Twig

by wildbow

  “Point being,” I interrupted, “we’ve got all sorts of super soldiers and regular soldiers and people in different positions around the city. There’s no device she can deploy or plague or parasite she could pack it with that is going to wipe us out so thoroughly that she’ll feel confident just strolling out of Brechwell. A weapon? No.”

  “Is there an option after four?”

  “Ideology. Change minds, you change the paradigm. She tried that on me last night.”

  “Did it work?” Gordon asked. “I haven’t raised the subject, but you seemed to be considering it.”

  “I was running away, not running to,” I said. “Now? I don’t know. Even with the horrors that might be perpetrated, the ones Lillian talked about, I think I might rather live in a world where Fray’s books got out and the Academy couldn’t quite stop it.”

  That seemed to startle Lillian, who was walking to my left. “Why?”

  “Because,” I said. “Like I told Fray, I’m not loyal to the Academy. I’m loyal to the Lambs. What the Academy is doing with us, it’s a lazy, unhurried approach. Raise a generation of brains and abilities, put them to use, figure out their limits, discard.”

  “That’s a little harsh,” Lillian said.

  “They didn’t save him,” I said.

  I didn’t need to say who ‘him’ was.

  As long as I kept my eyes on the ground, my hood blocked off my view of the other Lambs. “The key to a good con is to rush the victim. Deny them the ability to think clearly. Apply the right kind of pressure and deny a man a chance to truly think, and you can fleece the Lord King of the Crown Empire of his crown.”

  “Hells bells, Sy,” Gordon said, lowering his voice. “Don’t say something like that in public. We can talk about betraying the Crown all you want, and we can explain our way out of that, but if you talk like that…”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Right.”

  “You want to con the Academy?” Mary asked. “Apply pressure?”

  “It’s not just that. Pressure isn’t always bad. You know this, Mary, you live by it. In contests and records of strength, speed, in development of new and innovative biological sciences, we see accident, luck, or effort raise the bar. The rest of the world realizes that it’s possible to go that one step further. They work harder, they hone their ability, they study the particulars… and the rest of the world catches up. What was impossible or world news one year becomes the norm a few years later. The world moves, and people push themselves harder to keep up with that new normal.”

  I paused, inviting question, response, commentary. The Lambs were quiet.

  “The Academy is lazy, lackadaisical. It’s not really trying, so much as it’s maintaining a natural, lazy sort of momentum. Now imagine a world where the books are out there. What does the Academy do?”

  “War, hunt for Fray,” Helen said.

  “No, more basic. What behavior does it default to in a pinch? What does it crave?”

  “Control,” Gordon said. “You’ve harped on it enough in the past.”

  I nodded.

  “They want control, but they’re dealing with something subtle. It’s all in the background, all indirect. The nature of war changes, and the books punctuate that,” I said. I was getting more excited and emphatic as I spoke. “How do you fight that threat? How have they been fighting it, with the Ghosts? Same sort of problem. Background, hard to nail down.”

  “Badly?” Helen suggested.

  “Not disagreeing,” Mary said. “But they’ve been keeping up.”

  “The Academy doesn’t lose,” I said. “Remember? A perpetual stalemate is pretty good for the Academy’s enemies. You could even make the argument that it’s hurting the Academy over time, because of how those Ghosts are created.”

  I’d reminded myself of the other side of the coin.

  The mice. Not just the ones of Radham. The little ones who couldn’t fend for themselves. The survivors.

  I kept talking anyway, “Think about it. How have they been fighting the Ghosts?”

  “Petey,” Mary said. “The Engineer. The Wry Man. Dog, Catcher.”

  “The talents they’re using, the tools. Tracking, talent, infiltration, versatility, they’re brain tools. Problem solving tools. Put the books out there for everyone to have,” I said, “and the world is plunged into a situation where wars aren’t won on battlefields so much as they’re won in shadows and behind closed doors. The Lambs stop being side projects that are kept on a shelf and brought out for special cases, we stop being secondary.”

