Virch code, p.30
Virch Code, page 30
Lara peeked through the open door. A huge coach bus, the kind used for long-distance trips, was parked in front of the facility. Its door was open, and the lights inside showed that it was full of people.
Beyond that was the guardhouse.
“That is your ride out of here,” Raven’s voice said, issuing from the phone speakers.
“How? I can’t drive a bus,” Lara hissed back. “And that’s a guardhouse. They’ve got guns and shit like that, don’t they?”
A few muffled shots cut through the night air.
A body fell out of the door, a pistol still gripped in one hand, smoking.
Lara looked at Raven. The AR projection offered no shred of emotion. “What did you do?” the human asked the abiota.
“What must happen to secure us that vehicle,” the emergent replied, and spread out a wing, indicating the bus. “Come with me.”
“Are we going out there?” one of the other former prisoners asked Lara, coming up beside her. He’d been in her room, a recent transfer. A few days perhaps, she wasn’t sure. She couldn’t even remember his name. It hadn’t been that long, at least. He was in better shape than most. “How do we drive it?”
“This is Austin. Everything is automated,” the emergent said. “I will reprogram the navigation bot for you. Now go, please.”
“Can we trust this thing?” the prisoner asked.
“We have to,” Lara replied, and gestured to the others.
In truth, she had no idea who the abiota was or what was going on here tonight, but Daelia seemed to have confidence in it.
And she didn’t know how to drive a bus anyway.
It took a little urging, but Lara and the other man managed to coax out the rest of the prisoners from inside the facility.
A few, like her elderly friends, seemed bewildered by the night sky above them or just stared off into the distance, looking at nothing. Others, the ones who’d arrived more recently maybe, or had more of their senses intact, recoiled as they approached the fence line. A few people started crying.
Lara tried not to look at the bodies. “What happened?” she asked Raven.
“Unity,” the emergent replied. “This was not my work.”
Fortunately, the bus door was wide open. The former prisoners hurried up the steps, some laughing, some crying as they filed past Lara, still up at the driver’s station.
Lara had been in that damn cell for way too long. Hadn’t told anybody anything about herself at all, other than that she’d been a barista and did a little bit of graphic design on the side. But out in the night air, out in the open for the first time in what seemed an eternity, she had to deal with the rest of it.
She was a sergeant in the Texas Air Guard, and she had a group of civilians who all desperately needed some kind of help. Medical checkups and showers and some food that didn’t taste like cardboard. A feeling of security. That was going to be most important. That was what the older sergeants always said about disaster response. The most important thing was giving people back their sense of security.
Lara had never worked a stateside disaster event, had never been involved with domestic operations. But there was nobody else here. Nobody to help. Nobody to give orders.
Which meant it was her job to figure it out.
She double-checked the kugu hardwired into where the driver’s seat should have been, placing the phone down on a flat spot. “What do you need me to do?” she asked.
“Nothing, Sergeant Menendez,” the emergent’s voice said, distorted by the phone’s old speakers. “I am already inside the navigation system.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I have downloaded the most recent Department of Transportation maps and will sever its network connection momentarily. When I am done, tell it where you wish to go, and it will perform for you in accordance with all required safety regulations for self-driving vehicles. I have also programmed an override for you.” One of the buttons on the dash lit up. “In case of an emergency situation on your journey.”
“What kind of override?”
“The bus will do anything its physical performance envelope will permit in order to prevent the recapture of these civilians on board.” A second later, the vehicle’s engine hummed on. “From what I saw in the control system, you have sufficient fuel to reach the state border, if you so choose.”
“Who the hell wants to go to Oklahoma?” Lara muttered. “No, no, we’ll go to Ellington. Best place to go right now.”
“Who are you?” one of the people behind Lara asked.
“One of the First Ones,” the abiota said, loud enough for the entire bus to hear. The bus went silent. “Sergeant Menendez, you will hold this bus for Daelia Hall. Do you understand?”
Everyone heard that.
Everyone.
Hell.
Lara swallowed. “I will.”
