Bitter Angels

by C. L. Anderson

  The Erasmans were creating a network of Companions that were being implanted in the Clerks.

  “Can you neutralize this?”

  Dr. Gwin shook her head. “Not in these facilities. I’d have to wake her up and scan the interactions while she’s in communication with it, and I can’t wake her up because I can’t disable her off switch here either.”

  Unstable as she was, if Siri woke up and saw that she was in the hospital, there was a very real chance she’d hit the switch and be gone.

  Pain swam slowly upstream to my consciousness and I realized my hands had curled into fists. I opened them and saw the neat lines of red crescent moons on my palms.

  “Can you keep her out and safe?” I asked.

  Dr. Gwin nodded.

  “Do it. I’ll have your orders shortly.”

  She nodded again, and I left her there. I walked through the clean lock and out into the battered foyer.

  Vijay was there. “What is it?”

  I looked up at him. “I found the war.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  TERESE

  Vijay grabbed me by the shoulders, whirled me around, and slammed me up against the wall. “What have they done to her!”

  “You will stand down, Captain!” I bellowed.

  Vijay stared at me, wide-eyed with panic. I watched the realization of what he was doing dawn on him. He lifted his hands away and snapped to attention.

  “At ease.” I was oddly grateful he’d pushed me to the wall. Without the support, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stand. “And upstairs now.”

  I led him up to the third floor and into Siri’s room. I bolted the door behind us. Probably the illusion of Siri was still on the other side. At this moment, I couldn’t afford to care.

  I faced Vijay. I felt hard as steel and sick to my soul. There, in the middle of Siri’s listening room, I told him what had been done to her—to all of us.

  When I finished, Vijay was white as a sheet. Anger rolled off him in tsunami waves. His hands clenched and unclenched and his eyes had gone distant. He was elsewhere. He was with the ones who had taken Siri’s mind from her, and no service oath could reach that place.

  “We’ve got to get you out,” I said.

  His eyes snapped back into immediate focus. “They don’t know about me.”

  “This is not a request, Captain. You are at risk, and you’re now putting the mission at risk. We have no counter for this attack, and we do not know how many ways they have to deliver it.”

  He swallowed, and licked his lips. “I want them dead, Terese,” he croaked. “I want them all dead.”

  “I know.” I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Believe me, I know.” Bianca, are you listening? Are you laughing at me? “We’re going to take the place down, and the one responsible is going to get to watch.”

  “We’ve got no orders.”

  I almost smiled. “We’ve got the ultimate order. The war’s already started. Listen to me, Vijay, I am trusting you to get every last one of our people off this rock before I make it all hit the fan. Get through to the embassy and try for the flight permissions, but if they can’t pull it out, you leave anyway.”

  “They’ll try to shoot us down.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He stared at me, almost as if he were trying to figure out the punch line for my joke. “You don’t think so.”

  I shook my head. “As long as it looks like we’re turning tail and running, they’re not going to care.” He frowned at me, disbelieving. I swallowed my impatience. “They wanted us to find out about this, Vijay. They worked a massive illusion to make it look like this place was an active hot spot to draw us in.” In my mind’s eye I saw the black-and-white figure of Natio Bloom as Siri had shown him to me, bowing elaborately. “They wanted agents with Companions in their system. They wanted to alter us, and they wanted us to know who had done it. Now they want us to run away and pull every active field agent in the diaspora in behind us.”

  “But we can’t…”

  “They cloned Bianca’s Companion nodes. They figured out how to use our ultimate protection to drive us insane.” I had to bite my lips for a moment before I could go on. “How much do you think they could sell this secret to the other hot spots for?”

  The implications settled in, and Vijay’s jaw dropped.

  “Go.” I sat down at Siri’s desk and pulled out my glasses.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to report to Misao, then find Amerand.” I slipped my glasses on.

  “What? Why?”

  I hauled on every nerve I had to keep from shouting at him. “Because this has been so tightly planned from the beginning, I cannot believe he was brought in by accident. He’s supposed to be in for the big finish.”

  “What big finish?”

  “I hope to all the gods we don’t have to find out.” I grabbed Vijay’s hand. “They do not get away with this. I swear it.”

  Revenge gleamed coldly in the depths of his eyes. “No, ma’am.”

  I released him and he marched out into the corridor, letting the door slam shut behind him. I faced Siri’s box. I unplugged some cables, rearranged others, pulled on my gloves, and clipped my set to my ear.

  “Field Commander Drajeske to Marshal-Steward Misao Smith,” I said. “Priority One, ears only from Erasmus System. We are live and running. Repeat. We are live and we are running.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  AMERAND

  The port yard looked perfectly normal when I reached it. The guards at the gate slouched. The Clerks prowled around the lower air-lock entrances. I even saw the infamous Papa Dare dressing down his subordinate Meek near one of the partitioned areas.

  You wouldn’t have thought it was the end of the world at all.

  I walked up to the lower air lock for Bay 6. The Clerk there was a little brown man with copper-red hair and a datapad clutched in his delicate hand.

