Agnosis – Ch. 9

<– Chapter 8 / Chapter 10 –>

Dorian rolled the trench jeep through the quiet scrub community of Gardenhole, a few kilometers north of Sonali. Dawn had come as a bleak and purple bruise on the sky. The mountains rose up grim and hostile in the west. Farther north, there were brown foothills, ridge upon ridge of naked stone and trackless wilderness. Dorian was happy to get off the main roads. They had left behind the steady streams of emergency vehicles plunging toward the disaster at Quiksand from outlying relief stations some minutes back, but morning commuter traffic had almost immediately begun to clog the expressway in their absence. It had become increasingly difficult for him to track the vehicles behind him in his rear view mirrors to determine if they were being followed.

Along the way, in more densely populated neighborhoods, men and women had stood on their front lawns, still in their night gowns and robes, peering south and west into the morning gloom, looking more than a bit bewildered by the excitement. Most of them had no doubt been plucked from sound sleep by newsflashes pinging across their local Strand hubs and data cache networks. They clustered in nervous groups, tongues wagging like clucking hens, drinking in the scene from both their remote personal perspectives and more intimately informed on-the-spot livecasts, and comparing the two. The Quiksand tragedy was a hot and happening media commodity, bleeding and leading, local history in the making. No one could resist rubbernecking a tragedy in progress, especially when the misfortune wasn’t their own.

Dorian went in the opposite direction, away from all the excitement. He had no urge to look back over his shoulder at the destruction behind them.

He said nothing during the drive, except that Amara should stay off the Strand. “Not the news, not damage reports. Don’t even check your messages. Keep it off.”

If there had been a reasonable way of doing so, he would have shut their arrays down completely, just to be safe. It was the best way he knew to confound passive ip tracking as they transitioned from one connex substation to the next. But it was probably already too late for that anyway. If Raville had been able to tag them and track them down to Quiksand that quickly he had better means than clumsy connex transfer log sniffing for getting at them whenever and wherever he chose.

Dorian didn’t explain these things to Amara. There was no help for them short of surgically removing their arrays, and anything he said would just alarm her further.

Amara looked at him as though he had gone mad, but she didn’t argue. She sat beside him with her palms pressed together between her legs, and stared out blandly through the windscreen. She appeared to him as dazed as the morning gawkers piling out onto their porches and lawns. Just as lost, just as lacking a frame of reference to make sense of it all.

But Gardenhole was still asleep in the early morning. There was no traffic here yet, no one watching the sky, or even peering out their windows. Dorian geared the Roland down and switched over from diesel to solar. The collector gauges blinked red, then orange, then pale yellow. There was hardly enough light to run on, and he had to hold the pedal almost to the floor just to tip ten kph. But they ran nearly silent, idling through the quiet community streets and, he hoped, attracted no attention.

He turned off onto a side road tucked between two stands of sprawling everanya willows and crept down a narrow lane bored through a tunnel of overarching trees. The tires crunched over fallen twigs and crisp leaves. The houses here were larger than those in the city, and set back a fair distance from the road. The yards were big, suburban and well kept, if still winter brown, and neatly trimmed hedges separated them one from another. Beneath the shade of the willows, the solars were quickly depleted, and one by one, the running lights and gauges began to fail. The Roland coasted a few hundred meters, and Dorian was just able to get it pointed down a secluded drive that appeared on the right before the engine quit completely. They rolled down a slight grade all the way to the bottom and stopped in front of a cinderblock garage when Dorian tapped on the brakes. He shut the few remaining systems down, sat back in his seat, and blew out a weary sigh. He was surprised to find that he was trembling. He curled his fingers into fists to make it stop.

After a few moments, he opened the console beside his seat and retrieved a much battered and ungainly black case.

“Come on,” he said, and climbed out.

“Where are we?” Amara asked as she joined him. Her voice quavered slightly, but she was getting a handle on it, Dorian thought. If his hands had not been full, he would have given her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “What happened back there, John? What does it mean?”

He didn’t have any answers that would comfort her, so he said: “I have friends here.” It would have been better if he smiled at her, but he didn’t have it in him.

“Your coffin. . .”

“We can chill here for a few hours; figure out what’s going on.”

“I want to go home.”

Dorian licked his lips.

“That’s probably not a good idea though, is it?” she asked.

He shook his head. With any luck, they were just trying to kill him. Because he’d failed. But it wasn’t a hope he could afford to give her, however bleak.

He hauled his luggage up the damp stone steps to the back porch. Amara followed tentatively. The lawn was still in shadow, but he could see that it was carefully tended. The grass was short, dark green instead of brown. Slender and graceful smoke trees poked out of the turf here and there on the long, rambling slope down to the dark and brooding copse of tangled undergrowth a hundred meters or more beyond the house. A nearly depleted wall of quartered cordwood stood between two of the trees, only partly shielded from the elements by a tarp that had broken its tethers and flapped morosely in the cool morning breeze. The house itself was a nondescript bi-level construction with a peaked, gray roof and a recently painted clapboard exterior. Most of the lower level was below ground, buried in the slope of the hill they had just come down, except at the far end that faced the garage. The windows were dark, and he couldn’t hear anyone moving about inside or the muffled chatter of the morning newswire. He wondered if anyone was awake yet.

Dorian set his travel case down gently on the decking and rapped his knuckles against the back door. He waited ten seconds or so, then started up again. Shortly, the slap of bare feet padding on wood floors reached his ears, and he stepped back. The rose colored curtain in the narrow window beside the door shifted. A face peered out at them, dark eyes squinting into the morning gloom. Then the scrabbling of locks. Many locks. A thrown deadbolt or two.

A massive black man stood in the doorway with his legs apart and his fists planted on his hips. He was unshaven, unamused and clearly unhappy to see them. He wore a white terrycloth house robe that was several sizes too small, covered him barely, and revealed a powerfully chiseled upper body.

He scowled at Dorian. “The newswire said you were dead.”

“I imagine it did.”

“You look all right to me,” the man said, raising his eyebrows.

“I know. I should have messaged your public box.” Dorian shrugged. “I couldn’t spare the time. And I didn’t want to use my array.”

“Didn’t want to?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Lily’s been trying not to cry for half an hour. How successful do you think she’s been?”

Dorian winced. “I’ll make it up to her.”

“You’d better think about how you’re going to make it up to me. You know how she gets.”

