by Alex Kirko
“Must have been one hell of a job,” Blake said, gesturing around him. “Clearing space for a town this deep in the jungle.”
Samuel’s subdued laugh didn’t match his appearance at all. His sister with the different surname, Mei, had mostly cosmetic changes, but all of Samuel’s mutations were geared for combat: metallic plates, flowing movement, fully black eyes that could probably see more than many sensors. He had a face that looked like a smile visited it only on Christmas.
“Stop staring, Mister Drummond. It’s rude. And stop digging for information. We have a business arrangement, but you aren’t one of us.” Samuel went silent for a minute as they walked to one of the many guard towers interconnected by a walkway system. “Although I suppose there is no harm in telling you. We Freefolk have to fight for every inch outside the protection of the shields.”
“Surely you have the technology—”
“Unlike the Council, we respect this planet. We fight it on its terms and not by blasting anything we don’t like from orbit like they did during the war.”
It was strange, listening to the man talk about events that had ended more than a thousand years ago as if they were still happening. Most Council Ascended he had met were much younger.
“So, don’t you have your own regeneration chambers?” Blake asked.
A swarm of purpleheart butterflies fluttered into the space between the trees and started playing in the branches. They moved as one, morphing into circles, stars, what looked like a bird . . . Above them, military-grade shields shimmered, protecting Hazy Meadows from an air raid. Those probably haven’t seen any action in a thousand years.
“You see, Mister Drummond, an intact regeneration chamber is beyond valuable. Most Council ones are worn down and half of them have been tampered with in some way. Many can still be used for a normal Ascension, but if you want to experiment with the process, then it’s necessary to start from a clean slate.” Samuel looked at Blake with an amused smile. “As to the unasked question, why would we just give you the cure if we had it? You don’t know where our chambers are, and you have to admit that not wanting to die is a great motivator.”
The bone-white grin on his ebony face made Blake want to punch those teeth in so that half of them would go into the brain.
“This way,” said Samuel, leading them to the edge of the settlement. “I thought I would have you figured out by now, Mister Drummond, yet you spent most of the negotiation staring at my sister instead of asking about the mythical Freefolk.” The left corner of his mouth twitched at mythical.
Blake said, “I was simply thinking, and your sister was much more pleasant to look at than you.”
The light from a passing swarm of butterflies reflected off the glossy black of Samuel’s eyes, and for a moment he looked like a demon of legend judging his soul. The moment passed and there was only a deceptively young man.
“There is something else,” Blake said. “You must have what? A thousand soldiers? Two thousand? Five? It doesn’t fill me with confidence as to your chances, all I say.”
They had reached an odd caterpillar of a building made of interlocked spherical modules of all colors curving gently as if it was trying to embrace Hazy Meadows. It was larger than most structures here.
“Welcome to your new home, Mister Drummond.”
Blake stopped. The first panicked thought was that this was a prison. There was a faint hiss of air pressure, and a door slid open. A person in a dark-brown assassin mech suit stepped out.
“Care to explain, Gallows?” Blake asked, flexing the fingers of his right hand.
He was suddenly aware that he was trapped in the headquarters of people who had nothing to stop them from killing him where he stood. Blake didn’t care for the feeling.
“What’s this about, commander?” echoed the person in the suit. The voice was neutral, and the mech wasn’t moving, but its stance was ready for combat.
“Meet your newest recruit, Nat. The jungle smiles upon us.”
Nat didn’t even turn her head to him. Blake knew that the suits’ sensors gave 360-degree vision, but most operators still moved the same as they did in ordinary life.
“So you picked up a stray,” she said. “Half a year—this is how long I’ve been training my unit. We are deploying in two weeks.”
“This is Blake Drummond,” said Samuel. “One of the best engineers their side had.”
“Really?” she asked, and Blake thought he heard some interest in her voice, although she still didn’t move. “I still say we don’t need him. The plan is solid, and my people have it drilled into their bones. And how is he not dead, commander?”
