PRECOGNITION: Part 50
Gina watched from around the corner, not sure what to do. He just sat there like a broken puppet staring into space. That by itself wasn’t unusual for Bomber, but this time, nothing she tried could bring him out of it. Wherever he’d gone, it was somewhere she couldn’t reach him.
The memory made her shiver. Their link had collapsed like a heap of sand. It was as if she could feel his mind break in her hands. He just . . . stopped. She tried to reach out to him again and again, but found nothing to communicate with. Just a living, breathing piece of meat.
Betrayal. The one thing that still hurt Bomber through all the layers of cynicism and detachment. It must’ve cut so deep that he went away inside, to protect himself, and for a moment Gina wondered if he’d ever come back from that place.
“No wonder you’re so screwed up,” she said softly, hugging herself. “You spent your whole life being a thing. An experiment, or a weapon. That’s what they made you.”
There was a knock at the door. She got up to let Hawthorn inside.
“I got your message.” He glanced around the small sitting area, grimacing at what he saw. “I kinda hoped you were kidding. What happened?”
She took his hand and pulled him into the bedroom, away from Bomber. There, sitting on the side of the bed, she gave him a tablet of Spice and showed him, piece by piece. It was easier passing the memories from her own mind than digging them out of Bomber’s. They flew by in quick succession, the last days of Sergeant Jacob Dusther. Hawthorn’s eyes grew wider as the story played out in his mind.
“The Colonel? Are you serious?” he whispered. Then he caught himself. “No, of course you are. I . . . I don’t understand. None of this makes any sense.”
“How well did you know him?”
“Not like Jacob did. The Colonel was my CO for a little while, that’s all. I never saw him socially. Not even after he left.”
“You don’t have any idea why Obrin would turn like that? Why he’d commit treason to help the Feds?”
“I don’t.”
“Then we’re gonna have to find out for ourselves,” she said in a voice like cold steel. “If Bomber’s not in any shape to infiltrate that airship, we’ll have to do.”
Hawthorn’s opinion was obvious. He thought she’d snapped along with her boyfriend. He began to argue, but the look she gave him told him to shut up before he said something he might regret.
She stood up and paced around the room as she went on, “I’ll need someone to take out robots and computers for me. Anything which doesn’t have a mind. That’s your job. Humans . . . Humans won’t be a problem.”
“What about Jake? Won’t someone need to stay behind and look after him?”
“I don’t think he’s going anywhere,” she said, though it hurt. “Don’t worry. I can keep Stoney in line in Bomber’s absence.”
Gina gave a terrible, mirthless grin. Nobody would want to get on her bad side today. She continued, “You have your orders, Major. We’re leaving in half an hour regardless of what anyone else says.”
The command, both vocal and telepathic, worked just as she intended. The military training inside him responded without hesitation. He jolted to his feet, confusion and fear in his eyes as he fled the room.
She was alone again. On the other side of the wall, Bomber sat as still as an old stump.
I’ll be okay, she thought to him. They can’t hurt me. Nothing can hurt me anymore. Who knows, I’ve been holding back for so long that it might be fun to . . . cut loose.
The faint outline of the burnt city stayed on her closed eyelids, like a visual representation of the tear in her soul. It didn’t bother her anymore. She was a survivor, she learned to live with the pain, and it might prove useful besides. All her anger and all her hurts concentrated into a telepathic weapon.
She’d just have to stop herself from going overboard. Somehow.
She breathed in, focussed her mind to a knife edge, and went looking for something black to wear for her mission.
Stoney took the news badly. Too bad for him. Gina wasn’t taking no for an answer today, and when all was said and done, he did show up on the roof to catch their air-taxi. He even brought the bag of tricks he’d promised. Wordlessly, he doled everything out between the three of them, holding his tongue until that job was done.
Fully-equipped, Gina stood like a warrior goddess. Black tank top, form-fitting jeans and a black leather jacket to match her boots. She could’ve been carved from Greek marble. A little rucksack of helpful equipment dangled from one shoulder, including two disposable holomasks, some smoke grenades, a tight-wave wireless transmitter, and Bomber’s stealthy laser gun. Just in case.
“You’re not going in with us,” she told Stoney one more time. “Me and the Major only. I don’t know you well enough.”
Even his legendary poker-face had difficulty keeping still, the corners of his mouth twitching. “This whole affair is tactically unsound. You need a third man, and I don’t mean myself. Simon would never allow an operation to go ahead without being involved. He ought to be here, conscious and on point.”
She gave him an empty smile and said, “Maybe you were misinformed. I know you had all kinds of arrangements with Bomber, but he’s not the one in charge. I am. Keep that in mind.”
The words hung heavy in the air. She knew how to project authority when she needed to, and neither of the boys felt like arguing the point. For the first time since she met him, Hawthorn looked at her with a bit of respect. Not friendship, but respect.
He turned his attention back to the little porthole at the front of the cabin, and Gina caught a glimpse over his shoulder. Their air-taxi zoomed between the tops of the starscrapers. It banked ponderously left and right to dodge traffic. Other taxis, government helicopters, camera drones, and of course the incomprehensibly vast airship docks. Huge multi-coloured blimps were anchored in vertical rows, as many as five to a row, all glittering in the afternoon sun. Seemed like today was a busy day for Laputa.
“Almost there,” Hawthorn announced. His eyes locked onto their destination, the central hub of trade and transport for the city, her biggest and shiniest airship complex.
It began as a hundred-metre-tall spire sprouting from the roof of Two-Alpha arcology. At the top it fanned out to a large, spoked wheel, and was surrounded by a cloud of delicate scaffolding which prevented the ships from being blown away or bumping into each other. Pink docking tubes connected the ships to the ring, through which people and cargo were funnelled down the shaft and into the city.
Despite the impressive size of Laputa’s arcologies and the height of the towers, it was the airship hub which caught the eye more than anything. A masterpiece of futuristic design.
“Alright! Alright, I’ll help you,” said Stoney, “but I want you to keep in constant contact. And if you get caught, you won’t hear from me again.”
“Your selflessness warms my heart,” Gina replied. She shouldered past him to the door and grabbed a handhold in anticipation of their descent.
The landing was over in moments, concluded by a green light and a little ding from the loudspeaker. Clever magnetic suspension kept them from feeling any of it from inside the cabin. The door folded outward, and a shaft of honey-coloured sunlight fell on Gina’s eyes.
She ran her fingers through her hair and stepped out into the blazing afternoon. The air on the landing pad was heavy and hard to breathe, but to a girl from Hong Kong, it tasted good. Helipads were one of the few places in Laputa open to the outside, and at this humidity, it felt like taking a warm bath in the sky.
“Have a little faith, boys,” she added, luxuriating in the sun. “Gabriel thinks he’s already won. He thinks we’re not a significant threat to his plan. I’m gonna prove him wrong, and anybody who gets in my way is gonna regret it.”
The boys fell into line as she went for the concourse. The outer door opened without a challenge, but the inner door was patrolled by a Laputan guard with a body scanner on his hip. He held up a hand to stop her, but Gina didn’t even look at him, paying as much as attention as to a fly buzzing around her head.
She thought, Get out of my way.
The guard’s face screwed up in confusion. He was sure he’d seen someone approach the checkpoint, but everything got all muddled, all turned around. Maybe he’d imagined it. He didn’t see anyone now. For no reason he could remember, he put his own fingerprint down on the machine before he went back to admiring the pretty sky outside.
Hawthorn watched the guard over his shoulder until he was out of sight behind the tinted glass. He let out a long, heavy breath and rubbed a few beads of sweat from his eyebrows. “Gina . . . You are one scary lady.”
“Easy on the flattery, Major,” she said with a sarcastic smile. “You’re gonna need better lines if you’re trying to chat me up.”
The dock concourse flared out to fill the interior of that hollow ring. A supporting wall blocked the view on the left, but on the right it was bounded by a huge seamless arc of glass. The immense shapes of the airships floated there, all but stacked on top of each other. Giant spindly-looking brackets held them in place, telescoping in and out like giant shock absorbers. The only way to the docking tubes was on the upper level of the concourse.
It didn’t take long for Gina to find it. She could recognise Gabriel’s ship anywhere. Her eyes followed the boarding tube down where it flowed smoothly into the glass, stoppered off with a heavy security gate. A sign above it displayed the airship registry code and the words RESTRICTED PRIVATE in big red letters.
“Masks on,” said Hawthorn as they mounted the stairs. The gate was on a small, restricted-access mezzanine under tight security. Gina unzipped her bag and pressed one of the masks over her face.
Her skin itched like mad as a hundred tiny needles pricked into sensitive flesh, then melted away on a wave of chemical numbness. The projectors fizzed as they came online.
She caught her reflection in a piece of brushed aluminium. Unlike the old pull-over masks, her hair was still the same, but in every other way she looked like a different woman. High cheekbones. Thin pink lips. Deep, sallow eyes which looked like she needed a good night’s sleep.
Stoney waved some kind of card key, a virus or override which cut power to everything on the mezzanine. Camera lenses shuttered over. The screen above the door went blank. Two hidden compartments with heavy security droids opened on the opposite wall, but they didn’t attack. Instead they turned their backs and unlocked their control panels for maintenance.
