She Wolf and Cub

by lillith saintcrow

  “That why the kid calls you Abby?”

  Of course he had to ask. “No.” I squinted at the canopy overhead. Thinning out a bit, and there was no doubt that we were getting close to civilization — or what passed for it out here. That blank space on the map.

  There were other blank spaces on the continent, too. It was enough to make a girl think. I knew the world was round, and I knew there were other landmasses out there.

  The maps that would show me those either didn’t exist, or were under heavily encrypted lock and key… or they didn’t matter. It was an article of faith that the Gene Wars had rendered much of the planet uninhabitable, at least by warmbodies. Spores in the air, bioweapons lurking in the soil, mutations drifting and curdling everywhere, just waiting to creep into your own body and start causing trouble.

  It had also been an article of faith that the Waste would kill you as soon as you stepped outside City walls, and if it didn’t the radiation or the cannibals would. The corporation townships were supposed to be only for criminals and rejects, City castoffs who worked hard and died young. Yet there were warmbodies all over the place who had never seen the inside of a City, eking out a living. Even the cannibals had a rough approximation of societal rules, and traded for items they couldn’t make, scavenge, or raid.

  It had never made sense to me in-City, but I’d been too busy thinking about other things. Now, outside, it still didn’t make any sense, but I had to figure it out posthaste.

  Somewhere, there had to be a hidden corner where someone wouldn’t be hunting down this kid. I just had to find it.

  Of course, Sam would ask me why. Didn’t matter.

  “You’ve noticed he’s growing.” Sam peered past me as Geoff’s fourpad picked its delicate way along the approximation of a path behind mine. “And he’s showing signs.”

  I stared past the tuft of hair atop my fourpad’s bobbing head. Signs of what? A useless question.

  I slept below… they sing, you know.

  What else would he end up being able to do? He was already much stronger than a warmbody should be, and faster, too. As fast as those second-gens?

  Would he heal like them?

  If the shield of green above grew patchier, we would have to wait until full night to travel. The Vines took its regular evening breath, the feathery canopy rustling, mist and steam curling between trunks and trashwood. The tree-things here were tall but relatively spindly, and the choking underbrush told me this part had been clearcut not too long ago as such things went. Added to that, the tangle of animal paths and guesswork we’d been following had turned into a reasonably well-traveled track, and there was ionization drawing nearer and nearer. Very little in the way of thopter or needle sounds overhead, and I didn’t hear a pinging for drops.

  Of course, in a blank spot…

  What the hell is that?

  A shimmer crackled to life between the trunks and hanging vines. It wasn’t stat, it wasn’t plasma, it wasn’t lectric.

  Geoff pulled his fourpad to a halt, because I’d done the same. “Mom?”

  “You see that?” I beckoned a little, and his fourpad stepped back. By this time, Geoff only needed to give the beast a slight indication of which direction to step and it obeyed willingly, its hair festooned with moss that didn’t seem to bother it.

  “Not exactly. Feel it, though.” Geoff’s eyes were round, gleaming in the failing dusk. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Nope.” Sam’s teeth showed, a wide white smile. “That’s just Libera. There’s geothermals all through the Vines, and this one’s large enough to power a Trapp core and turbines. You’re looking at a Trapp field.”

  I had to ping a blue-section scan on the shimmer in front of me, and it returned a spiky energy signature I never thought I’d ever see in person. “Huh.”

  “Is it safe?” Geoff made an inquiring movement with his dark, bushy head. “I don’t feel good. Something’s wrong.”

  “I don’t feel good either.” I eyed Sam. “When were you going to share this news?”

  “Couldn’t be sure we’d all get here.” His tone plainly shouted especially in one piece. “And…”

  “And?”

  “And, um, I’m not supposed to have brought you this way.” He shifted uncomfortably in the saddle. “I was supposed to take you to a pickup point west, out in the tepuis. Transport was supposed to be waiting. But it’s the damndest thing, Jess. I can’t raise my contact even through emergency methods. And it feels hinky. Remember TakedaCorp and the shitfest that turned into?”

