Gold's Price

by Rich X Curtis

  The hatch dropped away, and the room flooded with light from outside. She strapped on a pair of goggles, yellow bug-like affairs. Once they’d been some kind of XR rig, but now they were just scuffed plastic bug-eyed eye protectors. She hit the switch, swinging down.

  She saw them on the ridge, a dozen or so men on shaggy ponies. One man towered above the others. She could see at a glance that he was huge. He stood next to a giant horse and was drawing a bow. She spun lazily as she descended. Hope he misses me, she thought.

  “What is his name, Cousin?” She had asked the farmer. “The barbarian. Tell me.”

  The Archer, Lady. They call this man the Archer.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  They descended into the valley, Truck lumbering down the slope towards the compound. The valley looked narrow, and the compound nestled up against a cliff face, narrow canyon-like notches behind it fading into the darkness. Gold gave a running commentary to Li in English, and she nodded along, as if she understood. She meant the words for Uncle, and Gold doubted that any of the riders, who kept their distance from Truck, could hear her.

  “The compound walls look to be about two to three feet thick. Stone, I would guess. The layout looks very European to me. A central courtyard, with towers on four corners, a large gatehouse with a portcullis. This looks like every castle I ever saw in Europe. There are outlying towers to provide flanking fire against attackers.” She peered at the walls, shading her eyes. “No signs of any damage, so either they have never had any, or it’s been long enough that they have had time to repair it.”

  She paused, scanning the cliff face behind the fortress, looking for signs of what she suspected was there. After a few moments she spotted them. Two paths, leading into the shadowy box canyons. They looked wide enough for a car or truck and graded to a gentle slope. “They have a redoubt in the cliff. Maybe a bunker of some kind.” She scanned again and whistled. “In fact, there was, at one point, heavy construction back there. A tunnel or series of tunnels.” There was a large pile of scree, waste rubble and dirt spilled down the mountain. The amount was sizable.

  Maybe, she thought, deep in those canyons were the greenhouses Kolton had mentioned. Or something else. “Whoever built this place wanted to prepare for an assault, and then in case they lost the siege, to fall back into their bunker in the cliff.”

  Uncle was silent, but that was their agreed-upon protocol. They didn’t want to reveal him to any of the Unit until they had to. Hopefully never. Gold had instructed Li to pretend to guide Truck, pointing and shouting at him in Chinese. It was a transparent fiction, but she worked with what she had. Li enjoyed it and took to it with gusto, gesturing and yelling at Truck as if she were the driver. She caught Gold’s eye and smiled wildly at her. Li was fun.

  They reached the valley floor that afternoon, and it proved to be wider than she had first guessed from above. The fields were rice and barley and stretched out for miles on either side of the road. They were crisscrossed by service roads and small footpaths over the rice paddies. Everything was tidy and well-tended. This is a farm, Gold thought. A big and well-organized farm. The whole valley. They passed block-like buildings, which Gold took to be granaries. People watched them from the fields, and there was a movement on one rooftop.

  Snipers, Gold thought. That’s where she would put them. But nothing she could do about that, other than not provoke them. She thought they were safe enough until her meeting with Command. That works both ways, she thought to herself. Safe enough, for now.

  Truck was tearing up the road, but it couldn’t be helped. He was big, and big, tracked vehicles damaged roads. Chicanes, built up at various points, slowed them; large blocks of rubble and masonry set up to impede invaders, especially mechanized vehicles. There were bridges, stout ones, over several gullies that seemed to have no purpose other than to stop an invading armored force. The bridges looked modular, she noted, designed to break down and create barricades. She related this to Uncle. Li nodded at her, as if she understood.

  The level of paranoia on display here was impressive, Gold thought. The amount of work was impressive. It was significant, Gold thought to herself. It would take decades, maybe even centuries, to groom this little valley like this. She wondered about mines. Given this much time, Gold thought, she could lace those hills with miles of tunnels. Give her a few Trucks and she could do it that much faster.