“This lasts about half an hour,” he explained, “so make it quick. I’ll do my best to support you from here.”
Hawthorn already had the door open. If Stoney was right, they’d get no more than thirty minutes before the alarms started blaring and all Hell broke loose.
“Are you ready for this?” Hawthorn asked.
Gina Hart didn’t answer. She went, striding up the spiral ramp to the airship. She fished two Spice tablets from her breast pocket and kept them clenched in her fist. Insurance, in case Gabriel put in an appearance. Not a hint of fear showed in her eyes.
She wasn’t just ready. She was eager.
Gina let her mind flow out. She became a drop in the ocean, travelling outward in all directions. She intermingled with the smaller, weaker ripples of other human minds disturbing the world’s smooth surface. There were several on the airship and oh, so many more on the concourse. Hundreds. Millions of thoughts.
“Got it,” said Hawthorn. He was working on the emergency access panel with a screwdriver and a portable welding torch. Something inside made a popping noise. He grabbed the manual hatch release and heaved, forcing an opening. “Come on.”
Gina barely registered his speech. She was in a world where doors were meaningless, and even the thickest walls barely attenuated the flow of thought. Her body followed after Hawthorn, but she was already miles ahead, disturbing the ripples, altering them with delicate touches. Creating discordance out of harmony. Bad thoughts fed on each other and bred like wildfire.
“Security guard, first door on the left,” she said clinically. “Now having a panic attack. Don’t go in there.”
There was a grimace on Hawthorn’s face. His skin crawled, being reminded of what she could do to people against their will. He snapped, “Look, I don’t need to know how you deal with them, alright? Just deal with them.”
She said nothing. That freaked him out even more.
The antechamber was a curious mix of avant-garde design — white plastic, chrome and glass — and brightly-coloured emergency kit. She saw a neon yellow evacuation slide packed in a clear case around the doorway. Minimal white chairs gathered around stark, solid glass tables. Orange lifejackets in a box in the corner. Pale light-globes hovering just below the ceiling. Bright red fire extinguishers arranged around the room.
Memories flashed into her mind’s eye. Last time she was in this room, Gabriel had dressed it up to look like a normal passenger liner. Fake stewardesses had greeted her at the door. This was more like somebody’s private yacht. An elegant bead curtain decorated the main exit on the left, carefully positioned to hide the emergency blast doors. Behind them, a wide central corridor ran down the length of the gondola.
“Okay, I read up on this model,” the Major announced. “The automated security should be offline during maintenance mode. As long as we don’t cause an emergency activation, it won’t be a problem. The bridge is at the far end of the gondola. We get in, set the computer to dockside control, and let Stoney crack it open for us.”
“There are two men in that room,” she replied, wading through their thoughts. “The pilot. And somebody else, I’m not sure. A mechanic?”
“We can deal with that when we get to it. First, the bridge is secured with a card lock and every kind of biometric scanner under the sun. We need to find a way around them. Now,” he waved vaguely at the ceiling, “there are some access ducts along the big data pipe between the bridge and the engine. For the next half hour they should be completely unprotected. They’re only designed for robots, so it’ll be a fucking tight fit, but I think we can make it.”
Gina coughed. “Or I can get somebody to open the hatch for us from the inside.”
Clenching his jaw, Hawthorn replied, “Fuck me, I’m glad you’re on our side.”
He pushed through the beads with rifle on his shoulder. Stoney’s little trick had put most of the ship systems into maintenance mode, leaving only the basics – lights, electricity, and core computers. Only ship’s crew would know anything was wrong.
“Clear on infrared,” he said. “What does your brain say?”
Gina dragged her mental fingers through another ripple. “Same as before. Two men on the bridge. And . . . A secretary, I think, last room on the left.”
“Gabriel has a secretary?”
“Why don’t you go and ask?” she shot back. “She’s busy, anyway. No threat to us.”
“And you’re absolutely sure Gabriel isn’t on board?”
She hesitated. The ripples around her seemed normal, sedate, safe. None of them had that crisp, intense awareness and overwhelming sense of power. “I don’t feel him,” she offered.
“Great. Let’s go threaten some people.”
The hatch to the bridge was heavy, locked, and adorned with a number of friendly devices. Fingerprint reader. Retina scanner. Voice analyser. Facial temperature recognition. Hyper-encrypted key system. But as usual, the biggest point of failure in high-tech security was the humans operating it. Gina’s thoughts were liquid, radiation, plasma. They went wherever she desired them.
There’s something you’ve forgotten, she whispered. It’s urgent. Terribly urgent. You need to leave right now.
The suggestion spread out from her like a silent shout, overpowering lesser currents in the ocean. She felt their minds hesitate. Stopped what they were doing. A brief argument, tension about that forgotten something, until the anxiety won out. They grabbed their things and punched the hatch control. Stopped again when they came face to face with Gina. The pilot reached for his gun, but instead got Major Hawthorn’s steel-toed boot in the stomach.
“Gentlemen,” said Gina, smiling as she strode into the room. “Thanks for letting us in. You wouldn’t happen to know which one of these is the main input terminal, would you? You don’t have to say anything. Just think.”
In the surprise and confusion, they couldn’t stop themselves. All it took was a few stray neurons firing at the wrong moment. Gina grinned. She plucked her answer from their minds like taking a ripe apple from the tree.
“Thanks again,” she whispered in a tone as smooth as silk. “Now sit down and be good while we get on with things. You can do that, can’t you?”
They nodded, staring round-eyed. It never even occurred to them to disobey the siren song caressing their minds.
“Accessing now,” came Stoney’s voice, hissing with encryption noise. “It may take a moment. Looks like a custom-built system.”
Gina rolled her eyes. Stoney always said so much less than what was needed, and it was starting to piss her off. Especially when she couldn’t reach in and observe his thought processes as they worked. “What does that mean?” she demanded.
“It means it may take a moment,” he replied blandly. Then he amended it. “It means I can’t get much. This thing is so secretive I doubt it’s compliant with Federal regulations. But who’s going to tell a nanotech trillionaire off about his computer?”
“So what can you get?”
“A few things. One moment.”
The terminal flicked to a different screen, black text on blue. A list of airports and the dates when the ship was docked. Gina stared at it, but it didn’t reveal anything new; just several weeks in various places around the City, with occasional trips down to Calcutta and Singapore. She shuddered when she read the log for Odessa halfway down the page. It even marked the hours spent at Paine Airport, Missouri, waiting to spring Gabriel’s big trap.
She was about to comment when she noticed something below the entry for Laputa. Logs of every time the outer hatch was unsealed. It hadn’t recorded the current break-in, but before that, the last time the hatch opened was more than twenty-four hours ago.
She tapped it with a fingernail. Hawthorn, standing next to her, followed it and made a surprised noise. “Stoney, can you look at the travel manifest? Does it mention the intended stay in Laputa?”
Another pause. Then, “Two weeks. Other than that it just says ‘Business’.”
“I’ve never known Gabriel to stay in one place longer than a few days,” Gina pointed out. The list in front of her confirmed it. None of the stops ever lasted more than four. “I don’t think he’s here for the food or the culture. What else can you access?”
“That was it. I’m not a hacker, Gina. You would need someone extremely well-equipped to crack this level of security.”
A sharp response flared in the back of her brain, but another thought cut in front, and she suddenly found her smile again. She turned to the pilot and the . . . navigator, she read, as his ripples passed through her. Co-pilot and chief engineer in one overpaid package.
Sweat beaded the men’s foreheads. They were both ex-military, but all the training and discipline in the world couldn’t hide their nervousness. They were helpless against the red-headed sorceress.
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” she murmured. She dropped into a squat, facing them at eye level. “Boys, I want to talk about your boss.”
Hesitation. The pilot shifted, swallowing, wondering if he could carry off a lie. Fear had turned him morose, and he kept his eyes on the floor as a sign of defiance. “We don’t know anything,” he spat.
She traced a fingertip along the pilot’s jaw. He didn’t flinch, only gritted his teeth even harder. Then he stiffened. His back jerked up against the wall, arms and legs spasming like an epileptic seizure. Wide eyes twitched, then rolled back into his head. Gina grabbed him by the brainstem and began to twist. She examined his jumbled thoughts with cold detachment, watching them boil to the surface on a wave of terror.
Their lips moved at the same time, but only Gina’s voice came out.
“Ben, I want you to hold the ship in port until I’m back,” she said. “This is what I’ve been waiting for. I’m meeting some friends in town for a day or two, and they’ll help me charter a jet on the sly. Don’t ask why.”
“A jet, sir? Why can’t we take you?”
“I told you not to ask. Anyway, if some people drop by looking for me, stall them as long as you can. Especially if they’ve got any Feds with them. I don’t know how much time I have and I’ll need every second. Okay?”
“Understood, sir.”
Their right arms snapped a parade-perfect salute. Then all life bled out of the pilot’s body. He toppled sideways like a bag of sand and stayed there, barely breathing. Meanwhile Gina stood up slowly and stretched her neck. No headache. No dizziness. To her surprise, she felt good. Powerful and in control.
Hawthorn appeared at her shoulder, hands clenched at his sides. His voice was a dry whisper. “Jesus, Gina, what did you do to him?”
