Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  It was not lost on her that this was a less-deadly version of the sort of social engineering the Cabal itself partook in. The knowledge made her feel dirty.

  Bowers skimmed over the text and flipped past videos. After five minutes, he looked up with thoughtful eyes. “I do not believe this will be enough. But you have my attention.”

  After an hour of arguing, Beck conceded to giving Bowers a day—actually twenty-four hours—to use the information to privately wring concessions from Jason Keene. It wasn’t the way she wanted things to go, but the old man was convincing. If Keene could be forced into doing the right thing by threatening him with enough leverage, and the information held by Beck and Bowers certainly was that, then she could accept such a compromise.

  Like every good compromise, neither side walked away happy. Bowers would have his chance to work behind the scenes, but if he failed, Beck had his blessing to proceed as she saw fit. In any honest assessment, she had to acknowledge this was due more to the fact that he couldn’t stop her than a real belief that she was right. Beck’s arguments fell on deaf ears, unfortunately, but Bowers was shrewd enough to recognize she had him at a disadvantage.

  He had given his word that no one else would be sent after her. She had her freedom until his meeting with Keene was over, one way or another. She trusted Bowers in this to an extent, but the reach of that trust was not infinite.

  Once her armor was on its way to the rendezvous point she set up in advance, Beck sped away from the ancient, abandoned repair bay she’d been transmitting from. Her arms ached from hauling her stolen remote operation rig to the place, and she needed sleep. She made it to the rendezvous in an hour of jogging, then took a long nap. Either the armor would home in on the place and make it, or it wouldn’t.

  When she woke, the suit was waiting for her. She slapped a new Brick into it and set the other to charging. Manhattan was lovely in that way. While not all the old and forgotten tunnels had the proper outlets, power lines she could tap into with a little work were omnipresent. Another holdover from how ridiculously overbuilt the refuge was from the days of the Collapse.

  When there was no more work to do, no chore in front of her but the endless waiting, Beck found herself inexorably drawn into thinking about her family. Not in the sore but no longer sharply painful memories of their loss, but wondering what they would think about the twists and turns her life had taken since their passing.

  Aaron, her brother, would probably have pestered her endlessly about her armor. Not about the daily worries, fears, and responsibilities of being a Sentinel. He wasn’t too young to grasp those things as concepts, but she felt sure his interest would focus instead on the what he saw as the only truly interesting part of her job in the Watch.

  Mom and Dad were trickier. Months of honest examination led to the unavoidable conclusion that like most children, Beck didn’t really know her parents very well as people. Their religion had always created a distance. The idea of faith was alien to her, an invisible wall she could not breach or climb. Beck had never been offended or bothered by it, only mystified. Holding to belief in a higher power, especially considering he world they lived in, spoke of a fundamentally differing view of the world. One so far from her own that bridging the gap felt impossible.

  Yet she believed they would approve of what she was trying to accomplish now. Her parents, whatever else they might have been, were strong believers in truth. Not unvarnished fact with its capacity to do unimaginable harm, but truth nonetheless.

  The idea comforted her, though Beck would have carried on even if that same evaluation led her to believe her family would have disapproved. They had raised her to be independent and act according to her own values and beliefs, and in this Beck was probably an overachiever.

  The waiting was made more bearable by the warmth of their memories. Strange how those wounds could scar over enough to make that possible.

  Eventually even these thoughts could no longer hold her attention, and Beck got bored. Emotional exhaustion happened with good feelings as well as the negative ones, and her capacity for both was low.

  She set about checking every contingency she had set up before her meeting with Bowers. She had taps into the networks of every civilian division of the government. Stopping at the underground sections of each headquarters to tap the backdoor access the Watch kept was only one part of the whole. In a worst-case scenario, the fail-safes Beck had running in the Mesh would send out the truth about the Cabal without any signal from her. It was a software dead-man’s switch. If she went more than twelve hours without sending out a voice command over the Mesh, the program would activate.

  And it was not the only one.

  She only hoped it would work if the situation between Bowers and Keene didn’t resolve the way the old man expected. Beck had prodigious programming skills, but this was far beyond her abilities. Using the taps installed by the Watch was the only way she managed access to so many top-level systems, which itself was the only way to circumvent the many protections and filters the Mesh and vid services had baked in. She was far from the first person to try disseminating unapproved information this way, though it was unlikely anyone before her had access given to her by the High Commander of the Watch itself.

  Though the nagging thought would not stop biting at her mind like a bothersome fly: if Bowers knew she returned from the moment she stepped through the hatch, why hadn’t he cut off her access? Why hadn’t he changed the codes?

  It would have been easy to explain that lapse by blaming one or another of his political games, but Beck didn’t believe that was the case. The simple answer was often the best and most accurate one.

  Bowers trusted her, and her return by itself was not enough to break that trust.

  She only hoped that whatever came next didn’t finish the job.

  Eventually the time came for the meeting. She heard the chime from her suit reminding her that Bowers should now be walking into a room with the leader of her entire world.