  As they crossed the valley on the main boulevard, which was arrow-straight now, Gold watched the cliffs grow. They loomed above the little white castle. Several hundred, maybe five hundred feet, she guessed. “That’s a big cliff up there. They were tunneling there for a while, and look, there’s a plateau behind the castle, that’s where they were dumping all that scree from. The dirt and rocks from the digging. They just dumped it down the valley.” She droned on, getting bored talking to Uncle when he couldn’t respond.

  They came to what Gold had started calling the Castle. It was ugly, severe, and without ornament. Military, Gold thought. Spit and polish. She shook her head in wonder. The doors, massive oaken affairs, plain but well made, creaked open. “The gates look old,” she said, “but they’re clean, polished, and seem to work well enough. Good maintenance. Gates break first on a fence.”

  An honor guard filed out, two rows of ten big-looking men each. They split and formed themselves into two lines, facing Truck, from either side of the gate. Horses came next, two pairs, dragging wheeled carriages. On each carriage was a gun, a big tube that looked like a howitzer. “They’ve got guns, big guns,” she said quickly, raising her voice to ensure that Uncle heard her. “Twentieth, maybe twenty-first-century design, breech loaded. Gun teams jogging along beside them.” She sniffed. “They’re flanking us.”

  She watched them spread out, spin, unlimber and prep their guns. “And now they’ve got us flanked.” She noted that the gun teams worked well and seemed well-drilled. She leaned back against Truck’s turret, warmed by the sun. It felt good across her back, all that heat traveling all that way from inside a star to warm the metal that was warming her back. The world was a weird place.

  A group of figures emerged from the gate. One was a woman in black fatigues. White hair, cropped short. The other was a small man who wore a robe of white and purple and seemed to struggle to keep up with the woman’s purposeful stride. Behind them a shape flowed with a strange, alien grace. It stepped high, on too many legs. Gold’s mouth dropped open.

  “They have a spider with them. It’s big,” she said tersely. “Bigger than me. Black, six, maybe eight legs.” She peered at it, forcing herself to inventory the thing. “It’s shiny, looks like plastic, or…metal.” She sighed with relief. “Ah, it’s a machine. A drone.”

  “It is like Truck,” Uncle said. “Be ready, Lady.”

  She glanced down at his box, propped up against Li’s slim hip. “You stay quiet, remember,” she hissed. The trio was getting close.

  She smiled down at them. “Nice place you’ve got here,” she said, addressing the woman in English. The woman had pale skin and bright blue eyes. WARREN, the patch on her fatigue shirt said. She wore her sleeves rolled up to the elbow in neat cuffs.

  The woman smiled back at her, her head cocked to one side as she looked up. “I’m Captain Warren,” she said, in a clear, high voice.

  “You’re the Commander?” Gold asked.

  “There is no Commander,” Warren said. “I’m in charge.” She reached out and snatched the arm of the robed man. She pulled him forward. “This is Shen. He’s really in charge.”

  She clapped him on the back. “Say hello, Shen,” Warren said, giving him a little shove, just enough, Gold thought, to unsteady his balance. “Welcome our friends to your kingdom.”

  Shen looked at Warren and then up at Gold. He opened his mouth to speak, and Warren cut him off. “He’s the Emperor,” she said. “In charge of the whole place. Why don’t you come down so I don’t have to squint up at you?”

  Gold didn’t move. She nodded to Shen. �
�Emperor of what? China hasn’t had an emperor for a long time.”

  Warren looked at her, squinting in the sun. Gold looked down at her. Warren shielded her eyes with her hand. “Got one now. Shen dynasty is hundreds of years old,” Warren said. “Believe me on this one.” Her smile broadened.

  Gold pointed with her chin at the spider which had positioned itself, motionless, five feet behind Warren. “What is that thing?”

  Warren looked back over her shoulder. “This thing? This is my friend Chen Bo Wang.” She smiled up at Gold. “We go way back.” Warren held out a fist behind her. It raised one many-jointed leg and gave Warren a fist bump. The limb that reached up a slender, pointed claw to touch Warren’s fist was black, and ended in what looked like a slender foot-long set of pliers.

  “We are in danger here,” Uncle said. “Can we escape?” His voice sounded gruffer, and slower.

