She Wolf and Cub

by lillith saintcrow

  Doesn’t matter now, does it. I unfolded myself, tested arms and legs. Everything working fine, nearly tiptop. Geoff crowded close, and I ruffled the coarse silk of his hair before I could stop myself.

  I bent down, put my mouth close to his ear. “I’m going to work,” I whispered. “While I do, you need to stay where I put you and be quiet. I’ll come back to get you, and then we’ll leave. I know you’re tired, but we have to move, and you’ve had some sleep. Do you have to… to eliminate?”

  He shook his head, his cheek bumping mine. The thought of those tiny, pearly, very sharp little fangs sent a weird zing down my reinforced spine.

  “Do you need to drink?” Meaningful emphasis on the last word, so he couldn’t possibly miss my meaning.

  Another shake of his head.

  “Any questions?”

  Three nos. I closed my eyes, running over the scans I’d taken when they carried me in, the layout of the cave complex and its inhabitants called up behind my eyelids as if I was preparing for a rooftop run, dodging statbolts and bullets, outthinking other runners who would just as soon drop you and collect payment for your cargo at the other end. Eyes that would turn you in, knives that would sink into your back — even inside an incorporated tribe of runners there’s not a lot of loyalty. Only strength, and the instant yours fails, there’s always someone ready to step over your still-warm corpse.

  It was great training for Agency work. Or even just for living.

  When I opened my eyes, I found Geoff peering at what he could see of my face, his teeth sunk into his lower lip. They weren’t the distended fangs, but they still gleamed in the semi-darkness. The firelight wetly licking the crusted, weeping walls had sunk to an emberglow.

  I moved slightly, and he closed his eyes while I planted a kiss on his forehead. That seemed to work, because when I straightened, his expression had turned far more relaxed. He wasn’t shivering anymore, either.

  “Okay,” I whispered. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  By about 3am, according to my internal chrono, we were finally far enough away. I chewed on a bar of freeze-dried from the train’s medikits — the idiots had dumped all their loot into a single pile, making it easy for me to take what I wanted. I’d burned through solar and was operating from internal energy, and that takes replenishing. The sand had turned to indigo, spangled and outlined with silver starshine and the light of a nail-paring moon. We were leaving the large rocks behind, but there were still smaller stone piles and caves, gullies and treacherous shoals at the edge of every pond of just-sand.

  Just before Geoff and I had crept with our fourpads into the open air, the clamor had begun behind us, heavy toxic smoke filling up the lower caves — because the webbing I’d used to suspend nerve-blot canisters over the main fire had finally been eaten away by a judicious spray of cephannic acid easily extracted from a scavenged personal fuelcell. Add to that the leader of the monstrous hive — clearly marked by his habit of sleeping on a raised dais in front of the open fire, almost swallowed by a slumping pile of bones and tattered oddments — silently eviscerated, with plenty of his muscle mass as well as several bloodstained trinkets scattered around the bed of his grog-deadened third-in-command, and finish off with his second-in-command’s two closest subordinates killed too, and what did you get? A fine internecine rivalry that would keep them busy murdering each other for quite a while.

  Figuring out who’s who isn’t hard in that sort of tribal setting. You just look for who has what percentage of available resources, and rank them accordingly.

  The chaos would muddy the waters of any pursuit, and our trail would be long cold if they even realized we were gone and not casualties of the melee, taken out of our cage and eaten in a corner.

  It was a good bit of work, although not nearly the caliber of other turf wars I’ve started at the Agency’s behest. Not bad for thinking on my feet.

  Geoff rode in front of me, both of us squeezed into the saddle; the second and third fourpads followed placidly. They seemed much happier with traveling during the chilly dark, only nervous when a thundering under the sandy soil began. It wasn’t a human commotion, but I didn’t care to know what it was.

  Not yet.

  It was there — with a sleeping child in front of me and rivers of stars overhead, the east paling and dew coalescing out of thin air — I was able to turn all my resources to figuring out something that had bothered me all along.