  It’s not like I can forget. My pulse tried to speed up, a subroutine clamped down. The shimmer in the air taunted me. The TakedaCorp pressure had gone sideways in a big way. I knew what it was like to be parted out and dropped into corrosive sludge.

  And after all, it had been Sam who’d fished me out. Dealing with the psych responses after your first dismemberment is unpleasant, to say the least.

  Of course, this could be a facilitator’s game. I could be expected to feel some loyalty, right? That’s what he wanted.

  “I didn’t want you to worry.” He touched his heels to his fourpad’s sides, and the beast moved forward. They slid through the shimmerfield with a brief fluorescing, man and fourpad limned like digital echoes.

  I exhaled sharply, and Geoff watched me. Waiting for direction.

  Our supplies were low. I could turn the fourpads loose and carry Geoff, swinging from tree to tree. Shimmy up into the canopy to get a solar charge while he slept safely below during the day. He could live off the porcines here handily.

  They are closely related to humans, you know.

  If we did that, Sam wouldn’t be far behind.

  “Abbymom?” Tentative, Geoff kneeing his fourpad closer. “He could be telling the truth.”

  “How do you know?” I shook my head. It was useless to start questioning now. “We might as well go on in.”

  Geoff kneed his fourpad forward, and I was about to follow, when the silence bloomed all around me and every instinctive hackle on me bristled.

  That was when they hit me, knocking me right through the shimmer.

  The second-gens could live on the bigger mammals as well. And if Geoff could find me, of course his cousins could, too.

  Chapter Ten

  Non-Alliance

  The fourpad exploded, chunks of meat flying and a starburst of hot blood. It died silently, the beast with the tufted swirl on his head, and oddly enough, that was I thought about as I tumbled free of the statrifle blast.

  I liked him, dammit.

  I was buffered. The fourpad wasn’t.

  I tumbled through the Trapp field just before it turned crystalline-solid, reacting to the statblast. That’s the great thing about them — if you have the power to waste, that type of field will immediately react to stat, projectile fire, and plasma. Of course, anyone who throws plasma at a Trapp field has to be prepared for the plas to yank on all available energy in its vicinity and rebound on the idiot who fired it. A nice bonus, but again, you had to have the power to burn. If you could link one of them to a solar complex big enough you could have your own impregnable enclave — and you’d need it full of cheap labor, too, just to keep the solarcatchers polished.

  Hit with a crunch, reinforced bones bending instead of snapping, tumbling over roots and tile-hard brown-husked vines. Now that I was through the shimmer, intake feeds and scans crackled into life, a breaker of hideous feedback before I adjusted, already scrambling with my feet underneath me. Channels both encrypted and non, high chatter and a massive thrumming, ionization and statrepeller fields contributing their own special burning tinge to air I’d grown used to smelling only sap and animals in.

  Geoff screamed, a high piercing cry. Two of the second-gens had gotten through before the shimmer hardened, and the others — how many, couldn’t tell, had they picked up their fourth member? Could they survive a probe through the chest cavity? In any case, they would be through as soon as the Trapp field cycled back
down. The fourpads bolted, their claw-pad feet throwing up dirt and glistening chunks of vines, furrowing deep pale scars in the earth as they decided anywhere was better than here.

  I didn’t blame them.

  Sam blurred, tumbled free of his fourpad and rolling. Geoff still clutched the reins of his own fear-maddened beast, and his curly head bobbed as he held on for dear life with his knees, hunching down and curling his fingers in a handful of mane as well.

  I almost, almost streaked after him. It would be simple to catch the fourpads, and Sam’s held all his gear. The plasma cannon was in Geoff’s pack, broken apart for easier transport — at least we didn’t have to worry about it getting crushed and its core reacting with the Trapp field.

  It would take them a little while to deal with Sam. That was long enough for both Geoff and me to get some distance.

  A crackle, another sizzle, and a thump. I whirled, moss flying from my hair. I was already in the air, committed to my leap, before I thought about what I was doing. Simple, really — Sam would slow them down, but not enough.

  He wasn’t a liquidator.

