“Who the hell are you?” he blurted, getting to his feet. Lou had never seen him look more frightened.
Again, Lou heard Kid’s soft voice inside her head. Dog was my friend! He looked after me when I was sick. I saved Kestrel for him. Now I’m gonna make you hurt the way you made Dog hurt!
Tom ran, shouting for Lou to do the same. Lou watched him go. She saw, out the corner of her eye, Kid make a simple hand gesture; several phage shells burst against Tom’s back. He screamed, leapt in the air, shrieking. He fell to the ground in two pieces. Lou winced, watching, awed.
Kid advanced on Tom’s ruins. Lou could see him breathing hard, his shoulders heaving. She got up and went to Kid, and found him crying. “He killed my friend. Why did he do that?” He was speaking aloud now. It was unbearable, listening to that much grief.
Lou felt fresh tears. She held Kid’s hand, and tried not to think what Tourignon had said about this young man’s connections, about what he could do — what she had just seen him do. Right now he was an angry, frightened boy in a young man’s body. He howled, “Why did he kill my friend?”
Lou led him away from the scene of Tom’s destruction. The smell, she knew, would follow her forever.
“Dog was my friend, too,” she said. “I was helping him find you.”
The boy nodded, looked at her. “I know. You were good to him.”
They stood a while. The boy was inconsolable. She let him cry on her shoulder, and held him, thinking about his destiny. She looked at him, his eyes wet with tears, sniffling, shivering, aching with loss, and tried to see him as some kind of conduit between humanity as she knew it and something beyond her imagination.
“Do you remember much, about your time away?”
He nodded, sobbing more.
“The people you were with. Are they friendly? Do they like us?”
Nodding. “Curious. Confused. Don’t … understand.”
Jen interrupted, “Lou, every emergency services asset in the whole Orbital is converging on your location. The first wave should be there any moment.”
She sent a thought message back to Jen acknowledging this, but she wondered, too, what to do about it. Lou noticed she couldn’t hear the sea, or feel any wind around her. Kid had some kind of exclusion zone thing going, she figured.
“Um, Kid,” she said, “all kinds of people are about to show up here, and they’re gonna be curious as hell about you. But I’d like to ask you something, if that’s all right.”
Kid wiped his nose on his hand. His eyes were puffy and wet. Lou noticed the fine gold hairs on his arm. He was a beautiful … whatever he was. He nodded, not moving his head from her shoulder. Sniffing, sobbing.
“You said you saved Kestrel. What did you mean?”
He said, his voice soft and simple, if halting, “I didn’t want Dog to get hurt. He was my friend.”
Lou could think of nothing to say. She stroked his hair, thinking about the love of children for their dogs.
Suddenly there were voices all around her. “Do not move! Stand where you are!” The sounds of guns being set mixed with the ominous hums of engines of destruction powering up.
Lou glanced up, and saw a squad of twelve immense soldiers in black patrol armor, about five meters away. They had big assault weapons trained on her and Kid. Looking around at this ring of firepower, she saw a lot of hovs, both dark cop-hovs and red emergency services hovs, landing back in the Plaza area. Hordes of guys in big yellow NanoHazard suits climbed out, bearing frightening-looking equipment. And, off behind these, she saw a fleet of cop-hovs in holding patterns, awaiting developments.
One of the armored figures in the ring around her and Kid removed its helmet; it was Etienne. He saluted Lou. “I see you have captured our boy for us, Madame Meagher! Excellent work.” He stepped forward, one, two steps. She heard the drivers in his armor whine. She noticed he didn’t have a gun. That was something.
Lou said to Kid, “Look around you. These guys are here to take you away and make you work for them. They want to exploit you.”
He looked up at her, wiping his nose, baffled, confused. Scared, she noticed. Frowning, she said to him, “See that man there, coming towards us?”
Kid nodded, staring.
She said, “He wants to hurt you.”
Kid looked at the approaching Tourignon. “Why does he want to hurt me?”
Tourignon said, “Come along, Madame. Hand over the boy and we can all go home happy. You are entitled to a generous fee for delivering him to us, I might add.” Smiling, he took another step.
Lou said to Kid, “You know that part of you that makes you special and unique? That man wants to pull it out of you and use it for himself. He wants to take away what is yours. He will make you his slave, do you understand?”
Tourignon issued a command to his troops to close in. The ring closed. The troops towered around her. She could smell their armor, smell the coolant from their torso units. Those assault weapons looked gigantic, black and smooth.
Kid continued to look confused and anxious. Lou, panicking, shook him by his shoulders. “Kid, these guys want to hurt me! I’m your friend and I was Dog’s friend. Help me!” Kid looked up at her then, and she saw that baleful, implacable gaze come over him once more.
Tourignon took his last step, and put his cold, gauntleted hand on Lou’s shoulder, pulling her away from Kid. She said, “Kid!”
He saw. A soldier stepped in and picked up Lou, carrying her away towards a waiting hov. She kicked and struggled to no effect. The soldier’s armor was cold, angular. Kid watched her go, heard her scream his name.
