More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  She was the elephant, and he was eating her one bite at a time.

  “Limontour,” she said, “please. You don’t have to do this. You could just…you could go away. Leave me here. I will see myself to safety.”

  He didn’t deserve a chance, but she gave him one anyhow. Just one. Out of atonement, maybe. Because it evoked the best part of her, the part that seemed to be shrinking constantly. Winking out of existence, replaced with…she didn’t want to think about that. All she knew was that it had to stop, and it had to stop soon.

  Tonight. Now.

  Before Apega was ready to go out into the world and rain her own fire upon the humans.

  Limontour reached cool fingertips to her temples and combed the hair back from her face. “When a rare diamond is mined, the artist does not immediately set it in fine metal. He studies it in the rough, appreciates its size and heft and power. He cleaves it first along its tetrahedral plane, then encases it in cement, bruiting the two parts against each other to achieve the longed-for shape. To make it perfect. When it is done, he dusts it with diamond powder and polishes it until it sparkles. Until it is as beautiful as he always knew it could be.”

  He finished the braid in silence, moved the heavy rope off her back, and placed it gently over one shoulder. It lay there, heavy as a dead snake.

  G series. Fourth mech-clone body. Chloe knew how this part went.

  He had immobilized her but no longer felt a need to silence her. ”No,” she said in the smallest of voices as he inserted the spike into the port at the base of her borrowed skull. And then he electrified it.

  Time was different for a creature such as Chloe. In that last half second before dark, before she would wake rebooted either in her box or in a new mech-clone body, she sent her command, straight through the spike and into the station computer. She had all the time in the world.

  “Apega, embrace your king.”

  • • •

  Garrett heard the klaxons inside the sub for only a couple of seconds, and then the outer door sealed and he was grasping the sides of his modified inflatable, surfing it down the metal hull. Okay, no, not surfing in any athletic way. Falling, really. And hanging on to the inflatable for all he was worth. They hit the ocean’s surface hard, he and the craft. He felt the impact in his knees, in the soles of his feet, in his tailbone. Mostly there.

  Fucking ow.

  The world was white, white on white, blinding and full of death. He couldn’t tell where the gun emplacements were precisely, but he knew in a general way where the shots were coming from, and that was the direction he needed to head. He aimed the hover-boat-thing, engaged the battery-powered engine, and popped the Armorflate shell, which he’d had the foresight to bleach whiteish.

  They’d surfaced in thin ice—it was summer, after all. In winter, this whole bay would be locked up and require breakers, but right now it wasn’t so bad. Still he was glad for the modifications he’d made to the inflatable dinghy. It flew over the ice, eased over the first drifts at the shoreline. Transitioned easy from water to ground, and didn’t lose any of its forward momentum.

  Garrett could say the same for himself. It felt like he was breathing adrenaline, pumping it pure in his veins. He thought about the efficiency of machines, like Dan-Dan. That guy wouldn’t slow down because of fear or injury. He’d plow on, do the job. Complete the mission.

  Bullets skidded off his Armorflate, and he knew that his statistical chances of getting hit by at least one bullet were off the chart, off the grid, off the whole damn smartsurface.

  Also, this place where he was right now? Ant-freaking-arctica? Redefined cold. Summer, again. He kept telling himself, It’s summer. Hot. Surfing. But none of that worked. The arctic air hit him smack in the visor. He hadn’t thought to construct a windshield like a real hovercraft would have. Stupid.

  The suit kept him warm, though. Vallejo had done good.

  Maybe if he’d had a few more weeks he could have added impact resistance. Garrett could feel the sharp zing of each bruise as he slammed his shins against the retractable metal decking, or elbows against the reinforced sides. But he only felt the flare of pain for a second, and then his senses were on to the next insult, the next injury, the next defiance of death in all its forms.

  The white ahead of him bled orange for a moment, then darkled.

  Explosion.

  Not in front of him, though. That was a reflection on the white. Behind him.

  The sub?