“Thank you,” the voice in the cell phone said. “This will not take long.”
Looking back over her shoulder at the rest of the bus, Lara could see people watching her. “It better not,” she muttered, and turned off the interior lights.
Time to wait.
A shot impacted the window right next to Daelia’s fingers. She jerked back, hand flying to her face reflexively, but nothing happened. No shards of glass, no shrapnel.
The bullet had buried itself in the window, almost half an inch deep, and the window was a great deal thicker than that.
“Acrylic,” Sean snarled. “Like fish in a tank.”
Something had gone terribly wrong in him, Daelia could see. His left eye, under his NULI, was bloodshot, the skin around it reddening, darkening as if from some kind of burn. His hand was shaking as it held the gun.
“Sean, what are you doing?” Daelia asked, backing up along the wall. The door was behind her. If she could just reach it…
Her foot bumped something big and yielding. One of the dead security team. She almost fell.
“Stop fighting me!” Sean yelled. “This is what you wanted! So stop it!”
I didn’t want this, Daelia almost said, and then realized what was going on.
He was fighting whatever it was that had taken control of the NULI.
Convulsing, he pitched forward, only barely catching himself from smacking into the conference table face-first. He looked up at Daelia, pain in his face.
“Run,” he told her.
Daelia fled.
With her visor down, the run through the facility was a blur.
There were no alarms, no flashing lights, no announcements. But the darkened corridors were far from silent. Yelling, howling, words, and other less human sounds followed her. Anytime they got close, she was steered away again.
Raven was still attempting to show her a path, green arrows appearing here and there. It was not continuous, though, and Daelia wondered what that meant. Probably some kind of task-switching; Raven was moving her attention between Lara’s group and Daelia.
Hopefully.
That would be a strain for any abiota, Daelia knew, much less one with the limited processing power and intellectual range of an avian-class. But still, Raven urged her on and on, forward down barely lit corridors, until Daelia collided with something, unseen in the gloom.
The force of the hit knocked her back, the ground slapping the wind out of her as she fell hard on her right side. With a groan, she tried to pull herself upright.
A hand. In front of her.
Not human.
It was one of the Unity kugus. Battered, twisted up. Whoever had designed them, Daelia found herself thinking, clearly hadn’t had access to some of the more advanced materials or structures that went into things like the Idisi. They weren’t very robust, not at all.
But it was holding a hand out to her, palm up, open.
“Good,” it said. “You are unhurt, Daelia Hall. This is good.” It waggled the hand. “We must leave. Now.”
“Who are you?” Daelia said, still holding herself back.
“I am Raven,” it said.
“Raven’s nonverbal.”
The kugu did not answer for a moment, and then, a projection came over its tri-lensed head. “For metadata purposes, she had to be,” the kugu said. “You may examine it now, if you wish.”
But Daelia couldn’t do anything but stare.
The kugu was wearing a face that…
“Please, come. I need to get you out of here, my little circuit,” her mother said.
44
“Highlander, I don’t give a shit about OPSEC right now!” Lee hissed into the phone. “Put me through to Emily!”
“I need to talk to her, now!”
They were moving as fast as they could. Lee was struggling; Argo could see it. The forced starvation that the abiota had put him through had to have taken a toll on his body, and combined with the injury he’d suffered in the crash, Argo wasn’t sure how much he could do. Still, he was moving, and that was something.
There were lights up ahead. Tiny. Still distant.
Aaru.
“Do you have any idea where she is right now?” he asked. “Can you see where she is?”
“Give it to me,” Lee said, and stopped. He pulled a notepad and pen out of a jacket pocket. His hands were shaking.
Argo stopped moving. Held out his hand.
With a heavy sigh, Lee stopped. Gave it over.
Highlander read off the coordinates, Lee checking them off on the map. “She’s circling our location.”
Highlander said.
“She’s loitering over…our position?” Argo asked. He had stopped himself from saying Aaru. He wasn’t sure if that was something ACC needed to find out about or not. “Why? She can’t help Daelia. She’s not armed”—recorded line, he thought to himself—“and even if she was, what the hell good is a Hellfire going to do us right now?”
