by R. Z. Held
When she arrived at the conference room, more bland polymer surfaces in the form of a central table and surrounding chairs, she found Pyrus frowning over a case of different injection pens. The “really good shit” Eriope had come back with from her last illicit trip off-planet must indeed be quite good, if the usual antagonists weren’t working. Any substance, recreation or medical, had to be damn powerful in the first place for an Install’s system not to just shrug it off. Eriope worked hard to accomplish as much with her self-destructive behavior as she did.
Lemna stood at a slight remove, arms crossed. Even in stillness, she projected a concentrated grace. There were traces of wrinkles on her skin, and gray in her tightly braided hair, because of her age when she’d undergone installation, but they only enhanced her intimidating air. In contrast, Eriope was slumped in the chair in front of Pyrus, a small smile of pleasant dreams on her expressive face, her short, black curls tousled over her forehead and up the back of the chair where she’d slid down. She and Pyrus had skin of a middle ancestrally sunny shade, while Lemna’s was slightly darker.
Pyrus applied one last pen, and stood back. “That should get most of it, I hope.”
Eriope groaned extravagantly. “Why do you have to be like that, Pyrus? That shit was expensive.” She coughed, gulped air, and sat up straighter.
“Thank you, Toledo.” Lemna nodded to Pyrus and shot Genevieve a narrow look. Apparently she was allowed to stay, however, as Lemna stepped up to Eriope, turning the woman’s chair to face her with a jerk on one of the armrests. “I give you a little leash—all of you, but you especially, Cusco—with the understanding that you will not make me regret it, do you understand? Brass thinks you’re confined to the planet, and then you go and do stupid fucking shit.”
Lemna tipped her head as a physical sign of the picture her system had just sent to the main wall display: Eriope, nude, back to the security camera and her photovoltaic carbon-fiber wings open wide as she rode someone just out of frame. Eriope’s second favorite way of taking her mind off the feeling of being trapped, though that one was usually practiced among the other Installs around Tsuga. Genevieve couldn’t imagine that photograph had been taken here.
Eriope glanced at the photograph, but not even a twinge of embarrassment showed in her body language. It was nothing Genevieve or Pyrus hadn’t seen before, she supposed; they had invited Eriope to join them on a few occasions. She was delightfully enthusiastic, but too uninterested in power play for it to be a regular arrangement. Eriope tipped her chin up and met Lemna’s glare without flinching. “There are Installs taking their downtime on planets across the empire. I don’t see the problem.”
“The problem, Cusco, is when the brass—who know that you are not on active duty—find out you fucked the leader of a terrorist movement selling drugs to finance said movement’s efforts against the empire.” Lemna took a bruising grip on Eriope’s chin and trapped her wrist against the armrest with her other hand, fingers digging in until Eriope grunted. It was very much in line with the casual violence all the ex-military Installs in this facility displayed with each other, even Pyrus when he forgot himself, but Genevieve still didn’t like it. She rocked forward, reminded herself that interference at this point wouldn’t make the situation better, and settled back again.
Eriope tried to wrestle her chin away and failed. “I didn’t know what she was doing with the money!”
“How’s this, then? That shit you were on is killing people. It works great on Installs and kills everyone else within a few months of regular use.” Lemna switched her grip to both of Eriope’s wrists and slammed the chair into the table, cracking Eriope’s head against the headrest. “Stay on the fucking planet so I don’t have to have you executed, Cusco. Because I will, if I have to, to make sure other Installs retain the choice to retire.”
Eriope surged up, breaking Lemna’s grip now she was trying properly. She planted herself toe to toe with the woman. “Or you could let me go. Let us all go. What are Installs going to do if you let us pick some peaceful planet and try to build some kind of life? Build a family? We wouldn’t need to sneak away to find something, anything, to take our minds off being trapped, if after the decades of our lives we gave to fighting for the empire, we weren’t confined to this boring little facility on this boring backwater planet for the rest of our damn lives, who knows how long those will even be!”
Lemna didn’t give a single centimeter. “You want interest, sign up for another tour.”
“Suicide by indefinite tour” was what the ex-military Installs here called that. Keep fighting until eventually something swamped nanite healing and killed you. Genevieve had gathered that that was the way most Installs went. Direct suicide was generally unnecessary and thus much rarer. And that left them with the ragged, self-destructive dregs who’d retired to Tsuga.
Genevieve stepped up, touched Eriope’s shoulder—she knew better than to grasp the woman’s hand or arm without warning—and urged her away from Lemna when Eriope turned into her.
Lemna waited in stillness until it was clear Eriope was going to go with Genevieve, then swept for the door. “Malao will let you know your new duty schedule.” No doubt she’d be assigned double security shifts—along with someone else to watch her—for the foreseeable future.
“Fuck me.” Eriope dropped her forehead against Genevieve’s shoulder. Maybe the antagonist was finally making enough inroads that she was crashing. “In my defense, she was a great lay?”