“He can answer for himself, thank you,” said Blake. “The self-destruct system didn’t survive when I landed in the jungle.”
She did turn her head this time with a deliberate motion, only it was to Samuel and not to him. Nat said, “I don’t believe him. We have been trying to disable ours for months—no good. And he doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut.”
Samuel took a step forward, and only now did Blake realize that the Ascended was taller than an assassin mech—about seven-five. “And you, Commander Fisher, are forgetting that I am your superior. Just like you are Mister Drummond’s,” he said. “We have someone with expertise of setting up Council cyber-defenses. We would be foolish to pass up the opportunity.” He looked at Blake out of the corner of his right eye. “Even if his tale about the self-destruct is suspicious.”
She didn’t say anything or move for a minute before turning around and going back into the building.
“What are you waiting for, Mister Drummond?” Samuel asked. “Follow your commander.”
They entered a spherical room. A dozen tiny lamps in the ceiling battled the gloom and lost. The place was far too Spartan, Blake thought. They passed between two squat tables, each placed near three bunks lining the curves of the walls on each side of the door. The entire space was maybe eighty square feet in size.
“Damn Freefolk. What did he promise you, Drummond?” asked Nat.
“Survival.”
“Heh, so not the same rosy shit that all of us were told.”
Half an hour later he was sitting on a branch above the settlement with Mei. He dialed up the sensitivity of the smell receptors, and the jungle filled with the saccharine notes of flowers underlined by a whiff of decay from all the plants that had lost the fight for sun and water. There was no smell of putrid flesh—only of foliage.
“The team will take some getting used to,” he said, laying his left palm against the bark. He felt the ridged texture, but it was as if his hand was numb. Mech suits didn’t have much use for tactile sensation.
Mei sat next to him swinging her legs. The branch creaked under seven hundred pounds of combined weight. She said, “Can I call you Blake?”
“After saving my life you can call me whatever you like.”
“Well, Blake, Republic mech pilots can get out of their suits whenever they want. Take a walk. Eat a snack. Have sex.”
Blake snorted and shook his head. “Come on, even I know that the body is pretty much frozen when we pilot. One nutrient tank lasts forever.”
“Not frozen. Slowed down,” Mei leaned over and flicked him in the metal forehead, grinning with her all-canine teeth. “And then there is the psychological. Knowing that you are physically able to do all those things but being kept from it by your suit? Tension builds, and people either snap or channel it into eccentricities.”
Blake looked down and saw the entirety of Hazy Meadows under them. They were up the oldest of redwoods way above the guard towers, and the town looked like an insect colony with tiny people scurrying on the motley carpet of moss.
“Not what you are used to?” Mei asked him, looking down without any fear. He wondered whether she could survive the fall. She said, “The Council builds their cities differently, doesn’t it? Still clinging to those Old Earth ideas.”
He said, “The Council has millions of people livi
ng in their cities. They need skyscrapers. Why the moss, though?”
The fox-woman shrugged. “What’s wrong with moss? Once you get rid of the larger plants and all the herbivores, moss takes over. It’s hard to clear up, and we wouldn’t want to. If we removed it, waist-high grasses would blanket everything, and those can be poisonous.”
Blake nodded absent-mindedly, his mind going back to Nat introducing him to the rest of the team that now rested in one of those buildings on the ground below. They had sat on their bunk beds, fronts of their helmets open, unblinking eyes peering into the humid air.
“I get that the pilots got stuck because Council systems were only partially hacked, but why do they open their helmets? An awful lot of trouble to go to when their nervous system is still plugged into the suit’s AI.” He leaned forward, maintaining perfect balance to stay on the branch. “Sheong, the chatty one, told me that the barracks have modified microclimate to fool the suits into thinking the helmet is still closed.”
“They can still see and hear a little,” Mei said, shaking her head. “And it makes all the difference after a couple months.”
“I don’t plan on being cooped up in this tin can for that long, love,” Blake said.
