Falling Sky (34 page)

“Ben—” Claudia begins.

“I have to go after them,” I say. “She's right. This is all my fault.”

“They made their own decisions,” Claudia says.

I can't meet Claudia's eyes. Not now.

“I have to go. I have to do what I can. They helped me get back the
Cherub
. I can't just leave them.”

“And what about Miranda?” she says.

It's like a punch in my gut. Now that I have the
Cherub
back, Miranda is all I want. All I'm lacking in the world. But I can't afford to wait for her. I can't look for her. All those people are depending on me.

What can you do? says the voice in my head. But I know I have to try.

“Can you look for her?” I say. “I know I have no right to ask. But . . .”

“You don't want me with you?” she says.

“I do. You know I do. But . . . I owe her as well. I was supposed to look after her.”

Claudia shakes her head. “It's more than that, isn't it?”

I wince. Then nod. “Yes.”

“Okay,” she says. “I'll look for her. Try to get her somewhere safe.”

I put my good arm on her shoulder. “Thank you.”

“When should I tell her you'll be back?”

I smile. It's a question we both don't want to answer.

Then I walk away.

I head back toward the
Cherub
with my cap down low and my scarf up high. I'm turning about a block from the warehouse when I'm slammed against a corrugated metal wall and I feel a pistol nuzzled into the small of my back.

“Where did you take him?” asks my attacker.

My head is reeling from being slammed into the wall, and the pain in the rest of my body is joining in. Panic races through me. They've got me dead to rights. I can't move without the pistol going off and I'm in no shape for another fight.

Then the voice threads its way through the panic, and pain and fear and recognition hits almost as hard as my head into the wall.

“Miranda?” I say.

The gun moves away from my back. “Ben?”

Then I'm being turned around and Miranda is tugging my scarf down. I can't help smiling as I see her face. She holds her pistol in her hand. “Ben!”

I grab her and pull her to me, holding her as tight as I can. Already the Juice is fading and my muscles feel all watery. “Yeah. It's me. Thank fucking god, Miranda. I thought they got you.”

“What . . . what did you do? Is Diego . . . ?”

“Walk with me,” I say, and I pull her after me, after replacing the scarf around my face. “We got him out. Rosie took him.”

“Thank goodness,” she says. “I was going to try to get him out, but I wasn't sure I could take out all the guards.”

I look at her and the gun she's still holding in her hand. “I thought you didn't like using that.”

“Against Ferals,” she says. “They don't have any choice in what happens to them. These assholes, though . . .”

It's such a Miranda thing to say that I start to laugh.

“What?” she says.

“It's just good to see you,” I say.

“Where are we going?”

“Back to the
Cherub
.”

“You got her back?”

I nod and a rush of warmth floods through me at the thought. I have my baby back. Then I remember what I'm about to do. “But there's a problem.”

“What?”

“They tortured Diego. It looked bad. He told them where Tamoanchan was.”

“Fuck,” Miranda says. “What are we going to do?”

I want to smile again at her use of the word “we,” but I keep it inside. “I'm going to go after them. Try to stop them somehow. I told Rosie to head straight back and let them know what's coming.”

“I'm going with you,” she says.

I think about telling her no. I think about how she would be safer in Gastown. But then I think of how beat-up I am and how I really want, maybe even need, her with me. “Okay,” I say.

“Are you finally learning to listen to me?” she says.

“Stranger things have happened,” I say.

We make it back to the
Cherub
but make sure to check our surroundings before getting too close. It's strangely unguarded. No alarm yet?

I don't wait to question our good luck. Instead I push Miranda ahead of me and onto my ship, quickly closing the door behind us. Then I start making the preparations to get up and in the air.

“What happened to the
Cherub
?” Miranda asks, looking around.

A pang shoots through me at the reminder of how my baby's been looted. “The Gastown raiders were using it. They did this.”

“I'm sorry, Ben.” She places her hand on my arm, and I'm sure I can feel its warmth through my sleeve.

“I have her back. That's all that matters,” I say. I move to the controls, get the
Cherub
warmed up, start to bring her back into the sky.

Risking being overheard, I dial up Claudia's frequency and manage to get through. “I have Miranda,” I say. “No need to look for her.”

“Good,” Claudia says. “But Ben. I've been monitoring the Gastown radio frequencies. The ships have already left. They're on their way to Tamoanchan already.”

“Fuck,” I say. That's probably why things seemed so quiet in the city. They already assembled their attack force.

I take a moment to look at the map to find the quickest route to Tamoanchan from Gastown, factoring in the weather conditions on the horizon and the assumption that there are several ships moving in formation. If the raiders stay true to form, they'll drop Ferals down on the island, which buys us some time. They'll want the Ferals to be alive and wriggling. Catch them too early and they'll expire before reaching Tamoanchan. So they'll need to stop on the coast and fish.

In the meantime, the
Cherub
will catch up to them.

“Ben, you're hurt.” Miranda moves forward as I strip off my jacket and she catches sight of all the blood on me.

I try to smile but end up with a grimace. “It's just a scratch.”

“Let me look at you.”

“I'm okay,” I say. “Claudia sewed up the gunshot.”

“Gunshot?”

“The rest are from getting Diego out.”

“Let me look at you.” Her hand alights on my bare arm, and an electrical tingle runs through it at her touch.

“There's no time, Miranda,” I say softly. “We need to leave.”

She pulls away and nods. I turn back to the controls.