  Oh shit, oh shit. But he couldn’t look back, could only squeeze his control stick, shunting more fuel to the engine, and hope his armor held. Hoped the hastily built fan didn’t fly off its mounts. Hope he didn’t drop into the polar ocean.

  Hope Vallejo and Dan-Dan had gotten away.

  Dive, dive, dive, you guys.

  A blur to his left was probably the gun emplacement. He flew past it, and the hail of bullets stopped coming at him. He unclenched his fist on the stick, drew the engine revs down, and turned his boat.

  That chick in the Bible, the one who looked back? Lot’s wife? Well, she was an idiot. And Garrett was probably one, too. He ought to be headed out fast as this thing could move, in Chloe’s direction.

  But he turned. Yeah, that was the gun emplacement, right there. Still firing, volley after volley. And smoke rising in the distance.

  If the sub was hit, it couldn’t dive.

  Shit.

  Don’t be stupid, kid, go. He could almost hear Vallejo yelling at him.

  Vallejo who’d shot his own daughter. Vallejo who’d started the war with Texas, who’d been responsible for the hurricane that drowned Houston. Vallejo who, without even seeming to think about it, had called him son.

  And Dan-Dan who didn’t deserve any of this.

  Yeah, Garrett turned back. Yeah, he plowed his dinghy-sled right up to the emplacement. No people here, just the gun. The shooter was someplace warm right now, twitching a joystick and trying to score a hit on the enemy sub just as he would if he were playing a game.

  But it wasn’t a game. Asshole, it’s not a game. There are real people out there on that boat.

  The emplacement was a three-sided cement square, a pillbox, with some scary-as-hell cannon-looking thing in the center, pumping out artillery-size flak shit. At its side was a sleek, unassuming XN-4 LaWS laser system. He couldn’t tell whether the laser was set to disable-the-electronics mode or burn-everything-in-its path mode, and it didn’t matter anyhow.

  Dan-Dan was an electronic, and he didn’t want that dude disabled.

  Garrett got out of his vehicle and hiked over to the dugout. Whoever was scoping out this encounter must have missed him stopping and coming back. Probably assumed, correctly, that he would have to be out of his gourd to double back. At any rate, both guns were still aimed squarely at the sub.

  A sheen over top of the pillbox looked familiar, and it took Garrett maybe a minute to remember where he’d seen a glimmer like that on the air. Chloe’s illusion over the Pentarc, before it fell. No wonder Vallejo hadn’t seen the guns on his satellite images.

  Had Chloe copied the Consortium stealth technology, or had they stolen it from her? Either way, Garrett took it as a sign. She was here. Or close to here. He could feel it.

  He walked around the dugout, checking the mechanics, the mounts, figuring out how it all fit together. The control-rig fed through cabling that wasn’t even buried. It was just sheathed in some heavy-duty weather-resistant foam. Big honkin’ mess of foam-reinforced wiring, sure, but seeing it made Garrett grin inside his helm.

  Because, what do you know, he had a laser mounted to his forearm.

  Goddamn right he did. Vallejo hadn’t called this the Iron Man suit for nothing.

  It was the work of maybe a minute to sever the cabling, foam jacket and all. And the big gun went silent. The LaWs sputtered and lolled, deprived of its power
.

  He couldn’t see very well over the white, but a column of smoke still rose out on the bay. The gunner, wherever he was, would come out here soon to fix the equipment, wire around the cut maybe, and then the attack would start all over again.

  Garrett was going to have to take his sled-boat back out there, assess the damage. Figure out if they could approach someplace else, though the rest of this coastline looked like one giant ice cliff.

  A flicker of light on the edge of his visor caught his attention.

  It was text, from the sub: “We were hit but still floating. Moving to a safer location. Backup en route. Now stop fucking around and go get your girl.”

  Chapter Eleven

  POSSIBLY HEAVEN?

  Cold hurt. Stabbing, biting, ripping pain. Not just sensors flaring, but… pain.

