It was a hell of a lot of blood.
The blood and the gunfire made him twitchy. Made him wish he had his old faithful AK, instead of—
A bunch of useless meds.
The twitchiness was a problem all of them had. Some more, like Shoebox. Some less, like Stork, who mostly seemed to keep his cool. But all of them carried memories of Drowned Cities war. Small things would send Van ducking for cover, raising a fist before he even knew he’d done it. Fireworks going off during the festival when Kali-Mary Mercy went to the waters for her ritual bathing. The clank of metal cutlery in one of the Seascape’s swank restaurants. The flash of an amulet that looked a little too much like the Army of God’s.
I need to get me a damn gun.
Nah. On second thought, it was probably good he hadn’t been packing. The weapons the kill squad had used had been a whole different level of carnage from the guns he’d used in the Drowned Cities.
Not having a gun had probably saved his life, because for sure, he’d have stepped up against those soldiers if he’d had one—and then he’d have been shredded just like that maggot meat lying out there in the road.
As it was, he’d lunged for cover behind a row of electro-rickshaws, and from there, he’d squirted up the street, then stopped just in time as a squad of shooters in Shore Patrol uniforms came piling down the stairs of an old brownstone.
Shore Patrol uniforms, but for sure not SP.
Shore Patrol, for all the things Van hated about them, mostly confined themselves to pounding you and then dumping you in lockup until Ocho came and bought your drunk ass out.
Assassination wasn’t their thing.
So Van had crouched down clutching his Fates Eye, and the kill squad had pelted right past him, all of them thinking he was just some pathetic war maggot, instead of an experienced advance scout for UPF. It was almost enough to make him feel insulted.
Out on the street, the SPs were stretching more neon-green plastic tape: CRIME SCENE—DO NOT CROSS. A couple more SPs—officers by the bars on their slickers—were starting to ask questions, picking out bystanders to tell their story.
Time to bail.
Van skirted the barrier tape and headed down the street. It was kind of funny that they went to so much effort over one dead body. In the Drowned Cities, bodies floated in the canals, picked at by the fish. They lay in abandoned buildings for years, rotting and desiccating, their bones chewed ragged by raccoons and rats and coywolv. But here, they had fifty different people in six different uniforms all showing up, all acting like one dead augment was a big deal.
A few blocks farther on, he pushed his way inside an ancient brownstone, and climbed creaking stairs.
The building was full of short-sleep crash pads for sailors on shore leave. The smell of hashish and opium was strong. The laughter of nailshed girls. Three stories up, Van found the right apartment. He stood aside as a nailshed girl and her client stumbled past, then tapped at the door. Taptap-tap-tap-taptap. An old knock from when they’d all been UPF.
A rattle of latches, and then Ocho peered out the crack. “Where the hell you been?”
“Did you hear that shooting out there?” Mahlia demanded as Van came inside.
“Hear it?” Van laughed. “I was in it.” He dropped the meds on the kitchen table. “Seascapers whacked some augment, right in front of the vet’s. Blew him to all bits.” He went and peered out through the grimy front window. From here, all he could see were the red and blue SP lights down the street, bouncing off drizzle-slicked buildings and rain puddles.
“They got the whole street blocked up now. Straight-up carnage. You wouldn’t believe how many people they got out for one dead augment.” He pointed. “Check it out. Now there’s another ambulance. Like one isn’t enough. They should send in a shovel crew instead. That sucker was a mess…”
Mahlia and Ocho didn’t respond.
“What?” He checked back on them. “What’s wrong?”
They were both frowning at Tool, who was slumped on a sagging couch that had given way under his weight. The half-man was asleep. Ocho was giving Mahlia one of his looks, and she was nodding back at him. A whole conversation, without any words at all.
“What’s the problem?” Van asked.
Ocho shot Van an annoyed glance. “You think it’s a coincidence, maggot brain? You think someone just decided to shoot an augment outside the vet clinic where you just happened to be buying bags and bags of burn and cell-stim meds?”