“Whatever it took. We’re in this to win, aren’t we?”
“Yeah but–“
“If he’s strong, he’ll survive,” she interrupted him. “Not your problem, Major. As for you . . .”
The navigator stared back at her, strung like a piano wire. His shaking bones knocked softly against the bulkhead behind him. His eyes had grown to the size of dinnerplates, pink and bloodshot.
Gina didn’t have to do anything. He fainted all on his own.
She patted Hawthorn on the elbow. “Come on, I wanna see Gabriel’s office. He might have left a clue or two.”
The instinctive impulse to shy away, to cringe from her touch, flashed through him. He barely managed to suppress it. Tearing his eyes away from Gabriel’s pilot, he forced a smile and gestured for Gina to lead the way.
“A charter jet,” Gina marvelled, checking the unconscious body of Gabriel’s pretty little secretary for anything useful. There was an ID card around her neck, embedded with a wireless chip. A ring of electronic keyfobs. An electric-ink tattoo of a barcode decorated her wrist, powered by her own heartbeat. Gina couldn’t tell whether that was security or a cosmetic thing.
Snapping up the ID, Gina told her holomask to scan the secretary’s biometrics. The needles in her skin stung faintly as her holographic face changed to match. Retinas, heat profile, everything. Only a hologram detector would tell the difference, and thanks to Stoney, they were offline.
She eventually finished her thought. “You know, I didn’t think anybody used jets anymore.”
“They don’t,” Hawthorn replied. “Too expensive. You can’t find the hydrocarbons to run them, and the Feds don’t allow hydrogen rams for commercial use. Everything in the sky nowadays has a propeller on it.”
“So Gabriel’s spending an awful lot of money to be the exception to the rule. To get somewhere in a hurry.”
“That follows, yeah.”
“And you wouldn’t need a jet unless you were going a long way,” she said, waving her new ID at the secure hatch in the corner. A lens scanned her face. The control panel light blinked green, and the hatch slid open. “The kind of distance that regional flights don’t make. You’d have to take an airship instead.”
He turned to her in the hatchway, frowning in thought. “Gina, where are you going with this?”
“Don’t interrupt. Am I right or not?”
“Well . . . Yeah, I guess. Hydroprops only do short flights to keep costs down.”
“Then I know where he’s going.” She smiled, pushing past him into Gabriel’s office. She wanted to enjoy the suspense for a little longer.
The ‘office’ was not a room she recognised. She hadn’t been on the airship long enough to see it, but she already knew he spent a lot of time here. His presence had soaked into the walls. She could practically feel him hovering over her shoulder, watching her as she took in the details.
An unmade bed, the covers partly on the floor. A desk strewn with high-tech tools. Two blue nanocontainers, much like the one she found in Austin but not as advanced, opened and bare. There were several empty spaces on the desk where things had been, visible by their imprints in the dust. A heavy machine stood dormant in the corner, partly built into the wall. Gina wouldn’t have known what it was except it had a cubical slot where one of the nanocontainers would fit.
She reached out to the machine. It came alive at her touch, an image flickering into the air just before it. She knew it immediately. It was one of the same nanobots she first saw at East Electronics, months ago.
“America,” she said, at last. “If I wasn’t sure before, I am now. He’s obsessed with Hephaestus. Hephaestus is connected to Radiation Alley, and Colonel Obrin’s knee-deep in all of it. Now that Gabriel’s got him, I’ll bet you anything that’s where he’s headed.”
“So, anywhere along three thousand miles of the Eastern Seaboard?” Hawthorn asked with gentle sarcasm.
“I don’t see you helping.”
“Oh, I’m working on some ideas. Stoney,” he licked his lips thoughtfully, “look up a list of chartered departures since this thing docked. Maybe we can narrow down his destination. And in the meantime . . .”
He grabbed one of the empty nanocontainers and pushed it into the machine’s receptacle. It immediately flashed up a list of options, and Hawthorn zoomed through them with practised ease, faster than Gina could follow. A slideshow of different nanorobots flashed past the screen, many variations on a single theme. All of them took obvious inspiration from the broken Hephaestus bots. It ran through them all like a mechanical bloodline.
“There!” Hawthorn said, triumphant. “It’s outputting samples of all the designs in memory. Everything Gabriel’s worked on. I–“
Gina jerked forward and accidentally put her hand through the holographic screen. It flickered and distorted around her wrist. “Stop! Make it go back,” she said, operating the screen with a few clumsy waves. She managed to stop it at the design she recognised, her eyebrows dipped in a brooding frown.
“What is it?”
“Spice,” she said, unsure what to think or how to feel. “I saw analyses of it at Jupiter’s place. I figured Gabriel had a hand in it, but . . . I don’t know. Are there, like, research notes in here? Anything written down?”
The machine withdrew its injection tube from the container and beeped to indicate it was finished. Hawthorn touched Gina’s shoulder, gesturing his chin at the exit. “We can look later. I think we’ve got what we came for, so let’s not push our luck.”
That was when the lights burst back to full power, the door slammed shut, and klaxons started blaring in their ears.
“This is the Angel’s Sword,” an artificial voice boomed from speakers in the ceiling, “and I think you’ve already pushed your luck far enough.”
PRECOGNITION: Part 49
The same thoughts rolled through Rat’s mind over and over as she rode the underground tram and wrestled with rusty, immovable doors. She kept going back to that spot at the office door. The awful impulse to squeeze taking her over, the harmless little tick that followed.
She’d never failed so spectacularly at anything. It wasn’t even the kind of failure she could learn from. She didn’t feel any stronger for the experience, and she wouldn’t even try telling herself she could take another shot at it. The fact that she pulled that trigger, fully believing it would fire, gnawed at her. Had things really been desperate enough to justify it? Or had she just wanted some way out of this desperate holding pattern, trapped in a war she didn’t really understand?
It had been like this ever since she came to Laputa. One raw deal after another. She catalogued every defeat, every indignity — real or imagined — she’d been made to suffer since she got here. The line between friend and foe had gotten blurry. Everybody still pushed her around, and she felt a burning need to get even somehow. Not by killing, but rather something elegant. Something devious. She wasn’t a fighter or an assassin; she was a hacker, right to the core.
And she had all the time in the world to plan her revenge.
With most of the tram exits either blocked off or chained up, there wasn’t much exploration to do. The only workable exit she found led out into some giant cooling unit for one of the arcologies. Rather than get lost in there, she turned back and resumed her search for the next one. She stopped to bathe in the light wherever the tunnels opened up, but the oppressive darkness suited her mood better.
Three stations on, another rusty door groaned and gave way, sending her tumbling into brightness. The spiral promenade of York Tower loomed over her through a layer of clear glass. From the ground, she could see all the way to the top of the tower, three hundred floors of it. She grabbed hold of a railing to stop the mounting sense of vertigo.
The gentle double-helix shape of the promenade coiled around the empty space like a pair of giant snakes, the entire height and width of the tower. Occasional bridges spanned the gap like nucleotides in a huge chain of DNA. Shops and restaurants lined every inch of the walkway. The glow of signs and logos mixed together to fill the air with multicoloured light, while holographic advertisements fought for the free space that remained.
In the middle of the gap was a shaft of clear glass with all the tower’s elevators. Even the carriages were transparent, so that Rat could see all the people in them. Shopping, eating, working, killing time.
She found the beginning of the ramp, dared herself to climb up a few floors. The helical layout meant the feeling of immense vertical space never stopped weighing on her. Still, she managed to reach the lowest section of shops without succumbing to a panic attack, and a cup of coffee in a little cafe calmed her nerves. Nobody had told her not to take breaks. She felt like she deserved one.
It wasn’t even good coffee, probably just flavour powder dissolved in hot water, but it hit the spot and served as a good distraction. She kept her eyes on it for a long time, gathering her courage. She’d never been able to exercise so much control over her fear. Now she wanted to find out how high she could climb.
She wouldn’t get the chance.
Maybe it was intuition that made her look up just then. Some sixth sense or other. She noticed a woman hurrying past the cafe, going down. She looked rushed, hunted, and familiar.
Rat jerked to her feet. She dropped a credit chip for the coffee and set off in pursuit.
“Hey,” she called. “Wait up! I wanna talk–“
She grabbed the woman’s shoulder. Suddenly she was sitting down, holding her nose as warm blood trickled down her fingers. The woman grabbed her by her collar and slammed her back against the wall.
She spat, “Who are you? One of Kensei’s? I’m not gonna go like the others!” She paused, getting a good look at Rat for the first time. “Wait. You’re no soldier.”
“You’re that reporter,” Rat sputtered. She couldn’t decide which hurt more, her bloody nose or the bruise on the back of her head. “I– I’m with Harmony. I thought you got arrested.”
“I will be in a second! There’s a pack of Guards right on my tail. They already took my colleagues and I’ve got nowhere left to run,” she quavered. She ran a hand through her dishevelled hair. “Look, it’s too late for me. Get out of here. Get away, or they’ll take you too!”
Too late, Rat thought. She didn’t budge from her spot. Couldn’t. She needed to do something for this woman, and her mind raced to find a solution.
The reporter frowned and pushed her a few steps up the ramp. “What are you, deaf? I told you to stay away from me!”
