Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Except he had spent his surge of rage on her now, in the same way that he spent other emotions on her when they’d built up and he needed to purge himself of them. Now he was purposeful. “Boyo,” he said. “Get Fellatio. Go fetch.” And Boyo was loping away, every lean movement of his body speaking relief that he was being allowed to act, that he wouldn’t be made mute witness to any more of that. They’d locked the antechamber door, it turned out, but Boyo didn’t allow it to be more than three seconds’ impediment.

  “Get me Scout,” Thompson said. “I want to talk to Scout.”

  “Sir, it’ll be fine.” She was trying to speak very clearly past the places her lips had been bloodied against her teeth. “We already know what to do if Doctor Felorian doesn’t help. We made a plan.” And she had already sent the messages that backup strategy required. Messages that didn’t have to go far, after all, not even past Braintree’s chain link fence. “And we can deal with Aslan, sir. He’ll come around. They always come around. They always do what you want.” She was listening on Scout’s channel. He was at the offices. His squad had a bonus. “They’ve caught one of the HumOS units, sir. Got her right there, in their hands. Got her in front of Aslan. Leverage, sir.” He understood leverage.

  And he was calming down, the mottled, angry colours fading from his face, something resembling a sane human expression sitting as naturally there as a party hat on a corpse. “Do it,” he ordered, and she told Scout what to say, what threats, what offers.

  Then Boyo was back, Felorian trying desperately to seem like he was simply striding ahead of the Bioform of his own volition; that there wasn’t a big, clawed hand holding the scruff of his neck and creasing his nice white suit. His stupid empty spectacles were gone and Carole wanted to imagine them crushed under Boyo’s boot, stamped into crumpled wire.

  Aslan had been talking, some typical gallows speech about ideology. Scout’s replies were on-message but off script. She had a terrible sense of things getting out of her control, and Thompson just seemed to get larger and larger, filling more and more of the room in her mind.

  “Tell them to kill the woman,” he snapped. “Leverage. Kill her. So he’ll know we’re not playing. Him next. So kill her. Then he’ll play.” His eyes like a taxidermist’s glass beads.

  “Sir—”

  “Scout.” And he was on the channel. “Kill her. The HumOS woman. Kill her now.”

  And she had access to Scout’s camera, watching as it swung from the lawyer’s dark, creased face over to where a young woman hung between two of the Trigger Dogs. Just a girl, younger than Carole. Familiar almost, like someone she’d met. Beret, chin high, defiant look like a resistance fighter before a Nazi firing squad. And Carole was trying to say no, say not to, find a way of saying she was useful, she was evidence of, valuable because, should be saved for. And while she wrestled with those objectless sentences one of the Trigger Dogs snapped the woman’s neck and she was dead.

  Damn it, Scout, she tried to say, but even those words were stillborn in her and she was feeling sick and weak again, leaning against the wall, trying to focus on what was going on. “Scout, you’ve got to get him to agree now. Get him to agree not to release the data, do you understand me? Bad Dog, get him to sign the contract, Bad Dog.” And there wasn’t even a contract yet, and Scout was hardly going to draw one up himself, but the situation was getting away from them and she was clutching at any stability she could possibly get.

  “Bad Dog,” Thompson echoed, listening, watching through the same camera. Not agreeing but mocking her, disgusted that she was so soft when he needed hard tools to gouge hard wounds in the world.

  And then Aslan said what he’d done.

  Carole shut down, just about. Still there in her head but all connection to the world severed. He was already sending it out. He’d been sending all along. He wasn’t playing the game the way it was meant to be played. He wasn’t taking the money. He—

  “Scout, kill him,” Thompson said, and she wanted to say “No!” staring into the face of the dignified old man. She wanted to countermand the death sentence, to find some other way, but she couldn’t speak. Her master’s voice had made its pronouncement and what was her will, to that?

