XCOM 2- Resurrection

by Greg Keyes

  “I guess I see the attraction. But—”

  She put her hand on his thigh and squeezed hard, digging in her nails.

  “First of all,” she said, “don’t go there. I know what you’re about to start on about, and you know you shouldn’t, not here. And even if you could, I wouldn’t want to hear it. Just one night, okay? With no moralizing or guilt—just let me enjoy my damn drink, okay?”

  A couple of people were looking at them now. Lena turned on her stool. “Are you all enjoying the show?” she asked.

  They quickly turned away.

  “I’m tired of this place,” she said. “Let’s find a different bar.”

  The next place looked pretty much exactly like the last. They ordered a light meal and later had neon-colored ice cream, which he had to admit was very tasty. Then more drinks, and finally they walked around to the waterfront, which was as manicured as the rest of the city. A half-moon looked as if it was sailing in the harbor, and a few couples were rowing in iridescent flatboats.

  They sat on a bench, and after a moment, he leaned over and embraced her. He felt her stiffen.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded, pulling back.

  “Settle down,” he whispered. “Just pretend like we’re kissing. I need to say something, and I don’t want to be overheard.”

  She looked at him doubtfully, then leaned over so their cheeks were touching.

  “Did you get a chip put in you?” he asked.

  He felt her tense and then sort of sag.

  “You followed me?” He wasn’t sure how to read her tone. Was it despair, disappointment, or both?

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She began to quiver, and he realized she was crying.

  “No,” she said. “I brought a chip with me, a counterfeit one. So I could get in. So they can’t hear you or see you, if that’s what you’re worried about. Not through me, anyway.”

  “Then why? Why go in there and not tell me about it?”

  She drew back a little, so he could see her eyes, glistening in the city light.

  “One last time,” she whispered. “Once more, and I’ll never ask this again. Amar—I need you to have faith in me.”

  He had been thinking about those words—and the last time she said them—for a long time.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He stood up. “You should get some rest. You start the job tomorrow.”

  * * *

  The next day Lena returned from work and flashed him the pass. She suggested they take a walk before dinner, so they took the lift down and were soon exploring one of the more bucolic areas of the city. Here the housing was grouped into little compounds with raised, shared green spaces, many of which were on the roofs of the houses.

  “Terraces?” he asked.

  “Yep,” she said. “I grew up in that one.” She pointed at one of three houses that shared both a terrace around them and a sort of courtyard between them.

  “I thought you grew up in Gulf City,” he said.

  “Right,” she allowed. “But in that model house. You could put a blindfold on me and I would be able to navigate the inside of it without much trouble.”

  “So this is the old home place,” he said.

  “As close as I’ll ever get,” she said. “So. Ask me how things went today.”

  “I saw the pass,” he said. “I guess things went well.”

  “Yep. I’m now officially the quality control monitor for augmented processing units.”

  “Which means you do what?” he asked.

  “Well, the units are inspected by automated assessors. The modules either pass or fail. If they pass, I send them to packing. If they fail, I direct them back to production.”

  “Couldn’t the automated assessors do that?” he asked.

  “Says the man whose job is to sit on a couch all day,” she said with mock disdain.

  “Don’t get touchy,” he said. “I’m not knocking your career.”

  “Just remember, I’m the one putting CORE on the table.”

  “How could I forget?” he sighed. Then he grew a little more serious. “How, um, safe do you feel there?”

  “Very,” she said. “The security system is top-notch. I was warned there are a few glitches in it, but those will be gone soon enough.”

  “And your boss? How is he?”

  “I didn’t meet the boss,” she replied. “At least I don’t think so. And my orientation was mercifully brief.”

  “So you think things are going to work out?”

  She nodded. “I think it’ll work out just fine,” she said. Then she noticed he had stopped to stare at something. It was a little park, but unlike the others they had passed, it had some odd structures in it—tubes, narrow inclined smooth surfaces. Children were climbing and sliding on them. Others were swinging back and forth in flexible strips of plastic suspended from a metal frame by cables.

  “Amar?”

  “What is that?” he asked.

  She laughed. “You’re kidding, right?” She put her hand up to her mouth. “Oh god, you aren’t kidding. It’s a playground.”

  He knew each word individually, but the two together sounded weird.

  “You didn’t have playgrounds?” she asked in a disbelieving tone. “You didn’t play?”

  “Sure, we played,” Amar said. “We just didn’t have a particular place for it. Or … things.”

  “You mean slides and swings and monkey bars?”

  “We had monkeys,” he said. “But they weren’t drinkers.”

  “Funny,” she said.

  “My uncle made us this sort of thing to jump on once, from a tarp and some springs—”

  “Like a trampoline.”

  “That was what he called it,” Amar said. “ADVENT troopers trashed it the next time they came through.”

  “I guess that explains why you didn’t have playgrounds,” she said.