Neither Genevieve nor Pyrus dignified that with a laugh. “I’ll take her to her rooms to charge?” Genevieve suggested to Pyrus. And by “charge” she meant “soothe the pain with something else from her stash.” She hated to enable that, but it was only what Eriope would do anyway if left alone. Pyrus gave her a nod, looking just as conflicted as she felt.
Usually Genevieve offered miserable Installs who asked that question a “closer than we’ve ever been” but now that platitude wasn’t even true. Burnout had taken them backward.
Even if she had to dedicate her whole life to the search.
***
After dropping Eriope off, rather than go back to the lab, Genevieve headed up to her own rooms, to do some charging in truth in the late summer sunlight on her own balcony. She needed to bleed off some of her frustration with the whole situation.
The universe seemed to have the opposite in mind for her. She stepped off the elevator on her floor to find two soldiers hulking in front of the door to her suite. “Are you with Abidjan? I thought she already left,” she said, fetching up in front of them. They were both clean-shaven, both wore the Pax Romana standard-issue military haircut and “casual” clothing that was far too snappy, too similar in its cut—so as to allow a shoulder holster, she was sure—but when her system tried to ping theirs, she got nothing back. Not Installs, then. She snapped out her wings, carbon composite plates unfolding like feathers along the
central ribs, silver-gray with a touch of black like patina. In case they might have forgotten she was an Install. “If you’re supposed to be inspecting the lab, it’s several floors down. These are personal quarters.” Lemna had always done her own poking around before now, but maybe this was because of Eriope’s behavior?
“Amsterdam Genevieve?” one of the men said. “We need to speak with you.” The lack of any kind of reciprocal introduction hung in the air.
“Unless I’m some other Install with the codes to her rooms, I guess yeah, that’s me.” Genevieve presumed she was supposed to invite them in. She sent her codes to the door and gestured inside when it opened. As she followed them in, she glanced around her living room to make sure it was presentable, but it wasn’t like she really lived here anymore. She spent her nights a few floors below in Pyrus’s rooms, and had for years, so the worst problem here was the dust on uneven surfaces the automated system couldn’t deal with. All plastic, metal, and glass. Blue-gray color scheme. Bland.
“So?” she prompted, when the two men watched her silently. “What does Abidjan want that she couldn’t tell me herself?”
The spokesman cleared his throat. “Were you aware that though you were the first Install who received nanites through infection who survived, since that time, nearly fifty other Infecteds have survived, most of them not Pax Romana citizens?”
“Forty-six. Even if we weren’t keeping meticulous track of our results, they’re all part of my research group now.” Recently down from forty-eight. And each of those successes so hard won—was she “aware”? Fuck him. Disquiet was rapidly knotting Genevieve’s muscles, however. She was no citizen of the empire herself. But the Pax Romana were well aware of that, and had cleared her for her research years ago. Why bring it up now?
Genevieve opened a private channel to Carex, attaching pictures of the men’s faces.
All her channels went down, full lockout. Carex or Lemna had the codes for that, but she couldn’t see why either of them would bother. But Goon Two was looking up from pressing something on a handheld com unit. She’d unconsciously noted him taking it out while she was focused on Spokesman, she realized as she jerked her memory back, but had dismissed it just as unconsciously when she realized it wasn’t a weapon.
The panic Genevieve had been sitting firmly on swelled up, bucking her like a storm wave before she fought it back down again. The horrible, ringing silence of being cut off from the ever-present possibility of communication was mostly emotional. That didn’t mean this wasn’t dangerous, however, it just meant she needed to act, not panic. She backed up, out of her door and away from the soldiers.
At least that was the plan. What she backed up into instead was the feeling of a gun muzzle against the back of her head. Another soldier. Must have hidden inside the other empty suite on this floor; she hadn’t seen anyone else in the hall, and the elevator arriving would have been audible. Knew something about Installs, if he had the gun there. Her nanites could heal a lot, but not an instantly fatal head shot. “What do you want?” Her voice quavered and she let it. Maybe they’d underestimate her because she’d been a civilian before her infection.
Maybe it wouldn’t be an underestimate, either. Genevieve searched for the weapon, in hopes that her system could remotely disable it, but it seemed to be manually triggered only. Her system helpfully presented the specs and she dismissed them hurriedly. At this distance, there wasn’t any difference between “a mess” and “a fucking mess” when it came to her head. What next trick would a real Install try, on a battlefield? Turn into Goon Three, try use faster reaction times to wrestle the gun away before it fired? She didn’t think she’d ever be fast enough for that.
“I told you, we just want to talk,” said Spokesman. He stepped back, and Goon Three took that as an indication he should shove her after. Genevieve went docilely, cursing herself for doing it. She heard the door close behind them.
She wasn’t going to stop thinking, though. These soldiers couldn’t be with Lemna—if Lemna had discovered what they’d hidden about burnout, she’d have held the gun to Genevieve’s head herself if she’d viewed it as necessary. So the soldiers must have used Lemna’s arrival as cover for their real purpose—to hide it from Carex? Could she hope for help from that quarter, now she’d warned him? He was a raging asshole, but he wanted an uninstallation process as much as anyone.
