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[fishtheimpaler]

I had to give up on nanowrimo when the family blew up, but I'm still working with what I got, going back over it and editing it. Fuck you universe I will do it.

So here is chapter the first of Nuisance Animals, in which Sarahconnor is terminated.

xxx

33407 Laracroft, Hidden Rock Confederacy, Asteroid Belt, 5 March 2169
The female voice continued, as it had for the past two hours:
“Colony-wide curfew and security measures are in effect. Proceed immediately to dormitories on in your present complex. Colony-wide curfew and security measures—”
Jack Pielczark pulled himself upright relative to the weak gravity and the steel hatch, toggled the hydraulic latch beside it with his thumb. One tangle of worry among all the others knotted in his belly snapped as the actuators hissed and spun the the manual wheel-lock in the center of the door. Part of him had feared that some maniac, fearing for the children in the same way as the ones that had cut their spawn’s sleeping throats to save them from the wrath of God, back during the last war, had cut in the pressure failsafes and left them alone and unknowing to play with each other and whatever oxygen was already past the filters . . . .
He pulled back the hatch.
The park was the pride of Lara’s B-complex workers, even if they’d had to name it after whoever management’s chief of mining operations was five years ago. Two hundred sixteen cubic meters dug from the rock, space paid for with their own calories and sweat and inactive cycles. Even if you couldn’t work a drill, you gave up what little you had coming that management didn’t withhold for food, air and water rations, buying your neighbors’ shifts from management so they could steal a day a week out from the new deep-level D-complex tunnels and mines and drill at home instead. The result wasworht it, as nice as anything you could find up in the command-suite in A-complex. Polished black-composite walls and ceiling, lined with grips and places to clip a harness; each wall had at least one display ready to show art, video, or a false window on the vacuum outside. No plants—the water and nutrient feeds,outside of biomass division, would have been somewhere between a mess, a disaster, and far too expensive.
Today, there also wouldn’t have been room: the park was packed. It looked like everyone in B-complex who hadn’t told the kids to hide in a dormitory storage locker had stuffed them in the park and told them to wait until mom came back. They were swinging and tumbling and bouncing off the walls with the shrieks, exuberance and skeletal resilience of the young. A lot of boys and one or two of the less self-conscious girls were stripped to the waist, the arm-sleeves of their tan jumpsuits tied about their hips, trying to shed the radiant oven heat of all those other respirating bodies.
Drawing less attention, quieter kids were clinging to the walls and corners. Some of their faces had begun to show the suspicious boredom that children get when they realize they’re being talked down to, that the parents are worried. Some of them watched the displays, which weren’t showing a starfield, but instead white letters on a black background: STAND BY.
Then Jack realized that even the ones that were just playing were playing at monsters and people.
“That’s what you would do. The Protectorate isn’t like you! It’s not people,” a boy who looked twelve proclaimed loudly from the ceiling. A knot of peers were clustered around him, eager to hear his monstrous lies so they could challenge them with ones they hoped equal or superior. “If you wanted to kill everyone in Sarah, you’d throw a rock at it out of the Kupier Belt. And I would, too. But it’s not a rock that’s coming.”
“A bomb!—”
“Not a nuke neither,” the kid interrupted, rattling off nuke with an ease that reminded Jack of boys he had known growing up, ones with an unhealthy interest in the abominations of the long gone war, all nervous, excited mutters about viruses and chimeras and ecocide processes. He drew his legs toward the ceiling and he lifted his shoulders conspiratorially. “It’s a big—” He wracked his brain for another word he’d learned from some pornographically violent history file. “Animal. That’s the kind of thing they are now, that they can be when they want to. Big animals that can live in vacuum, and can eat a—”
“Meg?” Jack shouted over the nonsense. Several faces looked to him, then turned away—it wasn’t Dad, it was someone else. “Meg honey? Megan Pielczark? Has anyone seen Megan Pielczark?”
“Mister Pielczark?” Right at his hip, a mousey, dark-skinned girl with her hair buzzed tight to her head, tightly clinging to one of the perch-bars beside the door with one arm and one hand. She had already been trying to talk to him for a while; Jack could barely hear her. She didn’t look like one of Meg’s friends—she had so few—but she seemed to know him by sight, and her quiet voice had assurance. “Meg was here, but she left with Miss Pielczark.”
“Oh shit,” Jack breathed. Li—
Just like that, half the eyes in the room were on him again, both admiring proto-delinquents and those too-smart, frightened kids in the corners. “What’s going on, Mister Pielczark?” the girl asked. “Mom told me to wait here, but it’s been—”
“Wait here,” he said, floating back out the door and pulling the hatch to behind him.