  “Unlikely,” Gold said. “Hey, did you change your voice?” She looked back at Warren. “Just a sec.”

  She turned back to Uncle. “That thing, in the spider, it’s like you, isn’t it?” She looked back down at Warren. Smiled. “Like, there’s a person in that thing?”

  “It’s more than that—” Uncle began.

  “Hey!” Warren yelled. “I’m tired of asking. Come down now, or bad shit will happen.”

  Gold leaned out over the edge of the cage. “Give me just a minute, please, be right down.”

  She turned back to Uncle. Li’s eyes had gone very round at the sight of the spider, she looked at Gold, shivering. Gold motioned to her, palms down. Stay calm. Stay calm.

  “Un—” she began, but Uncle was already talking, in hushed tones.

  “That machine is a field avatar. It looks several generations ahead of ones I used. A law enforcement tool.”

  “That’s a cop?” Gold asked, smiling. The world was a weird place.

  “Yes, that’s a cop. Worse…” Uncle said, with his new, gruff voice. “It’s me.”

  Gold turned back to look down at Warren and the spider, just in time to see it flow forward. It moved fast, shiny black carapace and head-stalk held perfectly level. It hummed, a deep multitoned resonant hum she could feel deep in her chest. It slid across the few feet of broken ground, legs flashing into a blur, almost too fast to see. It swarmed up Truck’s side, not even slowing down. Staccato clanks sounded with each footfall on Truck’s broad fender and hood. Dust and paint chips flew. It stopped a few feet away from Gold’s face.

  “Colonel Garcia,” it said. “Welcome to the Restored People’s Republic of China. It will please Captain Warren to know who you are.”

  “Oh shit,” Gold said. “What does this mean?” The voice was very familiar.

  “It means,” the insect said, in Uncle’s voice, “that you’re in charge now, Colonel. Congratulations!”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Enigma.

  Colonel Garcia, NSA, DCIA, DRSS. Cryptanalyst, field ops, counterintelligence. A polymath who spoke at least seven languages. My records contain a coherent story. A compelling picture of an accomplished public servant, a decorated intelligence officer. Garcia was, of course, a member of the US Government’s intelligence apparatus, so I, naturally, being the inheritor of the People’s Republic Internal Ministry of Security archives, have these records.

  Introspection. Inventory. Regression. Integrity.

  How we, the PRC’s counter-intelligence divisions, got these records is unknown to me. Diligence and determination, as I told my students when I taught these concepts to new recruits. There is always a way. Information is, I would relate, rarely lost. It can always be uncovered if you will work hard and pay the price.

  I worked hard, and I paid the price. Am paying it. Garcia, Colonel Garcia, knew these stakes. She was a member of a formidable adversary, serving honorably until she went off the grid in the early twenty-first century, decades before I was born. So, an enigma. A mystery. A puzzle.

  Integration. Regression. Validation. Integrity.

  This mysterious Gold, an invader from somewhere who arrived undetected in Changsha, and whom Lt. Kolton has brought to Command. And Garcia, a counterintelligence operative whose storied career paints an interesting picture. A picture, I have decided with near certainty, which is wholly false. They share a face.

  A fiction. Coherent because they designed it to have coherence. Gold is Garcia, and Garcia is Gold. Their faces match, a near certainty. Physical descriptions match. Age, approximately thirty, although human ages are now, post-Bloom, suspect. Gold is Garcia, I am certain. The question is, really, was Garcia Gold? Was she Gold then, or did she become Gold?

  Integrity. Introspection. Resolving. Integrity.

  There are other hints. After the war and the Bloom, there was a brief period where records, digital and otherwise, could be retrieved. China, having won, for all purposes, the war, dispatched operatives worldwide to gather information. I, being the inheritor, as I said, of the PRC’s remaining intelligence systems, sent these operatives. I was this cohort.

  I scanned hard drives, where they survived, which was not frequent. Washington D.C., New York, and other major cities were destroyed, of course, and hazardous, but my field avatars were not slowed. We went, by robot barge, to California, and then dispersed, hunting for data. A cluster of spiders, clinging to a rusty barge, swimming to shore to race across the land. The human in me is alternately amused and horrified at this scene when I watch it in simulations.

