EMPATHY: Part 17
Bomber sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, alone, his back to the door. Not a single muscle in his body moved when she came in, but she could sense an immediate jump in his alertness, ready to strike in an instant should the opportunity arise. Neither did he acknowledge the fact that anyone else had entered the room. He didn’t even seem to realise it was her until she said hi.
“Gina,” he breathed and leaped to his feet. He moved as if to throw his arms around her, but checked himself halfway and stepped back. His eyes studied her for several endless seconds, travelling from her face down to her toes and back up again. “Something’s wrong.”
“You could say that,” she replied. How much of the truth could she tell him? He might not be a telepath, but in his own way he was sharp as a razor.
“That bad, huh?” He gave a dry chuckle, and she nodded.
“Gabriel wants you killed,” she explained. “I think I can stop that from happening, but you’re going to have to trust me.”
His eyes hardened, and his upper lip curled slightly to show teeth. “That’s it? No ‘hello, hi, how are you, I’m fine, he didn’t brainwash me after all’? You’ve been away for hours with that sociopath, and you walk in here tellin’ me I’m just going to have to trust you?”
“Look, I haven’t got time to explain, I need you to–“
“So how good a fuck is he?” he interrupted, his tone and thoughts as sharp as knives, flaying the skin off her bones. “Good enough to turn on us, huh? Good enough to make you a lapdog licking at his heels like Jez?” She tore her eyes away and staggered back from the mental violence in him, but he just stepped in closer and ramped it up. Every scornful word slashed into her, tearing through her mind. “Where is our good friend Jez, anyway? Old Gabe snapped his fingers a few hours ago and she came runnin’. Must’ve been fun, did she join in or just watch?”
Her arm acted on its own, lashed out out of pure self-defence. There was a heart-stopping crack as her open hand connected with his cheek. She knew he could’ve stopped her but had chosen not to. All the possible reasons frightened her. Horrified at everything and halfway to panic, she started to turn for the door, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her back around. A rough kiss forced past her lips, black stubble scratching against her skin.
“What are you doing, Gina?” he asked softly as he let go of her. “Did any of it mean anything at all?”
She hesitated, heart pounding in her throat. Then, “Maybe you’re asking the wrong person.”
A long silence fell. Bomber looked down, and somehow he seemed smaller, deflated. It was as if one of the things that combined to make him Bomber — a hundred facets assembled into a once-unbreakable whole — had just abandoned him. Without looking up he said, “What do you want me to do?”
“Just sleep. We’ll do the rest.” She reached out uncertainly, stroked her fingers through his hair. She heaved a dry sob. “God, I wish there were some other way . . .”
“I’m sure you did what you could,” he said. “Let’s just get it over with.”
Gina swallowed hard, nodded, reached into her pocket. “They gave me a syringe. It’s okay, I checked it, it’ll only knock you out.”
Bomber sat down and offered his arm without further comment. Gina went down on her knees next to him and pushed the needle into his elbow. The knockout effect took only seconds; he looked into her eyes one last time, and then lay down to sleep. He never saw the tears rolling down her face.
The next thing she felt was Gabriel’s hand falling on her shoulder, a comforting presence in her mind, his voice in her head, “It’s time.”
Gina slowly rose to her feet. Her mind was made up, and she’d see it through.
Entering the dreamworld felt too much like falling through the floor, leaving everything solid and reliable behind. She held on tight to Gabriel. He was her only anchor in this world, her guide and protector, sensing her worries and calming them. It chafed at her to be so reliant on him, but for the moment she had no choice.
They landed on a flat stretch of valley sandwiched between two hills, one thickly forested, the other almost clear. A thin stretch of paved road snaked through the valley alongside a fast bubbling creek, both leading towards an old timber house built on the riverside. Everywhere the smells of grass and flowers and fresh water greeted them. As they watched, the front door of the house swung open and out walked Bomber wearing a crisp Army dress uniform, kitbag over his shoulder.
“This is the house where I grew up,” he said. He pointed to the water. “I used to swim in that creek, and some days my dad and I would go pick blueberries in the forest.”
Then he looked down at himself, at his uniform, and frowned. “This must be the day I left to join the Army.”
As if on cue a black town car pulled up by the front door in a cloud of dust. Two uniformed officers, one in blue and one in green, got out and saluted Bomber. “Private Jacob Dusther?” one of them asked.
“No,” he replied. “That’s not me.”
The army man furrowed his brow. “Then who are you?”
“I . . .” Bomber swallowed, fear and confusion choking him, and suddenly he dropped the kitbag and drew his pistol. He fired before the men could reach their weapons. Both fell dead on the ground, then vanished into smoke along with their car. In moments there was nothing to suggest they’d ever been there. Then he turned the pistol on Gabriel.
“This is some kind of trick,” Bomber spat. “You’re just after my real name. You’re not having it!”
“It looks like he’s brought us in too early,” Gabriel said to Gina, unworried. “Strong memories are annoying like that, they tend to work like magnets. Let’s skip forward.”
With a wave of Gabriel’s hand, the gun disappeared, and the world vanished into a fog as thick as bricks. At first Gina couldn’t see her hands in front of her face. Then, slowly, new environments started to take shape around them, colour bleeding into the white. Gina had a vague sense of half-remembered years passing by her in both directions, caught a fleeting impression of the car with the two army men arriving at the house a second time, now taking Bomber away with them. But then, before the world could fully resolve, everything distorted and tumbled into chaos.
Random shapes and colours flashed across Gina’s vision. Noise bashed into her ears like an old optical disc grinding to pieces in its player. Even the smell of the place was wrong; she caught a whiff of sea smell without any water in sight, then a hint of freshly cut grass, then a powerful reek of formaldehyde. Waves of crippling nausea overpowered her, and she doubled over retching, gagging up imaginary vomit.
“What’s happening?!” she wailed in between coughs.
“You didn’t tell me he had a memory block!” rasped Gabriel. She could barely make out his voice through the cacophony of sensory input. A single sound rose slowly over the din, however, and she soon recognised it. It was Bomber’s voice, screaming.
“It’s killing him!” Gabriel told her, pulling her up to her feet. “Quickly, focus on me, everything you’ve got!”
She nodded and started to concentrate on him, pouring her will into him like she’d done before, but this time he was a channel for her power rather than the target.
His teeth were set and straining. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, and she wondered how he could contain this much mental violence. Instinctively she knew he was holding together Bomber’s mind by sheer force of will, and she could feel him start to shake from the effort. Blinding pain echoed from his mind to hers, turning her vision red, but she held on by her fingernails and kept her focus, knowing what was at stake. Faint strains of music played in her ears, the distorted images flashed faster and faster, the chaos around her reached a fever pitch.
“Now,” said Gabriel, and the world exploded.
Brightness. Gina tumbled half-alive in the mental shockwave, farther and farther until she couldn’t sense Gabriel or Bomber anymore, couldn’t feel anything anymore. All she could see was endless white with no edges or corners. Her senses returned enough to start calling for help, screaming at the top of her lungs, but nobody answered. She floated adrift in the fog.
It seemed like hours passed while she was lost in the white nothingness. No matter where Gina flew, no matter how hard she waved her arms, no matter how loud she shouted, nothing happened and nobody came to her rescue. No Bomber, no Gabriel, no mysterious stranger. Just Gina, herself and her screaming panic.
It wasn’t until she calmed down that she started to sense things. Fragments of thought flashing by her. Half-heard phrases, stray images on the wind. She seized onto them searching for anything familiar, but wherever she was, she couldn’t feel a single landmark or clear direction. Trying to reach out and touch the people proved equally useless. No one could hear her.
She let out a long, tired sigh. “You sure know how to find trouble, girl.” Then she took another look at the white between-place, muttering, “And apparently you’re now one with the fucking cosmos or something. I’d like to get off this train now.”
“So why don’t you put on the brakes and take control?” asked a familiar voice, and Gina stopped dead in her tracks as a tall, slender Chinese woman in white robes walked out of the mist. Every part of her seemed to glow with light except the eyes, which were shaped like almonds, brown as coffee, and pierced Gina like a pair of needles.
“Fuck me,” she whispered. Then she took a hold of herself and added, “If you’re dead, Onu, why do I keep seeing you?”
The vision of Onounu snorted at that, tried to hold in her amusement, and failed completely. Instead she held a graceful hand in front of her mouth as she burst into a long, rich laugh. When she finally finished, she smiled and answered, “You tell me.”
“Are you real?” asked Gina. “Is this, like . . . the afterlife?”
Onounu snorted at the ridiculousness of the question. “Of course I’m not real, Gina. I’m dead. What you see is just the personification of your memories of Onounu, constructed by your mind into a form that you can talk to.”
Gina stared at the face of her late friend, utterly perplexed. “Huh,” she said. “I can do that?”
“Oh yeah.” Onu smiled. “Your brain can be smarter than you are sometimes. It’s decided you need a friend to hold your hand and kick your ass, so here I am.”
“Man, I wish all my hallucinations were this lucid.” Gina ran a hand through her dishevelled hair and rubbed the wildness out of her eyes. When she finished, she felt a little bit less like a frightened animal lost in the woods and a little more like a civilised human being. “So,” she continued, “what am I supposed to talk to you about?”
“That’s up to you. I’m just a part of you, Gina, I don’t know anything you don’t.”
“That ain’t entirely helpful, you know,” said Gina.
Onu clucked with disapproval. “Since when do we use ‘ain’t‘?”
“Bite me,” said Gina, and she turned her back. It was easier to speak to this thing when she couldn’t see the face of her dead friend. “Look, the thing is, I’m lost. I want to get back to familiar territory, but I can’t find any.”
Humming, Onu assumed a thinking pose, tapping two fingertips against her cheek. “Maybe you shouldn’t be looking for familiar ground, but familiar people.”
“I did! It didn’t work!”
“Then maybe you haven’t been trying hard enough,” Onu said reproachfully.
“Seriously, bite me. I don’t have time to be abused by figments of my own imagination.”
Onu took a few steps towards Gina, walking on thin air, until they were standing face to face. Then Onu slapped her right across the cheek. Gina shrank away, hiding her stinging face, and looked at her friend in complete horror. “You!” she gasped. “You!”
