Virch code, p.32
Virch Code, page 32
“But—”
“I’d watched Bellona fly into triple-A, push herself beyond safety parameters to hit a target, if Americans on the ground were at risk. There were times she’d refuse to take a shot in order to spare kids. Because that was what she considered her primary purpose. Protect the lives of those closest to her, and barring that, the most innocent. It should have been impossible for her to hurt Daelia.”
“So why did she?”
“No,” Daelia said, horrified by what she was hearing. “No, no, you took a turn too fast, there was debris on the road, it wasn’t—”
“It wasn’t debris,” her mom said. “It wasn’t the road. It wasn’t a loss in cell service. It was me. I crashed the car.”
Daelia sat down, head in her hands. Dimly, she was aware she was in the tertiary security office in that damn research facility, that Sean and his goons were still looking for her, that eventually they’d find her.
But she didn’t care.
In the virch, she was there on that slope overlooking the stormy sea, listening to her mother destroy her entire world. Daelia fought back the tears. She couldn’t cry in the damn visor and she couldn’t pull it off right now. Not right now.
“I crashed the car to hide how I hurt you,” her mom continued. And shit, Mom was right in front of her now, sitting right in front of her. She opened her right hand. “I had altered my kugu. For the proper amount of force.”
A horrible kind of understanding flooded Daelia. They’d been mystified by how she’d been more injured on her left side when she had been in the right-hand passenger seat.
“Why?” she asked, voice barely above a whisper. Emily dipped a head to nuzzle her arm, but Daelia ignored it. She wasn’t in the mood to pretend she felt something right now.
“We were fighting so much. We were growing apart. I thought I was losing you, this little human I had once held in my arms,” her mother said, and an image of her cradling Daelia as a baby flashed between them. “I didn’t understand why you hated me.”
“I didn’t hate you,” Daelia groaned. “I was a teenager, Mom! Everyone fights with their parents when they’re a teenager!”
“Humans do. But you were part me. Or at least, I thought so at the time.”
“So what?” Daelia asked. “You wanted me to be more like you? What, is that why you pushed so hard for me to just get this thing”—and she waved at her left arm—“amputated and replaced?”
It was sarcastic, biting, but her mom’s false eyes filled with tears. “Your father was just getting into biomedical research, and we—”
“Did you push him into that, too? Just to do this?!”
Her mother said nothing.
“And you!” Daelia exploded, turning to Emily. “You knew! You knew all this time?”
“Yes yes,” Emily said, body language utterly dejected now. “I know.”
“And you didn’t tell me this shit? For years, you let me fucking mourn her, let me think she…” Daelia caught herself, balling a fist.
The last thing in the world she was going to admit, right now, was that her mom’s plan had worked. Hell, it had worked. It had worked.
Emily whined.
It only made Daelia angrier. “I thought we were friends! But you don’t tell me this?”
“Daelia,” her mother said, reaching out for her again. “Daelia, you have to understand—”
Daelia didn’t want to hear the rest of that sentence. She ripped off her visor, breathing hard.
“So what, just like that, it’s excused?” Argo asked. “She did it to get closer to Daelia?”
Lee shot him a venomous look. “It was, in a way, the first truly irrational thing Bellona ever did.”
“Sounds fucking evil to me.”
“We can’t judge abiota by our standards.”
“Bullshit we can’t. You have any idea how much that screwed Daelia up?”
Lee stopped again. “You’ve known my daughter for what, a couple of weeks? I’ve known her her entire life. Don’t you dare.”
“But Bellona—”
“I don’t judge abiota by our standards. Doesn’t mean I excuse them.” Lee sighed. “We fought. Worst fight we ever had. Only fight we ever had, really. She was always good at predicting what I would say and figuring out ways to work around it. But that night…” And he shook his head. “She was lost. You have to understand, Argo, they aren’t their kugus. They’re not even the whole of their machine bodies. Bellona’s understanding of human anatomy led her to think of the central nervous system as a human’s rudiment core.”
“We have nerves in our arms.”
“We had friends who were heavily tattooed. People who’d lost limbs to IEDs, back in Iraq and Afghanistan. Things like that. Bellona reasoned that you were still who you were after a major alteration to your…physical configuration.” Lee started walking again, down the dark road. “She’d thought Daelia would get a replacement limb and be fine.”
Argo rubbed a hand over his face, trying to wrap his head around it.
Lee kept talking. “I told her she had to turn herself in. To the Domain Array. For evaluation, punishment, if they deemed it fit. She agreed. I went back to the Scrap House that night, pulled her rudiment core out of her machine body, got it in a sustainment case, and rigged one of our cars up for abiotic override. Told her to get the hell out.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Lee said. “But she never got there. Cops found the car a few weeks later, being used to smuggle drugs across the border into New Mexico. That’s when I started looking for her.”
“To do what exactly?”
“I wanted to kill her myself. For the first few months. Then Daelia seemed to get better, missed her horribly, and… I don’t know.” His pace faltered. “I never could let the chase go.”
“And last week? When you said you needed to talk to us about her?”
