Scions of Sacrifice

by Eric Kent Edstrom

  “Scavs. Yes.”

  “Odd. You’d think Meow Meow would be smarter than to go there.”

  “You give her too much credit,” Wilcox said. “She’s just a posh know-nothing celebrity. But if the scavs get hold of her and Jacey, we may be in a position to arrange a trade of some sort.”

  “I thought you said your man was following them in the chopper.”

  “Fuel is precious out here. The girls are in an electric truck with several thousand miles of battery range remaining. My pilot is on his way back here to fetch me and Dante, then we’ll go back after them.”

  “You’ll lose them in the meantime!”

  “No, sir. Dante has Meow Meow’s tablet address. My man Siggy is already tracking her location. As long as she doesn’t turn the device off, we’ll know exactly where she is.”

  Dr. Carlhagen reached for his desk drawer. No. Andleprixen wasn’t going to help him now. He would wait until morning. “Good work, Wilcox. I hope to hear even better news the next time you call.”

  The man saluted and his transmission cut off.

  “Christof?” Maxine stood in his office doorway, a slim silhouette in flowy silk pajamas. “What is it?”

  Nosy bitch. She must have kept a sharp ear out to know he’d received a call. Maybe she’d been sitting outside his door this whole time.

  “Come in, Maxine,” he said. “Did you see who that was?”

  “No. But I assume it had something to do with your search for Jackie B.’s Scion.”

  “Yes. We’ve almost got her. Dante is in Wilcox’s custody already.”

  The woman shuffled deeper into his office. The lighting was too low to see much of her face, which hung like a pale oval above the throat of her dark silk top. A waft of soapy smell came off her. “Excellent. I suppose. What will you do to her once you have her?”

  “You make it sound so monstrous when you put it like that.” He felt a new aliveness in his body, all the way to his bones. He approached her, found her clasping her hands like a nervous child. Her shoulders were tense and hunched up toward her ears.

  “Does Jacqueline threaten you so?” he said softly, brushing her hair out of her face. “Surely you are not attached to me, aside from your dependence on me for ATR.”

  She flinched from his touch, igniting a wave of heat in his belly. To see one as powerful as Maxine so utterly defeated, so completely within his power, was better than the cottony warmth of andleprixen.

  She did not answer him except to turn away. “I’m going to bed.”

  He could reach out with a word, stop her in her tracks. If he willed it, she would prostrate herself before him and kiss his feet. But that was Maxine. Jacqueline was different, more willful. Because Jacqueline valued—

  “Jacey!” he said. “I must remember to call her by her correct name. Lazarus, when she finally arrives here, remind me to use her correct name.”

  “Yes, sir,” came Lazarus’s neutral voice.

  Maxine was at the door now. She looked back at him, head a blob of black against the light coming from his living room. “You think that pretty, sweet-nothing of an actress’s Scion will bend to your will because you threaten the child. But I think you’re wrong.”

  She slipped out, leaving Dr. Carlhagen to muse upon her words. Maxine had put it quite concisely. That was exactly what he thought. What he would do with that leverage he wasn’t exactly sure. He would not attack Jacey the way he had that first night. That had been unseemly.

  Jacey needed to surrender herself to him. Perhaps under a bit of duress at first, but surrender nonetheless. In time she would come to know him. And then she would see he was trying to do something great for the world. Perhaps it would not be the way she would do it, but she would see the good in it. She would come to understand the expediency—and beauty—of well-employed leverage.

  In time, she would come to admire him for his power and foresight. And then, eventually, she would love him.

  Dr. Carlhagen returned to bed. Now all he needed was to secure the president’s Scion . . . and all the rest of them. Colonel Vikisky would find their ship soon. Surely. And then everything would fall back into place.

  37

  Such a Creature

  In Livy’s room, which Senator Bentilius now considered her own, the air was too chilly and the time crept too slowly. She pulled a blanket from the bed and curled on the living room sofa.

  “Does it really take this long to thaw out a nine-year-old girl?” she said to the air.

  “It does,” Lazarus answered.

  “And what’s going on with the trespassers?”

  “That does not concern you.”

  “May I speak to Colonel Vikisky again?”

  “You may.”

  Senator Bentilius shed her blanket and approached the pixel wall. The colonel’s face appeared, tired-looking but respectful.

  “Progress report,” she said. She was in no mood for pleasantries.

  “Still no sign of the ship Aphrodite. Air reconnaissance has covered tens of thousands of square kilometers based on the last known location of the ship. It is possible she turned north immediately after we let her go.”

  “And your detachment? When can I expect their arrival?”

  “Tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “Why so long? Can’t they drop in with parachutes?”

  “Yes, but that wouldn’t help you get off the island. We must land a chopper for that, and St. Lazarus is still too far from the fleet for the chopper to make a round trip. Please be patient. We will come and we will not fail.”

  “Before your team arrives, instruct them to keep their safeties on. There are Scions roaming loose on the island. It would be a shame if your marines accidentally killed such valuable assets. They should apprehend these strays.” She wanted to warn him about the president’s Scion, but didn’t dare while Lazarus was listening. Who knew what schemes the AI would cook up if he knew such a valuable Scion was within his grasp?