“Grow up and get your head on straight, girl,” Onu snapped. “This self-pity bullshit is what got you here in the first place. I’m not sure what the hell you’re playing at out there, but it doesn’t make sense half the time and it’s fucking scary the other half.”
Gina’s head was still spinning. The real Onounu would never have spoken to her like that. She was gentle, she was kind. “You mean Gabriel . . .?” she blurted.
“What the fuck did you think I meant?! Yes, I mean Gabriel!”
Gina bristled and countered, “I don’t care what you think! He’s nice to me–” She saw the slap coming this time, ducked under it and moved with anger-fuelled quickness. She pushed Onu backwards to land on her rump and stood over her, looking down. Before the phantom could say anything, Gina spoke with ice in her voice. “Whatever the fuck you are, part of me or not, I make my own choices and my own decisions. I don’t need any lectures and I sure as hell don’t need you.”
She spun on her heel and started to walk away. There was no response. When she looked back the phantom was gone, and where it had been she could now make out a patch of grey on the horizon, the only thing out of the ordinary she’d seen so far.
At first there seemed to be nothing there. Then faint voices came to her, a man and a woman, raised in argument. She moved in closer and swam into reality.
A dark room rushed out at her, lit only by a few dimmed lights. Glancing outside, she could tell it was near the top of a truly impressive skyscraper, high above the yellow street lights outside. Covered walkways linked the individual buildings with each other as well as with massive permanent airships or semi-permanent mooring stations for private ships. A hundred colourful holograms played through the sky, but only one caught her attention — it flashed the letters, ‘Welcome to Laputa.’
“Just shut up and find them!” Rat shouted at the man suspended in an impressive VR rig. Jock. Gina squealed and moved closer, trying to get their attention, but they didn’t seem to hear her.
Jock growled, “For the last time, I’ve been trying for the last forty hours, and there’s no sign of them. Not a blip. It’s like they just dropped off the fucking planet.”
“I thought you were supposed to be a fuckin’ cowboy. Maybe you’re getting old, is that it? You’re, what, thirty? Forty?”
“I’m twenty-eight,” spat Jock.
“Sounds over the hill to me.” Rat crossed her arms and sat down to glower at him.
“If you think you could do a better job then you’re welcome up here.” Jock swivelled around in his rig to face her. “You want to be a cowboy so bad, you come strap in and prove you got what it takes, or sit down and shut the fuck up.” He didn’t get a response; Rat only glared at him some more. He turned back to his original facing and muttered, “Why in hell would you want to be a cowboy, anyway?”
Rat snorted. “What are you on, man? You got it all. People fall over themselves just to give you stuff. You got power, you just jack in and you can do anything.”
A bitter laugh escaped Jock’s lips, and he blurted, “Tell me that’s not what you really think.”
“Hey, I know it’s tough gettin’ up the rankings, but once you–“
“Once you get some points you’re just as much of a tool as you ever were,” Jock said, his tone deadly serious. “You just don’t get it, do you? You have no clue what it’s all about.” Rat emitted a questioning grunt, and he sighed. “How do you get on the ranking, Alex? You do it by pulling a job. Most wannabes don’t even get that far, they’re caught on their first ride, but it’s the same if you’ve pulled one job or a hundred. You’re still looking to do other people’s dirty work.”
“Doesn’t bother me,” argued Rat.
Jock suddenly exploded. “Fuck me! Are you fucking retarded?! Do you really have that much pig shit over your eyes that you can’t see what’s right in front of you?” He didn’t wait for a response. “I keep trying to explain this to you. Hackers don’t have power, Alex. We don’t become kings, or creators, or legends. We just follow orders. That’s all hackers ever do, they serve others.”
“That’s not true! The Hacker Nations are owned by hackers, they got presidents and everything. Or I could make it on my own. You used to be a freelancer.”
“That was years ago, Alex. It can’t be done anymore, you can’t get a job now without signing up to the Nations. The ‘Net’s tame, there’s watchdogs everywhere, no places left to hide. Why do you think I signed up with the Emperor in the first place?” He paused to think about how to go on. “And what do the Nations do, boy? They take contracts from countries to crack other countries. And what do they do when one of us leaves too much evidence on a job? They catch him, they disavow him, and they extradite him. Doesn’t matter how high up you are. If you get indiscreet, you’re gone, no questions asked. Because there’s always another talented young idiot to step into the vacancy. If your victims can’t collect enough evidence on you, then someone below you in the rankings will be happy to lend them a hand!”
Jock was panting now, almost leaning out of the rig, but then all the air suddenly went out of him and he sank back. His voice continued, but smaller, subdued. “That stupid fucking hierarchy is all we’ve got. The feigned respect, the phoney glamour. Free stuff and all the girls you can cope with until you get caught.”
Rat studied the floor with hooded eyes. “It’s what I want.”
“It’s not enough. It’s never enough,” Jock said softly, looking away.
She crossed over to where he hung strapped into the rig. Olive-coloured fingers turned his face up and pink lips planted themselves on his. He was too shocked to resist, spluttering only when Rat let him go.
“You–” he stammered, “I’m not–” He stopped short when she pulled her shirt off and lifted the VR crown from his head. He stared at her body with eyes wide as dinnerplates and mouthed, “Oh.”
Gina turned away to give them some privacy. Who’d have thought, those two together . . . But if she couldn’t communicate with them then she didn’t need to be here, especially as a peeping tom.
She slipped back into the white.
“Okay,” Gina told herself as she searched the blank place for other doorways. “If there’s one, there’s got to be others. One of ’em must lead somewhere. Just get a hold of yourself. Think.”
However, her thoughts always turned to the scene she’d just witnessed, and the more she thought about it the more it disturbed her. Not so much the idea of Rat hooking up with Jock — although that was creepy enough — but the facts were obvious. Rat and Jock were a zillion miles away. She couldn’t possibly have seen them just now, but it was undeniably more than an illusion. She’d done something or tapped into some power that had opened a window to the other side of the world.
Nor could she ignore what the phantom had told her earlier. Put on the brakes and take control. Did it really imply that she could control this place if she wanted it badly enough, or at least control her place in it?
“You were thinking of familiar people,” she said. “Maybe that’s it. If you just think hard enough . . .”
She carefully selected a point a few feet in front of her. Then she closed her eyes and imagined a passage at that spot, leading to someplace dark but familiar, with her mental image of Bomber superimposed over everything. Wherever the passage went, it had to lead to him. Once she had a clear picture of what she wanted, she stepped forward without opening her eyes, and was assaulted by a blast of freezing cold.
Shivering, she opened her eyes and looked around, but still couldn’t see anything. It was as cold as death. She drew her shirt tight about her and rubbed her arms to stave off the frost, but stopped when she heard footsteps echoing loud and close. Her teeth started to chatter as she listened.
“Who’s this guy?” asked a voice, echoing strangely, as if it came from the bottom of a deep well. Gina felt his presence in the dark, a warm body in the cold, breath steaming in the air.
“Nobody,” snorted another, deep and male. That answer didn’t seem to satisfy the first voice, and the second sighed. “Another one of those speed jockeys from R&D. They broke him, so we got to fix him.”
The first voice sounded shocked. “Jesus Christ, he’s going back to combat after this?”
“Don’t know. Last one got ‘transferred’ out in the dead of night, locked in some big fuckin’ cage screaming and tearing at the bars. She was mental. Clawed the eyes out of two lab techs before they put her down.” The man shrugged. “Who cares? Not our job.”
“Fuckin’ creepy, man. Do you think he’s listening?”
“Listening? Marlow, he’s dead. I know you’re new, but we don’t use this cryo shit for nothing. Put your hand on the glass and you’ll freeze your skin off.”
“So when do we decant him?”
“Couple hours and he’ll be ready for reanimation. Better let the whitecoats know. C’mon, this place makes me hungry, I need a burger.”
“Yeah, yeah.” There was a loud mechanical thunk as if a set of lights had been switched off. It slowly started to get less cold, and when she heard a dull booming thump, she instantly knew it for what it was. A single heartbeat. Then, an eternity later, another. And another. It was happening every twenty minutes and speeding up.
The next thing she knew, the world around her was tumbling, and she felt the impact as her body hit some kind of hard metal slab. Icy water splashed all around her, but the slab was hot, almost hot enough to burn skin, and big clouds of steam rose up around her. Hurried hands wrapped her naked body in a toasty electric blanket. The heat soothed her convulsing muscles. It slowly seeped into her bones until she was warm, and she could make out people talking.
“Jacob,” said a male voice, and the face attached to it swam into view. Gina gasped when she recognised it as Colonel Obrin. “Jacob? Sergeant Dusther? Can you hear me?” Her mouth moved in response, but no sounds came out. Obrin’s hand squeezed her shoulder. “It’s okay, soldier, just relax. It’s over.”
When she finally got her voice back, she automatically husked, “SitRep, Sir?”
“You’re back at the base. We recovered your body from the field after your mission, it’s a little beat up, but you’ll be fine. Lie back, we need to check your regen implant.” The hand on her shoulder held her down gently while strange white devices of every description were passed over her and pressed against her skin. A man in a white coat gave the Colonel a thumbs-down. Obrin nodded at him and turned back to Gina. He sighed, “Listen, Sergeant. I’ve got some bad news. There was a reporter at the scene, she caught some pretty bad footage of your mission, and has subsequently uncovered more about the project than we’d like anyone to know. SOCOM’s ordered us to shut it down as part of the hush job.”
“Don’t understand,” Gina replied.
“It’s alright, son,” said the Colonel. “It’s gonna be alright. The . . . the doctors are gonna be operatin’ on you soon, you just do whatever they say. We’ll . . . We’ll meet up again someday.”
“You goin’ somewhere?” Gina stared dumbly at the syringe piercing her arm, and her vision quickly narrowed into dark tunnels. Everything seemed to grow farther and farther away.
Obrin smiled under his terrific moustache. “No, Jacob. You are.”
Blackness overwhelmed her.
Gina took off her flight helmet, climbed out of the simulator, and saluted the instructor. The instructor — a middle-aged woman with the gold oak leaf of an Air Force major on her sleeve — didn’t look up from her notepad, busy marking tick boxes on her grading sheet.
“You came in too hard on the landing,” she muttered almost absently, but the depth of scorn in her voice was withering. “During the computer-unassisted trials, you failed to properly compensate for wind drift and coriolis force twice, causing you to miss the cradle entirely. On the third go you cut power to the rotors too early and hit it like a brick. If that were a real cradle and you were just an inch off, you could very well have smashed the cradle and your copter with it.”
