“Fuck a duck,” she said, then realized she sounded five years old and was probably being recorded. She looked around for cams, didn’t see any. Probably there, though, because they didn’t cost anything, and maybe your prisoner would say or do something you’d like to know about. The lights were too bright, the kind of totally white LEDs that made your skin look really bad. She guessed she could stand up, but she might knock the chair over doing it, and then have nowhere to sit.
She heard the bolt come out of the hasp.
Corbell Pickett opened the door. He was wearing black wraparound sunglasses. Came over to the table, leaving the door open behind him. His watch looked like a clock out of an old airplane, but gold, on a leather strap.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well what?”
“Ever dislocate your jaw?”
She looked up at him.
“I could do it for you,” he said, looking her in the eye, “if you don’t tell me more about your people in bullshit Colombia.”
She nodded, just a little.
“How much more do you know than you told me at the house?”
She was about to open her mouth but he raised his hand, the one with the big gold watch. She froze.
“Your Colombians,” he said, lowering his hand, “bullshit or not, aren’t necessarily the ones in this with the most money. Could be somebody else. Could be I’ve been talking with them. About you. All the lawyers in Miami don’t mean shit to them. I’d say you’re out of your depth, but that doesn’t do it justice.”
She waited for him to hit her.
“Don’t tell me any shell story.” His suntan looked weirder, under the light, than her skin did, but more even.
“They don’t tell us much.”
“People I’m talking to want me to kill you. Right now. They see proof you’re dead, they give me more money than you can imagine. So you aren’t just some random-ass poor, much as you look to me like one. What makes you that valuable?”
“I don’t have clue one, why anybody would give a shit about me. Or why Coldiron hooked up with us. If I did, I’d be telling you.” And then that crazy thing that had first come to her in Operation Northwind chimed in: “Where’d they say they’re from, these people of yours?”
“They don’t,” he said, pissed that it was true, then pissed at himself for answering the question.
“If I’m worth more dead than alive,” said the crazy thing, “how come I’m alive?”
“Difference between a cashed check and leverage,” he said. He leaned a little closer. “Aren’t stupid, are you?”
“Wilf Netherton,” she said, the crazy thing gone as suddenly as it had come. “At Coldiron. He’d want a chance to outbid them.”
Pickett smiled, maybe, just a tiny little change at the corners of his mouth. “We use your phone from here,” he said, stepping back, “they’ll know exactly where it is, where you are. We wait another few hours, till it gets somewhere else, we’ll patch a call through, you and I, to your Mr. Coldiron. Meantime, you sit here.”
“Any chance you could turn the lights down?”
“No,” he said, and she saw the micro-smile again, and then he turned and went back out, closing the door behind him.
She heard the bolt rattle.
72.
HALFWAY POSH
Netherton watched as Ossian transformed the decloaked baby buggy, glossy as a wet peppermint toffee, red and cream, into something surprisingly if only vaguely anthropomorphic.
The two rear pairs of wheels, now flat on the garage’s floor, had formed figure-eight feet, from which sprouted candy-striped legs. Its gleaming armor, around the actual baby seat, had flattened laterally, widening at the top, emulating a muscular dynamism. The tires at the ends of each arm suggested clenched fists. Netherton could actually imagine this having some appeal, for a child. It didn’t look as though it were armed, particularly, but cocky, certainly, belligerent.
Thumbing its cream-and-red controller, Ossian guided it to the open door of the Bentley executive-hauler, into which it climbed, wheel-paws gripping the silver-gray bodywork. It sat on a backward-facing seat, freezing as Ossian gave the controller a final tap.
Ash had insisted Netherton remain with Ossian while she and Lev dealt with Flynne’s apparent abduction. She and Ossian were in contact, but Netherton could only hear Ossian’s side of any exchange, and that in their morphing gibberish.
Netherton had watched Ossian put a pair of grotesque gloves, or rather hands, on the white exoskeleton. These had far too many fingers, black and unsettlingly limp, like oversized, anatomically incorrect rubber spiders. The second one had given Ossian some unspecified trouble, so he’d left it for the meantime, choosing instead to decloak and transform the buggy.
