Perfect Gravity

by Vivien Jackson

  “As I understand it,” Vallejo went on blithely, “Farad has to be able to establish and maintain communications with the drone army to rig it. He typically does so through the cloud or via wireless, I would imagine. And we know the consortium or UNAN or whoever is in charge over there can deploy extremely dense ICE nets. If Farad is plugged in to an entire military database, he won’t have the bandwidth to get through their security countermeasures.”

  “But Chloe can,” Angela said. She was starting to feel the shift in energy. A whiff of hope. Her command codes to access the continental drone army, Heron’s ability to command it, and Chloe keeping the coms open. This could work.

  “Um, but before we get rolling, I need to clarify one thing,” she said. “You both know what we’re talking about doing here, right?”

  In the slice of silence that followed, she met first Vallejo’s gaze and then Kellen’s. The ambient temperature in the submarine went bone-cold. An unspoken word hung in the air: treason.

  Her com buzzed, and a digital voice crackled its way out. “The term is military coup,” said Yoink. “I am standing by for orders.”

  • • •

  Was crazy how much planning went into prepping a massive governmental takeover. Kellen had just spent an hour on the com with his Pentarc crew, working through their plans, assessing capabilities, and getting caught up on the whole nation-under-attack thing. The crew had managed to get the entire Pentarc refugee population down into the protected underground area. Surface structures were being guarded by the Chiba Space Station and its queen, knocking drone-launched missiles out of the sky. Her aim wasn’t perfect, though. Some strikes were getting through. Couple of times during their chat, some serious strikes had come in.

  During one of those, he lost Rook, who had insisted on coming down last, after all the rest of the barn evacuated. Little Azul had freaked, apparently, and would only come out from under the trough when Rook nosed her into it. But she’d no sooner gotten into the stairwell than a hit on the wall at the edge of his pen had opened up a hole there. The dwarf goatie hadn’t been used to open space and no protections, and he had expected the dirt ground to be where it always was. Fan had watched him fall.

  She’d gotten herself to safety, though, and the whole rest of his animals. She’d done good.

  Kellen was less certain he was doing the right thing. Heron had been easy to recruit to the idea of a coup. Maybe too easy. Mari, of course, was on board because violence was her happy place, and the mamas—Adele and Fanaida—could always be counted on to support anything smacking of anarchy.

  Chloe had fully engaged herself in the challenge, and Garrett backed her.

  As a matter of fact, the only person who seemed to be harboring second thoughts of any kind was Damon Vallejo. Which, any way you looked at it, was wrong with a capital W.

  When they’d gotten control of the boat, or when Chloe had, Vallejo hadn’t gone right to the control room/communications module with Kellen and Angela. He’d chosen to stay behind in that weird oval lounge. Well, fine, so they’d locked him back in. But something about his behavior niggled at Kellen, so when the planning chatter started to seem like it would go on forever, he wandered back to check on Vallejo.

  The sight that met him wasn’t exactly what he’d expected. Wasn’t a complete surprise, either.

  Vallejo was crouched over a void in the wall paneling, directly below the liquor cabinet. He’d managed to get the stark white molding off, and his hands were deep in the electronics webbing the wall. On his head was a pressure seal, roughly head-sized, rigged with a com with its LED app blazing in front, providing a clearer peek into the tangle of wires and diodes and switches.

  The getup made him look even more like a mad scientist than he already had, but it also looked sort of perfect on him, like this was his natural habitat.

  As Kellen walked in, he heard voices, tiny and familiar. The same conversation Angela was having over in the com room. Sly little fucker had been listening in.

  When he noticed Kellen in the room, Vallejo didn’t jump away from his tinkering. He looked up calmly, still clutching a pair of slip-joint pliers. “Come to interrogate me all alone this time? I do hope you did nothing nefarious with the senator.”