  No. That was no longer true. Keene was the leader of the Protectorate, but she could no longer see this place as the alpha and the omega of human civilization. She settled down to count the time—the meeting was to last no longer than half an hour, after which Bowers would contact her.

  Instead, the chime from her armor sounded again, this time more insistent. Beck hauled herself to her feet and poked her head inside the open back to find a flashing message. As soon as her eye came close enough to trigger the retinal scanner that secured her suit from anyone using it without authorization, a video feed popped up on the HUD.

  She saw Keene in it, approaching from a distance. The Protector was in a dingy room and flanked by an entire squad of Security division Deathwatch. It was only when she heard Bowers speak that the scene made sense. He had somehow smuggled a recording device into the meeting, past the sweep he surely must have undergone for such a thing.

  She was watching it happen live.

  What she saw knocked the breath out of her.

  30

  “You were supposed to come alone,” Bowers said conversationally, as if the nine armored figures simply didn’t exist. He was of course meant to be intimidated by the fact that Keene would bring his own Watchmen to this meeting. It was a blunt statement that those Watchmen were bought and paid for. Bowers gave the shining black wall of armor no more than a casual glance. A fool—and in this case he suspected Keene might be such a fool—might believe this was bravado. That Bowers was trying to show how unconcerned he was to make a point of his own.

  Which just went to show how badly Keene misunderstood who Francisco Bowers was.

  “Did you really think I would agree to this meeting without protection?” Keene asked, sounding genuinely curious. “Your people have made concerted attacks against mine. My safety has always been a concern, since well before I was elected by the council.”

  Bowers gently clasped his hands in front of his waist, a posture more suited for casual debate in the counci
l chambers than a clandestine meeting between enemies. “Strange, Jason. I thought they were supposed to be our people. All of them.”

  Keene snorted. “Please. You know as well as I do that every garden needs pruning. Your band of killers has been doing it for a hundred years.”

  Bowers felt the first stirring of real anger waft up from a ball of heat in his middle, but he kept the rage from his voice. Barely. “If that is how you view the Watch, it’s no wonder you were so cavalier about murdering citizens.”

  The words should have sent a ripple through the Watchmen in the room. They were an accusation of broken Tenets, a crime no one was above. Instead the silent figures stood rooted in place, not so much as a twitch between the lot of them.

  Well. He had always known some of his must be in the Cabal.

  “What I have done has always been for the good of the Protectorate, Frank,” Keene said. The sincerity in his voice was nearly believable, but it had the sound of a practiced line. A justification of the sort that was old and tired long before Rome fell. “What we do maintains order.”

  Bowers shook his head sadly. “You fall into the same trap far better men before you were unable to avoid. You believe the society, the government, is separate from the people in it. But I’m not here to talk philosophy with you, Jason. You know damned well why I asked for this meeting.”

  Keene reached into a pocket and removed a small data card. “Yes. This. Information your people stole from our server. Finally managed to decrypt it, I see. And you expect me to believe you, the old guard himself, will allow it to become public? Give me some credit. I’ve watched you for years. You’re far too cautious to let something so…disruptive come to light.”

  “You’re not wrong,” Bowers said. “I would never condone releasing something like this.”

  Keene tilted his head in an oddly birdlike way. “Then you have no leverage. Which considering the company you find yourself in seems suicidally moronic.”

  Despite the words, Keene gave no orders to the Watchmen around him. If anything, his body language was tightly controlled. Bowers understood this in ways those without his decades might not have. He had, after all, seen men take cues from their leaders from gestures as small as the motion of a shoulder. A man trained to be a weapon, to think of himself as such, often found his body reacting before his brain had time to process reality. Keene might have curious blind spots, but he was aware enough not to kill Bowers by accident.

  The Protector was worried. He saw there was something here he did not understand, and was unwilling to risk catastrophe without knowing what it was.

  “Yes, I can see how it would look that way to you,” Bowers said. “You can think many moves ahead, I grant you that. But in this case there are circumstances beyond my control or yours. I did not ask for this meeting to threaten you, Protector. I wanted to warn you.”

  Again, Keene tilted his head, this time with narrow eyes. “Oh? That’s magnanimous of you.”

  “It isn’t,” Bowers assured him. “If I had my way, your head would be months rotting on a pike. I am a realist, however. I recognize limitations. In this case, someone else has access to the information on that card, and they’re going to spread it like wildfire if we fail to reach an agreement. You see, the decision is out of my hands. We have both been outmaneuvered.”

  Keene’s jaw tightened ever so slightly. His eyelids pulsed with the beat of his heart. The vein running across the upper left side of his forehead twitched. These were old familiar friends to Bowers, tells he had observed hundreds of times over the course of meetings. Keene was an apt politician, but that was all he was. A player of games. The difference between the mask he wore and a member of the Watch was that for Keene, it was a mask only. The calm only went skin deep.