“I didn’t, though,” said Gina. No protest, no recrimination, just a simple statement of fact. The instructor looked up at her over the rims of her glasses.
“And that’s the only reason why I’m passing you, pilot,” she growled and put the pen away in her breast pocket. “You will have your full flight certificate by the end of next week.” She threw Gina a dirty look before Gina could start to smile. “Don’t think you have anything to be proud of yet. Now get back in that cockpit and practice without the computer until you get it right every damn time.”
Gina grinned. She put her helmet back on with a heartfelt, “Yes, Ma’am!”
The instructor, unamused, gathered her paperwork and left the simulator bay, slamming the door behind her. Gina saluted her after she’d gone and tried in vain to wipe the smile off her face. It was hopeless. The culmination of all that training built into a huge sense of elation, and Gina’s feet floated on clouds as she put them on the rungs back up to the simulator cockpit. Then, suddenly, a pair of hands clapped in the darkness, and Gina jumped with such surprise that she landed right back on the ground looking for the source of the noise.
“Not too bad, rookie,” a woman’s voice called from across the hall, echoing through the empty space. The owner appeared from behind one of the other cockpits and approached Gina, walking with a cocksure confidence that immediately set Gina’s libido to raging. A mass of thick auburn hair danced around the shoulders of her uniform, an Army captain’s bars gleaming on the epaulettes, and Gina didn’t fail to notice how the fabric clung to her well-muscled body in all the wrong places.
“Who’re you?” Gina asked. “Ma’am, I mean.”
“Captain Sarah Caine, F Squadron, second in command,” she replied with a smile. “Just here to check out the fresh meat they’re putting on my team.”
“Lieutenant Jacob Dusther,” said Gina. “They didn’t tell me I was bein’ added to a squadron yet. Hell, I just got my wings!”
She chuckled to herself and shook her head. “We’ve been watching your progress since you get here, Jacob. This unit doesn’t usually get trainees, but we were told you’re a natural.” She looked up at the simulator and ran her fingers along its smooth metal nose. “From what I can see, they weren’t wrong.”
“Thank you, Ma’am, but if you’ve been watching me for that long, why introduce yourself now? Why the theatrics?”
“‘Cause we’re likely to be seeing a lot more of each other in the near future,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I want you to know exactly who’s in charge here, and that would be me. The Major doesn’t like to deal with rookie screw-ups, he trusts me to make sure they don’t happen.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Gina. “You’re the boss.”
“Good. Now that we have an understanding, you can come with me. I’ll show you to your bunk in the morning.”
Blinking at that comment, Gina blurted, “Ma’am?”
The Captain just grabbed Gina’s collar and pulled her along to a small private trailer in the officers’ camp, only a short walk from the simulator, and shut the door behind them. The next thing Gina knew she was on the bed with most of her uniform missing.
They awoke when the sun started to peek in through the slits in the window blinds. The Captain rolled onto her side to look at Gina and said, “Just so you know, this isn’t a relationship. As far as I’m concerned we’re just using each other for sex. Right?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Gina. “You’re the boss.”
“And before you ask, no, I don’t do this with all the rookies. Just the ones I like.”
“Good to know.” Gina grinned up at the ceiling and thought, This’ll be interesting. She was about to reach for the Captain again when something pulled at her, like a cord attached to the base of her spine, and the isolated little world of the military base fell away from her at a million miles per second.
She came to with Gabriel’s arms wrapped around her, saw the gentle smile on his face, sensed the floor and the air flowing across her skin, felt the reality of things around her to a level of detail that no memory, dream or simulation could achieve. “That’s enough of that, girl,” he whispered. “I nearly lost you out there.”
“Sorry,” she croaked. She tried rubbing her eyes, but her arms responded clumsily or not at all, as if they weren’t her own arms anymore. “What’s wrong?”
“You spent too long inside his head. You’ve gotten used to using his body, but your muscles aren’t in the same place. It’ll wear off.” Without another word he lifted her off the floor, carrying her as if she were light as a feather, and deposited her in the seat of a simple wheelchair. “This’ll help you until you’re ready to start walking again.”
“What about Bomber?”
“Still alive, but in a coma. The experience was pretty hard on his mind. I’ll bring him out of it when the time’s right, and–” There was a sharp crunch. Gabriel grunted and dropped straight down, a large pulpy dent in the back of his head. Gina gasped and twisted around in her chair to see Bomber standing there, holding a jagged length of pipe which looked like it had been torn out of something by brute strength.
He looked at Gina with a perturbed expression and said, “What just happened, and why am I holding a pipe?”
She glanced up and down in horror, and Bomber went, “Oh.” He bent down to check Gabriel’s pulse and seemed to find none. “Well, this looks like a perfect time to get the hell out of here.”
There were so many things Gina wanted to scream at him that she couldn’t make up her mind. Bomber simply grabbed the handles of her wheelchair and started running, ignoring everything she said.
“Three ways to get off an airship,” he recited to himself. “Boarding tubes, emergency parachutes, lifeboats. Parachutes are kept in a safety locker near every hatch. Lifeboats can be accessed through hatches in the floor. We’re not on the ground so we can’t use the tubes,” he glanced out of one of the giant bay windows as they ran, “and parachutin’ into the ocean ain’t a brilliant idea. Lifeboat it is.” He stopped at the next junction and pulled away one of the rich carpet tiles to reveal a hatch with a recessed metal handle. He grabbed the handle and twisted it, then pushed, opening the way into a tight staircase downwards.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?!” Gina roared at him. “You just bashed his brains in!”
Bomber lifted her out of the wheelchair and placed an experimental foot on the steps. “If you want an apology, don’t waste your breath. I’ve just solved most of our problems.”
“Not quite,” said Gabriel from behind them. Bomber wheeled around, banging Gina’s head against the wall, but not hard enough to do more than hurt. Gabriel continued, “You got the drop on me, Simon, and I respect that. So I’ll make you a deal. You can leave, but she stays.”
“Don’t call me Simon,” spat Bomber. “Whatever you think you know about me, you don’t know shit.”
“Don’t be silly. I know exactly who you are.” Gabriel smiled. “At first you fooled even me, but now it’s clear. You’re the chameleon. The man without a name. Simon Caine, Benjamin Marlow, Jeremy the Wanderer, Jacob Dusther, Aaron Thomason, these are all skins you’ve taken from others and worn to hide yourself. But what’s your name, chameleon? Do you actually remember it?”
Teeth bared, Bomber took a step forward as if to attack, then remembered Gina cradled in his arms. He shook his head and said, “I’m not fallin’ for it, you bastard. Your voodoo mind shit ain’t gonna work on me. We’re leaving whether you like it or not.”
“Hey, listen, it’s okay,” interjected Gina. “I’ll be okay. Just get the hell out of here, save yourself.”
“No.” Bomber met her eyes, full of rage and frustration, betrayal and fierce protectiveness. “I’m not letting him do to you what he did to Jez. We’re going together, even if I’ve got to blast this ship to bits around us.”
A sharp laugh burst from Gabriel’s lips, and he looked at Bomber like a man with a gun might look at some slope-browed creature wearing animal skins and waving a club. “You’d tear me limb from limb if you had the chance, wouldn’t you? So much bottled-up anger, all coming out in one rush.” He glanced over his shoulder at Jezebel arriving from down the hallway. “Last chance, Simon. Take the offer. You won’t get another.”
Slowly, resentfully, Bomber put Gina back down in her chair and stood snarling at Gabriel, who nodded approval. Gina squeezed Bomber’s arm to let him know it was all right.
“Excellent,” said Gabriel. “Goodbye.” He closed his eyes, and Gina could sense the whirlwind of mental force lashing out from across the room, straight towards Bomber. Horror gripped her heart when she realised Gabriel was going to kill him. He’d simply been waiting until Gina was out of the firing line.
She reacted, but her muscles moved so slowly, so clumsily, as she staggered to her feet and jumped in between them. Bomber seemed to understand the situation and disappeared through the emergency hatch, but that would offer no protection from Gabriel. In desperation she reached out, grabbed on to Gabriel’s mind like a limpet and dragged it forcibly into the dreamworld.
EMPATHY: Part 16
“So where’s the trap?” asked Bomber, peering out at the lightening horizon. The hours wore away but never seemed to bother him. He didn’t grow bags under his eyes, didn’t lose an ounce of his alert tension, didn’t rest his eyes just for a moment. Every time Gina awoke from her fitful doze she found him sitting there, never moving, like a gargoyle watching for evil spirits.
“I don’t know, Simo– I mean, Jacob. Sorry.” A tight smile crossed Jezebel’s face. “I’ve gotten so used to calling you ‘Simon’ it’s hard to think of you as anything else.”
He shrugged and said, “Call me Simon if you like. One name’s as good as another.” A long pause. “I sure would like to have some clue where the bullets are gonna be comin’ from, though.”
Jezebel, too, gained a measure of Gina’s respect for her endless patience and level-headedness. “You’ll be the first to know, Simon,” she said.
“He’s just nervous,” teased Gina. Bomber obviously didn’t think very much of that. He craned his neck around to give her a dirty look, then resumed his watch. She patted him on the shoulder.
In the front, Jezebel cleared her throat as if preparing to ask a difficult question. “You know, Simon, there’s something the Colonel never told me,” she began. “How do you know him?”
Bomber hesitated. He didn’t make a noise until Gina squeezed his shoulder, at which point he slowly started to speak. “He used to be CO of the airbase where my copter squadron was stationed. We never spoke much before he left for a new command, until we were both roped into attendin’ some Virginia senator’s dinner, him as CO of his new base and me as stand-in for my squadron commander. We got to talkin’. Things went from there.”
“That’s interesting,” Jezebel murmured.
“Why?”
“‘Cause I know the Colonel’s only ever had one command, and it wasn’t an airbase.” She glanced at him. “When I met him, he was CO of the Marine base at Quantico. Combat Development Command and R&D, the whole shenanigans.” When Bomber didn’t respond, she asked, “Which branch of the service were you in again?”
He looked at her, eyes like gleaming daggers. “I suggest you be very careful about the next thing you say. You’re either callin’ me a liar or the Colonel. I won’t have anyone, not even you, disrespectin’ the memories of good people.”