  And Scout’s view was shaking – no, Scout was shaking. Scout was fighting desperately, wrestling with his own body, trying to stop himself from carrying out the order. Inside his dog mind, Scout had both hands on the tightening collar, desperately trying to pry it from his throat. And Carole found herself cheering him on, because if he could, then maybe…

  “Scout, kill him!” Thompson roared, and she felt Boyo shudder, felt Scout resist, a growl in her own throat as though in sympathy. Felorian had sunk back against Boyo’s chest as though Thompson was the worse devil.

  And then: “Tozer, kill Scout. Kill the lawyer. Kill Scout.”

  Carole froze, and in that moment the large calibre anti-Bioform round went into the back of Scout’s neck and rattled back and forth inside his skull before lodging in the inner rim of one eye socket, and Scout was dead.

  Scout’s camera died in the same moment and she scrabbled for Tozer’s viewpoint, catching Aslan with a completely blank expression, a man who’s already read to the end.

  After it was done, Thompson just stood there, and she had no idea what he might do next. All the layers of civilised organisation she had patiently put up between him and the world, to make it do his will, to protect it from his wrath, were in pieces all over the floor; were in pieces across Keram John Aslan’s office. And then Felorian started talking.

  He’d obviously seen some opening she hadn’t. He was talking damage limitation. “Mr Thompson, sir, this can all still be handled. We’re never out of options. This business at the lawyers, we can make it look like a break in. They’ll believe us. They’ll believe you, Mr Thompson, sir. We can tell them whatever we need to. There are always ways to spin something. We find someone to blame. There was a HumOS unit there? We blame her. She cooked up the images. People will believe it of her. She wants to blacken your name, sir. Just call a conference. Wounded anger, sir. A threat to national security. Should have hunted down the last of her a long time ago, isn’t that right, Mr Thompson, sir?”

  “Send the signal,” Thompson said flatly, not even listening.

  “Sir…”

  “It’s ready. You said ready to go. Done Processing. Send the signal.”

  Felorian wrung his hands. “Mr Thompson, sir…” Squirrelling backwards into Boyo’s chest. Thompson went for him, shoulder-barging Carole out of the way, sending her to the floor, feeling the queasy slickness between her fingers where she’d thrown up. Something hard here. Something in among the bile and the softened pieces of lost lunch.

  “Fellatio—” Thompson was warning, over her head.

  “Indemnity!” the scientist got out. “You have to indemnify me. I want a statement. That it was all your fault. That I did what you told me. They’ll crucify me. I’ll never work again. Unless it was you, all you. You need me, Thompson, sir. You can’t make it happen without me. So say it now. Say it’s all on you. Say it for the cameras, sir.”

  “Your damn cameras,” Thompson growled. Carole was getting back up slowly, that little slick bead in her palm, hidden behind curled fingers. She looked up and Thompson’s dead gaze was on her, impatient with her frailties.

  “Backup plan. Make it happen. Do it.” Lumpish, half-formed instructions coming from the thing inside him, the true Warner S. Thompson.

  She looked past him to Felorian, but there wasn’t much satisfaction in the moment, not past her throbbing face and aching gut. She opened the channels, though: three of Felorian’s most ambitious underlings got the call they’d been waiting for. Vacancy at the top. Goes to the first to send the signal. She’d made the arrangements but Thompson had known the cracks would be there, as though his very presence corroded organisations and people until there was always somewhere to stick the prybar, somewhere to foment betrayal and backstabbing in his service.
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  The quickest of Felorian’s traitorous underlings confirmed it done in under twenty seconds. Like Thompson had said, the Processing, the whole upload process, was done. It was just a matter of sending a message along a channel that had been held open ever since the first workers had arrived at the Hell City site, all loaded up with expensive Braintree headware.

  “The signal’s been sent, sir,” she got out.

  Which just left…

  “Boyo,” Thompson said. “Kill Fellatio.”

  Carole expected something similar to the Trigger Dogs’ execution of the HumOS unit. A clean break, life to death in a humane instant. But Boyo had been hungering for this moment, like a wolf tracking a man through the wilderness day and night for a week, waiting for his opportunity. He didn’t like Doctor Marco Felorian, who had tormented Carole, who had installed her Collar, and his own. And now the protection of his master was removed and he just lunged forwards, jaws first, all dog, nothing of man. His teeth ground into the scientist’s neck with a bloody crunch and he ground and worried and savaged, and more so, long past the moment when Felorian was dead. Because Bioforms could harbour long-held frustrations too. They just didn’t get to act on them as often as regular humans.