Tourignon put his hand on Kid’s shoulder. “Time to come with me, boy. I’m your Uncle Etienne.”
This was Etienne Tourignon’s last known utterance.
Kid looked up at Tourignon, and said a lethal word, “No.”
Tourignon felt the end of his grand plan first as a terrible total-body pain, which settled in his head. Then there was a sense of awful pressure. He held his head, his face screwed up, uttering squeezed gasps of pain. He looked down at Kid. Their eyes met.
Tourignon’s body came undone; his liquid head spilled down the sides of his armored suit.
The soldiers fired on the boy, blasting him with everything they had, a fusillade of cutting-edge antipersonnel technology. Cop-hovs overhead opened up with phage cannons.
Kid absorbed it all. Enraged, he screamed at them. And screaming, he released a fire of his own.
The soldiers close to the boy were vaporized.
Lou saw the flash. In the split-second before the shockwave and blast engulfed her, she thought, Go, Kid!
Suddenly, she felt herself wrenched from the trooper carrying her, pulled at right angles to the universe; it felt like falling into cold water on a hot day. Too astonished to scream, she looked around. The view was like that fractal stuff she saw on that reporter’s face. She was plunging up into it, through geometric infinity, at what felt like phenomenal speed. Strange that she sort of knew what was happening, but not in a way she could explain. It was hard on her eyes. But that was okay. She’d heard of worse afterlives.
When the experts came to study the Orbital’s wreckage in the weeks following its destruction, they would cluck their tongues and estimate the strength of the initial blast as equivalent to the yield of a hundred megaton fusion weapon. The waiting news media expressed surprise at this, and the clever ones wondered if there was a connection between this baffling, tragic incident, and the disappearance of the Herrington Object. Subsequent investigation revealed that there had been no thermonuclear weapons aboard the Orbital, which only added to the mystery surrounding its loss — and the rumors.
The Orbital had broken apart. All hands were lost.
Immense, charred chunks tumbled together, following the Orbital’s original cour
se. Some of these pieces suffered further explosions for days as smaller generators, hov powerplants and other energy sources blew. A confetti of glittering debris accompanied the Orbital’s remains.
Lou sipped her espresso, looking around. Kid had created a nice place for her. It was a cross between her Hotel Metropol penthouse in Stalktown and Jen’s place. Old movie posters and big white blocky pieces of furniture, polished hardwood floors, big floor-to-ceiling windows, and lots of bookshelves and fixed media displays. Jen’s red fiber bike hung on a back wall. There was even a bathroom featuring a genuine clawfooted tub, an antique from the bad old twentieth century. She missed not having a little garden area the way she’d had at the penthouse.
Lou didn’t know what happened to Jen, or, for that matter, where the hell she herself was now. Afterlife or virtuum; she didn’t know.
While she liked the windows, she wasn’t sure what to make of the view. Standing there, looking out through those windows, she saw … she wasn’t sure what she saw. An opalescent light, but with a sense of spooky depth. There were outlines and suggestions of vast structures in the distance. She wasn’t sure. Sometimes she saw things moving around within it, as if she were somewhere under an ocean of this light, and there were strange fish out there. These “fish” often seemed as curious about her as she was about them.
Kid was on the sofa, all elbows and knees. He didn’t look much like that potent figure of wrath she recalled from his first appearance. He moped a lot, and still suffered great fits of crying about Dog. Lou did too.
She knew Kid had destroyed the Orbital; this scared her. It was one thing to avenge Dog’s death, and to save her life, and to hit back at reptiles like Tourignon in a kind of self-defence. But to take the lives of millions of otherwise uninvolved people? She tried to explain this to him, that such slaughter was wrong, that revenge like that wasn’t the right way to deal with his feelings. But in his head he was still a scared little boy, with hurt feelings. Learning right from wrong would take time.
She also tried to find out where they were now.
Kid shrugged. “We’re here, Lou. You like it?”
“Okay,” she said, frowning. “Where’s here? What is this place?”
“This is where I live now. You, too, if you want.”
She looked at Kid, wondering what to make of him. It had only been a few months since Dog made those recordings of him, when he had been a dying little disposable boy. He had had only a few weeks to live at most. And yet, here he was, much, much older, apparently healthy. She almost did not want to know what had happened, but, ever curious, she couldn’t help but ask.
He told her, “My friends took me away, and they changed me so I could be with them, and so I could do a special job one day.”
Lou stared at him, wondering at the simplicity of his world, a world she did not know if she could ever understand. She started to put things together in her head. That day in her apartment when Dog was having his spasm attack, and she could hear those weird noises coming through Dog’s synth-box, she had heard on one hand a sound something like the ocean, and on the other a more distressing sound, like a small boy choking, as if someone was forcing a tube down his throat. She’d imagined someone was torturing Kid.
Torturing or transforming?
Kid said his friends “changed” him so he could be with them. She remembered, too, from her first conversation with Dog, when he’d said that Kid was still alive, but that he was scared. And there was the time with the crazy lady, the time-traveling lady, who had told her that Kid was “with his own kind”.
