Revolution World (26 page)

"Great. I will try to get over there as soon as I can," Clio replied.

"I can come get you if you want," Jason offered.

"No, Seth will give me a ride," she said, looking to see Seth nod his assent as he continued restoring some security equipment.

"Is that guy still there? It's his fault those DARPA guys were at the Co-op to start with," grumbled Jason.

"It is not!" Clio hissed, dropping her voice and moving away from Seth.

"Why else would they bother you, if not because of him?" asked Jason. "Foreigners are bad news. I don't know why you are seeing him."

"Who I see is none of your business," she replied. "I'll be up to the hospital as soon as I can. Call me if there is any change, ok?" She ended the conversation and flicked off her handheld before he could go any further.

Seth gave her a hug. "After all I've done to help out with Revolution World, he still doesn't trust me?" he guessed. They had decided to refer to his involvement in Clio's rebellion as 'doing some consulting for the Revolution World game.' That way they could discuss it in public.

"He says DARPA attacked us to get to you," Clio replied, resting her head lightly on his shoulder.

Seth's expression sobered. "He may be right. Those DARPA guys are Class A Crazy and we have no idea why they targeted your office. I don't know what I've done to get them so focused on me either."

"Still, it's not your fault that this happened," she said, gesturing to the wreckage of her life's work.

Seth tightened his arms around her and wished they were someplace more private.

"Speaking of perpetual pains in the ass." Clio nodded towards the sight of Gloria striding through the crowd like the queen at a garden party.

"She's helping to organize the volunteers," Seth replied, pointing to the tables of food and beverages set up by the door. Gloria was directing a line of trucks waiting to take away equipment that couldn't be salvaged.

"She's just doing it to irritate me," Clio said sourly.

Seth adopted a mock-frustrated tone. "I can't bicker with you about my cousin right now." He grinned at her to show he was teasing.

Clio didn't think that was very funny. But right now she didn't think anything was very funny. She was about to go in search of medicine for her headache when Bob the Money Guy appeared at her elbow.

"Bob, you look much better," she said, welcoming a change in conversation. "I guess your nose isn't broken after all?"

"I need to talk to you," Bob said, ignoring her question. "It's important."

He led her into an empty lab, motioning for Seth and Joanna to follow.

"First off, if I had known what would happen, I would have come to you much earlier," he started. Then he went on to detail his meeting with Shiva and Medea earlier in the year.

"They tried to buy you off? While doing that, they told you that they had already bought off someone else in the company," Clio summarized to make sure she understood what he was saying.

"Why on earth didn't you tell us this before?" asked Joanna. "Just knowing Malsanto was behind that burglary would have been a huge help for us."

Bob hung his head. "Look, I know you probably suspected I was involved with the break-in. I figured that if I came to you with this story, you might think it was all made up to get you to stop suspecting me. I mean, it sounds fishy right? They said that whoever was helping them before couldn't do anything more for them, so I figured that meant they would give up. I told myself there was no sense getting everyone stirred up if the danger was past."

"But today it was DARPA," Seth pointed out. "How does knowing Malsanto was behind the raid months ago help us now?"

"This brings me to my second point," Bob said, pulling out his handheld. "Look at this. I went through the video files that those reporters shot, looking for anything that could help us."

He played some footage of the DARPA raid, and then skipped ahead. Clio involuntarily winced when they passed the part where her mother was shot. Bob zoomed in on soldiers throwing equipment and specimens into the vans. Then he stopped the tape and focused more tightly on one of the vans.

"Look who was waiting to get their sticky mitts on our stuff," he said, pointing to a grainy but distinct shot of Shiva and Medea sitting in one of the vans, grabbing what the soldiers brought.

"Ha! So this had nothing to do with me," crowed Seth.

"That is true, but not the main point here," said Clio, studying the image.

"Wow, if Malsanto and DARPA are working together, maybe my troubles with DARPA might actually be a result of your problems with Malsanto," Seth continued. "My problems are all your fault, not the other way around. I am so throwing that in Jason's face the next time I see the big jerk." He smiled at the idea of scoring a point off Jason.

Clio turned to look at Seth with astonishment. She couldn't believe he was smirking at her at a time like this. Her headache made her whole body throb. She didn't need him irritating the crap out of her right now.

"Seth, I think now is a good time for you to go. I'll finish up here and then head out to the hospital in Austin," she said icily. She pitched her voice so the others couldn't hear.

"Don't you want me to give you a ride to see your mother?" he asked, bewildered.

"No. What I want is for you to go away now," she said, turning away from him pointedly.

He stared at her for a long minute but she continued to ignore him. He left with a perplexed shake of his head.

After he left, Clio dropped her head into her hands. "Joanna, my head is killing me. Can you get me something to fix it? An aspirin? A hammer? Anything."

Opening the door, Joanna solved the problem with a wave of her hand to her underlings. "And I will give you a ride to the hospital myself," Joanna added. "I need a nice long car drive to clear my head and I won't be able to sleep until I see your mother with my own two eyes. When I think how close we came today to getting thrown in one of those awful prisons or shot in the road like dogs." She shuddered and left the room.

