by Joel Dane
When I realize I’m getting priority treatment, I feel a twist of dread. Not because I don’t deserve special treatment, even though I don’t. I mean, who knows how many unsung heroes like that CrediMobil rampart squad saved lives? I’ll still accept undeserved benefits, of course: I’m a gutterboy, not a Class A shareholder; I’ll take whatever isn’t bolted down.
The dread is because I’ve made myself too visible. I’ve drawn attention to myself like a search beam at midnight . . . and roaches die in the light.
Forty-seven new messages flash on my lens. Forty-six of them are from officers and executives, with congratulations and commendations. And probably orders, but I hide behind my medical status and don’t acknowledge any updated duties.
One message is from Rana. A regular message. Nothing covert, nothing classified. She doesn’t even mention trying to get back to Earth. She’s just saying hello.
The sound of her unmusical voice joins all my broken places. She chats for a moment, then roller-coasters me through a fast-motion version of one of her “average days.” It’s a standard template of channel fluff, but it makes me smile. Not because of the herky-jerky experience and the silly zero-gravity sight gags. Because the thought of Rana sending me something so whimsical soothes me better than the narcotic tubes I’m swallowing.
I play through three times before responding with a quick, breezy message. I don’t mention lampreys or CAVs. I don’t mention Voorhivey’s death or Shakrabarti’s injury. Not because I’m trying to protect her. Rana can take care of herself. What I’m trying to protect is my picture of her, floating happily above me, an unseen star in my personal heaven.
Down on Earth, M’bari visits medical bay and tells me Ting is still in recovery and Cali is in the brig for shooting that officer. He’s not worried, though. The officer lived, and the Calil-Du family is wealthy enough to negotiate a proxy sentence or a wergild settlement for any crimes Cali commits, up to and including wiping out an orphanage.
“Don’t give her any ideas,” I say.
M’bari grins. “And given that we actually beat the lampreys? She’ll be released with commendations on her braid.”
“She’ll like that,” I say. “How’s Shakrabarti?”
“Wishing that he only lost a few toes, but he’ll recover.”
“Pretty as ever?”
“We can only hope.” M’bari takes a breath. “Listen, I tried to come with you. I’m not saying I wanted to, but I tried. My CAV wouldn’t respond. I didn’t just leave you hanging.”
I already know that. Ting couldn’t work her genefreek magic on M’bari’s CAV, and he doesn’t know how to zero out his brainwaves in any case.
“Sure,” I scoff. “Like you weren’t hanging back, calculating the ROI of letting me die.”
He nods, playing along. “Corporate policy frowns on risking my Class B life for a Freehold roach.”
“Class B? You’re not a sniff above C.”
“Not yet,” he says, taking my hand in both of his. “But after I vest, my whole family’s moving up to the bottom of the middle.”
I squeeze his fingers. “I never would’ve made it without you.”
“I didn’t do anything. I just told you what I was seeing.”
“You told me what I wasn’t seeing.”
“Well, you were busy at the time. And uh . . .” He opens a private link and lenses the rest: “You showed the corpos a powerful weapon, Kaytu. They will take a keen interest in you.”
The last thing I want is Command focusing on me. “I didn’t show them anything.”
“You paired with a CAV.”
“Not really. I mean, it was all that techie with the cloisonné forehead.”
M’bari catches on immediately. “Is that what happened?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll tell Jag.” He closes the link and speaks aloud. “Our debriefs start in thirty. She’s supposed to be meeting me here in—”
“Now,” Jag says, stepping through the film.
I stare in horror at Jag’s face. “What happened to you?”
“What?” She touches her cheek in alarm. “What?”
“There’s panda marks all over you.”
She snorts. “Oh! I almost forgot.”
“What?”
“This”—she backhands my nose—“is from Cali.”
“Ow! Ow! Gutterdammit, Jagzenka. That hurt.”
“And this is from me,” she says, and kisses me.