“I’m sorry.”

The man grunted and shifted to look Amara over. “And who are you?”

“Amara Cain,” Dorian answered. “I was getting to that. She’s a friend.”

“You’re just a little slow on all fronts this morning, aren’t you?” He extended his enormous hand toward Amara and clasped her fingers. “I’m Danek. Tyrus Danek. You’ll meet Lily in a bit. She’s my wife.”

Danek tilted his head back, indicating the interior of the house. “Come on inside.” To Dorian: “You had better have a good explanation, because otherwise you can be sure that just before Lily brains me for having been put through all of this, I’m going to strangle the life out of you. Capisce?”

Dorian only nodded and waved Amara ahead of him into the house.

They followed Danek down a short corridor to a narrow and windowless room. In the center was a hole a couple of meters on each side cut to accommodate the staircase that marched down into the basement of the long house. The upper floor was chilly. Dorian could almost see his breath. He looked around at the pictures on the walls. Most of them were characterless video captures. Landscapes fading from mountains to meadows on timed loops. The obligatory husband and wife holding hands, looking happy, but it was an old one, the pixels beginning to decay at the edges. It was a sterile space, an old woman’s parlor, kept painfully neat for family or friends who never arrived.

At the foot of the stairs, Danek tugged on a rope that dropped through a hole in the ceiling, and a malleable plastic covering dropped over the staircase. Dorian glanced up at it and saw that the underside was lined with sound suppressing foam. “Lily doesn’t like the noise so much these days,” Danek said. “It’s the hum, she says. It never stops.”

Lily likes it this way. Rustic, she says, like that cabin her folks had up on Morningway Pass.”

Dorian looked about them slowly. They had entered a long chamber. The walls were paneled with rough hewn planks. The floor was bare concrete, broken up by round, utilitarian rugs. The decorations were sparse, mostly framed photographs and flowers. The air was pungent with the scent of oil and tallow and ash. There was a stone fireplace at the far end of the room, and a sturdy if not elegant dining room table set in the middle. A couple of rocking chairs and a decent antique book cabinet completed the furnishings. Beside the fireplace was a door, but it was closed. On the other side of the stair was a concrete wall with another door. The wall was coated with more suppressant foam. There were no windows down here, and the only light came from a pair of oil lamps set in sconces on either side of the room and the meager glow of the logs in the fireplace, not yet stoked for the day.

The crowds bother her, and she can’t abide anything but walking. But that makes her joints ache for the whole next day if she goes too far.” He tugged at the sash of his robe and lowered his voice. “You’ll see for yourself in a bit. She’s in the bedroom now, making herself presentable, I imagine. She gets along a’right most days. Wishes she had more company than she gets. She’s read all the books we’ve got a dozen times. I pick up more when I can, but they’re getting harder to find in Sonali, and she doesn’t like me going all the way to Southrange.”

“Oh yes, she’s a walking disaster. Crazy as a loon, you know. But her ears still work just fine, Tyrus Danek.”

Amara inhaled sharply, but said nothing, which Dorian took as a blessing.

The creature that emerged from the bedroom was almost indescribably hideous, an unbearable monstrosity. The skull was too long, torturously malformed, bulbous where it should have been sleek and sharp where it should have been supple. It possessed neither nose nor ears, nor did it have eyelids, though its massive, crescent shaped orbital bones provided some protection, and the cold, black nanomesh screens that covered the gaping holes where eyes should have been served well enough. Her limbs were thin, like knitting needles joined at the points by a knot of yarn, but the torso was misshapen. Long at the top, like a candle that had been heated and stretched; full and round at the bottom like the belly of a winter pear, and everywhere the skin was mottled and sickly pale. She did not walk so much as she scuttled across the floor, pulling herself forward with her palms and clicking her clawed feet in rapid, mincing steps behind as she dragged the lower half of her body after her along the bare floor. The sharp knobs of her elbows and knees were level with her forehead, like those of a water spider.

Dorian set the case he had been carrying on the floor and went to her. He bent and kissed her upturned cheek. She ruffled his hair with the claw of a shorter, third arm on her right side.

“How are you, Lily?”

She waggled the third arm at him dismissively. “Don’t you try to suck up to me now, John Dorian. ” Her voice was thick, a wheeze bubbling through mucous. “First thing we hear from you in almost five weeks is that you’re presumed dead, and you believe you can just show up here and play kissy face with dear old Lily and make it all better? Shame on you, Johnny.”

Dorian hung his head. “I know, Lil. Work has been murder lately.”

She smiled at him, a black and toothless maw. “Most folks, when they say that, don’t mean it quite so literally. What sort of trouble have you gotten yourself into this time?”

He glanced uneasily at Amara, who had remained at the foot of the stairs. But she seemed to be looking right through them, hugging her elbows. “I’m not completely sure, to be honest,” Dorian whispered. “It’s a long story.”

“Your friend doesn’t seem to be doing very well.”

“With good reason, as you can imagine.”

Lily lifted her head. “Go and get some coffee started, Tyrus. These two look like they’re about ready to fall over on their feet, and I’m the only one who gets to do that in this house. ” She drew herself over toward the fire, and Dorian started to follow her, then went back and took Amara by the arm and led her after him. Danek vanished through the door in the soundproofed wall on the other side of the room and closed it quietly behind him. “We might as well get comfortable in the meantime. Now, John, you remember to be a nice young man and let your friend have that chair. Haul that one by the book shelf over here if you want to sit down.”

She tucked her limbs into a neat pile on a mat beside the fireplace and used one of her claws to stir the logs. The fire popped and crackled as she coaxed it to life. She turned her glistening eyes on Amara and offered a close-mouthed smile.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Cain. Tyrus did a passable enough job with the introductions that I imagine you’ve guessed who I am.”

Amara stumbled a bit, but managed a hollow, unfocused greeting. Dorian leaned over to her. “Don’t mind Lily. She’s just showing off. She has the ears of a bat. ” He thought for a moment, then added, “Not literally, of course. The principle is the same, though.”

“Hyper-cochlear auralectics,” Lily said. “Very beta. Not anything like the finely tuned augmentations you’d be familiar with, dear.”

“I see,” Amara answered.

“It’s all right. I know it’s disturbing. You’ll notice that we’re not big on mirrors down here. Johnny pretends, but I can hear his eyes clicking away from me, even when he thinks he’s looking.”

