Virch code, p.7
Virch Code, page 7
With Sean on their tail—as he no doubt would be, the second Ginger appeared on a surveillance camera—there was no guarantee Daelia would survive it.
Any other time, Daelia would have simply headed into the bus depot and asked for a couple of gallons of gas. For an abiota, in a town like this, it wouldn’t have been a problem. But this was not any other time.
Argo might have been able to walk in and charm it out of the manager. Emily could have threatened her way through it. But all Daelia had was a panoply, a low-class emergent with a rapidly draining battery, and a psycho on her tail.
And while Daelia was trying to figure out what the hell to do about this, something unexpected happened.
People began filing into the garage.
A warning emoji flashed up on the little abiota’s screen, and Daelia just barely got Ginger turned off before they were there. She didn’t even have time to duck.
It was a group of people, all wearing similar one-piece outfits. That wasn’t what made it strange; plenty of people in Austin wore work or co-op uniforms. What made it strange was that they looked like medical patients. A few were accompanied by nurses holding IV lines. Others dragged wheeled equipment along with them. One was in a wheelchair. They didn’t look sick; in fact, they all looked young, healthy.
One locked eyes with Daelia. And while she had never been the best reader of human emotion, there was a plea there that she couldn’t just ignore.
The man who was looking at her had stopped moving, attracting the attention of another man just leaving the train, a light jacket thrown over white scrubs. The doctor leaned in, speaking softly in the patient’s ear for a moment. The patient looked away then, eyes downcast and body language defeated, shuffling along, prodded back into line.
“What’s going on?” Daelia asked.
The little abiota replied almost instantly. A logo. A fine-line design that looked Egyptian.
“What is it?”
The hospital emoji. Red cross. Surgical tools. Heads.
“A medical facility?” Daelia asked.
A green check mark.
“What do they do there?”
A web link appeared at the bottom of Daelia’s field of vision. She blink-clicked it up. It was a paper authored by one Doctor Michael Park. Daelia didn’t understand half of what she was reading in the abstract, but the subject was clear enough.
Neural-link research. NULI development.
Daelia thought about the Envoy, with that bizarre crown of hers. She thought about Greg, up at Numina, and the men who had attacked Aunt June. Something was going on with all that, something related to that tech.
Suspicion starting to fill her, she asked, “What’s this place called?”
The abiota answered with a photograph. Of her old owner’s work access badge. A logo with a name below it.
“Aaru,” Daelia read. “That’s what it’s called?”
A green check mark.
Daelia knew she should go back in the station. Get on a train, get out of town, get back to Houston. Be on her way out of this place, away from Sean Robinson, out of danger.
And yet.
“Raven,” Daelia asked quietly. “Do you know where this Aaru place is?”
The little avian-class abiota didn’t answer for a moment, and then, finally, gave her a thumbs-up.
Daelia laid a fond hand on Ginger’s dashboard, closing her eyes for a moment, and then opened her door. “Show me.”
“How is she doing this?” Sean asked nobody in particular. “How is she moving without us seeing her?”
“We are seeing her,” Elrod said, and gestured to his laptop. “The predictive security admins just aren’t recognizing her.”
“Galatea’s not recognizing her, you mean,” Sean corrected. “Galatea can’t see her.’
“Neither can you. Or Boyd. Or anyone else on the team.”
“But you can.”
“Apparently.”
Sean felt another nudge of anger and forced himself not to react to it. Taking in a deep lungful of the parking garage’s stale, stinking air, he considered his options here.
Daelia Hall escaping from her room was one thing. Daelia Hall making it all the way up to Union Station was quite another.
The car behind them was whimpering, a pathetic sound echoing through the AR. It put Sean’s teeth on edge. It was a well-done sound effect, something no doubt based on an actual canine whine.
Grabbing Daelia’s vehicle had been almost as important as grabbing Daelia herself. It was an essential part of maintaining the illusion that he’d been setting up for Lee.
Lee, who’d shown back up after being missing for a few weeks, not a single shred of evidence as to his disappearance nor his whereabouts. He was a priority target too, as important as Daelia, but Unity was pragmatic. Unity was practical. Unity had formulated its current plans around Daelia, and so it was Daelia who was the first target.
Lee could be dealt with later.
For now, it was better he believe that Daelia had driven herself off. The second he realized she’d been taken…
Well.
Lee’s hunt for Bellona was legendary in certain circles. No telling what he’d do to get his daughter back.
Sean patted the car absently. The abiota here refused to manifest in AR for him, so that was the best he could do.
He hated seeing the poor emergent this distressed. But that push in the back of his mind wouldn’t stop.
find her, find her, find her
“We’ll get the technical back end figured out,” Sean said, thinking. “But until then, Elrod, I’m relying on you to sanity check everything. If you hadn’t spotted Daelia on one of the security feeds, we never would have realized she’d found this place so quickly.”
“Of course, boss.”