It hit her all of a sudden. The obvious answer, staring her in the face. The tunnels. The damn tunnels!
“Come with me,” she said. She took the reporter’s hand and pulled her along to the rusty door at the bottom of the tower, into darkness.
The tram station was right where she left it. The dark, concrete cavern echoed to the sound of their footsteps. A lightstrip recessed into the track let them see by its dusty glow, just enough to get them to the waiting carriage.
Lucy, Rat suddenly remembered. That was her name. Lucy Hong.
She looked around open-mouthed as Rat pulled her aboard. “This . . . I had no idea this was here!”
“It’s a secret,” Rat giggled. She grabbed the throttle control and pushed it up to full. The carriage lurched, clunked, and finally began to accelerate along the big spiral shape of its track. York Tower faded away behind them, visible for a moment through a plastic skylight before the track plunged underground again.
She offered her hand. “I’m Rat, or Alex to my friends. Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Lucy replied. Her fingers trembled against Rat’s as the adrenaline rush ebbed away. “Thank you. This will buy me some time, but Kensei’s goons will figure out how we escaped. They won’t stop looking until I’m caught. I’ve got someplace I can go, but I have to get back up and make sure I’m seen.”
“Huh.” Rat furrowed her brow. “I guess we can get off at the next station and–“
The lights popped. The faint hum of electricity along the tram rails whimpered out and the control console went black. Emergency brakes ground the carriage to a halt. The next station, Orleans Tower, was still miles away. Rat’s heart sank into the pit of her stomach.
“Shit,” said Lucy. She looked around desperately for another way out. “Shit! Okay, listen . . . I’m as good as caught already, but they may not have seen you. You hide. You hide, and you don’t come out until they’re gone. Understand?”
She didn’t wait for a response. She took Rat’s wrist and made her jump down into the tunnel, then stuffed her under the tram, where the glowing heat from the brakes might hide her body from infrared. “Find Karen. Tell her our benefactor is in Laputa. She’ll know what it means.”
A sudden, dazzling flash of light filled the tunnel. Thunder so loud it shook the walls and echoed endlessly in the enclosed space. Rat couldn’t hear anything after that. She watched it happen through the ringing in her ears, Lucy staggering down the tunnel until something invisible hit her from the side. It knocked her down like she weighed nothing at all. She screamed and scrabbled away. When she reached the side of the tunnel, she put her back against the wall.
A hulking Laputan battlesuit swam into existence. An amplified voice boomed, “Lucy Hong, by authority of the Crown of Laputa, I hereby place you under arrest. If you do not cooperate, I am at leave to use all necessary force to uphold the law.”
Rat glimpsed the two figures through a gap in the undercarriage. There was Lucy, face turned up to scowl at the trooper — an immense, vaguely-human shape that filled the tunnel from floor to ceiling. Rat shrank back from it. She cowered in the shadows, her own pulse thundering in her ears. She tried not to breathe.
“Aren’t you gonna read me my rights?” Lucy snarled.
“I would if you had any, ma’am.”
“Do you even know what you’re doing? How many laws you’re violating? I’m a Goddamn journalist!”
“Negative, ma’am. You’re not anything, anymore.”
The trooper picked her up by the front of her shirt. She gripped his wrist with both hands. “Then what’s the charge?”
“Conspiracy to withhold information. Conspiracy to commit sabotage. Conspiracy to terrorism and terrorist acts. Conspiracy to treason. I could go on, but it’s a long list.”
The blank, faceless helmet shifted half an inch, looking over Lucy’s shoulder. She turned her head to follow. Quicker than she could react, a gauntleted finger pressed into the side of her neck. Pneumatic needles pierced her skin.
She stiffened, then slumped. A drop of blood trickled down her shoulder. The battlesuit carried her in the crook of its arm like a sleeping baby.
“Job done,” he said. Didn’t bother to shut off his voice projector. “Get to the transport.”
In that awful moment, Rat didn’t feel like she had any choice at all.
She wriggled out from under the tram carriage. Her eyes were wide and her legs sore, but she stood, defiant. “Leave her alone!”
The battlesuit swept back to observe her. She didn’t flinch, staring down the black barrel of its autocannon. She hissed, “You heard me, you bastard. Let her go.”
The thing, not quite a man in Rat’s eyes, did not obey. “Alex Park. Detention order, priority retrieval to Cloud City. We’ve had units out looking for you.”
“Of course you have, and I don’t give a fuck,” she snarled. “I wanna see Kensei. You leave her alone and take me to him. Now!”
“Huh.” He seemed to think about it for a moment. His tone sounded . . . amused. “Never retrieved anybody who wanted to be retrieved before. Alright, you can accompany us on the transport.” He stepped aside to clear a path for her. “Just this way, Ms. Park.”
She summoned up the rest of her pride and swept past him, head held high. Aware of a faint wrongness in the air behind her. Tiny eddies in the current that betrayed more silent, invisible troopers walking at her shoulders as an escort.
The ride to Cloud City never got any easier. She sat with her eyes clenched shut and sensed Laputa dropping away below her. Her stomach was a tight knot of terror. Cold sweat prickled her back. The military dropship didn’t have any windows to look through, but she could imagine the awful things she couldn’t see, in excruciating detail.
Nobody spoke to Rat or even made a noise, though the suits occasionally looked at each other as if talking. She wondered what they were saying to each other. Then she went back to her desperate daydreams about solid ground and big, flat surfaces.
A soft judder rolled through the dropship as it touched down. Rat was on her feet in an instant. She squirmed around the press of troopers and climbed through the slowly opening hatch. Anything to get some air.
A security detail stood waiting for her on the landing pad. While Rat had to brace herself against the whipping wind, the faceless people in their light infantry suits stood glued to the floor like perfect toy soldiers. Ready to treat their prisoner with due gravity.
She specifically didn’t look at the awful blue horizon, the clear skies all the way down to the Pacific Ocean. The longer she could fool her brain into thinking she was on the ground, the better.
The disembarking battlesuits strode past the security guys without paying the slightest bit of attention. Only the commander stuck around, pulling up next to Rat with a curt salute.
“Lieutenant. There’s no need, I’d like to escort her myself.”
The security officer frowned. Then he resolved his inner conflict with a shrug. “Your call, Major. I’ll accompany you. Orders.”
The commander directed Rat to a small hatch. The security lieutenant fell into step behind them. She was vaguely aware of Lucy’s body being offloaded onto a gurney and wheeled to a different exit. No telling which one.
The hatch opened at their approach. She was sure the commander’s suit wouldn’t fit, too big in every direction, but it simply bent and slithered through like a greased snake. Rat followed and felt a familiar panic rise in her throat. Don’t look down, don’t look down, don’t look down . . .
She was in a long tube suspended from the bottom of the balloon, the ‘ceiling’ of Cloud City’s habitats. One of the great upside-down domes stretched out below her, as though standing at the rim of a huge bowl. The castle of the King of Laputa sat in the centre. It was the same great lump of stone she remembered, flaring out towards the top like the hanging gardens of Babylon in reverse. Something about the colours seemed off, though. She suspected she was looking at it through some one-way camouflage.
None of those rational thoughts did anything to help her, though. This was a million times harder without Jock there to keep her distracted. Her body froze. Her feet welded themselves to the ground, and she couldn’t make them move.
“Acrophobic, right?” the commander said. “Hang on to me.” He scooped her up into the suit’s arms and carried her across. She clung desperately to that soulless metal shell, and hated herself for it.
The end of the tube disappeared into a block of warehouses behind the castle. The lighting was dim and red, not meant for ordinary human eyes. She caught a glimpse of more suits resting in spider-armed cradles, empty. Racks of oversized rifles. Loading mechanisms for ammunition.
They turned off from the path. It ended in a row of elevators, of varying shapes and sizes. The smallest one opened as they approached. The commander gently dropped her inside. The wood-panelled interior was identical to the one which had first carried her up to Kensei’s throne room, weeks ago.
The commander glanced sideways at the security lieutenant. “You’re on your own from here, Ms. Park,” he explained. “No weapons or armour allowed in the throne room. The elevator will take you straight there, and the King asks that you wait for his arrival.”
She couldn’t think of anything to say. So she just nodded and watched the doors close.
The carriage seemed to move down at first. Then it stopped for a few seconds, and when it got going again she couldn’t tell which direction. Out of curiosity, Rat tried hitting the buttons on the control panel, but none of them responded.
It finally came to a halt with a loud, mechanical clunk, and the doors whirred open.
The torn and faded carpet leading into the throne room was the same. The artificial sunlight, however, was gone. A pale moon burned white in the ‘sky’, much larger than the real one. Thin, wispy clouds passed in front of it and cast their faint shadows over the bit of fake Greco-Roman ruin that housed the throne of Laputa.
She walked down the dais. Traced the edge of the long table with her fingertips. The throne stood exactly where she remembered it, angular yet graceful, green-veined marble set with delicate scrollwork in platinum and gold. She touched it. Glanced around, saw she was alone. Grinning, she made herself comfortable in the royal seat of a Hacker Nation and imagined herself as its Queen. She’d have the fastest rig, pull the most dangerous jobs, and spend her whole life on the rankings as number one.