  The blond had a lectricshiv, shoved deep in Sam’s belly. My handler twitched a kick, a knee breaking with a greenstick crack, and the other second-gen — the one with bones in his hair, clacking as he moved — had Sam’s arms pinned. The tactic was pretty clear: tear him in half.

  It wasn’t anything Sam wouldn’t recover from, unless they put his halves on either side of the Trapp barrier. But still. It was the principle of the thing.

  Using principles to justify what we want now, agent? That’s a bad sign.

  A snap-kick as I landed, throwing the bone-haired monstrosity into the barrier. The shimmering squeal-crackled and the second-gen howled, his face twisted up into purple pleats and valleys, those teeth gleaming as they snapped together with a heavy, sickeningly familiar sound.

  The blond launched himself at me, his navy shocktrooper gear sadly mangled both from combat and the rot of the Vines. They must have been following us for a while, and Geoff’s immunity to the moss and resinous drippings might not be completely shared.

  I had no knife but I was ready, and more than ready, I had them calculated. They were fast, yes. Brutal, yes. Very durable, too.

  But they were stupid.

  Dropping, my foot flickering up to sink into the blond’s abdomen and help him on his merry way, with a little twist at the end to hopefully toss him near the curvature of the shimmer-field. Which squealed afresh — had some idiot on the other side hit it with another stat jolt? It would keep this section of the field locked down, impermeable.

  Amateurs. Knees pulled in, a reverse somersault, uncoiling and touching down on a tangle of vines, one of my boots almost disintegrating from rot and stress. Didn’t matter, I was already in the air again as the bone-haired no-longer-warmbody — what the hell did you call these things, anyway, other than terms from other fairytales and old moldering pre-War legends? In any case, he slid down the inside of the shimmerfield, his clothes smoke-steaming. Sam was already on his feet again, tearing the lectricshiv free of his belly with one contemptuous, fluid motion, spinning it to hold reversed along his forearm. Nanos swarmed, silver crawling among the blood and a grayish looping dangle of intestine sucking itself back in, and I caught a long hank of bone-studded hair. Landed, set my heels and yanked, but the second-gen had his wits about him and just dropped, twisting fluidly to strike at my belly. The punch might have gone right through me, but you could tell he was used to tearing apart warmbodies. No real challenge, no reason for him to hone his enhanced strength. Battering ram only works if your power is unmatched.

  Hand blurring down, caught his wrist, reflexes loosening my left knee and using the power of his strike to pull him past, spinning him with the force he so helpfully provided.

  A childhood spent dodging other runners and a career outthinking other agents and heavily implemented warmbodies with more than two brain cells to rub together was great practice for this. I broke his neck again, arms closing around his shoulders in a hug, my knees in his back, and from there it was only a fractional application of force to change direction just a touch, slinging myself down and around like a stat-crawling wreckball on a crane for slum renewal, and his spine gave way with a defeated snap.

  I wasn’t finished yet. Oh no. I heard another howl — the blond, but I couldn’t worry about Sam just yet. If he kept the other one occupied for a few seconds I could finish this.

  Warmbody flesh, even enhanced with whatever they’d tinkered with to make Geoff and these awful cousins of his, parts so easily. I just had to hook my fingers and drag, and viscera spilled wetly out. That was just to keep him down, though, because my other hand curled around his nape. For a moment we were nose to nose, his rank breath spilling past my parted lips, those teeth snapping fruitlessly — he got a mouthful of my hair and sheared it, a whole moss-laden chunk — while my hand cramped closed, a vise whose two prongs found the edge between the cervicals and the diagonal of the sternocleidomastoids, puncturing ruthlessly and diving between nerve cables, I had a grip on the cervical spine itself and hauled, bone splintering and puncturing my own skin.

  Didn’t matter. Hauled again, finding just the right rotation to work the cable free without snapping it, and the cry that burst out of me when I tore the top half of the motherfucker’s spine free, whipping it behind me with a spatter of blood, trailing nerve-strings, and flying moss, was another echo from the beginning of warmbody history.

  We don’t ever change biology. We just build on top of it, like Nature folding a whole new brain around a lizard-stem.

