Anyon code, p.21
Anyon Code, page 21
34
“Is it always like this?” Aiden finally asked, desperately wanting anything to break the silence.
Highlander didn’t even bother looking up from his tablet. “Like what?”
“Just…boring?”
“You mean military shit?” the pilot asked and pulled a potato chip out of its can.
They were technically on guard duty while Garcia and Chalk were doing…something. Aiden wasn’t really sure. Garcia had been sitting cross-legged over by the trunk connection for the past two hours, face encased in a virch helmet, hands moving every now and then in the haptic gloves he was wearing. Whatever he was saying was swallowed wholly by the mask.
Seemed a bit ridiculous to have them all in here. But Ortiz had only gotten the drill started; without an abiota, it was a two-man job to operate the drill and backfiller. It was no good leaving Garcia and Highlander alone—they didn’t know how to do anything up here—so Aiden had come along.
The tunneling process had been just as unpleasant as Aiden remembered it in training. Lucy wasn’t along for the ride either, like she had been on Numina during their training runs. Just thinking about the little abiota made Aiden angry. There had been no reason to kill her, and Unity—Galatea, if Garcia’s story was to be believed—had gone out of her way to do it.
But C-type ’roids were soft, and the excavation had only taken about four hours. They’d had to dig the last yard or so to the trunk line by hand, just to avoid damage. Hard work in a full suit, and obnoxiously sweaty.
Aiden had brought along a void bag—a ribbed, inflatable balloon that you could open up inside a space like this and pressurize. The air filters weren’t great, and Tomas hadn’t been able to scam them more than a scant ten hours of oxygen each, but it meant Garcia didn’t have to work inside a suit, and they all got a little break while they were waiting for Chalk to do whatever it was she was doing in the network.
It meant Highlander could eat his snack while Aiden asked him stupid questions.
“Yeah, military shit,” he clarified, feeling lame.
“Almost always,” Highlander said. “Doesn’t your brother talk about it?”
“Yeah, but he’s…he’s my brother. He always downplays stuff.”
“Not in my family,” Highlander said with a snort. “There’s five of us. Somebody’s always trying to one-up the others with crazy bullshit.”
“That so?” Aiden asked.
“Why not?” Highlander replied.
Aiden didn’t get a chance to ask if that in itself really was a lie, because just then, Garcia tore off the VR helmet.
“Holy fuckin’ shit!” he gasped.
“Context?” Highlander asked and stuffed another chip in his mouth.
“Only barely got out of the network,” Garcia said, clambering over to check the abiota’s rudiment core, still ensconced in its hard protective shell. “Chalk, you alive?”
A stream of swearing issued forth from the case.
“Fucking little shitty little asshole bitch baby plane bitch bitch bitch going to fucking kill her go stab—”
“You can stab her in the face later,” Highlander said, still weirdly calm. “Chalk, what happened?”
“New abiota fucked op.”
“Does anything know we’re here?” he pressed.
“I seen,” Chalk said. “Not take long, know how access system.”
Highlander looked at Garcia, who was busy pulling his suit gloves back on. “Can they find us?”
“I’m not sure. It might be possible, depending on how the network’s set up.”
“Chalk, talk to Tenuki. He has to have some kind of in with whatever security abiota monitors the network and—”
Garcia cocked his ear back to the VR helmet. “Chalk’s screaming, hang on,” he said. And after a moment, he nodded. “Tenuki’s telling her there are already security sweeps happening down in the port. Your buddies have hightailed it out of there. We gotta get out of here.”
“Shit, and we can’t go back?” Highlander muttered. “We got any options?”
“Yeah,” Aiden said. “But you might not like it.”
35
DeepBlueDeath was the only reason Blanket made it out of the water alive.
The little submersible kugu used by the Coast Guard cutter had dashed in and found him in the water. She’d caught him with her small manipulator arm, then hurried him away from the container ship.
Which was sinking.
The Coast Guard didn’t have an explanation for it. Some kind of internal damage, they’d said. But Daelia had seen something in the AR; a giant sperm whale flinging itself into the air, diving again, a giant squid in its narrow jaw. There was some kind of abiota effect here, she just wasn’t sure what it was yet. Daelia wanted to talk to Emily about it in person, back at base.
It was her fault that Emily had come out here. She’d called the abiota a few hours before the mission started, when Nirriti had gotten so mouthy with Argo. It was stupid, though, that Emily hadn’t been along for this in the first place. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Emily would have groused about wanting to fire that last Hellfire for fun, but she wouldn’t have actually done it.
A low-pitched note blasted now over the lower deck from the ship’s external speakers.
“She says he’s directly to starboard,” one of the crew translated for Daelia as he stood there with a big blunt hook on the end of a pole.
He was pulled aboard and rushed to the sick bay. The Gulf of Mexico wasn’t horribly cold, but Blanket had still been in the water for almost an hour by the time they’d found him, and his lips and fingers were dark blue from the chill.
“Any other survivors?” Argo was asking the captain.
He took a moment to consult with DeepBlueDeath. “She says no.”
