Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  Bowers couldn’t help being reminded of Beck as the words rolled across him. He was not so lost in the lofty heights of his office that a dressing down could offend him beyond reason. It seemed most of the women he knew or encountered over the last few years had the same fight in them. A willingness not to let him shout them down or make them feel less than they were.

  It made him strangely proud. His people produced strength, and not the mindless lashing out of men with egos far beyond their capacity. This was power with a purpose, directed exactly where it should be.

  Toward protecting.

  “You’re right,” he said, bowing his head slightly.

  “I am?” Fallows said. “I mean, I know I am, but I’m surprised to hear you say it.”

  Bowers swiped open his terminal and set a search function running. “Not about the legality of our actions, no. In that I stand by my agents and their actions. The recent exile was the illegal act. But yes, you are correct that I should have planned ahead when we removed so many key people for their crimes. The first duty of the Watch is to protect, but among the others is to assure the stable continuation of services to citizens. I will find you the people you need to bolster your work force while you train replacements. You have my word.”

  As the meeting continued and the search looked for likely candidates among the Watch, Bowers couldn’t stop one corner of his mind from wondering just what that girl was up to.

  28

  Beck tried not to think of the merry hell the Loop system was going through at the moment. She had chosen her time precisely, not eager to cause a massive snarl of missed carriages by doing it during the day.

  She let the tracking device embedded in every set of Deathwatch armor function until she was midway between Brighton and the next Rez, Dawes. When she switched it off, a cascade of commands took over through the Mesh. To anyone watching the tube readouts, it would look like her carriage went on with its business while her location blinked away.

  In reality, the car bled off its speed and engaged its brakes in the span of thirty seconds. Her programming had been fairly accurate; the other carriage waiting for her in a connecting tube was only thirty feet off the expected position.

  She had to engage the atmospheric systems in her suit since the Loop was kept at a near vacuum for most of its length. That was fine. She planned for it.

  Less fine was the knowledge that her actions would by themselves paint her as untrustworthy to Bowers at the very best. At worst she would be treated as an enemy combatant. The idea bothered her more for the respect she would lose in his eyes than for the danger to her life. She didn’t want to die, but losing her family had taken away much of the fear in dying.

  That was after all a primary reason the Watch recruited so heavily from people like her.

  Her second carriage should be invisible if everything went the way she planned. Shutting down huge sections of the Loop network to ensure there were no oncoming vehicles within it was a necessary bit of sabotage. Widespread service outages would also mask her destination.

  The trio of carriages very obviously heading toward Movement headquarters where Parker was housed would draw some attention. Beck had no illusions anyone looking for her would believe she was on any of them. It was too obvious. But it would make them sweat. Bowers wouldn’t be able to ignore those carriages, even if he was the only one able to see them once they entered the enormous perimeter around the base itself. Beck wasn’t suicidal enough to screw around with the programming that hid Loop carriage movement that might give the place away.

  If Bowers suspected the reason for her return, then he would also work out the most likely place she would head toward. The Mesh was a network of fine lines of communication from every connected device, each leading toward the larger threads of the communication lines. Those optical fibers ran between every Rez—ran beneath the Loop rails, as a matter of fact—and each Rez needed a small routing center to manage the Mesh.

  Brighton was both too familiar, making her suit more likely to be recognized, and too far away from the rest of the Protectorate to make a good target. Her aim was the dissemination of information, and the many checks and firewalls between Brighton and the rest of civilization created too many spots for potential failure. Dawes might seem a better choice, which was why she didn’t bother with it either.

  Instead she rode the Loop for hours without end toward Manhattan. Along the way she composed a set of messages and queued them in her suit to be sent under certain conditions to certain people at certain times.

  This too was something Eshton had insisted on. Beck was content to leave well enough alone and not inform anyone she was back no matter what. Eshton, having picked up a fine sheen of nostalgia during his exile, thought that a few final words to her friends should things go off the rails was not out of line.

  She switched carriages several times on her trip to the big city. The layers of precautions and misdirections seemed paranoid to her, which was exactly why Eshton had demanded she take them.

  The long trip afforded her the chance to recharge her armor. Like every soldier in history who learned to catch sleep at any opportunity, Beck rigorously took advantage of the abundant energy and ubiquitous outlets.

  The doors of the Manhattan station airlock approached as the carriage slowed. It stopped well before them to let Beck out. She didn’t stay to watch the empty transport speed back up before entering the lock. Instead she made her way to the access port for the local undercity the schematics promised was here.

  Getting inside required more work than she expected. The port was an airlock as well, but the exterior door was clearly not maintained. It had to be hidden as all such entrances were, and years of not being used allowed fine dust and grit to work into the faint seam in the wall, acting like glue. Beck had to jam her blade into the gap and work the door loose until it released with a slight pop. Once inside, the automated system took over and everything worked just fine.

  With the pressure equalized, she stepped through the interior door and into the Manhattan undercity. This was no sterile hallway. Before her spread history itself; ancient stone reinforced with modern materials, the light irregular. Rock arched, some raw and black with patches of glazed tile that had once been white standing out like bone through a wound. Beck had to take a moment.