  “Nah, that’s later and all private,” Kellen replied. “She’s hooked into the coms, powwowing with her contacts, setting up meetings and petitions and other stuff. You realize she can holoconference with two people at the same time? Gal can multitask like I ain’t never seen.”

  “Angela Neko is uniquely suited to ruling the world. All you MIST kids were.”

  “Yeah.” Kellen folded himself into a half kneel/half crouch so he could get down on Vallejo’s level. “What the hell are you up to?”

  Vallejo tapped the light off and removed his improvised headlamp. His hairdo had valleys in the sides where the pressure-seal hat had jammed it down. “Listening.”

  “I gathered that,” Kellen said. “How did you patch into the boat’s communications with a mobile com and some wires?”

  “Young man—”

  “Kellen.”

  “Fine, Kellen. I have been building speaking machines for longer than you’ve been alive. Early AI work was all about communication. Besides, if I hadn’t boosted my com’s signal with this submarine’s communications gear, your dolphins might never have heard me, and then where would we all be?”

  Kellen didn’t know about the geezer, but if the dolphins hadn’t felt like chitchatting tonight, he would be in a nice warm car sleeping off a shitty day in the arms of the woman he loved. Given such an alternative, he couldn’t say he preferred being here instead. Talking to a regretful old genius about how they were about to commit high treason.

  “So you heard our planning just now,” he said. “Find any weak points?”

  Vallejo smiled. “I’m not a tactician on my best days, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t listening for strategy. I was listening for her voice.”

  “You mean Mari’s?”

  The old man shrugged. “Not because I care about the abomination, mind. Only she reminds me of who I used to be, who she used to be. It’s different, listening when she doesn’t know I can hear. I’m not trying to get her to do anything in particular; I’m not trying to fit her into any schemes. I’m just listening to the cadence, the accent. Her voice is made of memories.”

  Huh. Figure Vallejo to have the soul of a poet, underneath all those schemes and sins. It wasn’t Kellen’s place to judge, but the old dude was looking rough around the edges, like maybe regret had started gnawing at him. If the pattern held, guilt would work its way in soon, and what would that even look like, Damon Vallejo on some kind of atonement spree?

  Probably pretty dang beautiful. Though it would be a hard sell to the folk he’d wronged. Especially Miss Mari.

  “Look, I been meaning to ask you some things,” Kellen said, nudging their conversation closer to where he wanted it. “Things I need to air out real good before I let you anywhere near Angela again.”

  Vallejo turned away from the disemboweled electrical panel. “Ask me anything you need to.”

  “Why’re you helping us?”

  “Easy and already answered. Freedom. That explanation isn’t working for you?”

  “Not really, considering you tried to kill my best friend’s partner.”

  Vallejo narrowed his eyes. “I’m guessing the friend you’re referring to is Heron Farad?”

  “The same.”

  “Ah.” He looked down at the pliers. “I have explained my reasons for shooting the clone. And you will note that none of those reasons required me to kill her. I meant to disable her, keep her from running, and lure Heron out into the cloud. I accomplished those things.”

  “Yeah, I hear you about them reasons, but the fact remains that you shot her. You hurt her. Your own kid. Now how you gonna convince me that my
Angela will be safe with you trottin’ around free? Give me one reason why I shouldn’t keep you locked up in here until we settle in a port.”

  Vallejo put the pliers on the floor and turned to face Kellen straight on. He narrowed his eyes, but not to make them mean. Maybe just to make them see.

  “My own Mageda, my wife, was a member of the Athanatos consortium, just like Ezekiel Medina and Daniel Ashe Neko,” the old man said, “and I loved her anyway, so I know how this happens. I know how it feels to love above your station. There’s no shame in following a woman to the raggedy ends of wisdom. Or beyond.”

  “So the shame comes in later, then,” Kellen said, “like when you kill a few million people? That when it happens?” Lord, he would never do in politics, in her world. Honesty had too firm a hold on him, and he couldn’t make it shut up. Not even when wheedling and soft words would do a much better job.

