Glitch (26 page)

She sat up, banged the drone’s head on a piece of broken lumber. “Awesome.”

He squatted in front of her in a space between a portion of the fallen roof. Dust and debris still floated in the air, a definite fire hazard. Of course, her brother’s illegal constructed representation didn’t seem to care. In fact, he looked at her with curiosity, as if the two of them might spend an hour catching up.

“You should definitely get out of here,” he said. “But before you go ...” He looked around, as if unsure whether someone were watching or not. “No matter what happens between us, tell Mom and Dad I wish I were with them. I wish I were free.” He looked behind his shoulder. “They make me ... do things.” He edged away. “Just remember that ... if I were free ... I could be myself.” He disappeared.

She pushed at a canted crossbeam for space. She kicked aside a broken chair before climbing up through the rubble. Whatever method Jonen had used, worked; she had total system control.

The entire brick house had come down into a huge pile of shattered wood, stone, drywall, and furniture.
 

“Wow,” she said, and heard its electronic voice. “Dad’s got chops.”

She exited the house with a single leap. She landed in the soft sward of a cut lawn littered with debris. She trotted toward a tree-line not far away and the darkness beyond it. There was no sensation like you’d get from pressure on the ground, but she could sense the world around her in a number of interesting ways. She imagined this was what it was like for Wally in his mech.

She arrived in the shelter of darkness as she heard a loud horn. She heard others respond, each with a distinct, plaintive sound. The tone changed to anger, and aggression. They wanted her.

She began to mumble her mantra of calming, and without even knowing it she began her steps of summoning, the drone mimicking them.

* * *

Agent Cliff Nable struggled to move, not far away, halfway down a gravel drive that pushed through brush running away toward the main road. The cydrones’ alarms awoke him. He cried in agony when he realized both legs weren’t working. His shades had blown off. He cursed for not having had them grafted to his head; he still had access to his metaverse and his AIs, but everything was scrambled.

Broken legs ...
and one arm wasn’t working right, which meant at least a dislocation. He tried to breathe. A stabbing pain meant he’d broken ribs. He wondered if he were hemorrhaging. The data wasn’t showing yet. He lay his head down and spit blood. He’d bitten the tip of his tongue off. His automated release of painkillers was already calming him.

He could see a cloud of dust where the house had been. A quiet rage settled on him as he considered the fact of Skippard Wellborn’s existence. For years the Consortium had been working with the Rogues to capture him, each contest another step toward his obliteration. Some of them (Cliff, in particular) wanted to know his secrets because Skippard had many—his ghosting process, for one—and, as he’d proved today, how to blow a house apart.

At every step, Skippard had eluded final capture. Something about the contests made Cliff wary. It was as if Skippard didn’t mind losing.

That thought infuriated Cliff enough that he shifted his weight and cried out. A shooting pain in his back made itself known. It forced all the other pains to subside like minor players in the major drama taking place in his body. He forced the automated systems that controlled his pain receptors to do their work. He was stabilizing, and (he hoped) out of mortal danger.

With his good hand, he fingered the device he kept hidden in a jacket pocket. It was his last resort,
the
last resort of any full cyagent who needed immediate help. It meant his partial death, but he would be a cyborg for however long he wanted, and he would be powerful.

He had never done it before.

He looked at the cylinder that comprised enough high-end technology that many organizations, institutions, nations would kill to have it. Worthless, if someone stole it. If anyone touched the device but him, it would defabricate in a minute. Just having it out made him feel better. It helped him visualize the powerful nanosystems that imbued his body. He was confident he wouldn’t have to use it, not if he could just lay here and wait for the authorities.

If Skippard and his people arrived first and began digging Simone out ...

“Fuck it,” Cliff said. He shut his eyes, and a smile stretched across his face, as if he were a martyr in the making. He lay there in the middle of the drive, maybe someone who might have fallen down drunk. He was a small man, he’d admit, not impressive at all. He’d been given an intellect package, but had never shown the promise of the top Transhuman agents, beyond his ability to Interface. He also hadn’t shown any of the defects. He was average, and he’d tell you he hated it …

His thumb moved over the device, and he triggered it.
 