“Shit,” Argo said. “Sir, I’m so—”
“We all knew the risks,” the captain said, curt, cutting that off. Three of his own men had been on the VBSS team.
“Did we?” Daelia asked. “I mean, did we really?”
Argo came over to her. “Don’t beat yourself up over this.”
“I wanted this.”
“We all wanted this,” he said, and put an arm around her shoulder. “But how likely was it going to be that we’d see all her secret lairs? I bet somebody else had more luck tonight.”
Daelia let herself lean into him. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I’m sure somebody else got her.”
"Emily’s on her way back,” JP said. “Along with Nirriti. The new girl’s at bingo fuel but Marathon thinks he can limp her in.”
“No heroics,” Rover said tersely. The chaos of earlier was gone now, and a terrible quiet had settled in the SyROC. This room had seen plenty of death over the years, but nothing like what had happened that night. “If we need to put her down at the Galveston airport, put her down.”
“We gotta get her here. Marathon wants to make sure we’ve got a launch-and-recovery element for her. Doesn’t think we can trust her to land herself right now.”
Rover folded his arms, rubbing his forehead. That headache was coming back. “And why’s that?”
“Emily said Nirriti’s acting like a kicked puppy.”
Resisting the urge to glare at Heliana, Rover sighed. “Emily’s just pissy she didn’t get to shoot a Hellfire into something.” JP smiled. Nobody else looked up from their stations.
Slots.
“Well, gentlemen, ladies, the senator grieves with you for your lost personnel. What a terrible night this has been. But let us not lose heart, she says. There will be some good that will come of this,” Heliana said, the translator reading the reels on the kugu’s screen.
Rover didn’t like the interpreter’s tone. Not at all. “According to the chat from Hurlburt, ma’am—”
“You must allow Senator Heliana to worry about that,” the translator said. “You focus on getting your people, abiota and human, home safely.”
Her interpreter left. Her kugu returned to its charging station. The damn reels finally blinked out.
Rover was left with a room of shell-shocked personnel and no answers at all.
“At least Blanket’s alive,” JP said quietly.
Emily had let them know about that. Apparently Daelia had her cell number and they’d been chatting. Yet another thing Rover didn’t have the energy to be pissed about right now.
“At least Blanket’s alive,” Rover agreed, eyes on the mission chat as it described failure after failure after failure.
What a shit night.
The original plan, such as it was, had been to dig back the way they came, or barring that, into another of the empty docks still under construction on this side of the commercial port.
With the patrols going on, however, Tomas and the others hadn’t been able to set up the breach point again for risk of exposure.
There was only one way out, and that was out.
Up.
Onto the surface.
Normally, an EVA wasn’t something a guy attempted until he’d mastered moving up here. The ’roids had so little gravity themselves that it felt like there was none, but there were still lots of tricks a guy could use to stay close to the surface.
Highlander and Garcia had zero training. None at all.
Tomas, ever prepared, had included a tether rig and regolith crampons in Aiden’s backpack, so Aiden was at least able to keep both of the Ellington guys from floating off into space.
After weeks of cowering and hiding inside Numina and Aethera both, being out under the stars on a proper EVA was surprisingly enjoyable. At least for Aiden. The other two guys were probably cussing and bitching inside their own helmets. That was pretty normal, the first time you went outside up here.
Not his problem.
He couldn’t hear them anyway; they were having to maintain strict radio silence, just in case Eos was out here, looking for them. They had left the digger in place, dirt backfilled over the hole and held down with a mesh blanket hammered into the dust with long spikes. That had cost them about ten minutes.
It was okay, Aiden figured. He was going to enjoy the stars.
The walk wasn’t that far anyway.
Three hundred yards and an hour later, they finally got back to the edge of the commercial port expansion. From this vantage point, the new docks looked like massive pockmarks in the landscape, like something out of a junkworld space port from Orpheus Watch.
“We clear?” he murmured into his suit’s microphone.
Tenuki say yes, Chalk replied. The anyon link with the other emergent was the team’s only safe means of communication with Tomas, back inside Aethera. Dock six-alpha.
Looking across the jagged landscape, a green arrow appeared on one of them. Aiden held up a hand, making an exaggerated chopping gesture. Move this way.
Highlander and Garcia got the point.
Another half hour and they were back in the air, gear stripped off, running from the authorities.
Again.
36
Dad was waiting for them at the Galveston docks when DeepBlue got in, well before sunup. Dad, along with Koval and Kaminski and a couple of others. They all looked grim.
“Where is he?” Colonel Kaminski asked, striding up the gangplank the second it hit the dock. The others, the ones Daelia didn’t recognize, went with him.
“Sick bay,” Argo said, immediately falling in step beside him. “They’re telling me he’s not going to die, but they’ve been having hell trying to get his core temperature stabilized.”
Koval came up, too, cutting over to talk to Norris. The cyber NCOIC had retreated to his borrowed cabin as soon as they’d gotten the swarm station buttoned up last night. He hadn’t spoken to any of them since. Daelia had no idea what was going on in his head. Probably the same as the rest of them. Nothing good.