“C’mon,” M’bari tells her. “We’re due to report.”
Jag strokes my cheek. “That rampart soldier who saved us? The one you asked about? Her name was Dodovatova. Her squad called her Tova.”
“That’s a good name,” I say.
“Cover your ass,” M’bari lenses me as they leave.
I lie there for a while, making sure I know what he means. Nobody cares about my background, not really. Nobody knows about my grandmother—not even the Djembe. Maybe not even Ting. So there’s no problem except the CAVs. Command thinks I know how to pair to one. That’s not a small thing.
M’bari was warning me about the expectations of overeager officers, but the real problem is, how do I explain what happened without getting Ting killed? I guess I’ll claim I got lucky and I’ll push the cloisonné Tech Specialist into the spotlight.
Except what if they notice anomalies? I need Ting to fiddle with the surveillance records. If Command realizes that a technopath messed with the CAVs, they’ll vivisect her.
I’ve been ordered to report to a bridge-level conference room upon discharge. No doubt for a debrief about the CAV-pairing. Strictly speaking, I’m contractually obliged to respond with all due haste, but instead I request information about Ting’s location.
She’s four floors below me in this labyrinth of a carrier. Ten minutes later, I find her in a medical wing with eighty patients lining the walls, most of them cocooned in treatment film.
Ting looks like a little girl in her pod. She’s not in recovery, she’s in thera-sleep. She’s lacquered with film inside and out. It’s breathing for her, pumping for her. Whatever she did to pair me with that CAV is killing her. She pushed her limits for us, and now she’s paying the price.
And the medics removed her lenses; her pupils are golden. The sight makes my breath catch. I don’t know how to help her, but we’ve come this far together. I won’t leave her behind.
“What’s wrong with her?” I ask a passing nursurgeon.
The nursurgeon lenses me a wall of medical jargon without slowing.
I grab her arm a little too hard. “Use little words.”
“She’s having an idiosyncratic reaction to lamprey contact,” the nursurgeon says, jerking her arm away. “The same thing that’s wrong with everyone in this ward. We don’t know. Some lost consciousness, some lost brain function. Your friend is mimicking stem withdrawal.”
“Stem withdrawal?”
“Look at her. The golden pupils? That’s a symptom.”
“So she . . . you mean she looks like an addict even though she never touched the stuff?”
“I’ve got four patients covered in crystal welts.” The nursurgeon shakes her head and keeps moving. “And you are not helping.”
The good news is that in the future, Ting’s medical file will claim she’s not a stemhead, she’s just suffering from a strange side effect of lamprey contact.
The bad news is that she doesn’t have a future.
She’s going through stem withdrawal. When’s the last time she dosed herself? She needs stem or she’ll convulse like a junkie and die like a technopath.
Her stash is in the base below us. Hidden impossibly away. I’m adequate at picking locks but I’ll never find a strip of stem hidden on a military base by a technopath.
So I sit beside her and stroke her arm with my fingertips.
I tell her what happened. I tell her I miss her and I study a projection of medicarrier-to-base traffic flow grids. Getting to Ayko Base to search for her stem is easy. Join a volunteer rescue team and I’m there. Of course, I’ll need to keep ignoring the summons to the conference room, but in the chaos maybe that’ll go unnoticed.
Sure. The service is always happy with selective obedience.
Except what happens once I touch down? I don’t even know where to start looking for Ting’s stash. Her room? Too obvious. The common areas? Too overwhelming.
While I’m flicking through schematics, one of the columns in my lens blurs. The image turns fuzzy, then clears. Then blurs, then clears, in a familiar rhythm.
When I stop stroking Ting’s arm, the blurring stops. I frown and watch the column superimposed over Ting’s thera-sleeping face.
I move my fingers again and the data blurs.
Every time I touch her, there’s another blur.
“Can you hear me?” I whisper, my finger motionless.
A blur.
