Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  Grace made a noncommittal noise. “I’ll see. My time isn’t my own.”

  “I’m aware,” said Shah, in a way that made Grace think that she really was. “My offer wasn’t just for the debrief. You’re welcome to join us.”

  Grace took that in in silence. There was no need for any further words between them. Given the disaster that the mission had turned into, they’d all be getting an earful soon enough.

  • • •

  Monsignor Angiuli smacked the folder onto his desk with a force that set his pens rattling in their leather holder. “You assured me that this was an operation vital to the aims and mission of the Society,” he hissed at Menchú. “I called in favors. I brought in the other teams on your recommendation. On your word, the Society has been more public in the last forty-eight hours than we have been in the last four hundred years, and then… this happens.”

  The viciousness of that “this” overflowed with the venom of the mission’s disaster. Menchú felt it keenly. Liam was missing, and with every passing hour he was falling farther from their grasp. Still, now was not the time for guilt or recrimination.

  “We’re already working with the Orb to try to reach Liam. We can’t get any read on his location, but the connection he had has not been severed. Asanti is optimistic that we may be able to send him some kind of message. In the meantime, if we could coordinate with Team Two, we might be able to—”

  Throughout this, Angiuli’s face had grown redder and redder until he rose from his chair and smacked his hands down on his desk beside the folder. Menchú stopped speaking, confused.

  “He’s still connected to the Orb?”

  Menchú nodded. “Yes, we’re not sure how, but—”

  “Cut him off. Immediately.”

  Menchú’s mouth went dry. “What?”

  “I have been given reason to believe that your agent was complicit in his own abduction. It is the only explanation for how he and his accomplices in the Network were able to disappear so quickly and completely, avoiding both Grace and Team One—”

  This time, it was Menchú’s turn to interrupt. “Excuse me, Monsignor.” He leaned on the other man’s title, because the only alternative was to address his superior with a term far less forgivable. “What do you mean, his ‘accomplices’?”

  “Your man’s past known associates include members of the Network, correct?”

  “He has a name. If you’re going to accuse my colleague of the past nine years of betraying his work, his friends, and his Church, please give him the courtesy of using it.”

  Angiuli struggled for a moment, and then calmed. Seating himself behind his desk once more, he said, “Liam’s known associates include members of this so-called Network. True or false?”

  “Past associates.”

  “True or false?”

  “True.”

  “Do you have another explanation for how he was able to vanish from a train car in the middle of the Alps?”

  With effort, Menchú mastered his own temper, and calmly counted possibilities on his fingers. “Technology? Magic? A combination of both? You’ve known Liam for years. Where is this coming from?”

  Menchú noticed that Angiuli studiously did not look at the report sitting on his desk. “You are ordered to take all necessary steps to secure the Archives and the Society against incursions from the Network.” He paused. “Be they technological, magical, or both. Dismissed.”

  Menchú left Angiuli’s office in a daze. He was prepared to cut the man a certain amount of slack owing to the pressure he must be under after the failure of such a large operation. But to write Liam off as an acceptable loss, or worse, to condemn him as a traitor? There was a limit to his sympathy, and that was long past it.

  By the time Menchú had reached the Archives, his mood had not improved. Sal had placed herself at Liam’s desk. Asanti and Frances were in deep consultation over the Orb. They all looked up as Menchú descended.

  “How did it go?” asked Sal.

  Menchú felt sick as he told them. “It was Shah’s report,” he finished. “I could see her name on the folder.”

  Sal’s eyes hardened. “I’ll kill her.”

  “You’ll do no such thing.”

  “I’m not leaving Liam in the wind for this!”

  “Of course not,” said Menchú. He turned to include Asanti and Frances as well. “None of us are. We have been ordered to do whatever is necessary to secure the Archives against incursion or attack by the Network. In my book, the first way we do that is to get Liam back.”

  Sal nodded, relaxing fractionally.

  “This wouldn’t have happened if we’d done this on our own.”

  Asanti’s voice was low, and for a moment Menchú wasn’t sure she had intended for him to hear. Then he saw her face.

  “Do you have anything helpful to contribute?” he asked.

  Asanti did not waver. “I might. It will require further experimentation with the Orb.”Which you aren’t going to like hung between them, unspoken. Daring him to challenge her.

  The silence stretched.

  Menchú declined her invitation.

  “Do what you have to do. Let’s get our man home.”

  And with that, they went to work.

  • • •

  Startled out of sleep by the bang of a door slamming open, it took Liam a moment to remember where he was. He was lying—sleeping? passed out?—on a sagging sofa covered in a chenille that smelled like mildew and the seventies. If the rest of the decor of the tiny flat was anything to go by, it had had plenty of company on its trip into the twenty-first century.

  The crash pad looked like it had been assembled by frat boys after a drunken raid on a charity shop. Was that really a heart of Jesus lamp sitting on the milk-crate-turned-end-table in the corner? It looked like something out of his great aunt’s house. Liam blinked to get a better look at his surroundings. The furniture was there mostly as a way to keep piles of computer equipment off the floor. There was something familiar about the place, but aside from vague feelings about the lamp, Liam couldn’t place what.

