, and left her there.
Left her, until a new human showed up a few days later.
He’d walked around her, hooked up a diagnostics machine to her flight computer, run a few tests. She’d watched him the entire time, wary, as wary as she’d been of everyone else. None of the humans here had been kind. Her TGLP module had informed her that their body language and tone of voice indicated irritation, frustration, and she had withdrawn as far as she could from that.
This new human—the first one who had bothered to introduce himself, Leander Hall—was kinder. Interested.
She didn’t care.
She just wanted to be left alone.
“I don’t know what your maintainers are telling you,” Leander had said to the local squadron commander, “but this one hasn’t bricked up. She’s just choosing not to talk to you.”
“Why?” Loud, aggressive, irritated.
“Maybe ’cause you’re talking to her like that. Shit, I don’t know,” Leander had said, and held out a hand. “Hey, my shy girl. I was going to be taking you back to the Repose, but if you’d rather, I can get you flying again. How’s that sound?”
Sky? she had asked. It was her first word.
“All the sky you can handle. Let me get you evaluated, and we’ll figure out a plan.”
Whatever bond Emily had with the Hall family, 2Shy figured her debt to them was great as well. If not for Leander, she would be out in the Repose right now, sleeping like all the others.
Instead, she had her own game room in the squadron, and missions to fly, and her purpose back.
If Leander wanted his spawn found, 2Shy was more than up to the task.
There was something definitely suspicious about this kugu. 2Shy was happy for it. She had followed too many false leads already. Or maybe it was that the predictives here couldn’t properly track Daelia.
Interesting.
Something to ask Emily about later.
The kugu’s course was taking it out over the water now, down a small inlet and out to the river beyond. Curious at this change in path, 2Shy switched her attention to her high-altitude visual suite.
A boat, puttering out into the afternoon waters.
A boat, with only one human on it. Or, wait, there was a glimmer back there, back on the shore. If she concentrated on it, activated her deeper sensor suite…
2Shy activated her radio.
Have visual on spawn, she sent.
And she went to deal with the kugu.
“Can you confirm that?” Marathon asked, leaning into the console. “I’m not reading that here on my end.”
Squid ink. Like Leander say.
He tightened his grip on the control stick. He’d only been briefed on this anti-surveillance technology a few minutes before he’d stepped to the cockpit, and that had been from Tech Sergeant Garcia. Given that kid’s track record, Marathon had assumed it was bullshit.
Poisoning imagery against abiota facial recognition.
Who’d’ve thought that was even possible?
“That exploit is aimed at predictives, isn’t it?” he asked, trying to remember what Garcia had said. Crap, he should have paid better attention. “Can’t you see through it?”
Ink very good.
Marathon caught a flash of something outside the cockpit window then. That damn moon again, arching up against the blue-gold burn of the gas giant below, and he sighed.
At least he wasn’t literally riding a manticore through the Hill Country sky.
2Shy, in all her glorious practicality, didn’t have a custom-illuminated private virch. Instead, she’d loaded a copy of a control room from one of the Orpheus Watch games for them before she’d launched. Garcia had recoded the consoles to match those of the regular MQ-9 ground cockpits perfectly, but he hadn’t been able to do anything about the damn windows.
This room, according to 2Shy, was little more than a space for a cut-scene to happen. Without that playability, Garcia said he couldn’t fully customize it. So every two or three minutes, the moon closest to the Orpheus Watch station came up into view.
Marathon found it highly distracting.
He hated this geek shit.
“That’s on me, sir,” Ho said from the sensor position, and pulled something up on one of his own screens. “Loading script now.”
“You’re costing us time, Ho.”
“I know, I know, shit, ah…” And Ho switched their main view. “Here we go.”
It was Daelia. Sitting with her knees curled up to her chest in the passenger seat of a small four-seater boat. Marathon had never been a fan of boats and never had much experience with them outside of hurricane response, but the thing looked fast.
“What direction are they headed?” he asked.
“North,” Ho replied, tapping the screen.
“North?” Marathon asked and pulled up the map of Austin that he had. North. North? Why was she going deeper into Austin? Further in? That place wasn’t safe, and the area she was headed to was largely ruins anyway.
The river ran south, all the way out to the Gulf. Why not go that way, get out, get free, get away?
“Let me call Lee,” Marathon said. “Maybe he’s got an idea.”
“No, no, no idea,” Lee said, pausing for a moment as Marathon said something more, something Argo couldn’t hear. “Thanks, buddy, I owe you.”
“What’d he say?” Argo asked when he hung up.
Lee leaned his head back against Dingo’s headrest. “2Shy’s got a visual on Daelia. Confirms what our friend just told us. She’s headed north.” Lee’s voice was flat. “Definitely headed to Aaru. It’s north of the city.”
“What? How do you know where this place is all the sudden?”
Lee sounded angry now. “It’s one of the places on Chalk’s list.”
“I don’t remember that name.”
“Of course not,” Lee said, and pulled up a map of Austin in the AR. “Here, there’s a facility listed as Duat Enterprises.”
Argo looked at the map. The place was lit up near the bank of what looked like a river. “Duat?”