“Somebody’s helping her, maybe,” Boyd said.
Elrod snorted. “In this town? Who’d be stupid enough to alter or hide video of her?”
“Same person that’s helping her with biometric identification,” Boyd said. “It shouldn’t be possible to spoof that.”
“It shouldn’t have been possible to manipulate Serket, and yet, we know that happened. Besides, she is Daelia Hall,” Sean mused, and felt a real pang of regret as he said those words. She’d been so angry, so frightened. He’d done that to her, even though it was all a big misunderstanding, really. “Anybody could have recognized her. Anybody could have decided to risk their place here for her.”
“But she just found her car? All on her own, just like that?”
“I doubt it,” Sean said. He shouldn’t have mentioned that Ginger was here. He’d just wanted her not to worry about anything. She wasn’t under arrest. Hell, she wasn’t even in trouble. Not even after what happened with Serket. Unity needed to talk to her. That was all. “But Miss Hall has been to Austin before. Probably knows a little bit of the city’s layout. She’d know that there’s limited parking.”
“We should have put this gal further out,” Elrod said.
“Hindsight,” Sean shrugged. But Elrod wasn’t necessarily wrong. He shouldn’t have been so careless. But Unity’s voice was just so loud in his mind. Made it hard to think. Hadn’t seemed like an important detail. “Question is, where do we go now?”
“We should search the train platforms,” Boyd said. “Seems like the most rational step.”
A little murmur of pleasure drifted through Sean’s mind. She agreed. They were doing what she wanted them to do. Wonderful.
“Yeah, that seems like the best plan,” he said, trying not to let it distract him. “If I were her, I’d want to get the hell out of town.”
11
“Can’t you change the station?” Argo asked.
Garcia tapped the truck’s archaic radio screen. “Everything’s been overridden. Isn’t that right, Dingo?”
All commuter podcast streams same, the truck answered.
Argo grunted.
He was really getting sick of Lisa McConnell’s voice.
Headed south on I-45, Dingo’s GPS showed their location as somewhat south of a major intersection with Beltway 8. Traffic was heavier than it had been last week, and it was getting worse again every day. Argo wondered idly what it would take to truly disrupt things in a city this big. If the threat of aliens blasting the city back to the Stone Age wasn’t enough, what would be?
Argo would have asked Lee, if Lee had been here with them. Instead, the older man had taken Garcia’s car. Chalk was too big to move, and he’d wanted to stay with her. Argo had thought about giving him shit about it—he wasn’t super enthusiastic about letting the older man out of his sight, not after what happened last night—but had refrained.
Anger wasn’t going to help them get Daelia back.
June was on her way back to her own place, that weird little ranch, with August. Her brother, apparently, which was something Argo hadn’t realized before. He’d thought they were married, which had made it kind of weird, watching Lee with her.
There was definitely something there, something between those two.
Not his problem.
Now, outside in the right-hand lane, Argo spotted a semi. It was coming up alongside them fast, he thought. If Unity could take control of predictives, who was to say it couldn’t attack them on the road through another vehicle’s autopilot program?
Dingo had been in combat, hadn’t he? There was some comfort in that.
Argo moved over another lane to the left, just in case.
“Even ByYou’s showing it in the recommended feeds,” Garcia said. The edge of his rimless monocle was glowing.
“Did you turn that damn thing back on?” Argo demanded. “Didn’t Lee say not to do that? Nothing with a cell signal?”
“It’s set to receive mode only. I’ve got facial recognition off. I’m working it manually, which is a bitch, by the way. Blink-clicking makes my eye itch.”
“Lee said—”
“Shit, Argo, I’m not an idiot! I know what I’m doing!” Garcia protested.
“I’d say that none of us really know what we’re doing right now,” Argo replied.
“If ByYou is doing a general override of all their other streamers,” Garcia pressed, “it’s probably important.”
“Important to who?” Argo asked.
Garcia didn’t answer. Turned up the sound.
<—are here with the Envoy herself, the representative of Unity on Earth. You said you had an update for the people of Texas on last night’s events, is that correct?>
Calliope added, the usual bemused interest gone from her voice now,
“What is this?” Argo asked. “Are they trying to spin last night’s attack into something that benefits them?”
“Spin? Yeah, I’d say so. Shit, there are even images,” Garcia said, alarmed. “Video.”
“Dingo, take over,” Argo ordered, and pulled out his cell phone. He navigated to the first local news feed he could find. “Huh. There are.”
“I said so, right?”
“Looks like exactly what she just said. Angry mob storming a hospital.”
“That’s not what happened, though,” Garcia said, and Argo gave him a hard look. “So what, Unity’s faking it?”
“You just figuring that out?” Argo asked. There were multiple videos, all from different personal devices. It looked good. It looked real.
“I mean, of course they fucking are,” Garcia said. “But I mean, why admit to it at all? They lied about San Antonio.”