“That’s a yes?”
Another blur.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Do you need . . .” I don’t want to say stem, even though if Ting is monitoring this conversation, she’s no doubt blocking surveillance. “. . . what I think you need?”
The entire output of my lens blurs wildly.
“Okay, okay! Settle down. Is it in your room?”
No blur. Which I guess means no.
“Is it on base?”
A blur. Yes.
“You’re going to have to lead me to the right place, one step at a time. Can you do that?”
Another blur.
“Well, this is going to be tedious.” I squeeze her arm. “If tedious means what I think.”
CHAPTER 62
I catch a cable car to the surface. Rescue and Retrieve is based at the Welcome 12 sports field. Crisis engineers and combat architects bustle around in lens-synced motion, while clouds of moskito-sniffers and EMtechs deploy from bubbledrones.
A few queries hit my lens, requesting my presence at the bridge-level briefing. I blank the messages and head through the managed chaos toward my squad’s barracks.
Every time my lens blurs, I pause. I turn until the blurring clears, then head in that direction. I’m just a fleshy lumbering drone, trying to look busy and focused. Nobody bothers me after the first minute—
Until the Djembe flashes an override on my lens.
I don’t accept, but that doesn’t matter. I can’t blank an override. Not hers, at least.
“Mar Kaytu,” she says, her face appearing. “You requested a meeting?”
I didn’t. I didn’t request a meeting and I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what she wants, or how she’s going to react to my failure to leave Javelin immediately.
However, my lens blurs so I say, “Yes.”
“Next time, approach me with a little more subtlety.”
“Sorry,” I say, wondering how Ting contacted her.
“Not to worry. The coin of my realm is favors, and I suspect that you’re about to put yourself deeper in my debt.”
“That sounds right,” I say, trying to figure what the gehenna is going on. Ting put me in contact with the Djembe. Why? Because she agrees with M’bari, that we’re in some kind of danger. “I think I need to cover my ass.”
“Let me tell you what I think. I think you proved me wrong.”
“Oh,” I say.
“In the end, your contribution was not negligible. Quite the contrary. You saved a lot of lives, Mar Kaytu. More than anyone knows. You killed a lamprey, and—” She pauses. “You killed three.”
“Yes, san,” I say.
“The research units are humming with activity. They have the specimens they need. For the first time, we have a chance against these things. You did an extraordinary thing.”
“Well, um . . .” I follow my lens past a mound of rubble, still scrambling to understand what Ting expects of me. Probably to cover our asses, like M’bari said. “That’s the problem. I’m too visible.”
“In what way?”
I don’t know what I’m saying, I don’t know what I’m doing in this conversation and I hear myself blurt, “I mean, whoever’s behind the lampreys, what if they track this to me?”
“There is nothing behind remorts except the terrafixing.”
“Um, yeah, but . . .” I wince inwardly. “I mean, if they’re remorts. I heard that maybe they’re intelligent.”
“Do they seem intelligent to you?”
“No. I don’t know. They’re not human, I don’t know.” I take a breath. “My buddy M’bari says I need to cover my ass. He thinks DivCom is going to strap me to a table and run tests until they learn how I paired with a CAV. But I don’t know anything. I can’t help them. I was just . . . right place, right time.”
“Is that what you’re afraid of?” she asks. “Being strapped to a table? Or are you frightened that your past will come to light?”
Does she mean Vila Vela? Does she know about Sayti? “I’m afraid of everything, san.”
“Your Vila Vela ID is . . . curious.”
My heart clenches. “It was a curious time.”
“You apparently sprang fully born from the alleys at the age of eleven.”
“Maybe I’m a remort,” I say, trying to hide my fear behind flippancy. “After Sweetwater died, the records went wonky.”
The Djembe’s virtual face inspects me. I feel her attention like a blade at my neck. “I’m less interested in what you were, Mar Kaytu, than in what you’ll become.”