  “There you go,” he said as he continued to watch the children. “It doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, a playground. Maybe one day …” He didn’t finish the thought. He had been and was involved in the creation of several things—the Avenger and the Skyranger, for example. If he lived long enough, he would likely be involved in the building of any number of weapons, facilities, and defensive capabilities. But the odds that he would ever be in the place or have the time to build a playground seemed pretty close to nil. That would be for someone else to do, when it was all over. If it was ever going to be over.

  “Yes,” Lena said. “One day.”

  They began walking again, back toward the apartment.

  “We were both drunk last night,” she said. “Is there anything you want to say now that we’re sober?”

  “No,” he said, “I think I covered it.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” he echoed.

  CHAPTER 19

  IT WAS THE sitting on his thumbs that was the most difficult part for Amar. Lena had been trained to recognize the particular “augmented processor” they needed for the Avenger, so it made perfect sense that she was the one tasked to work in the factory. But it left him too much alone with his thoughts. He could not stomach watching the media screen for more than a few minutes at a time—even the games available were so clogged with nonsense and outright lies that he couldn’t bring himself to play them.

  So he was left with his own thoughts, and right in the middle of that was his decision to trust Lena, a decision he second-guessed on a nearly hourly basis. But he also kept returning to the reason he was able to keep his resolution: He would be able to cancel the mission almost until the last second. If he did, he would probably die and would certainly never escape New Singapore. But no one else would be involved. Shen could try again with someone else, possibly in New Seattle, one of the other targets they had considered.

  But he didn’t believe Lena would lead him into a trap. He couldn’t.

  He continued to explore the city, thinki
ng he could at least come to understand it better. The playground had been an eye-opener, a sign that he had his own prejudices and blind spots when it came to places like this. He still did not at all approve of New Singapore, but he felt he needed to understand it. The battle they were fighting against the ADVENT was not and could not be merely military. They needed the help of the people in the New Cities to win; they needed those people to want to be free. And right now, the ADVENT were winning the propaganda war.

  As in New Kochi, the billboards here were much larger than those forced on the settlers, and they were constantly filled with images and stories of how the dissident few were making life harder for everyone, how twenty years of mutual cooperation for the common good of humanity and their benefactors were threatened by malcontent thugs who thought only of their own selfish needs. Even the contagion was being blamed on the resistance: The story was that it was a biochemical weapon developed by unscrupulous scientists to blackmail population centers, and that it had somehow gotten out of control.

  And people bought it. He watched and listened to them in coffee shops, bars, and public squares.

  On the other side of it, images of ADVENT peacekeepers were everywhere, posed heroically. Children wore ADVENT T-shirts and played Peacekeepers and Bad Guys, and no kid he saw ever wanted to be the Bad Guy.

  He wondered, if he hadn’t grown up where he had, if he didn’t know the things he knew—would he be happy here? Would he watch his screen and eat CORE burgers and never wonder too much about what was really going on, why the aliens would try so hard to make people feel secure and happy, to draw them into the cities until there was no one left outside?

  Maybe. Probably. But he didn’t have the choice of accepting all of this without qualms, without wondering about the price.

  * * *

  The factory hummed along a constant twenty-four hours, so they went in at night. With Lena’s pass and the “glitches” in security she had learned about, it wasn’t difficult to get into the place.

  Nothing manufactured here had any direct military use—most of the components, in fact, went into building entertainment systems and the autopilots for cars, trains, and transports. The only real exception seemed to be the processors themselves. This had seemed odd to Amar, so he had remarked on it during their last walk.

  “Oh,” Lena said. “No, the part we’re talking about isn’t used in ships of any kind. It’s mostly used in traffic grid guidance systems and to replace the processors in older satellites. We wouldn’t have had any chance at all to get our hands on anything meant for a modern military or deep-space ship. Those places are incredibly well guarded.”

  “But that’s exactly what you’re trying to repair—a ship.”

  “Yes. A twenty-year-old ship. The aliens have made serious upgrades in the past couple of decades. From what we can tell, their computer technology has changed substantially. But the APs they build here are old technology, perfectly adequate for our purposes. It will probably take some tweaking, but the Shens are quite sure they can make it work.”

  “So the security is minimal,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think you could just walk in, take it, and walk out?”

  “Walk in, yes. Take it, yes. Walking out will be a problem. The security is low, not nonexistent.”

  Now they had done the walking in part and were on to the taking.

  The human staff was negligible, and only a few of them looked up as Amar and Lena passed through the corridors and open fabrication rooms. None took any notice of the empty backpack on Amar’s shoulder.

  In truth, almost everything in the factory was done through automation, with alien overseers and a few human collaborators at the top to give them a public face when they needed one. Most of the jobs that didn’t involve public relations were like Lena’s—humans watching machines that could already watch themselves. After all, the aliens didn’t have any particular interest in educating humans in their technology.

  Amar had the impression that most jobs in the city barely met the criteria to be called that. His time in New Singapore had sharpened his sense of what the New Cities were for.

