Fear the Survivors (8 page)
The two women set to. They needed a plan. Not just to develop individual systems, but to encompass how they are going to be able to escalate their abilities. A plan to help them capitalize on their new source of knowledge. Birgit’s and Madeline’s imaginations were wide open as their talk turned to how to protect themselves, and the world, from the boundless experiments they knew they must soon undertake.
Talk of containment. Talk of remote, uninhabited locales where potential collateral damage might be limited. Experiments that expanded out past humanity’s known boundaries into fantastic new avenues. Madeline and Birgit talked of the only place that they could conceive of where they could truly stretch the legs of the fabulous new creatures they had to breed, and so it was not long before their unleashed imaginations took their sights skyward, into the vacuum.
Chapter 9
: Street Fighters
They rode in the car together, itself a strange sensation. John drove. He had downloaded
the detailed information coming in about the whereabouts of Ayala and her team, along with the reports on the activities of their target.
The two Agents could share information in ways hard to conceive of. When they were in close proximity, their onboard subspace tweeters were able to communicate directly and instantaneously with each other, tiny hammers in their brains thrumming the fabric of space, sending out minuscule vibrations that instantly reached anywhere in their radius. Their range was linked directly to the power of their internal hammers, and the Agents had a range of almost a mile. Since they had been within range of each other, John had communicated a lengthy and exhaustive account of what had happened in the last weeks directly into Lord Mantil’s own memory.
In return, John had felt a surge of information from Lord Mantil. He saw the launch of the missiles in Pakistan, he saw the death of Preeti Parikh, and he felt the speed and devastation of the battle that ended with the searing laser bolt into Jean-Paul Merard’s brain. When they were done, Lord Mantil knew all that John knew, and John knew all that Lord Mantil knew. Not in terms of access to files, but in terms of knowledge as accessible and known as the most vivid of memories. The two men were up to date.
Once they were on the same page, Lord Mantil considered the reports of Agent Raz Shellet’s movements and, like John had before him, he saw that they were calm and calculated, the actions of an aspiring terrorist. From her pattern of purchases, she was clearly constructing an arsenal, and a considerable one at that. Primitive but brutal bombs appeared to be her staple, but no doubt she was using some of the more exotic materials she was managing to get her hands on to create more complex devices. Lengths of copper wire and amounts of substrate, old computer chips from calculators and defunct PCs, spoke of homemade computing machines that may be used for any number of projects. Detonators perhaps. Monitoring devices. They could not know. But it was clear that she was not being idle. What her intended targets were was pure conjecture, and maybe she was merely preparing herself so that she could respond to what humanity, and its new allies, would do next.
How she had been getting hold of her raw materials had been a mystery at first. But it had not taken long for the experienced if cautious team tracking her to discover her clandestine sources. She was prostituting herself to several local men of varying prominence and power. Each was giving her different parts of the list of ingredients she sought, both in terms of money and access. All seemed ignorant of her destructive intentions. Certainly they were unaware of who her ire was aimed at, for even if they had managed to surmise that she was using them to enable an unparalleled campaign of terrorism, they would naturally have assumed it was against the usurping Israeli state that they all lived in the shadow of.
As they drove the final miles to Ayala’s position, John considered a completely unrelated question that had been bothering him. In Mobiliei society it was normal, as it was here, for someone to have a given name and a family or clan name. For Lord Mantil, that family name was one of tremendous age. The name of the heir to the Protectorate of Hamprect, the highest office other than king in his country. But it was not a name. Its owner took it as his name when the title became his, and often the memory of his original name faded with time. His inner circle still knew it, no doubt, but outside of that, such things were taboo, the most vulgar of conceit to even discuss.
But John Hunt and Lord Mantil shared a danger and ideological solidarity that brought them far closer than any inner circle Agent Hunt had ever known, and if Agent Shahim Al Khazar had decided that his Agent’s name was tainted by its bloody cause, then John felt a desire to know what name he might call his brother in arms in its place.