“But look how that went. The truth of the attack’s been leaking out,” Argo said. “Should have figured Unity would find a way to twist this against us. It’s using the situation from last night to make itself the victim.” He thought about that for a second. “But why?”
“I’ll have to analyze this closer, but I don’t see any of us in this footage. What does that mean?”
“It means they don’t want us picked up by the cops, I’d guess.”
Garcia sighed and took his own monocle off. “How are they doing this?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how? Like, from a technical perspective.”
“We’ve seen them do it before. I think it had something to do with Bri Quercitron.”
The cyber sergeant shook his head. “Not possible. He’s in a quiet box. Nothing gets through a quiet box.”
“So maybe it’s something else.” Argo put his hands back on the steering wheel. “Manual control mode, Dingo.”
Not yet, the truck said, and swerved.
Before Argo could stop him, the vehicle had crossed three lanes of traffic, barely avoiding the front bumper of an SUV and the back corner of a coupe, shooting into an open space in the traffic, accelerating hard.
Argo heard the sound of metal smashing into metal behind them. Alarms went up in the navigation view. A pileup was starting, car after car after car. The semi had jackknifed across the freeway.
Never relax here, Dingo said.
12
Daelia had been hoping that maybe Raven’s facility would be located somewhere inside the inner core of the booville. Raven had killed that idea the second she had shown Daelia a map.
Aaru wasn’t far. Relatively speaking.
If this was Houston, Daelia could have driven the distance in an hour.
But this wasn’t Houston, and anything beyond a mile from Union Station was dangerous as hell. At least some of the trip would have to be made on foot, too. Why in the hell did she not have a gun in Ginger? Shooting one-handed was a bitch, but it would have been better than nothing.
If anything was going to save her today, it’d be the panoply.
Fortunately, the local light-rail system was comprehensive, and had a line that ran roughly in the direction of where they needed to go. The local lines didn’t require tickets of any kind, as long as one was a resident or an officially registered tourist.
As long as one was in the Mediation Office biometric database.
Which was her most immediate problem.
“Raven, anything we can do about the biometrics here?” she asked as she headed for the light-rail lines. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to put up, like, my military ID or anything like that.”
A green check mark. A hand scanner, a 100% complete emoji, another check mark.
“You’re not saying… Did you already build me a profile?”
An emoji of a hammer and saw. That 100% again.
“How?” she demanded.
All she got in reply was a shrugging yellow woman.
Daelia’s heart was in her throat as she closed in on the light-rail platform. She was sure she was going to get caught any second. Sean was going to find her. Some security kugu was going to stop her, ask her to come in for questioning. Something like that.
Raven cawed and swooped ahead of her, towards the turnstiles.
“I can’t do this,” Daelia said, speaking as quietly as she could. “Raven—”
A green check mark. An arrow.
The message was clear.
Go.
With nothing to do but trust Raven, Daelia steeled herself and headed straight for the turnstile. A kugu attendant waved at her cheerfully. Daelia wondered if there was even an abiota puppeting the thing, or if it was just some stupid bot. Kugus were ubiquitous in Austin, but Dad had always said Omphalos liked to exaggerate the number of abiota who actually lived here. The kugu seemed to be more about putting on appearances than serving any kind of purpose.
Distracted, she bumped into the bar of the turnstile.
“Honored human, do you require assistance?” the kugu chirped.
Definitely a bot, Daelia thought, and smiled back. “Nope, I’m fine, thanks.”
She uncurled the fingers of her right hand.
Held her palm over the scanner.
No alarms tripped. No klaxons started up.
The gates opened.
She hurried on through, forcing herself not to run.
Daelia almost got on the wrong train, only realized it when Raven flooded her visor with warning emojis. But she did eventually get to the correct train, the Tarrytown line, and found herself a back corner of a car without anybody else around.
It wasn’t until the doors closed, and they were pulling away from the station that she let herself relax.
“So how do you feel?”
Daelia stared down at her left arm, unsure how to answer that. Over the past couple of months, she’d gotten used to the scars. They were somewhat faded now, down from the big ugly red welts they’d been to thin white lines, criss-crossing her skin.
Now, though, now there were shiny points running down her arm. A ring of them encircled her upper arm, while pairs of smaller ones trailed down, set above and below major joints. Elbow, wrist, knuckles. One of each pair was silvery, large, threaded for attachment screws. Those went down into the bone. The others were small, gold. More of those sat above her fingernails.
The brace would screw into the larger connection points, while the smaller ones would serve as neural links. Some new tech Frank Tamm had been working on. One of Dad’s industry buddies. One of the biggest names in astronautics right now. What he was doing taking time out of his surely insane schedule to work on this, Daelia had no idea.
“What are you thinking, Daelia?” Aunt June asked when Daelia didn’t answer.
She was grateful for her aunt being there. Not that they were related or anything. June wasn’t really her aunt. Just one of Dad’s old friends, one of the few that hadn’t abandoned him when he’d decided to marry Mom.