  “I am here under the authority of the Grand Sentinel,” I told him. “I am supposed to document the changes I made to the access codes for the engine compartment.”

  The Clerk looked at me and punched in a note on his data-pad. “Captain Amerand Jireu?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I have you down here. You’re to have supervised access only.”

  “It makes no difference to me.” It didn’t. I had assumed I would have at least one Clerk looking over my shoulders.

  We rode the elevator up to the air lock and waited while it cycled. The Clerk thumbed his datapad restlessly, as if searching for something. I wondered what it was. He seemed different from some of the others I had seen lately. His eyes lacked the hard, concentrated glitter. But I didn’t have thought to spare about that. I had my own plans to put into motion.

  The upper air lock hissed open and we stepped into the peeled core. It had not improved in my absence. The air smelled stale, and the webbing in the emergency cradles dangled loose. So did the oxygen masks. The cradle caps had been left open. The internal drive squatted in the middle of the chamber, silent and solid, its silver branches inserting themselves into deck and ceiling like a giant’s fingers.

  I stepped carefully around to the control pad. I had caught the Clerk, or someone, in midinspection. Lines of code filled the screen. I read it, identifying which control quarter I was in more quickly than I would have expected. But it was not the place I needed. I touched the controls, scrolling down.

  “You will report what you are doing as you proceed,” said the Clerk fussily.

  “No.”

  I had it now, the timing and targeting codes. These were dense and complicated, and this was done on purpose. You did not want someone casually altering this segment. These were the codes that kept your ship from jumping where there was known to be a planet, or a star, or some other physical object.

  And they had been butchered, like the rest of the safety codes had been.

  “You will report to me what you are doing,” ordered the
Clerk.

  “No.”

  I could hear his harsh breathing behind me. He had never been defied before. He was a Clerk. Which of us would even think to argue with him? I kept my attention focused on the codes in front of me: matching broken commands, inserting new ones, reconnecting fragmented loops and feedbacks, smoothing over rough holes.

  “You are removed!”

  I turned and I stood. “Then go find a secops to remove me. Or will you be trying to do that yourself?”

  I was unarmed, but so was he. I was taller than this little man. I was a tunnel runner and a secop, and I knew how to fight in small spaces. I was at the end of my resources and the end of my life. He was not. Not yet.

  The Clerk opened and closed his mouth, gasping for air and words. Behind him, the air lock cycled, and we both jerked our heads up.

  Terese Drajeske stepped across the bulkhead. She met my gaze, reading my expression, and my stance.

  “You’d better get out of here,” she said to the Clerk.

  The Clerk swallowed. His thumb moved reflexively across his datapad, but he didn’t seem able to connect to any other node. “You…you’re not authorized to be here.”

  “No,” she agreed. “But I’m telling you, if you want to live, you’d better get out of here.”

  It was too much. The Clerk had probably never needed courage, and surely had seldom needed to make a real decision. He darted out the air lock, and we heard his feet slamming against the decking as he ran for the elevator.

  At another time, I would have been afraid. Right then, I could have laughed. One of our omniscient omnipresent Clerks had just run away from a saint.

  As it was, neither of us spared him a glance.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  Her mouth twitched and she reached up, touching me on the temple, just as she had before down in the tunnel. “You’re carrying my camera,” she said, and she held out her gloved hand to show me the near-invisible silver speck. “Sorry.”

  I had no outrage left for the saints and their machinations. I plucked the speck from her finger, dropped it onto the deck, and ground my heel down on it. Terese made no move to stop me.

  I turned back to the control pad and my work.

  “What are you doing, Amerand?” she asked.

  “You don’t want to know.” I scrolled down farther to check an identity, then copied it over into a broken code line, plugging a hole.

  “Is this going to Fortress?”

  “I said you don’t want to know.” I shoved two code lines that did not belong together into one statement and changed the acceptable inputs, one number at a time.

  “Do you want to at least tell me why?”

  “They killed my mother.”

  She stood silent for a long time. I kept working. I didn’t have much time. That Clerk was reporting to somebody. Secops would be on their way soon. I had to get this finished.

  “How’d you find out about your mother?”

  “Emiliya left me a message.”

  More silence. Stretching out long enough for me to knit up and alter three more codes.

  “And where’s Emiliya?”

  “She’s dead too.” I said it flatly, factually. I knew some part of me was shouting out my grief, but it was distant. I had tried to keep us alive. I had tried so hard. All I had wanted was for her, for me—even for Kapa—to survive. It was more important than love or friendship or anything else. We, I, had to stay alive. That was why my parents had brought me here, that was why they had put me into the academy—to keep me alive after they had failed my brothers. So many dead so I could live.

  But we had all failed, and the only ones who would stay alive were the Blood Family.

  “Amerand Jireu, I want you to listen to me.” “I don’t have time to listen to you.” Don’t make me fight you, Terese. I do not want to hurt you, but I will not let you stop me. “Hamahd was right, Amerand. They’re using you.” I swung around. She was still standing just in front of the threshold. Her hands were out a little from her sides, where I could see them. She was unarmed and her hands were empty.