  Pain?

  Wait.

  Except yes.

  Glorious, honest to bits, pain.

  Chloe was housed in a mech again, but this one was different. For one thing, it was a gazillion times more complicated than any she’d inhabited before. It took her several minutes to locate the visual cortex, the optic nerve, the facial muscles. She opened her eyes and looked around.

  Her cell was dark. Not even the electrical ports glowed their usual blue. There was no familiar lick of electricity between the walls of her cage, no hum of magnets keeping her penned. She put her hand out and advanced, seeking the familiar Faraday barrier.

  Ah, there it was. Cold also. Unbearably cold and hard against her hand.

  She switched her eye augments to thermal but the system glitched. Whatever mech housed her this time sure had some ass-backwards eye tech. No thermal. No UV. No density or elemental scanning. Limited visible-light spectrum, and all of it currently showing black.

  There were other problems with this body, too. Conductivity for one. And responsiveness. It moved sluggishly, like a game with a twitchy interface. She couldn’t locate the central power source.

  It was almost like that time when Mari’d gotten shot and to remove the bullet and prevent a mortal injury Chloe had embedded herself.

  In a human person.

  Hold on.

  How complicated is this mech? So complicated that maybe it isn’t a mech at all?

  Tentatively, Chloe wrapped one hand around the opposite forearm. Squeezed.

  A whole orchestra of sensation burst into song, from both the palm and the arm itself. Skin, hair follicles, individual nerve endings. So many! She had to stop counting at a thousand. And all of them… singing. There just wasn’t a better word for it. She pinched, stroked, and soothed, directing the symphony of feeling. Sensation. Bliss. A trill of fingertips behind the elbow and…

  Tickled.

  She tickled herself.

  A burble of laughter rose in her throat. She hadn’t summoned it, hadn’t sought it. But it was there. Like magic.

  Laughter. And, and a wet something on her face. (Something wet?) She dipped one fingertip in the wet and touched it to her tongue. If the wet was what she thought it was, this was what salt tasted like. Salt tears.

  She was cry-laughing? That was a thing? And shaking. And keening. And cold. And wow.

  Wow, just wow.

  A human body. All hers, no one else here. No sharing necessary, no deference to the host. She didn’t need to give it back.

  Overcome with the need to share this moment with someone, anyone, even possible survivors among her captors, she called out, “Hello?”

  Her voice syncopated with the music on her skin, all in one amazing, gaudy riot of existence. Of being. Of life.

  Hers.

  No one replied, of course. The command she’d sent to Apega had triggered an EMP. The station computer and all the parts of Chloe it contained were gone, and yeah, that hurt a little. But Limontour and all his unshielded ancient alterations would also have been susceptible. Chloe had never encountered anyone else here, but she assumed that any person working in an explicitly research-oriented installation would have been crammed full of metal, microscopic electronics. Even most normal, non-sciency people had alterations these days, so the plague of bio-hacking would have to be even more pervasive among those who saw themselves as inheritors of the earth. People working for the Consortium.

  They were gone. She had most likely killed them all.

  She was alone.

  Probably.

  She took a nice long time letting those two thoughts sink in. First the killing, and then the solitude.

  Murder was the monster that chased her, chanting that she could never be real. Love was real, and love was mercy, and someone without mercy could never become more than a mere thing. She needed to work on her conscience. And she would. Just as soon as people stopped hurting her or killing folks she cared about.

  Which brought her to alone. Because, honestly, solitude might be her best bet in banishing that monster. Couldn’t kill anybody if nobody was around to die, right?

  She’d never been alone before, not completely. Even when her family had left her on the spaceplane, even on those rare occasions when Garrett went off to frolic or let off steam of do whatever he did when he wasn’t with her, she’d had the plane’s many and amusing electronic systems to bounce her ideas and thoughts and plans off of.

  Solitude, though. Whoa. It was huge. Gaping. Dark and fascinating. Also terrifying.