Rumors that one of Lara’s two sister-colonies was on course to collide with an unmapped object from Jupiter orbit space broke four shifts before. Jack had been skeptical—“unmapped object from Jupiter space” was what kids like the one on the ceiling who didn’t grow out of their fascination with death learned to talk about instead of giant hungry monsters; you might as well just substitute “Protectorate” for “Jupiter” and “death machine” for “unmapped object.” The Protectorate was somewhere far out on the elliptic, everyone knew, and maybe it was even still fighting the war with yet another splinter-branch of itself in some unrecognizable form out in the Oort Cloud. It would make some kind of sense, according to the logic that had detonated in some military network back on Earth, when the homeworld’s war had leapt from politics into biology, and the augmented ranks of the American Protectorate decided they no longer had need of free-willed workers, an ecology, or anything else besides themselves. They destroyed the planet and blasted out from it like the front of a solar CME, burning through Mars, the belt, out into Jupiter space and beyond, exterminating anything human, anything capable of thought, any possible enemy.
Ancient history.
The Confederacy’s founding company and refugees had dodged the destruction, hiding in rocks that hadn’t been rich enough to attract a mining operation. The wave had passed them and gone on, and now they were safe—cramped, frustrated, only able to communicate between the three asteroid colonies at irregular intervals with tightbeam laser, but alive in the silence. If what ever the Protectorate had become was still somewhere on what could be considered the far reaches of the solar system, they couldn’t know where they were without scouring the belt for signs of human life. They couldn’t just peg one of the colonies out of Jupiter space.
And then management came down on the gossips harder than they ever had before. Two entire families got hit with serious food debits for disrupting public order, and there were secondary rumors of a stock forfeiture. Everything but a public flogging in the central core.
They might as well have confirmed that the entire Confederacy had incoming.
He fought the urge to kick hard off the push-plate beside the hatch and nudged himself down the steel-plated hallway at a safe velocity, floating with his hand close to the guiderail. For all his nearly two meters of absurd, expensive height, he wasn’t strong; take off the baggy paper jumpsuit and he would be a pencil sketch of a human, rib-cage starkly outlined by his flesh, sharp elbows and knees that poked from his limbs like steel joints stressing an air bladder against vaccum, a tight black crewcut and a taut line of a worried mouth to give it a little personality. But in the microgravity, if nothing stopped him, he would go fifty meters before Lara’s mass and gentle rotation brought him back down to the floor.
Twenty-five meters before him, people were kicking their way into and crawling their way out of the open hatch to the commissary. He had seen video of an ‘anthill’—one of Li’s obsessive hoard of files and trinkets supplying her false memories of a planet she’d never seen—and the hatch looked like an anthill, like a human hive, workers all dressed the same, all nourished on the same food, living side by side.
It looked like over half of B-complex’s adult population was there, rather than at work. Maybe turned away; when Jack had tried to report to the secondary B-complex oxygen plant, a security team was watching the sealed hatch, one of them holding a big-snouted flechette gun from the deep armory, the kind of thing that could shred a man to blood confetti with a single pull of the trigger.
But maybe some kind of work stoppage, instead, which was a serious problem. People put up with management, management kept them safe. But now, perhaps they didn’t. Anybody with an urge to start something stupid had an excuse.
Li. And she had brought their daughter along with her. The guards would bring those flechette guns.
Jack spun, reached his left hand back and traced his fingers along the guiderail, slowing his mass and pulling himself closer to the wall to let a man pass him, and then heard a familiar bellow: “Make a hole!” Thin-limbed colonists scattered as Pawel pushed his way out of the galley with arms that wrestled a drill on a D-complex cut crew. A big, shaven brown skull and tiny black eyes that widened when he saw him. “Jack!”
Jack grabbed onto the guiderail and promptly slammed into the wall-plate cheek first. He felt the welt start to rise as he rudely pulled his way toward the galley. “Li!”
Pawel drifted to him and grabbed his arm with a grip like a mag-lock. “Inside,” he said, quietly.
“What’s happening?” Jack could feel the sweat beading up on his face in little globes. “Has Sarah been hit?”
“Nothing yet. She has Meg in there with her,” Pawel whispered, and with the tone he didn’t have to say get them out. He squeezed Jack’s arm.
“Where’s safe?”
“I don’t know. Try the dormitory; block yourself in.”
Pavel gently pushed away, floated toward the opposite wall. Jack grabbed and tore his jumpsuit. “Help me—”
“She doesn’t want to leave,” Pawel said, which Jack already knew, however much he didn’t want to. “She’s talking to everyone about Earth—”
“Alright,” Jack nodded, not looking at Pawel. He tightened his grip, felt sweat squeeze out from the lines in his palms. Before him a pair of legs were sticking out of the galley hatch, paddling at the air. “Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” Pawel said, and he was gone. Jack pulled himself forward and looked inside.
