“Get back to work, Van,” Ocho said tiredly.
“I just wanted to know how much he ate,” Van said.
“I believe I ate his heart. I’m certain I ate his head.” But even as Tool said so, his bestial face showed doubt. “My memories of the time are… muddied. But I do remember the feel of the man’s head between my jaws. The taste of his blood…” A growl of contentment thrummed. “I must have eaten him. I would not have let him go, once I had him between my teeth. Perhaps I ate him all.”
“Fates.” Almadi was shaking her head.
“A human skull, it crackles like balsa wood—”
“Fine,” Mahlia interrupted. “We get it. You ate your general.”
“I thought augments were always loyal to their… to their…” Ocho hesitated.
“Masters?” Tool goaded.
“Owners,” Almadi said firmly, glaring. “You are supposed to be loyal to your owners. All augments are loyal to their owners. Unto death.”
Tool smiled. “I believe this surprised my general as well.”
“Still seems like a lot of trouble to go after one rogue soldier,” Ocho said.
“Indeed.” Tool frowned. “I thought Mercier had given up.”
“Mercier?” Almadi almost shouted. “That’s who—”
“Owned me?” Tool gave Almadi a dark look.
Ocho whistled. “Well, that explains the firepower.”
“You ever think of pissing off someone smaller?” Van asked. “Like China, maybe?”
“Get back to work, Van,” Mahlia said. But of course, the boy ignored her, squatting down as if he belonged.
“None of us choose our gods,” Tool said. “Mercier created me.”
“They’re the ones who’re gonna fry your ass, too,” Van said.
“It seems so. By taking command of the Drowned Cities, I set myself above human beings…” Tool trailed off, looking wistful.
Mahlia watched his expressions shift. The Drowned Cities had been hell for the people who lived and warred within it, but for Tool, it had been his ideal home. The sort of place a creature like him belonged.
Tool was staring down at his huge clawed hands, flexing them thoughtfully. “Once again, I am alone.”
Mahlia had never seen the half-man look so defeated. It wasn’t the bleeding wounds, or the charred flesh, or his melted pelt, or the vicious scars that closed one eye. It was the droop of his ears. The sag in his shoulders.
“You can have another pack. Another place,” Mahlia said finally. “We can help you find a place. Someplace Mercier won’t go.”
Tool laughed shortly. “No. It is over. My gods are everywhere and they cannot be fought. I must hide. I will find a place where humans are few, and augments fewer. They only allowed me to survive because they thought me lost. In my hubris, I forgot myself. I must disappear, and never become worth noticing again. It’s the only way.”
“What about crewing with us?” Mahlia asked.
Captain Almadi sucked in her breath, but Mahlia rushed on. “We can give you cover. You can say you’re”—she hesitated—“you can say you’re ours. You wouldn’t stand out, then. You’d just be another augment, employed by a ship. No one would notice you.”
“Crewing decisions are mine,” Almadi objected. “That was our deal. I run the ship. You run the trading. We agreed that I would have absolute command of the ship.”
“So call him cargo,” Mahlia shot back. “I decide cargo. That was our deal, too.”
“Your captain is right to be concerned,” Tool said. “Anyone who is close to me is in terrible danger.”
“At least stay with us until you’re healed. You don’t have to decide before then. And after that, wherever you want to go, we can take you. We can at least do that. The Raker can take you anywhere in the world.”
For a moment, she thought Tool would refuse this offer, too, but then the augment cocked his head. “Where are you bound?”
“The Seascape,” Captain Almadi said flatly. “For the fall auctions.”
“But you can stay on with us after that,” Mahlia pressed, giving Almadi a hard look. “None of us would even be alive if it weren’t for you.” She looked to Ocho for backup. “None of us.”
Ocho pursed his lips, and for a second Mahlia thought he would side with Almadi, but then he said, “Mahlia’s right. As long as you want, you stay with us.”
Almadi looked pissed, but she didn’t protest anymore, seeing herself outvoted.