Lou swore, thinking about it all. Aliens had indeed taken the boy. It was hard to accept. And yet here she was, in what she had to assume was where these same aliens lived and communed with the new, upgraded version of Kid.
She wasn’t sure she could handle this. It was too much.
Kid was asking her, “What do you wanna do now, Lou?” He wanted only to make her happy and comfortable in this new life. He was being a good host, she realized queasily.
“Well,” she said, and set down the espresso on the polished granite breakfast counter. The coffee wasn’t very good, she noticed. Kind of … bland, tasteless. “Well, I don’t know. I mean, where are we?”
Kid grinned, looking happy. “This is where my friends live. They like you.”
She was trying to sort through everything, thinking out loud. “So, this is where you were the whole time you were gone?
Kid nodded, big silly nods, and grinned. “Yeah.”
Staring out the window, Lou felt a fresh unease. “Do you have any idea why all this happened to you?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“All right. Can you take me back to human space? Maybe drop me off somewhere?”
“Yeah. Uh-huh. Whatever you want. Anything you want.”
Lou shot him a serious look, thinking. “Anything? You saying I could have anything I want?”
Kid giggled. “Yeah!” He said it as if this point were blindingly obvious.
She curled her lip, thinking. She flexed her fingers, and felt the stiffness, the grittiness in the knuckles. Her eyes, she noticed, still did not feel quite right. She had to squint to see the posters across the room.
“Could you restore me to actual life? You know, so I’d have a heartbeat and stuff?”
Kid looked glum. “Sorry.”
“You said anything I wanted.”
He shrugged, got up and went to a window, where he waved at passing lights, giggling. Lou stared, thinking about his unimaginable future as the entity Tourignon had called “the Bridge” between humanity and the aliens of the Unseen Realm. Which, she realized, must be where she was now.
Lou sighed. She could go back to human space, but then what? She was still a dead person. Still needing constant refreshes of her nano-tink to keep her going. There was even a good chance that all the baggage of her former existence, including her murder conviction, would haunt her forever. Even though, weirdly, the murdered victim was now all better. Otaru might even want to insist on keeping her as its property.
Could she accept life as property of a synthetic mind?
Maybe if Otaru “died” all deals would be off. That was a thought. Maybe she could put something together with Otaru and Kid, make everyone happy.
She laughed. Yeah, right!
But she’d still be a dead freak, zombie scum, always trying to keep one step ahead of the rot, trying to pass for living. Probably homeless.
The only person she knew, who didn’t mind her condition, was this now-adolescent boy.
For a moment she allowed herself the amusing but cruel fantasy that her mother would ask her to come and live with her, and they’d have wild girls-only parties.
Lou was too old for this crap. Too old. Too tired.
She understood that something had happened inside her, that when she saw Dog die, she felt like Tom had cut out her heart. Which was stupid, of course. But that plucky little dog , her dog, she added. He’d depended on her. She felt herself getting tight in the throat again, and took some deep breaths.
“Kid,” she said, her voice breaking.
Kid turned from the window, a huge luminous smile on his face. “Yeah, Lou?”
“I, I um, listen, can you … Christ, I’m making a botch of this.” She stopped to wipe her nose. “Kid, I want to die. Can you do that?”
Kid looked hurt. “You wanna die?”
Her voice wavered badly. “I’ve had enough. I’m finished. I just don’t want to go on. Can you help me?”
Kid glanced out the window, then back at Lou. She could see he had an idea. “Lou, would you like to be with them?”
It took her a moment to understand. He was offering her what Tourignon had wanted to take from him. A way to escape from the bounds of flesh.
She blinked, sni
ffled and looked at the opalescent lights outside the window. What kind of existence would it be out there? How would it feel? Would it be hard to make the transition? She thought…
She thought she was thinking too damn much! Frowning and holding her breath, she was suddenly nervous as hell. She looked at Kid, who was looking out the window, giggling and waving.
She bit her lip.
“Kid — I want to do it!” She stood, and walked over to him on wobbly, nervous legs. He came to her, smiling, looking tall and confident again, powerful and innocent. He took her hand.
“There’s nothing to be scared of,” he said.
Lou, feeling funny, said, “Better not be, Kid, or you’re in big trouble.”
But she was already slipping towards numinosity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book came to be with a lot of help from many people, too many to list here, but the ones I can mention are..
* Michelle, my lovely wife, whose support and belief in me from day one has been a constant inspiration
* My parents, who, before Michelle, put up with my writing for many many years, and in particular put up with the deafening clatter from my portable typewriter from 8 in the morning to 11 at night, day after day, for years. And who now couldn’t be more chuffed for me
* My friend Robyn, partner in crime, fellow writer, tireless listener and supporter, who believed in this book from the first moment she clapped eyes on crappy early drafts
* My late friend Ellen, who did not live to see the book finished. She was a great friend and supporter of my work. Her memory still infuses the character of Lou
* My writing friends on the Writingchat Internet mailing list who have always been there, during the good times and the many, many bad times, encouraging and supporting me. Every writer should have such a support group
* And, lastly, to the good eggs, past and present, at EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, who took a punt on a writer from the other side of the planet. Any errors remaining in this book are, of course, my own.
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