  The cities of the past had for the most part evolved from crossroads or ports or defensible places. They had economic and social reasons for existing, and if they grew larger than a village, there were a number of demographic forces that caused that to happen. The old cities had been places of production, of commerce, of innovation in the social, technological, and artistic senses.

  The function of New Singapore wasn’t anything of the sort. It was about control, pure and simple. It had the outward form of a city but nothing of the essence.

  Lena had sorted through the various configurations available to select the augmented processor with the best possible fit for the Avenger’s computer. She had marked it, packed it, and sent it down to the loading dock, which was what they were entering now. Dimly lit with dull red lights, it was about half empty. Bundles of parts sat on small trams. Across the room was a pair of massive doors.

  “What’s through there?” he asked.

  “A hangar,” she said. “And a junction with a rail line. Some things get loaded onto rail, some are flown out—a few things go by truck.”

  “Well, let’s find it first,” he said.

  “I have my handy inventory stick,” she said, taking out a slim rod. It glowed and scrolled a few glowing characters.

  “Right over here,” she said.

  The cylindrical container wasn’t quite half a meter in length and half again that in diameter.

  “That’s the one?” he asked.

  She examined it again and nodded.

  “So exactly when does the alarm go off?”

  “Everything that comes in here gets counted and has a match code to whatever is supposed to pick it up. If this leaves any other way than through the loading doors, there are alarms. If it goes out the loading doors but gets put anywhere other than its appointed destination, alarms again.”

  He examined the doors. They were thick and heavy, and would reel up into the ceiling when opened.

  “Can we open these?” he asked.

  “I don’t have the codes or even access to the controls,” she said.

  He didn’t think a rocket launcher would punch through them, either. That was too bad. It would make things much easier. The front door, however, could probably easily be compromised.

  “I guess the plan is we take it and run for the front door,” he said, stuffing the processor into the backpack.

  “I was really hoping the brilliant chief could come up with a better plan,” she said.

  He shrugged. “We could hang out here until they open the doors and start loading,” he suggested.

  “There will be ADVENT security for that,” she pointed out.

  “Then I like my first plan,” he said. “Give me a moment.”

  He paused only a moment before flipping on the radio.

  * * *

  As predicted, the alarm started braying as soon as they exited the dock. Amar had debated whether they should just walk and try not to draw attention, but he decided instead on running like hell. Lena hadn’t reported any jabbers in the building in the four days she had been there, so the real danger was from the troops that would show up from the outside. The longer it took them to get to the front door, the greater the odds that they would meet with resistance.

  This time they were noticed. Most of the workers were sort of milling in confusion, wondering why the alarm was sounding—until they saw Lena and Amar. Then they started ducking into rooms or under things. Whether they thought Lena and Amar were the danger or were running from the danger wasn’t clear, but the billboards taught that where there were alarms and people running, there would soon be explosions and bullets.

  One guy had a different reaction. He was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, and he moved to intercept them, yelling for them to stop. Since he was blocking the corridor, there was no avoid
ing him.

  Amar jabbed a fist at him, without slowing down.

  “Do not!” he shouted. “You do not want to do that.”

  But the guy stood his ground.

  Amar stopped just long enough to hand the backpack with the part to Lena.

  “I don’t know what you’ve stolen,” the man said. “And I don’t care. Just wait here until the police arrive.”

  “What’s your name?” Amar demanded.

  “Brian,” the fellow said, looking mildly surprised.

  “Brian, I’m in a hurry,” Amar said. “You have exactly two seconds to move out of the way.”

  “Now, look—”

  Amar decided two seconds was too long. He feinted a punch to Brian’s face; Brian threw up his hands to protect himself—also effectively blinding himself as Amar drove his hand into his solar plexus. Brian made a sucking sound; Amar swept his front foot and pushed him over while he was off-balance.

  Big men could get away with a lot in a fight just by being big, which meant that a lot of them, especially civilians, thought it was enough to be big. Being big usually just stopped fights from happening to them, leaving them relatively … uneducated. If it had been Dux or Palepoi standing there, it would be Amar on the ground gasping for air, perhaps with a broken limb or two.

  He let Lena keep the pack in case it happened again, and they continued on.

  When they reached the front door, it was locked, naturally—the entire building was sealed. Odds were there were already ADVENT police closing in on the building, so they didn’t have long.

  “Now,” he heard Lena say. She took him by the arm and pulled him back, away from the door.

  He was surprised. He hadn’t realized she also had a radio.

  Suddenly one of the workers appeared from nowhere, dashing toward the exit, a look of pure terror on his face.

  “Hey, no!” Amar shouted, but the young man showed no signs of slowing down. So he did the only thing he could. He sprinted forward, tackling the guy below the waist, trying to roll aside before …

  The door exploded, along with a significant fraction of the wall. The shock knocked him another four meters and hammered the breath out of him. Black spots threatened to blot out his vision entirely.