  Thompson watched. Blood was spattered across his shirt like avant-garde art, some of it Carole’s, some Felorian’s. He had that smile on, the thin-lipped beam, hard to look at as the sun.

  “We can say it didn’t happen,” he pronounced, once Boyo had dropped the body and was pawing at his red muzzle. “None of it. Nothing sticks. Tell them.” Eyes pinning her again. “Put the words together. Deny everything. Fellatio did it. Bees did it. HumOS did it. Faked it. Out to get me. They won’t get me.” He looked at the doctor’s corpse, seemed surprised as though not sure how it had got there, and Carole was eerily sure he was even now convincing himself he didn’t know. It wasn’t important. It couldn’t have been his fault. “Boyo did it,” he murmured. “Boyo was a Bad Dog. Fellatio was bad. Then Boyo was bad. Boyo says he did it. He’ll be a Good Dog.” And Carole knew that was true. If Thompson said to confess, Boyo would confess. If Thompson said to go to the gas chamber, that was where Boyo would go, loyal unto death. And she knew the rest would come to pass, too. Thompson would get out of it, no matter there was all the video evidence in the world. It could be faked, after all, and Bees and HumOS were like the witches that had never really been there in Salem, but could be blamed for everything, an unlimited capacity for nebulous evil.

  And Thompson’s gaze had passed beyond them all, beyond the walls of the room, because Felorian, post mortem, had finally achieved what Thompson had been after all this time. Thompson’s attention was fixed on a notional Mars, on Hell City. He’d be watching the skies from now on, and in maybe ten more minutes there’d be the pingback, that said their signal was received and the data was being downloaded across the void of space. Today, Mars; tomorrow…

  Thompson turned that unbearable smile on her. “Clean yourself up,” he told her. “You’re a mess. Go do your job. Tell them I didn’t do it.”

  And he was striding off, Boyo hangdog behind him, and she opened a channel to his lawyers as she went to find a washroom and do what she could with her face and her hands and her clothes. And the bruises wouldn’t wash off, nor was there make-up enough in the world to cover them. But then a woman’s bruises were usually invisible in the shadow of a powerful man. Nobody would comment on them.

  And she washed the vomit off her hands, off her chipped and bloodied nails, and stared down at what she was holding. A bee, a metal bee, and it seemed to flex against her palm, seemed to beat like a heart. She had a moment’s memory of the car on the way in. A moment when it had given her a choice, a free choice, not one shackled to Thompson’s brute will.

  It pulsed, and she felt something shift in her head, the iron band of her headache weakening. She had the sense of a question mark hanging there, devoid of words.

  Yes, she thought. Because if there was no specific question attached to that stray punctuation then no answer she gave could be disloyal.

  It was in her head. She felt it scuttling there, little scratchy insect legs touching the pieces and connections of her headware. Yes she said again, not daring to contemplate what she was agreeing to in case that meant she wasn’t able to.

  And though nothing of the pain from the bruises and the aches, the loose teeth or the split lip went anywhere, her headache was gone.

  She told the lawyers to get ready for a meeting, just her. She wouldn’t be attending and they could bill all their wasted, expensive hours to Thompson’s account. Instead she sent a message to Jennifer Wiley.

  I need you to get me a channel, she said. I want to tell the world the truth about Warner S. Thompson.

  PART V

  BEARS REPEATING

  21

  JIMMY

  Sugar’s gone by the time we arrive. It’s just Marmalade stood there, shuffling awkwardly. You get to know bears, after you work with them long enough. Bears have got their own body language. Marmalade’s real unhappy, but not in the angry, dangerous way bears get. She’s just miserable, scared to do anything, like anything she does might make matters worse.

