She figured her false credentials were worthless. She’d been stupid to reach out to Korgan. Protocols existed for a reason; lock-down was important for a reason. But she’d been trying to be a do-gooder. She’d compromised the only true safeguards between her and that team of killers. And Kaizhou… she forced her thoughts away from him, focusing solely on moving and putting more distance between herself and them. Kaizhou had killed himself so that she could live, and she could not let his death be in vain.
She limped away from the basin, a hand pressed against her belly to keep pressure on the still-bleeding wound. The gore and her movements conspiring to pull the tape’s sticky side away from her skin, she shuffled through the grass until it gave way to the sandy claims of desert expanse.
She pulled down a sat feed and mapped it against her now-blown and useless cred. The terrain was a jagged mess, and civilization was far to the rear. Going back that way meant walking directly into the path of a couple of heavily armed men intent on murdering her. She was not entirely without options, though, and one promising target presented itself if she could move fast enough.
An old silver mine, Alice said, pointing out the claim marker that had caught Mesa’s eye, as well. Again, she felt the curl of a smile deep within her mind.
Steadied by a goal, her spirits buoyed, she walked, dragging her injured leg behind her. It was momentarily useless but getting stronger.
With the inferno raging at their backs, Boyd and Kaften hurried back to their vehicle. The scrub was catching fast, and with the wind picking up, the fire would be spreading into the backyards of the abandoned subdivisions soon. Kaften had no desire to be there when that happened.
Crassen’s body was trapped beneath the Jeep, where the driver was still slumped over the steering wheel.
Boyd looked at the body then back to Kaften, the question apparent in his eyes.
“No time,” Kaften said. “We leave him to the flames.”
Jogging along Last Chance Road, sodden with sweat, they navigated the alleyways and cut through empty lots. An ancient electric H6 was parked a mile away, far enough to not be directly tied to them if the authorities were called in. Before approaching the church on foot, they’d taken the time to wipe down the vehicle; if the worst should happen, it would simply be another abandoned vehicle in an empty suburb.
They circled the block cautiously, maintaining operational security and looking for anybody who may have been looking out for them. The neighborhood was silent and lifeless.
Across the dark roofs, flickers of approaching flames danced.
Kaften climbed in behind the wheel, spun the Humvee around, and put Elko in the rearview mirrors. He took Lamoile Highway to the Pinion exit then took that road to its dead end. The tires bumped off the edge of the paving and rocked back down onto dusty shoals. Kicking up clouds of sand as the wheels bit down and gained traction, it sped north through the desert.
Boyd worked the computer, his eyes glazing over as he focused on the commands being broadcast across his retinas. Kaften drove, following the current of the river, while Boyd busied himself with the orbital deploys, recalling a cluster of drones Earth-side. In half an hour, they would see the aerials glowing brightly as the drones reentered the atmosphere over Nevada, like shooting stars barreling directly toward Elko. In the meantime, not wanting to distract himself while driving, he ordered Boyd to pull a sat feed and do a quick territorial recon.
“Last Chance follows Humboldt pretty closely. We’ve got some suburbs to the northwest, mostly along the river and spreading south of it. Lakspur is coming up, and we’ll be hitting houses soon. Abandoned probably.
“Lots of roads, lots of land. Not much population, though. Hardly any developments at all, really. A few stabs at settlements, but other than that…” He shrugged. “All kinds of flammable stuff, though.”
“The cowboys and whores will have their work cut out for them,” Kaften said. He didn’t care one way or the other about what happened to those shitkickers and their backwater gambling den. “Shame about the brothels, though,” he added.
“Farther north, we got an open-pit silver mine.”
Kaften considered it, but the open expanse of land worried him. The desert was too vast to hunt down a single person, even if she was on foot and wounded. She could have made her way to the suburbs or the settlements along the outer reaches. The fire was an issue, though, and if that didn’t get under control soon, it could grow into a violent wildfire.
Mesa Everitt, and the data locked inside her skull, was too important to leave to chance. They had to find her. They had no other options. Schaeffer had been clear on that, and Kaften wasn’t stupid. He knew the score.
Blind luck was better than no luck at all. He rubbed his hand across his face, trying to smooth away the tiredness. He decided to keep driving and plot out an ever-widening circle on the off chance they found her. In a half hour, the drones would be overhead and spread far and wide, hunting his prey for him.
What the fuck are you? A virus or something? Mesa asked.
Again, she felt that smirk coiling in the back of her mind. This presence, this other, was cold and deliberate. Vicious.
I honestly hadn’t thought of it that way. But I suppose it’s apt enough.
How are you in my head? Mesa asked. Who are you?
After a moment, a flood of memories scorched her brain, akin to a levy breaking. The dangerous storm-driven waves crashed through, intent on havoc. The sudden impulses were staggering, and she lost her footing and fell, outstretched palms crashing into the scrub. Dry, skeletal leaves poked and stabbed at the lacerations crisscrossing her hands.