  The last thing he could remember was—

  “Hey!” A voice—attached to the person responsible for opening the door and waking him up in the first place—jerked Liam’s mind away from his memory. Liam squinted at the pale figure looking down on him. He knew him. What was he called again? Opus? Optimus?

  Liam sat up with a groan. He was sure he would be able to think of the guy’s name if his head weren’t pounding quite so hard. The new guy smirked. “You must have been on one hell of a bender last night.”

  Was I? Liam didn’t think he did that anymore. But his head certainly felt like he’d tied one on, and who was he to argue with his own head?

  “Did you get the relays working?”

  Liam squinted. “The whats?”

  “The relays. The ones that need to be up and running for the beta test?” Reading Liam’s confusion off his expression, the new guy shook his head. “Oh man, you’d better hope you did, or the HBIC is going to be pissed.” There was a pause and then he added, “American style, not British.”

  Annoyance brought the new guy’s name back to Liam. “Who are you calling British, Opie?”

  New guy scowled, and Liam awarded himself a point.

  His feeling of satisfaction vanished an instant later when a figure appeared behind Opie in the doorway. This time, recognition came instantly.

  “Christina?”

  “Well,” she asked, “did you fix the relays?”

  What are these relays everyone keeps talking about? Liam was about to demand to know just that, but as he opened his mouth, Christina frowned, and he was seized by a sudden wave of vertigo.

  Something wasn’t right.

  Liam lurched to his feet—so he could leave, demand answers, do something—but his inner ear rebelled and he swayed off vertical. And then Christina’s hand was on his elbow, holding him steady, and the world stopped spinning.

  �
��Liam. Liam? Are you with me?”

  Liam blinked, caught by her blue eyes.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  She patted him on the arm, her small hand familiar against his bicep. “You had a hell of a night. It’s going to take a bit for your brain to put itself back together.” Her words had the ring of truth, and Liam’s stomach settled a little further. “Are you feeling better now?”

  Liam nodded. “Yeah.” Weirdest hangover ever.

  Christina released his arm and gave a brisk nod in return. “So. The relays?”

  “The relays.”

  “Yes.” Despite Opie’s bluster, Christina didn’t really seem that angry as she waited for his answer. Expectant, maybe. Hopeful. “Remember them?” she prodded gently when he didn’t answer.

  I don’t remember, Liam thought—and then he did. “Fuck.” The relays. For the beta test. The whole reason they’d come here in the first place. Christina smiled as it all came flooding back to him.

  “Coming back now?”

  “Yeah.” Liam let himself fall into a comfortable slouch. “I don’t suppose you’d be here asking after them if they’d magically fixed themselves during the night?”

  “I don’t think that’s how magic works, more’s the pity.”

  Liam snorted. “In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never pitied me once.”

  Christina grinned up at Liam and he wanted to burn the world for her. “Well, I hope you’re not getting soft in your old age, because I’m pretty sure the next step is for you to go out and check the hardware.”

  “No rest for the wicked?”

  “Not even a little,” she said. And kissed him. Liam kissed her back. It felt like coming home.

  In the doorway, Opie made a disgusted noise and left.

  2.

  One of the things that Liam appreciated about his native country was that somehow, on a small island, it was still possible to have a village that was—for all intents and purposes—in the middle of nowhere. Case in point, this one was so isolated it didn’t even have a name. It was just “the village.” Everyone in the area knew exactly where you meant. And if someone wasn’t from the area, they probably didn’t have any business finding the village in the first place.

  It sometimes felt as if the village had been placed on earth specifically to suit the Network’s needs. If Liam had been a more religious person, he would have taken it as a sign from God. Too bad for God that Liam hadn’t been to church in more than a decade.

  Still, ideally constructed for the Network’s needs or not, their first tests of their integrated systems weren’t working, and since everyone was morally certain there wasn’t a problem with the code, it was time for Liam to get out and troubleshoot the hardware side of the equation. Which saw Liam walking half a kilometer down the main road out of town to a small pond fed by an underground stream.

  The village was supposed to be a testing ground for the Network’s next step in biocomputer development. They’d managed to get reliable results using systems at the scale of a tank full of seahorses, but the holy grail of biocomputing had always been to step things up to the next level: larger and more complex systems. The logical step forward from a fish tank was a pond. The processors were still mainly driven by analyzing fish movement, but now they could add in data from the hundred additional eco-niches of the natural environment. That was the theory, anyway. In practice, it wasn’t working.

  As the pond came into view around a bend in the road, the first thing Liam noticed was that it was completely choked with algae. As Liam watched, a fish floated up to the surface of the water. It lay unmoving on its side, one glassy eye staring blindly toward the sun.

  Well, he thought, there’s your problem.

  Liam turned around and went in search of a skimmer.

  • • •

  The sun was high and Liam could feel his shirt sticking to his back when he heard a woman’s voice behind him say, “Oh, man, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  He looked up to find a woman wearing jeans and a button-down watching him from the side of the road. “Yeah?” he said.

