Source code, p.25
Source Code, page 25
“Hard to say, Argo. Something’s going on out there but the interference in the overlay is making it hard to tell what it is.”
Trust me.
“I am not flying you like that again!” Argo snapped.
Only way. Cannot catch outside of virch. In virch—and Emily’s voice took on the angriest growl he’d ever heard out of an abiota—I will kill them.
Argo gritted his teeth. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Ho.”
“Yeah?”
“Hold off,” Argo said.
“Are you fucking kidding me? She’s headed over the goddamn air show!”
“Yeah,” Argo said, and punched the manual release for the haptic gear, “I know.”
Turning back to the object, Daelia was just in time to see light spear out of it, erupting through newborn fissures in the surface like lava. For a moment, the object was on fire, too brilliant to look at, and Daelia threw an arm up to protect her eyes from the sudden glow.
The light died.
A sound like shattering stone filled the air.
And everything went a little crazy.
The vitrified rock mantle had sloughed off, a rockslide in miniature, leaving behind an impossibly smooth object shaped like the Apollo mission command modules of old. Red lines traced its dull silver surface, glowing with internal heat.
A hatch.
It had a hatch.
An open hatch.
Tamm was yelling now, calling for security forces maybe. Daelia couldn’t hear. There was a hum coming from it, amplified and echoed by the steel and concrete confines of the hangar, so loud she could barely think. And no sooner had that started than something—some thing—clambered out of the hatch.
It was bipedal, but far from human. Its legs hooked backwards, and its arms were too long. In place of a rounded head was a triple assembly of what looked like cameras, set on a spindly double neck. It had a skin of the same dull metal as the object, the craft.
In one three-fingered hand, it clutched a small box of dark gray metal.
The other was mangled, tucked against its body, weeping some kind of clear oil.
“Hey!” Daelia yelled, but nobody seemed to hear her. The noise was absolutely stupefying.
The thing’s camera mounts turned to look at her, lens-irises focusing on her for just a moment. An abiota, she thought wildly.
She had been right. Right about everything.
But what the hell did that matter right now?
It started to run.
Later, Daelia never could say what caused her to chase after it. The shock maybe, at seeing something like that. A desire for more information, to stop it and speak to it and know that she really had pulled this off. But maybe it was just because it was scared and hurt, and this was what she did.
It crashed through the doors leading out into the parking lot, the small open lot that lay between Tamm’s facility and Bellona’s, its movements strange, fluid, unlike anything Daelia had ever seen before.
Running.
Straight at Ginger.
It bashed the window in and was inside the car before she reached the asphalt of the parking lot. The engine turned over, and for a moment, Ginger’s form appeared in her AR field. Ears pinned, tail flat against the ground. Cowering.
Something lashed out of the kugu, dark and indistinct, like a tentacle or a wisp of cloud—it wouldn’t resolve into anything recognizable. It hit Ginger, swallowing up her form, pulling her with it as the car careened out of its parking space. The sustainment power cord jerked free, tearing loose from its station.
And it was away.
For a moment, all Daelia could do was stare after it. The car seemed to be out of control, like an RC toy in the hands of a sugar-crazed toddler, veering down the road toward Highway 3.
Toward the freeway.
Maybe it would crash, she thought, stop, let her—
But it smoothed out. Got control. Picked up speed.
That got Daelia moving. Moving, before she could even resolve a course of action within herself. Heading for the Scrap House, running as fast as she could keep up. Through the doors, up the stairs, to where she’d left Dingo’s keys on her messy desk.
Ginger was family, as near as any Daelia had, and she was not going to let some unknown abiota drive her into oblivion out on Houston’s freeway system.
Dingo was already awake, growling with rage, when Daelia threw herself into the cab and shoved the key in the ignition. His engine roared awake, and she threw him into reverse.
“Let’s go get her back.”
31
Speed, Emily was roaring, speed.
Ho had switched the speakers on in the cockpit as Argo fought his way into the virch piloting setup. He didn’t bother with the safety check, the preflight checklist. He ran through the start-up procedures as fast as he could.
FQ-47s were faster, more maneuverable, but they weren’t built for dogfighting. Despite the fighter designator. Nothing was built for that anymore.
That one little fact, Argo held on to.
If anything was going to get them through this, it was that.
Argo chanced a look at Ho. But his sensor was on the line with somebody from the Storm Gryphons, reading off flight data from his own monitors. The Storm Gryphons were on their own dedicated network, and the cockpits couldn’t be tied in together; everything had to be handled via standard voice comms.
Typical military efficiency.
“What’s going on?” he demanded as the visor booted up.
“Any reason why?”
“Emily! Objective!” Argo demanded.
Get in range, in right position, she said. And eat them.
Argo and Ho exchanged a look. Argo wasn’t sure if that was possible or not; the FQ-47 was built for an A2/AD environment. Her Siren pod might not be able to touch it.
The light on the visor turned green.
He pulled the visor on, shoved his hands into the gloves, and stepped into Emily’s virch.