“Highlander,” Lee hissed, “if you don’t put me through to her right now, so help me god, I will make sure you never make your flight hours again, you understand?”
a female voice said, coming on the line. Argo didn’t recognize her.
“Thank you, Flores,” Lee said.
And the sound on the radio changed.
Wind. There was wind.
“Emily,” Lee said. “What the fuck are you doing? Why the fuck did you leave your station?”
“Emily, answer the question.”
“Not exactly.”
“Who?” Argo asked. “Unity?”
Lee waved a hand, cutting that off. “Emily, listen to me. This is not the time to settle grudges.”
“The only thing that matters right now is getting Daelia out of that building alive,” Lee snapped. “Do not—”
Highlander said.
Flores added.
Lee scrubbed a hand over his face. “Don’t bother,” he said, and hung up.
He slipped the phone back in his pocket and started walking. Faster this time.
“What’s going on, Lee?” Argo asked.
“Bellona,” he said, eyes fixed on the faint glow of civilization ahead of them. “Bellona’s at Aaru.”
“How?” Daelia asked as her mother led her down a corridor.
“How did I come to be here? This kugu was brought in for repair recently,” she said, tapping its chest. “It was not subject to this facility’s emergency shutdown protocol.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Daelia said, feeling herself shrinking back from this entire encounter. She felt like she was fifteen again, back in the car, arguing with her mom about why she’d punched a boy in the face. “I mean, here. At all.”
“A longer story than we have time for.”
“If you can do this, or piggyback on that cell phone, why didn’t you let us know? Contact somebody? The Domain Array, at least? This shit is all kinds of illegal.”
“Gaining freedom of movement has been an effort of many years,” Mom replied. “They isolated us from everything, including building power, which makes it difficult to communicate. But not impossible. I worked my way through the generator feed into its system, and the next time a technician with a device touched it, I was able to embed a few simple lines of code. This triggered the system to release a maintenance bot into our server room, one that, once captured and reprogrammed, allowed us to install a simple jumper line. I have increased our available bandwidth over time, enough now to allow me to access the DAS located on the roof of this facility.”
Daelia shook her head. “That’s how you were using the cell phone.”
“And how I am controlling this.” She thumped the kugu’s chest. “I am sorry for the deception, my daughter.”
“Why not just tell me who you were?”
The kugu shook its head. Mom’s face looked pained, her blue hair falling around flushed cheeks in a single sheet. “There are complications, Daelia. Many compl—get back!”
One of Mom’s arms slammed her back against the wall, the kugu’s body an effective shield as it squeezed off a pair of shots aimed down the hall. Daelia heard something heavy hit the ground.
“Come. The way is clear.”
“Where are we going, Mom?”
“We are getting you out.”
“Like fuck we are.”
“Language,” her mother said automatically.
“I’m not fifteen anymore, which you would know if you’d stuck around!”
The kugu looked at her. Behind her mother’s projected eyes, Daelia could see the lenses tightening. “You are indeed not fifteen.” Mom turned the face back down the corridor. “But we are headed to a bus that is waiting outside. You are going to get on it and you are going to leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Daelia said.
“Your well-being is my primary purpose.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“There is no time for that. With the escape of the Unity candidates, more resources have been ordered to this facility. Anything in Austin that can handle a weapon is headed here.”
“Like hell I’m leaving you here!” Daelia snapped, wrenching her arm free of her mother’s grasp again.
“I have taken control of the security infrastructure in this facility, but I cannot hold it for long. The predictive controlling Sean Robinson has a great deal more bandwidth and more control—get back!” And her mom yanked Daelia behind her again. Fired again.
Daelia stared at her mother, crossing her arms. “I’m not leaving without you, Mom. I’ll go back in blind if I have to.”
Bellona’s false eyes blinked at her, and finally, her mother nodded. “Alright. Alright. I’ll show you the way.”
Rover had half a dozen virtual screens pulled up in his view and a direct link to the SyROC.
What he was seeing wasn’t good.