“Are you loyal to Pax Romana?” Spokesman asked, settling himself into something like parade rest in front of her, manner deeply incongruous in the rough conversation circle of bland couch and chairs.
Wasn’t that the question. Genevieve had no pride in this moment, her only question was what answer they wanted: the simple one, or the honest one? And why would they come all this way, camouflage their arrival, and arrange themselves so carefully to catch her alone, if they were inclined to believe a straight vow of loyalty? Honesty seemed her only option. “Our goals align.” And a little exaggeration for spice: “I would never work against the empire.”
Goon Two’s com unit chimed, again, each noise increasing in screech. Spokeman’s attention shifted, but the gun at Genevieve’s head did not. “Malao,” Goon Two muttered. Someone pounded on her door.
Spokesman’s brow lowered, too fast, as if he’d already had a high kindling-pile of anger this latest annoyance had set a match to. “Our lockout codes have a higher clearance than he does.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he can’t annoy the shit out of us by trying them over and over.” Goon Two offered out the com unit, and Spokesman snatched it out of his grip. “Control freak.” Not unlike Spokesman himself, Genevieve would bet. She wondered if Goon Two agreed. Not that it seemed likely to help her if he did.
“Fine. He’s not implicated, let him in so he can see what’s going on and then get the fuck out of our hair.” Spokesman gestured and Goon Two pressed a combination of buttons. Genevieve wasn’t allowed to turn, but she heard the door open, and then a curse from Carex.
“You’re Johannesburg Malaxis? What the ever-living fuck do you think you’re doing?” he demanded of Spokesman as he came into sight, stepping around her with a gun to her head as if she wasn’t worthy of his notice. Carex’s skin was of a similar, ancestrally sunny shade to that of the soldiers, but the line of neatly trimmed beard along his jaw instantly marked him out. That style was popular among the ex-military types here, and Genevieve wondered with a hysterical flavor of distraction if that differentiation was the point.
“You’re supposed to be inspecting the security section, the same as Abidjan inspects the lab, not screwing around in personal quarters, especially without informing me…” Carex wound down and planted himself before Malaxis to glower until he got an answer to his liking. Genevieve was touched that his concern was for whether he was kept in the loop, not his actual personnel. Though she supposed that was the only kind of outlook these soldiers would understand.
And he had known they’d arrived separately. So the camouflage behind Lemna’s visit was for—who? Her and the others in the research group, to get her truly alone? Why did they care about her?
“We apologize for the oversight in you not being fully briefed,” Malaxis said, and Genevieve wondered if anyone in the room believed the apology. “There’s no reason for you to be inconvenienced personally if you leave us to it, however.”
Carex looked Malaxis over and shifted his stance. He didn’t bring out his wings as Genevieve had, but she still felt his lethality like a naked blade to her throat. “Your generous offer is that I get to walk out and look the other way while the higher-ups fuck around in my own home? Hard pass.”
“Fine. You want to watch, you can watch.” Malaxis turned back to Genevieve and babbled some nonsense syllables. When she looked blank, he spat them again. “Don’t play dumb, Idyllian.”
The mention of her home planet gave Genevieve the key to fight through the egregious pronunciation of her native language. She repe
ated the phrase properly, then translated it to Lingua for Carex’s benefit. “Paradise is freedom. Is that supposed to mean something to me? There are easier ways to get a translation.”
“We know all about your Resistance friends, at home. What’s your mission for them, fronti?”
Paradise is freedom. It certainly sounded like a rallying call. But her planet had been conquered nine years ago, more. Had they finally gained traction in their fight against the occupying force? Genevieve supposed something like that might have been covered by the news, but she’d studiously avoided any mention of what was happening on her home planet for just as many years. “I haven’t had any communication with Idyll or even another Idyllian since I left home.”
She carefully didn’t look at Carex. He knew she’d arrived with a virus, as a mission from the beginnings of that Resistance—a joke of a mission, more likely to get her killed than succeed, but it meant she, so inconveniently infected with Pax Romana nanites, was out of their sight and out of their minds. She’d abandoned that mission and surrendered the virus to Carex to be destroyed long since, but if Carex wanted to get rid of her now, he could do so in a handful of words.
But if he’d wanted to get rid of her, he could have deployed those words long before now. “You think we’re all fucking stupid, Malaxis? She’s a civilian, if she tried to sneak some secret communication past any of us, she’d fall flat on her face.”
“Wrong answer, Idyllian.” Malaxis drew his own weapon, pressed it right up to Genevieve’s forehead. “This is your last chance to change it.”
Genevieve wasn’t sure what made her instincts start screaming at her that yes, he really would do it. Maybe the way Goon Three withdrew his own gun and eased back, out of the line of fire behind her. Maybe some quality to the flatness in Malaxis’s eyes. That fast, she was back to the war at home, the fear of it so deep and insurmountable she couldn’t bring herself to fight. Words came out and she didn’t even know what she was saying, she just didn’t want to die.