  “Do you know where we are?” she asked. She had an American accent, which was a little odd, but Ireland was full of Americans looking for their roots on heritage tours or some such, and he supposed this was as good a place as any to get lost on the way to finding yourself.

  “It’s the village,” said Liam.

  “What village?” the woman pressed.

  “Just the village,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Head down the road and you’ll come to a place with a name soon enough.”

  The woman gave him an odd look. “Liam,” she said, “do you not know—”

  “How do you know my name?” he interrupted.

  The woman’s mouth opened, then shut. “I—”

  But she was cut off by another shout from the road: Opie. “Hey, Liam, how’s the hardware problem coming?”

  A last pass of the skimmer and the pond was clear. “Halfway solved,” Liam said. “Now we just need some new fish.” Although, as Liam said this, a large carp rose to the surface, lipping at a bug. “Or not.” It must have been hiding at the bottom.

  Opie nodded. “Let’s head back to the servers, then,” he suggested. “See if that fixed the problem.”

  Liam nodded and turned back to follow up with the American, but she was already gone. Tourists, he thought. What a pain in the ass.

  • • •

  Sal felt Asanti’s hand on her shoulder. “Let it go,” she said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  Sal tried to shake her off, but the archivist’s grip was surprisingly strong. “No, I was there,” Sal insisted. “I found him.”

  But she let her hand fall away from the Orb as Asanti led her to a chair, which she sank into with more relief than she could conceal.

  “You found Liam, yes,” Menchú reassured her. “Then what happened?”

  Sal sighed. “He didn’t know who I was,” she admitted. “Or if he did, he wasn’t showing any sign of it. It’s like he’s been brainwashed. I found him by a pond cleaning out algae.”

  “Why would the Network kidnap him and then put him to work as a groundskeeper?” asked Grace. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “That’s why I have to get back in there,” said Sal. “So I can figure out where this village is and get him out of there.”

  Asanti looked to Frances, hovering by the Orb and making extensive notations. Frances shook her head.

  “It’s possible,” Asanti said, ignoring Sal’s comment entirely, “that the village isn’t a real place in the physical world. You were communicating directly with Liam’s mind, and it might not be giving him good information.”

  Grace frowned. “So the Network has Liam, and they’re doing something to his brain, and he’s interpreting it as clearing algae out of a pond?”

  Asanti shrugged. “Something like that.”

  “Which means we still don’t know anything more than we did before Sal was able to make her connection,” said Menchú.

  “Not quite,” Frances put in. She blushed in the silence that followed. “I mean, we know that Liam is still alive. We know that he seems relatively cogent, but he doesn’t recognize Sal. And we know that he’s been set to accomplish some task that even he might not fully understand the meaning of.”

  “Fine,” said Grace, “but that still leaves us with two big questions: What are they doing, and how do we stop them?”

  3.

  Back in the flat, Liam found, to his disappointment, that clearing the pond had not fixed the problem.

  Of course it didn’t. That would be too easy.

  Rather than going back to banging his head against the code, Liam went for a walk to try to get a new angle on the problem.

  He found himself at the pond, now bubbling and clear, with a dozen different kinds of fish tracing intricate patterns below the surface. He felt a keen sense of satisfaction with a job well done, marred on
ly by the nagging thought that the patterns he was looking at were somehow familiar. But that was impossible.

  Nature was random, that was the whole point of using it for their project. Project to do what, again?

  Before Liam could explore that line of thought, Christina arrived. He must have been really lost in his own head not to notice her coming. “How’s it looking?” she asked.

  Liam shrugged. “You know how it is: We clear up one problem, something goes wrong somewhere else.” They’d been here for months, playing metaphorical (and on one occasion, literal) whack-a-mole to try to implement a system that didn’t want to be implemented. “What if it’s systemic?” he asked suddenly.

  “The whole point is to be systemic, Liam.”

  “No, I mean, it’s like… when your dog has fleas. You can dip your dog and clean your house all you want, but it doesn’t do you any good if the neighbors’ dog is infested. Your dog is going to keep bringing home fleas.”

  “You think all the problems we’ve been having could come from a single underlying source?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “But what? Where? We did a complete survey when we got here; we accounted for everything.”

  Liam sighed. As soon as she said it, he knew it was true. Still. “People have lived on this island for thousands of years. Every village has secrets, even if no one knows they’re there.”

  Christina frowned. “I’m not sure that applies in this case, Liam.” But he could tell she was considering it, looking out into the middle distance, for a moment unguarded and lost in thought. Liam followed her gaze to the horizon. Not that the horizon was very far. The village was built in a small valley, surrounded by hills on all sides, and looking out was like standing in the bottom of a bowl and looking up at the rim.

  “I’ll check into it,” she said finally. “But in the meantime, I have another job for you.”

  “Yeah? Is it a dirty job?” Liam asked, wagging an eyebrow suggestively. She laughed, but dodged away instead of leaning in for the kiss.