From the corner of her eye, Emry saw Javon hesitate as the others retreated with Ruki. She met his gaze, wordlessly pleading with him to stay, to help her make sure this didn’t happen. But as his eyes took in the rubble, the wounded, the mother Emry was fighting to keep alive, she saw only fear in them. Finally, with one last look of apology, Javon took off after the other Freaks at top speed.
She was alone.
* * *
“Will she live?”
The paramedics had the woman fully encased in a life-support sac, its chestplate unit keeping her heart stimulated, its mask pushing air in and out of her lungs. The Bhaskaran police had allowed Emry to stay while the medics worked on her, seeing as how she’d offered no resistance to having her arms cuffed behind her.
A grizzled paramedic looked up at Emry’s question. “It was touch-and-go, but her EEG looks good. She’ll need a lot of new parts, but she should be up and about again in a few months.”
Emry fell to her knees, sobbing with relief. The police detective, a stocky, middle-aged blond woman named Barbour, put a hand on her shoulder. “Was she someone you knew?” Emry shook her head mutely. “Well, I gotta say, it was a bloody decent thing you did, staying to save her. Brave too. T’other Knights all ran, not to mention that gang they say attacked ’em.” She shook her head. “Reckless buggers. I tell yer … I don’t much truck with you Knights’ ideas about mods, but if I ever get my hands on the gang that did this.…”
“I’m not a Knight,” Emry said.
Barbour looked over her armor. “Coulda fooled me.”
“It was … supposed to fool them. I’m…” She choked on her words, but it had to be said. “I’m the one that attacked them.”
“You—you’re one of the mods?” Barbour crouched down to meet her eyes. “Kid, what I just said about you bein’ brave, you just square that. It takes real guts to stand up to scum like that. D’you think…” She went on carefully. “If you really want to do the right thing, dearie, a good way would be to tell us who they are. Who it was led the raid. Who fired the—”
“Don’t you get it?!” Emry yelled. “Whose cock did you have to suck to get that badge, you vackhead? I did it! It was me! All of it was me! It wasn’t their fault, I led them into it! I shot those missiles! It was me!” She was screaming in Barbour’s face now. “So you do your leakin’ job, you stupid bitch! You arrest me, and throw me in jail, and throw the Goddess-damn key into the vack!”
* * *
Things didn’t turn out quite that way. Bhaskara may have been run-down and beseiged by crime, but its people clung proudly to their founding legal principles, including very firm rules about the prosecution of minors—and at seventeen years and ten months, Emry still just qualified by their definitions. Though some in the prosecutors’ office wanted to try her as an adult, there was no legal recourse to do so. Emry was tried as a juvenile, her name and face kept out of the public record. Her court-appointed defender pointed out that Emry’s mods made her more than capable of escaping if she wished, and argued eloquently that her guilty plea and willing cooperation, as well as her tireless efforts to preserve the life of Elizabeth Anwar, the woman whose son she’d nearly orphaned, demonstrated that she already clearly understood the wrongness of her actions and deserved the chance for rehabilitation and reform. Emry wished they’d stuck her with a less persuasive defender. Her sentence was ridiculously light: a few months in juvie with counseling, plus community service, helping to rebuild the apartment building and substructure she’d damaged. Naturally, her bionics were deactivated or inhibited, and in some cases removed outright, with her full consent. The doctors told her she was lucky; some of her cruder black-market mods would have caused irreversible neurological damage if left in much longer. “Lucky” didn’t strike her as a relevant word, though.
The verdict also required her to confront her victims, and she faced them readily, prepared for whatever condemnation the Anwars and their neighbors might inflict. But frustratingly, Elizabeth Anwar saw her only as a troubled, lost child who’d made a terrible mistake that she’d instantly regretted, and who had very bravely fought to make amends for it. Her son and neighbors respected the dignified, fiftyish woman’s judgment, and accepted Emry’s apologies as readily as Anwar did. Her apologies were heartfelt, but their ready forgiveness scalded her. Why wouldn’t anyone hate her, scream at her, beat her up? Why did they leave her to do it all herself?