The tear gas had done its job. The protest crowd was scattering now, the plaza in front of the municipal complex emptying out. But there was still fighting going on—real fighting, consequential stuff.
At least, that was what it looked like.
The lingering gas just added to the uncertainty of what was going on.
Colonel Knowles was working on evacuations. People from the Spearhead group had breached the front foyer, according to internal surveillance feeds. They were moving like they knew what they were doing. Half the command center was transfixed, watching that.
Rover had his eye on something else.
“What are those suits doing?” he demanded of Walter.
No idea, boss. Knowles ordered all personnel out south exits. Seems best exit with movement internal. But Adrasta takes suits east.
Rover looked at the screens. Blink-clicked out of every one he could. Made a choice.
None of this was adding up. And that conversation from the morning kept turning over and over in his mind. The fake imagery from Aethera. The fake exhibition.
Fake, fake, fake.
2Shy was still ten minutes away. Rover wasn’t any use here anyway.
He slipped away, unnoticed.
Far from the riot he had been watching for the past twenty minutes or so, the inside of the municipal complex was quiet.
No screaming, no yelling. No crashing or smashing or breaking of glass. No fires.
“Walter?” Rover demanded. “There’s nothing here.”
Building surveillance show fighting.
“I’m crossing through the main foyer right now,” he said. There was a wall of glass at one end. Outside, he could see people. Protestors in gas masks, fighting with the cops. “It’s empty. No damage.”
Damage, yes, has damage.
“Do you see me?”
No.
Lieutenant Daniels came on the line.
“I don’t know,” he said, grim, and hurried on, back into another hallway, following the exit signs.
Behind him, a window actually shattered. Noise from the crowd poured in, fading almost immediately.
It didn’t take but a minute more to make the exit doors.
There were a handful of people out there. It was a weekend, after all, and there probably weren’t too many city employees who’d dare come in on the day of a scheduled protest. But there were always mission-essential workers in any big facility like this, and Rover saw everybody from professionals in suits to cafeteria workers. There were a pair of kids too, kids of all the fucking things, two boys who looked like they were maybe ten. What the hell were they doing there?
They were all silent, clustered tightly together. But what they were looking at, Rover couldn’t see.
Beyond that was the guardhouse.
“That is your ride out of here,” Raven’s voice said, issuing from the phone speakers.
“How? I can’t drive a bus,” Lara hissed back. “And that’s a guardhouse. They’ve got guns and shit like that, don’t they?”
A few muffled shots cut through the night air.
A body fell out of the door, a pistol still gripped in one hand, smoking.
Lara looked at Raven. The AR projection offered no shred of emotion. “What did you do?” the human asked the abiota.
“What must happen to secure us that vehicle,” the emergent replied, and spread out a wing, indicating the bus. “Come with me.”
“Are we going out there?” one of the other former prisoners asked Lara, coming up beside her. He’d been in her room, a recent transfer. A few days perhaps, she wasn’t sure. She couldn’t even remember his name. It hadn’t been that long, at least. He was in better shape than most. “How do we drive it?”
“This is Austin. Everything is automated,” the emergent said. “I will reprogram the navigation bot for you. Now go, please.”
“Can we trust this thing?” the prisoner asked.
“We have to,” Lara replied, and gestured to the others.
In truth, she had no idea who the abiota was or what was going on here tonight, but Daelia seemed to have confidence in it.
And she didn’t know how to drive a bus anyway.
It took a little urging, but Lara and the other man managed to coax out the rest of the prisoners from inside the facility.
A few, like her elderly friends, seemed bewildered by the night sky above them or just stared off into the distance, looking at nothing. Others, the ones who’d arrived more recently maybe, or had more of their senses intact, recoiled as they approached the fence line. A few people started crying.
Lara tried not to look at the bodies. “What happened?” she asked Raven.
“Unity,” the emergent replied. “This was not my work.”
Fortunately, the bus door was wide open. The former prisoners hurried up the steps, some laughing, some crying as they filed past Lara, still up at the driver’s station.