  I was on my feet again, spinning as my naked heel slipped, and I saw Sam in a loose easy crouch, wrenching back the blond’s head as he sawed at the neck with the lectricshiv. Its blade spat and hissed, glowing blue-white and cauterizing. With a final crack and a heave, he wrenched the head free, and tossed it aside. Nerve-death took over, the body bucking and kicking, and gouts of blood cooked on the lectricshiv’s blade and the Trapp field, smoke-steaming and sending up a heavy copper reek.

  Look at that. Wonder if that’ll really kill them.

  Sam’s face was a pale dish, spattered with blood. His shirt flapped as he moved, blurring, and the crack of him ripping the second-gen’s arm from its socket was shortly followed by another. More gushing and welling, splatting heavily. How much blood did they hold?

  Just like the tiny pinprick insects who buried their head in your skin and tried to suck. The nanos made me impervious, and Geoff simply brushed them off. Like the sap, and the clouds of midges.

  Sam glanced at me. A silent snarl, lips pulled back from gleaming implemented teeth, and it was the first time, in years of meeting him in anonymous restaurants and back alleys and the weeks of out-City traveling, that I actually saw past the screen of his job and into the man.

  I wasn’t always a facilitator, Jess.

  It had to be true.

  The moment passed. He tossed the other arm aside, carelessly, and stood. A quick stamp, ribs snapping like branches, slivers of bone flying. He snapped a look at the Trapp field, beginning to lose its crystalline hardness. “Not a lot of time.”

  “They were going to tear you in half.”

  “They intended to try. Why did you stop them?”

  Can you guess? “Maybe I just want to kill you myself.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  “Mom!” Geoff’s piping cry brought me around again. He’d managed to get the fourpads under control. “There’s more of them!”

  Sam’s hand clamped around my arm. “Get into Libera. Hide, but don’t go down below. I’ll deal with them.” I almost twitched away, but he jerked on my arm again, with more-than-warmbody strength. “Okay?”

  I hesitated. Flickers of movement past him, outside the shimmerfield. “There’s at least a half-dozen. You’re not implemented for this.”

  He shrugged, the door of his face slamming shut. Just like a facilitator. “Jess. Go.”

&n
bsp; The fourpads sidled and made their nervous noises when I arrived in a blur next to them. I swung up on Sam’s, and Geoff, deathly pale, stared over his shoulder. “I can hear them,” he whispered. “They don’t want us. They want him.”

  “They’re going to get their wish,” I muttered, my knees clamping home as Sam’s cantankerous fourpad decided he might as well try to take charge of the situation. He’d chosen a beast just like him, the bastard. “Come on.”

  “We can’t just—” Geoff swallowed the rest of whatever he planned on saying when I glanced at him. Behind us, the Trapp field hummed, its resonance losing the sharp clarity of solidity.

  “Come on.” I kneed the fourpad forward, and Geoff’s followed. They picked up into a shattering, ungainly jog, and I heard more crackling and ripping sounds behind us.

  We moved faster.

  * * *

  This Libera — probably Sam’s little joke, to call it that — was built around the trees, and up their rough-fiber towers. The Trapp generators were mostly underground, but their humped backs rose almost to the canopy, the couplings atop them sending up a column of faint shimmer that reached a ceiling defined by Martell’s Equations and umbrella’d out and down. The result was a rough circle, its surface area a bit larger than the average township — but they used every tree-thing’s trunk and the network of thick vines to hold sheets of processed resin and build upwards, making almost-translucent walls. The ceilings and floors were tinted to make them darker, and detritus from outside the Vines had made its way even here. Pressboard, plasilca fragments, gutted transport hulls cradled in tree-things that had probably been planted right after the Wars.

  Comchatter. The faint thunderous sound of conversation, echoes bouncing through the trees. The resin walls and windows glowed amber — lectric was free here, another benefit of the Trapp generators. There was little in the way of trash — maybe, I thought, everything was used or tossed into the generators’ cores. The geothermals provided energy and to spare, but it was like the nanos — why make what you depended on for survival work harder than it absolutely had to?