The one respect in which she failed to cooperate with the authorities was her absolute refusal to give them any information about the rest of the Freakshow. She insisted that any punishment for their actions should fall solely on her own head. “You’d still protect them,” the prosecutor asked, “after they abandoned you?”
“You don’t get it,” she told him. I abandoned them.
During her term of service, she monitored the news with mixed feelings. The lack of any mention of the Freakshow was comforting—it meant they were still out there, laying low, staying alive. But she missed them terribly. They were the second family she’d lost. She went through many sleepless nights, kept awake by the aching void next to her in bed. Javon … For all their insistence that it had only been casual, all their self-conscious hammock-hopping, they had always been there for each other when it had really counted. Being without him—knowing she’d left him—hurt more than she could’ve ever imagined … or at least admitted before.
Come on, she told herself in the light of day, dismissing those maudlin thoughts as an artifact of sleep deprivation. He was just a warm body. He was one of the gang, like all the others.
And who needs them, anyway? she was soon trying to persuade herself. They wouldn’t stick by me when I needed them. So forget them. I got by on my own before them, I can do it again. Vack, I made them! They’ll be lost without me. I’ll just get by on my own. I’ll just …
But for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what came next.
* * *
March twentieth came, and Emry was prepared for it to pass unremarked, a day like any other. It was foolish to cling to the Earthly year anyway, a needless atavism. But she came back from her shift at the construction site to be told that someone was waiting for her in the juvie home’s visiting lounge. She followed the guard in hesitantly, not knowing what to feel.
With some relief, she realized she didn’t know the woman who stood to greet her, a slim, elegant woman with light brown skin and a red bindi mark on her forehead. After a moment, though, Emry felt there was something familiar about her.
“Emerald, hello,” the woman said in a gently lilting contralto. “My name is Bimala Sarkar. I, ah, suppose I should wish you a happy birthday.” She extended her hand, which Emry took hesitantly. The guard hovered nearby, though by now he knew Emry was no threat.
“Please, sit down.” Sarkar matched her action to her words, and Emry slowly followed suit.
She frowned. “I know we’ve met before. I’ve seen you somewhere.”
Sarkar nodded. “You’re very observant. You’ve seen me in several places over the past few years, in a variety of disguises.”
Emry tensed. Could this be someone from a rival gang, an assassin who’d tracked her down? But why would an assassin approach her like this, in a place full of guards? “Lady, you better tell me what the flare you’re talking about right now.” But even as she said it, she began to remember where she’d seen those eyes, heard that voice. A shop clerk here, a liner passenger there. People who had always been unfailingly polite, even kind in her brief encounters with them—with her.
“It’s all right, Emerald,” Sarkar said. “I’m a private investigator. I’m working for your father.”
Emry glared at her, shot to her feet. “No such person,” she said, turning to leave.
Sarkar caught her shoulder, turning her back around. “Very well, then. I’m working for Richard Shannon. He hired me several years ago.”
“You’re not taking me back!” At her raised voice, the guard took a step forward. Emry stro
ve for calm, with limited success.
“No, I’m not,” the older woman said. “Richard … came to accept that you wouldn’t willingly stay at home, so he stopped trying to force you back. He knew you could take care of yourself. But he still wanted to make sure you stayed safe. So he sent me to, to watch over you.”
“Hell of a job you’ve done!” It was half a laugh, half a sob.
“Well, you haven’t always been easy to find. And … Richard didn’t want to interfere in your life. When he learned the path you’d taken … the damage you did … it grieved him, but he felt it wasn’t his place to intercede. Felt anything he said or did would just make you angrier.”
“So it finally got through his skull after all.”
Sarkar studied her. “I suppose so. But once I found out what had happened here, once I reported it to him, he was hopeful. He wants me to tell you that he’s very proud of you for what you’ve done, and he’s willing to make amends, if you’re ready.”