“I think you’re in my chair,” said a voice from behind. She jumped and wheeled around to find Hideo Kagehisa’s tightly-smiling face. She glared at him. “Hello, Alex-han. I hope my people treated you with adequate respect.”
She recovered quickly, biting her tongue to stop the impulse to swear. “Hideo. We got some things to talk about.”
“We do,” he agreed, placing himself on his throne and his feet on the table. “Please, pull up a chair, and we can decide who’s going first.”
Rat stood, arms crossed, and studied the King of Laputa. Hideo was the opposite of the man in the press conference last week. There he’d looked exhausted and overworked, frayed with stress and jacked up on stimulants. Now he lounged like a big cat, leanness outlined under a tight white polo-shirt. Hale and well rested. His eyes were bright and alert, as if all his troubles had gone away in a week, or they hadn’t really slowed him down.
Tired or in-control, one of the two had to be an act, but Rat was no longer sure which one.
“I said sit down.”
“I prefer to stand,” said Rat.
Another silence fell, a tiny battle of wills about who would give in first. Rat was determined. For once, she wouldn’t be the loser in these exchanges. She glared at Hideo until he shrugged.
“Alright, then you’ll answer the first question.” He smiled and folded his fingers over his stomach. “Where have you been?”
Her teeth ground together in cold rage. “Hiding. Where else?”
“You’ll have to do better than that, Alex. I thought we had a deal. You wanted an assignment, and I gave you one.”
“An assignment that nearly got me turned into dog food by a Goddamn machine gun!”
“This is the real world. Risk is part of the game.”
“Risk? We barely made it out of your fucking conference alive, and you’re still the prime suspect!”
“‘We’? So he did escape?” Hideo’s eyes flicked away in mental calculation. “That’s a pity. I had a feeling, but the camera feeds were scrambled and I couldn’t be sure. I suppose if anyone were going to survive what happened, it’d be him.”
“Him–” she started to ask, but caught herself just in time. “You mean Banshee?”
“Of course. Who did you think I meant?”
“Nobody,” she said firmly. “My turn. Why did you put a detention order out on me?”
“I’ve had people trying to contact you for days. You weren’t answering your phone and didn’t reply to any of our casts. I figured a detention order might get you away from your new friends without arousing too much suspicion.”
“When would I have had time to look for a fucking cast? I wasn’t by myself long enough to make any calls, let alone hijack an unsupervised rig!”
That last part was, of course, a lie. But he didn’t need to know that.
Hideo tilted his head to the side. “You’re a hacker, Alex. We make things possible.”
That word affected her more than the rest of the conversation. It flooded her mind with memories, happy ones, of doing a job for the King of Laputa and of her reward. The first man ever to call her a hacker. She swallowed and tried to clear her head.
“I believe it’s my turn.” Hideo kept his eyes on hers, unwavering. Reading her like a book. “Have you taken a look at your messages lately?”
Rat’s hand went to her pocket and pulled out her mobile. The holographic screen lit up at a touch, alive and well. She pulled up the comm history and showed it to Hideo. Blank. Nothing received in the last two weeks. She shot back, “What messages?”
“Interesting. May I?”
He held out his hand for the phone. Hesitantly she let him have it, though she watched every move like a hawk. He twisted and pulled at the casing. The magnetic seals disengaged with a sharp warning click. Sliding the case all the way up, leaving the electronic guts naked and vulnerable, he gave the phone a little shake.
Rat watched wide-eyed. A few tiny drops of gluey, silvery paste leaked out from between the circuits and landed on the tabletop. “What the fuck? What is that?”
“Nanobot residue. Dead shells and waste. Looks like they’ve been adding some hardware.” He put the chunk of plastic and metal back on the table. Rat took it. She held it up at an angle to look into the tangle of wires. “That little blue node below the antenna is what they call an interceptor module. It selectively interferes with your calls, blocking them and rerouting them to a new destination. The question is, who put it there? Why? And how much do they know about your . . . association with me?”
She focussed back on Hideo, still in shock. “I don’t believe this.”
“It’s all easily verifiable. You didn’t think it was strange to go several days without any contact from me?”
“I thought you were trying to kill me!”
Surprise on his face. He was taken aback, like he couldn’t imagine how she could leap to that kind of conclusion. Rat wasn’t buying it for a second.
“Did you order the attack on the Fifteen?” she asked sharply. “Was it your guys in the helicopter?”
He waved his hand, dismissing the question as irrelevant. “Don’t waste my time.”
“You owe me an answer, Hideo. Did you order it?”
“No.”
“Bullshit! I don’t believe you.”
“You asked. I answered. Believe what you want.” He gave another tight smile. “But you still haven’t asked me the most important question. Most important to you.”
“Fine,” she said. Her fists clenched against her hips. “Where’s Jock?”
“Safe.”
The phone lay on the table between them, and her attention flicked back to it at intervals. A hesitation in the back of her brain prevented her from reaching out. The thing felt diseased, infected with something to the point where she’d never trust it again. And for some reason that made her angry with Hideo, for telling her.
“I want to see him.” When he didn’t respond, she repeated, “I want to see him, Hideo.”
“No.” He studied her expression carefully, and held up a placating hand before she exploded. “Not until you do something for me first.”
White-hot fury boiled in her veins, trying to grab control of her tongue, but she bit it back. She stayed in command of herself. The contempt in her eyes and the snort of disgust from her throat were entirely deliberate. “Is that how things are gonna work now? Blackmail?”
“Always so crude,” Hideo sighed. “I’m not blackmailing anyone. Think of it as scratching my back, and getting yours scratched in return. Fair exchange.”
“I’m not stupid. It’s blackmail, or extortion, or whatever you wanna call it. No deal.”
Hideo swung his legs off the table and stood up. “Don’t misunderstand. You owe me, and right now I’m not sure I can still trust you. A lot of things have happened lately, Alex. Prove your loyalty and things can still go back to the way they were. A place on the rankings, with the support of not just the King of Laputa, but the Lord Protector of the Nations. That’s my new title. Like it?” He gave a little shrug. “That, or I promise you will never see or hear from Jock again. Your choice.”
There was no denying it; he fought dirty. Rat looked away, reeling. She’d lost. Totally and completely. Her eyes found a small tree growing between two cracked pillars in the scenery and stayed glued to it. It helped to silence the gnawing of her conscience about the decision she’d already made.
“What . . . What do you want?”
Hideo put his hands on her shoulders and nodded in a grave, avuncular sort of way. “Don’t worry. It’s just a little thing, and it won’t take you any effort at all.”
PRECOGNITION: Part 48
What little Gina had in the way of belongings fit into a single rucksack, slung over one shoulder while she waited for the dinghy to hit the beach. Its little engine buzzed like an angry wasp. A sea bird rasped out a few calls in the distance, then gave up on everything like the rest of the local wildlife.
Dirty white sand, the same colour as the leaden sky, sucked at her shoes like mud, and the muggy autumn breeze whipped her hair into a ginger storm. Bomber stood beside her, his arm tight around her shoulders. He wrinkled his nose at the salty-sour, polluted smell that lingered in his nostrils.
He shouted over the moaning wind, “What do you think? A moonlit night, a few pina coladas, it could be romantic!”
Gina snorted. There was a number of reasons why City planners hadn’t made any effort to reclaim this bit of beachfront, and it didn’t take a telepath to figure out what they were. The dinghy rolled precariously on the waves, always in danger of being dashed against sharp rocks and sandbars. Decomposing jellyfish and other shapeless corpses floated among thick beds of poisonous red algae, sitting on top of the water like an oily film.
“Yeah,” she said. “Romantic.”
She took another look around the flat, lifeless beach. Nobody. No boats, no houses, not even homeless. Probably why Stoney chose this place for the pickup. She watched him for a minute from the corner of her eye, but nothing changed. He kept his attention on the dinghy in expressionless silence, moustache heavy and dripping with sea spray. His blind eye twitched whenever it caught a drop of stinging salt water.
Another gust of wind ruffled her, much stronger than before, and she had to hang on to her jacket. She tucked the flapping ends of it into her belt and adjusted her curve-hugging jeans. Even in this weather it felt so good to wear something feminine that actually fit. She’d gone almost a month running around in nothing but men’s clothes, and if she indulged herself a little now the pressure was off, what was the harm?
Annoyingly, she’d had to get everything a size larger than usual to fit around her belly. Either she was gaining weight or the fun and frolics of pregnancy had already started.
The boat driver lifted the outboard engine moments before it hit beach. Then he and his assistant were out in the surf, turning the boat around to put back to sea. There was no ceremony, no invitation.
Hawthorn went first. He stepped into the open-topped plastic wedge that was their ride, stuffed his duffle bag in a waterproof compartment and strapped himself in. Soon all four of them were seated and ready.
“I hope we’re not going all the way to Laputa in this thing,” Gina said. The rocks looked a lot bigger and sharper when they were right in front of her.
“Not quite,” grunted Stoney. “There’s a nice private yacht waiting offshore. We won’t be on the passenger manifest, but I’ve convinced the dockmaster in Laputa to let us in. Under the radar, so to speak.”
The two sailors jumped back in the boat, propelling her through the surf at a rapid pace. They wanted to get out of here more than anyone else. The engine sputtered back to life, and soon they were forging a path between the rocks and algae, out to the open water.