Her brain ached. Hell, her whole body ached. But this… this sensation was unlike anything she’d experienced before. She’d tripped on DRMR plenty over the last few years, trying to recover as much data on herself as she could while experiencing the joys and horrors of others.
She’d assaulted her brain with foreign stimuli, with the chemical dumps of pain and pleasure that composed the memories of strangers. And still, none of that was similar. Alice’s personality was more akin to a foreign invasion, an army of thoughts storming Mesa’s ill-defended beachhead then opening fire. The shock-and-awe assault of memories was impossible to defend against. It was mind-rape that left her immobile, and making any sense of the stimuli overloading her nerves was impossible.
She caught a glimpse of familiarity—a hand scrambling to her neck, trying to work her fingers beneath the coils of wires wrapped around her throat, choking her to death as the world turned gray and fuzzy around the edges.
I’ve dreamed this, Mesa said.
You’ve remembered this, Alice corrected her.
But this never happened, Mesa insisted, pointing to her slack form, her other self, prone on the table covered with butcher’s paper.
Not to you.
Her brain felt blistered, and each heartbeat sent a throbbing ache shooting through her skull. The evening’s stars and moon suddenly burned too brightly, and she shut her eyes against them, hoping to blot out the pain.
She reached out, her fingers scraping the earth, collected dust and sand into thick wedges beneath each nail, trying to drag herself forward. Too weak to stand, she kicked loosely with one leg. The pots and pans hammering in her skull left her nauseated. She coughed, her stomach clenching violently and shooting forth the food from hours ago. The image of Jonah choking Alice Xie to death was imprinted in her mind’s eye.
Suddenly, she knew too much. But none of it was her knowledge. Instead, it was the infestation of another woman’s vile perspective. You kidnapped me. You destroyed my mind. You killed me.
You’re still alive, Alice said.
But I’m not me! Don’t you get that? You killed me. All so you could—what?—hitch a ride inside my corpse? Take over my mind, my body. You
destroyed everything.
Alice was silent, nothing more than a lurking presence riding out the storm of invectives, waiting for quiet. She let Mesa wear herself down.
Then, after a moment of silence, Mesa asked, How did you do it?
Alice smiled. Mesa’s curiosity was beginning to override her need for anger, and she felt as if she’d stepped into a bear trap. Alice was cohabitating in her mind, which meant the memories were there, but Mesa was too weak to search for them. She was struggling to build walls, to partition these two halves of these selves into separate corners of her mind.
A simple bio-fi connection and a dead-man’s switch, Alice said. When my heart stopped beating, my DRMR unit used those precious last seconds of brain activity to send out a data packet. Your mind was already blanked, which made insertion a simple matter. You were my life raft.
Why now? Mesa asked.
You needed to heal, and I needed to rest.
Mesa attempted to mount a protest, but a darkness, which felt keenly Alice stopped her before she could speak.
Body-shifting is a delicate process, Alice said. I wiped your mind and chemically destroyed your memories. This wiped out all resistance, all traces of who you were. But I couldn’t simply upload myself and take over. I had to repair the damage and kick-start your brain back into being able to form and retain memories. I never had that chance, thanks to your father. He interrupted the process, so my last-chance data transfer was into an empty void. You were brain dead, Mesa, but still alive. And I was nothing more than a dormant collection of ones and zeroes.
You had to get better, she continued. Your brain needed time to rebuild, to recover, to get used to shaping and storing memories. The stronger your brain got, the more my data was allowed to bleed through. In essence, we’ve been growing together, sharing this body, recovering ourselves.
Mesa asked, So you’re what? A ghost in the machine?
Alice smiled. We’re each other’s ghost, dear.
Her words sent a chill through Mesa’s spine. She closed her eyes, wishing she could sleep. But that was impossible. She—they—needed to move, to run, to put more space between them and Elko. She needed to regroup, regather, and figure out the next steps.
But they had no time.
In the distance, a faint yellow glow broke the horizon. A horizontal shaft of light began rising above the desert floor.
Her thoughts were slow and gummy. Is that… she began, but the words were molasses in her brain.
It’s them, Alice said, her voice icy.
Twenty-seven mini-drones streaked through the sky, burning brightly as they entered the Earth’s atmosphere and arced toward Nevada, leaving silver contrails.
Kaften watched them fall and disappear into the high altitudes. The drones ran silently while Boyd tracked them in layers of feeds piped into his retinal displays. They broke off into a pre-programmed flight pattern, actively seeking a single girl in the desert, using an array of active motion, heat, and sonar sensors as well as high-resolution night vision.
On the ground, Kaften maneuvered the H6 through unmaintained, pot-holed streets, having followed the Humboldt River into a deserted housing development. To their rear, the wildfire was eating its way through the shadescale and spindly sagebrush, spreading in all directions. They wouldn’t be going back to Elko, if there was even going to be an Elko to go back to.
Kaften had activated the night-vision display on his retinal implants, turning the world into vivid layered shades of greens and blacks. He kept his head moving, his eyes scanning all directions, meeting the rear-view and side-view mirrors, as well. He sucked at his top front teeth, an old nervous habit he’d picked up from his father, along with a host of others. Smoking cigarettes, chewing the inside of his lips until white sores formed then rubbing his tongue against them, and constantly picking and chewing at his cuticles until they bled—all were learned behaviors that lived on in him long after his old man had passed.