Gone was the cockpit. Hell, gone was his flight suit. In front of him, he saw her world: flying leathers, harness, dragon heads. The vast sky.
And in it, a pair of gryphons, doing their absolute very best to kill each other.
One of the Storm Gryphons was chasing another out across the spaceport’s airspace in a flat, tight spiral. Their movements were erratic, jerky, the result of the predictives within the control harnesses executing maneuvers without the input of a human pilot. They moved differently under conditions like that. They were tearing at each other, circuit-patterned feathers and glittering ephemeral blood ripped away. He also saw contrails, which seemed like an odd thing to be rendering, swirled and eddied like smoke.
“Can we verify this is translating right?” he demanded as Emily roared herself toward the combatants.
“Good enough,” Argo muttered to himself, and patted Emily’s false neck. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Emily screeched. Up!
The gryphons were climbing now, high up in the clouds. It had to be near the FAA’s ceiling for the air show. Argo loosened the reins and leaned forward, letting Emily go, climbing as sharply as the laws of physics would allow.
One of the crazed gryphons flattened its own ascent out, plane body raking mere feet across its victim’s wing. He understood the contrails now: jet wash. Argo jerked hard to avoid it as Emily shot up, uncomfortably close.
“What now?”
Dive. And there was a feral laugh in her voice.
Argo had a sudden uncomfortable flash of memory. The dive she’d taken him on, out over the Gulf.
But there was no choice here. This wasn’t how he was trained to fly.
Pushing the plane very close to its stall limit, Argo tipped the nose down.
Emily’s dragon form fell into the fighting FQ-47s like a raptor into a flock of geese. Her feet descended, the great talons extending out and down. Argo jerked hard, leveling her out sickeningly close.
She sank a front claw into the neck of Storm Gryphon Five and wrenched it back.
Struck.
Bit the glittering eagle head clean off.
“Somebody give me a visual!” he yelled.
Whoever was on point over at Bellona opened an image screen for him, even as Emily fought for acceleration. He let her have it and checked the real-world feed.
The FQ-7’s engines sputtered out, then died. With the loss of its abiota, the human pilot couldn’t resume control, so entangled were those systems. It dropped from the sky, slowly at first and then faster.
Seconds. Seconds, agonizing and…
“Direct hit, right into the golf course,” Ho announced. “That is a big, beautiful fireball.”
Focus! Emily snapped at Argo.
Argo looked back up in the virch, just in time to see the remaining FQ-7 coming straight for them.
“Where is she?” Daelia snapped as they blew through the stoplight, headed straight for the I-45 feeder road.
Have scent, Dingo replied. Daelia had her monocle set to voice; there was no way she was going to read his responses. Not in this traffic. Faint, fading. Further ahead. More speed.
Dingo wasn’t an autopilot program. He wasn’t a predictive, wired into the control system of his chassis. Hell, his engine wasn’t even electric. He lacked the total control of his machine body any of those things could have given him. But he could plug into the vast overlapping AR environment generated by the extensive cell phone network off base, and he knew how to track in it like nothing else.
The edge of the freeway was rapidly approaching, the intersection bloated with air show attendees.
“Dingo!”
North.
Daelia jerked the truck across two lanes, barely avoiding the front end of a minivan. The tired squealed as she took the curve onto the frontage road, heedless of the light. Then they were running north, toward the on-ramp.
Take it, Dingo said, and sent Daelia a flash of images, overlaid on her view of the road ahead. It was late afternoon now, the sun drenching the seven northbound lanes in harsh light. Daelia blink-clicked through her monocle settings, even as she fought her way through the slower lanes to the center, trying to—
The images resolved.
Ginger was a mile or so ahead. Everything or nothing: it would depend on the traffic. Daelia gritted her teeth and stepped on the gas.
I-45 was legendarily terrible.
Houston, thanks to lax zoning laws, was spread out, diffuse. That was one of many reasons it had weathered the Five Days War as well as it had: no true center mass to hit. But it meant that the city had to be serviced by a massive network of freeways, interconnected and vast, concrete tendrils winding in and around and over each other in an ever-complicated dance as state planners struggled to keep up with the bloating population.
I-45 was one of these main arteries, a corridor that led from the coast at Galveston, through the prewar heart of the city, to Dallas, hours away, and beyond. It was squeezed, hemmed in by developments both new and old, with twists that were barely negotiable at the speed limit.
Not that anybody ever stuck to the speed limit on I-45.
So it was that Daelia was not the only person screaming up the freeway at nearly ninety miles an hour, nor was hers the only emergent abiota on the road. This was almost as much of a problem as the traffic itself. She trusted Dingo to keep his head, keep his eyes on Ginger, but fights weren’t unheard of.
He fed her navigation data in the form of path indicator arrows in her monocle: what lane Ginger was in, where the slowdowns were occurring, where the openings were. Trusting him not to steer them wrong, Daelia pushed aside her better sense and followed. Weaving in and out of slower traffic. Speeding up when she really should have slowed down.