Tool regarded Mahlia thoughtfully. “Every time I think that humanity is a waste, it seems one of you…” He trailed off. Shrugged. “The Seascape is a good destination. There are wealthy companies there who employ my kind for labor and security. No one will question if I belong to one or another. And there, they will have the supplies I need to complete my healing.”
“It’s settled, then,” Mahlia said. “You’re with us.” She gave Almadi another warning look. “For as long as you want, you travel with us.”
“Yeah!” Van laughed. “One big, happy family!”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Almadi muttered.
12
“HOW WOULD I go about finding out about a specific augment?” Jones asked.
Tory glanced over from his workstation. “Sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, Junior Analyst?”
“Hypothetically.”
Tory gave her a hard look. For a moment she thought he was about to ream her out, but instead he stood abruptly. “I think we need an intervention.” He motioned for her to follow him. “Come on. Stretch your legs.”
She glanced around the intelligence section, where the rest of the analysts were focused on their own tasks.
“Now, Jones.”
Reluctantly, she followed him out. Bulletproof doors slid aside. Monstrous Fast Attack augments loomed over them, watching as they exited. Brood and Splinter. They were both almost as large as the one she was hunting, but really all augments were terrifying when you stood close to them. Too large. Too many big, sharp teeth. It set off all the ancient alarm bells of the human species to see those creatures looking at you like you were a snack.
Tory didn’t seem bothered by them at all, though. “Hey, guys. Just out for a sec.” He pointed her down the corridor. “Let’s walk.”
At first, she thought he was taking her toward the mess hall, but he skipped an elevator and kept walking. They passed navigation units. Barracks sections. More Fast Attack augments standing guard. Engineering techs. Flight squad personnel.
“Where are we going?”
“Here’s the deal, Jones. I like you, okay? You’ve got all that youthful energy and gumption, and that’s kind of funny to watch. I like seeing you work circles around analysts twice your age. That’s good giggles.” He paused, glanced around, and tugged her into a corridor recess. On a wall, the symbols for a weapons locker glowed orange, listing rifles, pistols, grenades, body armor…
Tory looked down the hall one last time. Jones realized they were in a section of corridor without surveillance cameras.
Tory lowered his voice. “If you piss off Caroa, he can drop you anywhere he wants. He doesn’t have to put you in an escape pod before he dumps your ass.” He made a motion with his hand, an arc of fall, downward, downward. “Pssseeeeeeeewwwwww. Splat!” He clapped his hands together and rubbed them, pancake flat, for emphasis. “Stepping into open air at six thousand meters gives a junior analyst a lot of time to think about chain of command. All that way down.”
“I was just curious,” she protested.
“I think we’re both a little too smart to believe that.” He gave her a penetrating glare. “It’s not your job to be curious.”
“Come on, Tory. I’m just trying to figure out who owns it. Caroa won’t say who we’re up against. Every time I ask, he shuts me down.”
“Maybe you should take the hint! Why can’t you just follow orders?”
“If I followed orders, we would have sent the Strike Raptors back to Karakoram, and never kn
own you missed the target.”
“I didn’t miss!”
“Okay, so aren’t you a little curious about how our augmented friend survived all that Havoc, then?”
“It was just dumb luck. It’s like smashing ants. Sometimes one gets away.”
“Maybe. Or maybe our augmented friend has more going for him than just some tiger and dog DNA.”
“Like what? Asbestos skin? Come on, Junior. Be serious.”
“I am serious. I’ve been looking into some stuff. It doesn’t add up. It’s… it’s weird.”
Tory checked his watch. “Look. I don’t have time for this. I’ve got a Havoc drop in twenty minutes on the Trans-Cal water pipeline. And then I’ve got another in Caracas, right after. You’ve got work to do, too. Real work,” he said pointedly.
“Come on, Tory, you’ve had them zeroed-in for the last hour. You could burn them to slag in your sleep. I just want to figure out this augment. You have to be at least a little curious.”
“Blood and rust.” He peered out into the corridor. “What have you got?”