“You’re not the only one who remembers the Colonel a bit funny, Simon. Let me tell you a story, before you do anything stupid.” She locked eyes with him and slowly stared him down. Gina didn’t know what to do, particularly with a driver taking her eyes off the road, but she decided that butting in now would do more harm than good. “I used to know a woman,” Jezebel continued, “someone a lot like you, boosted to the gills and cocky as hell. Friend of mine. She remembered being in an experimental Navy SEALs unit, specialising in infiltration and security hacking. Described the trials she did, the people she met, the training areas, everything in absolute detail.
“I didn’t know exactly what it was about the things she said that sounded funny, but one day I decided to go to the base where she was stationed, just to have a look. It was all there. The unit existed, the people and places checked out just like she said, and her name was on the roster. But I couldn’t find any transfer documents. Not at the base, not in the main system, there wasn’t a single shred of information about the time between the day she joined up and the day she was posted to that base.
“When I got back, I questioned her about her previous posts, and she told me this experimental unit was her first. Straight out of boot camp into an experimental SEALs unit. ‘Yeah, right,’ says I, even if there were mountains of paperwork to confirm it. So I checked the age on my friend’s file against her latest physical. Turned out she was at least two years older biologically than on paper. Of course, she was a loner, no friends or family from before the service who could tell us her actual birth date. That’s where my investigation ended.
“I asked the Colonel about it once. He told me it was classified, and ordered me never to investigate it again. It didn’t seem too important, so I let it rest.” She smiled at Bomber. “Ever since I met you, I’ve been hoping for the chance to ask you the same things. I’m betting something similar happened to you. Am I right?”
Bomber’s eyes had gone wide, his face pale and ashen. He breathed, “Jesus . . . It’s just like you said. First thing out of boot, I was dumped on this airbase, bein’ trained up as a pilot. They said I qualified for some kind of fast-track scheme. After that it was straight into the cockpit flyin’ test missions, goin’ to the docs every week for a new implant.”
A long sigh hissed out of Jezebel’s chest, as if years of tension were expelling themselves in relief. “I think the Army did something to you, Simon,” she said, her attention back on the road. “The same thing they did to my friend. If I’m right, two years of memories have gone missing inside that head of yours, and you’ve been conditioned to never realise they were even gone.”
“I don’t think I wanna hear any more of this,” said Bomber, his voice strained. Veins stood out in his face. Gina couldn’t tell if what came out of Bomber’s mouth was what he wanted to say or if something was making him say it. “Right now I think we should concentrate on getting to the airport alive.”
Jezebel nodded. “I actually agree. That’s why I’m warning you. By now Gabriel may know more about you than you do, and there’s no way we can get inside your head and pull out the info.” Then she glanced slyly over her shoulder, straight at Gina. “Unless there is.”
Gina shuddered and kept quiet. No one spoke as the outlying suburbs of Jefferson City started to rise up around them. Every village and town to the south had been abandoned, but here they saw people crossing the street without suits or anything, with only a faint glossy sheen to the houses to indicate radiation-proofing. It took a minute for Gina to realise that the tags everyone outside wore weren’t part of some weird fashion statement, but were actually radiation tags, just like the one pinned to her jacket. Somehow that seemed worse than the glittering domes and subways of Austin.
The tension built while they approached the airport. Soon Gina could see the airships coming in and taking off, people milling around inside the terminals. She counted the seconds until the anticipated attack.
They reached the airport car park without incident, which put everyone that little bit more on edge. One by one they emerged cautiously from the jeep like rabbits on a shooting range and headed for the terminal. They were all watching for the enemy, planning escape routes in case of emergency, trying to think tactically. Gina was starting to wish the ambush would just come so they could get it over with.
“We should be safe if we can make it to the airship,” whispered Jezebel. “Once we’re a couple thousand feet up, there isn’t a whole lot they can do.”
Gina smirked and said, “I’m looking forward to it.”
Meanwhile Bomber adjusted his belt, his trousers heavy with a hidden stealth gun and a ceramic vibroknife. Gina, too, had been offered her share of weaponry, but she’d begged off. The very idea of holding a gun was repulsive to her now. Her Mk5 was all she needed. Even if it got discovered, it wouldn’t mean too much trouble for Gina, as every commercial airship crew wore low-profile armour that no taser could get through.
The terminal doors slid open without complaint. They stepped through into the riot of duty-free shops and past the massive flight lists displayed on a cubical hologram as big as a house, and headed for the pass machines. An uneasy feeling built up in Gina’s stomach, a cold lump sitting in her belly, above and beyond her normal anxiety. She couldn’t find any reason for it, so she resolved to ignore it.
“This automated boarding pass service is brought to you by Yumito Virtualities,” said the familiar cartoon girl floating in front of the booth, pink dress waving in the holographic winds, stars and rainbows playing all around it. “Please show your credit card up to the scanner.” Jezebel flashed a small red card at the machine. The hologram assumed a thoughtful expression for a moment, then laughed and clapped its hands. “Success! Thank you, Mrs. Eleanor Kowalski, your boarding passes have been uploaded to your card. Thank you for using the Yumito Virtual Fun Experience, please enjoy and be happy!”
“Mrs. Eleanor Kowalski?” sniggered Bomber. Even he had to have a sense of humour.
“Fuck off,” Jezebel replied firmly.
At the main junction of gates was a long queue, directed by a group of holographic traffic wardens and instruction signs. There didn’t seem to be any actual human beings at work that Gina could see except the pair of hard-faced guards at the security gate, glaring down everyone in their line of sight.
One by one they held up their passports to the scanner and approached the gate, which happily buzzed everyone through.
The rest of their route was a long, escalator-assisted walk to the boarding gate. The walls were made almost entirely of bulletproof plexiglass so that travellers could see all across the airfield while still protected from most things. Outside, the tarmac blazed with the reflected light of the morning, the sun peeking just above the horizon. The low rumble of airship engines and chartered aeroplanes buzzed through the floor. Emergency exits lined the long hall on both sides, each receiving suspicious glances from Bomber and Jezebel, as if any of them might be harbouring the enemy.
Gina’s stomach only grew more restless along the way. It was a feeling she couldn’t quite place, a nameless dread that refused to completely materialise in her mind. She shivered. Sweat beaded on her forehead, and a throbbing ache crept into her brain. The next thing she knew, she was walking ahead of the others and still speeding up, for no reason that she could have explained.
“Gina, hold up!” Bomber called, but she barely heard him. The pounding in her head only grew more intense, cold sweat poured down her shivering face. The drumming between her ears sped up more and more until it seemed there was someone running at her shoulder, laughing like hell.
Rough hands grabbed her shoulders and turned her about. Her eyes cleared to see, and for a moment she saw eyes like burning embers, hair that shone gold with inner light, and the face of an angel. Her heart froze into a solid lump of ice. The image faded, but the terror did not.
“Come on, wake up!” Bomber yelled in her face. “What’s wrong?”
“He’s here,” she whispered. She saw Bomber’s face go pale, and he went for his gun. He quickly wrestled it out of its hidden pocket and shouted for Jezebel to move, then grabbed Gina by the collar and hauled her along at a run.
Jezebel growled, “Move, move! Get to the ship, it’s our only chance!”
They dashed through the crowd at a reckless pace. Bomber used his shoulders and elbows to carve out a path, keeping the stealth pistol concealed in the crook of his arm. Jezebel covered the rear with her own half-concealed gun. For once, the lack of airport staff worked in their favour, and they made a run for the airship gate.
“Remember the panic button,” Jezebel said to Bomber as they charged down the empty straight. Gina could feel the rush of thought that accompanied the words. We can’t get caught with guns, Jezebel repeated to herself. She seemed to be repeating a phrase someone else had told her. If we’re cornered, just hit the button and the piece will melt to mud. That’s why they call it the panic button. If there’s reason to panic, hit the button.
Their desperate flight slowed down as they reached the gate. An airline attendant stood behind the small desk in a ridiculously short skirt and smiled at them, saying, “Good evening, sir, ladies. It’s a good thing you got here, you’re the last people to board today, we almost left without you.” She shrugged by way of apology. “May I see your boarding passes please?”
Jezebel held out the small red card, and the attendant passed a scanner over it. Then she smiled with renewed force. “Thank you, madam, everything seems to be in order. Please proceed up the boarding ramp and into the ship.”
The woman barely had time to finish before Bomber dragged Gina into the boarding tube and up the ramp, sheet metal clanking to their footsteps. The airship door was open and they stepped through it with barely-composed restraint.
Bomber and Jezebel breathed sighs of relief as the ship doors closed behind them. They’d escaped the trap. Another airline attendant greeted them as they came on board, and introduced them to a holographic talking bluebird which would lead them to their seats. Bomber and Jezebel exchanged glances, then shrugged and followed along.
Row after row of empty seats were passed by. The entire first class compartment was bare, but their tickets were business class, so they had no choice but to follow the bluebird into the next compartment. The pounding in Gina’s head reached fever pitch, as if someone had a battering ram at the gates of her mind and a serious determination to get in. She wanted to scream, but had no energy left with which to do it.
When they brushed through the cloth screen separating the compartments, Bomber stopped dead and clamped his hand back on his gun. Business class, too, was completely empty. Jezebel stared dumbfounded for a second until the horrific realisation came over her.
A hand brushed aside the screen to the economy class compartment, and Gabriel took a few lazy steps towards them with his casual body language and engaging smile.
“Welcome to Lowell Airlines,” he said. “I hope you have a pleasant flight.”
“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” Gabriel said. With only a split second to act Bomber raised his gun and fired. The shot rang out like thunder, but Gabriel’s smile never darkened. He just nodded at one of the airline attendants, who stepped in and politely took the gun from Bomber’s hand. There was no casing on the floor, and the magazine indicator still read the same number.
“So nice,” he continued, “now that we can dispense with the hostilities and get to know each other.” He walked past them into the first class compartment and draped himself across a chair. “Come on! Sit down, order the wine, leave your seatbelt off for all I care. It’s my ship, nobody’s going to complain.” As if to punctuate his words, the ship shuddered as it cast loose its moorings, and the large windows showed the airport dropping away below.
Bomber looked over to Jezebel. She stood like a statue, arms clamped to her side and her pistol pointed at the floor, held in white-knuckled fingers. He growled at her, “Jez, snap out of it! Shoot him!”