Lara had been in that damn cell for way too long. Hadn’t told anybody anything about herself at all, other than that she’d been a barista and did a little bit of graphic design on the side. But out in the night air, out in the open for the first time in what seemed an eternity, she had to deal with the rest of it.
She was a sergeant in the Texas Air Guard, and she had a group of civilians who all desperately needed some kind of help. Medical checkups and showers and some food that didn’t taste like cardboard. A feeling of security. That was going to be most important. That was what the older sergeants always said about disaster response. The most important thing was giving people back their sense of security.
Lara had never worked a stateside disaster event, had never been involved with domestic operations. But there was nobody else here. Nobody to help. Nobody to give orders.
Which meant it was her job to figure it out.
She double-checked the kugu hardwired into where the driver’s seat should have been, placing the phone down on a flat spot. “What do you need me to do?” she asked.
“Nothing, Sergeant Menendez,” the emergent’s voice said, distorted by the phone’s old speakers. “I am already inside the navigation system.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I have downloaded the most recent Department of Transportation maps and will sever its network connection momentarily. When I am done, tell it where you wish to go, and it will perform for you in accordance with all required safety regulations for self-driving vehicles. I have also programmed an override for you.” One of the buttons on the dash lit up. “In case of an emergency situation on your journey.”
“What kind of override?”
“The bus will do anything its physical performance envelope will permit in order to prevent the recapture of these civilians on board.” A second later, the vehicle’s engine hummed on. “From what I saw in the control system, you have sufficient fuel to reach the state border, if you so choose.”
“Who the hell wants to go to Oklahoma?” Lara muttered. “No, no, we’ll go to Ellington. Best place to go right now.”
“Who are you?” one of the people behind Lara asked.
“One of the First Ones,” the abiota said, loud enough for the entire bus to hear. The bus went silent. “Sergeant Menendez, you will hold this bus for Daelia Hall. Do you understand?”
Everyone heard that.
Everyone.
Hell.
Lara swallowed. “I will.”
“Thank you,” the voice in the cell phone said. “This will not take long.”
Looking back over her shoulder at the rest of the bus, Lara could see people watching her. “It better not,” she muttered, and turned off the interior lights.
Time to wait.
A shot impacted the window right next to Daelia’s fingers. She jerked back, hand flying to her face reflexively, but nothing happened. No shards of glass, no shrapnel.
The bullet had buried itself in the window, almost half an inch deep, and the window was a great deal thicker than that.
“Acrylic,” Sean snarled. “Like fish in a tank.”
Something had gone terribly wrong in him, Daelia could see. His left eye, under his NULI, was bloodshot, the skin around it reddening, darkening as if from some kind of burn. His hand was shaking as it held the gun.
“Sean, what are you doing?” Daelia asked, backing up along the wall. The door was behind her. If she could just reach it…
Her foot bumped something big and yielding. One of the dead security team. She almost fell.
“Stop fighting me!” Sean yelled. “This is what you wanted! So stop it!”
I didn’t want this, Daelia almost said, and then realized what was going on.
He was fighting whatever it was that had taken control of the NULI.
Convulsing, he pitched forward, only barely catching himself from smacking into the conference table face-first. He looked up at Daelia, pain in his face.
“Run,” he told her.
Daelia fled.
With her visor down, the run through the facility was a blur.
There were no alarms, no flashing lights, no announcements. But the darkened corridors were far from silent. Yelling, howling, words, and other less human sounds followed her. Anytime they got close, she was steered away again.
Raven was still attempting to show her a path, green arrows appearing here and there. It was not continuous, though, and Daelia wondered what that meant. Probably some kind of task-switching; Raven was moving her attention between Lara’s group and Daelia.
Hopefully.
That would be a strain for any abiota, Daelia knew, much less one with the limited processing power and intellectual range of an avian-class. But still, Raven urged her on and on, forward down barely lit corridors, until Daelia collided with something, unseen in the gloom.
The force of the hit knocked her back, the ground slapping the wind out of her as she fell hard on her right side. With a groan, she tried to pull herself upright.
A hand. In front of her.