Amara didn’t respond. She stared into the fireplace, the leaping flames, momentarily lost. Dorian caught Lily’s gaze and shrugged an apology. He mouthed the word shock, and Lily nodded in understanding.

Danek returned from the kitchen, bearing a plastic platter laden with mugs of steaming coffee. Dorian nodded his thanks and to show his gratitude, gave up his chair for a seat on the stone ledge beside the fire, across from Lily.

“They’re reporting across the local newswire that the fires are under control finally. Investigators are gathering on scene, but they don’t know much yet. Most of the West Tower is gone above your floor, John, but they won’t have an accurate casualty count until the investigators can start picking through the wreck. No official word on the cause, but they’re guessing that it was a gas leak.”

“There was no gas leak, but that probably won’t stop them from finding one,” Dorian predicted. “That’s generally the way these things work.”

“You care to explain which of these things you mean?” Danek asked, managing to sound both curious and annoyed at the same time.

Amara looked up sharply. “You said the newswire is reporting that John is presumed dead. Did they say anything about me?”

Danek tilted his head toward her, clearly confused. “Not that I’ve heard. Are you two neighbors?”

“I ought to message my mother to let her know I’m okay,” she said vaguely. “She’ll be frantic if the newswire–”

“Stay off the Strand!” Dorian barked and flashed her a warning look. “I mean it. The connection isn’t safe right now. They can read your ip when you log onto a public hub.”

“Which they would that be, John?” she asked. There was an edge of frustration, of imminent hysteria about her. It was the most spark he’d seen out of her since they had run from Sonali. “What’s going on here?”

“They would be whoever it was that Raville dispatched to kill us. Most likely military specialists, but I’m not ruling out freelance corporate stringers. Some of those guys aren’t afraid to get a little dirty if the price is right, and they’re easy to find if you’ve got contacts. I’m sure Raville has resources of both sorts at his disposal. ” Amara started to respond, but Dorian shook his head. “Right now, they think we’re dead. It’s best to leave it that way until we can figure out what we’re going to do.”

“But, why?” she demanded. “Why would he try to kill us? We’re trying to help him.”

“Not that one,” Dorian said, keeping his tone gentle. “He assumed the actual Raville would try something, but neither of us expected it to be this soon.”

Amara shuddered and clutched her arms over her chest once again. “But why? What have we ever done to him?”

He had to remind himself that there was much she did not know, too much that Raville had told him only after she had been expelled from his presence. Amara knew only that she had pledged to help him save the universe in the dream of Raville’s memory palace, then awakened to find her life in danger almost immediately and without explanation. She didn’t know what Raville had done to her, or the truth about the quae-ha-distra code object, only that the world had erupted into madness.

It was no wonder that she was holding on by her fingernails and failing to make sense of just about everything. For about the hundredth time in the last few hours, Dorian cursed Raville under his breath.

“It’s complicated,” he said simply. “Suffice it to say that Raville wasn’t quite as forthcoming with you as he should have been, and the real person has a legitimate cause to feel somewhat aggrieved.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” Danek grumbled. “You want to explain what’s going on in a way that we can understand, or are we just here to provide moral support for your genius?”

Lily hummed softly to herself. “You mentioned Raville. That isn’t Michael Raville by any chance, is it?”

“That would be the one.”

“Oh, Johnny! How did you manage to get yourself mixed up with big time trouble like that?”

Dorian hesitated, feeling uneasy about such a direct question. “As much as I’d like to satisfy your idle curiosity, Lil, I think that’s really about as much as you need to know. I didn’t come here to get you involved in my problems. I needed an anonymous hardline ex-connex, and I needed an alternate form of transportation since my Roland is too distinctive as well as registered in my name. You’re the only people I know who have both of those things and don’t use either of them. ” Lily and Danek had given up their arrays almost ten years earlier. “Other than that, I want the two of you to stay as far away from this one as possible.”

Lily fixed Dorian with her blind gaze. “What is it that you’re intending to do, exactly?”

“I intend to use your ex-connex. Then I intend to borrow your car. What part of that plan was I unclear about?”

“We can’t help if you don’t let us in, Johnny.”

“And I can’t justify putting you in more danger than I may already have. If I’d had a choice, I wouldn’t have come here at all.”

Danek laughed loudly. “Now there’s a first. Boy, I’ve been wet nursing your troubles since your first day of TechTac. You’d better listen close to what the lady has to say, because she’s asking nice. I’m not nearly so sweet, nor so patient. You’re going to explain it to us, and you might as well give it up easy, because I know you don’t want me to go get my Gunny boots on and make you report it formally like we used to do after one of your screw ups. Don’t think I’ve forgotten how.”

Dorian grimaced. “Danek, I really don’t think–.”

“What’s that?” Danek cupped a hand behind ear and leaned forward menacingly. “What’s that you say, Corporal?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“That’s better.” He sat back with a contented grin. “Go ahead, then. From the top.”

So Dorian told them, starting with his discovery of the spider, his careful dissection of its contents and the dead port on his network, then on to the memory palace, the meeting with Raville’s self-aware copy, and finally the transfer of the orb from Raville to Amara. What came after he hadn’t even shared with Amara yet, so he tried to be as thorough as possible, though he glossed over his subsequent actions in the basement of the Archive and his defensive maneuvers inside Raville’s foam as much as possible, trusting Danek and Lily to fill in the blanks.”

“I don’t like this man Raville very much,” Lily said when he was done. “Either the copy or the original. He tastes foul to me. Like any man who has picked himself an agenda and gotten so used to commanding others, that he’s forgotten about the consequences. We’ve known our share of men like that.”

Danek nodded vaguely, but scowled at Dorian. “You should have known better than to go into a hostile scape in the first place without an adequate extraction vector or the tools to get the job done correctly.”

“I had an escape plan,” Dorian countered.

“Any escape that doesn’t have the flexibility to respond to unforeseen circumstances and account for the safety of your entire team is flawed. You know that. I taught you better than that.”

“This isn’t his fault. I asked to go with him,” Amara said. “He warned me of the dangers.”