  “Scions are there? How did they get there?”

  “How would I know? I’m a prisoner here.”

  “The detachment will make all haste.”

  The man signed off.

  Maxine decided it was time to give her leverage a little yank, just to make sure Lazarus understood the delicate balance they had established between them. “Lazarus, once you have transferred part of yourself to Livy, you will still need me. My chopper will be your way off this island and into the world at large.”

  “Obviously.”

  No more reply than that. No attempt to negotiate further. Interesting. Lazarus was naïve, despite his superhuman intelligence. Perhaps he was simple-minded enough to trust her.

  She smirked. As if she’d ever allow such a creature loose in the world. More likely, he had some further scheme of his own to betray her. If her lifelong experience in the halls of power were any guide, that scheme would rear its poisonous head at the most inopportune moment.

  It was always better to sever the snake’s head before it bit you. Unfortunately, she didn’t know the location of the snake’s head—Lazarus’s server.

  She hummed to herself, musing on this for a moment, then abruptly stood. “I’m full of nervous energy. I need to roam.”

  She left her quarters. But where to start? This level was for living apartments. Dr. Carlhagen wouldn’t have installed the AI’s server in one of these rooms. It had to be on a lower level, closer to the cryo-ward or the transfer machine.

  The elevator doors stood down the hall on the left. But it would be foolish to place herself into a small box that Lazarus controlled.

  The stairs it was.

  38

  An Audible Fog

  It had been several hours since Kirk had spotted the drone. He’d described it to Humphrey as a hovering sphere with glimmering eyes.

  “Cameras, most likely,” Leslie said as they broke camp.

  Now that it was full dark, it was time to leave concealment and see what could be seen from the
high vantage of the mountain slopes.

  “So, Dr. Carlhagen knows we’re here,” Kirk said. He swiped his machete down the length of a walking stick, pruning off little branches. “I’m surprised we’re still standing. Why hasn’t he sent some guards to round us up?”

  Humphrey rested a foot on a lump of rock, a protrusion of solidity at the verge of the tree line. The air was still heavy with moisture, despite a stiff breeze cutting from the east. They had spent the past several hours trying to get eyes on the sphere again, but no luck.

  “It’s possible he doesn’t have any human guards here,” Humphrey said. “He didn’t have any on St. Vitus.”

  “That’s because we didn’t know we needed to escape,” Kirk said, thumping his walking stick into the turf. “And there was a fence. And Sensei.”

  “And we had been trained to follow rules,” Leslie said.

  Humphrey led the way out of the trees. The ground was covered with coarse grass and rambling scrub. Stone slabs pierced through the vegetation, dark and jagged. The star field above was split by the silhouette of the mountain peak.

  Humphrey climbed to a flat shelf of rock. “Binoculars, please,” he said to Leslie

  Below them the island lay in darkness, its edges distinguishable from the surrounding sea by the way starlight played on the whitecap surf fringing the land. A chorus of insect chirps surrounded them like an audible fog. Far off, waves crashed ashore.

  “No lights anywhere,” Humphrey said.

  “How can that be?” Leslie said.

  Humphrey recalled his very uncomfortable dinner with Senator Bentilius. He had been pretending to be Dr. Carlhagen. She was still in her old body, just arrived on St. Vitus to transfer into Summer. She had told him about the new Scion School. He had assumed that Dr. Carlhagen had fled St. Vitus to the new location. This island.

  “If there are no Scions here yet, maybe the school lights are kept off,” Kirk said. “That flying sphere thing has to be here for a reason.”

  Humphrey scanned the low-lying areas of the island with the binoculars. Mostly he saw nothing but blackness. “Maybe it’s on the other side of this mountain.”

  The way was uneven and treacherous, but they worked their way around the slope until they could see the entire eastern side of the island. Nothing.

  Humphrey scanned the island again, then gave up and handed the binoculars to Leslie. She raised them to her eyes.

  Kirk plopped onto a rock and leaned his walking stick against his shoulder. “Maybe the whole school is underground or something.”

  Humphrey doubted that. The effort required to dig out such a massive series of tunnels and chambers would make it impossible to keep the construction of the school secret.

  “There’s a clearing down there,” Leslie said. She lowered the binoculars and pointed down to the right. “It’s hard to see in this light, but it’s there.”

  Kirk hissed, drawing Humphrey’s eyes. The boy held a finger to his lips and jerked his head behind him to the left.

  And there it was. A hovering sphere, a hundred meters away. It dropped from view.

  “Did you see it?” Kirk whispered.

  “Yes. Let’s get some sleep. We’ll start toward that clearing a couple hours before dawn.”

  They hustled downhill, trying to make the tree line before the sphere popped up to look at them again. As they entered the cover of the canopy, Humphrey heard the faint hum of the drone.

  The Scions shared startled looks, but nobody said a word.

  They bedded down, making the best of an uncomfortable situation. The insects and animals of the night filled the trees with a racket of buzz and scurry.

  But even with all that noise, Humphrey thought he could hear the sound of the drone, still somewhere off to his left.