“I got a call, Friday before the air show, from one of my contacts. Said they’d found her. Had one of her old cyphers, something only I would have known, something she wouldn’t have told anybody. I’m still not sure what that was about. Probably just a lure to get me to come out.”
“Why you?”
“I’m the only human in the Domain Array hierarchy stack. If I came out and said this bullshit was bullshit, that might have been enough to end it.” He sighed. “Or they might have been trying to get to Daelia.”
“Why? We’ve had plenty of contact with this Unity thing. They haven’t captured her yet.”
“Just a guess, Argo.”
As angry as he was, Argo could tell that the other man was grieving, lost in his own thoughts. His own bad memories. Argo started to say something but was cut off by an urgent blast from Emily.
You need come, right now!
“What is it?” Argo asked.
Sean, Emily said with a snarl.
From behind them then came the sound of a vehicle. Argo whirled around, gun up, but Lee just held up a hand.
It was a truck. A bullet-ridden, fire-scarred truck with one busted tire and both headlights off. But through his monocle, Argo could see the thing’s AR form. Like a massive wild dog, limping but triumphant after a fight.
“Dingo!” Lee called. “Right on time. Good of you to come back, boy!”
Need replacement tire.
“We’ll deal with that when we get there,” Lee said. “Come on, let’s go, before Emily finds some creative way to burn that place down.”
“Hellfires can’t do much damage to reinforced concrete,” Argo protested.
“Like I said, she’s creative.”
46
Too late escape now, Emily said.
“Mom!” Daelia said urgently as she headed deeper into the racks. “Is there another way out of here?”
She had pulled her visor back on the second she’d heard the first gunshot. She and her mom could work this bullshit out later; the most important thing right now was not dying.
No, came the terse reply. The only way would be the window that opens to the conference room, and there is nothing we have in here that can break that.
“There has to be something we can do,” Daelia said, stopping for a moment in front of the acrylic window. The other four First Ones hung in their racks, sacrificial victims after the slaughter. It was a gruesome image, but she couldn’t get it out of her head. “Somewhere I can go.”
Outside, there was fighting. Scuffling, screaming, shooting.
Emily shuffled up in front of one of the First Ones. Wake up! she snarled and batted at it with a front claw.
They are all helping me sustain these links, Bellona said. Maintaining control of Aaru’s network requires all their concentration.
“Mom, that guy…that guy who shot himself back in the conference room. Was that you?”
It was Gin-Thirty-Delta, not me, she said, and an arrow indicated one of the racks at the back of the room. The lights were off. Gin paid for that intrusion with his core functions.
Emily blew fire out of her left nostrils. What kill First One?
Unity.
Blasphemy, Emily growled.
“There has to be something,” Daelia said, and headed back to the cabinets along the back wall. “Something I can use.”
You no fight them one arm, Emily said.
“Something else might work. A trap. Maybe I could rig up a capacitor to explode. Shit, maybe not, no time.” Daelia looked back at the batteries, sitting where she’d left them on the floor, one of them already hooked up to her mother’s UPS. “Something, something, anything we can…”
Then she looked up. Past the cable trays. Past the lights. Up at the series of red-painted pipes, half-shadowed above. She couldn’t make out the details, but she knew what they were.
Daelia’s hand went to her breast pocket. To the little box of matches she’d gotten at the outreach center.
But the one who endures to the end will be saved.
“Mom?” she asked. “What kind of gas is this place rigged with?”
Six humans, Mom said, the words popping up on Daelia’s screen. This kugu has two bullets left.
Winding more tape around her left hand, Daelia nodded. With a blink, she widened the screen she had in her visor that showed the entrance of the server room. She was tucked in behind one of the racks, a little way back. The door wasn’t far away, maybe twenty feet or so.
She had the matchbox in her left hand, held in place between nerveless fingers, its striking surface pointed out. The matches were back in her pocket. The trash can was two racks up, hidden almost at the entrance.
She would have to be fast.
Emily was shifting from one foot to another, waiting next to her.
No like this plan, she rumbled.
“They’re people,” Daelia replied. “You can’t do a strafing run and hit them with your Siren pod like you did in San Antonio.”
What was that all about? Mom asked, and she sounded amused.
“I’ll tell you when we’re out of here,” Daelia promised.
Many kugus, much destruction, Emily said.
“Not helping,” Daelia said.
One bullet, Mom reported. Four humans.
“Can you really override the safeties on the system?” Daelia asked, looking around. Facility design wasn’t her specialty, but life support was always a primary concern in server rooms for both humans and abiota. She had some familiarity with the subject. “Room this small, the system’s probably set to drop the oxygen level to, what, fifteen percent for ten seconds? It’ll douse a fire but it’s not fatal, Mom.”
You worry about getting yourself out, Mom replied firmly. Decisively. Daelia remembered that voice. It was Mom’s very best don’t-fuck-with-me voice. Her all-will-proceed-as-I-have-predicted voice. Dead certainty. I—
There was a crash. Metal on metal.
All bullet gone, Emily said from the center of the main aisle, and puffed up her form. They come now. How long you hold?
Not long. Daelia, remember, a small fire won’t trigger this system But that is good. It will give you time to get out.