“He did no such thing. He didn’t properly analyze the risks before he barged in there like every other dumb old Marine bent on kicking butts and breaking things down. That’s always been your problem, John. Because it’s just text, isn’t that right?” Danek glared at Dorian, his eyes narrowed with disappointment. “It isn’t real. It can’t hurt anybody, especially not somebody fast enough or clever enough to outsmart a bunch of stupid text scripts.” He shook his head fiercely. “You were never able to stop thinking like a jack, like someone above the environment, or immune to it. Someone who could always control it on the fly. You’ve always been just a little too competent for your own good.”

Lily raised herself up from her mat menacingly. She made a sound in her throat like hissing. “Hush now, Tyrus. That’s enough. We’ve been over that ground before, and there’s no coal left to mine there. Let it be.”

Danek stared, sullen and silent, into his coffee. He didn’t challenge Lily’s outburst, but he wasn’t ready to let it go so easily, either. He didn’t speak again. Lily watched him for a few moments, her expression tender, then gradually relaxed her limbs and settled back onto her mat. “You did an adequate job of managing the variables you could reasonably be expected to account for, Johnny. You had your target identified and contained. You had a fair notion of his capabilities given his past actions and his environmental limitations. I doubt that any of us could have predicted this business with the orb. That was dirty. It was a ploy designed to give you just the one option.

“And to be honest, I think your package of Raville knew exactly what he was doing, and had a decent idea about what would happen next. He may not be the known Raville, but he is a raw Raville, and the willingness to put others in danger, the willingness to kill a man who is a complete stranger simply because he might one day prove a threat to you isn’t something that most people grow into. It’s either there from the start, or it isn’t, barring genetic tampering. I’d be very careful with a man like that, and extremely wary of trusting anything he said to me.”

Her expression softened, her mouth twisted into a sort of frown that Dorian might not have understood if he didn’t know her so well. She was preparing herself to say something hard, something she didn’t think he would want to hear. “But he’s like you too, Johnny. Tyrus was right with what he said. You live in the text, in worlds you think you can manipulate. We taught you to do that, but you were always that much better than the people giving you instruction because you understood, on some level, the real power that was being put into your hands. Everyone else in this pathetic old world of ours is immersed in the things you and those like you create. It’s their bread, their wine, their stimulation and their participation in the community of humankind. Every time you make something or destroy it, you change the lives of a billion unseen people. You alter the trajectory of their lives because they have to go somewhere else to get what they need. You lay out the paths that they can follow. You draw the maps through the wilderness, and because of the decisions you make, they end up bouncing off of people and ideas and institutions they would have otherwise never met, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. You change what they have the potential to become. But you, you live outside that messy web of interconnection. You use it instead of taking it into yourself. You make it into something that pleases you.

“I think this copy of Raville recognized as much. Recognized you, or something in you, that suits his purposes. You suspected, probably correctly, that he’s seen your employment file. And indeed, much more than that, truth be told. He’s been looking over your shoulder for some time, knows about all your little tricks with the folks at Hometown Mart or Sierra Bancorp or any of your other favorite targets, all the things you think are secrets. See, the problem is that you’ve finally met your match. He’s got you on the other side of the text now, messing with your life at a whim, altering your landscape to meet his taste. You treat the Strand and the foam like your private little kingdom. Well, the foam is his kingdom. It’s what he is. He manipulates his environment just by thinking about it, and any man, real or virtual, who gets used to thinking like that is dangerous to the people around him. A man like that comes to see himself as a god of sorts.”

Lily gave him a long, hard look. “So you need to decide, and quick, what you’re going to do about it. You can’t walk away from this. You can’t delete it. You can’t rewrite it and make it so that it never happened. A living god has put a charge upon you, though you didn’t ask for it. That’s the way of gods. Oh, you can kill him, sure, or at least this incarnation of him, but you can’t stop what he’s put into motion. You can only walk the path he’s set before your feet or be destroyed. It’s up to you to determine which way you’re going to go from here.”

“What can I do? What choices have we really got?” Dorian demanded. “How am I supposed to trust anything he told us? Raville knew what would happen when he passed over the orb. He knew his actualized self would try to kill us, Lil.”

“And when the true Raville has figured out that he failed, he’ll try again. And he’ll keep trying until the job is done. You and Tyrus and I, we’ve all been there before, so put away your moral outrage and see the situation for what it is. How do you stop them? How do you beat them? It doesn’t particularly matter who they are. It just matters that you push them to the endgame as quick as you can, so that win or lose, you’re of no value to them anymore. You focus on staying alive long enough to get there. So I say again, what are you going to do? What tools did Raville’s package give you against himself? I’m not saying to trust him, dear. I am saying that nobody knows better how to stop a god than another god.”

“I don’t know,” Dorian said, feeling uncertain. Lily had always been good at casting situations into black and white, into straightforward choices that must be made. “I mean, he told me how to access the quae-ha-distra. But I don’t know what’s in there. That’s why I need your ex-connex. I brought along an old portable Korski pre-seenop compiler I can use to jack into my foam anonymously without using my published ip. I can’t guarantee that Raville won’t detect the intrusion, but at least he won’t be able to track what I’m doing and he can’t be positive that I’m the one doing it. Knowing what’s in there, what he wants to keep secret, that’ll give me a map of the territory, at least. That’s a start. We can decide what needs to happen next from there.”

“I know what’s in there,” Amara said suddenly, in a voice so small, Dorian almost didn’t hear her. She turned to face him and her eyes were too large, too distant, as hollow as an old, abandoned well. “I know what’s inside, through the quae-ha-distra.”

Lily gazed curiously at her, as though seeing Amara for the first time. “What’s in there, Amara? What have you seen?”

“Do you want to see?” Amara looked from side to side, furtively. “I can show you.”

“Stay off the Strand,” Dorian said once again.

But Lily held up one of her claws, urging him to be silent.

“Go ahead, Amara,” she said.

Danek grunted. “John’s right, baby. It doesn’t make any difference. Even if it was safe, neither of us has the tools to see it on the Strand. It’s a coded artifact.”

“But I can show you, if you want to see,” Amara insisted. She pressed her hand against her chest, in the same place where Raville had touched her inside the memory palace. “It isn’t hard.”

And just as before, just as it had been in geek, a black and empty slit opened in her flesh. Amara put her hand inside.

Danek made a strangled, gasping noise. Dorian leapt to his feet and cried out, throwing his tepid coffee all over the floor.

