Virch code, p.23
Virch Code, page 23
Daelia was sobbing now against her mom’s chest, hating herself for it but unable to stop.
“But listen to me. This,” she said, tapping the brace, “it does not make you less. It makes you more. It gives you an insight into us that most humans will never have.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know what it’s like, operating a kugu?” Mom asked her.
Unsure of where this was going, Daelia shook her head, mute.
“It is the strangest thing. We extend our awareness into it, get sensory feedback, feel it, experience it. It is removed, one step away, not quite ourselves. It can never be fully us. But this”—and she rapped on her chassis with her free hand—“lets me reach out and touch you. It let me hold you as a baby. It lets me embrace you when you cry. It lets me cook dinner for you. It let me pull you from the crash. It gives me access to your world. Even though it is not everything I may want to be for you and your father, it lets me be with you as a wife and mother ought to be.”
Daelia was crying now. Hot, heavy tears, rolling down her cheeks. “I’m not you, Mom. I’m not abiota. I’m just some broken girl. Look at this.” She gestured at her left hand. “Who’s going to want me?”
“Daelia, you are not broken.”
“I am. I am, Mom. I know you seem to think it’s as easy as swapping out parts on a wing rebuild but I’m not like you like that. This arm is part of me. And it’s dead now.”
“You have part of us with you now,” Mom said, and tapped a finger against the back of the hand plate. “But while this may feel foreign, it gives you access to the world. It is an experience I can…sympathize with.”
That pause stopped Daelia cold. Mom almost never paused. When she did, it meant she had reevaluated the word she was going to use. Decided a different inference was necessary.
So what had Mom really meant to say?
“You have the best of us, all that your father and I can give you. You can reach through this device and grab that ball. You can do anything.”
Daelia wiped the tears off her face, nodding, and reached out again.
That time, her fingers had moved.
Her attention shifting back to the here and now, Daelia looked back up the ladder. It was set at a slight angle, she realized. Not much. But enough.
Maybe.
Hopefully.
“Okay,” she said, and tucked Raven back into her pocket, zipping her in. “Okay.”
It was the most painful thirty feet Daelia had ever traveled.
The tilt in the ladder was the only thing that saved her. The slight bit of slope allowed her to lean her weight forward, keeping her left arm tucked in its makeshift sling, holding on with her right. She hugged herself tight to the outer edge of the battered aluminum, letting it slide between her forearm and shoulder, using her legs to push herself up. Daelia kept her eyes firmly fixed on the rung above her. The first, then the next, then the next, until the dirt behind it gave way and she was looking over the top of the mesa.
With one last terrifying effort, Daelia threw herself over the top rung of the ladder, rolling over on her back, panting hard. The late afternoon sky shimmered overhead, ablaze with a dusty sunset.
Raven beeped.
Daelia waved a hand and closed her eyes. “I know. I know. We need to keep moving,” she panted. “Give me a minute.”
“Anything?”
Rover turned around in his chair, looking Colonel Knowles right in the face. “When was the last time you worked something like this?”
“You know this isn’t anything we normally do.”
“Oh, I’m aware.”
The Army colonel hesitated. “Can you leave your station? Come take a walk with me?”
Rover sent a quick message back to the SyROC. Stepping out for a moment. “Sure,” he told her, and grabbed his cover.
After Argo’s equipment drop-off, the military contingent here had finally been able to get set up. Stations down here were organized based on a couple of different things, but during big events, news streams and press conferences were common occurrences.
To keep civilian cameras from seeing anything unauthorized, the TDM area was tucked into a back alcove, set up about three feet from the main floor, with a low wall closing off almost the entire space. It still allowed them an unobstructed view of the floor but prevented some of the civilian stations from seeing—or hearing—what was going on up in the military side of things.
Rover was grateful for that today. The Feds had no idea what they were doing and watching them blunder around was embarrassing. Wasn’t that Knowles was incompetent—she never would have gotten a unit like First MAB if she didn’t know how to run an op—but this sort of thing wasn’t part of active duty’s skill set. It wasn’t anything she was trained to do. But she outranked him, and as far as the Army was concerned, that’s all that mattered.
He’d claimed himself a quiet corner of the room, set up the SyROC interface gear he’d brought with him, and tried to ignore them.
Walking down onto the main floor now, it was impossible not to see the screens. Local news feeds. Cop streams. Security camera views from various parts of the complex.
The whole day had been crazy. The march from the train station a few hours back had been exactly as advertised: peaceful, ordered, civil. Speeches had been made, both by local organizers and a few people who had come up to the podium to speak off the cuff. Mostly family members of people who had tested positive for Unity compatibility.
One of them, a distraught older woman, had said her daughter was even stationed at Ellington and had still disappeared. That had been met with resounding anger from the crowd. Rover hadn’t caught the woman’s name and hadn’t had an opportunity to go out and find her. He’d passed the time stamps on to Walter, back at base. Hopefully their primate-class data analyst could figure out who she was talking about.