The crashing waves reminded Gina of the time she spent bobbing around on a half-sunken lifeboat in the icy Atlantic, waiting for a rescue she wasn’t sure would come. At least it was warmer here. Closing her eyes, she instead imagined herself in a rickety blue house on a beach somewhere east of Hong Kong, with the best friends a girl could have.
Onounu, she whispered to herself, warm tears running together with cold seawater, unnoticed. You taught me so much, and I haven’t forgotten.
She spent a long time lost in those memories. The world passed in front of her unfocussed eyes while she hugged herself and allowed a little bit of that locked-down grief to come through. At one point she become aware of the boatmen attaching chains to the ends of the dinghy. A winch groaned overhead, lifting the little boat out of the water, onto the rubber deck of a shiny white yacht. She was the last person to climb aboard, and she clutched a railing until her gasps and shivers subsided.
Bomber offered a steadying hand but she shook him off and made her own way belowdecks. Their host had set up a table with hot coffee and sandwiches in the galley. She barely looked at it. She didn’t think she could keep anything down. Instead she slipped off towards the staterooms, looking for someplace to be alone.
She could feel her mood swinging ponderously around from grief to numbness to black wrath. A tidal wave of the worst human emotions crashed down on her in awful slow-motion, closing in over her head, and it made her all too aware of her capabilities. What she might do to someone on an instinct reaction, before thought and reason ever entered the picture. If her mind lashed out without restraint, somebody could die.
She found a bench tucked away against the side of the hull and curled up on it, folding in on herself in body and mind. Nobody around to accidentally lash out at. She thought about Gabriel for a second, and she could still feel the link with him faintly in her mind, somewhere between all the scars and self-pity. She kept that gate firmly locked and barred. She and Gabriel both guarded themselves from each other, and kept their secrets close.
But after everything he’d done to her, after all the shit he put her through, her aching heart still carried a torch. That probably made her more angry than all the rest of it. Things would be so much easier if she could just hate Gabriel and never look back.
She didn’t know if she could keep being Bomber’s woman, in that weird American-dream fantasy he cherished. She could take a wild guess at what her life with him would be like once this was over. A loyal wife and mother waiting for hubby to come home after a hard day’s bloodshed.
Funny. They’d put so much effort into trying to make her understand them, to show their softer sides, and she still found them terrifying, each in their own way. Apparently she was a sucker for dangerous men. Still a sucker, either way.
She spent a long time on that bench, hugging her knees to her chest, seething at herself and everyone around her. Seething more than anything at that unwanted life growing in her belly, and the would-be father. She still hadn’t told him. She kept convincing herself there’d be a better time, as if she’d somehow become less confused in the future. Or maybe she was saving it as ammunition. Something to help her get back at him.
It would be only fair, said a voice in the darkness. Gabriel could use a little pain of his own. For such a smart guy, he didn’t know a lot about people. Maybe he’d finally start to understand her a little bit.
It would be only fair, she kept thinking, while time slipped away from her.
She was herself and not-herself. She walked down a long dark path, a cold lump of fear in her thundering heart, though she couldn’t say why. She kept glancing left and right off the path, and everywhere she looked she saw eyes staring back at her. They were every shape and size, every colour she could imagine. A thousand blank gazes all directed at her.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, without stopping. “Why are you all looking at me?”
“We’re lost,” they replied. “We can’t see.”
She blinked, and suddenly light hit her closed eyelids. The bench kept bouncing against her cheek. Her senses slowly came back to her, and she pried her eyes open. Faint white and yellow seeped in through the rain-spattered porthole above her. Raising her eyes above the rim, she caught her first glimpse of Laputa’s towering starscrapers and arcologies, glowing in the pre-dawn gloom. She couldn’t tell where the ocean ended and the buildings began. Concrete, steel and mirrored glass from the sea to the sky.
The sight held her spellbound for a long time. She sat and watched the boat cut through waves and weather, slipping into the great man-made bay of Laputa Harbour. The on-board computer piloted through an intricate, calculated dance with a dozen other small boats, and emerged on the other side with a clear shot at the local marina.
Not everything about Laputa pleased Gina’s sense of aesthetics. There was a weird quality to it, too regular, too soulless, as if the whole city had been designed and built by a computer. It would never be Hong Kong — that forest of interconnected blocks, buildings of all different shapes and sizes woven together into almost-organic neon chaos. It would never be Shanghai — rows upon rows of crumbling concrete bricks populated by squatters and every other kind of dirt-poor bastard in the City, trying to make a living by any means necessary.
It would never be the Street.
Then she looked a little higher, at the airship docks dotted around the city, and thought about Rat. The visions weren’t always clear about locations and timeframes, but Rat was definitely somewhere in Laputa. Should she look for her? What would she even say? How did one broach the subject of telepathically looking over somebody’s shoulder in every aspect of their life, for months, without them knowing it? Or the knowledge of a deliberate, knowing betrayal for the sake of a teenage girl’s selfish ambitions?
She turned away from the porthole, a bitter taste in her mouth, and froze in unwelcome surprise when she found Bomber in her face. He sat motionless on the floor next to her bench. His eyes were half-closed, aimed at the opposite wall with a real thousand-yard stare. She gingerly waved a hand in front of his face. Even then it took a few seconds for him to notice her.
“Were you asleep?” she asked.
“No.” He cleared his throat, rough from lack of use. “Just . . . thinkin’.”
She uncurled her body one limb at a time, stretched her legs out in the too-narrow space by bracing her feet halfway up the wall. Everything ached. No surprise, really. The last time she’d had a good morning was in Odessa, before her half-successful attempt to run away from Gabriel.
The wound inside her mind was like learning to live with a lost arm. It stopped bleeding eventually, but the arm wasn’t going to just grow back. It kept hurting even when there was nothing in that empty space still capable of feeling.
She laced her fingers together behind her head and looked sideways at Bomber. “You know I don’t need a guard dog.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said blankly.
“Can you do me a favour and be overbearing somewhere else?”
“I don’t think–“
“That wasn’t a suggestion,” she snapped, with her voice and her mind. The words caught in his throat. His eyes went wide as his body began to move, climbing to his feet like a puppet dancing on a set of strings.
He stood there for a second, looking at her in pure disbelief, hurt, betrayal. Emotions which, to Gina, meant nothing at all. She met his gaze and sighed, “Look, I just need some space right now, okay? I’m not feeling real well.”
“I know, Gina.”
“You . . . What?”
“I know, Gina,” he said flatly. “It’s kinda hard to miss. You’re, what, six or seven weeks along? Your body’s puttin’ out so many chemical cues right now I could track you from across a City district.”
All the blood drained from her face. Cold fingers coiled around her heart. She hugged her shoulders tight and, reeling from his words, she whispered, “Bomber, I . . . I don’t . . .”
He shook his head. “Save it. We’re docking in twenty minutes. You kept quiet about it this long, I’m sure it can wait another day. Or a week. Or until whenever you were gonna fill me in. Take all the space and time you need.”
There was nothing she could say. No explanation or excuse would be good enough. This wasn’t how she wanted him to find out, It was the worst way things could have gone, and she cursed herself for underestimating him, the Goddamn cyborg. She’d just been so afraid of what might happen, like the little nightmare taking place right now.
“Bomber, please . . .”
“I’ll be on deck,” he said without looking back.
The only thing Gina could see when she appeared on the rain-soaked deck was the harbour terminal, wrapped around the bay in a huge crescent shape, so vast it blocked out the rest of the city. Immense warehouses stretched out from the base of it. Conveyor belts sprouted from them like twisted arms, going up, funnelling goods directly into downtown Laputa without the need for more transport.
It looked so weird to a City girl. She had to remind herself that there was no such thing as a railroad here, and no use for cars. Laputa covered the entire island. It imported pretty much everything, and the column of container ships in the commercial dock never stopped loading or unloading.
A man with a clipboard came down the marina jetty to greet them, and Stoney gave him a friendly handshake. They warbled a few words at each other in Mandarin and waved everyone else off the boat. Gina followed after Hawthorn, who offered his arm like a gentleman to help her disembark. Bomber was already at the front of the group to communicate, manage things and be involved.
“Are you okay?” the Major asked, walking her down the fake-wood jetty. “I haven’t seen you since we boarded.”
“I’m fine.”
He gave her a wry smile. “I may not be a telepath, Miss Hart, but I’m also not a complete fuckwit. Are things not going good with you and Jacob?” When she didn’t respond right away, he nodded awkwardly and coughed into his fist. “I know it’s not my place to ask–“
“I’m pregnant,” she said, blunt as a big stick. “Sorry, being polite is a little more than I can handle right now.”
That gave him pause. He almost stopped walking before his brain kicked in and took back control of his legs. “I . . . Wow. I don’t know what to say, Gina.”
“Anything but ‘congratulations.'”
“No. It just . . . Well, it explains a few things,” he said. He took her hand for a moment and squeezed it. “I know I’m probably the last person you wanna talk to right now, but my door’s always open. Might help to get things off your chest. I won’t breathe a word to Jacob or anyone else, Scout’s honour.”
