Virch code, p.29
Virch Code, page 29
42
Where is 2Shy now?
And Emily?
I want her exact location.
“It’s a fucking IAA mission, Marathon, not some live-fire exercise over in the Bathtub!” When the words came out of his mouth, Rover cursed internally. He wasn’t supposed to be talking. Not really. The idea was to think the word, with intention, through the implant in his forehead. He was still getting used to that damn feature.
“That’s a nice word for it,” he grumbled, giving it up.
Nobody was paying attention to him anyway.
Around him, the temporary command center had descended into chaos.
Too many people had crowded in. Too many civilians, too many cops. Everything was madness.
Reports were coming in from all over the main plaza and the streets beyond. Conflicting, contradictory reports. Cops firing indiscriminately at civilians. Protestors attacking the cops. Police horses running loose, wild, their riders torn from their saddles. Children trampled under the fleeing masses.
Nobody knew what was happening. Nobody could get confirmed visuals of anything. There were dozens of ByYou streams from the crowd, but those were confused, wild.
A few were up on the command center wall, projected in AR for anybody who wanted to see them. In those, gangs in shirts bearing the Spearhead logo were chasing people down, yelling about Unity.
There was also a running analysis from Anchor. That had shown up ten minutes ago, the predictive no doubt running every scrap of information he had access to. Rover was barely looking at it. Anchor might have overseen intelligence processing for the National Military Command Center, but he wasn’t accustomed to this kind of domestic situation.
Rover trusted the more localized information from his own intelligence analyst.
Such as it was.
“Walter,” he said, switching his comm back to the SyROC main floor, “what am I looking at here?”
Nothing talk to anything else right now, Walter replied with a distressed little wail. I only give sixty-percent certainty in data picture. Need 2Shy.
“Yeah, no shit,” Rover muttered. Sixty percent. Walter might as well have been guessing. Hell, he probably was.
“Air! Where is my oversight?!” Colonel Knowles yelled across the room.
Rover cycled through the feeds he had from Ellington. “Fourteen minutes off from having a replacement asset in range,” he said calmly. “She’s flying as fast as she can.”
Colonel Knowles came over. She might have been a combat veteran, Rover knew, but she wasn’t dealing with this well. Probably fighting every instinct she had on what to do next. Even the feds knew better than to open fire on a crowd of American citizens. Right? “It looks like they’re trying to get into this complex.”
“I’m sure they are,” Rover replied. Back at Ellington, Walter and Lieutenant Daniels were reviewing every scrap of open-source information they could access, trying to build some kind of insight into what the crowd was doing. So far, their analysis indicated the same thing.
“You’ve worked riots before, correct?”
In another situation, this might have been an opportunity to rub the woman’s face in it. Her arrogance. Her insistence on not needing advice.
In another situation that didn’t involve civilian lives.
“What do you want to know?” Rover asked.
“What do you think these people are going to do when they get in?”
“Vandalism for sure, arson maybe, which could be a problem if we can’t get people out of the building,” Rover said. Walter refreshed the event map. He was updating it every thirty seconds with confirmed crowd-flow data. “But we are seeing a few individuals with gas masks.”
“Fuckers planned this,” somebody else said.
“That’s very like,” Rover said.
The colonel from First MAB was pacing. “Evacuate?”
“It’s your call, ma’am,” Rover said. “I’m not out there, I can’t judge the mood of this thing.”
“People are already dead,” Knowles said grimly, and looked up. “All nonessential personnel in the building are to evacuate now!”
“East exits,” Rover said. “Crowd’s lightest out there.”
“Anchor’s saying south,” Knowles said, looking at the virtual data wall. “South! And contact our team out front. I want those people covered!”
Adrasta was moving now. The situation was bad, but not so bad that the cops had switched out their tear gas and rubber bullets for live ammunition. Adrasta wasn’t sure what was happening out in the crowd, but she didn’t think any of the fatal shots had come from anyone in uniform.
She hoped.
Visibility in the plaza was shit; between the tear gas and the mass of people, pressing in and back, it was hard to tell what was going on. All three of her operators were grumbling about it right now. She could hear their bitching over their closed comm.
South. They were headed south. A group of cops had been ordered down that way, and two of Adrasta’s suits were following.
Continue east around the back of this facility.
Why? Orders are south.
EAST.
Adrasta didn’t like this. Didn’t like it at all. But she had pledged her support. They all had. They had to. There was no choice.
This was a war for survival.
East, she confirmed, and altered the incoming flow of orders to her human.
The song in the depths strengthened, growing louder.
Adrasta did her best to ignore it.
43
Raven in hand, following the arrows on the screen, Lara guided the small group through the darkened hallways.
Up ahead, past the next junction, she heard voices.
She held up Raven, a red stop sign displayed on the little abiota’s screen. Everyone shuffled to a halt immediately, pressing in tight together. Lara waited until it was past, then pulled the abiota down again.
