Gunwitch: Rebirth

by Niall Teasdale

  The view appeared to be from a security camera trained on one of the entrances to the Below in Tacoma and, for several seconds, there was nothing on display aside from the heavy door. Then a figure appeared, moving in from the right and approaching the door quickly. Annette’s heart skipped. It looked, from the back, like Nate. He began punching keys on the pad beside the door, but turned suddenly after entering half the code. It was definitely Nate and, as Annette’s software scanned over the image and picked out expressions, he seemed to be angry and frightened.

  The reason for the fear became apparent as a UDF armoured suit stepped into frame, blocking the view. There was no sound and now Annette could not really see what was happening, but there were flares of light… The suit stepped clear and she could see her brother again, what was left of him. The suit’s laser weaponry had almost sliced Nate in half. There was little in the way of blood, but there was no doubt that she was looking at Nathanial Barrington’s corpse.

  The video appeared to end, but she heard a voice report starting, probably talking about what she had just seen. The words failed to go in, passed through her like water. Annette simply sat there, not realising she had slipped to the ground, replaying the image of her dead brother in her mind.

  North-West Enclave, 4/12/83.

  The coordinates corresponded to a location over sixty kilometres south of the city wall, more than twice that to drive from Annette’s apartment block by road. Feeling numb from the neck up, Annette walked all the way to the White Tower complex and used her UDF authority to book out a light all-terrain vehicle she could use, heading south as soon as she had clearance.

  She waited until she had passed through the checkpoint at the city wall before setting the car to autopilot and loading up the video again. This time, the weight in her chest did not seem so heavy, but it was still there. She took in more details, but they told her nothing she did not already know. Then the images cut out and she heard the voice.

  ‘Report filed following execution of insurgent Nathanial Barrington on six, six, seventy-seven. Time of death recorded as twenty-two sixteen. Insurgent was attempting to gain access to Below tunnels prior to formally joining the Insurgency. UDF forces responded to a report made by a member of the insurgent’s family. Name of source withheld in this report under security directive nine zero two one.’

  Either Charles or Patricia had sold Nate to the UDF. Annette was finding it hard enough to believe that Nate had been joining the Insurgency, but… The obvious choice was Charles, a member of the administration, promoted to a high position soon after Nate had gone missing. Charles had always got on better with Annette… But discounting the alternative did no good. Patricia had supplied the file and she had presumably known what the audio said. If she had given Nate up, then turned around and joined the Insurgency herself, she could be using this to turn her daughter against her ex-husband. Convoluted, malicious, but how well did Annette really know her mother? How well did she know any of her family?

  Parking the car four kilometres from the location she had been given, Annette walked the rest of the way there. It was still dark when she found herself climbing over fences and into fields with cattle in them. A farm, and the farmhouse was dead ahead with no signs of activity. It was now seven in the morning and the sky would start to brighten in five minutes or so. She headed in, but she could tell something was wrong before she even got to the door.

  There was a body on the porch. From the look of it, a laser had scorched a line from the man’s left hip up to his right shoulder. The tissue was blackened. There was no blood, but the wound looked like it went deep into the flesh, even cutting through bone.

  The door was ajar so getting inside was not a problem. The building seemed to be all one storey, the front door leading onto a hallway which ran to the back of the house. There was another body near the back door, but the bulk of the death was reserved for the lounge. Annette counted nine bodies and she was about to check them for signs of life when she noticed one particular one sitting against the outer wall.

  Patricia Barrington had probably died when someone drilled through her forehead with a laser beam, but she had fallen before then. There was a deep wound seared into her left side, another almost severing her right arm at the shoulder, a glancing burn across her right cheek. Annette looked down at her mother and knew she would get no useful answers here. The mother she had not spoken to in six years would never speak to her again.

  The sound of the front door of the house opening had Annette turning and bringing a pistol up to aim at the lounge door in a second. There was a short pause and then three men in UDF combat armour appeared, the one in the lead immediately swinging his rifle up to point at Annette. The armour was good and Annette was not wearing hers. Even if she hit the faceplate…

  Annette lifted her pistol, raising her hands. ‘I’m SAU. Annette Barrington, ID number nine four six two six nine beta.’

  The lead soldier edged in so that his colleagues could follow, all of them covering Annette with their rifles. ‘What are you doing here?’ The voice was altered electronically to be unrecognisable, and more menacing.

  ‘Following a lead. I got a tip that there were insurgents operating out of this area. It looks like I was right, and too late.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘I was just scouting. I was going to call in help if I turned up anything. Then I saw the body on the porch…’ Slowly, the leader’s rifle lowered, followed by the other two. So far so good. ‘Could I maybe see who I’m talking to? And cut the synthesised voice?’

  There was a pause and then the leader reached up to unlock his helmet. ‘These things are damn claustrophobic anyway. Sergeant Jake Watson, regular UDF.’

  Annette smiled and lowered her arms, hanging her pistol at her side. ‘You guys know what happened here?’ The other two, Watson’s juniors she assumed, were also taking their helmets off. Perfect.