  “Is it worth the cost?” Lillian asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t. Makes me wonder if Fray doesn’t want to recruit us more than she’s letting on.”

  “Something to think about when and if we go to see her,” Gordon said. “Which means we’ve got to decide on a plan of action, and we’re going to have to make our move, sometime in the next hour, if we’re going to do it before the rest of the forces approach and collapse on her. Before…”

  He trailed off.

  Before the new Lamb arrives.

  I frowned. That little niggle about the time constraint had been sitting in the back of my mind. An echo of my recent argument about the value of pressure, and it was complicated further by—

  “The problem,” Gordon said. “Is we’ve got to do it while that region of the city is surrounded by ‘allied’ forces.”

  Yeah. that.

  Previous Next

  Tooth and Nail—7.11

  I could feel the soreness from the previous night as I ascended a ladder for the whateverth time. Up roughly four stories, shoes and hands slipping on wet, cold metal rungs. Each time, there was that precarious moment where I had to transfer over onto the roof, letting go of the ladder and putting my weight firmly on a slanted surface.

  Gently slanted, but all the same, it didn’t leave much room for maneuvering or catching myself.

  Eyes were focused on me as I stepped onto the roof. Men and boys in uniform, some only a couple of years older than me, some middle-aged, were giving me the once-over, smirking, and murmuring to their buddies.

  We’d been getting those looks and smirks for a while yet. Approaching this perimeter, we’d ended up practically swimming in soldiers and cadets, along with other civilians who were making their belated evacuation from the area. It had been hard to make headway and harder still to talk about sensitive matters, and the irritation of those two things was compounded by the smug and condescending attention we’d gotten.

  They were frustrated, stupid military cadets who’d had it drilled into their head that society was all about hierarchies, and they saw an easier target in us, a way to relieve tension and stress.

  “Nice gun,” one commented.

  I touched the rifle I’d slung over my back, and declined to respond.

  “Guy your size, you’re going to shoot that thing and the recoil will send you flying off the roof.”

  The soldiers in the area broke into laughter.

  “When they said we’d have more people coming to help today, I thought the help would be bigger.”

  More laughter.

  Gordon got off the ladder behind me, offering a hand to Mary.

  “A girl with a rifle, now!” the comedian commented. “Do you know which way to hold that thing?”

  That was worth a chuckle from the gallery. Kind of sad, really. He had the ear of everyone nearby, and that was all he could do? A wittier person could have had them laughing uproariously.

  Mary gave me a sidelong glance. I kept my mouth closed, standing at ease as we waited for Helen and Lillian. She took my lead.

  “They just keep coming. Look at that! Hello beautiful! You brought your dog?”

  Light chuckles, this time. Bored soldiers, amused at an odd scene of children visiting the… I wasn’t even sure what to call it. The inverse of the trenches.

  “Good boy,” Helen murmured, as she put Hubris down. She glanced down at Lillian.
<
br />   “What’s going on here?” a man asked. He stalked toward us, moving with surprising ease on the rooftop. He had an officer’s coat and two medals on one side of his jacket, a helmet tucked under one arm, clearly not yet worn as his black hair was oiled and slicked back. Spectacles were perched on his nose.

  Not high ranked. A half-step above a captain? I could remember when the ranks had been neat and ordered, but special cases came and went, sub-ratings and capabilities, like Academy training and a core understanding of the types and dangers of superweapons, or the ability to manage stitched. In a place like Brechwell, I imagined it was worse. Teaching officers and non-teaching officers, to complicate things further.

  Rather than answer the man, Gordon withdrew a badge from the coat of his raincoat, and handed it to the man.

  I was willing to let him take point here. It conveyed a better picture, as fun as it might be to toy with phrasing and really drive the point home.

