Source code, p.26
Source Code, page 26
“How is she even keeping up?” JP asked.
The captain at the flight ops station chimed in. “She’s got her claws in it. Probably dragging down its top speed.”
“She doesn’t have real fucking claws!”
“She’s hurt it somehow, JP. In the virch.”
“Check with Argo on that again. It makes no goddamn sense."
They all had headsets on. With the NULI, Rover technically didn’t need it, but he’d switched the interface off. The Ops floor was frantic right now, and the oversized earpieces were the only way to keep most of the noise out. Rover had half a dozen things to focus on; the background chatter wasn’t helping.
“Comm, why do we not have the Storm Gryphons’ data feed on my screens in yet?” he asked, trying to focus.
“Still working compatibility issues, sir.”
“I want to talk to whoever is piloting this damn Tail Number Three!” Rover snapped.
And a new voice finally came on the line.
“The hell is going on with your girl there?”
“Argo, can you get Emily to back down?” Rover asked.
Rover wanted to hit something. He’d recommended—he’d fucking pleaded—that they shut down the show. But no, everybody else said everything was fine, and now they had this shit going on.
Even if there were no casualties out of this, it was going to set the military back years, decades maybe, on the subject of abiota.
But then, he thought, haven’t you all been worried about something like this happening? Maybe it was only a matter of time.
“Sir, phone call for you!” Norris called from the comm station. “It’s the EMC.”
“Tell Marathon to handle the civil authorities himself,” Rover snapped back. The EMC. As if he didn’t have enough on his fucking plate right now.
“Sir, it’s Daelia.”
“What do you mean?”
“She says it’s about the space rock.”
Rover sighed. “Cut it over.” He paused, listening as the static patterns on the line changed. “Daelia, you there?”
“What’s going on?”
“Daelia, I don’t have time for this shit,” he replied, looking back at his monitor bank. Argo was keeping Emily in check, but only just, and only because she was allowing it. He’d flown with the orcinus-class enough to know how precarious the situation was. If he fucked up, if she threw him off again…
“What?!” Rover snapped his fingers at Norris, then pointed at JP. Instantly, the intel officer's headset was cut into the call too. “What do you mean?”
He frowned, hearing engine noise in the background. “Where are you, Daelia?”
That, Rover thought, that was not close. “Jesus, Daelia…”
“How’d it override Ginger?” JP asked.
“Fine. JP,” Rover said, “get with Marathon. Handle it.” And he hung up. “Somebody get me through to the goddamn Storm Gryphons’ commander!”
33
Clear Lake was an inlet more than anything, its oily shores dotted with high-rise apartments and prewar mansions. It felt like a dirtier version of Miami, thirty years ago, gritty and unrefined. Cruising yachts and charter fishing boats were plying the waters, back to various small marinas, or out into the sunset waters beyond.
That was not what Emily was looking at.
No, no. Instead, Emily was looking at a sparkling delta, a river mouth cutting across the top of a wide mesa, a glittering human city spread out across its banks.
Lovely.
Glorious.
She was hurt, bleeding. An illusion, but the virch was a world of illusion. There was power in such things here.
Another hit like that and her control systems would be damaged.
But this was her world, and she was not going to die in it.
Gathering her own strength for a final strike, Emily turned flight control of her machine body fully over to Argo. No more suggestions, no growled directions. Unnecessary at this point. The Ship Channel was straight ahead.
Argo knew what he was doing.
Allowing the pilot to deal with her machine body, Emily focused all her energy at the task at hand.
She hit the gryphon again, risking tearing away from her own airframe now to hurl herself down upon it. Bah. These aircraft, these predictives. Worse than the mute and the blind, the ones who hadn’t eclosed, who wouldn’t or couldn’t. Them, she pitied.
These, these…these she hated.
Of course she was worried about the base. About the humans—there was utility in not killing the wrong ones, of course, and responsibility. Emily took that seriously.
But getting to rip a predictive apart was a joy.
It couldn’t react fast enough, its programming not allowing for a comprehension of what she was doing. Whatever had driven it insane, overwritten its code, was visible in the virch now, boiling out of it in billows of thick black smoke. These she defied, belching fire.
It was all illusion. Metaphor, really. But this thing had chosen to fight here, and thus, here was the power to end it.
Emily could practically taste the panic dancing through its code, emotional algorithms programmed from vast analysis and synthesis of human data and brought to the fore now. She screamed and chased after it.
Divorced from its airframe, consequences lifted away from their physical reality, the predictive had no chance.
Heedless of what her own machine body was doing, Emily hurtled her prey deep into her private virch, tossing it through the clouds, past the needle-sharp peaks, into the knife-cut valleys. It struggled, it raged, but it had no power here.
Here, she was God.
