She Wolf and Cub

by lillith saintcrow

  “Six.” Geoff’s hot breath on my ear, under my tangled dark hair. “I can hear them.”

  I didn’t waste respiration telling him I did too, and that he’d missed one. Six heartbeats, popping along high and hard, none of them implemented beyond some basic combat reinforcement — and shoddy, sloppy work of it, too, if my ears weren’t deceiving me.

  The seventh pulse was as steady and calm as my own, and semi-buffered as well.

  It was another agent.

  The first place a sweep team looks is down. Inescapable human habit, searching the ground you’re going to be stepping on. Besides, the crack in the side of the train, added to the slope created when the car behind us wedged underneath this one, made it logical to assume everything would be jumbled at the bottom. The last thing they probably expected was an agent clinging to the ceiling, wedged in a tangle of metal and tough fabric netting that had disgorged its cargo of baggage onto the floor in the first jolt. Most of the injuries to our fellow passengers had been from those sudden missiles.

  Well, except for the ones I’d inflicted.

  I dropped into the middle of them and broke two immediately, swinging the bar laterally to crush ribs and get them out of the way. A snap-kick to the leader’s knee to put him down — he reeked of dominance and cheap harsh liquor, his head a mass of wild dark sand-grimed hair stuck with feathers and bits of circuit wire glinting as he dropped. Smears of some kind of paint on their faces, red and chalk-white, their gear bits and bobs cobbled together — looked scavenged — and I was revising my initial dread that they were a capture team sent from in-City.

  Which meant I probably shouldn’t have bothered to put Geoff on my back where I could be reasonably sure nobody would snatch him. Like they say, hindsight has panoptics.

  Get them down, where’s that fucking agent? Where? You don’t strike where you think we might be, or where you expect us to be — you have to anticipate, outthink, and hit where we are.

  In this case, though, my opponent was transport-slow and sloppy. Of course, tagging along with train-hunting cannibals in the Waste might do that to you. And only semi-buffered? Maybe an older implementation?

  Thud. Agent on the roof. An instinctive leap to get the high ground, or part of a plan? No time, I was already past the clot of warmbodies dead or still mostly breathing, with their piecemeal implements and augments. The metal in my hands was too soft to crack an agent’s reinforced ribcage, and there was no way I could cause enough internal damage to put him down quickly enough. So, that left just one option, and I had to do it with Geoff clinging to my back.

  The glare burst through my eyes, scoring into my skull as I burst out and took my first breath of non-mineralized, unsmoggy out-City air. Geoff let out a high piping fear-cry but I was already twisting, one hand curled around a support strut and the rest of my body whipping as force transferred, the kid’s arms and legs clamping down and cutting off my oxygen as he struggled to stay aboard. Blinded, clumsy because of the extra weight and the need to go less-than-quarter-speed so he wouldn’t be flung off into space, it was with more brute force than skill that I landed correctly on the crumpled, steaming metal lid of the car. Whirling, my bootheels scraping for purchase, and the shock of a blow to my belly — dammit, he hit me, too slow — as I rammed into the other agent.

  You get even a bar of soft metal moving quickly enough, and you can pierce the weaker spots alongside the throatbox. Crunching, levering the bar as the other agent screamed — high male noise, spray of blood laced with silver motes of nanos very much like my own — and a sudden loss of blood pressure from the shiv dragged across my stomach threatened to drop me before I could wrench the other agent’s head off his reinforced neck, shearing the cervicals just right. The feedback squeal cut out and I crumpled, my shredded midriff a hot bar of pain. Coughing, a burst of fluid from my abused lungs and stomach, the nanos swarming and patching. Damage critical but there was glorious raw unfiltered sunlight nailing us to the top of the roof, flooding my suddenly darkening skin with the power needed for repair. Geoff screaming some more and I tumbled off the roof with the other agent’s head in my fist, dangling bits of meat and reinforced cervical structures. The body was still thumping around up top, nerves scrabbling blindly against the shock. The nanos would seal everything up and keep it in stasis until the cervicals got within reach of each other, then they would meld and he’d be good as new.