  ‘Like you said, this place was being used as an Insurgency safe house,’ Watson explained. ‘Looks like a major cell too. We think they were using it to smuggle people in and out of the enclave through Gate Five.’ Annette nodded: Gate Five in the enclave wall was not too far to the north. ‘Got the word to move in here at zero one hundred, had every last one of the stinking traitors burned down in thirty minutes. No trouble.’

  ‘So why are you still here?’

  ‘Someone had to stay and see whether any more of them turned up. When we saw you sneaking in… But I remember you from some of the reports. You’ve nailed two of them yourself in the last couple of days. Up close and personal too.’ Watson grinned. He thought she was great, a hot girl in jeans and a T-shirt who killed insurgents. If not for the weird eyes, she would have been perfect.

  Annette returned his grin. ‘It’s been busy lately. I wasted twenty Zeroes in the Below and a bunch of Cabal last week.’

  ‘Twenty Zeroes? That’s harsh.’

  ‘Yeah, and three dicks in UDF uniforms today.’

  ‘Huh?’

  Annette swung her pistol up, reaching for the second one as she fired, punching a hole in Watson’s forehead, right between the eyes. The expanding round pulped his brain as it smashed its way through and rattled around inside his skull, but Annette was already locking aim on her second target and firing. The last man standing was just about getting his hands on his rifle again when a penetrator punched into him and he went down with his two colleagues.

  They would likely be relieved, or at least have to check in, at eight a.m. Annette figured she had less than an hour to go through the farm and find anything that might be useful and not already taken by the UDF. She turned and looked down at her mother. Mourning would have to wait. Now she had to move.

  Crouching down, Annette began going through her mother’s pockets.

  ~~~

  There was not much left in the farmhouse and Annette had made sure that no one was going to find anything else thanks to a few incendiary grenades she had found. She had watched from a dista
nce as the relief team arrived to find the building burning. Now she was parked fifty kilometres away to examine what else she had managed to find.

  There was a portable fabricator, a suitcase-sized version of the plant the Zeroes had wrecked. To function, it needed materials to work with and power, but Annette figured it might be useful and, being relatively standard equipment, the UDF had not taken it. There were several sealed meal packs, so she was not going to go hungry while she considered her next move. She had a couple of cans of industrial-strength nanocleanser. The insurgents had likely used it to remove forensic evidence since the stuff was death to practically any organic matter it came into contact with. Annette was unsurprised to find a collection of devices for defeating security systems, but she took only the latest items, designed to help when picking electronic and physical locks. She had picked up a pair of rather elaborate electronic handcuffs because they were not heavy and you never knew, and she found a basic paramedic minibot which she figured could be worth taking. Her favourite find was a common-looking, black sports bag. Luckily, the hidden compartment built into it had been open or, even with her vision enhancements, Annette doubted she would have noticed it. She could carry a reasonable amount of gear in it, including her pistols if necessary, without it being obvious.

  And then there was the memory dot she had found clasped in her mother’s hand. It appeared that no one had looked for something there, but the tiny devices were difficult to pick out anyway. Using highly efficient molecular storage technology, the submillimetre devices could store huge amounts of data. Annette figured that if her mother had been holding onto this one, there was a good reason for it, and there was a reader built into her arming pod.

  True to form, this one had a lot of data on it. Annette saw the video file she had been given on the stick, and then she saw an audio file labelled ‘To Annette.’ Swallowing, she selected it and set it playing.

  ‘Hi, Annette, it’s Patricia.’ There was noise in the background, a lot of noise muffled by electronics which were not managing to block it all: it had been recorded during the attack on the farm. ‘I’m not sure I deserve to call myself “Mom” now and it doesn’t look like I’ll get to explain what I did so… Well, I can’t imagine that would have been a pleasant experience, so we’re both being spared that. If you’re listening to this, you found the memory stick at the tree and you know what happened to your brother. I’m going to say no more. You can make whatever judgement, take whatever action, you see fit. There’s a lot of data on this dot. Mariel Edmonton managed to worm it out from under White’s nose. Mariel’s safe. We got her out last night. Look at what she found. Decide what you want to do. Stay safe. I’m… sorry for everything, Annette. Goodbye.’

  Annette lay back against her seat and sighed. Aside from the news about Mariel, that had been distinctly uninformative. Patricia had not denied being responsible for Nate’s death, neither had she implicated Charles. Both were probably plusses to her mother’s side but did nothing to make the decision easy. There was only one way Annette was going to uncover the truth, but it would have to wait and that gave her time to examine the data Mariel had dug up. Very well. Annette began working through the files one at a time.

  ~~~

  Annette closed down her file-viewer app and turned her attention to the sky. It was somewhere to direct her attention and there was always something distracting to see there when your vision encompassed everything from infrared to gamma rays.

  If you sat back and looked at some of the evidence Mariel had collected, it could be viewed in a fairly positive light. Some of it. Some fell into the category of ‘good intentions, but misguided,’ and you could maybe give Doctor White a pass there, given the circumstances. Some of the files were significantly more damning.