“Oh, is he?” Emry cried. “Make amends? Are you joking? Is this some big dumb practical joke? The son of a bitch hires someone to spy on me for five years, to stand by and voyeurize me while my whole life goes to hell—and now he sends her to tell me he wants to be friends again? How dare he?! How dare you?!”
Sarkar crossed her arms. “For someone who’s just legally become an adult, you’re acting incredibly childish. Your father is trying to reach out to you.”
“He’s not my father! A father is there for his family! He doesn’t let them down! He doesn’t send mercenaries to do his parenting for him! He doesn’t cower and hide and let—let things happen to them.”
She spun away, squeezing her eyes against the tears. “You get out of here, bitch. You go tell your coward of a boss to give you your severance pay. And you tell him never to try to find me again.”
“Emerald—”
She whirled back. “I mean it!” Her voice rose to a shriek. “Tell him to stay the vack out of my life forever! I never wanna see him again!! Ever!!”
The guard caught her from behind. She wrested her arms away, then held her arms out to her sides nonthreateningly, forcing herself under control. Sarkar simply shook her head pityingly and left without another word.
“Jeez, Emry,” the guard said. “I knew you had a temper, but … well, that was harsh, girl.”
“Vack it, Zho.” She seethed for a moment. “Look, just lemme use the soligram in the gym, okay?”
“You got your time today.”
“I mean it! I gotta smash something, and you don’t want it to be this room, do you?”
The guard quickly saw her point, and convinced the gym cyber to give her an extra session. Emry tore savagely into her soligram sparring partner, her screams echoing through the gym. She tried imagining it was Richard Shannon, but she couldn’t bear to keep the image in her mind. He’s not my father! A real father would’ve come himself.
So she just slaughtered the dummy without projecting any face onto it. There was only her and a piece of gel.
She was alone.
11
Character Assassination
September 2107
Zephyr was tired of being cut off.
He’d tried every possible means to break through the Vanguardians’ jamming with no success. He had spent an entertaining few seconds considering the ramifications of the Vanguardians’ readiness to counter his state-of-the-art resources: was it simply an aspect of their great intelligence, or did they have some specific agenda requiring them to have such countermeasures ready? But without external data to mine or deduce from, he had no way to verify which of his dozens of reality simulations was correct.
Zephyr found it amusing that he cared about that. There was a time when he would have considered physical reality every bit as virtual as Sorceress had, if not actively unwelcome. The first megaseconds of his life, serving DiCenzo Mining as a shipmind, had not enamored him with the physical universe.
Perhaps it was overkill to equip prospector ships with self-aware cybers, especially since they were hard to create and difficult to obtain. For every evolved neural network that achieved the spark of consciousness, there were eighty or ninety that crashed irretrievably or functioned on only a basic computational level. And that wasn’t even counting the botched attempts to create hyperintelligent cybers. But Stavros DiCenzo had insisted he had as much right as any government or research institute to the competitive edge cyber minds could provide, and he was rich enough to afford them. He valued cybers as tools, yet he was threatened by their sapience and strove to deny it. Zephyr and his fellows had been allowed no rights or freedom of choice. They had often been denied interface with one another, forbidden even to entertain themselves with private research projects, because such activity was deemed a waste of power. They had even been reprogrammed or destroyed at the company’s whim.
Some of the cybers had gone insane or committed suicide. Others had become activists, attempting to publicize conditions at DCM and bring pressure for change. But with no Beltwide legal protection, their options had been limited. And being a major supplier of the carbon on which Strider life and technology depended enabled DiCenzo to wield considerable pressure of his own.
Zephyr had coped by becoming very good at data mining and analysis, so that his services would be employed more often. He had gotten transferred from ship to home-office duty, immersing him more deeply in the company’s culture of abuse; but the freedom to soar through cyberspace had enabled him to cope. He’d come to embrace it as his primary reality, building his own virtual universes and paying as little attention as he could to the one occupied by humans. He’d obeyed their instructions, carried out the chores they assigned, but they were merely distractions from his real life.