  At least, until the nanos exhausted every molecule of nutriment stored in his tissues, or the body ran out of solar charge.

  Right now, though, I swung the head, cracking one of the remaining warmbodies across his un-reinforced skull. Burst of brain and blood and bone, the gloom of the car interior just as stunning as the nuclear glow outside. Geoff slid free of my back, still screeching, and I had seconds to deal with the last two ambulatory attackers.

  Plenty of time.

  Two cracks and soft thumps, and the only sound was the leader’s heavy desperate breathing as he scrabbled for his pistol, an antique projectile number. I knocked it away with a clatter, probably breaking his finger in the process, and crouched, dangling the agent’s head — heavy, a hell of a flail — from my left hand, my fist wrapped in long dark hair with scratchy circuit wire threaded through. Adornment, that perennial human need, ranking right after food and shelter. “Geoff?”

  “Bright,” the kid gasped, but he didn’t sound any worse than just-breathless. “Couldn’t hold on. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Come here.”

  The leader swore at me, vile anatomically-impossible terms in an accent far away from City Spanics. A drawl tangled and tainted his vocals, and I kept the record-and-flag going. Always helpful to talk like the locals, a lesson left over from agent training.

  Geoff crept painfully up the slick, tilted. His boots didn’t slip, because he placed them with such tentative care. “What are you going to do?” Hitching and unsteady, as if he feared punishment. The leader swore at me again, adrenaline and pain soaking his glandular wash.

  I sighed. My own hormonal balance had spiked up for combat, and it was more difficult than I liked to bring it down. The commchatter had faded into the crackle of live lines open but nobody talking. A seven-man team to derail a whole train? It didn’t seem credible, but then, they had an agent.

  Operative word there, had. If not for the sudden flood of solar, and the fact that I was a flex liquidator and knew just the right angle and force to apply to shear even reinforced cervicals, had might have been my operative word too.

  “You.” I waved the head a little, to get the leader’s attention. “Any more in your team? Anyone outside?”

  He spat at me. The wad of thick phlegm splatted against my cheek, and the reflexive chemtesting in my skin didn’t catch the expected tang. None of the markers of Adison’s ketosis, the body rebelling at eating human proteins.

  Huh. Might not be a cannibal. In any case, the sudden lack of commchatter told me we were clear enough.

  For now.

  I turned my head slightly so my panoptics, adjusted now to both the golden hammerlight outside and the red emergency-lit dimness in here, could take Geoff in. His hair was a wild mess, but he looked otherwise all right. He blinked several times, and under the various nasty smells collected in this little car, the copper of blood suddenly became noticeable.

  “How bad are you hurt?” He scanned fine, but contusions would take a few minutes to show.

  “Not bad. Abby, Mom… I’m… I’m thirsty.” Whispered, barely audible under the leader’s fresh ranting tumble of obscenities.

  I dropped the head and darted forward, breaking the leader’s right arm, then braced myself and lifted him by the throat. Applied just enough pressure to the carotid, and the sudden blissful silence was a balm. “I know, kid. I left this one alive for you. He’s disease-free, come and get it.”

  Geoff crept forward, a stray’s cringing.

  “It’s okay,” I soothed. “It’s just fine, kiddo. Come on.” Just get it ov
er with, please. “What did they feed you before?”

  “Cloned.” He cleared his throat, then came the small sound of the scar on his chin separating and his jaw distending, familiar from Barlowe’s suspended home in the Cirquit. The unconscious body I held twitched a little as Geoff sank his teeth in, and the gulping began.

  He drank his fill.

  * * *

  The cars in front of us were crumpled between walls of relatively soft red rock rising on either side of a gorge, tall spiny plants and other crowding succulents clinging in the cracks and a merciless pale-blue sky hung overhead on a single golden nail. A pall of greasy blue fuelcore smoke lifted from the very head of the train, the engine shredded to a fare-thee-well. I wondered how they did it until I smelled the caustic reek of altahan, probably mixed up from City sludge and outlying refuse dumps. Spark a fuse as a magtrain thunders down a track, judging the few seconds of lead time it needed to develop just right, and you had a reaction that would shatter fuelcores as it broke the sound barrier. Cheap, nasty, and extremely effective.