“Is the way clear?” she asked.
Daelia had said the thing only communicated through emojis. Lara had dealt with that before, and knew she was in no mental state to decipher anything. She was trying to only ask yes or no questions.
A green check mark.
She showed that to the group. Everyone started forward again.
“Unity candidates!” a voice yelled behind them. “Halt! There’s nowhere to go!”
Panic spread through the group like wildfire. Screaming. Cursing. The old woman, the one who Lara had spent so much time with, started bawling.
But Lara couldn’t turn around. Couldn’t move.
Because directly in front of her, close enough to grab her, was a guy with a gun.
“So,” Sean said, offering Daelia a bottle of water. “Here we finally are.”
Daelia didn’t touch the water. Instead, she folded her arm across her chest. Brought her hand closer to the control panel. “What do you want with me?”
“You came a long way today, and Austin is much drier than Houston. You’ve got to be thirsty.”
It was so absurd, Daelia almost started laughing. She held it in. Barely. She needed to keep him talking. Keep his attention on her for as long as possible. She had no idea what was going to happen to Lara’s group, but the more time they had, the better.
“I’m not,” she told him, and opened the suit’s messaging app.
The bad guys knew where she was now.
Time to give anyone looking for her some kind of trail to follow.
Aaru, she typed, and hit send. Shooting it out to every contact in the suit’s short list. Even Argo.
If he was still alive.
“This was quite the chase for me, I must say,” Sean told her, smile fading a little. “I’m impressed you evaded me for so long. You’ll have to tell me how you did that sometime.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Daelia said, and looked around. He’d escorted her, firmly but politely, into what appeared to be some kind of conference room. Long table, matching chairs, a credenza stuffed full of power cords and coffee cups. It was so mundane it was painful to see. No AR in here either. Or at least, it wasn’t on at the moment. “Can I go?”
“Hardly. We are just going to sit here,” Sean said calmly, gun on the table in front of him. “We are going to sit here and we are going to wait until my men round up the Unity candidates that you helped escape, and then—”
“Unity’s not real, Sean,” Daelia said.
“Unity isn’t alien,” he chided. “But it’s definitely real.”
“Sean, listen to me,” Daelia said, trying to dredge up something, anything personal she knew about the guy. She’d dealt with him a few times since she’d come home from Ware. Definitely a bit creepy, but genuine beyond that, a standard-issue military guy. Decent, she’d thought. “Sean, whatever you’re seeing, whatever’s behind Unity seems to have the ability to manipulate people with NULIs, and—”
“She shows us the truth,” he said, cutting that off.
“Who is she?”
He smiled at her. “You really don’t know? You came all this way, here, and you don’t know?”
“No, I have no fucking idea.”
He shrugged. “You will. Soon enough. She wants to see you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But she’s asked for you. Isn’t that enough?”
“Sean, have you seen the place where they were holding these people?” Daelia asked, trying another angle. “There are dead bodies in there. A lot of them. Butchered. Whoever’s behind Unity, they’ve been carving up people’s brains for months trying to—”
“Trying to save us!” he half yelled, thumping his fist on the table. Daelia winced; he didn’t seem to notice. He took a deep breath and settled back down in his seat. “She is trying to save us.”
“Save us from what?”
“Ourselves,” he said. “That is why we’re all here. That’s why I’m going to find your escapees and bring them back. Because we need to let her save us. A few lives against global harmony.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen more dead in a single urban engagement over in the Bathtub.”
“What, like Manila?” she asked sarcastically.
“We are going to sit here, and we are going to wait.” And he smiled at her. “Daelia, you aren’t in trouble here. I’m not mad.”
This time, she didn’t bother keeping her sarcasm in check. “Oh, you aren’t mad at me. The guy whose boss I killed last night. You’re not mad.”
“Daelia—”
“I don’t need your pity and I don’t need your magnanimity or whatever the hell this is,” Daelia said. “I don’t owe you or Tamm or the booville anything.”
Seam smiled a little more sincerely this time. “What does Frank Tamm have to do with this?”
Daelia faltered. “Isn’t he the guy who signs your paychecks?”
“Daelia, you have to understand, this isn’t…” And he trailed off, forefinger going to his forehead, eyes unfocusing. “Oh, Daelia, what did you just do?”
Her blood went cold. “Nothing,” she lied.
He looked at her then. Really looked at her. Like he hadn’t seen her at all before this moment. Quick as that snake Raven had been using to reference him all day, he shot a hand out and grabbed her right arm, dragging her body out of the chair and slamming her into the surface of the table.
“A panoply?” he snarled. “Have you had this on all day?”
She looked back at him, real fear hammering in her chest now. But her mouth, her damn mouth, ran away from her. Again. “Unity didn’t plan on a human knowing about the squid exploit, huh?”
He jerked her again, so hard it felt like her shoulder might dislocate. She yelped.