Deciding that the subject was too delicate to discuss over their open link, John spoke out loud, “Lord Mantil. May I ask you a question?”
The other Agent turned in surprise, and John felt a system’s query ping in his subconscious to check that their link was still active.
“I did not want to use subspace to ask this.” John said.
John paused a moment, deciding whether this was really appropriate, and then went forward. Lord Mantil had proven many things to John over the months since his violent conversion, not least of which was that he was, above all, reasonable.
“I certainly do not want to broach any protocols, or make you feel uncomfortable, Lord Mantil, so please do not feel any pressure to answer this if it makes you feel in the slightest bit uneasy …”
“Quavoce-Annat,” said Lord Mantil.
John’s eyes left the road for a moment, and he looked confusedly at his sometime friend.
“My name,” said Lord Mantil. The phonetic and local spellings appeared via the link in John’s mind: kwa- vōs, ən-ət.
“Quavoce-Annat.” said John.
“Quavoce. My family calls me Quavoce.” and after a pause, Lord Mantil continued, “In truth, I miss hearing it. If it would not make you uncomfortable, I would be honored if you would refer to me by it, when we are not in company.”
John restrained a friendly laugh at the noble’s polite manner, a laugh that the real him would have found impossible to contain. But the Agents’ control over their bodies was absolute, and he remained politely grave as he replied, “I would be honored to, Quavoce, and I would be equally honored if you would call me by my real name.”
“A pleasure. Shtat-Palpatam? It is an unusual name,” Quavoce went on, calling up the name of the man he had met at the ceremony where their personalities were downloaded.
But John shook his head, smiling.
“No, no, my friend. A traitor to the cause would never have passed the plethora of mental tests and probes that you all underwent in the lengthy approval process the nominees all had to endure. No, I could not have gotten past those exams, my real purpose would have shown up like a beacon. I was implanted at the last minute. When the transfer was being completed, I was one of the men operating the port into the Nomadi nominee’s mind, only our link was not as it seemed, and my personality instead of his was implanted, along with a virus that allowed me to fake my way through the final confirmations that followed.”
As John Hunt spoke, a thought struck Quavoce. A terrible thought. And as John went to tell Lord Mantil his real name, Lord Mantil spoke and signaled John at the same time, shouting:
John fell mute, shocked, and Quavoce went on more calmly, “I had assumed you were Shtat. But this, this changes everything. I must ask you to not to tell me your real name.”
John sent a mental query at Quavoce who went on, “John, I do not know where the real you
is
right now, whether it is back on Mobiliei or with the Armada, but the real Lord Quavoce Mantil deshamer Annat rides aboard the fleet that is even now descending upon us, Representative to the Council and the Captain of the Mantilatchi fleet contingent. If they manage to get close enough in the coming war, the AIs aboard his … or rather
my
capital ship will begin probing the earth for signs of my mind in the hope of reestablishing contact and updating the link between my real mind and the copy that inhabits this body.”
John nodded and pinged his understanding but Quavoce went on, “It is strange to imagine, but we must remember that it is only this version of me that has undergone the fundamental change in ideology that has brought us together since we were all downloaded back on Mobilius.”
The reality of the divide that Lord Mantil faced hit John for first time. John had known at the time of his transference to this body that he stood firmly against the invasion. When his two minds met again they would be exchanging only memories. But Quavoce would be exchanging two opposing sides of a war, a war that would then rage within himself, and it would be like two enemies uniting in one mind.
Lord Mantil went on, quietly, his machine body expressing freely the reticence he felt, “I now stand on the opposite side of a chasm from the
real
me. We cannot know how the coming war is going to play out. I am sure you have plans, a set of strategies that you know each version of you will try to accomplish, but we both know there is a very real chance we will fail here.
“If we do, then at some time in the not-too-distant future the real me will stand in orbit over this planet and upload the memories that now make me who I am. Maybe they will overpower me, maybe I will come to the same conclusions that this copy of me has. But if I don’t, then the less I know about the identities of you and your fellow conspirators the better.”