“I can’t,” she said. Her voice had a strange edge to it, like breaking glass. It didn’t take a telepath to know there was something deeply wrong.
“What the hell are you saying?”
“I can’t.” After a long pause, she lifted the gun in front of her, barrel pointed down. Then, with her free hand, she pressed the panic button. The weapon melted to brown ooze in her hands and blotted the airship carpet. “I can’t,” she finished.
Again, Gabriel smiled at them. “There’s no need to be shocked. She’s just remembering, it’s part of her instructions.” To Jezebel he added, “Ellen? Are you alright?”
Gina watched in horror as Jezebel jerked a nod and walked forward, took up a position at Gabriel’s side. She felt the rush of knowledge in Jezebel’s mind, words and images flooding back through a crack in the wall that had held them out. Days in a dark room, tied to a chair, naked and alone and frightened. Gabriel’s radiance every time he came into the room. Speaking with her about everything and nothing. By the time she walked out the door at his side, she loved him, a burning flame in her heart of hearts; white and pure and bright as the sun.
Supporting herself on a chair arm, Jezebel took a deep breath and shook the thoughts out of her head. He offered her a glass of water, but she waved it away. She was still pale but a little colour was returning to her cheeks. She said, “The remembering’s . . . a lot to take in.”
“I know,” he said. He spared her a quick pat on the arm, then returned his attention to Gina, knowing what she’d just seen. He stared at her with wonder plain on his face. When he opened his mouth, though, he was still speaking to Jezebel. “Wait outside, please. Take Simon with you. Gina and I have a lot to talk about, in private.”
She started to move towards Bomber, but he immediately fell into a fighting stance, ready to kill with his bare hands if necessary. He rasped, “Come near me and I’ll break your neck. Any of you. Same for Gina, you’re not touchin’ her.”
“Be quiet.” Gabriel looked at him with those blazing eyes, and Bomber fell silent. “You seem to be under some very mistaken impressions, Simon, like the one about you having a choice in what happens here. Nobody’s going to die on this boat, understand? Nobody. Unless you want to take the shortest route from here to the ground without a parachute.”
Through an effort of will, Gina swallowed her fear, uncrossed her arms and laid a shivering hand on Bomber’s shoulder. “It’s okay. I’ll be alright,” she said softly.
He seemed outraged by the suggestion that he’d abandon her. “But–“
“It won’t do anyone any good if you get killed on my account,” she pointed out. The reality finally dawned on him, and he hung his head. Gina worked up a brave smile and tried desperately to think of what to do now. The only thing she could think of came on a whim — she suddenly threw her arms around him and planted her lips on his. They were warm where hers were cold. She crushed him to her, held on with all her strength, and a little bit of life seeped back into her through him.
It lasted as long as it could. Finally they broke away, and Bomber allowed himself to be led of the room.
“Alone at last,” Gabriel murmured when Bomber had gone. “So much to talk about. I hardly know where to start.”
“Maybe you should strip me and tie me to a chair first,” she replied, teeth bared and venom in her voice. “Or have some goons beat me. Or call in the fucking Feds!”
Gabriel’s eyes held a slight twinge of guilt. He glanced out the window and said, “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Don’t patronise me.”
“Sorry.” He sighed, then met her eyes once more. “When you’re in my position, morality becomes a luxury you can’t afford to indulge very much. I’ve had to do some pretty questionable things in the past because there was no other way to get what I needed. If it makes you feel any better, I left the men who beat your friend to the Feds. Onounu, that was her name. I liked her.” His lips twisted into a sad little half-smile.
“Oddly enough it doesn’t,” she said. Then, firmly, “You can’t do to me what you did to them.”
He almost jumped out of his chair and exclaimed, “It’s not like that!” Crossing over to her, he took her hands in his and stared down into her, his eyes like pools of molten steel. It was hard to resist feeling sympathy for him then, but Gina held on to the bitter strength inside her. He continued, “I didn’t force them. Whatever Ellen feels for me, it’s something she built up herself. Onounu was the same. They just care.”
She let out a long breath. “You manipulate them. Everyone you meet. You don’t think you do, but that’s what it is. You twist people to your own ends.” She paused, bit her lip. “Even me.”
Surprisingly he let go of her hands, and instead she felt a soothing hand reaching into her mind, as if caressing it. Every hair on her body stood upright, every cell shivered with joy down to her very core. “You know better,” he whispered.
“Is this what you did to her?” Gina asked, her voice hoarse, and jerked her head towards the doorway where Jezebel and Bomber had gone. “Do you fuck her as well?”
“No,” he murmured, almost shyly. “I wouldn’t . . . I’ve never . . .”
She sank into his arms.
“Open your eyes,” his voice echoed. When she did, her senses reacted with confusion and nausea — a moment ago she had been standing on an airship carpet breathing dry, filtered air. Now she felt fresh sand curling between her toes, sea wind on her face, dark waves lapping against a shore somewhere in the night. Overwhelming dizziness brought her to her knees, about to be violently ill, but then she felt a soft touch in her mind soothing everything away.
“You’ll get used to it eventually,” Gabriel said, helped her gently to her feet. “Your mind’s still too attached to your body. When you stop thinking physically, it starts coming easier.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Gina coughed back. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and took stock of her surroundings. At first everything seemed unfamiliar, but then she recognised the wooden chairs and table, candles burning in the darkness and stars dancing across the sky like fireflies. This was where she met him alone for the first time, in her dreams.
“So it wasn’t just my imagination,” she breathed. “You were really there.”
He nodded. “I’ve always found it easier to speak here. It’s so much richer, it has more meaning.” A slight grin brightened his face. “And there’s the fact that I couldn’t find you at the time. It would’ve been easier if we’d been together. From so far away, I could only get in touch with you once or twice, it’s a bit draining.”
A hundred questions boiled in Gina’s mind, all trying to come out at once. “How do you do it?” she blurted. “What is this place, and how do you change it the way you do?”
“I’ve studied it for years, but I’m still not sure I have all the answers. It’s like a shared dream. Anything you can dream, it can happen here.” He demonstrated by waving his arm, and a trail of coloured sparks appeared following his hand. “See? You just go into the part of you that dreams and . . . connect. Pick up the phone and dial,” he chuckled. “It’s not that simple, of course, but there’s no other way to explain it.”
A spark of excitement burned in Gina’s mind, mixed with wonder and disbelief. She breathed the air, felt the stars tickling against her skin, and knew that she wanted this. On a whim she grabbed his hands and pulled him along, running through the sand, and she giggled, “Can I do what you do?”
“Of course! Just think about what you want to do and do it!” he called at her.
“Well, I want to fly!”
No sooner had she said the words and concentrated on her desire to fly than her feet left the ground, running higher and higher onto thin air. She let out a squeal of childlike joy and soared. Gabriel let go of her and flew up in front, offering his hand to her for a dance. Instead of taking it, she laughed and launched herself into him, kissing him passionately as they tumbled toward the ground. He hardly protested. At the bottom of their arc, they ploughed into the ground with a spray of sand but no pain, and she rolled on top of him.
“How do you ever leave this place?” she gasped, breathing hard with excitement. “Why would you want to?”
When he looked into her eyes she knew she’d touched on a nerve, but it didn’t diminish her curiosity. Finally he breathed deep and said, “It’s hard sometimes, but in the end it’s meaningless if there’s no one there to share it.”
“I bet you have, though.” She poked a finger at his chest. “You can’t tell me there hasn’t been a girl you’ve done this with. Probably done a lot more, as well.”
He didn’t answer. Instead his brow furrowed and his eyes started to glow, and Gina sat back to watch, and she opened her mouth to ask what he was up to–
She screamed aloud as a bolt of pure sexual pleasure shot into her body. It was too much, a complete overload to her senses, and the pleasure quickly turned into white-hot agony lancing up and down her body. Her vision went red, her ears rang, and every breath of wind across her skin was like a raw and painful orgasm. She collapsed on top of him, panting and paralysed.
“Are you okay?” he asked. Even the vibrations of his voice sent her into spasms, and she would’ve begged him to stop if any noise had come out of her throat. After a moment he realised what was going on. “Oh, you’re being physical again. Here.” Again the soothing touch was there, smoothing away her hypersensitivity until she simply drifted on an ocean of pleasant sensations.
She was still panting when she finally recovered. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she rasped. “Ever heard of being gentle?”
“I was holding back,” he said deadpan. “That was nothing.”
Unimpressed with his attitude and her body raging with hormones, she grabbed him by his collar, pushed him down onto the sand and focused everything she had on him. Every ounce of her willpower focused into a single spot. He gasped from the explosion of ecstasy, shuddering all over — she could feel echoes of his emotions bouncing back through her, like a warm body pressed against her skin, but only coming through in waves.
“How was that?” she asked him.
He tried to hide his shivers behind a smile. “Not bad. We can work with that.”
Lowering her mouth down to his ear, she murmured, “I think I prefer the real thing.”
Gina disentangled herself and started putting her clothes back on. The airship was warm and cosy, but she felt strangely vulnerable in the nude. Fabric rustled as Gabriel sat up behind her. A hand cupped her breast and lips teased her neck, but she shrugged him off, then ran a playful hand through his hair to keep from giving the wrong impression. Sex while flying high on Spice was pretty intense, but what she’d just experienced made everything else pale in comparison.
“Not ever?” she said.
“First time.” He seemed uncomfortable to admit it, but strangely unembarrassed. “It’s never seemed right before. The dreams were always enough. Less . . . physical.”
“It’s just a body. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
He looked at her for a long moment, then broke into a smile. “Do you know how long I’ve wished for you?” he murmured. “Someone who can do even half of what I do. Someone who understands.”
She stopped dressing with her shirt halfway down her torso and smiled back at him. It was kind-of sweet, in a way. “I wish I did. There’s so much I don’t know about you, I’m not even sure who you really are.”
“Sometimes I don’t really know myself.”
“Now you’re evading the point,” she countered in a teasing tone.
“Sharp as a razor, that’s another thing I like about you,” he laughed. “So many questions rolling around in that head of yours. Which one would you like me to answer first?”