Amara brought out the quae-ha-distra, shimmering in the shadowed room, and held it out to Lily on her palm. It glowed like an iridescent heart, casting arcane patterns on the walls. Lily remained on her pallet, unmoving, but fiercely alert.

“They gave it to me,” Amara explained slowly, like a child speaking to children. Light coursed through her fingers, dripped from her hands into puddles of red and green and gold. “It’s what let me go inside, where the Helpers are. They came to me, just like he said they would.” She turned to Dorian. “Why would he try to kill us, John? After he had shared this? After he had given knowledge?”

She gazed at him, hand extended, looking lost and vacant and alone.

“That can’t be,” Danek whispered, sitting stiff and upright in his chair. He gripped the arms in his powerful hands as if he meant to crack the wood. “You said it was code.”

“It was code,” Dorian snapped.

“That doesn’t look like any code I’ve seen. Lily?”

She said nothing at first, and Danek called her name again. Deliberately, Lily roused herself and waved her arm at Dorian. “Tell her to put it away, Johnny. I don’t need to hear it any more.”

He crossed the room with careful steps, keeping in Amara’s line of sight, so as not to frighten her. When he reached her, he lowered himself to his knees until he was level with her, face to face. Trembling, he grasped her wrist and folded her outstretched fingers over the light of the orb. Her scales were cool to the touch, hard like old leather.

“It’s time to put it away, Amara.”

“You should see what’s in it.”

“I’ll see later, okay? For now, just put it back where it belongs.”

She searched his face for a moment. Dorian didn’t know what it was that she sought, but she must have found it, because after a moment, she nodded in acquiescence and tucked the quae-ha-distra away, then she put her head against the tall back of the chair and closed her eyes.

Dorian leaned over her, listening to her breathing. “I think she’s asleep.”

“I think I’m the one who is asleep,” Danek muttered. “That was impossible, yes? What in God’s name is going on?”

“I don’t know.” Dorian backed away from Amara. He couldn’t think, couldn’t begin to pull this apart and figure it out. But by the time he reached his seat alongside the fireplace, Lily was already in motion. She hauled herself up onto her hands and feet, wobbled a bit as though her balance was off, but all the time called out brisk directions to her husband.

“Make up the bed in the bedroom upstairs, Tyrus. There are spare blankets and fresh linens in the storage chest in the closet off the utility room. Give them a little heat if you can get the furnace working. Johnny, I think it’s best if the two of you stay together. She shouldn’t be alone right now. Tyrus will make you a nice mat on the floor, I’m sure. You’ve slept in worse places.” He started to speak, but Lily brushed right past him. “I don’t want to hear it, young man. I’m not ready to talk about it, and neither are you. We’d just make a mess of nonsense out of things we don’t understand. Rest for awhile. Sleep on it.”

Both Dorian and Tyrus Danek knew better than to argue when she got like this, so they didn’t.

He woke with a start to darkness. Suffocating. Weight on his chest, his limbs entangled. He raised himself up sharply and struck his head hard against something solid and collapsed again. Dorian pressed his palm against the sharp pain in his forehead and groaned.

He’d been dreaming. Dreaming of fire and pursuit, of disastrous decisions.

Of screams, high and frightened, banging down the cold metal corridors, chasing after him like accusations, boring into his flesh like greedy claws.

Dorian lay still, gathering his thoughts and remembering where he was. His body ached from a restless sleep on the hard floor and, he suspected, from carrying more tension in his muscles than he’d wanted to admit to himself. It had been a long day. A red letter day. The sort anyone with sense hoped came no more than once or twice in a lifetime. He wasn’t even sure he remembered the last time someone had tried to kill him. He was glad, on the other hand, to have apparently gotten over the little psychic kick that came along with it, the alarmingly egoistic boost that someone out here felt strongly enough about him to so ardently want him dead. Maybe there was hope for his maturity level yet. His mother had always held out hope that one day he would outgrow his ego.

In any event, with stillness came clarity. He couldn’t move because someone was on top of him. Or not on top of him exactly, but beside him, twining her limbs amongst his like she intended to conform him to her shape. He touched her limbs, the gentle swell and diamond shapes of her scales. She was strong, and she clung to him with the insistence of sleep, so he lay back and willed himself not to struggle against her grip. Amara whimpered quietly until he stopped moving, then hugged tighter to him and fell quiet again.

The room’s ambient lighting system eventually registered his change in body temperature and the overhead bulbs snapped on, a soothing, ruddy glow like candlelight. He took in his surroundings: plain, baby blue walls with a northerly facing window obscured by thick curtains. A Puritan inspired presswood bureau in the corner. Off to the left, in the opposite corner, was an open doorway to the washroom. It was quiet and sterile, the same as the rest of the house, a domain of long-wearied ghosts. He couldn’t see a clock from where he lay, and caught himself just before he consulted his system time by reflex. Directly above him he could see the natty and cobwebbed underside of a bedside table. He vaguely remembered bunking down beside the bed, but comfortably south of the table. He must have wriggled in his sleep. He was a notorious wriggler, a toss-and-turner. He probed the ache in his head and agreed that the size and shape of it more or less fit the size and shape of the imprint said table would make upon a skull if the two bodies were brought together with sufficient force. That was comforting, somehow. He wasn’t even out of bed yet and was already beginning to resolve some of the many mysteries his life had decided to pitch at him.

The minutes dragged by. His headache slowly subsided. He made motorboat noises with his lips for a time and stared at the ceiling. It had been a long while since he’d awakened before a bedmate, he realized (a rather embarrassingly, almost emasculatingly long while as he counted it up, in fact). He had forgotten the protocols for this sort of thing. So he just waited.

It occurred to him that moments, minutes like this were the reason the Strand had been invented in the first place.

After a time, he felt her move sinuously against him. Dorian looked down on her face in the gloom as she opened her eyes. She blinked at him, then covered her mouth with the hand that had lain across his chest.

“Well, this is awkward,” she said.

“I have all my clothes on. And I can’t be held responsible for the fact that you don’t wear any.”

“True.”

“I put you in the bed. I swear. Danek saw me do it.”

She might have grinned, but he couldn’t be certain. Her hand was still in the way. “I believe you. I woke up once, briefly. I was scared, and you seemed to be sleeping so soundly.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

Once again, she searched his face, reading things he couldn’t guess. “Is it, John?”