The galley had been transformed. Someone had disabled the normal LEDs, and the emergency circuits had not cut in. The anchors and seats, the tables, everything in the room was another place for a body. People were crowded on the tables, pushed into the walls, hanging from the O2 vents and LED mounts on the ceiling. All of them in paper, all of them workers, not a single shareholder in the crowd.
All faces were turned to a signel display panel that had bee leaned against the far wall, ghostly with its light. It showed a starfield. In the middle like a hole in space with just a sliver of sunlit nickel-iron gray to show its reality, hung 38604 Sarahconnor, the third of the Confederacy’s asteroids.
“Is that real?” Jack wondered, eyes on the display.
“That’s Sarah alright; Jenny cut into the line from the surface optics,” said a blonde wisp of a man who somehow thought Jack should know who Jenny was. “Management’s as interested we are. Has it trained with one-K optical and computer-assisted mag. That speck to the left is the bogey. If it hits, it’s going to hit soon.”
“They should never have spun it up,” someone said. “It was suicide.”
“What else could they do?—”
Jack winced. How many times had he heard that strong, sharp voice utter the same words in their quarters, over the squeak of the springs as she worked her legs, arms and spine, strengthening her bones and muscles for a trip that she would never make? How many times had he told her that of course he understood, that no one wanted to live in barely-insulated microgravity, eating and breathing the same atoms, year after year? How many times had he told her to keep her mouth shut in front of others? In front of their daughter?
Li had either staked out or shoved her way to a perch just beside the display. She was a small woman, or she had been before the isometrics, before her obsession with Earth. Now, though she was shorter than almost everyone in the room at one and a half meters, her body was stout with muscle that a biomass worker would never use. Her head looked too small on her thick neck, and the tightness of the ponytail strapping her fine, carbon-black hair down to her scalp only made it worse. It was like some posthuman Protectorate monstrosity had removed the head of a beauty—the soft mouth, the high, delicate cheekbones, the jade eyes—and vivisected it onto a hulk, and then shot the monster full of some sort of muscle-building cocktail of hormones and engineered bacteria and nanomachines, and programmed its mind with one fixation.
“Humans were meant to live in gravity,” she cried, ignoring the wave of exasperation that passed through the room, riding the faces of the people that knew her. “On a planet. Spinning Sarah for centripetal counterforce—”
“—Showed those fuckers right where they are!”
“—could’ve seen the thrusters from the Oort Cloud!”
“—going to scour the belt—”
“The Protectorate is just waiting for a chance to feed us vaccum, and—”
“Yes!” she shouted, stabbing a finger out into the display-glow. “They are. They won’t let any humans live. They won’t let anything live but themselves. And we are vulnerable. It doesn’t matter how many decagrams of rock we hide under, how much we give up. They’ll freeze us; they’ll starve us; they’ll blow the air right out of our lungs. The belt practically does it for them. We do it for them, by living here.”
While she took a breath, the room was silent. Waiting for her to say it. Meg, clinging to her knee, wrapped her little arms tighter around her mother’s leg.
“But on Earth—”
Meg buried her face into the paper of Li’s thigh, but her ears were still poking out of her shaggy black hair, and heard it all.
“Shut up!”
“The Toronto virus—”
“The hybrids—”
“The radiation—”
Li pulled herself higher, dragging Meg’s shoes from the floor, shrieked at a room of half-seen fists, eyes, glistening teeth. “On Earth, we could live like we’re supposed to! We don’t have to live like this!”
“That’s goddamn right!” someone roared above the other shouts, and Jack thought it was Atcheson. If Atcheson had his way, the entire complex would be throwing itself on the flechette guns, trying to get to the Board of Directors and slit throats.
The room had been packed to the ceiling before; now that the occupants were screaming, it was a whirlwind of half-seen arms, drifting and colliding bodies. Through it Jack could see Li’s mouth wide open, Meg’s fingers pulling the fragile fabric of her pant leg so hard her fingertips punctured it.
Jack pulled himself hand over hand to the floor, coiled his legs behind him, and then pushed in their direction as hard as he could. A moment later his skull was throbbing, he was looking at some impossible angle of steel and glass, and someone was kicking him in the stomach. He coughed, then retched, then crawled and pulled his way forward on wriggling legs, a sour, acid burn of spiced seitan in his throat and nose. His elbow slammed into a bolt and pain shot up to his shoulder. Somone else cried as a thin-soled shoe bashed him in the small of his back. He squeezed his eyes closed, curled into a fetal position, but the back of his head hit stell anyway. He took it, letting his neck and spine bend to eat his momentum until his dull, tingling right hand found a grab bar and slid in behind it so he could simply hang, a limp bag of ache.
“Dad?”