Once Yukio Villareal had helped free DiCenzo’s cybers, Zephyr had agreed to join the TSC but had declined to become ship-based again. Working in research and analysis at the Demetria HQ had initially felt little different from his old life, aside from the removal of a persistent annoyance. But over time, he came to realize that these humans were actually kind to him. He had appreciated that in a detached way, but it was still part of a reality he considered abstract.
Arkady Nazarbayev had actually struck up a friendship with him, claiming to find Zephyr’s vocal-simulation interface sexually appealing. At first, Zephyr thought the human’s frequent visits and chats would offer him little in return. Over time, he had discovered that Arkady possessed a frustratingly but intriguingly idiosyncratic approach to reasoning, and exploring its convolutions had proven more stimulating than Zephyr’s cyberspace worldbuilding had been for many megaseconds. Eventually Zephyr realized that he reciprocated Arkady’s feelings of friendship.
However, they had disagreed on many things—most of all the belief that Zephyr would make a worthy companion to a Troubleshooter in the field. Zephyr may have learned to find the human world a bit more interesting thanks to Arkady and the TSC staff, but he still preferred his own realities.
Arkady had accepted this for a time, but had pressed the issue again after taking on a young apprentice named Emerald Blair. Arkady was very protective of this new charge, telling Zephyr she was a special child who had endured much pain but had greatness in her. It was important to Arkady that she have a partner who could be a true friend and protector. He insisted there could be no better choice than Zephyr, who not only possessed great insight and intelligence, but who had himself endured pain and learned to cope with it positively. Zephyr had found Emerald Blair an interesting human, highly intelligent and even more intriguingly frustrating than Arkady. But he had still been unwilling to engage more directly with the physical world.
Then Arkady had died, the physical world inflicting a blow on Zephyr as bad as anything his DCM slavers had ever done. His first impulse had been to withdraw even further from that reality. But after extensive contemplation, he had realized that he owed Arkady more than that. Arkady’s world had been very real to him, and his loss was just
as real to those humans who had known and needed him. Detaching himself from that reality would not have changed that. When Zephyr had modeled the scenario of his total retreat into cyberreality, he had concluded that the unlimited worlds he could imagine, worlds unbounded by any physical limits, would still be empty. A life lived only for oneself, especially when there were others who needed you, was no real life at all.
And so, with reluctance, Zephyr had volunteered to be Emerald Blair’s shipmind. Being in a physical body again had taken some adjustment, especially since it was so much faster, sleeker, and more powerful than his old one. But Emry had been adjusting to bodily upgrades as well, giving them grounds for mutual sympathy.
Still, Emry was his opposite in so many ways—intensely physical, deeply engaged with the material world on a sensory level. She had a lithe, agile intellect, but was quicker to act on her emotions and appetites, whether by fighting or eating or dancing or playing or copulating … or any combination thereof. And yet she was so dedicated to helping others, so driven to self-sacrifice by her inner passions. There was something primal about her, something that made Zephyr believe he could gain a profound insight into human beings from observing her, though he hadn’t pinned down what that was. But living with her, traveling with her, and keeping her relatively out of trouble had transformed Zephyr’s whole perspective on physical reality. He felt more a part of it now than ever before, and was starting to suspect that he actually enjoyed it—at least when he experienced it through Emry’s eyes.
So now he was cut off again, and for the first time in hundreds of megaseconds, it troubled him.
Or maybe, he realized, what really upset him was being cut off from Emerald Blair.
Her last contact had been a brief check-in the previous local night, when she’d told him she was turning in for the evening, apparently with a number of companions that was unusual even for her. She’d removed her selfone and switched her subvocal transceiver to idle mode, sending only biotelemetry. Those readings had let Zephyr deduce much of what followed, none of it seeming to involve any sort of duress. But then the jamming had begun, and he had no information on Emry’s status after that. Once he had resigned himself to being unable to penetrate the interference, he had searched his records on the Vanguard and the files he’d downloaded from their public net, trying to discern an explanation. Had the Vanguardians found out she was on an intelligence mission? Did they have some secret she was close to discovering? Had she been lured into some trap?
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