Mei sighed and looked up at a purpleheart that had decided to perch itself two feet above them. The mindless insect was slowly flapping its giant wings in front of Blake’s face, releasing a small cloud of glowing purple dust.
“Hey little guy,” he said. “Do I look like a butterfly?”
It was mating season, and purplehearts would play until they laid eggs. Pretty things, dying after one dance. He had visited brothels a few times, but found the experience too hollow to make it a habit. Now Blake found himself missing those tender hands and excited eyes.
“The inability to eat is the worst, I suppose,” he mused. “To never taste food—”
Mei snorted and said, “The previous Count was a shitbag, but he knew how to keep his army drugged on ecstasy. Those men and women in your squad? They are used to people doing all kinds of depraved things for them. They’ve been locked into their suits after being taught to dominate civilians. Feeling guilty and yet missing it.”
Blake frowned and peered into the darkness. “Nobody says Heatsworth’s predecessor’s name.”
“The man doesn’t deserve to be remembered by name. Under him, the only things Lankershire produced were whores, drugs to keep everyone numb, and mech suits to kill people when all else failed. Heatsworth turned all of it around in just three years.”
Blake perked up at the conversation flowing toward the man he was interested in.
Mei continued, “He also hacked his mech forces before anyone caught on. That was supposed to be impossible. In fact, I’m sure that if he didn’t need to attend all those Federation meetings, he would have found a way to get the soldiers out of those suits by now.”
“Why should he bother?” Blake asked, shrugging. “Soldiers being stuck increases battle readiness.”
“Because he cares.” Mei socked him in the shoulder with surprising strength, and he had to wave his hands to keep himself from plummeting to the town below.
Blake tilted his head toward her wishing he could shoot an affronted look. “All leaders say they care. None of them mean it.”
“He does,” said Mei, scowling at him. “Heatsworth could do anything after getting the county, but he decided to share his power with others. He reached out to us.”
Blake shrugged. There was no point arguing with a believer, and who knew? There was a chance that Mei was right.
4
Life at the Bottom
Chewing her hand off had seemed a brilliant idea at the time, but Tara was reconsidering. Pain is like that, she thought as she slumped against an alley wall behind a ruined entertainment center. Adrenalin was fading now, and she could feel the agony of where her forearm ended in a jagged stump. She had been able to stop the blood loss using what little nutrient reserves had survived the hit from that abomination: there had been no time to feed on her guard. But now she was empty, and cramps started all over her body as the nanites darted through the tissue, scrambling to rebuild their numbers and her flesh at the same time. Without the raw materials, they were doing more harm than good. She needed energy for them to repair their programming after what the inhibitor manacle had done to her, and she needed meat to grow her hand back.
Federation soldiers were probably following the trail she had left. At least she had passed through the ruins of the worst part of the entertainment district to throw off potential pursuers. There were dead bodies everywhere, but none were fresh enough. “We make our own luck,” her father had always said. Well, she would be happy to do that if she could find anything except half-rotten corpses and debris.
Tara slid down against an intact wall. She was so tired. She closed her eyes for a moment, and then a woman with crimson hair was kneeling in front of her.
“Hey, are you alright? Do you understand me? What’s your name?”
The human’s clothes looked like they had been picked from a charity bin, but small blue gems embedded into her forehead betrayed high social status. Must have run out of her home when it got hit by the artillery, Tara thought. She was young, no more than forty.
“Hey, please focus. Can you answer me?”
Tara nodded absent-mindedly. The smell of blood and flesh hung in the air like smog. There were bandages somewhere under the girl’s plain white pants and shirt. Tara breathed in, double-checking that her rescuer-to-be wasn’t an Ascended.
Tara said, “Everything is so blurry. I don’t think I can stand.”
The woman reached for Tara’s right hand but then jerked back from the cauterized stump. She said, “Those Federation assholes really got you, didn’t they? Don’t worry, there is a hospital a couple blocks from here. They may be bastards, but at least they allow the doctors to do their work.” She grasped Tara’s other hand and pulled her to her feet with some difficulty. “Your prosthetic will probably be better than the real thing. I’m Sidney, by the way.”