  This was where humanity huddled when the Pales broke through the slipshod walls of Outer Manhattan. Here, the first heroes who became the Deathwatch—Christjansen, Beers, even Aur Beck, the man whose surname she preferred to her own given name—took up their armor without the benefit of practice or calibration. She had turned off her own BIM once just to see what a suit felt like for those pioneers, and it was like being stuffed in a tight metal trash bin and thrown down a hill.

  Every child of the Protectorate knew those stories and learned about this place. The two versions of her saw it in starkly different lights. Beck the civilian revered this place for the sanctuary of legend it rightly was.

  Beck the Sentinel understood she walked in the belly of the beast.

  The Manhattan undercity connected to every part of the Rez above. Not in the way most of the tunnel networks across the Protectorate did the job, with sections reaching only as far as they needed to serve a purpose. Here the maze was truly omnipresent. The estimates she’d read claimed less than ten percent of the island lacked some kind of underground level. Old New York had subways galore, and the sewer system was extensive. Add to that years of deliberate effort to hollow out as much of the remaining space during the Collapse and twenty more after the survivors moved in finishing the work, and you ended up with a magnificent warren of chambers connected like a god’s circulatory system.

  In the full day she spent moving from one destination to the other, occasionally stopping at a high-speed charging station to top off, Beck never caught sight of another person. She kept to the access tunnels and back ways only used for maintenance. She wasn’t stupid enough to try the local Loop network or civ
ilian thoroughfares that carried traffic through the underground.

  Her stops were carefully planned, each lasting only a few minutes. Even those short respites sent her stomach writhing like a bag of eels. Every pause near the foundation of a major operations center—and all of those stops were just that—included a much larger risk of being spotted.

  When the day-long circuit of the world beneath Manhattan was done, Beck made the long slog to a quiet storage room at the periphery of the undercity and took her rest. Her eyes burned with exhaustion as she locked the door behind her and stepped out of her suit.

  The giant bags of emergency rations didn’t make a very comfortable bed, but she was out in seconds.

  She was having a dream about being back in Canaan, sitting in the shade of the cliff and working on a piece of Deathwatch armor, when a loud voice spoke.

  “Sentry mode activated,” it intoned.

  Beck came awake instantly, just in time to see her suit raise its right arm toward the opening door. A figure in dark clothing was in the middle of reeling back, having opened the door only to hear the booming words issue from the suit.

  The armor did its job perfectly. Beck saw the tiny adjustment as it acquired the target before launching the stun dart. The sound of snapping electricity preceded the thump of a body hitting the stone floor.

  She nearly leaped into the suit, which while in sentry mode didn’t bother with the slower closing procedure. Instead the back half folded shut with a snap as soon as she was safely inside.

  Beck took a step forward and grabbed the intruder just as he was beginning to regain control of himself. She hauled him into the room and dragged him to her makeshift bed, tossing him on the bags. She knew him, if only by name and sight.

  “Brunsen,” she said through the speaker. “Shit.”

  The older man opened his mouth to say something, and Beck was suddenly sure it wouldn’t be anything she wanted to hear. The hand not clamped down on his wrist with vise-like strength shot to his mouth and covered it. With prejudice.

  “Activate personal sandbox,” Beck said to her armor. “Send all external voice commands to virtual testing ground until further notice.”

  “Sandbox enabled,” the suit responded.

  Beneath her gauntlet, Brunsen’s face immediately flashed with defeat. She considered that confirmation enough. Disabling a suit was the surest way to beat an agent of the Watch without killing them.

  “I’m going to take my hand off your face,” Beck said. “If you try any commands, they won’t work. Also I’ll break your jaw. We clear?”

  Brunsen gave the only nod he could beneath the pressure holding his head down. Beck slowly pulled back but kept the gauntlet within a foot of his face. The man certainly knew how to read a room; he didn’t move an inch.

  “Well, that’s fucking embarrassing,” he said.

  Beck sighed. “Getting beat by a girl?”

  “By a rookie,” he replied. “Should’ve known better than to check rooms without my own armor, but it was going too slow.”

  “How did you find me?” Beck asked. “Professional curiosity.”

  Brunsen didn’t smile, but the twinkle in his eye was unmistakable. “Thermal bloom. Once I figured you were here in Manhattan, the most likely place for you to lurk was down here. Checking the logs of what personnel went into what tunnels against the average increase in temperature in the closed areas gave me a general location.”

  The armor put off a lot of heat, that much was true. Enough to bring the temperature of even a large space up by a margin the heat sensors meant to warn of fires could detect. But that wasn’t what she meant.

  “How did you know I’d be here,” Beck stressed. “In Manhattan?”

  Brunsen shrugged. “You came back from exile against orders. Struck me that you’d probably only do that for a good reason. Something big. And you were hiding. That meant you wanted to hide where you were going. Though I’m gonna be honest with you, kid. I had that program up and running across every Rez just looking for weird temperature spikes that didn’t have a corresponding Watchman in armor show up. You’re invisible to the network, but you can’t fight entropy.”