Jones hid her triumph as she pulled out her tablet and started calling up the oversight images of the augment from her drones.
“You’ve got this on your tablet? Out here?”
“I didn’t want it logged. You’re the one who’s on me about not pissing off the brass anymore.” She caught his expression. “Don’t worry. I crypto’d it.”
“Fates, Jones.” He shook his head. “Your career…”
“Just take a look at this, will you?”
He glanced down the corridor again. “Fine. But make it quick.”
In contrast to her hunt for the Raker, the images she pulled up now were good, aimed right at the target, sharp and clear, thanks to Raptor One’s superior intelligence suite.
She’d spent hours tracking the augment, following him by heat inside the old capitol building where he had kept his headquarters, snapping pictures and capturing steady video of him when he was outside, down by the huge rectangular lake that had spread before the capitol building, before the Havoc drop had melted everything down to slag.
“Pretty place,” Tory commented.
“If you like warlords and murder.” She arranged the images. “It was a civil war, until our augmented friend showed up. Local reports say he started consolidating power a couple years ago, right after the United Patriot Front collapsed.”
“Who?”
“Low-rent warlord faction. There were maybe a dozen different militias, all fighting over control of the city and the scrap recycling there. UPF. Army of God. Tulane Company. Taylor’s Wolves. Freedom Militia. Minutemen. And then our big, hairy friend showed up, and he wiped them all out.”
“So he’s military.”
“Definitely. Perfect tactical and strategic planning. But here’s the thing.” She swiped through the old footage. “It took a while to catch him in daylight, and from the right angle. And then stitching the pictures together…”
She stopped the footage. Zoomed in on the augment’s head. Zoomed in tighter still. “There.” She pointed at one of the augment’s doglike ears. “Check it out.” She handed over the tablet. “What do you think of that?”
A long string of numbers was tattooed into the monster’s skin, bending around the fold of the ear, barely visible through the thick fur:
228xn+228-NX__F3'/___2'
“I think it’s a GeneDev ID,” she said. “‘228’ is a platform, but it looks wrong to me. I’ve never seen a ‘228xn’ prefix, and then have ‘228’ repeat that way. Have you?”
“Huh.” Tory frowned. “That is weird.”
“Caroa saw that, and as soon as he did, he ordered Karakoram across the Atlantic and had me tasking Raptors ready. That’s all he needed to see. He stopped asking questions about the augment, about how it operated, all the other stuff; he stopped caring as soon as he saw that number. So? Have you ever seen ‘228xn’?”
“Do you have the whole number?”
“Pieces and parts. The fur covered up some things.” Jones fiddled with the footage, pulling up more and more images. Pinched them together. “This is everything I can get.”
228xn+228-NX__F3'/___2'(C8_6C5__ U0111___Y__29_9_4___MC/MC__8xn
“It’s GeneDev, all right.” He frowned. “But yeah. It’s weird. ‘228’ is standard for augments, especially military ones. They mostly get built off a common genetic platform, so you get consistent results when you fertilize in vitro.”
“I know about 228,” she said impatiently. “What about the rest?”
“You want my help or not? The rest is the genetic branching. If you look it up you can find what ‘F3’ is. I think it’s something from the tiger’s tooth-and-jaw structure. But just looking at it, I see some feline, probably tiger, some missing stuff, and a bunch of different canine parts. I think ‘U0111’… maybe it’s something from badgers or grizzly bears?”
“So it’s a vicious badass. I knew that already.”
“Okay, fine.” He gave her an annoyed look. “And then you have the breeding facility, ‘Y’ could be fragmented off ‘KY,’ for Kyoto. They’ve got a ton of breeding vat labs there. You’d have to look that up and see if there’s another match. But…”
“But it’s weird looking, right?”
“Yeah, that extra ‘228xn.’ And it looks like it might be a suffix, too. See the ‘8xn’ at the tail end?”
“Maybe that’s why it survived our hit. ‘228xn’ equals asbestos skin.”