“When will they reach Flynne?” Netherton asked.
“As you know,” Ossian said, “I don’t know.” He dropped the controller into the wide pocket on the front of his apron, bent to adjust the yellow kneepads he wore over his black trousers, then knelt before the white exoskeleton.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“You might try buggering off,” Ossian suggested, without looking up.
“Burton’s gone to bring her back?”
“Seems likeliest.”
“I’d think him competent,” Netherton said.
“Tendency to fly violently off the handle aside.” Ossian prodded a black, penlike instrument into the recalcitrant glove’s jiggly black digits, causing a small red light to strobe briefly.
“He was disoriented,” Netherton said. “Understandably. When you came barging in, he reacted.”
“I might disorient you,” Ossian said, “if Zubov didn’t need you to lie to your girlfriend’s face. Is it true, that she periodically has herself flayed, her entire epidermis, to hang in whatever establishment might be willing to display such a thing?”
“If you want to put it that way,” said Netherton.
“Kinky, are we?”
“She’s an artist,” said Netherton. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“My hairy arse,” said Ossian, as if naming the root precept of a long-held philosophy, then pressed the penlike tool repeatedly into the black spider, managing to briefly produce a steady green light.
“Why are you putting those on?”
“For Macon’s technical. Field manipulators, military. Anything from stone masonry to nanosurgery. Once he’s locked in, can’t have him coming up short the right size spanner.”
“Locked in?”
“There,” indicating the windowless silver vehicle. “Put them both in, seal it, depressurize it, partial vacuum. Should anything escape, it stays inside. Really, though, this is all to satisfy Zubov. Those assemblers are self-terminating. If they weren’t, nothing in this vehicle would stop them.”
Netherton looked at the exoskeleton. Ossian had bodged a domed, transparent cylinder onto the thing’s shoulders, during Burton’s visit. Within this, immobile, legs akimbo, stood the homunculus that had driven him, along with Lev, to the house of love. Though really, he knew, Ash had been the driver.
Ossian got to his feet, dropping the black tool into the pocket with the controller. “Lowbeer,” he said, “has someone in the stub. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“No,” Netherton lied. “Who?”
“If I knew, would I be asking? Whoever it is, they aren’t being paid. Not by us. Ash signs off on all monies spent, there. Lowbeer has someone at her beck and call, apparently able to get in anywhere, learn anything.”
“I’d think that would be exactly what you’d want.”
“Not if it means someone on our team who’s an entirely unknown quantity. Becomes Lowbeer’s game, then.”
“She’s an unknown quantity as it is. And it’s quite obviously been her game since she had that private talk with Lev.”
“He doesn’t see that,” said Ossian. “She’s leveled his game up for him. That’s all he sees now. He m
ight listen to you, though. You’re halfway posh.” He blinked, then, distracted. Looked away, listening. Said something in that moment’s Esperanto. Listened again. “Closer to her, now,” he said to Netherton.
“She’s safe?”
“Alive. Tracker in her stomach’s giving them basic vitals.”
“Tracker?”
“We’d have had no way to find her, otherwise.”
The exoskeleton’s new hands, with an unexpected dry rustle, sprang suddenly to a state of bristling attention, hyper-manipulative readiness.
“Hold your horses,” Ossian said, neither to Netherton nor, evidently, to Ash. “I’ll need to get you inside first, then depressurize.”
Netherton saw the homunculus, under the transparent dome, lower its own hands and the exo’s simultaneously, black digits drooping.
73.
RED GREEN BLUE
The only good thing you could say for this toilet was it had a seat. No door on it, and dog-leash man was about six feet away, keeping track of her out of the corner of his eye. He’d replaced his rifle with a pistol, worn on one of those nylon harnesses slung down from his belt and strapped across his thigh, like where a gorilla would wear his gun.