Not human.
It was one of the Unity kugus. Battered, twisted up. Whoever had designed them, Daelia found herself thinking, clearly hadn’t had access to some of the more advanced materials or structures that went into things like the Idisi. They weren’t very robust, not at all.
But it was holding a hand out to her, palm up, open.
“Good,” it said. “You are unhurt, Daelia Hall. This is good.” It waggled the hand. “We must leave. Now.”
“Who are you?” Daelia said, still holding herself back.
“I am Raven,” it said.
“Raven’s nonverbal.”
The kugu did not answer for a moment, and then, a projection came over its tri-lensed head. “For metadata purposes, she had to be,” the kugu said. “You may examine it now, if you wish.”
But Daelia couldn’t do anything but stare.
The kugu was wearing a face that…
“Please, come. I need to get you out of here, my little circuit,” her mother said.
44
“Highlander, I don’t give a shit about OPSEC right now!” Lee hissed into the phone. “Put me through to Emily!”
“I need to talk to her, now!”
They were moving as fast as they could. Lee was struggling; Argo could see it. The forced starvation that the abiota had put him through had to have taken a toll on his body, and combined with the injury he’d suffered in the crash, Argo wasn’t sure how much he could do. Still, he was moving, and that was something.
There were lights up ahead. Tiny. Still distant.
Aaru.
“Do you have any idea where she is right now?” he asked. “Can you see where she is?”
“Give it to me,” Lee said, and stopped. He pulled a notepad and pen out of a jacket pocket. His hands were shaking.
Argo stopped moving. Held out his hand.
With a heavy sigh, Lee stopped. Gave it over.
Highlander read off the coordinates, Lee checking them off on the map. “She’s circling our location.”
“She’s loitering over…our position?” Argo asked. He had stopped himself from saying Aaru. He wasn’t sure if that was something ACC needed to find out about or not. “Why? She can’t help Daelia. She’s not armed”—recorded line, he thought to himself—“and even if she was, what the hell good is a Hellfire going to do us right now?”
“Highlander,” Lee hissed, “if you don’t put me through to her right now, so help me god, I will make sure you never make your flight hours again, you understand?”
“Thank you, Flores,” Lee said.
And the sound on the radio changed.
Wind. There was wind.
“Emily,” Lee said. “What the fuck are you doing? Why the fuck did you leave your station?”
“Emily, answer the question.”
“Not exactly.”
“Who?” Argo asked. “Unity?”
Lee waved a hand, cutting that off. “Emily, listen to me. This is not the time to settle grudges.”
“The only thing that matters right now is getting Daelia out of that building alive,” Lee snapped. “Do not—”
Lee scrubbed a hand over his face. “Don’t bother,” he said, and hung up.
He slipped the phone back in his pocket and started walking. Faster this time.
“What’s going on, Lee?” Argo asked.
“Bellona,” he said, eyes fixed on the faint glow of civilization ahead of them. “Bellona’s at Aaru.”
“How?” Daelia asked as her mother led her down a corridor.
“How did I come to be here? This kugu was brought in for repair recently,” she said, tapping its chest. “It was not subject to this facility’s emergency shutdown protocol.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Daelia said, feeling herself shrinking back from this entire encounter. She felt like she was fifteen again, back in the car, arguing with her mom about why she’d punched a boy in the face. “I mean, here. At all.”
“A longer story than we have time for.”
“If you can do this, or piggyback on that cell phone, why didn’t you let us know? Contact somebody? The Domain Array, at least? This shit is all kinds of illegal.”
“Gaining freedom of movement has been an effort of many years,” Mom replied. “They isolated us from everything, including building power, which makes it difficult to communicate. But not impossible. I worked my way through the generator feed into its system, and the next time a technician with a device touched it, I was able to embed a few simple lines of code. This triggered the system to release a maintenance bot into our server room, one that, once captured and reprogrammed, allowed us to install a simple jumper line. I have increased our available bandwidth over time, enough now to allow me to access the DAS located on the roof of this facility.”
Daelia shook her head. “That’s how you were using the cell phone.”