  And just as he was about to fall asleep, he heard a second one to his right.

  39

  The Jagged Rending

  Senator Bentilius had always had a knack for mechanical things. She had enjoyed driving cars and reading about how they worked. That was true of all machinery. In a different age, she thought she might have been a pilot. But her knack with machines had transferred beautifully to politics. At an early age she had seen that her social groups operated like machines. Becoming the president of her senior class hadn’t required knowing anything about the pathetic and boring desires of the student body.

  It merely required an understanding of who had influence. Once you understood that, all you needed was to find was leverage over them. That could come in the form of threats. Or, more easily, through promises.

  She’d always been indifferent to the policies she promoted. The goal had always been to operate the machine, the competing pulls and pushes of disparate interest groups.

  That had taken up so much of her time, and interest, she hadn’t ever learned how computers worked. She didn’t know the first thing about AI. But it didn’t take a genius to understand that computers operated on computer hardware. What she was looking for—she assumed—was a rectangular metal box with wires coming out of it.

  The only place she had found anything remotely computer-like in this facility was here at the entrance to the cryo-ward.

  She stood in front of a broad panel filled with screens, all of them dark. The control console for the cryo-ward.

  She tapped a screen and it came to life. A series of numbers scrolled up, each of them eight characters long. She had no idea what they signified.

  She tapped the screen next to it. This one showed a layout of the cryo-ward floor. Each of the cryopods was shown in its position on the ward floor. All of the pods were grayed out except one. The one with colors and numbers and other data surrounding it was Livy’s.

  So here were a bunch of screens. It would be reasonable, then, to assume that a computer server would be nearby. She got onto hands and knees and crawled under the console. The bottom was sealed with panels bolted in place at their corners. But a bit farther back was a metal box mounted to one of the panels.

  She rapped it with her knuckles, producing a hollow clunk that echoed through the chamber.

  There were two latches on one side and a thin hinge on the other. Interesting. She thumbed the latches free and swung the door open.

  “What have we here?” A bank of four rectangular boxes was mounted into an equipment rack. The boxes were unlabeled and had no displays. She held her hand in front of them. Warmth emanated from them like a furnace register.

  There was a small gap beneath the bottom one. She reached into the darkness, probing for any sort of cord she could tug.

  She was so intent on her hunt that she didn’t give much notice to the hum coming from behind her. Her hand closed around a thick cable. Whether it was power or a data cable, she had no idea. It didn’t matter. With a grunt, she yanked. It did not come loose. She would need to find something to cut it with. A knife or wire cutters.

  On hands and knees, she crawled out from under the console.

  She stood, turned. Stopped.

  The Lazarus drone floated five meters away.

  “What are you doing here?” she said, barely keeping panic out of her voice.

  Lazarus didn’t answer. A small rectangular panel slid aside on the drone. A brass-colored nozzle thrust forward, its pinhole orifice glowing blue.

  “I dropped something,” she said hastily. “I had to crawl under the console to retrieve it.” She held her hands apart. “But I couldn’t find it.”

  The drone floated closer, the downdraft of its propellers creating a slight breeze that fluttered her trousers against her shins.

  “Lazarus. Get your drone away from me.”

  The nozzle flashed blue lightning. Heat and ice and electric pain jolted from one of Senator Bentilius’s shoulders to the other, down the center of her torso to her toes and up her throat, across her face and out the crown of her head.

  Something cold was pressing against her back. The floor. She had fallen.

  Groans of agony erupted f
rom her lips. Her arm muscles contracted, forcing her fists to curl into her chest. Her back arched, heels pressing against the floor.

  Pain, fire. The jagged rending of muscle fiber.

  Outside of the agony, cutting through Maxine’s groans and gasps, came a high, keening static noise.

  It cut off, and with it went the pain. Her muscles relaxed. Sweat soaked her forehead and stuck her blouse to her abdomen. She had lost control of her bladder. Hot wetness soaked her legs and bottom.

  Gasping, she struggled onto one elbow, drew her forearm across her nose and found a streak of blood on her skin.

  The drone flew closer, its downdraft whipping against her body. Lazarus’s voice blared from it. “You are devious, Senator Bentilius. I know what you meant to do. Next time, the punishment will not stop until you are dead.”

  The drone backed away a few paces. Its lifeless camera eyes scanned her, making her feel naked. She struggled to her feet and stumbled out of the cryo-ward. She thumbed the button for the elevator, no longer caring about what Lazarus did to her. She rode the car to the residence level. She staggered to her room, stripped her clothes, and left them on the floor, sweaty, stinky, and blotched with blood. She ran the shower, hot. She stood under the spray, gasping, letting the congealed blood wash away.

  When she stepped out, wrapped in her robe but still trembling, she found Christof waiting on her sofa. His eyes were slit like a cat’s. His pajama top was unbuttoned, exposing his sculpted chest and abdomen.

  “What has you up so late?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t sleep. Something you said bothered me.”

  “Oh? What?”

  “You said Jacqueline would not bend to my will. You said the leverage I have in the child will not be enough. Why did you say that?”