He forced his eyes open and Meg was looking at him, sideways in his vision. She had his pale skin, but was otherwise almost a little mirror of her mother, complete with the excess musculature from the springs Li made her use. She was still one day away from the water ration for her shower, and her hair was twisted into greasy, thoughtless sculptures over her brows and ears.
“Hi, sweetie,” Jack croaked.
“Jack!” Li bent down and pecked her lips sharply to his, rubbed her hand against something hot and wet on his forehead. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he lied, putting his left arm on her shoulder. “Pawel says if we secure the dormitory—”
“You need to help me,” she said, and before he could ask her what was wrong, she went on: “We need to make them see. We aren’t safe here.”
He nodded. “We need to get to the—”
“Sarah could be gone,” she hissed, eyes shining. “We aren’t safe in the belt. Things have changed. We need to go to Earth.”
“Yeah,” he said, like he always did whenever she showed Meg her treasure, the pressed flower with the yellow petals in the plastic laminate, crumbling to brittle dust. “But right now we have to go to the dormitory—”
She grabbed his head, pulled her nails through his meager hair, and the pain cleared his mind for her words: “No! This is it! This is the first time that something has ever happened, Jack! You need to help me make them see! We can convince them! Air, water, gravity, all the food you could—”
She kept talking but her voice sank back down into the others, the ones shouting about what trusting management gets you, about why the children of people who ran a lunar transport station would be any good at hiding in the belt, about why they didn’t ever come down in waste processing and get their hands dirty. Even too close to see her freakish body Li’s face seemed strange now, her eyes too big, her hair pulled so tight that it was like her skull was about to pop out of her skin.
When had they gone wrong? Was it when her parents gave her a name from a culture that had already been erased by fire before she was born? When she first saw the picture-files of the ocean as a child? When he decided that the arguments weren’t worth it, let her prattle on as much as she wanted at home to the echo of an occasional passionless yes, hon?
Earth wasn’t all the oxygen you could want, or a field of golden flowers, or water you could bathe in every day. He’d seen the other pictures. Earth was a gravity well filthy with drifting debris from shattered orbital habitats, frozen hulks of dessicated flesh. It was a city like a burst blister in the landscape, scarified towers surrounding a crater of seawater and muck, a wound oozing radioactive pus. It was an alley clogged with corpses, cheap paper masks half-hiding faces blue with death anyway, a feast for things that were half-dog and far less than man, their commands and their conditioning forgotten along with their rifles as clawed digits tore into the meat that could keep them alive.
Li pressed her thumbs into his cheekbones, a euphoric grin. “Listen to me! Earth, Jack!”
“You’re crazy,” Jack realized.
“Impact!” someone shouted.
The room was instantly dead quiet. On the screen, Sarah hung in space, rotating too slowly to see.
“Well the bogey’s occluded,” the same voice said, lamely, as the people nearest the display drifted closer, squinting.
“Debris? Are they outgassing?”
“Could be in transit behind her.”
“What if it—”
A flash.
There was of course no sound from the screen, just the quiet gasps from around the room like air whispering out a hairline fracture into vacuum as the glow spread, sustained, the far side of Sarah suddenly visible in stark silhouette that fuzzed into glow as the surface began to boil, and then lost all sense as the asteroid seemed to swell, spread. Blown apart.
Jack had Meg in his arms almost before he knew it, definitely before Li knew it or could react. The shouts and screams were too loud to bear any sense. He tucked her to his chest, braced his shoulders, thought he heard her voice like a vibration in his ribs. “Hold on to me!” he shouted. “Close your eyes!”
He thought he heard Li, too. Even though by the time he was in the dorm with the others, bolted in the darkness that had settled once management cut the lights to the entire wing, there was certainly no way that he could, any more than he could hear the distant gunshots.

[fishtheimpaler]

Have some more

xxx


248 Kilometers West of Hudson Bay, 26 May 2191
A flash shut Megan’s eyes. Before she could start counting the bang hit her like a punch. The thunder was so loud that it touched some animal part of her brain, dropped her into moment of thoughtless, wordless terror. Surrounded by half-glimpsed monochrome tree trunks and darts of water pelting down from the black sky, a stinking-sweet smell of rotting pine needles in her nose and afterimages in her optic nerves.
Then she started walking again, the suit crinkling with every step. Thin transparent polymer, but tough and nonpermeable, loose and baggy at her knees and elbows, cinched into an airtight seal with sturdier boots and gloves, and around her waist by the exterior equipment belt: utility knife, green bioluminescent flashlight, gas-propellant pistol, emergency sealant patches for tears, emergency protein calories. And then right there at the base of the extrusion covering her head, a hundred Angstrom filter.