“I’d rather—” I clear my throat. “I’d rather not become strapped to a table.”
“Mm,” she says. “That sounds wasteful.”
“Yes, san,” I say.
Silence falls as Ting leads me through nonfunctional security film into the pool building. I feel sick about the Djembe rummaging around in my past. I’m not surprised, though. Just scared and ashamed. At least she doesn’t know the truth—not yet.
“Tech Specialist Gaaldine is claiming that he paired you with the CAV,” she finally says, “despite his inability to replicate the feat. Is that what happened?”
Ah. Ting must’ve intercepted traffic wondering how I paired with a CAV. I need to shut down that question before anyone even thinks the word technopath. The cloisonné tech is the answer; in a moment of inspired genius, he pushed the bounds of the possible.
“Well, this is the guy who decoupled the CAVs.” I lens the Djembe a picture of the tech. “He’s the one who paired me.”
“Yes. That’s Tech Specialist Gaaldine.”
“I guess he’s got a, a special interest in CAVs. Judging from his forehead.”
“According to his file, he’s an innovative thinker.” A gleam shines in the Djembe’s eyes. “Though he barely scraped through training on account of all the reprimands.”
I don’t rise to the bait. “He’s the reason we won, san. He’s some kind of genius. He’s the key, he’s the hero. So, um, it makes sense to . . .”
“To increase his visibility, instead of yours?”
“Fair is fair.”
“And if he ends up strapped to a table?”
“They wouldn’t really do that, would they?”
“And risk losing their only edge in this fight? No. Also, shareholders have rights.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s all I wanted to tell you. That, um—that I’m just an innocent bystander here. I drove, but Gaaldine turned the key.”
The Djembe hears something in my voice. “This is not the time to lie, Mar Kaytu.”
Shit! She’s too smart. She’s going to keep digging into this until she reaches Ting. Unless I distract her. “Yeah. Yes. There’s more that I’m not telling you.”
“Mm. I’ve
learned to expect that.”
“I don’t know how, but he—Gaaldine pulled off a miracle. He gave me control of a CAV. That’s all true. That’s the first step.”
“The next step is you?” she asks.
“The next step is me,” I agree, pausing in a ruined hallway. “I’m a good match with a CAV.”
“Why?”
“Because I survived being a cry pilot? I don’t know, I just—I understand them.”
“What do you understand?”
“That’s the wrong word. I feel them. We fit.”
“What aren’t you telling me, Mar Kaytu?”
“Well, um.” I take a breath. “I meditate. To clear my mind.”
“You meditate?”
“Yeah, I learned in the refugee camp.” I explain about Ionesca’s lessons, though I don’t describe the specific cultish method. “I think it helped Gaaldine pair me.”
She gives me a thoughtful pause. “There are SICLE techs that synced with dendritic cascades. Illegal now, of course, in these more enlightened times.”
“You think CAVs use illegal tech?”
“I think I won’t raise that question. We need CAVs more than ever.”
“Yes, san,” I say.
“I also think that Javelin needs you, Mar Kaytu.” The Djembe wields her smile again. “I sound like one of my grandson’s channels, but perhaps the Earth needs you. I’ll pass along the information.”
I exhale. “Thanks. And, uh, I can stay with Javelin?”
“For now.”
“Good.” I manage not to laugh. “Great.”
“One day I’ll call in your debt.”
“One day I’ll pay it,” I promise.
The connection ends and I find myself standing in the pool building. I’m impressed that Ting—even unconscious—managed to detect trouble and try to keep us safe. I’m also terrified that a technopath can do that.
Mostly, though, I’m worried that the Djembe will unearth our secrets. I don’t mind so much about mine. Well, my stomach sours at the thought of being exposed as complicit in the Plaguemaker of Vila Vela’s war crimes. They’d discharge me and lock me in blinders, but that pales beside what they’d do to Ting. They’d run wires into her brain and turn her into a thing.