But that had been hours ago. Most of the kids and elderly were gone now, people dispersing, heading home after a few hours without any official response from City Hall. The president had made a statement on the national news streams. All pablum, Rover had thought it, nice-sounding words about guaranteeing the safety of American citizens and securing the future of the planet. Nothing of substance. Nothing concrete.
No assurances that everyone going up was, indeed, a volunteer.
The protest was supposed to have wrapped up around 1600.
It had not.
“What’s going on?” he asked Colonel Knowles as they hit the main hallway of the complex, headed toward the front doors.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t like the vibe we’ve got going on out here right now.”
Probably made worse with y’all being here, Rover thought, but didn’t say it. At least with the Idisi stationed within the complex’s temporary fence, nobody was going to be stupid enough to try anything.
And yet…
Walking near one of the mechanized, oversized personnel armor, he noticed something with the main gun.
“Colonel,” he said in a low voice, pulling close to the First MAB officer again. “This thing has a drum magazine loaded.”
“Yes, it does.”
“You have live ammunition in these things?”
She gave him a look that would have peeled paint. “Do you think we would deploy an asset like this without weaponry?”
“This is a peaceful civilian protest, in our own country,” Rover said, keeping his voice as low as he could. They were close to the fence now, close enough to see the faces of the people on the other side. And people were catching sight of the uniforms now, pointing, holding up phones. One little kugu quadcopter dared lift above the edge of the fence, until the Idisi pointed a secondary weapon at it. “This is not a CCP-backed riot over in the middle of the goddamn Bathtub!”
“Does that look peaceful to you?” Colonel Knowles asked, pointing a little way away, where a group of young men were pouring gasoline on a cardboard likeness of those kugus that Unity used.
“It’s a kugu, not a person,” Rover pointed out.
“I suppose you think it’s all in good fun?”
“It’s protected speech!”
Colonel Knowles’s attention was fixed on the crowd. “For now.”
“What the hell are you afraid of?” Rover asked, and thought of something else. “What kind of intel have you gotten on this?”
“You’re not the supported commander here,” Colonel Knowles said. “I am. You get the information you need to have.”
“Bullshit. Ma’am,” Rover replied. “I can’t do my job if you aren’t telling me everything. As you pointed out yourself, you don’t have experience with this.”
Among Air Force pilots, that little jab would have started an argument, but one that would have resolved easily enough; rank wasn’t necessarily as important as knowledge, not in a situation like this. And they had parallel positions anyway, regardless of who was wearing what patch on their uniform. Knowles should have been listening to him.
But Colonel Knowles was Army, and all she did was give Rover a cold stare. “Your job is to liaise with your MQ-9. Nothing more. Stay in your lane, Lieutenant Colonel Marsden, or I’ll replace you with somebody who will.”
It was bluster. Probably. Colonel Knowles was still active duty and no amount of special requests from the city or agreements between the Texas Military Department and whatever the First MAB’s higher organization was were going to change the fact that there were some things active duty simply wasn’t authorized to do.
Stand there. Look threatening.
Rover didn’t have the authority to kick the 121st out.
But that live ammo… That was a problem.
Rover stayed outside for a few more minutes, after Knowles headed back inside. Watching the crowd. Listening to the chants. Witnessing more fires being lit.
Knowles wasn’t wrong. There was some bad energy out there tonight. And the problem with situations like this, he’d learned over the years, was that humans tended to get stupider in large groups. Tended to abandon caution and reason and get swept up by whatever was happening. All it would take was one little incident, one little spark, and the whole thing would go up in flames.
He pulled up his messaging app in his NULI as he headed back inside.
JP, he sent, I need Emily on point. Start scanning the crowd for anybody looking to rile things up. I want to let HPD know before anything can get stupid.
On it, boss, came the reply.
The chanting behind him was getting louder.
Yeah. It reminded Rover of the ’26 Riots. All over again.
The top of the mesa was flat, almost unbearably so after that climb. Juniper and scrubby little oaks predominated, a forest barely higher than Daelia’s own head. She found herself near an old clubhouse, clearly once part of an old marina. It was in decent shape still. Somebody living there maybe.
Daelia skirted it anxiously and slipped into the cover of the trees.
“Raven,” she whispered. “Where are we going?”
There was a road in front of her, shattered and cracked. There had clearly been a missile strike here. The ground had been raked flat again at some point, but missing sections of road and the absence of trees spoke to the area having a crater in it. Cluster bomb, probably. Daelia recognized the signs easily enough. They’d had strikes like that in Houston.
There was one road, however, that was freshly paved and clearly well maintained. It curved around, back north, towards the canyon’s edge. Looking at it, a green arrow appeared in Daelia’s visor.
“How are we getting in?” she asked.
Raven sent an emoji of castle gates with another green direction arrow.
“Straight through? That’s nuts.”
A suit emoji.
“The panoply thing? Is it going to be enough?”
A shrugging woman. Then walls. Lots and lots of walls.
“No other way in, okay,” Daelia muttered. “Let’s go.”