  I never heard her speak before. Most bears, you hear them, they get some kind of human voice. Outdoors they radio you sub-voc. Indoors, past the airlocks where the atmosphere’s dense enough to carry the sounds, we just talk. Talking’s more natural to us people, and the Bioforms keep direct channel comms to between themselves.

  So Marmalade never had anything to say, and when we meet up I find out why. Her voice isn’t something nice you’d use for after-dinner conversation or sweet nothings. It’s got subsonics in there that fair make me wet myself just to hear her. I am suddenly so very glad I never got far enough on Sugar’s bad side that she sent her friends to have a word with me.

  “She got this smile,” Marmalade growls at me, and her voice makes out it’s my fault even when she’s not trying. “Big smile like she never had before. Then it was like I didn’t exist. She went out. I tried to get in her way. She shouted at me. Said things.” Not complimentary things, I’m guessing. Not things Sugar ever said before. And I don’t know how it was between Sugar and her henchbears when they were alone. Part of me – that would have been most of me not so long ago – reckons she shouted at them and beat them and maybe had some headware hack to keep them in line, because she’s one small human woman and they’re a couple of goddamn enormous bears. But the rest of me, the most of me as of now, finds it doesn’t believe that. When Murder went down, that was a personal and not just a professional loss to Sugar. And now Sugar’s gone AWOL with a weird-ass smile on her face and on my way back Honey and I saw plenty of that. Like every second face we ran into was beaming at us, hand out to shake like it was National Gladhanding Day.

  I clue Marmalade in that, whatever’s going on, Sugar’s the least of it. She won’t stay still, wants to find something she can lay into that’s responsible. I’d love to oblige her, just so that something doesn’t end up being me, but I got a dreadful crawling feeling that whatever’s going on here ain’t going to yield to tooth and claw. I got a dreadful feeling Honey knows more than she’s saying about it, too. And given how fond she is of her own voice that ain’t exactly reassuring,

  “What’s doing?” I ask her. “Come on, now.”

  “I’m trying to assess the network traffic. That seems to be key to the situation but a proper analysis is proving unexpectedly difficult. Simply put, there’s not much room for me to get about in the system. Digital rush hour in Hell City, Jimmy.”

  “She says—” I start, but Marmalade got cut in on the channel ’cos I guess Honey’s not going to just absentmindedly assume a bear isn’t worth including like a human might.

  “We need to get a better vantage,” she decides.

  “Meaning what?” demand I. “You want to go climb a mountain so’s you can look down on your armies or something.”

  “Meaning,” she says, wit
h enough of an edge that I reckon Doctor Bear’s patience is wearing thin, “that this hole we’re in has lousy connectivity and I need you to take your two legs and get me closer to the centre of the city, closer to Admin, so I can gather data. I am also going to say, and you should in no ways take this as a threat, that I can take those legs off you and walk you all the way there myself if I have to. But that would take a lot of concentration on my part and so I’d rather not.”

  “I thought you said that was against your goddamn ideology. I thought you were Freedom Bear.”

  “Jimmy, I’ve only recently had to come to terms with my own death. Let’s just say that I’m not having a good day,” Honey tells me sharply.

  “Let’s go,” Marmalade rumbles. “Sugar’s gone over to someone else, this place is blown anyway.”

  “We’ll get her back,” I say. I even put a hand on the rough hair of her arm. It’s a mistake at first, I think. Don’t be familiar with the savage criminal animal. Except she sags a bit – and nothing sags quite like a bear, where their skin and its contents always have this shifting relationship, big-tall-strong one minute, pooling puddle of fat the next. She sags and she nods, and apparently I did the right thing for once.

  We go out, the two – three, kind of – of us. I stay in Marmalade’s shadow, and she’s ready not to take shit from anyone. Except right then nobody’s handing it out. For about half the people we see, more than half, it’s almost like they’re doing a play and we got backstage. They’re going about shaking hands with each other with those freaky smiles, and each time we see them make the clasp, someone ends up nodding. Not agreement-nodding, but something lower, someone giving way. One head’s definitely higher than the other when they part. Honey says something about ‘tugging forelocks’ which apparently isn’t a sex thing.