She was glad she just had to pee, seeing as she had company. She’d gotten them to take her here by explaining that she really needed to, that if she didn’t she’d eventually wet her pants, and that that wouldn’t be nice for Pickett, assuming he was coming back, which she told them he definitely intended to, but not for hours. So she’d been right about there being cams, and she must’ve struck some right tone with her prisoner’s assisted urination pitch. Nothing angry, not too urgent. Just sitting there, addressing the door, because she had no idea where any cams might be. She’d gone through it twice, giving it a few minutes in between, careful not to escalate the second time. The two of them had come in, not that much later, put her on the leash, snipped the blue Homes zip tie fastening her to the table, and led her out. About thirty feet to the left, away from the roll-up door they’d first brought her in through, was this doorless single stall.
Sitting there, she thought this could’ve been the place where the heroine of the Resistance, in Operation Northwind, took out dog-leash with an OSS thumb-dagger she’d hidden in her underwear. She didn’t have any thumb-dagger, but then they hadn’t searched her, and maybe Reece hadn’t either. Which meant they were slacker than a lot of game AI she’d played against, and didn’t know she had a tube of lip gloss, which might be poison or an explosive gel. But then that was all she did have, and it wasn’t either. To dog-leash’s credit as a jailer, though, he’d zip-tied the nylon ring on the handle of the leash to a vertical, paint-flaking pipe, just right of the toilet, which would’ve made it hard for her to take anybody out with anything, short of a gun. When she pulled up her jeans and stood, he came in and snipped the tie. Then they took her back to the bright room.
That was probably when she first noticed the bug, though she barely did. Just a gnat. Fast, close, then gone.
But back in her chair, fastened to the table with a fresh Homes-blue zip tie, both men gone, something whined past her ear. If those tanks outside were standing water, there’d be mosquitos in here. With her hands tied, she wouldn’t be able to do much about them.
She was looking in the direction of the closed door, given that was easiest and she hadn’t much choice, when three bright small points of light moved horizontally across her vision, dead level, one after another, right to left, and vanished. Red, then green, then blue. They’d seemed to be either square or rectangular, and she’d barely had a chance to wonder whether she might be having a stroke, a seizure or something, when they were back, right to left again, same order, closer together, then collapsing into a single longer one. Aquamarine.
Unmoving now, in the middle of Pickett’s white, finger-smudged door.
She moved her head, expecting the pixel-thing to move. But it stayed put, above the tabletop, closer than she’d first taken it to be. Like it was really there, an object, aquamarine, impossible.
“Huh,” she said, mind filling with those things she’d seen kill and eat the woman, then with however many episodes of Ciencia Loca she’d watched about UFOs. Hadn’t mentioned any tiny ones. This one descending, now, as she watched, to the tabletop, between her tethered wrists. Straight down, like a little elevator. Its length doubling, on the dull steel, it began to rotate on a central axis, revving to become a slightly blurry aquamarine disk, size of an antique dime, flat on the table. And she heard it do that, faintly buzzing. Couldn’t get her wrists any further apart than they already were.
Aquamarine to bright yellow, then a stylized red nubbin, dead center. Thing still spinning, because she could hear it. A kind of animation. “Macon?”
The disk flared red.
She’d done something wrong.
Aquamarine again. Then a graphic of an ear, drawn with one black line, like a PSA warning. Becoming a housefly, in the same style. Then both, side by side, the fly shrinking to vanish into the ear. Then yellow again, Edward’s two nubbins instead of Macon’s one. The yellow background went cream, the two nubbins becoming Lowbeer’s emblem, that pale gold crown. Then the disk was gone, leaving an actual bug, much smaller, in its place. Not a housefly. Translucent, waxy looking.
“No way,” she said, under her breath. She leaned forward.
Too fast to see. Into her left ear. Buzzing. Deeper. “Don’t speak,” the buzz became Macon’s voice. “You’re miked, on cam. Pretend nothing’s happening. Do exactly what I say.”
She made herself look at the door. It sounded like him, but she could see the woman’s clothing fluttering down, over that empty street.
“Click your teeth together twice, one-two, without opening your mouth. Quiet as possible.”