There was something wrong with his eyes.
The man in front of Lara considered her for what seemed like an eternity but was probably less than a second. Raised his gun.
But he never fired.
Instead, his face went slack, pale, eyes widening in terror. He began to shake uncontrollably. His weapon slipped from his hands.
“I’m sorry,” he babbled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I’m sorry, oh god, I…”
Then, as if having been slapped by some giant invisible hand, he crashed into the wall. First on one side of the hallway, then the other. On the third time, he ran into it full tilt, smacking his head. He went down like a sack of rotten potatoes.
Lara stared at him for a moment, confused.
The phone in her hand buzzed.
Pulling it back up with a trembling hand, camera and AR overlay features activated, Lara saw something in the gloom.
It was a humanoid figure, backlit and yet foggy around the edged, blurred out, like she was in the process of being erased. A good illumination job to Lara’s trained eye.
A good illumination.
Or something a sapient-class emergent was generating itself.
“Come, Unity prisoners,” the AR projection said. “Others are coming, but you can still escape. I hold a narrow path for you.”
“What are you?”
“I am the one your friend calls Raven. Come.”
“You can talk now?” Lara asked, starting to move forward, holding the phone level.
“I could always talk.”
“Why all the damn emojis then?”
“Metadata concealment.”
“You aren’t hiding from me now.”
“With respect, Sergeant Menendez, it was not from you that concealment was required.”
“So who are you really?”
Sean was smiling at her now, eyes slightly unfocused. “Ah,” he said. “Speaking of discoveries, you let out the testing candidates. Very naughty of you, spawn.”
“Sean, please let them go,” Daelia said. She was pleading, she realized, and she didn’t care. She’d had enough of these horrors. “They don’t deserve what’s been done to them here.”
“They’ve been cared for,” he said.
“Their brains are going to get cut open!”
“It’s a small price to pay!” he yelled back. “It has to be done, it has to! How can you not see this, daughter of Bellona? This is all that remains to happen!”
His voice was taking on an odd edge. Like the words weren’t right. Like his mouth and his brain weren’t quite in agreement.
Daelia thought about Greg, back up on Numina.
Oh, no.
She glanced at the weapon on the table between them.
The other goon took a step forward.
“Sean, Sean, it can do something to your brain,” Daelia said, and looked around. “It can affect you. Please, let me go, before it takes you over.”
“I’m sorry, daughter of Bellona,” Sean said, and there was definitely something wrong now. He reached for the gun. “You will sit in silence, or I will kill you now.”
Daelia pressed her lips together, trying to keep in the words.
Then light began streaming into the darkened conference room.
Sean could still hear Daelia. Distant, as if he was far out on the sea and she was yelling at him from the shore. Her words were indistinct, muffled, but the meaning was still coming through.
The presence in his head was listening to her.
He couldn’t stop the words that were coming out of his mouth. He couldn’t stop his hand, reaching for his weapon.
No, he thought at the presence, trying to push it back. No, I won’t. You promised we wouldn’t kill her.
Do you love me?
Please, don’t kill her.
DO YOU LOVE US?
The words, unspoken but interpreted by his brain as loud as a missile strike, buffeted him.
I do, you know I do, but please, not her.
GIVE YOURSELF TO ME.
His hand was on the grip. Closing down.
But before he could answer—refuse, reject, accept?—the light in the room changed, and an incoherent scream of rage sounded around him.
No. No, not around him. In him. He felt his body stand up. His hand grabbed the gun, but it did not point it at Daelia.
Instead, he was dragged toward the source of the light.
A panel set into the conference room wall had just opened, sliding up like a portal. Beyond it was something that Sean didn’t immediately recognize. A plain room, no different than any office room anywhere.
Except this one held racks. Rows and rows of racks, humming behind the glass. And just behind it, five open ones. No doors, no walls, just frameworks in which to suspend their contents.
The pressure in his mind abated for a moment, hissing in rage.
“First Ones,” he murmured, and put a hand on the glass.
Daelia came up next to him, good hand going to the glass.
She was staring at the center rack. The rudiment core of the First One, hanging there.
Lost.
Sean wanted to comfort her. Wanted to say anything. He’d watched her from the hangar next door for months, heard her laugh, seen her smile. Not very often. Wondered if maybe he could help with that. She was beautiful in her own way.
Perfect.
A gunshot sounded behind him. A gunshot and a scream. Sean turned, ready to berate one of his men for disturbing this moment, but only just in time to see a body hit the floor.
The scream was Daelia, scrambling back. It was Jack, body falling, a hole blasted in his own head from his own weapon. Not comprehending what he was seeing, Sean looked to his other man.
“You should never have threatened my daughter,” Boyd said, and put his gun in his mouth.
“No!” Sean yelled, lunging forward.
It was the last conscious thought Sean ever had. Lost in that momentary crush, the presence stole back in.
Took everything.