  I’d have to keep it in mind if I had to begin cracking and stripping trains to feed both of us.

  The cars behind us had few survivors, and they were stunned and easily taken care of. No witnesses, nothing to slow us down.

  I scavenged medkits and clothing while keeping an ear tuned to both audible and comms. The driver AI could have been crippled into losing contact, or down here in a gully all the attackers had to do was sabotage one relay station right before they hit the tracks and the train might show up as malfunctioning instead of dead and opened like a can of protein shake. I dragged the entry team’s bodies out, weighing the advisability of just making them vanish, while Geoff huddled in the dim, malodorous shelter of our carriage.

  The light hurt him, and it was the safest place for a noncombatant anyway.

  In the end, I decided distance was better than taking the time to leave a mystery for the cleanup crews. When I slid back in through the hole in the side of the carriage, I found the boy rocking back and forth on a seat that had wedged itself against the wall, hugging himself. His elbows were sharp points, even through the parka.

  “Here. We’ll wrap you up.” I shrugged out of the pack and looked for a dry spot to set the pile of stripped and scavenged clothing. The attackers had some usable gear — piecemeal like everything else they carried, but the agent didn’t have any Agency kit. I didn’t quite like that, but if it meant they weren’t a capture team I could live with it. Besides, if he was only partially buffered, he was almost certainly older. Nowadays the buffering adapts to every new field it encountered, except plas.

  Always excepting the plas.

  “It’s so bright.” He shuddered, hugging himself. “It wasn’t like that at home.”

  “Cities have UV domes. The statrepellers fuel them. You okay?”

  “I… I think so. You killed them all.”

  “I did.” I held up pair of tinted goggles taken from the smallest of the attackers. With a little modification, they would fit his kid-sized head. “Think you can wear these?”

  “Why did you kill them?”

  It surprised me. Asking why. He’d asked about Barlowe, too. “No witnesses, no deadweight. I can’t haul survivors around, and can’t leave them for questioning. Not that the Agency won’t suspect, especially when they… anyway, the more ambiguity, the better.”

  “Deadweight.” He still hugged himself, and his eyes were cat-gleams in the dark. “Are you… am I deadweight too?”

  Maybe he didn’t even know what he was wondering. Maybe he didn’t want to say it out loud. “Of course not. You’re my kid, Geoff.” And I want to live. Which means you have to.

  That seemed to reassure him. At least, he stopped shaking so badly. I waited, impatience ticking under my skin, while he absorbed the information. “So… you are my mom?”

  Oh, for fucksake. “I am now. Come on, we need to get out of here. Sooner or later they’ll send thopters to check this piece of track. We need to be far away when that happens.”

  Chapter Two

  Cannibal Warfare

  We marched into a heat-haze afternoon, the horizon shimmering with false promise, and stacks of that reddish rock occasionally breaking a sea of deceptively gentle sand-waves. Geoff didn’t complain, even when the sunlight worked through the wrappings and raised blistering weals on pale skin. He would have gone until he dropped from the fourpad’s broad back and cracked his head on a rock, if I hadn’t been paying attention.

  We weren’t far enough away, not by a long shot. Tracking the would-be train robbers to their supplies turned out to be child’s play, and the shaggy creatures with broad padded feet we found there were docile enough. All sorts of usable gear hung off each big, hairy, smelly beast, there were ropes to keep them tethered, and their long split-lipped faces and mournful veiled dark eyes were familiar from holos and old books escaped into dusty forgotten corners.

  Basic literacy was about all public edu could give you, if a corporation wanted more they’d train you, and most Projekts kids dropped out early. But drop out of school doesn’t mean stop paying attention, because even a poor kid from the Projekts can figure out that staying brainsharp keeps you going a lot longer than expensive augments or xaco-laced protein shakes. Most runners freelancing for the drug lords don’t survive past eighteen. You found another line of work or you died, it was that simple.