“I don’t know. It was some kind of kill squad, for sure. At least two squads of four. Plus there was a sniper team, I think. Crazy big guns, you know. Some kind of bullets that exploded—”
“They’re tracking him,” Mahlia interrupted. “Mercier is still tracking Tool.”
Van immediately felt stupid. “You sure? It was just one body. People get shot all the time, right?”
“A killing? In the Seascape?” Ocho pressed. “In the middle of the day?”
“How would I know?” Van protested. “I’m not a Seascaper! I just figured the augment pissed someone off.”
“This isn’t the Drowned Cities, you maggot head.” Ocho was already going into the other room and waking up Stork and Stick. “Get some eyes up on the roof. See what’s around,” he ordered.
“You think they’re coming here?” Van asked.
“Better hope not,” Ocho said, giving him a dark look.
“No one followed me! Didn’t even look twice at me.”
Stork and Stick came and peered out the window. “They have a lot of firepower?” Stork asked.
“You could say that.” Van mimed the guns. “Bambambambambam BOOOM! Shredded half-man. All over the street.”
“How come everyone else always has the good guns?” Stick complained.
“If you had a gun like that you’d probably shoot your own pecker off,” Stork said.
“What do you want to do?” Ocho asked Mahlia.
Van didn’t like Mahlia’s expression. She was just standing there, hands on her hips, looking at Tool, looking uncertain.
Uncertain.
That, more than the kill squads or the missiles that had burned the Drowned Cities, worried Van. Normally, Mahlia had a plan. Ocho too. Those two were solid granite. You leaned up against them, no matter how bad things got, and you had something at your back.
But now she looked worried, and Ocho was looking to her like she made all the decisions, and couldn’t figure out what to do his own damn self.
“Mahlia?” Ocho pressed.
“They had to be gunning for Tool, right?”
“Big damn coincidence if they weren’t.”
“Maybe they’re done now,” Mahlia said. “Now that they shot up that other one. Maybe they’ll be satisfied.”
“You want me to spin you that fairy tale?”
“We can’t haul him out,” Mahlia said. “Look at him.”
“If we stay here, we’re like to get bottled up.”
To Van’s surprise, Mahlia started pulling out medical sacs, fitting needles to tubes. “We’ve got to heal him up. It’s the only way. If he’s healed, he can fight—”
“That’s your solve?” Ocho asked. “You know how much time—?”
“No!” Her voice cracked. “If you want to go back to the ship, fine, but I’m not leaving him.”
“Fates.” Ocho scowled. “Fine. We’ll stay. For now. Stork and Stick. Get a lookout. Down the street, right? Look for people in SP uniforms, see if they’re door knocking.”
He turned to Van, but Van was already heading for the window, knowing the orders.
“I’ll keep an eye out,” he said. “See if I recognize anybody.”
As Van took up his position, he glanced back at Tool. Asleep, the augment looked more alien and monstrous than ever. A slumbering beast, now being festooned with the long rubber tubes of IV drips. The more sacs of fluid that Mahlia hung up on the walls, the more he looked like some kind of creepy medical experiment. Tubes ran to his neck, his wrists
, his ankles.
Mahlia was going from one sac to the next, squeezing the healing fluids into the half-man. Big science. Van had been on the needle end of a half liter of that stuff once, and it had made him feel like a superman, and here Mahlia was pumping liter after liter into the creature.
Stork joined him at the window, peering out at the people in the street.
“How’s it look upstairs?” Van asked.
“All quiet, so far. You?”
“Umbrellas and drizzle. I think maybe we should get us some bigger guns, if we’re gonna keep guarding our big friend over there.”
Stork raised an eyebrow. “The kill squads that good?”
“Ain’t no Drowned Cities war maggots, that’s for sure.” Van couldn’t get the image of the shredded half-man out of his head. “Wouldn’t mind having something to balance things out, if it comes to a fight.”
“Yeah, well, we go to war with the army we got.”
“Don’t I know it.” Van shook his head. “I just wish for once we could be the guys with the bigger guns.”