“This is okay, you and me. It’s the rest of our lives that are a parade of unmitigated disasters.” She nodded in understanding, and he winked at her. “How are you feeling?”

“Better.” She didn’t sound completely certain, but it was something, so Dorian didn’t press her. “I have only the vaguest memories of yesterday. Yesterday? This morning? I’ve lost track. What time is it?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Late, I’d imagine. But I can smell coffee, so Danek is still up, at least. Or back up. Whatever.”

“I don’t know what happened to me,” she said, “there at the end.”

“There’s no need to talk about it right now if you’re not up to it.”

“I feel like I have to. I want to understand what happened.”

There was an unspoken appeal in her eyes, not the near hysteria of the morning, but something deeper, a burgeoning fear of the unknown. She needed to sort through it just as desperately as he did, perhaps more than he did. She had experienced things with Raville, inside the foreign foam, that she hadn’t yet shared with him. She must have questions he hadn’t even imagined yet, because he didn’t have the proper context; mysteries she could share, but that he didn’t have the framework to comprehend.

He began slowly, gently. “How long have you known? That you were carrying the orb, I mean.”

“I can’t really say. When I try to think about it, it’s like I’ve always known. It’s just always been there…but that can’t be right, because Raville gave it to me, or he gave me the key and the Helpers gave me the orb.” Her lips curled in a weary and dazed smile. “Sorry. It’s something of a muddle still. At the same time, I can’t say that I was ever actually conscious of the orb itself until the impulse struck me to bring it out. And then it wasn’t really an impulse, it was…inevitable. It was like suddenly remembering something you’ve done, a trip that you took a long time ago or suddenly remembering a scar you’d forgotten you had. You don’t consciously think about it, but when it comes up, you have this flash of recognition that yes, I’ve been there, I’ve experienced that. It’s part of the fabric of who I am. Does that make sense?”

“No.” But it wouldn’t have, no matter how she explained it. He wasn’t the one carrying the orb inside him. “But I can live with not comprehending if I know that you’re okay.”

She pressed the side of her face against his chest, squeezing him between her powerful arms. “I’m frightened by it. I’m angry because Raville gave it to me knowing that someone would try to kill us. He didn’t warn me, and I’m scared about that, too, about the other things he might not have warned us about. What’s inside it frightens me, the potential and the risk, but it fills me with this strange sort of exhilaration at the same time. The worst of it is that all of my feelings are a little hazy, like I should be feeling one certain way about it, but when I try, it’s like I’m just pretending. I can’t seem to think or feel very clearly about any of it, not the orb or the attack or even Raville’s manipulations. I’m just here, watching it all happen, and that seems to be all I have the strength for.”

Dorian nodded, though he still didn’t understand, and rubbed her shoulder. “It’s natural to feel a little conflicted at this point, I think. There’s so much we don’t know, and so much has happened since this morning. Besides, this is much more useful than all of us getting hysterical, right?”

“Does it scare you, John?”

“Honestly? It scares the crap out of me. But I hope that when we figure out what it is and how it works, it won’t be so terrifying anymore. My hope is that Danek and Lily will have worked out some insights for us since they’ve had all day to think about it while we were sleeping. They’re good at this sort of thing, at unraveling mysteries. They can help us sort this out.”

“They’re friends of yours? Good friends, I mean. You’re sure you can trust them.”

“We have a long history.”

“You served with Danek, yes? In the Marines.”

Dorian thought about his answer for a long time, surveying all the potential pitfalls. “I served with both of them.”

“Lily?” She was surprised.

“Yes.”

Amara hummed over this information, and her body grew tense. She was working up to something. “She’s in pain, you know. Danek knows it, but tries to ignore it most of the time.”

“He doesn’t ignore it. They have treatments that keep the worst of her symptoms under control, as long as she isn’t too active or doesn’t push herself too hard. But beyond those, there’s only so much he can do for her.”

Amara pulled herself up onto her elbows. “Why does she endure it? It’s a bad mod, a horrible mod. She knows it. All you have to do is look at her to see that. I understand that it would be a long way for her to get to an upload station, but the pain would only be temporary. She could have something new built, something better, or even reconstitute–”

“She wouldn’t do it. Danek used to say the same things. They had some epic and glorious battles over it back when they were first married.” Dorian took a deep breath. It still hurt after all these years to talk about it. “But Lily, sweet Lily, she converted to hardcore New Resurrection near the end of her tour of service. She’d zapped so many times, she said, been wiped and reconfigured so often, that there wasn’t anything left of her but her soul, and she wasn’t even sure anybody but God would recognize that. Call it bad timing. Call it a deep and abiding need to make amends for the crimes she’d charged against her soul. She connected with God when she had one last task to perform in the civil service of our fair world and its inhabitants, and when Lily makes up her mind about something, there’s no arguing with her. She said she’d meet God in the condition that he found her and no other. The rest, everything that comes along with it, is just walking the talk, I guess.”

“I don’t understand,” Amara said. “She’d rather be in pain?”

“She calls it faith. It’s a long story, but I don’t really understand it either.”

Amara dropped her gaze to the floor. “Is that why Danek was so angry with you for taking me to meet Raville?”

“Why would you say that?”

“You love her. Not in the same way that Danek does, but rather like a dream, or something nostalgic. You carry it like guilt, or like an old bone you can’t help but gnaw. You and Danek both. It’s between you all the time, a subtext running beneath everything you say.”

“You’re picking at old wounds,” he said gruffly. “Danek and I both have a harder time forgiving me than Lily did. Sometimes that’s worse, I think. Being forgiven by someone who means it.”

Amara backed off, figuratively by withdrawing into herself and literally by pulling her knees up to her chest, crossing her arms in front of her and resting her chin on them. “You don’t have to tell me.”

But that wasn’t true, not at all. He owed her something, a trade in kind for the things he’d seen and done to her while she slept off Raville’s synaptic bridge. Secret for secret. Dorian cleared a sudden lump in his throat, and said, “Danek and I, we worked together. Ninth Technical Tactics Group, stationed over in Annawan at Fac Granger. They called us the Icebreakers. That’s what we did, went after hostile networks to extract military data for analysis, supported tactical units in the field with real time intelligence data, performed mobile killings of big score physical security systems. That’s also where Lily fit in. We were the support side for her SpecTac squad during the Hamers-Doss Insurrection.”