  The Department of Public Health, which did have a remit to improve the health of the enclave’s citizens, had been engaging in eugenic and genetic programmes to achieve that goal for a while. The generation Annette belonged to were predisposed to better health, had improved immune systems, and were likely to live longer. It was when you looked at the details that things got shaky. In Utopia City, the engineering had focused on enhancing intelligence and promoting scientific skills. In the outer enclave, where Cranfield had been born, they had been pushing for a strong, placid workforce. Annette would have bet that all Cranfield’s brothers and sisters were stronger than city folk, and also more amenable to suggestion. She had noticed that a little with the big guy himself: he was fairly easy to sway with a little argument. Even when he was being decisive, you could persuade him the other way without too much trouble.

  However, that kind of manipulation had taken decades to get into place and there were still people alive from before the programme had begun. The answer to the initial problem was Aries and they were still using it to control the city dwellers. Aries was an organic nanodrug which altered brain chemistry, reducing resistance to outside influences. It had a distinctive, not entirely pleasant taste, so mixing it into the water supply might have been noticed. Thus, as Annette had seen for herself, it was distributed in Nutopium.

  Aries had been through several iterations since it was first introduced, primarily to attempt to eliminate a side effect. Overdoses of the stuff had been known to produce unusual effects for some time: paranoia, depression which bordered on the suicidal, and/or enhanced aggression responses. Some people were more susceptible, exhibiting brain chemistry changes at even normal doses which could not be reversed. Aries created Zeroes. Aries was responsible for turning a small fraction of the population insane, but the administration continued to feed it to as many people as would drink Nutopium.

  The propaganda which Annette had noticed and let slide over her without real question was a lot more scientifically designed than she thought. There were studies of population and take-up rates. They were treating the propagation of ideas like a virus, and they had noticed increased resistance in some of their populations recently which they were unable to explain. Nutopium intake had decreased over the past twenty years or so, but the resistance was a bigger effect, so that had been rejected as the cause. To Annette, looking at the population groups and the resistance factors detected, it looked as though the generations subject to genetic manipulation were either more resistant to propaganda or, more likely, more resistant to Aries.

  There were a few other things. A paper on the high deviancy rate among SAU members pointed out that far more than the average number of new SAU recruits had to be re-educated within two months of starting operations. Annette was not surprised: she had really started questioning things when she had seen how much of what she had been told was basically lies. Another document described a new medical system being installed in White Tower which promised considerable benefits over traditional surgical techniques. Annette had never heard of it. It was being kept for the higher-ups in the administration. Again, not a huge surprise now she thought about it: Doctor Darius White, father of the city, had not been a young man when he had come to the Seattle region and had to be well over a century old now, but he looked little different to the pictures taken back then.

  Annette sighed. Her father would not know about all of this, she suspected, but she needed to talk to him. There was one thing he definitely knew and Annette needed to know it too.

  Utopia City.

  Charles Barrington let himself into his apartment and frowned. The lights were out, and they remained out as he closed the door. That meant that Annette was not home, but also that something was wrong with the computer since it should have responded to his presence by turning on the lights.

  There was some light: it filtered in from outside through the windows in the lounge up ahead of him and he walked toward it, pausing in the doorway. ‘Lights,’ he said and got no response. ‘I said–’

  A table lamp turned on across the room. ‘Better, Poppa?’ Annette asked. She was sitting in the chair Charles favoured, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, with one of her pistols lying in her lap
.

  ‘What’s wrong with the computer?’ Charles asked.

  ‘Nothing. I wanted to talk in private. Maybe you should sit down.’

  Still frowning, Charles moved around to sit on a sofa that faced Annette’s chair. ‘Is something wrong, honey? Has something happened?’

  ‘Yes. Mom’s dead.’

  ‘Uh… I… When she left, we lost touch. I don’t know where she went. I always assumed she–’

  ‘She joined the Insurgency. She was killed by the UDF early this morning.’

  ‘Oh. I’d never have believed… She always blamed me for Nate joining the UDF, going away. I think you know we argued. She said it was my “propaganda” that persuaded him to–’

  ‘You can stop now, Poppa. I know what happened to Nate. I’ve seen the security video.’ For once, Charles Barrington seemed to be lost for words. Annette was quite surprised by that: he always seemed to know what to say. ‘Someone in this family informed on him when he attempted to join the Insurgency. I know it wasn’t me. That leaves you, or Mom.’

  Then Annette watched as her father considered his options and what his daughter might do, and made his choice. ‘I didn’t know what she’d done until afterward. Don’t think too badly of her. She thought they would capture him, take him to re-education. When they killed him, she couldn’t–’

  Annette was on her feet and aiming her pistol at his head, and he stopped speaking in the face of her anger. ‘Shut up, you lying fuck,’ Annette said, her voice dangerously low.

  ‘No! It was–’

  ‘You know what’s truly ironic about this? You called in all sorts of favours and worked really hard to get me the software the Inquisitors use. I probably wouldn’t know you were lying without it.’