  …Woke up and the uniforms were different, and I was supposed to go to school.

  NifulCorp was the badge on his school uniform. I’d assumed they were his creators, but perhaps that wasn’t necessarily so. The two warmbodies in the house with him were security, not parental figures. I hadn’t seen other monitors, but I’d been buffered and almost invisible to anything other than physical cams as a matter of course. A Ring suburb means security and you don’t get that without eyes watching every angle, whether videoscan or otherwise.

  The Agency could have been contracted to steal the kid back for his original creators, but with his very existence a revolution that could kick implementation right in the teeth, well.

  The only flaw in this chain of logic was my handler’s reaction when I said I’d killed the kid, just like he’d told me to do.

  One thing was certain. I wasn’t the first person who had stolen Geoff.

  I was, however, determined to be the last. The next step was to find somewhere to shelter him from the inferno of daylight.

  The thunder drew closer, our fourpads suddenly sidling and making wary little chuffing sounds. My knees clamped down to keep my restive beast going the right direction, icy sand crackled underfoot, and I sighed. My scans were picking up something very large.

  Looked like something else was true about the Waste as well.

  The worms.

  Chapter Three

  Township Vega

  At first, I thought the township was a worm.

  We found out worms are slower during the cold nights. They’re big, and they move through the sand at will. They don’t scan as animal, vegetable, or mineral, and there’s a queer warping around them that could be anything from magnetic resonance to a stat-field precursor. They stay out in the open, where the sand is a sea. They don’t often venture into the rock-stacks, so if you have to cross an open bay or inlet, after dark is always best.

  By this time we were used to the dust, the weird vegetation, the scorch and the freeze. I could see in infrared, Geoff was like a cat in the dark, and moving kept us warm. During daylight we holed up in rock-stacks, the tough-as-old-transports fourpads cropping at whatever spiny succulent vegetation clung to the surfaces, surviving on dewfall and hidden veins of flat, horribly alkaline water. I could drink it to stave off fluid loss, but Geoff wasn’t so lucky.

  Fortunately, the plants were full of moisture. Geoff wasn’t an herbivore, but that much food meant there were hordes of little prey animals around.

  The only problem was catching enough of them. Between their cargo of meat and copper fluid, I managed three meals a day for him at least.

  When we crested a short rise and I saw the lights in the distance, a strange pulse shivering through cold air and throbbing into the subsonic, I immediately reached for the stat-rifle slung in its case on the saddle. Halted midway as commchatter fuzzed into existence at the very edge of my sensing range, and tasted the air. No breeze, but now that I knew to look for it there was trace ionization cropping up clear as a statfield’s signature.

  “What is it?” Geoff whispered behind me, keeping below the sightline until I motioned him forward. He’d taken to riding on the fourpads pretty well, and even though his liquid nourishment was intermittent he looked… well, healthy. More like a kid and less like an alien.

  Or maybe I was just getting used to him. “Supplies.”

  “What kind?” Always full of questions, but he stayed well back.

  “Looks like a settlement. Pretty big, probably a full township, can’t tell if it
’s corporate or not yet.”

  “Are you going to kill them too?”

  “Only if I have to.” It would have bothered me, but I was too busy planning, the glucose uptake around my well-cushioned brain in its reinforced case spiking nicely. “I can’t kill everyone we meet, Geoff.” Just most of them. “Come on up and take a look.”

  He did, his fourpad gnawing a cud of half-digested material. Their digestive systems are interesting, meant to strip every bit of moisture and nutrition from pretty much anything they can chew. Almost as good as the nanos, I guess, adapting to survive. Where do you think the cybiologists got the ideas for implementation from? A natural law.

  They just wanted it sped up a bit, that’s all.

  We were down to the two fourpads we were riding. The other one had lasted a long time, but in the end, when it’s a pack animal or your kid, you make the only choice you can and you hope.