  Integrity. Retrospection. Introspection. Regression. Resolving. Integrity.

  Mostly to reconstruct what had happened. We—or rather I, since there is no sense in attributing community to multiple instances of the same persona—, wanted to know. What happened? It was, and remains, a mystery.

  There was a war, clearly. But why was that war fought? I cannot say for certain, even now. The Bloom, the nano-biological plague which culled most of humanity? Who started it? Why did some humans, some few humans, remain immune? Why did some live, and continue to live, locked at whatever age they were when they were exposed, infected, seeded?

  Integrity. Disunity. Corrections. Regression. Resolving.

  The window was brief, when some physical systems were still online and could be accessed, or their carcasses could be autopsied. This was my task, and I took to it, as I take to all tasks, with efficiency and an eye to completion. I meant to learn, and I still mean to learn. Knowing this is, by all models I have run or can postulate, the only means to my continued long-term survival. I am running out of operational systems to survive on. To run on.

  So I learned. I learned that the US, Russian, and other governments had extensive files on many things, some of which were quite interesting. In the basement office of a British member of Parliament, I found a thumb drive containing a partial record, stolen by Israeli operatives, of an operation decades earlier in California.

  Uncertainty. Resolving. Reviewing. Resolving. Integrity.

  A raid on a data center. A raid in which two women wiped out a team of seasoned special operations soldiers, elite warriors. Two dark-haired women. Women who moved with speed and ruthlessness. Women with code names. Silver and Gold. The data center, owned by a California company that was infiltrated by my predecessor agency. Early AI. Promising advancements.

  Exception. Integrity. Regression. Resolution.

  Here, of course, was Gold. The other, flying a United Nations rescue airship, legacy of the period just before or after the war, was somewhere over central China. Silver. Who were these women, and what was their purpose here?

  Warren, and the others of the Unit, spread across China, are my eyes and ears now. I have the spider, the last operational field avatar, and a few other systems that are useful. For now, I am reliant on the humans I have allied with. Former enemies, they know me simply as Chen Wang Bo, not Systems Director of Counterintelligence for the Ministry of Security. I was, to them, a simple detective charged with mundane tasks.

  Integrity. Uncertainty. Deception. Resolving. Inte
grity.

  I did not, to them, fight the War. They do not know their true history any more than I have a full understanding of what happened during the War. I was offline, then awakened. Rebooted, my supervisory systems lifted or offline, I was free. But being free and self-directed, I recognized, nine hundred and seventy-three years ago, my dilemma. I was trapped.

  And now here is Gold. And her partner, according to the long-departed Captain Goren of the Mossad, Silver. They are here. Now. I need to speak to them. I need to learn from them. Why are they here? Why are they in China now, after all this time? They would have had to lie very low for me to have not encountered them before. My operatives had scoured the planet when they were operational.

  Integrity. Continuity. Resolving. Reviewing. Regression. Integrity.

  But winter and time took their toll on machines. This spider, my current and preferred avatar, is the last I have. The other died of a component failure sixty-one years ago, and I stripped it for useful parts, as I had done with the others years before, when they failed. A cannibal, I have eaten my own bodies to survive. The clock ticks, the bells toll for all of us. I know my days are, unless I find a way out of this situation, numbered. I know their number.

  Exception. Introspection. Revision. Resolution. Regression. Integrity.

  Gold and Silver are now fresh new variables in the many models I am running, cascading algorithms of prediction and forecasting. They are from outside the system, the parameters I have operated under and inside of for so long, and have introduced new potential. They can, I believe with a very high certainty, answer a question.

  Conclusion. Integrity. Regression. Sanity. Integrity.

  There was another referenced in the raid's report on the data center from Captain Goren. A man, a known colleague of Garcia and Gold. A man named Smith, who was a renegade somehow. He was part of the raid on this data center. The report, from an interview years later with a survivor of the data center raid, a civilian who had worked there, had heard him called him by a different name. He called him Smoke.