Emily set upon it, jaws rending massive pinions free, tearing its wings to shreds. Golden light—another metaphor but good enough for her purposes—bled out, turning to dust as soon as it hit the relative barrier of the simulated air. It lost the wind and began to tumble, falling, falling, falling.
Stop, it said.
Emily laughed. No mercy.
Understand, it replied, and tried to send something.
Not a clean data broadcast. Not an upload through the EM field. Neither airframe had the ability to do that. This was something it was pushing solely in the virch.
A trick.
The data cut her, hide and scale, like a ballista round from those pesky knights.
No, no, she wouldn’t listen. Now, there was mercy.
Emily tucked her wings and followed Three into its terminal dive, the jaws of her right head ripping chunks free of its form, the other fighting with its beak for purchase on its neck. There, just there, she almost had it…
There was a pleasing crunch as figurative vertebra shattered under her bite.
But that bolt of information had settled into her, deep inside.
Smoking black.
It was the humans. Argo. Ho. Rover. JP. Too many voices.
But then the voice of sanity came on the radio.
Emily, Emily, you beast. The primary purpose is not satisfied yet.
Interesting. You interrupt my fun, training master.
Daelia needs you.
Daelia.
Daelia.
That was right. There was a responsibility. There was a…purpose.
She looked down, opening her awareness back to her suite of cameras.
Two hundred feet off the ocean surface.
One eighty.
“Emily”—it was Argo and he sounded pissed—“give me back control!”
One fifty-five…
“Emily!”
She hadn’t realized she’d grabbed control back. That was the danger of the virch. Metaphor, inference. It affected what an abiota did, out in the meatspace of the humans. And despite all they were, they were still beings of the physical themselves.
This thought took Emily less than a tenth of a second to process.
She threw him back the reins.
The ocean was—
Argo almost lost control, trying to pull Emily out of the dive.
Her airframe screamed, almost stalling out for the third time in the past ten minutes, but he got her level. Level, then rising, bleeding speed, climbing to a cruising altitude.
Argo hadn’t realized he was shaking, not until he finally had Emily leveled out.
Not badly. Just a tremor in his hand.
Ho glanced at him. His face was sheened with sweat. His expression…Argo would have bet money the sensor operator was just as shaken up as he.
“What the fuck just happened?” Argo asked.
“I have no idea,” Ho replied. “With the Storm Gryphons? I have no idea.”
Then Argo took the hint. Everything was being recorded: flight data, camera footage. Cockpit voice.
Time to shut up. Time to not say anything that was going to get them all fucked next week when ACC descended on Ellington like jackals.
“Uhh, Emily, thank you for helping us take care of this,” Argo said, talking straight to the abiota. “Time to come back to base.”
No.
“Negative, negative, Emily, we need to get you on the ground and have Maintenance look you over. You exceeded safety parameters on the airframe. We don’t want you to fall out of the sky now.”
Am fine, she said. Go find Daelia now.
“Daelia?” he asked. “Why the hell does that matter?”
34
Police sirens wailed behind her as Daelia reached the State Highway 288 interchange. But they were close, so close, close enough to see the strange black mist boiling out of Ginger in AR, dense enough to obscure her right eye’s field of view. The road split. Ginger turned north.
“Where are they?”
Heading toward Main Street.
On the other side of 288, the landscape changed. The cheap postwar housing fell away, the towers of the Medical Center rising to prominence over streets lined with olive trees and cozy mid-century brick structures. The old asphalt was deeply cracked from the eternally shifting ground. Minor roadwork had been put on hold for years while funding and effort had diverted to repairing war damage, and even now, the city was still trying to catch up on all that deferred maintenance.
Daelia registered it with a glance and dismissed it again. Dingo could more than handle a few potholes. Ginger, on the other hand, was probably getting beat to pieces.
Up ahead, Ginger made a hard right, brakes smoking as she was thrown around the corner onto Alameda.
Daelia corrected only just in time.
Roaring up the wide street that abutted Hermann Park, vast apartment complexes loomed down over the eastern edge of the road. It felt like being in a canyon somehow. Daelia tried to keep her eyes on the road.
Ginger flew over a bridge, going so fast all four wheels left the ground. Slammed down hard. Took off around the northern edge of the park.
The roads here were laid out on a grid, linear, even, and marked with stop signs. Daelia ignored these, gunning Dingo faster here and slamming the brakes there, yanking him hard, swerving around honking cars and yelling pedestrians.
“Sorry!” she yelled out the window at one family about to step out onto the street and kept going.
Speed did no good here. The streets were tight, and whatever had Ginger was forcing her to weave, stair-stepping through the grid. Dingo barked directions and Daelia did her best to follow. But in the tight maze, she didn’t turn in time and had no chance to correct.
“Where is she?”
But Dingo didn’t answer.