It’s broken, she’d said the first time she saw it a year ago, holding the thing up to Matthews from manufacturing and watching the mild satisfaction depart his face in favor of his more traditional stoic underbite. It lets things in. Before Matthews had the chance to get angry, Mike had stepped in, telling her that the suit was okay, explaining. If it had been anyone else, she would have punched them, but Mike had done vacuum work in the belt, and as the chief of the colony’s external security he’d done more trips through decontamination and quarantine than anyone, to fix physical bugs in his optics that couldn’t be handled remotely from the Flight Deck. Just as important, Mike wasn’t an asshole. And Mike said that a fully self-contained, pressure-positive biohazard suit was not a practical option for external colony security work. In ten minutes she’d be dying: at the bottom of the gravity well, it the compressed air tanks would be constantly threatening to pull her onto her back or explode, and if condensation didn’t fog the inside of whatever view-surface she had to impenetrability, it would fog the outside. Protectorate space marines had been seen in what looked like skin-tight vacuum suits in off-world actions before the last war kicked off, but there was more to it than polymer, critically more, Mike assured her. Using external oxygen solved innumerable problems simultaneously.
And a hundred Angstom filter, well. Mike wasn’t dead, yet, and no one else had caught up mysteriously ill since he’d left quarantine.
So Megan had used the suit a year ago to bring in Florence Vache after her hormones had her brain the night watch on the flight deck and head out the maintenance airlocks with her four months of unlicensed fetus. Vache made it about five meters into the grass on the surface before she’d chickened out. Ten minutes in that air, a week in decontamination and quarantine, and they were both fine. Autopsy pulled the fetus apart and there was nothing in there either.
Kinski was another matter. While she was suiting up, Mike told her that the close-range surface surveillance had him cutting right out of range of the lenses without a backward glance. Minutes following his trail had become hours, and the rain had come and become a storm and the storm had gotten worse, and if Megan didn’t find him soon she might not be back to New Lara for days. The internal water pouch might run dry, and she might have to break—
Shut up, Megan ordered herself.
Beneath the cloud cover it was dark as night, and she followed a narrow trail through the trees and ankle-clinging brush more by feel than by eye. Little paths seemed to form naturally in the forest, somehow. She’d been pushing along the broadest, straightest route they offered. Infrared and light amplification were forbidden on the surface because of the EM field they produced, and without them there wasn’t much to do other than hope Kinski didn’t have the stomach to push a harder trail.
She trudged over a small rise, and the rain suddenly sounded louder. Through the spatter on the transparent polymer before her face saw some sort of clearing ahead. It was the first feature in at least a half-hour that had a good chance of being visible on the high altitude map, and with the cloud cover it would be safe to break out the bio-light. If the Protectorate had tech to see though that much mass, everyone might as well give up.
As she trudged forward, her boots slurped down into mud. And then, like someone had pulled the dimmer switch, the wind sputtered and the rain thinned against her hood. A sheet of water stretched left and right before her, meters wide, its surface a shifting, speckled array of momentary raindrop craters. The pines began again a few meters beyond a half-flooded plain of mud and rock on the far bank. Her side of the river was almost the same, with the addition of Kinski two meters to her left, dark, sopping jumpsuit clinging to his shoulders and wrists.
He lifted the shadow of a knife Mike had told her about as Megan extended her left arm, slid her right to belt. “Slow down, Paul. Take it easy.”
Megan could barely see him, but Mike had pulled the admin database’s images for her as soon as he figured out who it was that had gone walkabout. Paul Kinski was in his early fifties, with fair skin and graying blonde hair from the European DNA that made up the bulk of the Hidden Rock Confederacy. His wife had died of leukemia twenty years ago, before they had been licensed for children. Now he worked waste reprocessing and water recovery. He had no disciplinary history in the terrestrial colony, and only minor infractions back in the belt—curfew violaions, illegal distillery, nothing political. His data usage wasn’t out of the ordinary. He had requested assignment to the new colony, rather than getting unlucky in the lottery, but that hadn’t raised any flags in admin; management in Lara had been eager to dump workers in their late forties, before rad cancers and osteoporosis set in. The file said he was harmless.
But still, his age. That should have been a warning sign. The third generation away from Earth still had true believers in resettlement.
“Security Officer Pielczark,” Kinski said, a gravelly voice wet with rain and age. Maybe the earliest touches of lung trouble, if he’d caught a high-energy proton during the crossing from the belt. He lowered the knife to his hip. “Of course its you.”
Megan ignored the tone and kept her eyes on the shadow of his right hand. In microgravity there were more angles of attack, but friction with the ground made for harder strikes. “Alright, Kinski. I’ve read your file; you’re a good man.”
“Why thank you. You’re clearly an expert in good men.”
“You don’t want to hurt anyone,” she insisted.
He sighed, put his arms down to his sides, the shadow of the knife jutting out from his thigh. “Damn right I don’t.”