“Tara,” she answered without thinking.
Sidney nodded and threw Tara’s intact left arm over her shoulders to better support her weight. It was people like Sidney, Tara thought, that kept her from losing faith in humanity.
Sidney called out, “Hey, Jack, we’ve got a survivor here. Mind giving me a hand?”.
“Coming,” said someone with a feminine voice.
“Great, just hang on—” Sidney started saying when Tara leaned all her weight on her, and the pair started to tilt. “Tara, stay with me!”
Tara had almost no energy left, but it was enough to make sure she landed on top of Sidney, and that Sidney’s head landed on top of a sharp chunk of rubble. The sound of metal hitting stone echoed off the walls of the alley. Sidney looked puzzled as blood poured out of her scalp and onto the artificial stone behind her.
Tara said, “I wanted to make it quick. Blame yourself for coating your bones with metal.”
The woman was too stunned to react, or Tara wouldn’t have risked even this apology. With her last bit of strength, she put an arm over Sidney’s mouth, opened her jaws as far as they would go, and then closed them around the right side of Sidney’s neck. There was a surprised gurgle. Sidney died and became a sack of blood and meat. She tasted like salty cranberries.
All Tara had to do now was chew and gulp and try to keep silent. She needed some of her power back for what came next.
Combat or emergencies only, they taught every Ascended just after the change. Carry rations, they told girls and boys that had turned immortal. In a pinch hit a restaurant with raw steak, and it will sustain you until you get to somewhere with food. If you become important enough, you’ll have servants to feed from. Fuck that, she thought. Sidney might have been someone who gave her hope for humanity in an abstract rainbows-and-sunshine way, but it was people like Tara that the world needed to keep spinning.
The corpse had stopped thrash
ing twenty seconds before, and the blood was slowing down. Her exposed skin latched onto Sidney’s and recovering nanites got to work melting tissue and carrying the nutrients. Tara could feel her body calming, Sidney’s blood being absorbed into her own system and meat and bone becoming Tara’s long-term stockpile.
“Hey, Sidney, are you okay? She looks heavy, why did you try to carry her alone?”
That must be Jack, she thought. Tara made sure that her hair covered the corpse’s neck and went still on top of the body. Some more power returned to her muscles while she waited for the other woman—or a man who sounded like a woman—to get closer. Tara didn’t judge people based on gender or partner choices—she wasn’t a bigot.
Jack got close enough to see, and Tara heard a startled intake of breath, the kind that came before a scream. That inhale let Tara track Jack’s position though.
She pushed at the corpse she had been lying atop. She felt ribs snap under her fingers as she was launched from the ground and in the direction of the voice. She twisted in the air in a display of clumsy acrobatics and discovered she was off by a foot. Tara continued the spin and kicked at someone bald and tall. With a scragging pop, her combat boots caved in the right side of Jack’s skull.
As she killed Jack, she felt a stab of desperate longing for the woman. She and Sidney must have been together. When she fed deep, some emotions transferred and some she imagined. Well, she wouldn’t abandon Jack here—she would carry her inside herself.
After Tara was done with the pair, she hauled what remained of the corpses into the mall ruins and collapsed a ceiling section upon them with a well-placed kick to a supporting pillar. At least, they would rest together, she thought with the slightest pang of guilt. Killing humans was bad form for an Ascended, like torturing kittens or sleeping with a body pillow. But there was one of Tara’s kind per thousands and thousands of Jack and Sidney’s, and while the Council struggled to raise the Ascended population, it also struggled to keep the human population down. Once in a couple hundred years raising children would come into fashion and forcing the demographic pendulum back was a chore at best and psychological warfare at worst. She had done Terra Nox a favor, she reasoned, and what were two more victims in a battle that had probably cost half the city their lives?