  “You really can’t kill everyone we meet?” He sounded very dubious, and I almost winced.

  “That was imprecise,” I told him. “I can if I have to. It just isn’t efficient. Now, we’re going to ride into that township before the worms twelve klicks to our east get any ideas. I think that subaudible thumping the town’s got going is a facsimile of a territorial call, to keep the worms away.”

  “Worms.” He shivered, a flash of his teeth in the dark. Starlight played over his pale face, died in his inky hair. “You know they sing, right?”

  Sure they do, kid. ”Let’s go.”

  I probably should have listened, but I was thinking instead about what I was going to do if it was a corporate town.

  * * *

  There was a statrepeller field, but it slid right over my skin with a tingle and I motioned Geoff through. He stepped through the shimmer and dust crackled away, the fourpads blowing out through their reopened nose-slits and sidling a little, dissatisfied. No security cordon, but the way the sand was disturbed just inside the field told me they patrolled fairly regularly. A group of twelve riding fourpads, not bad. Someone here was organized.

  Geoff shook his head, twitching from the field. I forget, sometimes, what it was like to be unbuffered. “Tickles,” he said, and my mouth made a small movement, almost like it wanted to smile. A huge physiological tell, shouting to anyone around the exact nature of my feelings.

  Cut it out, agent. Take a look around. Be very careful.

  The bleached, thin-skinned buildings had their backs to us, glossy solarcatch panels lambent as they discharged spare oxygen; condensation ran down microchannels and probably was fed into filters underground. Cheap, robust tech, but probably the biggest investment anyone could make around here. There were skinny, needle-eye alleys; the main avenue ran north-south, which told me this place had been planned and was on a travel axis.

  The fourpads didn’t like the sudden close quarters, but I got us squeezed through the largest of the alleys, every sense and channel open. By the time we stepped out onto the main thoroughfare, melting out of a convenient pool of moving shadow as the pulse of prem-torch light cycled down the street, I was pretty sure it wasn’t corporation property.

  For one thing, the saloon we’d been edging along the southern wall of was rollicking like a thopter in a magnetic storm, which is normal even in corporate towns, but the woman with her face to the netting over a coop of rustling bundles of sleeping feathers didn’t have a monitor tag, and the man grunting as he stabbed her from behind with what he no doubt thought was his biggest weapon, to judge by the stream of obscenities he was pouring in her ear, wasn’t augmented at all. The woman gave every audible appearance of enjoying herself, but her pheromone balance shouted not aroused, thank you.

  I didn’t think about what Geoff would make of that as we passed like ghosts — or at least, as much like ghosts as two shaggy beasts, an agent, and an eight-year-old genetically-engineered boy could be. I was too busy scanning the main thoroughfare.

  Population: around 2,500, give or take. Lots of strangers, a lot of through-traffic. Garage at north end, saloon middle, slums south. Some agriculture evident, probably collectives who trade in barter, where is the tech — ah, junkyard there, that’s where all the security is. Attached to a convoy station, there’s an aquifer under here if that geo signature tells me anything. I pushed my fourpad’s nose away from my hair — the damn beast seemed to enjoy cropping at it, maybe thinking it a plant — and glanced up at Geoff, who was craning to get a better look at the loving couple further back the alley. I clicked my tongue, softly, to get his attention, shook my head. Don’t stare, kid. People notice.

  He probably couldn’t help it. Those huge dark eyes in that pale little face, in a town where everyone was likely to be burned dark, were giveaways. I’d have to see what their dry-goods depot would have in the way of bronze spray, and what I could trade for it.

  I didn’t think they took flex bitcoin out here, even untraceable, and I wasn’t sure they’d take hard bitcoin either. That was City currency, and if this wasn’t a corporate town, well, they might work solely on barter.

  All that could wait. I guessed where the livery would be, took a deep breath, and put on my bargaining face. I hoped it wouldn’t take too long.