19
“YOU’RE SURE IT wasn’t the right augment?” General Caroa asked as he gazed out his stateroom windows.
The old man knew the answer, and yet he asked anyway, and Jones resented it. It was as if he wanted her to humiliate herself to him again.
Yes, we got the wrong augment. Yes, we’re telling the Seascapers that we know nothing about squads of Stitch & Ditch operating in their territory. No, we didn’t leave any evidence. No, there’s nothing to connect us. Yes, all our S&D teams made it back. No, I don’t know where the target is now. Yes, I screwed up.
“The DNA didn’t match,” Jones said.
Caroa’s head whipped around. “How would you match that? You don’t have his DNA.”
“I pulled the general design from his GeneDev tattoo. From our surveillance. And I got the teams to get us a blood sample. To make sure.”
“Ah.” Caroa nodded. “Clever. You are a clever one, aren’t you?”
I’m good at my job. No thanks to you, old man. And now I’ve got a full DNA sample of the target. Which you clearly didn’t want me to have.
Out loud, she said, “The genetic markers were all wrong. Not even close. Very little on the military side. No tiger genes at all. No hyena. No badger. None of the Ursus arctos. Canine was more toward Labrador retriever, so wrong markers there, too. And it was all heavily weighted toward domesticated felines.”
Caroa gave her a contemptuous look and turned back to his windows. “So you’re saying your people gunned down a pussycat. A giant, bipedal pussycat.”
“I wouldn’t say—”
“Quiet, Jones.”
“Yes, sir.”
Cold silence. Jones waited uncomfortably. She wasn’t sure if the old man was going to explode, or have her dumped off his stateroom balcony, or simply send her back down to Brazil and the forestry plantations. She wondered if she had enough now to survive him, if he decided to purge her.
“You promised me there wouldn’t be any more mistakes,” Caroa said.
“There is some good news,” Jones offered.
“Excuse me if I’m skeptical.”
“I had an informant in Seascape Shore Patrol ask some questions on the ground. It turns out the augment we got wasn’t buying any of the meds. It was there to buy antibiotics for some kind of aquaculture farm. The med purchases definitely happened, but it wasn’t an augment who bought them.” She pulled out her tablet, and opened up her research screens. She approached hesitantly, offering the results to him. “If you’d like to see? This was the med buyer.”
Caroa took the tablet and scowled at the image she offered. A child, just growing into a gawky puberty. Asiatic features. Vietnamese possibly, somewhere in the genetic history. Black hair. No ears. Ugly scars. Clutching a huge bag of medicines.
“A boy?” Caroa asked.
Jones felt quiet satisfaction that he didn’t pick out what she had seen immediately. You’re not so smart, old man.
“Here.” She pointed. “The burn markings on his cheek match the ritual scarring the Drowned Cities were notorious for. They called it the triple hash. Three bars across. Three down.”
“A brand.”
“Yes, sir. Used originally by the United Patriot Front, one of the Drowned Cities militias, so their recruits couldn’t run away.” She looked at Caroa significantly. “UPF were strong on the ground just before our augmented friend showed up and started taking over.”
“So…” Caroa considered. “This is a recruit? He has human troops operating inside the Seascape?”
“I know it sounds incredible, but…” Jones shrugged. “It’s the only explanation. It’s possible the ship he boarded had troops who were loyal to him.”
“Or he recruited them once he got aboard,” Caroa muttered.
“That seems unlikely.”
Caroa whirled on her. “Don’t tell me what’s unlikely, Analyst! Nothing is beyond that creature’s capacity! Nothing!” Jones froze, shocked, as the general jabbed his finger into her chest. “You snoop where you don’t belong!” Jab. “You intrude where you know nothing!” Jab. “You know nothing—nothing—of his abilities! You. Know. Nothing!”
Jones fought the urge to lash out at the man’s invasion. “It might help if I knew why we care so much about one augment, sir.”
Caroa went from white-hot rage to brittle ice. “Is that a complaint, Analyst?”