Leaning in, she stroked his ear and basked in the reverberated pleasure she felt in him. “You went to so much trouble to get us here. For what?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” he said. “For this. For you. You don’t realise how amazing you really are, Gina.” For a moment he hesitated, as if he was afraid of how she might respond to what he had to say. Finally he plunged on, “Remember the first time we met? You just sat down and opened the door. I didn’t sense it at first, and that was surprising enough, but when I found you in my head . . . I tried to kill you. I put everything I had into crushing that little mind until it broke, but you wouldn’t break. You survived it. Managed to get up and walk, even. No one else has ever done that. As a result I became . . . fascinated with you.”
She snorted, “Some stalker.”
“Glad I made a good impression.” He put on a disgusted sneer, but couldn’t keep a straight face for long. “Do I really put you off that much?”
She sighed, “Listen, I like you. Despite everything, I like you disturbingly much, and I’m not sure what that says about me or you. But how could I ever trust you?” He started to protest, but she placed a finger against his lips and kissed him to shut him up. Then, “Let’s take stock here. You admit you’ve tried to kill me at least once. You keep appearing in my dreams and confusing me until I don’t know who I can trust. You’re not on good terms with any of my friends, barring the ones you’ve brutalised or gotten killed.” She swallowed a sudden lump in her throat. “Do I need to go on?”
“That does put me in sort of a bad light, doesn’t it?” he muttered, rubbing his chin, and she nodded.
“So let’s just leave things where they are for now, and we’ll see how it goes, okay?” After a moment of pregnant silence, eyes locked together in mutual understanding, Gina just burst into laughter. “God, I sound like I’m dumping you.”
He couldn’t help but laugh with her, blurting out, “And you aren’t?”
“Ask yourself,” she replied and pulled her shirt back off before lunging at him again.
The hours flew like seconds. When they separated again, every inch of Gina’s skin dripped with sweat. Her body still shivered with residual endorphins, past the point of exhaustion yet walking on clouds at the same time. She blinked at the last rays of the afternoon touching her face through the giant bay windows. Only then did she realise how long they’d been on the airship, and she scrambled for her clothes.
“I need to talk to Bomber,” she said urgently. “He doesn’t do well in a trap, and right now he wants nothing more than to kill you. You’ll have to drop us off somewhere.”
He started to laugh, but his mirth died as he caught her expression. “You’re not joking.”
“No.”
“Then be serious, Gina. Your friend has a grudge against me, he’s got contacts, and he knows entirely too much. What you know about me is yours, I give it to you freely, but I can’t have him running around with information that could potentially ruin my entire operation.”
Anger churned in her stomach at the implication in his voice. She jumped to her feet and glared down at him with steel in her eyes, made only slightly less intimidating by the fact she was dressed only in a button-up shirt and a pair of panties. She said, “Kill him and you’ll never get what you want.”
Gabriel rose calmly and spoke in a level, matter-of-fact tone. “Do you have any idea how much damage you two have done already? Any at all?” he asked. “Eight of my men are dead. I’ve had to torch half a dozen places just to keep anyone else from retracing your steps, and I don’t know how many dozens of lives that cost. Do you know how that eats at me?” Instead of waiting for a response, he closed his eyes and channelled the emotion into her, a wrenching in her gut like knives of guilt and remorse dancing in her belly. She staggered back in horror, clutching her stomach, but the next moment Gabriel’s arms were around her and the feeling melted away. “Listen,” he sighed, softening somewhat, “I don’t want to kill anyone. I really don’t. What can I do, though? Keep him locked up forever?”
A thought occurred to her then, a glimmer of hope, questionable as it was. “Can you take the memories out of his head, like you did with Jez?” she asked. “Lock it away so it never comes back?”
“I . . . maybe.” He seemed to consider the idea for a moment. “It wouldn’t be perfect. There’s a lot of strong emotion under his surface, there’d always be a risk of him accidentally breaking through.”
“Please?” she whispered, pressing herself in a little bit closer. Although she’d never openly admit to it, she knew a few things about manipulation herself.
“I’ll need your help,” he said, and after a moment’s hesitation, she nodded. For Bomber’s sake.
EMPATHY: Part 15
It felt like weeks went by while they waited in the improvised decontamination chamber. It had only been a few days, Gina knew on an intellectual level, but she couldn’t say how many. The dreary monotony of their plastic prison knocked her time sense completely on its ass.
She hadn’t been allowed to see much on the way here. The only thing to catch her attention was the black helicopter that had pulled ahead of them, escorted by a pair of old, heavily-armed military aircraft. They all seemed to be heading to the same destination as Bomber and Gina.
Gina remembered the humiliating showers and scrubbings on their arrival to the chamber. Most of their clothes and items were gone, incinerated in the 4×4, so they just spent their time sitting, wandering, doing occasional bits of exercise for lack of anything else to occupy their minds. Once again Bomber had shut down inside himself and blocked any attempt at conversation. He responded to her only once when she lashed out at him in frustration.
“Talk to me, you son of a bitch!” she’d snarled. “You know something! Who are these people?”
“Shh.” He held a finger against his lips, pointing at the ceiling. “Microphones. We’ll talk later.”
Gina tried one more time to find sleep on one of the hard plastic benches. She managed to close her eyes for a few precious seconds before another tray of rations arrived through the miniature airlock in the wall. Her stomach jumped at the smell of food, and she rubbed the bleariness from her eyes as Bomber went to collect the trays. The orange-brown slop with yellow bits — Gina guessed it to be some kind of pasta dish — couldn’t have looked less appetising, but she didn’t care. Her taste buds had already been destroyed by years of processed protein burgers. So they shovelled the stuff into their mouths one spoonful at a time, trying to taste as little of it as possible.
“Ah, MREs,” Bomber said after finishing his tray. “How did I ever manage without ’em?”
“Probably a lot better than you ever did eating them.” Gina looked up at the voice, which came from the little speaker above the main airlock. A man’s face appeared in the window, smiling, wrinkles half-hidden under a prodigious brown moustache. “How you doing, Jacob?”
“No way,” breathed Bomber. “Colonel Obrin?”
“Mister Obrin nowadays, m’boy. Nice to see you finally made it back to the old US of A.” The man’s deep, rolling voice reverberated through the floor. “Come on out, it’s past time we talked.” He wheeled open the airlock seal and, with a push, opened the door. Bomber was on his feet in an instant and almost ran the way to shake the Colonel’s hand. Gina followed behind him.
They emerged into what looked like a large country house, a hundred years old at the very least, richly appointed with carpets and paintings and tall windows frosted with condensation. The last rays of the afternoon filtered through as sparkling reds and golds. Another thing she noticed was the unobtrusive team of armed guards trailing a few metres behind them.
“I don’t understand, Colonel,” Bomber said softly. “I knew something was up when your people used my old callsign, but this . . .”
“That’s how we arranged it, Jacob. I’ll explain everything when we’re secure.”
The Colonel led them into a large study, where several chairs sat arranged in a semicircle around a roaring fireplace. Twin coffee tables on either side of the fire offered wine, biscuits and cigarettes. Two men swept the room with bug scanners, then gave the all-clear and bowed out the door. The Colonel waved at the appointments set for them. “Please, sit down, help yourselves. We’ve got a lot to discuss. You too, young lady,” he added to Gina.
Gina sat down mutely. She didn’t know for sure what kind of trouble she was in, but this situation made her nervous. So far Bomber’s acquaintances had been a very mixed bag.
“I assume you’ve got a few questions for me first,” the Colonel said to Bomber.
“Don’t know where to start, sir . . .” Bomber scratched his head. He seemed uncharacteristically out of his depth. “First things first, I guess. How did you find us?”
The Colonel smiled and sipped a glass of wine where he stood. “We’ve had people tracking you since the moment you set foot in this country, Jacob. You’re on our ‘subjects of interest’ list. We always knew you were alive somewhere in the world, although you’re not easy to keep an eye on. When our team saw what kind of trouble you’d gotten yourself into, they decided to intervene.”
“That brings me to my second question,” Bomber fixed the Colonel with a penetrating stare, “who’s ‘we’?”
“Ghosts from the past, Jacob,” Obrin answered. “Made up of mostly us vets and well-wishers. Tightly-knit. Possibly the best-kept secret in the country. Waiting for the day when the Federation is at its weakest.” He grinned at Bomber’s astonished reaction. “That’s right, Jacob. The US Army ain’t dead. It’s just biding its time. Don’t tell me you believed we’d really disbanded at the Feds’ say-so.”
Bomber sank back in his chair. “Not at first, sir. I heard some rumblings out of my old contacts, but then they started droppin’ off one by one, dead or disappeared by the Feds. I thought that was it for us.”
“Almost. They hurt us bad in the days after the takeover, bad enough to think we were gone, but all we did was go deeper into hiding.” The Colonel smiled fiercely. When he did, Gina thought he looked exactly like a moustachioed shark about to feed. “Now I’ve got a question for you two. We captured those mercenaries chasing you. Stupid bastards didn’t even know who they were working for, but I have a feeling that it wasn’t the Feds. Would I be right in presuming they’re a present from a man named Gabriel?”
“How do you know about Gabriel?”
Obrin gestured expansively with his wine glass. “Another of our ‘subjects of interest’. In fact, he’s the reason why I’m talking to you right now.” When Bomber didn’t seem to understand, the Colonel tapped one of his cufflinks. A door opened at the back of the room and a woman in a khaki military uniform took a few paces into the room, smiling at Bomber and at Gina.
“Reporting as ordered, Colonel. Good to see you two again,” she told Bomber and Gina.
“Jezebel,” Bomber blurted, staring at her. It was the woman, Gina realised in shock, the one who’d hired her to spy on Gabriel an eternity ago. Bomber laughed and pounded his fist against the armrest of his chair. “I knew it. I goddamn knew it!”
“The Captain here has been working with us for years on the Gabriel subject,” said Obrin. “She was in deep cover, we couldn’t risk revealing her affiliations to anyone. Not even you, Jacob. And we weren’t sure whether or not you’d take the job if you knew.”
This time it was Gina’s turn to speak up. “Why?” she asked. “Why are you after Gabriel?”
“That’s . . . complicated,” said the Colonel, “and something I’m hesitant to reveal in front of the daughter of Director Vaughan of the Hong Kong Federal Police.”