  I wanted a drink.

  * * *

  I hit the swinging doors just hard enough, and Geoff scurried in my wake. The saloon swallowed us with fauxsmoke and a healthy dose of another, harsher vapor I never thought I’d smell. Burning nicotiana, loaded with carcinogens and cut with something else nasal receptors identified as faintly soporific. The place served both ersatz and grain alcohol, and it looked like grain was the bigger seller.

  Warmbodies are so fragile, you’d think they wouldn’t go straight back to the killing chemicals once they got out of the corp-owned warrens. On the other hand, I’d always wondered about grain alcohol. It was supposed to taste better.

  The music, clunked and wheezed out by a shipwrecked hulk in the corner that appeared to be some sort of instrument, tinkled to a stop as a bespectacled, scruffy-bearded gent craned his neck to see the new arrival. The bar was three deep, there was a wide space in the middle of the building crammed with warmbodies full of light, cheap augments doing something they might have called dancing, and most of the tables hosted men looking at greasy rectangles of paper stamped with corporate logos, circuit-chips in piles in front of them. Probably playing Betrisq, I thought, noting the number of cards in each hand and what I could see of the suit the man with his back to me was holding.

  Geoff peered around my hip, clinging to me. I wished he wouldn’t, any indication of weakness was not the best first impression. Not if you expected to avoid trouble later.

  Still, the faces and voices were probably a shock after so long with just me to talk to, and whole nights spent with only six or seven words passed between us. When he wasn’t asking every damn question that tiptoed through his odd little head.

  In here, be quiet. I do the talking. Clear? I was hoping I only had to say it once.

  “For Chrissake, Cameron, you ain’t preachin’ tonight, play the synth!” someone yelled, in passable Spanics.

  The synth-player scratched under his mended suspenders and shook his head, light glinting off his oculars — wire-rimmed reworked Trefware, durable but with a disturbing habit of fusing onto the bones of the orbital socket. “Dios, forgive these sinners,” he all-but-screamed at the rooftop. “They know not what they do!”

  “Who slipped Cam the booze?” The bartender was a slight woman with long dark hair and green-gem eyes, an expensive bit of implementation that probably wasn’t coded in pre-birth. If it was a vanity augment, she’d come down in the world afterward, because the rest of her was in layered oddments that almost managed to disguise the sheer amount of weaponry she was packing. “And you, goddammit, if you make any trouble in here I’ll cut your heart out. Keep playing, Ortodoxo.”

  The preaching synth-player rambled off in a stream of something that sounded a lot like New Orthodox chanting, but the synth — if tha
t’s what it was, the thing sounded like a spavined holo stuttering garbled skinspray adverts — began to tinkle away through a ditty I’d never heard before. The rest of the crowd began to hum along in varying pitches. Apparently it was a popular tune.

  Great. I had to elbow a bit to get up to the bar, Geoff clinging to my side like a runner’s satchel. You have to wear them high and tight if you expect to skate rooftops, but with his nose at bellybutton height for me he was too big to haul in a sling and too small to elbow on his own account.

  The bartender watched this with a great deal of interest, her hands almost blurring as she mixed and dispensed. Her throat swelled a little — subvocal implant, probably an accountant and dictation tab. The arrangement of weapons handy behind the bar, camouflaged or not, was thought-provoking. She was well prepared for any drunken trouble.

  An agent, though… not so much.

  She was also handling the money without a looksee over her shoulder. Ah. Not just the bartender, then. “Evening.” I pitched my voice just loud enough to cut through the noise.

  “Ain’t you polite,” she yelled, husky and amused. “What you want?”

  “You Laurel?”

  “That’s Madam B to you, damn your City ass,” came the pert whipcrack of a reply. At the other end of the bar two men, both caked with dust and rancid grease, erupted into a shoving match. She paid it little mind. “Coy sent you?”

  I had no idea who Coy was. “Nope. Livery said you had rooms.”