Amara rolled her head to the side and gave him an uncertain look. She had still been on Sae Phen during the HD, he realized, or young and footloose enough that the minutiae of a dirty little colonial war wouldn’t have occupied much of her attention.

“It was complicated, the HD, because the media played it as our government trying to hold onto independence-minded colonies out in the Corus mining belt. We needed their silicate, that’s true enough, but Hamers was really just a puppet for Janus Prime. They were pushing hard to expand into our proprietary space. Most of the actual flesh and blood battles were against Janite ships flying the HD flag. But since there had been no formal declarations of war on either side, this just passed under the public radar. We weren’t going to declare because it would have made us look overly aggressive to the rest of the co-op sector. It was important for us politically to describe it as an unlawful insurrection. Janus Prime wasn’t going to, either, because they already had their own public relations issues after the Great Parming War. So it made for some messy complications. We worked under significant constraints to maintain the illusion that we weren’t stomping anthills with matter cannons. That was where SpecTac was so valuable. They could work anonymously, viciously, in places where we couldn’t send regular troops.

Dorian closed his eyes, concentrated on breathing, on just getting the words out. But it wasn’t that easy. He couldn’t talk about it without seeing it. He couldn’t see it without living it all over again. “God, you should have seen her in those days. She was beautiful. Her wide, dark eyes, that smile so white and generous, it made your heart flutter. She was always laughing. It didn’t surprise any of us when Danek fell in love with her–we were all half in love with her ourselves. Because part of it was what she did, you see? She was SpecTac, quick insertion cleanups and demolition, but she wasn’t like the rest of them. She wasn’t hard, wasn’t full of darkness and hate. She hummed with love. Don’t get me wrong, she did her job as well as anybody else, but it simply didn’t touch her somehow. She was better than that, better than all of it, despite the fact that her team was always the one being given the worst assignments, the deep infiltrations. I think the brass recognized how special she was, too. Not just her competence, but her ability to handle the lousy jobs without getting messed up by them. If there was a guy, a Janite colonel or something, who was giving us problems, they’d send Lily’s team in to clean him up. You know, not just this colonel himself, but maybe his wife, too, and his kids back on Janus Prime. Send a message to the other side that we could get them anywhere and any time we wanted, and the only thing constraining us was our own sticky, silly political situation. Lily would do that, then be home a couple of weeks later, smiling and laughing, having us all over to her apartment for pizza and beer. Like nothing had ever happened.

“Near the end of the war, about the time the Janites were finally realizing that they were running out of the economic will to keep fighting a stalemate over the Corus Belt and our side could tell that the hostilities were winding down, Defense Min Chalker decided that it was time to go for the throat. He was looking for a win, you know. Not just a quelled insurrection that left the Corus operation in shambles, but an honest to God victory over Janus Prime. A crippling blow. With that, he could take all the evidence we’d gathered about Janite interference to the other heads of state in this sector and drum up some real antipathy toward them, maybe muzzle them for a couple of decades with trade sanctions or something. Who cares? What he wanted was Hamers himself, because we’d jacked some evidence from the insurrection’s infocache that Hamers was in regular, direct contact with Janus Prime. If we could capture Hamers, he’d talk. He’d testify to it in Reconciliation Court.

“We worked hard, the Icebreakers, I mean, to crack their live military comm foam–that was our overriding mission, above and beyond all the other crap we did with unit support and data acquisition. Finally jacking that was probably what put the idea into Chalker’s head in the first place. The HD wouldn’t last long if they couldn’t even talk to one another securely, so we had to move fast. We were able to determine that Hamers would be visiting a command bunker on Zarette with a small entourage on a certain date. Zarette, we suspected, was the big foam archive station for the insurrection leadership. The brass decided to send in Lily and her team to grab him, blow the archive so they couldn’t reconstitute him from a backup, and leave no doubt that we had the original.

“So we shipped out, our small technical group with Lily’s SpecTac squad on a rapid-bore cutter and set up operations inside a heavy rad nursery about a dozen tics from the Zarette asteroid. Low profile, no fire support except the fighter escorts we brought with us on the Phantasm. Lily collected the latest intel on the second morning, confirmed that the target was in place, then loaded up in a dropcoffin and was gone. I don’t think she even kissed Danek goodbye. She was like that. Didn’t mix her personal and professional lives, especially after she converted to New Res, said she didn’t want to taint the things worth living for with the things worth killing for. I wonder, sometimes, if she regrets that most of all, missing that last real kiss, or if that’s just part of her understanding of Divine Providence and making amends.”

Dorian paused for a time, caught up in remembering. The chilly, cramped corridors of the Phantasm, the foul smell of unwashed soldiers. Lily stepping down into her dropcoffin, looking up at Danek one last time, giving them all a thumb’s up signal as the techs sealed her in. They’d pulled out her array before shipping to keep the Janite scrubbers from keying into her signal emissions. It was the last they heard from her until long after she and her team had touched on Zarette’s ponderously rotating surface.

He shook his head to clear the webs out, went on. “She gave us a quick sit-rep. The coffins were intact, the splash zone was tighter than we’d predicted, so she had fallen out within ready visual of her whole team, which didn’t happen very often. She sounded pretty happy about it. It was a good omen. She declared comm silence, which was standard protocol, and reminded us of the pickup coordinates one last time. Then she bugged out.

“So we sat back and waited, busied ourselves with the usual things like monitoring hostile comm traffic, staring at surface scan delays, looking for anything that would give us an indication of how the mission was going. It was scripted to resolve in just under six asthours.

“We got the call we had all feared without saying so at the four hour mark. It came from a Janite signal-transform officer, riding our own encrypted frequency from the SpecTac team’s p2p scramblers on their portable comms. It didn’t really matter what he said at that point. If they were jacking our signal, they’d caught the insertion team. Somebody had been broken. Once he knew he had the connection, he handed off the broadcast triDvid to Hamers himself.

“‘I believe I’ve found something that belongs to you,’ he said, and he was grinning. He had hard, evil eyes, I remember that. ‘Unfortunately, it isn’t completely intact. We’ll dispose of the broken bits in our own way. Perhaps next time you’ll be more cautious with your possessions. ‘

“That was the way he was. So cool, so aware of the political angles. It was always a wink and a nod. Later we found out that it was the intelligence that had failed us. Yes, Hamers was there on Zarette, but so were a dozen other members of their advisory staff. It was a wholesale packaging in preparation for dispersal to friendly outposts around human space. They knew the insurrection was failing, that Janus Prime was backing out, and the leadership had decided to withdraw and leave surrender negotiations to the middle management. Lily’s team dropped into security that was much heavier than we’d anticipated, and they never had a chance.