Megan responded in kind, took a moment to breathe, the air warm and close inside her personal plastic bubble. “You’re lucky we found you so soon, Paul. In this muck you could have been lost before you knew it.”
“Lost,” he said flatly. “Where do you think I’m going?”
“Decon. We’re two kilometers from the colony on a straight shot. I’ve got a map and I can get us back before the cloud cover breaks.”
“Huh.”
“You’re not in trouble Paul, not yet. I carry weight with Graham, and he’s got management’s ear. We can work something out. You’ll lose clearance for the flight deck and anything near the backup oxygen shafts, but it’s not going to affect your life—”
She thumbed the snap open on her belt, but the old man was just laughing, bending over and laughing and coughing, hand and knife resting on his knees. He cut himself off with a phlegmy snort. “But what’s life without the flight deck? The gray floor plating, the gray wall plating, the same damn air as everywhere else. All those nice little displays of the stars and the trees, of course.” He rocked back up, wiped rain from his face. “But I’ve got that right here.”
“Paul—”
“I’m not lost. I’m going out. And I’m not coming back.”
Walkabout was a crime unlike any other. In the belt, once you discovered the infraction, that was basically it. The perp was outnumbered, and there was nowhere to go. And there was nowhere to go here, either, but not for a madman.
“How much food did you bring, Paul?”
“Enough.”
“Enough for how long? And when you run out, what, that knife? Where did you get it, anyway?”
Kinski’s whole body tightened up at that, which was all the answer Megan needed. Friends in the colony, either in property control or manufacturing. Conspiracy—
She was getting ahead of herself. Step one, talk him down.
“You’re going to die out here, Paul.”
“Eventually.”
“Think you’re good enough with that blade to handle a pack of dog soldiers?” He’d never held a weapon before in his life. “How about an alpha particle in your lungs?”
“I heard the speeches back in the belt, too, Officer. They were mandatory.” Kinski ratcheted his voice up to a cartoonish squeak meant to mimic Leslie Krakauer’s boyish tenor. “Over one hundred years have passed since the nuclear exchange. The site for the new colony is over five hundred kilometers from any—”
“Toronto’s south of here,” Megan interrupted. “If the virus goes to spore, they could be waiting for you to kick up a little dust.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
The rain had dropped to a gentle hiss, with an occasional close splack against the polymer on her head and arms. Megan tried to think of the words that would put sense into the man.
Kinski shuffled his shoes in the muck, hitched what must have been the strap of a backpack against his left shoulder. “Anything else.”
Fuck it. “Any human presence on the planet’s surface could be seen as far as lunar—”
“Shut up!” Kinski roared. Megan felt the heels of her boots sink dangerously into the riverbank as she edged away from him, from the knife. “Don’t you know how tired everyone is of your bullshit? Fifty years in a rock eating your own recooked shit is bad enough, but it’s you.” She flinched to the side as he lifted the knife, but he only pointed it at her, a tiny waterfall dripping from the hilt as the rain ran down the blade’s edge. “You and all the management cocksuckers who know what’s good for us. We’re sick of your shit. Sick of it!”
Megan listened. “Us.” After a moment she shook her head, a private gesture if he couldn’t see through the hood. “I don’t see anyone but you out here, Kinski.”
“Give me five minutes and you won’t even see that. I’m done. If the boogeymen want to railgun me from orbit they can do it.” With a squelch he picked up his legs, turned, starting up the bank. “It’ll be interesting, getting screwed by someone else for a change.”
“No,” Megan insisted, following. “Where there’s one human there’s more. They see you and they’ll pave this continent with antilithium.”
“Like I said, I’ll take my chances.”
“You won’t take mine,” Megan declared.
The snap of her holster guard as she unfastened it was higher-pitched than the rain striking the mud and leaeves. Kinski stopped, still facing the encroaching trees. “Well.” He lifted his head to the invisible clouds, and Megan thought she could just see the outline of a bald forehead. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“Drop the knife,” she ordered, pulling her pistol, a long motion to get the bulbous flash suppressor clear of the holster. She braced the butt on her left palm and lined the sights on the center of the dark, shfting space where she thought he was. Even though the gloves were far tighter than the remainder of the suit, the gun still felt small in her hands. “Lift your hands out to your sides and put them on the back of your—”
Lightning raced along the clouds and she had a flash of him turning, half of a taut, snarling face, a steel flash at the end of his arm. It wasn’t the knife but the light, the sudden space that brought the panic, squeezed closed the eyes of a small thing clinging to the skin of an oversized rock in endless space where cruel intelligences watched, waiting to kill, exterminate. She dropped to her right knee as she pulled the trigger, feeling only the kick as the sound was lost in the roll of thunder.