Her hands were gripped so tight to the wheel, her right may as well have been nerveless too.
For a while, all she could hear, all she could feel, was the roar of Dingo’s engine and her own blood pounding in her ears.
Dingo was going ninety-five, chassis jittering, as they flew under the tangle of overpasses that marked the I-610 interchange. Lanes began to narrow, lift well above street level. Traffic began to slow.
Exit! Dingo yelled. Exit exit exit.
“Now!?”
Exit!
Daelia dragged the truck hard to the right, slamming on the brakes to tuck herself in behind a semi, pressing on the gas hard to scream out the other side, onto the off-ramp. Up ahead, at the light, she could see Ginger, tearing left onto the freeway underpass.
She’s howling.
“I know, I know.”
The light, as she approached, was red. “Dingo!” she snapped.
Clear to the right, four seconds, middle lane.
Braking hard again, she forced her way through and around into the intersection. The truck lifted up as she took the turn as hard as she could, slamming back down again to a chorus of horns.
Somebody was going to call the cops, she realized.
Last thing in the world she fucking needed.
“Dingo, get on the radio. Get me Ellington,” she ordered, and ran the next light too.
32
In a move that might have gotten him grounded in any other context, Argo flung Emily out of the way. They were closer to the ground than he realized—not the minimum-altitude floor for the show, but the literal ground. Through Emily’s virch, he could see the bleachers. Panicked people running. Chaos.
It was all skinned with that weird quasi-feudal imagery of hers.
Fucking distracting.
Storm Gryphon Three was right behind him.
“What’s the play here, Emily?” he asked as he pulled up on the reins, fighting to get her some altitude again.
Over water.
“It’s faster than us,” he said, but turned away.
More speed.
“Yeah, no shit,” he muttered. “Ho! Find me a path that doesn’t go over a neighborhood!”
“Stay over Highway 3,” Ho told him. “You can take the NASA bypass straight out over Clear Lake and then out to the Ship Channel.”
“Can you light up the route?”
“We don’t have local maps loaded in the mission system!”
I know the way, Emily promised.
The gryphon—dammit, the FQ-47—was faster. But that seemed to be playing in their favor. It overshot them, and as it did so, Emily raked it with fire. What the hell she was actually doing, Argo had no idea, but the gryphon screeched in rage. Feathers burst into flames or melted off. The gryphon faltered.
Animal! it screamed at them, saying something coherent for the first time.
Robot, Emily taunted, and bathed it in flame again, even as it tried to circle back.
Argo didn’t dare slow, though. Whether through luck or some innate instinct, Emily had managed to drop Five over relatively empty ground.
But this was a heavily developed corridor here. Shopping centers, churches, gas stations…
“Can I go east?”
“Negative,” Ho said, terse. “That’ll take y’all right out over the neighborhoods.”
East!
Argo banked. Between Emily’s necks, below his feet, he could see a huge stone causeway cutting through a city of Tudor-style buildings. He assumed that was the bypass. Storm Gryphon Three made another pass, dropping low, and Argo was forced to surrender altitude.
Cockpit alarms screamed at him, even in the virch.
“Thirty feet above hard deck!” Ho said.
Argo didn’t answer; he was fighting Emily again. Any lower and he risked clipping a utility pole or a building. Or a car. Shit, there were cars under them.
Little virtual horses, fleeing in terror.
To his left, the monolithic structures of Johnson Space Center rose, cast in glittering stone, carved from cliff faces that weren’t there.
Argo had seen a lot of it a few weeks ago, when he and Aiden had come down here to see the NASA Space Center. They’d wandered through the exhibits. Mercury and Apollo. The Eurus simulator. The Neriene command module mock-up. Taken the tour through the old mission control facility. Aiden had loaded the kid-education overlay on his monocle and they’d both had a good laugh. Ate some freeze-dried ice cream. Marveled at the Saturn V rocket.
Argo barely blinked, and they were past it again.
Altitude, Emily called. She sounded a little desperate.
“I’m trying,” he said, and looked up. The FQ-47 was right above them. If he attempted to… “Hang on, I’ve got an idea. Trust me here, girl.”
Jerking back on the reins, Argo cut the throttle. He let the FQ-47 rush in front again, and then gave Emily her head. She poured the speed back on. Together, they twisted her nose up in a rough upward banking movement.
The MQ-9, built for long-range endurance and not aerobatics, barely responded.
The gryphon caught them, turning belly to belly with Emily, wicked hooked beak tearing at the soft skin in her armpit.
Flaming blood spilled out into the sky.
Emily roared. Slowed. Pain emojis danced across the saddle display.
Reaching out with nothing but sense memory, Argo found the regular throttle control and punched it forward as hard as he dared.
It worked. It got them above Storm Gryphon Three and out of range of its beak. Emily raked its flanks with her rear claws as she went.
And now, now, they were over water.
“Where is Emily?” Rover was demanding.
“Tower’s tracking her heading east-northeast…she’s taking it out over the Ship Channel.”