  It was a loophole Beck hadn’t considered even once in the weeks and weeks of planning. Using the waste heat of her armor as a way to track her movements when the system couldn’t see her was brilliant. If anything, being invisible made her easier to track. One of the false identities she created might have held up longer. As it was, Brunsen knew he was searching for an anomaly. A hot zone without an obvious cause.

  “Well, I feel stupid,” Beck said.

  Brunsen shrugged again. “Age and treachery will beat youth and smarts nine times out of ten. Don’t beat yourself up too bad.”

  “I won’t,” she assured him. “Speaking of which, I can’t exactly allow you to run around chasing me. Sorry about this.”

  29

  An armored fist knocked against the door. The response took longer than it normally would have. This was due to the awareness of the larger circumstances outside by the man within. Bowers would surely have seen the movement by the figure in black from the service lift through his staff. Darts flying, their contents rendering all six of the people in the outer office unconscious before they could register the threat, much less call for help.

  Bowers had likely discovered by now that his own means of communicating with the outside world were all cut off. Or at least the ones Beck could manage to find.

  Which left him with one option.

  “Come in,” he said.

  The door had barely closed when Bowers stepped from behind his desk and spoke in a clear voice. “Stop. Command override.”

  The suit froze in place, the only movement the slight drop of a foot to maintain balance. Bowers removed a small firearm from his desk and positioned himself at the rear of the suit. “I hope you’re going to behave when you come out of there, Miss Park.”

  “I think you’re going to be disappointed,” Beck said.

  Bowers sighed. “Very well. I can’t fault you for having spirit, at least. Open suit.”

  Her armor unfolded like a flower.

  Beck saw Bowers’s reaction through the suit’s peripheral awareness camera system. The old man showed a rare moment of shock before dropping into the slight frown that passed for a scowl. “Very clever. I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me how you managed to program your armor to do more than follow someone around, are you?”

  From a mile away, Beck made a tsking sound. “Sir, you already know we have remote operation capabilities. I’m sure you read my file. I did this before I even joined the Watch. I needed to talk to you privately, but I wasn’t going to risk being caught.”

  He shook his head ruefully, a trace of a smile curling his lip. “You’re in Manhattan. There are only so many places with those devices. Tracking you down is only a matter of time.”

  “Unless I stole one from storage and set it up at a random location,” Beck suggested. “Then it’s trickier.”

  “Fine,” Bowers said, circling back around to take his seat. “May I at least assume you are not here to harm me?”

  “Last thing on my mind,” Beck assured him. “Though you can leave the suit frozen if you want. I don’t mind. Let me say, though, that it was pretty smart to hide the pieces of the top-level overrides in the firmware. I knew you had to have some ace in the hole. What is it, voice recognition keyed only to you? That way if I find a way around the general codes, you still have a fail-safe if you need it?”

  Bowers’s smile widened. “So damned clever. It’s a shame you’ve ruined your future with this…rebellion. I thought better of you.”

  “That’s rich coming from a man who knows the Cabal was or maybe still is planning to wipe out the Remnants and decided not to do anything about it,” she snapped back.

  Through the camera, she saw the old man flinch. “Ah. So that’s what this is about. You believe it better to enrage the masses about broken Tenets than pan
ic them by telling them Fade B was used against them. Do you really think there will be much difference in the results? Riots, work stoppages, attacks on civil servants. That is how people react to these things, girl. You’re just too young to see it.”

  From the safety of her distant location, Beck muted the mic and cursed the old man. When she went back online, her voice was calm. “I’m not perfect. I don’t know everything, you’re right on that. I’d appreciate it if you stopped assuming I’m an idiot just because I’m not old yet.”

  Bowers shook his head. “That’s your problem. You believe being told you do not yet fully understand the scope of a problem is an insult. The only thing age has to do with it is the experience it brings, and the wisdom to learn from it by people willing to take a hard look at themselves. I have seen uprisings. The deaths they cause. I will not throw my people into chaos because you believe they have a right to know that trumps their safety.”

  Beck pondered that for a moment. “Unlock my suit, please. I need to show you something. I’ve shut off the weapons systems, if you’re worried.”

  Bowers raised an eyebrow. “Temporary unlock, minimal functionality.”

  Beck saw the HUD begin to normalize, though there was only power to the motors and the communication system. Which was twice as many systems as were active a few seconds earlier. So, progress.

  She reached into one of the right leg storage compartments and retrieved a small disposable tablet. “This is the edited version of what I want to release. I sanitized it very carefully. It should incriminate the right people without setting off a full-scale revolt.” She left unsaid that Bowers might be out of touch enough to have missed the facts on the ground. Namely that enough broad pressure, however low, had managed to build up in the populace to make some kind of reaction inevitable. She didn’t mention it because she operated under the belief, as did Eshton, that a controlled reaction was better than letting nature take its course.