  She knew I was ready to use force against her. She was ready for it. For me.

  “They’re using you,” she said again. “This is a setup.” “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “I don’t?” The corner of her mouth twitched. “Then answer me this, Amerand: Why is this still here?” She threw her hands out, turning in a circle to encompass the disheveled chamber. “Why the hell hasn’t this great big security threat been towed out to the shipyard and put under lock and key?”

  I waved her words away. “Favor Barclay was going to sell it off.”

  “I’ve been to see Favor Barclay,” she answered. “He says his family is gone, but he’s still here. He says he’s covering their retreat, but he’s not acting like a man doing something he’s proud of. He was in really sad shape. I think he’s traded his family’s freedom in return for providing the cover for leaving this where you could get at it.”

  She moved forward one step. Her gaze remained locked on mine. Her hands stayed low and open. “Amerand, we have been shown a gigantic illusion. We’ve been given baubles and toys and obvious paths from the beginning and we’ve taken them all. This is just one more. Somebody left this here for you.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Then I ask you again: What is this still doing here?”

  My breath heaved in my chest. I had to end this. “Field Commander Drajeske, do you know what the Blood Family have been doing with their time and their Hospital? They’ve given themselves immortality. Real immortality that doesn’t need to be checked or renewed and can be passed on to their children. They dug it out of your Bianca Fayette. They killed hundreds of us to perfect it. If we don’t stop them here and now, they go on forever!”

  I watched with a kind of perverse satisfaction as the blood drained from her face. “Emiliya found the records. She got them to me before she…before she…” I couldn’t finish. The grief and the anger moved closer. It crowded up against my rational thought. I needed to get this woman away from me. I needed to get back to my work. Even if my fellow secops weren’t on their way up the elevator, I wasn’t going to be able to hold on much longer.

  I turned back to the access pad. I had four commands yet to repair. Just four. I could do this.

  “You’ll wipe the whole of Fortress out,” she said.

  “Good,” I whispered.

  “You’ll kill thousands, Amerand, and you’re not even going to get the ones you’re aiming at.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because it’s a setup. It has been from the beginning. You have been driven to this.” She spoke slowly, as if she were still fitting the pieces together in her head. “They killed your whole fucking world, and your best friend, then they let you find out they’d killed your mother. They let you find out they are going to become immortal! Then they left a loaded gun lying around so you could pick it up and pull the trigger! Amerand, they want this done!” She was speaking more strongly now, as if it had all suddenly begun to make perfect sense. “Where are they, Amerand?” Terese gestured back toward the open air lock. Where’re the Clerks and the cameras? Where’s secops? They let you in here and they’re letting you set off the biggest bomb in the history of humanity.”

  “Why? Why would they want Fortress wiped out?”

  “To cull the family. What you’ve told me about the immortality—it fits into everything else we’ve found. Those that are not worthy are not going to go into the future with the rest.

  “But the murder of so many Blood relations has got to be done by you, or somebody like you. Somebody who’s been driven crazy by loss and grief. The survivors will see you and they won’t look for your puppet master. You’ll take the blame for killing their relatives, the children, the hostages, the Clerks. Maybe especially the Clerks. They’re the ones who could identify how the decisions were made.”

  Terese took one s
tep closer to me. “Amerand, I’ve alerted my people. They’ll be here soon. In force. I know that sounds strange coming from us, but you’ve seen only a part of what we can do if we absolutely have to.”

  But I turned away again. I stared at the access pad with its tidy black lines of code on the shimmering grey background. I thought about the tear I’d seen on my father’s face. I thought about how I couldn’t draw up any memories of my mother or my brothers.

  “You’ll let them live,” I whispered hoarsely. “They’ve slaughtered and tortured and enslaved us, and you’ll just let them live.”

  “No,” she answered quietly. “I’ll make them live.”

  “And what’s the difference?” I sneered.

  “Terms and conditions,” she answered. “I told you I was tortured? The man who ordered that is still alive, and he’s going to stay that way. In fact, he’s immortal now. He’s living in a comfortable pair of rooms in the middle of his home city, and he’ll live there forever, nice and cozy. He can’t go outside. He can’t talk with another human being face-to-face. He can’t even go comfortably insane. He’s alive and stable, and we’re going to keep him that way. He never gets away from what he’s done, never gets to have a better life or another life. He never meets his Maker or sees his Heaven. He gets to watch while the kingdom he built fades from the historical record and the city he ruined is rebuilt by his enemies and opened up wide, because all the people he tried to lead to his brutal salvation like his enemy’s way better.

  “He’s ours. He’s mine, in his two-room cell, forever and ever.

  “Do you want revenge for you and yours? Help me make the Blood Family live with what they’ve done.”

  My hand was shaking, making the fingers drum against my thigh. “It’s not enough.”

  “And it’s never going to be,” she agreed. “But you can kill them all and it still won’t be enough. It just gets you the wrong answers and prolongs the horror you’re trying to end.” She took one more step closer. “Have you remembered the hostages, Amerand? Those are Oblivion’s children over there. You make the wrong move here and you’re killing them all.”