This is how junior analysts take a flying leap out of a mother ship at six thousand meters. Be smart, Jones. Don’t fight. Be strategic.
“If I don’t know why the augment is important,” she said tightly, “we’ll keep making mistakes, and we’ll keep missing. I’m good at my job, sir—if I have the information I need. If you want me to do my job, I need to know what I’m looking for and why. If you don’t like that… maybe you should get someone else.”
She held her breath, expecting him to rage again, but instead, Caroa laughed.
“Get someone else!” He turned away, shaking his head. “Someone else! Ha!”
He took a seat in a deep leather armchair, muttering. “More people. More security issues. More complications.” He glanced up at her, his humor disappeared. Motioned to the chair across from him. “Sit down, Jones. You want information? Fine. Have a seat. You’ll have your information.”
The general’s eyes followed her, predatory, as she hesitantly joined him. He was smiling again, but it was the sort of smile that men in the logging camps sometimes had, right before they stuck a knife in you.
“Very few people know what I’m about to tell you,” Caroa said. “It will make you highly valuable—and also very easily expendable.”
He paused.
“Last chance, Jones. Do you still want to know?”
Jones met his iron gaze. “I do.”
“Of course you do.” He tapped his facial scars knowingly. “I was young like you, too, once. Smart. Ambitious. Always looking for advancement. Hungry for responsibility and challenges. Always thinking I knew better than my superiors…” He wagged an admonishing finger at her. “Always thinking I could keep secrets.”
Jones’s skin prickled. He knows.
Caroa smiled. “Oh yes. I know about you, Jones. I know about your queries into my history, trying to dig up old Kyoto research. Such a good little analyst. Digging, digging, digging. Verifying this. Cross-checking that.” He smiled again. “Some might say that you have been busy digging your very own grave. And then of course there was that trick with the drone repair requests. It takes a rare mind to obey a direct order, while disobeying at the same time.” He waggled his finger again.
“You’re clever, Jones, but not clever enough to know that your elders were once exactly like you. Remember this: I know you, Jones. I know exactly how you think because I was once exactly like you.”
Fates, I hope not.
He held her gaze until she dropped hers. “Good,” he said softly. “You live—this one time—bec
ause I was once like you. Undermine my orders again, and you’ll be out the hatch. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” He nodded, satisfied. “I built him.”
“Sir?” She startled at the change of topic.
“The augment. Our target,” Caroa said impatiently. “He was mine. I designed him. I bred him. I trained him. I built his pack as well. I built all of them.”
“But how can that be? He’s—?”
Caroa’s cold gaze silenced her. “I wasn’t satisfied with the performance of our military augments. Our battles were becoming stalemates. Too many companies, too many city-states, were fielding augments of their own. It’s the age-old lesson of war. We must always evolve. We devise pike regiments to shatter cavalry charges, and gunpowder cannons to pulverize stone castle walls, and augments, of course, to dismember human beings. And every time we devise new technology and tactics to crush our enemies, our enemies, in turn, adapt and do the same to us, and so it goes, back and forth. The essential truth of nature. The essential truth of war.
“I was tasked with creating a better breed—one suited to modern battlefields where augments had become the norm. A superb physical specimen was no longer sufficient. We needed creatures that were hypercompetent. Natural engines of strategy, tactics, learning, violence, stamina, fearlessness. Tolerant of poisons and chemical attacks. Resistant to fire and cold and fear and pain…” Caroa trailed off, frowning. “We knew it was possible. Life exists in even the harshest environments. Bacteria survive in the vents of volcanoes and the airless vacuum of outer space, clinging to our forefathers’ communication satellites. Life exists on every corner of this planet. Extremophiles thrive at depths that would crush your skull in the time it takes a hummingbird’s wing to beat. I knew it was possible to do better.
“So. We pushed past the boundaries that others had imagined. We imagined better, and we pushed harder.” He shrugged. “We made magnificent warriors. Simply magnificent. Stronger, better, smarter, faster. And one of them, Blood, was a particularly fine specimen.”