“Anything yet?” he asked.
“No” was all Boyd said, his voice distant, lost in concentration. “Wait, yeah, maybe. I think we got her.”
“Where?”
“She’s northwest of us. The river carried her farther than I’d thought, but she’s tracking toward the east.”
“What’s there? A settlement, a town, what?”
Turning the Humvee north, Kaften sought out a break in the road, suddenly itching to go off-roading again.
“Maybe a mine. Yeah, it’s an old abandoned silver mine.”
“Keep the drones on her. How far out?”
“Five, ten minutes. Less if you step on it.”
Silently, Kaften cursed the drones for not bearing armaments. They were strictly for surveillance and didn’t carry any methods for resolution or deterrence of threats. Unlike the Kessler op, they couldn’t simply bomb the bitch from orbit and leave her charred, smoking husk of a corpse among the mice and thrashers. The PRC wasn’t shy about broadcasting its arsenal and using drones to carry out hostilities within their own borders; they were, after all, a functioning military presence. Daedalus, on the other hand, was corporate, and the shareholders frowned upon drone violence, especially if it opened the doors to an inquiry as to why private military were being deployed in a Free State. Messy wet work carried out by a human that couldn’t be traced back to the company was another story entirely.
When Mesa Everitt died, it would be by their hands and their guns, up close and personal, and very, very human.
The horizontal shaft of light grew rapidly closer, and the wind carried the throaty growl of the H6 across the distance. Mesa’s leg was wrecked. A rocky outcropping was close by but not close enough. If she could make it there, she would become a much more difficult target to run over. She wished she had more time to make it to the open-pit mine, but the thought was pointless. Deal with what’s in front of you right now, she told herself.
She hobbled forward, the splash of light cresting across her, blinding her. She was too late. Mesa turned her head slightly, judging the distance. She had no chance of making it to the outcropping, but she refused to stand still and be ground into road kill.
She trudged forward, the H6 correcting course, staying lined up with her. The bright white lights were demonically aggressive, casting deep, stark shadows across the hardscrabble earth.
She crouched, still getting one foot in front of the other, but ready to spring. In her mind’s eye, a soft countdown had begun.
3…
The driver was hidden behind an obsidian shield, an irresolute suggestion of a man but nothing more.
2…
The passenger window came down, and a gunman emerged, drawing on her. The H6 shifted slightly, popping rocks into dust beneath the heavy tire treads. Nearly right on top of her, it was only an arm’s length away.
1…
Bullets pocked the earth, missing her entirely. She leapt forward, pulled her legs up, close to her body, too slowly. She felt the ankle of her injured leg explode, bone crunching against metal as her knee careened off a headlight, a thousand points of pain as the glass casing ruptured, burying shards of itself into the thin layer of skin. Mesa landed clumsily, the sand scraping her face raw. The corners of her jaw clenched tight as she tried to bite back the scream.
Brakes squealed, and the backend of the Humvee fishtailed as the vehicle spun around to face her, sending up an arc of sand and grit that blinded her. Her eyes stung, and by the time she got a hand raised to protect her face, it was too late. Always too late.
Grinding her jaw hard enough to make her teeth ache, she forced herself to stand and meet her end head on. She was unsteady on her single foot, but her other leg was too ruined to take her weight.
The H6 idled in front of her, trapping her in its headlights.
The driver’s s
ide door opened, and a heavy boot crunched into the loose scrabble. The passenger repeated the movements half a second after the leader, covering her with the gun. Both were clad in black from head to toe, their faces hidden behind balaclavas. They watched her for a long, steady moment, maybe wondering what she would do.
Standing still and dying wasn’t her plan. In one fluid movement, she reached to her waist, pulled the gun loose, and raised it. The smaller man fired, aiming low, but she twisted on her leg, presenting her profile to them. The bullet seared across the top of her belly. That oddly calm, cool detachment of battle glazed her, dulled her senses, and slowed the world down. While she was stepping aside, moving to the inside of the shooter’s arm, she fired with a marksman’s precision. A detached part of her felt the edges of Alice’s influence as if the woman were a deranged puppeteer pulling her limbs and driving her focus.
The smaller man might as well have been a paper target. The bullets hammered into his face and punched out the back of his skull. He fell, his brain obliterated.
The second gunman stepped around the front of the car, his gun raised. The frag round punched through her shoulder, destroying the ball-joint and killing her left arm. She spun and fell, her face screwed up in anguish.
He stood over her prone figure. Her chest rose and fell with rapid, aching breaths. She kicked out at him and loosely connected with his hand, but the strike lacked force.
He smirked, clearly thinking that the kick was meant to be a serious effort and not a simple distraction. Mesa’s hand shot up and opened before his face, flinging a fistful of grit at his eyes.
Emergence (A DRMR Novel Book 2) Page 14