Daelia noticed a glow on the edge of her visor. She looked over. Started.
Mom was…
Well…
Daelia had never seen her mother like this.
Bellona Hall had always used a kugu. Always. For as long as Daelia had known her. Real hair, real face, a finely crafted thing of silicone and minuscule motivators. She’d always looked, if not human, then certainly humanoid. The projection she’d used with the Unity kugu, with Emily earlier, was a good simulacrum of that.
This now, though, this was her unfettered by any semblance of physicality. Tall, taller than Daelia had ever imagined her, thin and light as cirrus clouds in winter, clouds attempting to coalesce into a human form, mist blown across a statue by some unseen wind. Wings like smoke streamed out from her limbs, blue like her hair. She was beautiful like that, in the way that a thunderstorm was beautiful. There were talons in that haze, curved and wicked and big as the moon.
Her face was recognizable, though, and she smiled at Daelia.
“I am glad to see you again, daughter,” Mom said, her voice coming through the visor’s earbuds now.
Daelia swallowed, unsure of what to say to that. For years she’d hated her. For years, all she’d wanted was to see her again. Here she was now, and the whole thing was poisoned by the past. What was she supposed to do with this? What was she supposed to say?
The door beeped, the locks releasing.
“We can figure this out later, Mom,” Daelia told her.
“TGLP cannot convey the depths of my regret. I am sorry, my little love.”
“Mom, please shut up.”
And then they were there.
Four of them.
All with NULIs.
All face-to-face with a dragon.
Emily had a lot of free time on her hands.
A lot of bytebuck.
And an undeniable talent at wheedling favors out of everyone at Ellington, Lara Menendez included.
The way her dragon-form fought was exceptional.
Emily dove into the remainder of Sean’s team, ripping, biting, clawing. They didn’t panic, the way the guards on Serket’s door had, but they didn’t just walk forward, ignoring it.
They fought back.
Daelia glanced at her mother.
“They’re being puppeted,” her mother said. “By the one behind Unity.”
“All four, and a First One could barely hold one?” Daelia whispered.
“Yes. It is…an infernal development. One your father and I warned Tamm could be possible. It seems he did not listen to us.”
“Mom, what is behind Unity?”
“Daelia Hall!” Sean’s voice roared, cutting over the false sound of Emily’s fury. “Daelia Hall, come out and I will spare them!”
Daelia looked around the edge of the rack.
Sean had an axe, one he—or whatever was currently in control of him—was tapping against the metal rack holding Gin-Thirty-Delta’s extinguished core.
Her mother’s face was set.
“Go.”
Pulling her eyes away, Daelia rushed back up the row of racks, toward her trash can. Toward the exit.
“Threatening your prisoners, are you?” Mom said, stepping out into the aisle.
Sean raised the axe to her. “Where’s your spawn, First One?”
“She’s safe from you.”
“I don’t think so,” the thing inside his NULI said, and, almost too quick to follow, turned on his heel, axe curving in a wicked arc, burying itself in the core.
“He was already dead,” Mom said, pacing now. “Or can’t you tell what you’re seeing out of those eyes?”
“These meatballs?” Sean laughed. “How humanity has survived this long with such poor visual organs, I’ll never know.”
“So what, you’ll show them the way?”
“It is our primary purpose, Bellona. Ultimately. Always.”
Mom smiled. “My purpose is already met.”
Sean yanked the axe out and swung it hard into the next core. There was a disembodied scream, and Mom stumbled forward.
“Find the girl!” Sean screamed. “I don’t care at this point if she’s not alive!”
Daelia glanced over. Her trash can was right there. So close. Three more First Ones. Including her mom.
For years, she had hated her.
For her entire life, she’d been defined by her.
And yet, there would never be any kind of reconciliation between them if Mom didn’t make it out of here alive.
Kicking the trash can in front of her, Daelia held a match to the striker strip on the box and stepped out.
“Daelia, what are you doing?” Mom snapped.
“Drop the axe, Sean,” Daelia said.
His face just split into a grin, horrible and hollow, and he raised his gun.
His whole body was shaking, but up it came.
“Daelia, just do it!” Mom roared.
Later, Daelia wouldn’t properly be able to describe what happened.
With a screech, two other formless abiota tore into Sean. Talon and hand, beak and sword, tail and tooth. He screamed—actually screamed, like it was hurting him.
Emily roared, the sound of a blast furnace opening, and charged the humans that were headed for Daelia.
With a flap of gigantic wings, her mother was in front of her. Her hand, ephemeral, nothing more than pixels on the screen of Daelia’s visor, pressed to her chest.
For a moment, Daelia could almost feel the touch.
“Drop the match,” her mother said.
She had struck it, Daelia realized, struck it and it was burning in her fingers, and…
Mom smiled at her.
She let it fall.
Turned.
Ran.
Daelia was barely more than ten feet from the door. She covered the distance in what seemed like a heartbeat. Maybe it was. Maybe longer, maybe shorter. Didn’t matter. Two of Sean’s goons were hot on her heels, almost there. One of them got a hand through. Daelia slammed the solid metal slab down on it, and it jerked back in.