  “Mm,” the man murmured, taking the badge and opening it up. It was a little bit of silver with a leather flap to back it, and the latest version had writing inlaid in the leather, visible if the metal was lifted up. I had no idea how Gordon’s was legible—mine had so much wear and tear that most of the lettering had flaked off.

  We waited patiently. The joker and the other soldiers had fallen silent.

  “If you look over there,” the officer pointed. “The autonomous weapons are gathered over there.”

  “I see them,” Gordon said.

  “I trust your accommodations were suitable?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Gordon said.

  “If there’s anything you need, I can relay your requests to the Major.”

  “We may take you up on that,” Gordon said. “Where can we find you?”

  “I’m looking after several groups. Ask anyone here, they’ll know where to find me.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Gordon said.

  Navigation across the roof was treacherous, as groups were now camped out. The little rises where the roof extended over windows were flatter than the rest, and served as points to congregate, with sandbags and weapon emplacements set down, and soldiers clustering there, so close together that knees and shoulders touched. In other places, men with guns and binoculars were sitting on the roof’s peak, normally the easiest ground to tread on.

  It struck me that the way the city was laid out made it easy to set a perimeter around a given location. Pick any point in the city, and the constantly curving and looping streets allowed a circle to be established, with relatively few gaps.

  There were gaps here. Fray’s destruction had opened several, and I could see the distant shapes of people and emplacements on distant rooftops, covering those gaps. Less effective than a 12-metre wall with gunmen perched on top might be.

  With the streets being wider hereabouts, there was more room for Fray’s group to move around if and when they stepped out of the building, but less cover. Some of those streets had scorch marks and craters. There had been artillery fire in the night. Some had been close to the building.

  Scaring her people, keeping them off balance. It was good. A night without sleep, staring out windows and looking for signals from their double agents in our midst that something was going to happen, rattled by periodic artillery fire, wondering if that was the blast that preceded an attack, knocked down a wall, or wiped out a group of defenders.

  I imagined Fray was very calm and collected throughout, but I had to wonder about Cynthia, who’d seemed shorter on temper, and about Mauer, who was a soldier, intimately familiar with these situations and this kind of pressure.

  A crack and explosion made me think someone had fired an artillery shell. Instead, as I looked to the source, I saw the Brechwell Beast. I looked at its routes. To get to Fray, it would have to travel for two minutes down one path, decide to turn down one path instead of continuing forward through a hole in a series of houses, turn right, and decide to turn left instead of taking the more convenient ‘forward’ path.

  I was willing to bet it was designed to go forward when it had a choice. Were there other aspects to it? It couldn’t be solely limited to the city. If they sought to bring it to bear in a confrontation outside of the city, how did they pilot it? Were there ways it could be exploited?

  Gordon raised a hand. Stop.

  We all, Hubris included, came to a stop.

  “This is our best and possibly last chance to talk without being overheard,” he said.

  I looked back, then further down the length of rooftop. It was true; there was a wider gap than before, between the soldiers and artillery emplacement about seventy-five paces behind us and the group of Academy weapons about seventy-five paces ahead of us. Provided we didn’t raise our voice, there wasn’t much chance we’d be overheard.

  I saw Dog and Catcher among the Academy weapons and mentally revised my estimate.

  I raised my hand in a pair of signals I was pretty sure Catcher didn’t know. Subtle—careful—speak.

  Watch your words.

  Gordon nodded. “We’ve had a chance to think. We’ve got eyes on the situation. There are squads of soldiers stationed every fifty paces, except for here, and any enemy that attacks this part of the wall is going to be sorry.”

  Dog, Catcher, the Engineer, the Wry Man, others I didn’t recognize. No shortage of weapons who could and would extract said apologies from errant enemies.

  “From my guess, we used the attic windows to access the roof,” Gordon said. “I don’t think anyone is up to carrying sandbags and mortars up ladders. If we’re going to get to Fray, that means going down through the house, crossing the open plaza with two hundred eyes on us. From there, depending on where we exited from, there is another expanse of open space with even more eyes on us before we can reach her place, or we have to get around a row of houses on the way.”