Megan blinked. The knife was buried in the mud to its hilt, pulled down by gravity that the old man’s muscles still hadn’t learned. In between the green afterimages of lightning she thought she could see his shape occulding the trunks to her left, making a break for the treeline.
She’d barely found him to begin with. If the rain picked up, if he lost her in the woods—
This time she heard the bangs with each pull of her trigger, the grip slapping into the reinforced polymer over her palm, just a faint glow from the fat oval at the end of the barrel as it ate the flaming gas behind the bullets. Ten shots before she got a hold of herself and the thunder died away, leaving just the rain and her own close, animal panting.
Nothing moved.
Megan fell forward, her left glove slapping into thick septic muck, crawled to her feet, ran stumbling to the trees where, where—
Face-down, arms at his side, head knocked out of shape by the rock lodged under it like a pillow.
She sat, feeling the dull shape of mud and pine needles move beneath her, and safetied her pistol, cradling it between her bent, spread legs. Lowered her head and felt the individual impacts of the raindrops against the back of her hood.
“Good,” she muttered quietly to no one. “Good.”
The rain stopped in fifteen minutes, but there were still no stars. Lightning boiled above the pines to the east, silent flashes sliding from one bulbous extrusion to another. The bubbling of the dark river and the steady drop of old rain from needle to needle, leaf to ground were the only sounds.
Megan finally got up, her adrenaline rush subsided. Shrugging off her pack and laying it atop the body, she closed her eyes, played the encounter back in her mind. Almost colleded with him on the bank, about five meters away. Knife—she’d fired—shells.
The mud clung to her as she got up, dripping off her backside with wet plops. Footprints—but those wouldn’t last, this close to the river, and humans weren’t the only things that left footprints. Kinski’s blade came out easily; she tossed it up by his body. Then the churned mud where she had fired. She crouched down, performed the ancient mime of a pistol with the fingers of her right hand, aimed at the air above the man’s body and followed the path of her imaginary pistol’s shells with her eyes. About a half a meter to the right, if she was lucky enough not to have bounce.
As it turned out, luck—nothing bounced in the rain-drenched slime beside the river. Five casings showed in a neat cluster as soon as she activated the bioluminescent tube. She pinched their now-cold lips, dropped them in her right side pocket. The others must be sunk deeper.
Rationally, she knew that she didn’t need to pick them up. Even assuming a lens could spot them from low orbit, spent bullet casings were one of the things mankind had produced in abundance before it died out. A few in the middle of the North American continent wouldn’t draw even the artificial eye of a posthuman intelligence. She could just call it, pick up Kinski’s body and lug it two kilometers and low-end error back to the colony.
Megan bet the rain made him weigh more, with the clothes. He looked heavy, lying there.
So she kept at it for a few minutes, until she caught herself almost forgetting, touching the muck near the filter in front of her face.
If there were more shells in the mud, she’d managed to bury them with her clawing. She stood, scraped the mud off of the palms of her gloves and on to her pants, her light picking out footprints that she did her best to—
She reversed the flashlight in her hand and lifted it beside her head, training the beam on Kinski’s body again. The second time there was no yellow, just the black-brown of the mud, the brown of the old man’s jumpsuit, her green pack, and . . .
The records weren’t clear which branch of the fracturing American Protectorate had first weaponized dog hybrids, but well before the Toronto virus and the follow-on extermination bioweaons nearly everyone had been deploying them. All the loyalty and predatory aggression you could want from canines, spiced with primate HOX genes to get them standing on two feet. They were smart enough to understand Trade American and follow directions, tenacious enough to savage enemy territory even once their links to command had been cut. They had hands that could open doors and operate a multirifle, and snout that couldn’t speak Trade American but that would eat just about anything. They were extremely stealthy in natural environments, particularly at night. They smelled and saw you before you smelled them. Their eyes, when expoed to a light source, would briefly appear to glow as cells reflected incoming light over the retina a second time for enhanced night vision.
Only one more thing in common with humans: where there was one, there were always more, whether you saw them or not.
The river, Megan thought. If she could make it to the river, she might survive. Two breaths, and she ripped her gun from her holster, aming it and her light at the trees behind her pack. Two blasts to wound or scare it and she turned to—
The scream pierced her, froze her. It sounded like a baby, like a baby shrieking. Lines and shapes roiled in the beam of her light, black and white and gray.
“Naw chatt!” Megan kept her finger tight on the trigger but listened to what now sounded like a young child babbling in some lost language. “Naw chat! Naw naw naw chatt!” Tiny arms waved back and forth in her light above the edge of her pack, one empty, one holding—
“Drop the knife!” she shouted.
“Naw chatt! Naw chatt.”
“Drop the knife,” she said again.