“They sent us back three of the SpecTac team. Three out of twelve. I didn’t see the other two, but I heard that they were in such bad shape that the commander of the Phantasm didn’t even bother with med alert. He had them scanned and packaged and put in ice for reconstitution at home, euthed the remains. If it was anything like the condition Lily was in they were happy enough to go, I suspect.

“There are no words,” he said in a low voice, “for the things they did to her. No, for the things they were doing to her, for the pain she was in. They had put out her eyes, taken her fingers, mangled her feet. And it was still happening. They’d infected her with some sort of viral bomb that was shutting down her systems one at a time, a steady and irrevocable invasion of nanomech antigens. Obscene punitive technology that had been outlawed by the Dorn Conventions a generation ago. And Lily, she was aware of all of it, the things it was doing to her body, because it kept her awake and aware. You could hear her screaming all the way down the deck, even with the door to the med bay closed. She made us promise not to package her. She made us swear, even the ship’s commander. She said it was a matter of religious observance, and he had to comply after that. All he could do was shake his head.

“The smart thing to do would have been to put her in stasis while we burned for Maltis, but it was a week out at least, and I believed–Danek, too–that she wouldn’t survive that long. Something had be done to slow down the assemblers at least. So I told him I could do it. I wanted to do it, because I couldn’t stand seeing her in so much pain, and wanting turned into believing at some point. Danek was the only one who could give me permission. The docs had pumped Lily full of pain medication, a controlled coma, to help her weather the worst of it, but Danek and Lily had been married three weeks before we’d shipped. He had the legal right to override her objections and authorize the treatment I proposed. He had to, because what I had proposed was dangerous. Any of a hundred things could go wrong. If I botched it, it might kill her outright.

“But I believed I could do it, and I made Danek believe.” Dorian kept his eyes shut tight, focused on the words alone, spilling out his sins in the dry monotone of a penitent making confession. He was sweating. “Jacking the bomb was no problem. It was the work of a couple hours. But I spent two feverish days designing a radical seenop interface with the mech assembler. I ran thousands of simulations, isolated a hundred different antigens and learned how to take them apart and read their encoding. I just wanted to stop them, not destroy them, so I dug shallow pits over a wide area instead of excavating the engine like I should have. I knew better, of course, but I was rushing because of Lily’s pain, and because of our belief that she wouldn’t make it to Maltis. I told myself that I could deal with any surprises the engine might come up. I trusted my interface and my skills and my basic intellectual superiority over any other coder’s work.

“I went in on the third day, slipping in through an exploit I’d discovered in the Janite array. I hooked into the assembler just like I’d planned, and began the slow and tedious process of tracing instruction nodes, isolating command cores and rescripting the basic parameter sets. Med techs fed me progress reports as I went along. Her systems were stabilizing, her native defenses were starting to combat and flush the pockets of mechs that I was shutting down.

“But what I didn’t know, because I hadn’t dug deeply enough into the code engine, was that I’d missed a trigger point. Whoever had designed the viral bomb had recognized that his code was just like any other application, and that it could be breached by a jack with the right skills. So he set up a functional threshold in the assembler logic. Once it had hit certain mech production targets, it started assigning counter tags to the units with wickedly obscure recursive reporting functions. When those tags began to vanish in sufficient numbers, the array read it as an attack on its systems and activated a dormant alternate troll app. This application was a complex cortical sub-array that stimulated abnormal genetic growth, a combination code spew and biological engine. After the first ten seconds, I was completely overwhelmed. After twenty seconds, I was lost inside my own interface. At thirty, I was booted off the Strand and couldn’t jack back in with any of my standard scripts. I was helpless, a spectator. We were all just spectators.

“The only thing I accomplished was keeping Lily alive. The troll app was designed not to kill, but to maximize suffering while the assemblers finished their work. I had been more efficient at shutting the assemblers down than the app coder predicted and I left scripts behind that completed the job I couldn’t, but there was nothing I could do about the desecration of her body. I’d started it, but I couldn’t stop it.

“What you see now is the aftermath. After five days of her abject suffering, we made it to Maltis. The docs there did the best they could, but it wasn’t much. The troll app had given her a bastard aural mod so she could hear herself scream. Our specialists salvaged some of her sight with microvids etched onto the optical nerve bundle. They stabilized the joint constructs so she had some mobility. It was all done with this sort of triage mentality, you know. They had been handed this human disaster, and I think they just assumed that she’d change her mind eventually and take a reconstitution–preferably from a pre-mission backup. We all hoped she would, but on that point, she never wavered.”

He was nearing the end, and he was glad. Glad to be done with it. “So you see, Danek has his reasons for hating me, even if he says he’s put it behind him. I destroyed the woman he loved because I believed my own reputation, when I should have taken a little more time and just done the damned work. He’s right to be wary of my competence.” He felt sick, like he was going to vomit, but he battered down his own weakness. He had to finish it. “The funny thing, the worst part of it, is that we all failed. That’s all the Defense Ministry saw. We all received official Letters of Censure–for everything from dereliction of duty to spitting on the foredeck. Whatever they could think of that allowed the wonks to disavow the failure. Lily was a mess. Danek was forced into retirement. And Doss migrated to Earth, where he builds cruise liners. Hamers parlayed his organizational skills into a position on the Board of Directors for Hometown Mart. We won and it ruined us. They ran out on the war and all got rich.”

Amara said nothing for a time, and kept her eyes lowered, away from him. He didn’t know what to think, couldn’t read her reaction. Part of him didn’t care. He had paid a debt. Dorian rose to his feet. He needed to go to the bathroom.

Quietly, she said, “That’s why you don’t live on the Strand like most people, isn’t it? You don’t trust it. Because it failed you.”

“There are no secrets in text,” he replied. “The code doesn’t lie, it can’t hide anything from you.”

He walked away, crossed the room and locked himself in the bathroom.

Before the door was fully closed, however, he was certain he heard her whisper to him. I’m sorry, John.

Dorian vomited until his throat was raw.

<– Chapter 8 / Chapter 10 –>