“Hah. Maybe. New tech for sure.” He frowned at the stitched-together images of the tattoo. “Oh.” He handed the tablet back hurriedly, almost as if he’d been burned. “Oh, wow.”
“What?”
“Did you not look at that? ‘MC/MC’?”
“I self-taught basic genetics. I don’t know everything, Tory. That’s why I was asking you.”
“That’s not the genes, Jones. That’s the patent holder and purchaser.”
“So that’s our enemy?”
He yanked her close and whispered fiercely. “That’s us, Jones. ‘MC’ is Mercier Corporation. That’s our own augment that we dumped a six-pack of Havoc on. We bombed our own damn asset.”
“Why would we bomb our own augment?”
Tory made an exasperated face. “I hate to break it to you, Jones, but when you get to a certain level in the company, it’s not all happy-family rah-rah-rah. Finance, Trade, Viceroys. R&D. Markets. Joint Forces. Commodities. They’ve all got their own interests on the ExCom. Sometimes families have fights, you get me?”
Tory kept talking, but Jones was staring at the augment’s design tag again. Kyoto was a possibility. There were a bunch of gene-tech facilities there, and she might be able to trace the augment back to its crèche—
“Jones!” Tory waved a hand in front of her face.
“What? I’m listening.”
“Some things are above our pay grade. The less we know, the less trouble we’re in if we get called up in front of a Loyalty Board. Your performance is always being logged. This is bad mojo. Drop it. Forget it. Do what Caroa tells you to, and don’t stand out on this one. You get me?”
“Yeah. You’re right.” She theatrically shut down the images of the half-man on her tablet, folded it, and shoved it into her pocket. “It’s not worth getting demoted.”
“Now you’re understanding.” Tory looked relieved. He checked his watch. “Look, I gotta go drop some party favors on California.”
“Party favors…” Jones’s mind flashed back to her own Havoc drop—all the infrared people standing there, not knowing they were about to become ash. She forced a smile. “Good luck with the drop.”
“Don’t need it,” Tory smirked. “Cali militia doesn’t have asbestos skin.”
As Tory departed to drop missiles on terrorist militants, Jones considered her options. Despite what she’d told Tory, she had no intention of letting it go. She pulled out her tablet and called up the GeneDev number again.
228xn.
r /> She’d start with Kyoto. Trace Caroa’s movements, see if there was an overlap with any gene-tech facilities. She didn’t have access to his files, but she could call up plenty of surveillance data from that city. Mercier had security agreements there. And she could pull all of Caroa’s expense reports, from back in the day. See if anything matched there—
An alert interrupted her thoughts, an alarm notification from an overwatch Raptor. Jones read the information sourly. Things were moving faster than she wanted them to.
Showtime.
13
“I SMELL THE shore,” Tool said.
“I guess your sense of smell isn’t damaged,” Mahlia replied as she peeled away a blood-clotted bandage and examined the matted, sticky wounds beneath.
Tool’s ears twitched. “No. My senses are intact, even if my flesh is”—he prodded at the flaking meat of a bicep—“weak.”
With assistance, Tool could now hobble about, depending upon three or four soldier boys to support his bulk. If he clutched the rails and masts, he could move slowly on his own.
But looking at his ruined body, Mahlia wondered if he would ever truly heal again. She’d seen Tool survive bullets and shrapnel and teeth and machetes, but this damage was something worse. The missiles had done terrible things to his flesh with their heat and chemicals.
Tool seemed to catch the direction of her thoughts. “The medical advances of the Seascape will help me,” he assured her. He jerked his chin in the direction of Mahlia’s mechanical prosthetic. “They gave you a hand, did they not?”
“You can’t replace your whole body.”
“I will heal.”
“Have you thought any more about staying on with us? On the Raker?”
“Your captain has suddenly become amenable to my presence?”
A voice echoed from the high mast above, saving Mahlia from responding.
“Seawalls, ho!” A second later Van came clambering down the mast, reckless and nimble. He crashed down beside Mahlia and Tool, panting. “Not much longer now! You can see the arcologies, too!”