  “Garrett!” she said, out loud, several times just to feel the echo, test the vocal modulation that was anything but precise.

  She knew he wasn’t actually there, but his name was the loveliest word she knew. And then, once she started talking to him, and it didn’t feel weird at all, she just kept on. “Hey, Garrett, guess what? I am ticklish!”

  She started a recording. Someday she’d squash a psych-emitter helm on him and replay this moment. It would crack his shit up.

  And then she was laughing again. And crying. And wobbling up from the floor, taking it slow along the wall, mapping out her room, drawing its shape in her mind, learning to walk with muscles rather than hydraulics. Everything was complicated and hard. And everything was magic.

  The passcode box on her cage was as fried as the rest of the electronics, apparently, so she unlocked the gates, one and then the next, mechanically. Manually. With her hands.

  Giggling, singing atonally like a crazy person the whole time, just because she could.

  She was alone. In the dark. In a frigid structure whose electronics she had very probably disabled permanently, which was located who knew where. But wherever didn’t matter because ultimately she was right here: in a human body.

  So basically, in heaven.

  • • •

  The heads-up in his visor was wonky, pixelicious, unnervingly familiar, and he was about twenty kilometers inland, pretty close to the thermal concentration, before he realized that it was a joke. The display was one big in-joke that he should have caught onto miles ago. Vallejo had fashioned the helmet from parts of the psych-emitter from the submarine’s com room and parts of what looked like an old gaming rig.

  The display was snatched directly from the “away team” augmented-reality HUD those guys had used in DarkStars when they’d beamed down to a planetary surface.

  Man, that took him back. Space pirates, no rules, running. Minxy.

  Late-night binge rewatches with Chloe, while she educated him on early 21st-century tech and history, and he educated her on fantasy and tried to explain why nobody with taste buds would ever, ever put peanut butter on a pizza. Good times. Good—

  The hovercraft fan stopped rotating. Just like that. Stopped. The display on his helm went dark. Just winked out, and all he could see was white. Stretching forever.

  The world quieted.

  The happy hum at the small of his back, his reactor’s miniature turbine, was still going, but inside the sound-dampened he
lm, he could barely hear it. Mostly what he could hear was his own heart beating, a thump so loud he could actually feel it. Like somebody was tapping his neck with a ball peen.

  The inflatable drifted to a stop and sank softly into the powder.

  For a few minutes, all Garrett could do was sit there on the coxswain’s bench, his hand still on the powerless rudder.

  No power.

  He’d designed the dinghy mod old-school-style, because that’s what he knew best. Unlike the Iron Man suit with its own private micro-reactor—which, how the hell had Vallejo managed that anyway?—Garrett’s little hover had been all wrapped up in wires, fed by solar-charged batteries. Susceptible to E1 EMP attacks. Just like his psych-emitter-based helmet.

  The moment he realized what must have happened, the bottom also fell out of his world.

  An E1 electromagnetic pulse killed electronics, especially electrical components that were fed power over giant grids.

  Such as the very systems Chloe needed to inhabit in order to survive.

  Jesus.

  The ball peen became a jackhammer, tenderizing the meat of him, inside out.

  Whatever blackout bomb just took out his inflatable undoubtedly did a number on Chloe. Oh God. God. Please don’t let her be here. Please let her be anywhere but here.

  Please let this whole rescue attempt be a big-ass waste of time. Something she will laugh at, later. Something Heron and the rest of the fam can heckle me for. Whatever. I’ll take it. The shaming. Bring it, God.

  Just please don’t let what happened be real.

  Please let her be.

  He’d been staring straight ahead when the power went out, and he hadn’t moved since then. He took a breath, thought about the HUD right before it winked out existence. He was within a half a klick of the thermal concentration. The station where she please wasn’t. He did some calculations in his head. There was an elevation in the distance with a slash of black in its side. An entrance? This close to the thermal concentration coordinates, it was a good guess..

  He could get there, if he just walked in consistently that direction.