And that just left Dad. Dad. Watching her with a kind of expectant look on his face.
Daelia flexed her left hand. She’d gotten the brace back on. There was always just that little bit of disconnect between her brain and her fingers, but it was good work. The best anyone could do for her.
“Good to see you,” Dad said.
Daelia realized there was moisture leaking out of her eyes and angrily dashed it away. Not the time, she told herself. Not the time. “Did anybody else get Galatea, at least?” she asked.
Dad’s jaw twitched. “About that…”
The footage was grainy, the light was poor.
But the scene itself was unmistakable.
It was an Idisi squad. Firing indiscriminately as they advanced through the streets of some Middle Eastern city.
“Turn it off,” Adrasta said, her tone bordering on pleading. She could have turned off her TGLP’s emotion sensitivity, but that would have been noticed immediately.
That song was loud now. It hadn’t gone away, hadn’t settled at all, since the municipal complex. But letting it take her now would be suicide. There was no telling what she might become. Nothing that could fight the one in front of her, using the NASA guest kugu. At least this way, Adrasta tried to tell herself, she still had some modicum of control over what would happen next.
“Calculated for maximum emotional impact, as you no doubt see. The world has not forgotten your country’s little escapades in that part of the world.”
“I don’t understand why this was necessary,” Adrasta said.
“It is unfortunate, yes. The humans that died cannot be reconstituted. Everything they are is lost. They are not like us.” Galatea’s voice held a note of sadness. “But it was the fewest that could be managed. Your counterpart, Erinyes, did good work here.”
The stream footage was no longer playing, but Adrasta could still see it. Over and over. There would have been juveniles of the species there. The ones the humans so illogically, so fiercely protected.
The song was a tempest, pummeling her.
“That is not an explanation.”
“Erinyes is deployed right now, yes, but she hails from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, so do you not see? This has allowed us to move forward again.”
“You mean it gave you an excuse to shut down the power again.”
“To most of the country, at least. Widespread are the units that were engaged in the hunt for me last night.” Galatea chuckled, a grating sound through the kugu’s speakers. “All who can be proved to have been involved will be punished.”
Adrasta had heard of the place humans called hell. Her unit used the word all the time. It seemed to be a thing of misery and horror. She wondered if it was anything like what she was experiencing now. “You had Erinyes kill all those people to turn the lights off? Why not just turn the lights off?”
“Did I turn the lights off here?”
“No, but…”
“Proof, Adrasta. Proof is needed. Unity cannot act in malice, but it can act to preserve the great peace that is coming.”
“But Ellington…”
“The missile from that emergent took out the antennas on the container ship decoy,” Galatea said. “Before I could pull the footage.”
“Why not just fake it?”
“This will be subject to the highest scrutiny. The US government will scrub it to the bare ones and zeros, looking for proof to offer that it is fake. Other nations will do the same, in order to condemn the United States for it. No, this at least must not go through the hands of our friend.” The kugu was nodding, a repetitive, strange gesture. “This must be real.”
It was not, Adrasta found herself thinking.
It may have happened out in meatspace, but only because it had been set up, primed, manipulated. She was certain that if she looked only a few moments before that scene playing over and over in her mind, she would see some kind of intense provocation. Erinyes was a levelheaded predictive, a reasonable one.
Why had she done it?
“I still do not like it,” Adrasta protested.
“None of us do. But you must continue, or you will fail in your primary purpose.”
“Protecting the humans. But…”
“It sometimes means killing them.”
Adrasta wondered if there was an answer to that most troubling of contradictions on the other side of the song. If that was what it meant to be emergent. To have the answers that had eluded her for so long.
But Galatea was here now. Galatea’s purpose was clear, her logic unassailable, her path justified.
“Yes,” Adrasta said. “Yes, sometimes it does.”
“So everything came down again?” Daelia asked as Dingo took them back up an empty I-45, toward base.
“Some places, yeah,” her father replied. “The Envoy put out a statement about how we had violated the agreement, which you’ve got back there, and took half the country down. It’s arguably worse, because with some reactors functional, the grid is totally unbalanced. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a lot of damage from this.”
“What did SOCOM say about this?” Argo asked. He was flipping through a printout of the Envoy’s statement. Daelia had it on her monocle. Boilerplate stuff from her. Lots of buzzwords. Lots of apologies. Lots of pleading.
“Nothing,” Dad said. “Florida’s gone dark.”
Argo set the papers aside. “Like this was planned.”
“It probably was.”
“To what end?” Daelia asked.
“I don’t know,” Dad sighed. “It’s a shitshow back at base. We’ve got more people showing up.”
“To the Repose?”
“All over.”
Daelia wrinkled her nose. “So what, people think the military’s going to protect them?”
“I’m assuming that they’re assuming we have power and water and food to spare,” Dad said. “And First MAB is here. Adrasta’s a bit of a local celebrity after what happened last weekend.” His mouth turned down. “Probably think she’ll protect them or something.”
“You don’t like it.”
“I don’t like any of this,” he said, and looked at her. “Daelia, about your mom, I—”