The Colonel clearly didn’t realise how ill-chosen his words were. They cut into Gina like knife blades twisting in her belly, turning nervousness into anger until her blood boiled in her veins. She jerked upright, trembling in fury, and started to shout through the red haze before her eyes. “Who the hell do you think you are, bringing my parents into this?!” she screamed. “I have been kicked around, hunted, tortured, shot at, and dragged halfway across the fucking planet because of this telepathic psycho and his gangs, something for which you are apparently responsible, and now you’ve got the stones to stand there and tell me I can’t be trusted?!“
When she finished, she found herself standing over the Colonel only inches from his face, her hands in the air in some wildly impressive pose. The object of her rage had shrank back from her, looking a couple of feet shorter than he did before. Jezebel stood faithfully behind the Colonel and covered her mouth to hide her quiet laughter.
“I think the lady’s just said it all,” Bomber told the Colonel. Then, his eyes on Gina, “I like ‘Vaughan’ better than ‘Hart’ anyway.”
Obrin grinned nervously. “Right! Well, in that case, you two had better come along. I’ve got something to show you.”
He gestured at the door through which Jezebel had entered. Bomber and Gina followed the Colonel out. Jezebel fell in beside them, and their guards followed not far behind.
“So how the hell did you get out of that club?” Bomber asked Jezebel. “I didn’t see where you went, couldn’t find any sign o’ you after the whole op went south. Figured that if you made it out alive, you’d probably find us.”
“And I did,” she said. “Not that it was easy. We couldn’t be seen contacting you, the Feds would know about it straight away. So we had to wait ’till there weren’t so many eyes around looking for you.” She smiled. “I must say, you’ve kept ahead of them pretty well, if not by much. We heard what happened to East.”
“Yeah. Was it the same gang of goons that attacked us in New Orleans?”
“That holds with our information, yes.” She shrugged. “We can’t be sure, though. The ones we captured were all implanted with crude forget-me-nots. Everything they may have known about their past operations would’ve been deleted immediately after completion.”
“Shit,” said Bomber. “Nice work evadin’ my question, by the way.”
A rueful smile cracked the disciplined facade of her face. “Thank you. Truth is, I . . . don’t like talking about it. I’d rather fight the whole Sudan counterinsurgency all over again.” Cold shivers went up and down her body. “I knew something was wrong when Gina left the table in a hurry. I stood up under the pretence of shaking Gabriel’s hand, then punched the nearest face in and made a run for it. The rest of that night is a blur. Come morning it was just a cat and mouse game for days on end. I was trying to get into contact with base here, but they kept intercepting my messages, and when I tried to book any kind of passage they always found out which plane I was on. I had to fight my way clear of airports twice. I tried to contact you a couple times at our emergency addresses, but I never got a response on any of them. I was worried they’d caught you.”
Bomber gave her an odd look. “I checked those addresses every day, every hour when I could. There was nothing in them.”
Her jaw dropped and she froze in mid-step. Pure shock was plain on her face. “Jesus. I thought I was so careful. How did he get to them?”
“Well, he’s got an AI. That might explain a few things.” Bomber shrugged his shoulders. “Not that it matters now.”
“Obviously we underestimated him. An AI, though . . .” She exchanged a meaningful look with Colonel Obrin. “That’s a multi-trillion dollar project, and nobody’s breathed a word about it to the Feds. I’d like to know how he managed that.”
“That’s one question we may actually know the answer to,” the Colonel interjected. He waved a key card at the large steel door at the end of the passage, and it opened for him. They proceeded into a working laboratory, men and women working in white coats and safety masks, where everything was shiny and sterile and — if possible — stored in air-tight containers of bulletproof glass. Gina recognised it instantly from half-remembered documentaries and news articles and a more recent experience in New Orleans. A fully-appointed nanotech lab.
The Colonel continued, “The first thing that drew our attention to Gabriel was a clumsy hack on an old government database, around ten years ago, searching for information about a ‘Project Hephaestus’. Before you ask what Project Hephaestus is, we don’t know. We’ve been trying to find out ever since. Most of the knowledge seems to have been destroyed by the nukes or locked up in some Fed file cabinet. The best data we’ve gotten in over ten years has come off that disc you brought in, Jacob.”
He marched the group to a large hologram of a single nanobot, magnified by many orders of magnitude, of a design that Gina and Bomber recognised almost immediately. “This robot, recovered from one of our encounters with Gabriel, was part of Project Hephaestus. That’s virtually all the information we’ve got on it. We don’t know its intended function or where Gabriel got it from. It’s definitely some kind of construction bot, but without being able to look at the programming we can’t tell what it was supposed to be constructing. However, given how expensive these bots would be to manufacture just two decades ago, we can take a few educated guesses.”
“You think they built Gabriel’s AI for him,” said Bomber, not slow to arrive at the obvious conclusion.
“One of several possibilities,” the Colonel replied. “The most likely and logical one. And, if correct, something that could help us out a great deal provided we can get our hands on some live Hephaestus bots.”
It wasn’t difficult to see the possibilities. “That could wipe away the Feds’ tech advantages in an instant,” observed Gina.
“And set humanity back on course for a free world,” Obrin finished for her. “Shortly after we traced the hack to Gabriel, he caught wind of our plans to capture him. Fled the country the same day. Didn’t even bother to pack, he just went. Unfortunately none of the stuff he left behind in his flat was very enlightening, so we gave up after a couple searches. In the end we couldn’t risk attracting any more attention from the Feds. They were thick on the ground back then.” A grimace twisted his face, his moustache bristling. “Little did we know he was doing his work inside Radiation Alley. If we’d only guessed, maybe we could’ve figured it all out by now.”
“Do you know what he was working on in New Orleans?” she asked.
“Trying to reconstruct the bots’ software. He’d have no choice if he wanted to recreate them from dead examples. What’s left in their memory banks is hopelessly corrupted, but get enough samples together and spend enough time on it, and it might be possible to reconstruct part of their programming. We, unfortunately, don’t have a large enough sample base to work with.” He turned his fierce smile back on Bomber and Gina. “I need live ones, and I mean to get them by any means necessary.”
Lastly, he cocked a conspiratorial eyebrow and added, “I could use a hand.”
“. . . And this is where you can sleep if you need to,” Jezebel finished, showing Gina and Bomber to an unoccupied bedroom off one of the country manor’s vast halls. “Nobody else will be using it so make yourselves at home. Still, I don’t know how long the Colonel is intending you to stay, but I wouldn’t suggest getting too comfortable.”
“Thanks,” muttered Gina. The only thing she wanted at this point was a hot bath, and she’d just spotted the en-suite bathroom leading off to the right. That meant Jezebel now needed to disappear as soon as humanly possible.
“Oh, before I forget.” Jezebel threw Gina the mobile phone she’d thought she’d lost, a present from Rat in ages past. “We’ve checked it, calls are secure and untraceable. It’s been ringing off the hook for days, you’ll probably want to get back to whoever it is. Just don’t tell anyone where you are.”
A pissed-off smirk came to Gina’s lips as she said, “I don’t actually know where I am.”
“Even better!” Jezebel smiled, patted her on the arm and walked away. “Goodnight,” she whispered, closing the door behind her.
Gina sank into a chair with a long sigh, staring at the phone in her hands. “You used to put up with this for a living?” she asked Bomber.
“Every day,” he said. “You sort-of get used to it. You gonna call ’em back or what?”
“Do you think they might be in trouble?”
Bomber snorted at the apparent ridiculousness of that question. “In Laputa? They don’t even let you on the island unless your name’s on the hacker ranking. D’you want me to dial?”
“No, I’ll do it.” She held the phone up to her lips and said, “Return last call.” A few seconds later it was ringing. Someone picked up on the third ring.
“Yes?” came a suspicious voice, familiar enough to bring a smile to Gina’s face.
“Hi, Rat,” she said. “It’s us.” Slightly lame opening, she thought after the words had left her mouth, but it would do.
Rat almost squeaked into the telephone. “Holy fuck! Are you all right? We’ve been trying to reach you for days!”
“Yeah, I know. We haven’t had a chance to use the phone. Don’t worry, though, we’re all right. Bomber says hello.” She sent Bomber a smile, and he made a little wave of his hand. “How the hell are you guys? Did you meet up with Jock okay?”
“Sure, piece of cake! There were some Fed goons at the airport when I left, but I slipped by ’em. I’ve been off painkillers since yesterday, clean bill o’ health and everything. Jock’s taking a little longer to heal up, though, the old fart.” Jock muttered curses in the background, and Rat laughed. “So have you been shot yet? You realise you’re the only one of us left without a bullet hole for a souvenir.”
Gina couldn’t resist a grin. “No, not yet, though not for lack of trying. But we’re safe now. Everybody’s off our trail for the moment.”
“Good! Hey, we’ve been looking into Gabriel for ya from this end. Lately he’s been throwing money like it was nothing, just pissing away billions of dollars, and fuck knows where it all goes. I think he’s getting more and more desperate to find you. I don’t see the why, myself, you’re not that pretty.”
“Thanks,” said Gina. In a whisper she added, “Personally, I liked you better as a boy.”
“You just want me for my body.” For a moment Jock talked in the background. “Oh, Jock says that if you manage to get into VR anywhere, you should go up to the nearest street guide and tell it what you said to the Emperor in Hangzhou. Then we’ll be able to find you. Don’t repeat it out loud until then, you never know who might be listening.”
“But the phone’s supposed to be secure, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Secure from who?” countered Rat. “Stay on your toes. You don’t know who’s after you and who’s not, so don’t trust anybody except Jock and me and maybe that guy of yours.”
She nodded and murmured, “I will. Right now, though, we need some sleep. And a bath. Maybe both at the same time.”
“Alright. You can tell us what the hell you’ve been up to next time, maybe. Keep out of trouble, and remember what I said.”
Gina just managed to mouth a quick, “Goodnight,” before nodding off in the chair where she sat.
Strange days ticked away in the country estate, under the watchful eye of the United States military. It seemed that Jezebel had been assigned to them on a permanent basis. She kept a constant guard outside the room, and escorted them whenever they went out the door. A little bit creepy but also oddly comforting.
She talked freely with them and asked sharp questions, her favourite subject being Gabriel and what they’d learned about him. Gina answered as best she could, but natural suspicion still nagged at her hindbrain. So she held back, left out certain details that they really didn’t need to know about. Bomber followed her lead in that — for those secrets she’d shared with him. Even he didn’t know about the dreams.