  For Bowers, as with all of his people, control reached all the way to the bones. Like the best liars, Bowers had to believe. He had to become as icy and detached as he wanted to appear. The pretense might work in a conference room to convince others you were in control, but on the battlefield only hard reality would keep you and yours alive.

  Those signs told him that Keene was about to make a rash decision. He would react out of anger or disbelief. Bowers had a sudden vision of martial law, his people searching every building and every electronic trail in their hunt for the person that would turn out to be Beck. He understood instantly that this would be the exact pretense Keene would need to publicly act against the Movement and root them out once and for all. There would be casualties. Innocents would die.

  Over his decades of service, Bowers had been forced to inflict collateral damage. Oh, not often in person, but as a leader the responsibility was always his. Blame not the knife for the life it takes, but the hand which guides it.

  He saw with perfect clarity the cost in lives, the pain of loss, Keene’s crusade against the Movement would cost, and there Bowers drew a line.

  “Be the shield,” he muttered too low to be heard by anyone in the room. The microphone in the camera embedded in his eye would pick it up flawlessly.

  Bowers twitched his hand behind his back with deceptive speed for one his age.

  Two Watchmen with hidden firearms held at their sides reacted, their armored fists rising almost too fast for human eyes to capture. Sound filled the world. Pressure lanced his chest. The smell of blood, an old companion, wafted through the air with its indelible bouquet.

  In front of the wide and suddenly terrified eyes of Jason Keene, Francisco Bowers fell.

  The smart move would have been to take him along when Keene and his mercenary Watchmen left the room. Failing that, they should have finished him off. They did neither. Bowers lay in breathless agony as Keene shouted recriminations, electronically modulated voices from the surrounding Deathwatch squad biting against the pounding of blood in his ears.

  Had it been up to the Watchmen, Bowers was certain he would have died moments after being shot. As it was, the Protector panicked and ordered them to leave. Given the severity of his wounds, there was obviously little doubt in Keene’s mind that Bowers would soon be dead. The further away they were when that happened, the less likely the blame would fall on him.

  In fairness they were probably right. It was nearly impossible to breathe. Every time he did, flecks of blood erupted from his mouth in a red mist.

  With a shaky hand, Bowers pressed two fingers between the bones of his left forearm and held them there for five seconds. The faint buzz of the tiny device embedded there told him the signal was received and acknowledged.

  The harsh clank of metal boots filled his world in only a handful of seconds. The armor—his armor—moved as fast as the homing program would allow. It stopped next to him and did as it was programmed and unfolded open. Taking as deep a breath as he could manage, Bowers put his fists against the concrete and pushed.

  Every ounce of power in his aged but strong frame went into trying to lift himself to his knees. He failed. The drop was sudden, a loss of strength as abrupt as a switch being thrown. He barely felt his face hit the floor. Small favor that the bullet wounds hurt so much that everything else paled in comparison.

  The sound began to drain from the world. Not true silence. This was a familiar sensation. A reminder from his younger days. Shock setting in. Bowers closed his eyes and sought the empty center where pain and fear and hope could not exist.

  With the greatest effort it had ever taken, he found that place.

  “Record,” he wheezed. “And transmit.”

  The armor, as old and scarred as the man too weak to climb inside it one last time, chimed its agreement.

  “Beck,” he said in a weak voice. “You may still be watching this. I hope not. You don’t need another terrible memory. I am so sorry for your family. Sorry I wasn’t the man you needed me to be. I failed so many like you by not acting sooner. I’ve left other—”

  A wracking cough overtook him, sending a thick spray of blood across the scuffed exterior of his suit. “I’ve left other contingencies
in place. In case this went badly. I knew I might have to force their hand. This was my choice. He would have never admitted the truth out loud. I had to make him do something he couldn’t hide. Tomorrow you should do what you planned. You’ll see why.”

  Quiet as the words were, they took most of his remaining strength. The will required to stop the wet, ragged coughs trying to escape his broken body was tremendous and nearly gone.

  Bowers lay on his side and felt the end approach. There was regret, yes, but also pride. He had a lifetime of trying to do right, to be good, behind him. He expected to feel the deep dread of the inevitable approaching. Instead the weight he carried for almost as long as he could remember lifted.

  There would be no more worry. No more strife. The struggle to maintain the balance between order and freedom would pass on to another pair of shoulders. The end was coming and soon at that, yet he could muster no terror at the approaching rest.

  “You will do well,” Bowers said. “Remember your oath. Don’t lay it down.”

  Darkness began to creep in at the edges of his vision. The tangy smell of blood grew more powerful. Strange how one sense could strengthen as the others failed.

  A small part of him was grateful that he hadn’t been able to climb inside the armor with its emergency medical systems. Even the small chance at life they offered held no appeal. The pain wasn’t so bad now. Mostly he felt cold.

  He had wanted so badly to guide the Movement and the people of the Protectorate toward a better age. A place more free than the one behind him. Age showed him that the job was never truly done. He would have to be satisfied with the work and trust in the young to carry on.