She looked into his stark, expressive blue eyes, and she almost smiled. Sometimes you found class in the most unexpected places. “I–I’ll keep it in mind,” she murmured. “Thank you.”
The man with the clipboard led them past the marina’s pleasant little boathouses and club buildings, into a tiny alley between two sections of the terminal. Two security doors and a maintenance elevator later, he bade them goodbye again, shooing everyone towards a brightly-lit monorail station. No checks, no customs, just another handshake and a credit chip. Stoney almost smiled.
“Welcome to Laputa,” he said. “Human nature is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?”
“Fantastic,” growled Bomber.
Gina couldn’t help but stare. Even at this altitude Laputa’s buildings still managed to impress, little monorail cars tracing around the tracks high above, separated from the elements only by a layer of crystal-clear, unbreakable glass.
An empty car arrived for them, and they rode it to the large station set halfway up Orleans Tower. A Mandarin Hotel logo shone with reflected sunlight on the floor above them. That cheered Gina up to no end, but it was quickly overshadowed by the disturbance at the outer wall, where a small but noisy crowd pressed themselves against the glass to try and get a look of what was happening below. One of the arcologies looked like a real mess. The billowing clouds of dark-grey smoke couldn’t quite hide the damage, a twisted black scar down the south side of the building, and a big pile of rubble on the ground below. A couple of spider-shaped construction robots were raising emergency scaffolds to keep the rest of the building from shearing.
“Looks like the party’s already started,” Bomber said.
Stoney squinted, his blind eye twitching. “Interesting. My info didn’t indicate things had gotten quite so bad yet.”
“Looks like we can’t afford to waste time.” Turning away from the spectacle, Bomber seemed to drag everybody else with him by momentum alone. “First thing is recon. We need to scope out the airship right away. Finding out where it’s been is our first step to tracking down the Colonel.”
“Don’t be too hasty, Simon. From what you told me, showing your face around that ship is a perfect way to ruin everything. I have a contact coming this afternoon, delivering some useful bits and pieces. A couple of next-gen holomasks ought to help.”
They went up an escalator directly to the red-and-gold sumptuousness of the hotel lobby. It was similar to the one Gina had stayed at in Hong Kong, a cavernous and tastefully-lit space dominated by a semi-circular counter manned round the clock. Not an automatic check-in machine in sight. Even so, all Stoney had to do was lay a credit chip on the counter. Everything was arranged in moments.
Grudgingly, Bomber nodded. “Alright. Alright, Stoney, we’ll do it your way.”
“Excellent. When the package is here, I will find you,” Stoney said. “What you do until then is up to you.”
Hawthorn said, “I’ll check with my people, see how things are going in the City. See you later.” He followed Stoney to the elevators. In moments they were gone, leaving Bomber and Gina alone in the lobby.
She looked down and scratched the back of her head. “Well, this is awkward.”
“It’s fine,” he said. With fewer minds so close around her, she began to sense the dull headache pounding inside his skull, beyond even his ability to suppress pain.
“You know, Jock might still be around. Maybe we could get in touch,” she said, trying to lighten the mood.
“If he’s here then he ought to hope I don’t find him. I’m tired of gettin’ snubbed on the phone by that self-important prick. Next time I see his face, I’ll cut his balls off.” His lips drew back, teeth bared in an angry grimace. “Let’s find the room and get back to headshrinking. I need to know more.”
He went, and she felt compelled to follow by a mixture of guilt and weird responsibility hovering in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to talk but didn’t know what to say, and Bomber . . . Well, he was being Bomber, and that was all she could expect in or outside their room.
Old memories, dusty and forgotten, flitted by faster than Gina could read them. Bomber’s concentration never wavered for a second as he passed them. There was only one thing he wanted to think about, to the exclusion and repression of everything else, but sometimes it just wasn’t up to him. Not to his conscious mind.
The swimmy mess left by the concussion at Kagaso Refinery was hard to get a hold of, and she kept sliding off into other memories, past and future. Most were shreds, little moments preserved from Jacob Dusther’s life. His first day in the VR simulators as Sergeant. A long talk with Colonel Obrin laden with hints about a possible promotion. A prank pulled by one of the techs, replacing all the enemies in their sim session with aliens from some old sci-fi flick. Most of the squad was brutally massacred before they knew anything was wrong. They took revenge later by spicing the tech’s meals with pepper spray.
Bomber kept trying to pull things back towards the refinery, the battle, but he didn’t really know what he was doing and only made it more difficult to focus. “Slow down,” she told him. “You’re not helping. Take it easy and follow my lead.”
Grudgingly, he settled down, and she began to pick up the threads . . .
“Time to vacate the vehicle, Sir,” said the pinch-faced specialist, almost as short standing up as he did sitting behind the wheel of the bus. He treated Jacob with the exact amount of respect his rank demanded, but he didn’t seem to enjoy the job of dealing with reluctant officers who didn’t leave his vehicle in a prompt and timely manner. Even now Jacob was staring up at the sky full of helicopters in a strange daze. He knew he wanted to be up there, but for a second he couldn’t quite figure out why.
Then he floated back to reality, and gave the specialist as much attention as he could manage. “Okay,” he said, and marshalled his body to move. Steps down to the tarmac, solid groundunder his feet. The specialist followed at his shoulder. After a few seconds of staring thoughtlessly at the sprawling airbase, he opened his mouth again. “Any idea where I’m supposed to go?”
The specialist looked at a point six inches above Jacob’s head, expression rigid as a rock. “Your orders said to report straight to the CO’s office, Sir. Seems like a good place to start.”
Jacob looked dumbly at the wad of folded paper sticking out of his breast pocket. His orders. “Right. I’ll do that.”
He strode off toward the central courtyard. The base was big enough that he could spend a long time wandering before he stopped being lost. Still, heading for the middle was a safe bet. Either he’d find his target or get better directions off somebody.
The next thing he knew he was several storeys up in the squadron HQ building, entering a large but spartan office, saluting a colonel he’d never met before. Jacob did his best to assess the man while he had the chance. A bit stocky for a flier, even a retired one. The deep frown lines in his forehead and the grey at his temples looked a little out of place, as if the Colonel had aged a great deal in a very short time. Amazing moustache, though.
“Good to meet you, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’m Colonel Keith Obrin. Don’t worry, you won’t see too much of me. I’m here on a temporary basis, filling in for the late Colonel Carter. God rest his soul. They’ll replace me in five, six months. Until then, though, my door’s always open. Any questions you have, anything on your mind, let me know and I’ll do my best to help.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Jacob replied. “I only got out of officer training a week ago and sometimes I feel like it’s already slippin’ away.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much, Lieutenant. Doing well in an academy simulator is one thing, but what we’re attempting here is very different, and I know you’ll be able to hack it. You aced every aptitude test we’ve got, you’re a natural born flier. That’s why the tests exist. Sometimes they turn up skills and talents you never knew you had.” Obrin smiled. “I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes, so head on down to the sim centre and introduce yourself. Your security biometrics are already in the system. The instructor will take care of everything else.”
Time suddenly hurled forward. A deep association, a link in Bomber’s active memory, drew them headlong into another event at another place, faster than Gina could intervene.
Ten or twelve whiskeys burned in Jacob’s stomach. He looked out over an opulent room full of people he neither knew nor cared for, willing himself not to scratch at the uncomfortable dress uniform. The senator slipped smoothly through the crowd, meeting and greeting, making all the right noises to all the right people. The buffet was excellent, but no amount of free food could make up for having to rub shoulders with politicians for four hours.
He was seriously contemplating eating his own gun as an escape when one of the senior uniforms in the room drifted next to him. Jacob was just sober enough to brace to a semblance of attention. In that moment he recognised the face behind the stark blue and white of Marine Corps dress.
“Colonel Obrin,” he said, saluting automatically.
“There’s a face I wasn’t expecting to see!” Obrin laughed. “Jacob . . . Jacob Dusther. How’re you doing, son?” He sucked the rim of an empty highball glass. His face was red and flushed, the top button of his jacket undone. “Sorry, I’ve had a few too many.”
Jacob tried to think of something to say and struggled out, “I’m okay, Sir. You, ah, you don’t look so good.”
“I’m fine, it don’t matter. None of it matters.” He smiled as if at some private joke. “You know, it’s really good to see you. Are you still flying?”
“Yes, Sir. Wing Captain now, second in command of the squadron.”
“Good. It’s a good life being a soldier. Simple. You only have to worry about three things.” He took another sip of air and prodded a finger into Jacob’s chest. “Three things. Yourself, the ground, and the enemy. Take my advice, son, keep it simple. You’ll be better off. Rank, politics, it’s all a horrible trap.”
“I think you’re drunk, Sir,” Jacob pointed out. Then he had a flash of brilliant inspiration. “Maybe I should take you home.”
“That’s the best thing I’ve heard all night,” the Colonel enthused. Then, suddenly, all the life drained out of him. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Do you ever feel like,” he paused thoughtfully, “like you’ve made a mistake so big it could change the world?”
Jacob couldn’t respond to that. After a moment, Obrin went on, “It’s all gone wrong, Jacob. All that effort wasted. Christ, I never wanted it to turn out like this.”
“Come on, Sir,” said Jacob, putting an arm around the Colonel’s shoulder. “Let’s get you home.”