A
boom
like a jet fighter breaking the sound barrier echoed across the fields. Twin geysers of blue energy shot out of the device and into the ground. They widened and covered Cliff, and for a second a rictus appeared on his face, as if he were being electrocuted.

His eyes widened and looked like they might pop out of his head. His hair stood on end for a second. The nanobots in his body, arranged in well-coordinated battalions, all went to work at once, as the energy from matter in the ground became their fuel.

In seconds, a depression sank into the drive, and Cliff Nable began to melt away.

* * *

Simone heard the sonic boom and saw the eruption of energy, but the land dipped into a hollow, and she couldn’t see the source.

She had enough control of her drone to move as if she were a child trying to walk in an adult’s shoes. Already, she had cleared enough space under the trees to perform. A ring of battened-down wild grass marked the spot of her psy-kata steps. She had no idea why she was doing this, or if it would even work. She had already summoned once today. Her entity might be exhausted. Besides, she was enslaved in a machine! The physical dance was just a way to channel the movements in one’s mind. She had yet to master a purely mental psy-kata, as her mother had. Right now, she needed a little more space.

She continued to mumble her mantra and perform her dance. She focused on the destroyed house and what might be coming from that area. If she saw movement, she would finish, and fight.

She wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw a shape moving across a far field. She paused for a second to look closer. Her cydrone’s optics zoomed with bright green infrared and she saw a cymech moving toward her.

She finished her summoning.

Supertrans returned with gleeful laughter in her ear.
 

The other times she’d summoned, the sensation was of expansion. Her body and mind just grew. The thing that came gave her a new longing for a body. Each time the desire was to move, to feel, to be. In the arena, an inexorable impetus to pounce overcame her, and she had, even though she hadn’t given the command. She had been along for the ride. As if her entity were a well-trained pet that did what it was supposed to at the right time—except she was feeling its emotions and tagging along with it. Its desires became hers.

When the expansion happened inside the drone, after a few seconds, maybe a half minute, the machine expanded as her entity tried to push all the way through it. She heard Supertrans’ far-off roar, as if it echoed through time and space. The creaking and bending stopped. Her cydrone had morphed into Supertrans.

She forced it to take a step forward. What emerged out of the woods was nothing like what ran into it. The cydrone was larger, but organic looking. The hard lines had disappeared, and were now textured, almost like stippled skin over a machine that now looked alive. It paused at the edge of a gully that separated the trees from a fallow field. It looked across the field. Inside, somewhere, Simone wondered what had happened. The machine-organism that she’d summoned raised its limbs as if it were stretching them.

It ran forward to meet what was coming.

Simone hadn’t given the command.

Supertrans had taken over.

She imagined herself sitting in a bouncing chair, maybe strapped down with a seat belt and safety harness, like you would on a roller coaster. She had access to its systems, but only to monitor. She could assert herself, but the effort would take so much energy to fight through both the system AI and her entity. Better to let Supertrans take charge.

She shut her eyes when she saw the first blast of light. A brushed metal Consortium cymech had opened fire! The rocking impact jarred her; it would have killed her if she’d had a body. She mumbled her mantras, kept her eyes shut, and tried to brace for the next impact. The physical forces were all in her mind, she told herself. They couldn’t hurt her.

She heard Supertrans yelling its war cries. When it leapt, she managed a glimpse and saw they were at least forty feet in the air, now falling, and about to pounce on the enemy cymech, which looked up ...

Cliff!

* * *

“Movement, nine o’clock, everyone,” the Consortium Blackhawk pilot yelled over his shoulder.

Even with the door opened, everyone heard and looked.

They watched two mean-looking cybernetic machines tearing up the ground in the middle of an empty field. These weren’t the big ones, of course. Hutto pointed. Yancey and Rigon both watched through their shades, and both received the data quick enough to know what was happening: a Consortium cyagent had triggered his mech-device. They glanced at each other, both realizing that was Cliff’s signature. They would have to wait to be certain. But the other drone ...