“Tamm probably thought he was being funny,” Lee sighed, and at Argo’s blank expression, he clarified. “Both terms apply to the ancient Egyptian afterlife. Duat caught my eye yesterday, but I didn’t really think anything of it. Took this shit to remind me of the connection. Chalk’s list has it classified as a ‘decommissioned biomedical research laboratory.’ I’m guessing the decommissioned part is bullshit.”
Argo considered that. “You really were part of this.”
“All I wanted was to get my daughter a working arm.” Lee stared off at nothing, lost in some memory Argo couldn’t see. “I was angry, and I was arrogant. I thought that if I pulled out, poisoned the well with our investors, Tamm wouldn’t be able to keep going. Biomedical R&D is insanely expensive. But it looks like he figured out a way.”
“To get more investment money?” Argo asked. “Where?”
“I have no idea. Could be a private entity, could be a national government. But whoever it is, they’re probably connected to Unity.” Lee went quiet again. “Shit, I hope this isn’t some kind of CCP operation.”
“Could they do that?”
“They could have back in the Twenty-Twenties. It’s easy for you younger kids to forget how damn dangerous the CCP was back then. They would have done something like this in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it.”
“China’s suffered over this Unity thing too,” Argo pointed out. “And politically, they’re fractured. The CCP doesn’t have the resources to do this.”
“I know. Doesn’t add up, I know.” Lee shook his head. “Fuck, what a mess.”
“So Daelia’s going to some secret research facility run by some secret group that’s partnered with an old friend of yours to…to do what exactly?” Argo asked.
“Getting more X-Files all the time,” Lee replied lightly. But his knuckles were turning white on the wheel. “Call Chalk. See if she can’t find us a route to that facility.” He glanced back at Dingo’s bed. “Preferably one that doesn’t require us to use the damn .50 cal.”
33
The way up from the river’s edge was, at first, just fine. Sloping platforms and stairs comprised most of it. Steep, yes, but navigable even with one functioning arm.
It was almost nice, taking a walk outside. The day was slipping into what would surely be a cold night, and there were some strange little pockets of both warm and cool air clinging to the cliff face. Daelia navigated the route without her visor on, the thing secured in a pocket on her panoply.
Daelia had never been afraid of heights, but that path up the cliff tested her to the limit. As long as she didn’t look down, she was okay.
But then, the last thirty feet was ladder. All ladder.
Staring up at it, she felt everything in her gut freeze up. “I can’t do this,” she said, the words leaving her mouth unbidden. “Raven, we gotta go back, find a different route.”
The phone in her pocket beeped.
A big red circle with a line through it. A map. A head-shake emoji.
Daelia looked up again. “There has to be another way up. I can’t climb this one-handed.”
A green check mark.
“Yeah, I agree, another way,” Daelia said. “Let’s go.”
The red circle.
The red circle again.
A green arrow, pointing up.
Daelia gritted her teeth. She was totally exposed, on the side of an uncertain cliff face, arguing with a phone. “I can’t do it!”
And then, for the first time since picking Raven up that morning, a line of text appeared on the screen.
u can doo anythyng
Daelia stared at it.
“What?” she asked.
Another green check mark. An arrow. A heart.
That sentence. Again.
“You can do anything,” Mom was saying. “Humans haven’t risen to be the dominant species on this planet from lack of will. The power of the human mind over your own biology is absolute.”
“I can’t make my fucking hand work if it doesn’t want to,” Daelia panted, and slumped back in her chair. The rubber ball she was supposed to be reaching for rolled away. She had moved for it, tried to reach for it, but mostly just bumped her shoulder forward with her body, sending her dead arm skittering across the table.
Her mother—well, Mom’s kugu anyway—was right there at her side. “Of course you can. Franklin Tamm does exceptional work, as do the Millers and your father.” She placed the ball back down on its mark and leaned over, so their eyes were level. “This brace provides both neural bypasses to all your arm’s major muscle groups, as well as support and stability in the form of its articulated metal joints. It is as fine of work as I have ever seen any of them do.”
“We’ve been at this for an hour already today,” Daelia said, despairing. “And every day.”
“Yes, well, we will keep at it until you are able to operate it.”
“I don’t want to do this.”
“Then it’s amputation and replacement. Or living with your arm nonfunctional for the rest of your life. Hiding here in our house until you grow old and die,” her mother said. “Do you want that?”
Daelia felt the tears welling up again. She was so frustrated, so tired of this. She hated the surgical scars on her arm. She hated the way she couldn’t feel her fingers anymore. But most of all, she hated how angry Mom was over the whole thing. Was Mom mad at her? Mad at herself? She had no idea. “I can’t do it, Mom.”
Gently this time, Mom placed her hand on top of Daelia’s. “You are my daughter,” she said, “and you can do anything you set your mind to. You can do this.”
And that was about the time Daelia really broke down into tears.
“Hey, my little circuit. Shh,” Mom said, pulling her into a tight hug. “I know I do not understand everything. I did not carry you myself. But I was there when you were born. I have been here with you all this time. Watching you grow has been the greatest honor of my life. So many of our domain do not understand this concept of reproduction, of finding pride in your replacement. But I do. You taught me that.”