  “If we get seen, it reflects badly on us,” I said. “Problematic, whatever route we take. But I want to get in there.”

  “Which is another thing we need to think about, the route we take” Gordon said. “You’ve said your piece, Lillian and you have very different ideas on what the ramifications might be. Now, keep in mind…”

  Hand signs. Subtle. Careful. Speak.

  “What are we thinking?” Mary asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I want to talk to Percy,” she said. Her eyes were focused on Fray’s building. “I want to ask him things, why, and how much of what he told me was true. I want closure, but…”

  “But?” Lillian asked.

  “My reasons are bad. It’s not in tune with the mission. It’s for me.”

  “That’s not a bad thing,” I said.

  “It is when we’re here, and there’s this much going on,” Mary said. “The closure I want… I’m not sure it isn’t me sticking a knife between Percy’s ribs. But I’m not sure it is, either.”

  “That would be a poetic end,” I said. “To be killed by your own creation. There’s probably a Latin term for it.”

  Jamie would know.

  “Probably,” Gordon said. “Okay, Mary doesn’t think we should do this. Does that mean we start thinking about other approaches? Arguments that could convince Mary or Lillian?”

  “Percy killed the mice to make ghosts,” I said. “Time and again, he preys on the vulnerable. The Mary before Mary, rendered into fodder for experimentation by… it would have had to be Cynthia’s group. Sometimes it feels pathological. The way he preys on children.”

  “I didn’t know your feelings on the subject were so strong,” Gordon said.

  I shrugged. I couldn’t make eye contact with the others, because admitting to a more personal vendetta against someone, a justification, it felt wrong, awkward, doubly so because I was speaking it aloud. I crouched, straddling the peak of the roof, one hand fidgeting at my knee.

  “Sorry, Mary, to say all that.”

  “No, Sy. It’s fine. I want you to say it.”

  I nodded. I didn’t thi
nk it was fine, but I didn’t say so.

  “He’s a fox,” I said. I ran my finger down the outside of my raincoat, collecting water droplets, and drew out the symbol on my knee. There wasn’t enough moisture, so it barely worked. A series of blobs and lines instead of a proper triangle with two little triangles for ears. “If we move forward with my plan, what I’m arguing for, it doesn’t rule out working out how to remove Percy.”

  At my knee, my hand made a gesture. Speak.

  I looked up, and the others were looking down at me. No signs to ask for clarification. I trusted they understood what I was saying.

  We talk to Fray, and we make a deal, where Percy gets removed from the picture, in exchange for our help.

  I ventured, “I don’t know how that works for you, Mary. I know there’s the emotional component. He was—”

  “He is my father,” Mary said. “My maker. Everything I am, just about everything and every skill I’m proud of, he gave me.”

  A knife had appeared in her hand, blade resting between two fingers, handle extended back over her knuckles and the back of her hand. She rolled it along her fingers until it fell off the side, let it fall, and caught the pommel.

  “We’re running out of time,” Gordon said. “The discussion with Fray won’t be short, and things get more complicated when the reinforcements arrive.”

  When the new Lamb arrives.

  I’d spent so long so committed to the Lambs, living and dead. Now, as I thought about the new member joining, I couldn’t be sure where I stood. I felt more disassociated than attached. An unfamiliar feeling not unlike nervousness had settled in my chest and it felt very ugly and very negative.

  “The plan on the most basic level has to happen,” I said. “Whatever we’re doing, we need to get in there. We get close, we do our thing with Fray, I have ideas on how we get out.”

  I signaled the half truth, my fidgeting hand at my knee.

  I need those books back. Mary needs to talk to Percy.

  An artillery shell fired, distant.

  It didn’t hit the building, instead hitting the street. Only a few nearby windows were intact or mostly intact, and they shattered with the force of the explosion. A plume of dust and smoke was kicked up, only to get beaten down by the rain.