“That’s Simone!” Rigon yelled, just as the alien-looking drone ripped one of Cliff’s arms off. The two of them rolled across the field with such speed they looked like two lovers merging into one.

Yancey, scrolling through her HUD’s reading of the critical data below, just as her son was doing, could see that Simone’s cydrone had been morphed by her entity. “She summoned inside!”

The Blackhawk circled away from the conflict to find a safe landing zone.

Yancey jumped out first. Nisson and Hutto grabbed Rigon’s chair, but she was already running as fast as she could. He’d be able to catch her in his chair, and beat her there. She didn’t have much strength left. But she ran, as only a mother could run.

When she gained a crest and saw the driveway with the large hole in the ground, its heat signature off the charts, she realized Cliff had triggered there. She no longer saw movement in the far field.

She crossed the drive, huffing, and began to sprint again, just as she heard Rigon’s tank chair launch itself over the crest. It landed with a
thud
but kept coming. Nisson and Hutto sprinted behind.

Yancey cursed her weakness. But she ignored the pain in her lungs and continued to mumble her mantra. As she ran she moved through the steps ... in her mind.

Simone’s slaved cydrone, now controlled by her entity, sat atop the wreckage of the cyborg mech like some metal bird of prey. Yancey saw Skippard a few feet from the wreckage. He raised a hand to keep Rigon and the others back. Yancey slowed, sucking air, her lungs on fire.

“Skippard!” she yelled.

* * *

The steaming pile of hissing metal that had once been Cliff Nable looked no more recognizable than a pile of scrap. It represented the Consortium’s best technical effort to mimic the Alter’s summoning capabilities. A few shorting electrical units sparked, and the distinct smell of servo fluid filled the air. The titanium carapace of Cliff’s machine was rent open as if some treasure had once existed inside. Skippard couldn’t help but think the strange-looking creature sitting atop it had been digging for the sweet meats, maybe a cybernetic liver.

Skippard kept his distance. The morphed cydrone watched him. It sat on its haunches, as if it were resting, but had enough energy left to launch itself into the clouds. He’d seen it fly through the air and pounce. He’d watched it destroy Cliff Nable’s cymech. Like a proud papa, he’d kept his distance until it was ready for him to approach.

Rigon’s chair stopped next to Skippard. “She’s in there, Dad.”

“Yep.”

“Shit.”

“Yep.”

“How do we get her out?”

“I’m working on that.”

Skippard glanced at his son, who’d sacrificed his body just as Cliff had. Skippard tried not to show his distain. Rigon had been the only one of them to turn his back on the mysterious power of the entities he had inside him. He had never let it flourish. Instead, he had fueled all his energies into metal gears, silicon brains, and electrical circuits—all because Jonen had been so promising as an Alter, but had failed to survive.

Skippard looked over at the form of his resurrected son, Jonen, across the field. He’d seen him there, watching the confrontation, just as Skippard had watched. Skippard had wanted to speak to him again to better assess how much of him was there. Did it matter? No, because enough of Jonen’s personality was there, even if he were a possession of the Rogues. That meant he was being used.

The other cydrone Ghost Hunters appeared behind Jonen. They looked at Skippard instead of the wreckage.

“Is that Jonen?” Rigon asked.

“It is ... with four RAI Ghost Hunters.”

“Dad, you have to get out of here. What if more start dropping in?”

Both of them looked at the sky, knowing that if a fabricator had been placed in this area, an incursion could begin at any moment. Or, if the Rogues were deep enough in the Consortium, commandos and their armor units could start parachuting in.

“All we have now is the glad arena,” Skippard said. “The Rogues have penetrated Realspace and the Consortium, and it’ll only be a matter of time before everyone is forced to bend the knee.”

Rigon said nothing.

Yancey hadn’t moved. She was also starting at Jonen. “Skippard ...”

“Part of him is there,” Skippard said, “but he’s one of them … for now.”

“What have you done to our son? And our daughter?”