  If Geoff needed more… fluids… we’d have to see if any mammal would do. At least these potential meals carried their own weight.

  Geoff swayed atop his fourpad when we stopped, and I landed with an ungraceful thud. Riding the beasts was bad enough, between the awkward motion and the constant refining of muscular algorithms, but it was probably the heat that sapped him.

  Or the multiple traumas of the last couple days. Death, destruction, fearing for his own survival, and come to think of it, I wasn’t a cuddly type.

  Agents never are.

  He half-fell into my arms; I hugged him close despite the heat. “Shit. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Deadweight,” he murmured through chapped lips under a thin bandanna.

  Those towers of rock broke the sandy, simmering soil all around us, and the thick spine-quivering plants massed wherever there was shade didn’t look welcoming. Nevertheless, my area scan picked up all sorts of interesting movements out of the sunglare. There was life here, burrowing deep to escape the suffocating heat. A deeper scan, my eyes closed while other senses sent out concentric rings of awareness, came up with a couple options, none of them very good.

  At least there were shallow caves in the rock towers. One of them was large enough to shade us and the fourpads, who wandered over to the jagged, spike-leaved plants and began cropping at them enthusiastically. As soon as we were in the relatively cooler shade, Geoff perked up a little, and one of the full-sloshing canteens that held water instead of eyewatering-strong, clear alcohol held to his mouth produced a response. He drank — but not greedily, without gulping, and behind the goggles his eyes were half-lidded.

  “That’s right,” I found myself saying. “It’s okay, kid. Next time say something, okay?”

  He didn’t reply. I propped him against the sandstone wall, carefully, and unwrapped his head. That was when I saw the blisters. Huh. Those look nasty.

  “You’re probably sensitive to UV,” I continued. “But those blisters look odd.” Why was I blathering like an idiot instead of getting the fourpads situated? “Stay here, and drink some more water, but slowly.” I unbuckled the goggles and loosened his scarf, and he nodded, dozily. The vesicles and rashes were already shrinking, the flush in his cheeks from his… meal… smoothing them away.

  Thought-provoking, indeed. That kind of healing without implementation, without the nanos, was impossible. It was why we had nanos to begin with. Everything about Geoff flew in the face of the science that had built me.

  Well, maybe not built me, but certainly remade me. I’d been a perfect
candidate for implementation, all my measurements smack dab in the middle of optimal ranges, but I might have died a runner’s death at seventeen except for the bad luck getting caught by a flashgang of rival runners at the station between Cheska and the edge of the Projekts.

  Shake it off, agent. After all, we were outside the Cities now. I didn’t have to replay any memory I didn’t care to.

  I want to escape, I’d said, pointing a rifle at a big-eyed kid I’d been told to kill. Well, here we were. The persistent feeling of missing something, of some vital piece of the puzzle invisible from my angle, was too nagging to be nervousness. Maybe I was sloppy, one shock after another overwhelming even an agent’s flexibility and capacity.

  I hoped not.

  I had to figure out how to keep the fourpads from running off, and make sure they would stay out of the sun. They were eating the spiny bushes down to nubs, and seemed just fine. With that done, I could turn my attention to preparing the cave for the next few hours. Once dusk hit, we’d have to move again.

  Except Geoff was asleep, curled on his side with his thumb in his mouth, as if he was five instead of eight. I crouched for a little while on the other side of the cavern, watching.

  I’m an investment, he’d told me, calmly. I guess I’m not earning out. It wasn’t so much hearing it in a kid’s clear little voice, because by his age I’d known all about profit and loss and investments too. When the corporations own everything, it’s a lesson you get early, and deep.

  It was suddenly hearing how wrong it sounded.

  Maybe I was having an ethics crisis, but if anything in my psych profile had pointed toward that kind of handicap the Agency would have Dismissed me early, either with an explosive switch implanted somewhere in the standard agent upgrades or the old-fashioned way, like the head stuffed in one of the saddlebags. Finding a good place to drop it off was lower on my list of priorities than keeping my kid alive.