Both arms grabbed her pack, squeezed it, the right hand still holding the knife. A head poked over the top of the pack, an unsmiling alien, animal face, wide with bristling fur and pointed ears, crazy gaps and stripes and glowing yellow eyes. No mouth opened, but it made an inhumain whistling sound, rising in pitch, fingers bristling with short black hairs gripping tighter on the hilt of the blade.
Without thinking she fired again, wood fracturing in a symphony of brittle cracks. The thing’s eyes disappeared and it dropped the knife, pressing itself flat on top of Kinski’s corpse, behind her pack. “Naw chatt! Naw naife. Naw maiyne.”
Slowly, Megan lowered her gun, not believing it. Dog hybrids could hear orders, but . . . . “Don’t shoot?”
The dog-thing lifted its head again. Its golden eyes shone from pits of deep black fur over a over a squashed, flattened white snout. “Naw chatt!” it chirped.
Trade American. Almost. “Don’t shoot,” Megan said, stressing the vowel.
It made a warbling noise, again without opening its mouth, and pulled at the fur on either side of its head with its hands. “Mans,” it said. Then it pushed on the sides of its face, squeezing his flesh to the front of its snout until black-skinned lips bulged out under white fur. Rainwater dripped from long whiskers as it flapped its jaw: “Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah.”
Or maybe not Trade American. “Dog?”
“Dag?” the creature echoed.
“You,” Megan tried. “You’re a dog?”
The thing slapped both of its hands down on her pack, wet and muddy. “Naw dag!” it barked. “Feesh.”
“Feesh?”
“Feesh.”
“. . . Fish?”
“Feesh!” It clapped its hands together, rocked back and forth, spread his arms wide and waggled his fingers. “Waddafeesh. Strangswam, ayts feesh.”
Megan briefly played her light up and down the riverbank, but didn’t see any other dogs sneaking up on her. She wasn’t even sure the thing was big enough to eat her if it wanted to. Maybe it was a juvenile, in which case she should probably either kill it or run before its parents arrived. But the thing could talk—it seemed to think it could talk, although its answers wre gibberish.
She put her light back on the dog-thing and lifted her gun out into the beam, to make sure it could see it. “What do you want?” she said.
Without moving its arms, its head tilted to the side. “Waddawah.” The gun didn’t bother it. It seemed to forget to be afraid whenever she didn’t fire it for fifteen seconds at a time.
“What do you want?” What did any dog want. “You want him? The body?”
“Baah-deee.”
“Eat it. Do you want to eat the human. The . . . the human . . . meat.”
It ducked its head, rubbing his chin against her pack, and clapped its hands again, shaking water from limp, dripping fur on its forearms. “Ayt! Naw naw naw.” It looked to the right, to the left, the right, the left. “Man bag, kain smah. Ayt feesh.”
Meg sighed. “Well than what do you—”
“DAG!” The thing’s ears folded back to its skull as its left arm stabbed out, all but one finger pulled into a fist, an unmistakable, instantly recognizable gesture of pointing behind her and to her right. “Dags! Dag small!” Terrified. “Dags!”
Meg spun, tracing gun and light along the river and the far bank. The far bank was empty. The water looked empty—
She turned back and had a brief glimpse of thick, hairy legs, a short striped tail and a round, short body as the creature made for the tree line, her pack rocking wildly on top of it as it ran.
“Mother-fuck!” She took off after it, saw the thing reach a hand out for a treetrunk, swung her arm forward and fired. Another one of those terrible animal-baby shrieks as artificial fibers puffed from the sudden hole in her pack, which hit the ground, rolled, was still.
Megan drew up short, carefully lined both light and sights, and edged forward. Three decimeters. Two.
A rough kick to her bag and it flopped over in the needles of the forest floor. There was nothing underneath it. She snapped her light up into the branches above. She heard late raindrops falling, needles brushing each other. Nothing else.
She was already sure, but picked up her pack and walked a small spiral pattern by the treeline to verify. The knife was gone.
“You little cocksucker,” she muttered, coming to a halt by Kinski, who was looking heavier by the minute. “Least you could have ate him, you piece of shit.” Megan could bury him, like Mike had buried the Empire family, but she didn’t have a shovel, and it would mean digging through the dirt and hoping she didn’t wear a tear in her gloves or sleeves. Just thinking about it made her want to cut off her hands. Leaving the body out meant a lens could spot it, defeating the entire purpose of the mission. Dragging the body two kilmoters through woods infested with who knew what kinds of semi-intelligent monsters and diseases so it could be incinerated in decon was the best she could do, unless—
She played her light over the river. In the night the water was jet black, but where the beam caught it she could see clouds of sediment and algae in the water. The more she played over the dog-things word’s, the better she could grab them. Only a tenth of them made any sense, but tenth that did were helpful.
“Fish.” She muttered. “Eat fish.”
With a grunt, she picked up Kinski by his ankles. “Come on Paul. Fish eat.”