She looked down. Clicked her teeth, twice. Loudest thing in the world.
“Need a minute of you not moving much. How you are now, but not moving. Not too still, ’cause I’m going to capture, then loop that back to them, so they’ll see that loop and not what’s happening next. Got it?”
Click-click.
“No major head or body movement. Move too much, it highlights repetition in the loop. I say done, be ready to go. Earplugs first, then the suit.”
Suit?
“You good?” he asked.
Click-click.
“Capturing now,” he said.
She stared at the door. The knob, the smears above it. Hoped her mother was okay, Lithonia still there.
“Done,” said Macon, finally. “Looping. Stand up.”
She put her palms flat on the steel, stood, pushing back the Hefty chair. She heard the bolt rattle.
The door opened. Weirdness came in. Like her retinas were melting. A kind of roiling blob.
“Squidsuit,” said Macon, in her ear. Cuttlefish camo, like Burton and Conner used in the war.
The suit was reading whatever was nearest, emulating that, but part of it looked sprayed with blood. Like a chunk of broken game code, walking in. Then a squidstuff glove, with the head of Burton’s tomahawk, darting toward her, under her hands, to hook and sever the blue zip tie In the bottom curve of the head was a special notch, sharper even than the rest of it, crazy sharp. For ropes, webbing, harness. It nipped back in, between her wrists, to cut the tie that held them together. His other glove a steel-gray paw, offering two orange blobs on an orange string, like low-end Hefty candy. Then she had them in her ears, like Macon had told her to, but had he meant her to trap the bug in there?
Burton dropped to the floor, scooted under the table, popped up beside her. Velcro ripping, glimpse of his eyes. Squidstuff unfolding, shaken out in front of her, instantly going what must be the color of her face under these lights, plus two big smears, the brown of her eyes, trying to emulate her, and then she had her head in it, her arms, was pulling it down, oversized and loose, dark inside but then she could see, the lights mercifully dimmer. Burton closing his own suit, then bending to close hers, start
ing at her feet.
“Out,” said Macon, the earplugs changing his voice.
Burton picked her up, swung her over the table, came over it himself like a gymnast clearing a pommel horse, pulled her to the door and out. She stumbled. Her foot a concrete blur beside dog-leash’s holster, pistol still in it, splotched with blood.
Stepped over him.
“Door,” said Macon, close to her ear, “move.” The roll-up door they’d brought her in through, open, the night beyond it darker now. The big loose pajama feet of the suit scuffing, threatening to trip her up.
Not game blood, some other part of her said, from some distant sideline.
74.
THAT FIRST GENTLE TOUCH
Has her now,” said Ossian.
The exoskeleton’s operator, in the stub, had just positioned it in the executive-hauler, in a rear seat facing the inert buggy, black manipulators drooping.
“Who does?”
“The hot-head brother. Commencing exfiltration. Ash says she’s overreacting.”
“Flynne?”
“Lowbeer. Seal the door.” This last, evidently, to the Bentley, its open door obediently shrinking to nothing at all, an unbroken expanse of silver-gray bodywork, Netherton finding the very last bit of closure peculiarly unpleasant, somehow octopoid. “Full hermetic. Vent one third captive atmosphere.”
Netherton heard a sharp outrush of air.
“Take it apart,” Ossian said, Netherton assumed to the operator. “If the tutorials aren’t adequate, ask us for help.”
“Overreacting?”
“She’s about to make a point. Quite a sharp one, irreversible.”
“She needs to get Flynne out first.”
“Shall I get her for you? Couldn’t possibly mind being interrupted just now, by our resident bullshit artist.”
Netherton ignored this. “What’s it doing in there?”
“Attempting to relieve a pram of two autonomously targeting, self-limiting swarm weapons. Shouldn’t be too terribly difficult, you might suppose, having just seen me shut the bastard down cold. Not that the sadistic shits who engineered it would let life be that simple. And now our technical is broaching the matter . . .” Ossian was listening to something Netherton couldn’t hear. “And there you have it. I was right.”