Strangely, he seemed more animated now whenever Gina looked at him, more alive somehow, like something long-dormant inside him had been shocked awake. Or like fading echoes of the man he used to be. Bomber no longer walked anywhere; he marched, and even started snapping salutes when they met with the Colonel.
“Damn, we’re sure glad you made it here alive,” the Colonel said after a long interrogation session. “Don’t know what we would’ve done without your help.”
“It’s nothing, sir,” said Bomber. However, this time he didn’t beg leave, but stepped forward and lowered his voice. “If I may ask, sir, I know it may be OpSec, but . . . Do you have plans to eliminate Gabriel?”
The Colonel looked up, narrow eyes poking out from over the mess of moustache. He sighed, “Son, if it were up to me, I’d let you in on our whole battle plan. But I got superiors still. They don’t know you the way I do, they’re still not sure they can trust you.” He glanced around as if to make sure the room was free of bugs. Then, in a whisper, “I got a plan, son. There’ll be a knock on your door tonight. Get all your stuff together, follow Jez, and we’ll brief you about what needs to be done.”
They followed Jezebel back to their room in complete silence. Somewhere along the way they’d gotten used to being listened in on, used to postponing the overwhelming desire to talk. Neither Gina nor Bomber knew why the Colonel had acted so cautious, but caution seemed like a good plan in general.
The sun set slowly as they wasted the hours ’till nightfall. The old television kept their room nice and noisy, so nobody would get suspicious about the lack of conversation. When the call for lights out came, they tidied their things into their bags and went to bed as normal.
Gina was wide awake when she heard the knock on the door. She hadn’t shut her eyes for a second. She’d been sure Bomber was asleep, but now he jumped to his feet and started throwing on clothes.
The door opened without a sound, and Jezebel’s voice hissed out of the shadows, “Come on. Keep your head down and keep quiet.”
They crept out the door and into the stark, moonlit hallway. The carpeted wooden floors creaked under their feet, and it seemed like even a deaf man should’ve heard them, but nobody noticed them as they snuck down the stairs and through an empty kitchen into the motor pool. A single bulb dangled from the ceiling, casting inadequate light on the single row of vehicles in the back of the warehouse. From where she stood Gina could make out two SUVs, some civilian cars, a lone eighteen-wheel truck and an ancient burnt-out tank in the middle of being salvaged for parts.
Half-seen in the dimness, Gina could just make out someone throwing a bag in the back of one of the cars, then slamming the door. She caught a glimpse of a massive moustache when he turned and jogged towards them. Jezebel motioned to keep their voices down.
“We’ve swept the entire motor pool, but you can never be too sure,” she whispered.
Bomber stepped forward and asked, “What’s this all about?”
The Colonel held up a PDA showing a detailed analysis of a single nanobot, a new one to Gina, all cameras and microphones and wireless antennae. It had to be very advanced to pack so many things into one tiny bot.
“Spies?” Bomber asked into the silence.
“We first found them in the compound yesterday,” Obrin explained with a nod. “Another present from our friend Gabriel. They must’ve come in on the wind, we haven’t spotted any vehicle within miles of here that wasn’t ours.”
“Blanket nanodusting just to find us?” said Bomber, more a statement than a question. “Expensive.”
Jezebel sat down on the hood of a nearby jeep and hugged her elbows. “From the area measurements we’ve taken, a spread this large would cost at least twelve billion dollars.” She was quiet for a moment. “This is how far he’ll go to find you two. A bank account measured in trillions and no restraint in how it’s spent, as long as he reaches his goal. This was one of our most secure safehouses. I don’t know what the hell you did to get his attention this badly, but right now you two are our most valuable assets, and our most dangerous liabilities.”
Her meaning was obvious. “You can’t afford to keep hiding us,” Gina concluded.
“Right now there are six Federal Police helicopters inbound to this location, each with a squad of full constables on board,” Obrin ground out, spitting the words as if he resented having to twist his mouth around them. “We’ve been slipping out key personnel and equipment since the morning. Now we have to make sure the rest of the organisation isn’t compromised. After the attack starts it’s every man for himself, but we at least have to make a show of it to keep them off our backs and off your trail.” He held Bomber’s gaze for a moment, then lowered his head and rubbed his eyes. “It’s orders, Jacob. You’ll be given further instructions once you’re away, Jez will go with you to make sure everything goes as planned. That’s all I can say. Maybe I’ll see you in Geneva.”
“Yes, sir,” he said in a voice as hard as stone. He saluted the Colonel and took Gina by the arm. Jezebel led them along to the car prepared for them, despite Gina’s protests and demands for an explanation. Even a sharp kick to the shins didn’t faze Bomber. He bundled her into the car, locked her door, and then jumped into the passenger seat.
Minutes later they were bouncing down a rough country road, watching the first missiles streaking into the compound like rays of red fire.
They hid the car under a crumbling overpass and went out into the cool night air, without suits or protection beyond simple radiation badges. Gina breathed deep. It was good to feel wind on her face again, the claustrophobia of the suits a distant memory. The moon burned bright in the clear indigo sky, joined by the individual pinpricks of faraway stars. The valley stretched out before them, a visual reminder of both loss and hope — the carcasses of dead trees still arranged where they fell years ago, but now covered in fresh moss and half-hidden by new growth.
Less pleasant was the hint of smoke on the air, carried from the burning fires where the old country house had once stood. Occasional spurts of gunfire echoed across the distance. Every now and again a bright tracer round would arc uselessly into the sky. Jezebel’s face was drawn and pale while she watched, especially when her eyes wandered to the bare handful of vehicles scattering away from the base, engaged in a running battle with the chasing helicopters.
“There were sixty-three troops stationed in that base,” she said. “The Colonel. Major Brand. People I’ve worked with for years. How many of them are dead now? I don’t know.”
“None of the enlisted know, do they?” Bomber interjected. “About the organisation. Cells kept so blind they don’t even know there is a resistance. That’s why you’re sacrificing so much, so the Feds don’t guess your real capabilities. They can’t know you’ve known since this morning.”
“I don’t understand,” Gina stated flatly.
A dry laugh shuddered through Jezebel. “Don’t try. The second it starts making sense, you lose something inside. One of the pieces that make you human.”
“What about Colonel Obrin? The officers who know?” pressed Bomber.
“They got their orders too. If they can’t make it out during the attack, then all they get is a pistol and some privacy, and maybe the knowledge that their troops took out a Fed or two.”
The words seemed to hit Bomber at his core. His expression never changed, but he looked down, as if there was too much weight on his shoulders to keep his head up. After a second’s hesitation, Gina put her arms around him, and he didn’t protest. His grief was old, bottled up for years and years, now given a fresh focus. Faces flashed from his mind to hers, first the Colonel, then his old squadron commander and her brother and more, friends and lovers all in uniform and all gone before their time.
Somewhere out in the valley, a rocket came screaming out of the ruins, bored straight into one of the Fed helicopters. The copter seemed suspended in time for a moment, a glowing hole inside it, and then fell out of the sky in a slow arc. A massive white fireball erupted where it hit the ground. Too bright. Gina had to look away.
“The Colonel gave me a disc with our orders,” said Jezebel. “I’m to play it for you when we reach the state line, and not before.” She turned and headed back for the car, but Bomber stopped her as she opened the door, a hand on her shoulder.
He said, “Here’s what I wanna know — why would Gabriel give our location to the Feds? Does he want us dead?”
“Enemy of my enemy, Simon,” she answered. “Divide and conquer. He knew we’d evacuate you when we found his bots. Use the Feds to flush you out, then catch you in whatever net he’s got waiting for us.” She broke eye contact and climbed behind the wheel, turned the key, revved the engine for takeoff.
Bomber took the passenger seat, and once again Gina was left in the rear. She muttered, “So we’re heading into a trap.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. Keep an eye out.”
The car lurched out of its hiding place and raced down the bumpy dirt trail, throwing up plumes of dust behind it. Gina bounced around in the back with the bags without so much as a seatbelt. She had to wonder how anyone could drive like this. No lights, nothing to see by but the green night-vision display projected in front of the windows. Half the wheels would leave the ground whenever they swerved around one of the trail’s tight corners. The on-board computer complained, but was quickly overridden and settled in to sulk.
When they reached a straight stretch of road, Jezebel shoved a small disc into the car’s player. A small hologram of the Colonel’s head appeared just above the dashboard with a fierce smile. The moustache looked even worse than Gina remembered, covering nearly half his face.
“I’ll try and keep this brief, Jacob, Gina,” he said. “First off, don’t worry about me. I’ve been waiting for this moment eight years now. It’ll be enough just to see you two safely away.” He paused, cleared his throat. “We won’t forget about you, either. The Army will send you another contact, he’ll get in touch with you when the time comes. For now I’m counting on you three to make sure our sacrifice isn’t in vain. To say it simply, we need a Hephaestus of our own. If we’re ever to have a chance at liberating anyone, we have to have an AI on our side. I want you to go and get it for me.”
“What?” exclaimed Jezebel.
“Fuck,” Bomber added for good measure.
“Head north to Missouri. There’s overseas tickets waiting for you at Paine Airport, out to Geneva,” the Colonel continued.
“Fuck!” Bomber slammed his fist into the dash. “No!”
Gina groaned inwardly as the Colonel’s words hit home. “Not again . . .”
“Hell of a last request. I know it’s a lot to ask of you after what you’ve been through. If there were anyone else I could trust to pull it off, I’d never have turned to you, but there isn’t. The Army doesn’t want to stick its neck out too far.” Obrin sighed. “What I can offer you is the support of our team in Geneva to help plan and execute the mission. They’ll contact you when you arrive, brief you on Gabriel’s compound, give you a place to kip. They should also be able to procure anything you might need for the op.”
Turning to look at Jezebel, Bomber shook his head violently. “Jez, we already marched into the lion’s mouth once, we’re not doin’ it again.”
“You will,” she grated, her voice hoarse and her cheeks wet, “because it’s the last thing the Colonel will ever ask of you. And you’re going to do it, or so help me I will hunt you down and put a bullet in your head myself.”
The Colonel’s voice went on, “I’m sorry I can’t be there myself, I really wish I could, but I got to do my part. So . . . Well, I’ve run out of things to say. Good luck and good hunting, soldiers. Out.”