  “For what it’s worth,” Vallejo said, “the weather-control foglet program behaved unpredictably. It was supposed to have repaired the drought in south Texas.”

  “Well, if the opposite of drought is Noah-level flooding, you really knocked that one out of the park.” It was obvious but needed saying.

  Vallejo stared down at his hands, streaked with grease. “You are young yet, but someday, you might look back along the path your life has taken and regret,” he said. “The next generation will be the breakthrough, Mags and her cronies insisted, super intelligent, the true immortals. She was so certain. She’d run the genomes, you see, and her data had never been wrong, at least not about something so important. She was what we used to call a control freak, and I indulged her, even when she insisted on growing a clone of our daughter, even when she started experimenting on herself. Fatally, as it turned out. There were so many places in our story where I could have stopped her. Where I could have saved her.”

  “Is all this somehow supposed to convince me to stop Angela from going through with her coup?”

  “I’m not telling you to do anything, Kellen. I’m only telling stories.” He rubbed one hand against the other, but the stains remained. “As it happened, Mageda’s analysis was off only fractionally. Our Marisa was not the harbinger of humanity’s future after all, but Zeke and the others were convinced that her child would have been. Angela Neko’s, I mean.”

  Kellen’s body wanted to cringe away, wanted to sit smack on the floor and let itself be squashed by the weight of what Vallejo was saying. Those consortium fuckers had run genomes on her, presumably matching her up with Daniel Ashe. Was that why they’d arranged the marriage in the first place? For babies. For her babies.

  And those babies had never come. Lots of reasons why folks didn’t procreate these days, but with the kind of money and other resources at her disposal, she wouldn’t have even had to carry a child. And they wouldn’t have taken her wishes into account, anyhow. They could have made it happen despite her. The consortium could have put all the biological bits together in a lab. And all without her say-so.

  They could have held that threat over her, forcing her to do their bidding. Even if it hadn’t been physical control, it had still hurt her. Incrementally, maybe, over time. God, what would that have felt like?

  She’d finally had enough, he guessed. And then what? She left Daniel, threatened to divorce him, and let herself be mollified with a mech-clone replacement?

  Something here didn’t fit.

  Kellen’s thoughts tumbled, imagining a whole soup of horrible scenarios. And here the whole time, he’d been thinking while he was off saving people and doing good works, she was living large in California, married to her superstar and unfazed by one ill-fated and ill-advised teenaged love affair. He’d assumed she’d gotten over it all, that she’d moved on and only he’d been stuck remembering instead of living.

  But there’d been more to her story, behind the scenes. She’d told him just a little, about some of the things Daniel had done, and he’d known even then that there was more.

  He hadn’t left her for her own good. He’d left her to their devices. And, lord, they had used her.

  Chapter 15

  Modernists could say whatever they wanted about the efficiency of remote management or the speed of spaceplanes, but there was something relaxing about this underwater transportation business. Floating. Working. Floating and working. Angela wasn’t about to burst out in sea shanties or anything, but her schemes were coming together and she was hurtling forward through space. Efficient.

  No need to think about anything. Just act. Inhabit the moment. Make all the things happen.

  She was trained for this, good at this. She could see success from here. So why did it look so…empty? Lonely. Stop it.

  The communications room here was crammed with everything she needed, all the gizmos, and she’d been super busy this morning. She’d arranged to have Rafa meet her physically in Tampico, and he was bringing a style suite along. Fez was prepping a big show, simultaneously cast to all corners of this continent, an interrupt-level brief. The kind of shot across the bow that Zeke couldn’t possibly ignore.

  She had reserved a sound stage/transmission suite in Veracruz, just inland. That’s where the magic would happen. The reservation was for tomorrow evening, and by then, her petitions would be closing, and she’d have a clearer picture of where her efforts stood, whether the public was backing her. Whether she had told the best lie.