They left the dinner talking about the old days. Trivial things, nothing Jacob could remember. A taxi ferried him to the airbase, and took the passed-out shape of Colonel Obrin to wherever he was going. Jacob never thought much about it afterwards, least of all a few words half-heard through the warm haze of alcohol . . .
“Almost there,” Gina said, trying to keep him calm. “Concentrate.”
They were so close she could taste it. A few more memories, just a few more, and they’d know. It would all start to make sense.
Confusion. His thoughts trickled through his head like molasses. He almost forgot what he was doing, but when he looked down at the steps leading into the dark, at the grenade launcher in his hand, he remembered. He staggered forward, staying balanced by dragging his good shoulder along the wall.
There was gunfire echoing from below, in the antechamber of the vault. Muzzle flashes. Bursts of light and noise. Somebody was alive down there. He chambered a grenade and took aim at the bottom of the stairs.
“Fire in the hole,” he said on the open channel, holding down the trigger.
A full magazine of bullet-shaped lumps ripped from his launcher. They bounced around like pebbles rattling in a tin can, from wall to wall and everywhere in between. A second later they exploded into a cloud of hot, razor-sharp metal, tearing chunks out of the concrete until the air was white with dust. Steel reinforcements were laid bare at the bottom of a few ragged pits.
Jacob sagged to his knees at the bottom of the steps. The launcher slipped from his fingers, and his eyes crossed. Then somebody grabbed him and pulled him further into the room, bullets spanging loudly off his armour.
He noticed the big vault door passing him by. Then another human shape moving, pushing the door shut. The metallic thud of locking rods rammed into place. Finally Jacob and his rescuer crumpled against the wall, gasping for breath. His head lolled sideways and his eyes tried to focus, only half-seeing Fahlan as the Corporal clutched at his shoulder.
“Sarge?” Fahlan whispered, his voice drained of colour and emotion. Deeply shaken. “We thought you were dead, Sarge . . “
Jacob didn’t respond. Barely realised anyone had spoken. A little light flashed up as the Corporal accessed Jacob’s medical readouts. Then he hit some kind of manual override on the suit, and a warm cocktail of chemicals hit Jacob’s bloodstream. They began to drag him back to his senses.
The first words out of his mouth were, “Corporal. SitRep.”
“We’re not gonna hold out. You bought us some time, but these guys are hard as coffin nails. If we don’t get reinforcements they’ll come in here and mop us up one way or another. There’s something else, though.” He swallowed hard. “They’re taking the bodies. A few of them jumped out of cover to grab Benny and Craze, carried them up the stairs and out. Don’t know where. Craze was still alive when his telemetry stopped.”
Jacob grunted, “The . . . The blue helmets?”
“Dead. Every last one. I saw ’em throw the LT to the ground and put half a mag through his chest.”
“Jesus.”
“I know, Sarge, I know. I’ve been trying to reach Command, and fuck radio silence, but they’re jamming us. Sweeney’s working on a solution.”
Pushing to his feet, Jacob stood up and took a good look around the vault. It was little more than an armoured warehouse full of high-tech metal casks. Various shades of grey on the walls and the secure containers, dotted with warning stickers. A big orange cabinet in the corner contained a couple of rad suits for emergencies. The only other colour was the intense, ominous yellow-black of radiation hazard symbols.
Next he went to check on Sweeney.
She was on her knees in a corner, using her servo-assisted fingers and the bent barrel of a rifle to chip away at the wall. Bit by bit she uncovered a piece of the metal reinforcement keeping the place up. Her movements seemed jerky and jittery, very unlike the hard-edged efficiency he was used to from her. Then a flash of realisation. Behind that faceless mask, she was crying.
He put his gauntlet on her shoulder-pad, but took it away again when he realised what an empty gesture it was. Robbed of its humanity by the armour. He said, “Mary . . .”
“Hey, Sarge,” she said, her voice surprisingly level. “Good to see you alive. I’ve almost got this. The steel framework runs all the way through. With a little juice from my suit battery I can turn this whole building into a big antenna.”
“Okay. Okay, that’s good. When will it be ready?”
She beckoned him closer and flipped open the radio panel on the side of his helmet, pressing a length of metal wire into it, and attached the other end to the steel reinforcement buried in the wall. “Give it a try.”
He switched to the SOCOM emergency frequency and started to hail. “Mayday mayday mayday. This is Operation Normandy actual. We are trapped and under heavy fire, four remaining combat effective. Need immediate assistance. Mayday Normandy, over.”
After a few seconds of tense silence, a woman’s voice responded, crackling and distorted. “No operation by that name is underway. Get off this frequency. Unauthorised use will be dealt with. Out.”
He stared at the wall in blank disbelief. His mind strained to understand while the world crumbled to pieces around him.
“Sarge?” asked Sweeney. “Sarge, are they coming?”
He opened his mouth a few times, but couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“None of this makes sense,” Jacob said to his corporals. “Why wouldn’t they acknowledge us? SOCOM requested the op. Everything happened just like Colonel Obrin said it would.”
Fahlan glanced at the vault door and the two privates guarding it. A glowing spot had formed at the top right, red-hot. The first sign of a plasma torch starting to cut through.
“Maybe things went so bad they disavowed us,” he suggested. “For all we know, the other teams are already dead.”
That idea didn’t cheer Jacob at all. It had a certain twisted logic to it, the kind employed by special forces everywhere. He really wished he could offer a better explanation.
“Whatever happens, we’re not givin’ up yet, okay? Iwetel, you and the others set up another barricade. Mary, keep workin’ the radio. I don’t care who you call or how you do it. Just get us through to somebody.”
They gave a tiny “Yes, Sarge,” and went to work like soldiers. It wasn’t much, but Jacob couldn’t have hoped for more.
His own morale wasn’t much better. The situation seemed hopeless. Once that torch finished cutting through, they’d be overrun, and then . . . God only knew.
Frustrated, he picked up a rusty bolt from the floor and chucked it at the sloppy pyramid of waste casks in front of him. It made a loud ding where it hit. The whole construction was so flimsy that it wobbled on impact. Everything here looked like that, like the workers didn’t even care what they were handling.
Sometimes it seemed like nobody cared about anything. SOCOM would leave his squad to die without a second thought. The people here couldn’t even be bothered to stack piles of Goddamn nuclear waste with a bit of care and attention. And after all these months of trying not to think, not to remember, he still couldn’t find it in himself to–
A thought tugged at him. Maybe it wasn’t that the workers didn’t care. Maybe they knew exactly what was inside.
“Hold on,” he said, catching Fahlan by the shoulder. “Corporal, help me crack open these containers.”
“Sarge? Most of our suits are compromised, the radiation would–“
“If we’re all gonna die, I wanna know what we’re doin’ it for. Get them open. All of them.”
Jacob did his best to help with his good arm. Mostly he watched while Fahlan worked the locks and bars, one by one. First the casks of caesium, technetium and iodine isotopes. Then the stored uranium and thorium tanks. They hissed and belched out clouds of inert gas when the airtight seals were broken.
Each time, Jacob held his breath and then let out a hollow sigh. Every one of the containers was empty.
“Jake,” Fahlan whispered. Rank and protocol forgotten. “I don’t understand.”
Jacob was beginning to figure it out, but it wasn’t a welcome piece of knowledge. Sick dread twisted in his heart. All the strength seemed to drain out of his body, and he sagged to his knees.
“We were supposed to lose.” He giggled at the sheer madness of it. “I should’ve known when we first arrived. Cornell had it right, and we didn’t even realise it. The owners here are so corrupt they’d sell anything to anyone. Chances are these guys already have all the nuke fuel they need. They’re here for us.”
“Are . . . Are you saying somebody at SOCOM sold us out?”
“Somebody must have, Iwetel. Somebody did.”
A heavy gauntlet tapped Jacob’s shoulder. Sweeney stood there, holding out the metal comm wire. He took it and plugged it in.
“–mandy actual, come in,” came Colonel Obrin’s voice. “Sergeant, do you read? Your message was received. Report your situation.”
Intense, glowing relief. He couldn’t keep his voice from trembling. “Colonel, this is Normandy actual. Things are seriously FUBAR here. It was a trap, Sir. Unless we get some reinforcements–“
A rude beep from his suit computer cut him off. The Colonel was overriding his radio priority. “Sergeant, there’s no time. Yours is the only team that managed to report in. Is the fuel secure?”
“There . . . There’s nothing here, Sir. Somebody must’ve set us up. The containers are empty.”
“You opened them? You opened the containers?”
“Yes, Sir. It was a simple bait and switch, and we walked right into it. It’s gotta be somebody at SOCOM–“
“Sergeant, focus! Did you tell anyone else about this? Anyone outside Kagaso?”
“Negative. We tried the emergency freq but they wouldn’t give us the time of day.” He swallowed. “Please, Sir, we need help or we’re all gonna end up fillin’ jars in some Chinese wetware shop.”
A long, crackling pause stretched out between them. The cutting torch hissed and spat while the seconds ticked away. When Colonel Obrin spoke again, his voice was different, rough and full of emotion.
“I’m sorry, son.”
The faint click of a radio turning off, and then nothing at all.