They both contemplated that, and then Quavoce finished, “It would be a cruel fate indeed if your trust in me ended in me being your executioner.”
Quiet descended as this enigma hung over them. John had prepared himself for the fact that either this copy of himself or the real him may die in the coming war. He had even known that it may be both, or worse, that this more hardy copy may outlive the real him. But that he may form friendships with his enemy had been beyond him. The real Quavoce Mantil may kill the real him in battle. He and the other members of the resistance may kill Quavoce, they may have already, back aboard the Armada, if the opportunity has presented itself.
After a moment, John nodded and said, “Thank you, Quavoce. You are right, of course. And your desire to protect me, even from yourself, is yet another sign of what an honorable man you truly are. I would like to believe that the real you will come to the same conclusions that this version of you has. But you are right, unfortunately, when you say that we cannot know that for certain. He won’t have seen what you have, won’t have lived through what you have, and will have had ten more years among our Mobiliei brethren than you and I have.”
There was silence for a long time. They were trying to reconcile the concept that at this moment they were both the closest of allies, and the very worst of enemies, sworn to both save each other, and kill each other.
They drove on into the night.
After a long while, John said, “When I was a child my mother called me Batim. It is not my real name, of course, but in many ways it is just as much my name as the one my parents gave me before they actually knew what a troublemaker I was. You could call me that, if you wish.”
Quavoce appeared relieved at this gesture of friendship, his infrequent but genuine smile spreading across his face once more. “Batim? The swamp rat?” A chuckle escaped Quavoce’s lips, “What a wonderful child you must have been to earn such a name.”
John … Batim, laughed, “One would like to think she was being ironic …” Quavoce shot a doubting glance at John who smirked in reply, “Yes … well … like I said, one would
like
to think that.”
They were approaching the center of Gaza City, and John slowed as the muddiness of the evening traffic clogged the roads around them. But they would not drive all the way to their destination anyway.
Abandoning the car that they had been given by a contact in Tel Aviv, they walked the final quarter of a mile in silence. Side by side, they were a walking army. Their legs moving in unison as they passed, unnoticed, through the scarred streets of Gaza at night. John had tainted his skin to give himself a darkness that went some way toward disguising his systemically British look. He could not do much more. They were not designed to be shape shifters, but he used his malleable facial muscles to tighten his jawline, giving it an angularity, and to sharpen his nose a little to give his face something of the strength of the local Arabic complexion.
Their feet moved in unison, not in a march, but in the quiet agreement of two old friends walking in step. Each of those feet that could propel them farther and faster than any of the passing locals could have imagined.
Their hands were tucked into their jacket pockets against the forgiving and imperceptibly cool Mediterranean evening. Hands that could so easily wrench apart any of the fragile bodies of the innocent and ignorant that they encountered in the night.
And as they walked, their eyes stayed always on the path ahead, but they missed nothing. Eyes hiding their most lethal secrets. Eyes that had locked on each other in battle only months beforehand. Eyes that now faced an uncertain future, but did so together, as they went to confront one of the Agents they had betrayed.
They both noted one of Ayala’s team in his spot down the road from Raz’s building. They would not have seen him there but for the fact that his reports had told them indirectly of his position relative to Raz. He was well hidden and appropriately subtle, they each thought in unison. A fact that had no doubt saved his life. They did not feel the need to point these things out to each other, knowing like identical twins exactly what each could and could not see. They just walked on, another block and then a turn into a faceless, rundown apartment building. They did not glance at the building they knew was Raz’s. They would be visiting her soon enough. It would not be a pleasant reunion.
- - -
Across the globe, America was still writhing from the pain of the radioactive wound it had suffered. Twisting and turning in discomfort as it got used to the deep gash that was driving up through eastern Georgia. People moved away in massive waves like concentric circles, either bouncing off or washing into the swelling cities inland from the radioactive coast. Millions were uprooted, and the economy bled in response. The emergency funds of the wealthiest nation on earth pumped through its veins to dull the pain of the unprecedented upheaval.