The trees here were low, but they were wild and thick, and it was easy enough to walk parallel to the road but somewhat hidden from it. Daelia felt ridiculous. Some girl walking along in a dirty white outfit should have stood out like a sore thumb. But there were no cars, no people, nothing moving at all except birds and squirrels scampering through the underbrush. Maybe stealth wasn’t all that important.
Getting closer, her suit started offering AR overlays. There were a dozen or more private ones, but a few main ones too. She blink-clicked all of those offers away. But before she could close out of all of them, Raven cawed. Sent her an emoji of a dark night, dark room, closed door. A flashlight. The symbol for VR.
Oh, shit.
“Are you telling me this entire facility’s only illuminated in VR?” Daelia asked.
A green check mark. Raven bobbed her head.
Daelia left the network list open in her visor. “We’ll deal with that when we get there.”
34
“The trail’s gone cold. We’ve burnt through all our leads. We can’t seem to keep a single damn kugu in the air from the Mediation Office, and considering that we last saw her on a boat, she’s probably well on her way to the Gulf by now.”
Sean paced the floor of the city watch room as his number two, Boyd, laid out the situation with Daelia.
It wasn’t looking good.
“We shouldn’t have put the old man in the interrogation sim,” Elrod commented.
“It was necessary,” Sean said. “Could have taken hours to get anything out of him the regular way.”
“Too bad he stroked out,” Boyd replied.
“Yeah, too bad,” Sean said sarcastically, and stopped. He had a headache starting up now, a bad one. Felt like his brain was slowly being pickled. “What would you advise, Mediator?”
The kugu in the corner spoke with its layered voice. “As your man already pointed out, Doctor Jansen had the best potential to reveal where Daelia Hall might be headed.”
“She’s in a boat, or was, at least,” he said, pacing again. “That means she’s only got two directions to head in. Upstream and downstream.”
“She could have gotten off anywhere,” Elrod said.
“Why go to the trouble of getting to a boat, halfway across town, if you’re just going to leave anyway? She could have gotten on a train, been in Houston by lunch. No, no, she’s not going downriver. At least, she’s not going downriver to escape,” Sean said, and snapped his fingers. “I want a map.”
Immediately, the center of the room was occupied by a topographic projection of the city. Elrod flipped his visor down while Sean waded into it.
“So we’re here,” he said, stepping into the area between the Rainey Tin Town and the main booville resident towers. “At the central office. Have you finished mapping Daelia’s known path through the city?”
“Compiling,” the kugu replied.
Sean had taken all the security footage from the Singularity’s Wisdom for the past twenty-four hours. Overkill, their security manager had insisted, but Sean liked being thorough. Daelia Hall was running some kind of program that obscured her from traditional surveillance, and he’d been hoping a closer analysis could tell him what it was. The Mediation Office had had their full complement of analysts working on it for the past hour or so.
No answers yet, but they had identified a glitch in the program. Something recognizable. A pixelated pattern that had appeared a few times, at even intervals, during her escape from the Singularity’s Wisdom.
Not a single frame of video held an image of Daelia Hall.
But that pattern did appear.
Now, the mediators were running that against every shred of surveillance footage that they’d taken since Daelia Hall’s escape that morning. They’d been at it for an hour already, and Sean’s patience was running thin.
But the data populated the map view. A green line fell across the city.
“She was definitely headed west,” Boyd commented.
“West, with an attempt to go north here,” Sean said, pointing at the detour she had made up near the factory complex. He walked over to the marina near Tarrytown. “And considering this is where she was headed…” Squatting down, he looked north up the river. “What’s up there?”
“Outlying communities,” the kugu said. “Civilians, basic services. Nothing special.”
“Something up here matters,” Sean said, and looked at his guys. “Thoughts?”
Elrod shook his head. “No idea, boss. I don’t know this town that well.”
“Boyd?”
But Boyd wasn’t listening to him anymore.
He was on his knees, forehead to the floor.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Sean groaned, standing back up. “Boyd, if you don’t get the hell up right now, I’m going to—”
And then he realized what was going on.
“The time for ignorance has passed, former Sergeant Sean Robinson,” a very familiar AR form said, walking up to him. “You failed to stop her before this. You must stop her now. Everything depends on it.”
Sean took a deep breath. Hell. “Ma’am, we’ve been on her all day. Just trying to—”
“I know,” the abiota said, curt, and reached out to touch his NULI. “I am not looking for excuses, but results. Do you think you can deliver, former Sergeant Sean Robinson?”
And then he remembered.
Where Michael Park had said he worked.
The word Doctor Jansen had given up before he died.
Aaru.
And what was more, he knew exactly where it was.
He looked back at the abiota in front of him, wondering. How had she done that?
“No kugus,” she told him. “Only humans.”
“I’ll pull everybody I’ve got back in,” he promised.
“Do not fail me again,” she said.
Highlander twisted around in his chair, trying to get a little bit of a stretch in.
“You good, sir?” his sensor asked him.
“Just fine, Flores,” he said, and checked the mission chat again. Rover had put something in there a few minutes ago about needing to verify crowd size, ID any troublemakers. Intel was on that, asking Flores to highlight a few people they considered problematic.