Miranda helps me fly. She's been on the
Cherub
long enough to know the basics. Soon we're speeding through the air, on the trail of the Gastown force.

“What happened to you?” I say. “We missed you at the rendezvous.”

“I know,” she says. Her left hand curls into a fist and hovers at her side. “I thought I was so clever.”

“What happened, Miranda?”

She leans back against a counter, crossing her arms across her chest. Then she looks at her boots. “You know I was mad at you, right?”

I squirm a bit, then look away, out the window of the gondola. “I had that impression, yes.”

“I was grateful for your help with breaking into the lab, but . . . it wasn't enough. And I got a glimpse of their data and that spooked me, so I headed back with Diego to the
Osprey
.” She bites her bottom lip. A horrible habit—I cringe every time she does it, worrying she'll crack her lip, but it also does something to me. Inside. “I couldn't be around you. Not then. So I went with him to see what I could figure out.”

“And what did you figure out?”

“They've been examining the virus, like we have, trying to understand its structure. I lifted as much as I could after taking a look at their journals. They had data on virus morphology, on its genome, on replication cycles. They had detailed analysis of mutations.”

“So that I can understand, Miranda,” I say.

She sighs. “They're working on the virus, trying to see how to engineer it. They want to, well, to mutate it. They don't have access to all the techniques they need to make it happen, but they've been trying.”

I look away from the window. “What would that do?” My voice sounds incredibly small.

“You know how persistent the virus is, how effective it is. They want to use it as a delivery system. What if they were able to make it increase aggression, even more than it does now, but also are able to make the infected more susceptible to behavioral conditioning? The perfect troops. Or slaves. And they could use it as a weapon, infecting anyone, any group or settlement they targeted.”

“Christ.”

“It gets worse. They're also experimenting on the Ferals. I saw notes on behavioral conditioning and physical conditioning.”

“Physical conditioning?”

“Yes. Muscular enhancement, increased aggression. I get the impression they see the Ferals as possible manpower, maybe even troops.”

“Miranda,” I say. “Down at the plant, I saw . . . a Feral. But it was big. Muscular. They were . . . they were feeding people to it.”

“God.”

“They're doing this. They're doing it down there. I saw others, Ferals in cages. Jesus, Miranda. They're monsters.” I don't have to clarify that it's these scientists I'm talking about.

I think about everything Miranda's trying to do. How she's trying to fight the Bug. It was hard enough to do before, without having a bunch of mad scientists working on the other side.

“Ben,” Miranda says. I turn to her for the first time in the conversation. My wound screams, but I ignore it. “Hey.” She steps forward and puts a hand on the side of my face. “It's not all bad.”

“Oh, isn't it?” I ask.

Her smile is small and slightly sad. “In trying to understand the virus, they had to break it down. Like we've been doing. I didn't get to look at the data in depth, but they have figures we don't have. With what they've done, we'd be able to accelerate our own understanding of the virus. Hell, I think we might get close to a detection system.”

“What?”

“For all the evil they're doing with this data, we can use it to do some good. I think it'll advance our knowledge by about a year at least.” She shakes her head, then smiles the biggest smile I've seen since I left Apple Pi. She fishes into her shirt pocket, right by her heart, and pulls out a small rectangular object. “This prize right here,” she says, “is worth more than anything those Vikings are holding. If we can get this back to Sergei and Clay at Tamoanchan . . . Ben, we can make some real progress. Together with Alpha . . .”

I want to hug her, but I'm afraid it might be too much for me right now. Hell, I want to kiss her. While I was risking my life, and Rosie's, to get my ship back, she was risking hers to help save the human fucking race. And succeeding. Hell, I'd kiss Diego right now if I could. Then I get a flash of how he looked when we got him out.

“What went wrong?” I ask. “How did they get Diego?”

She shakes her head. Bites her lip again. “They were smarter than I thought,” she says. “I underestimated them. They had a working camera. Several, probably, rigged up in the lab. I was okay—I guess I'm in the habit of keeping wrapped up in places like that. But Diego . . . you know how big he is. And part of his face was showing. They tracked him down, a whole Valhalla force, and there wasn't anything he could do.

“He . . . he told me to run, and so I did.” She throws her arms up in frustration. “I didn't want to, but I knew I couldn't take them down. And they didn't know who I was. So I got away. They sent two people after me—they'd seen us together, after all, but I took them down and then kept moving. I planned on tracking Diego down and then rescuing him.”

“Which is what you were trying to do when I ran into you,” I say.

She nods. “That's about it.”

Miranda's head drops, and I move forward and rub her arms, once again ignoring the pain at the movement. “What's the matter?” I ask.

“It's my fault,” she said. “What happened to Diego. What's happening to Tamoanchan. I was the one who convinced him to go into that lab. I was the one who missed the cameras.”

I pull her toward me then and hold her in my arms. With my good arm I stroke her hair. “It's not your fault,” I say softly. “It's not your fault at all. It's mine. I was the one who brought us here. I was the one who convinced Diego to come in the first place. I wanted my ship and I didn't think about anything other than that. And now people are paying for that.”

She pushes back from me, looks up into my eyes. “Diego made a choice to listen to you.”

I shake my head. “I pushed him. And I took advantage of the shit he was in. Because of me. I didn't even know what he was going through back there, and yet it all worked to my advantage.”

“You got him out,” she says, but even she doesn't seem convinced.