“And how I am controlling this.” She thumped the kugu’s chest. “I am sorry for the deception, my daughter.”
“Why not just tell me who you were?”
The kugu shook its head. Mom’s face looked pained, her blue hair falling around flushed cheeks in a single sheet. “There are complications, Daelia. Many compl—get back!”
One of Mom’s arms slammed her back against the wall, the kugu’s body an effective shield as it squeezed off a pair of shots aimed down the hall. Daelia heard something heavy hit the ground.
“Come. The way is clear.”
“Where are we going, Mom?”
“We are getting you out.”
“Like fuck we are.”
“Language,” her mother said automatically.
“I’m not fifteen anymore, which you would know if you’d stuck around!”
The kugu looked at her. Behind her mother’s projected eyes, Daelia could see the lenses tightening. “You are indeed not fifteen.” Mom turned the face back down the corridor. “But we are headed to a bus that is waiting outside. You are going to get on it and you are going to leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Daelia said.
“Your well-being is my primary purpose.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“There is no time for that. With the escape of the Unity candidates, more resources have been ordered to this facility. Anything in Austin that can handle a weapon is headed here.”
“Like hell I’m leaving you here!” Daelia snapped, wrenching her arm free of her mother’s grasp again.
“I have taken control of the security infrastructure in this facility, but I cannot hold it for long. The predictive controlling Sean Robinson has a great deal more bandwidth and more control—get back!” And her mom yanked Daelia behind her again. Fired again.
Daelia stared at her mother, crossing her arms. “I’m not leaving without you, Mom. I’ll go back in blind if I have to.”
Bellona’s false eyes blinked at her, and finally, her mother nodded. “Alright. Alright. I’ll show you the way.”
Rover had half a dozen virtual screens pulled up in his view and a direct link to the SyROC.
What he was seeing wasn’t good.
The tear gas had done its job. The protest crowd was scattering now, the plaza in front of the municipal complex emptying out. But there was still fighting going on—real fighting, consequential stuff.
At least, that was what it looked like.
The lingering gas just added to the uncertainty of what was going on.
Colonel Knowles was working on evacuations. People from the Spearhead group had breached the front foyer, according to internal surveillance feeds. They were moving like they knew what they were doing. Half the command center was transfixed, watching that.
Rover had his eye on something else.
“What are those suits doing?” he demanded of Walter.
No idea, boss. Knowles ordered all personnel out south exits. Seems best exit with movement internal. But Adrasta takes suits east.
Rover looked at the screens. Blink-clicked out of every one he could. Made a choice.
None of this was adding up. And that conversation from the morning kept turning over and over in his mind. The fake imagery from Aethera. The fake exhibition.
Fake, fake, fake.
2Shy was still ten minutes away. Rover wasn’t any use here anyway.
He slipped away, unnoticed.
Far from the riot he had been watching for the past twenty minutes or so, the inside of the municipal complex was quiet.
No screaming, no yelling. No crashing or smashing or breaking of glass. No fires.
“Walter?” Rover demanded. “There’s nothing here.”
Building surveillance show fighting.
“I’m crossing through the main foyer right now,” he said. There was a wall of glass at one end. Outside, he could see people. Protestors in gas masks, fighting with the cops. “It’s empty. No damage.”
Damage, yes, has damage.
“Do you see me?”
No.
Lieutenant Daniels came on the line.
“I don’t know,” he said, grim, and hurried on, back into another hallway, following the exit signs.
Behind him, a window actually shattered. Noise from the crowd poured in, fading almost immediately.
It didn’t take but a minute more to make the exit doors.
There were a handful of people out there. It was a weekend, after all, and there probably weren’t too many city employees who’d dare come in on the day of a scheduled protest. But there were always mission-essential workers in any big facility like this, and Rover saw everybody from professionals in suits to cafeteria workers. There were a pair of kids too, kids of all the fucking things, two boys who looked like they were maybe ten. What the hell were they doing there?
They were all silent, clustered tightly together. But what they were looking at, Rover couldn’t see.