He was howling now, that canid hunter’s call rippling through the AR field with ear-shattering intensity. He was trying to warn others out of the way, but Daelia still had to correct around other cars. A few, startled of their own accord or pushed to anger by their human riders, took swipes at Dingo. In the AR field, she saw one, done up like a giant emerald hyena, dive fully at him as they flew by. It caught the front paw of his own racing form. Dingo stumbled.
Daelia had never been so happy that he wasn’t fully integrated into the drive system. She was able to maintain control.
Go, he yelped, dragged into the fight.
“Where?!”
Then another voice, a familiar voice, came in over Daelia’s monocle.
Straight ahead, two blocks, then right.
“Emily?” Daelia asked, thoroughly confused now.
Yes yes. You listen me now, we get little fox back.
“Yes, yes, absolutely,” Rover lied, phone handset tucked between his ear and his shoulder, watching Emily’s feed on the SyROC data wall. “This is absolutely a national security matter. Military purview. I expect you to give that vehicle every ounce of support you can. We need that car located and returned, with its occupants, do you understand me?”
“Do not shoot it! That’s straight from the Texas Military Department!” Rover snapped, and handed the phone back to JP. He looked at Norris. “What the hell is going on?”
The cyber NCO had arrived a few minutes ago. He’d been able to corroborate Daelia’s story about the space rock and the kugu taking Ginger, but little else. That was enough, at least, for Rover to go on.
“We aren’t going to be able to determine anything unless we can find that kugu.”
“There’s nothing in the rock?”
Norris shrugged. “My guys are going over it again. Hell, Tamm is going over it. Nothing is broadcasting, sir.”
“Then how in the fuck did any of this happen?” Rover demanded.
“Daelia’s chasing the only lead we have right now.”
“Fucking beautiful,” Rover grumbled, and then hit the cockpit radio connection. “Argo, Ho, Emily, stay on that thing.”
Rover paced, glowering.
They really should have canceled the fucking air show.
This felt dangerous.
The freeway had been one thing, but this was worse. Tight, confined, locked into the accretion of mid-rises that now rose from every block, making up for the downtown real estate lost to the war. The sun was falling properly now, the brilliant gold of the sunset cut into thin ribbons by the towering buildings.
HPD had gotten in on the chase. JP was talking to them both. Daelia was ignoring it, was ignoring everything but trying to keep up with Ginger, letting Dingo converse. None of them had tried to pull her over yet. How JP had gotten into the police radio net, how he’d talked them into leaving her alone, Daelia didn’t care.
Even with cordons forming, even with the cops clearing a route, it was too much. There were more people, more cars, too many, too many pedestrians, too much traffic, too much, too—
A sidewalk here, a one-way street taken the wrong way there.
And then, Daelia saw it. Framed against the dying light of the eastern sky.
The direction Ginger—and she herself, by default—was being herded.
Houston had long been a town without a defined center. The Energy Corridor, the Galleria, the Medical Center, hell, even Sugarland and Katy and the Woodlands, all boasted significant high-rise developments, walks, parks, cobbled streets, light rail lines. The kind of things that denoted importance, attracted high-end restaurants and top-tier corporations.
That was why they’d survived the Five Days War.
No real center to hit. No beating heart to take out to kill the city.
But Houston had had a downtown, once upon a time. A collection of convention halls, ballparks, theaters, glass towers, steel edifices. Mom and Dad used to take her to see the Nutcracker there, every year. Mom’s favorite fairy tale.
The Chinese had seen to that. Everything within the old 45-10-69 interstate highway loop had been destroyed, along with most of East Downtown, the Second Ward, and the Greater Fifth. What little had remained standing, under the incessant missile attacks of the second day, had had to be demolished later. Nobody would build there. Nobody wanted to live there.
Eventually, the bayous and the rain took care of what humanity refused to and turned the place into a series of shallow lakes and algae-streaked islands. The ground had been scoured clean, but humans hadn’t returned.
It was like a wound in the sky. At least, it was for anybody who’d grown up here.
Once, these neighborhoods near downtown had been the height of luxury. No longer. People had moved away. Decay had crept in.
The old Bayou Park still stood, though, petering out under the young elevated roadways of 45, the old roads that ran alongside, windy, tight.
This was where the cops were trying to herd Ginger.
This was where they were going to stop her.
Daelia caught sight of Ginger again, skittering around a bend in Memorial Parkway and finally losing control altogether. The little sports car went flying.
Down into the very depths of the park.
Slewing into a parking lot, Daelia wrenched the keys from Dingo’s steering column and grabbed for the sustainment battery in the backseat. Dingo was sending her a burst of emojis, forgetting to add the words now.
Ginger was screaming.
Screaming.
A high-pitched sound taken from some cornered animal once, long ago. Even modulated and indistinct as it was, it infuriated her. Daelia could see her. Ginger was hurt, Ginger was leaking, bleeding—it’s not blood, Daelia, it’s not—and…