  From that point, if everything went well, she’d travel to the Capitoline. She’d crash the goddamn inauguration, while the entire population of this planet watched. She’d arranged ticketing through one of her false identities, but according to Chloe, resources weren’t really an issue. The Pentarc crew was loaded, and apparently, Heron was so deep into the cloud that Angela’s own dead-girl accounts were available, if she wanted them. Security didn’t mean much to him. By tomorrow she wouldn’t even be legally dead anymore.

  It was all coming together. And it was all falling apart.

  What happens after? If this works, if I oust Zeke and stop the attacks, then what? What must I do then? What must I become? What must I leave behind?

  No, no thinking. Just planning. Planning was a safe place. Alone is safe. Even if it sucks.

  One leg bent in her chair, one foot on the floor, swinging her back and forth in an arc while she fiddled with the communications board. She tapped through her petitions, watching the numbers climb. Public petition to impeach an elected official. Public support for independent tribunal to investigate the rigging of national elections. Public petition of no-confidence in President Ezekiel Medina. She’d started with one verified electronic signature, hers. The highest-count petition now contained signatures in the millions. That was the impeachment document.

  Protests were gathering in femacities all over the continent. She’d logged on to rally in three so far today, gaunt in her smartfabric dive suit and shorn hair, and more were scheduled for the coming hours. Her fans were amazed at her story, at her seeming rebirth. They marveled at her courage to pursue the criminals, the masters. Immortal, they called her, having no clue of the irony.

  She was calling her coalition The People Rise. It was earthy, vaguely menacing, but that was okay. That was the mood among the displaced thousands. She’d thought of something milder, like The People Speak or The People’s Voice, but this wasn’t really a peaceful movement of people. It was an act of desperation, backed by her personal hammer of justice. She would stop Zeke’s violence. She would do it now. And he would not silence her.

  This was happening. All of it.

  An hour ago, she’d gotten word from the Pentarc. Zeke had tried to contact her through mech-Daniel, and Heron offered to relay the communiqués as they came in. Fine, she’d said. Put them through.

  “Angela! First, are you okay? Second, where are you? And third, what are you doing, kiddo?”

  “I am alive. Surprise,” she responded. “Nice of you to
ask. Eight weeks after the fact. Are you sure you don’t want to confess anything?”

  Such as, oh, let’s see: you have been micro-managing my life for the vast majority of it, perhaps? Or that you used me to do your warmongering dirty work? Or that you’re causing all those drone strikes, all those deaths, which are happening as we speak?

  He played it off like nothing had changed. “The election results were in our favor, and I thank you for all your efforts toward that end. But, kiddo, I’m worried about some vidcasts I’ve seen. Vids featuring you, today. What’s going on?”

  “I got clued in, Zeke,” she said. “I know Texas isn’t our enemy. I know you’re behind the drone strikes.”

  He was silent for a really long time.

  “Where are you getting these ideas? Is mech-Daniel functioning correctly? You should run a diagnostic on him.”

  “Why? Are you thinking of ordering him to kill me again? Using your Ashe back door, maybe?” This time she didn’t wait through the pause for his reply. “How about you and I make a deal instead? Call off the drone attacks, effective immediately. Apologize publicly.”

  He took a long pause before replying, “Or else what, kiddo?”

  “Or I will have you removed from office.” She moved her com closer to her mouth, to up the resonance in her voice. “Do we have a deal?”

  There wasn’t any reason to prevaricate or pussyfoot. These were the terms. She had copied the conversation and tagged Fez on it. She had no doubt it would be disseminated widely and immediately with verified identity tags.

  Don’t fuck with me, Zeke. You know I have nothing to lose.

  She’d been waiting for ten minutes now for a response. Of course, it was entirely possible that he didn’t mean to reply, that their conversation was effectively over. If he proceeded to ignore her completely from here on, it wouldn’t surprise her. Zeke and Daniel and their kind were fond of leaving difficult conversation threads unresolved, dangling like live wires on wet pavement.