Much later, Clio sat in the lounge at the hospital. It was like all hospital lounges. Old sofas, stale coffee and the smell of despair soaked into the carpet. She flicked through the channels on the wallscreen. On the news, she recognized the Texas governor, his face almost purple with rage.

"We demand to know why the military attempted to kidnap Texas citizens earlier today," he cried. "Reports indicate that the military invasion of a small business caused massive unnecessary damage. This damage is not just to the business itself but also to the local community. We demand reparations be made. If the government if going to act like a natural disaster, they should help our citizens recover from their onslaughts. Just like they would after a hurricane."

Clio was glad she had voted for this man. She hoped that his obviously elevated blood pressure did not keep him from continuing to be governor for at least a few more years. He was getting older, after all.

The news screen split to show the Texas governor and the Admiral in charge of the United States armed forces.

"How dare you demand anything from your country?" the admiral fired at the governor. "My reports indicate that our troops were performing an important security maneuver when they were accosted by an armed mob. Some reports indicate that this was some kind of local militia. A local militia setting itself up against the United States military? That's another name for terrorists, mister."

A vein in the governor's forehead began throbbing. "People simply try to defend themselves from military tactics that Cold War Era communists wouldn't sink to and you label them terrorists? Your troops shot an unarmed woman in front of her daughter."

The admiral blustered. "She was resisting arrest. And anyway, that woman is apparently going to live."

The wallscreen cut to images of the destroyed lab. There were a few clips of witnesses shouting angrily before it cut back to the governor.

"Your troops didn't have a warrant. When they were asked for a warrant, they responded by breaking a man's nose and causing another woman injuries that required stitches. How could she resist arrest if there was no warrant?" the governor asked. His voice had become monotone.

It was as if he knew, and wanted everyone watching to know, that there was no point in talking to the admiral. The admiral was beyond listening. But still the governor tried. "Your troops did not alert the local police to their presence. The police assumed that your troops were a terrorist group and further bloodshed was only narrowly avoided."

Close-ups of Joanna and Bob, before they had been cleaned and stitched up, replaced the governor's image. It was not pretty. Jason came in and sat next to her, watching the wallscreen. He had brought coffee and some donuts. He passed her the chocolate ones because he knew she liked those best. When she sipped her coffee, she found he had already added cream, just the way she liked.

"The United States military is doing what it must to protect itself. I mean, to protect the nation," the admiral was saying. "There will be no reparations paid to those who get in our way. Furthermore, armed citizens prevented us from doing our jobs. We have allowed Texas to have their lax gun controls laws long enough. There will be stricter laws coming soon. Texans cannot keep arming themselves against their government."

"That's not for you to decide," shouted the governor, losing his temper. The wallscreen began replaying the footage of Harmony's shooting again. Even though she knew her mom was doing better, she didn't want to see that again if she could help it. She switched the screen off.

"The doctors say she can go home tomorrow," Jason told her. She was so happy to hear it that she impulsively hugged him. He held her a little too close and a little too long for friends.

She pulled away and studied him. They had a lot of history, she and Jason. Whatever else their relationship had been, being with Jason had been easy. At least, it was easy in the sense that her family had not objected and their dates were not interrupted by military attack or mutant outbreaks. Their relationship had not been punctuated by long pauses brought about by monumental miscommunication.

On the other hand, she remembered feeling slightly uncomfortable all the time. She would never have dozed with her head in Jason's lap. She had never been able to relax that much around him. And she always felt like they were so alike that they kept running out of things to say. She never felt that way around Seth.

With Seth she never ran out of things to say and she always felt comfortable telling him anything. Maybe a little too comfortable, she thought ruefully. Looking back, she couldn't believe she told him all about the resistance the way she did.

She sighed and shook her head. Why does all this romantic stuff have to be so difficult? Surely there are better ways to ensure the survival of the species?

Clio smiled to herself. This is the sort of existential nonsense that you always end up pondering in hospital waiting rooms and on long car trips. It never seems to change anything. She patted Jason on the arm and left to go check on Kalliope. Her sister was still stubbornly guarding Harmony's door. She had repelled the advances of several nurses and attendants who might have otherwise disrupted their mother's sleep.

After intense negotiations, Kalliope had allowed Max to sit inside with Harmony. Clio wondered what Max had promised Kalliope. His first-born child? Canada? At any rate, he had been sitting there, still as a statue, for hours.

When she got to the room, Clio found Kalliope snoring. Clio tucked a thin blanket around her sister and sat down on the floor next to her. Her mind wandered over her lab, the events of the day, and what tomorrow would be like. She found she couldn't deal with problems that large and instead focused on whether there was anything in her fridge that would spoil and where she might find a toothbrush. It was going to be a long night. They all seemed to be lately.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

G
loria stormed into Seth's private room to find him moodily constructing rotating lightform sculptures. "Oh, that's pretty," she said, momentarily distracted from her righteous indignation. She recalled herself. "So, what have you discovered from that girlfriend of yours? Had she started any research into ZFD? Did DARPA steal any of it? Will the American government be coming to kidnap us all for experiments?"

Seth balled his hands into fists, but did not look away from his handheld. He forced himself to relax. "I have checked my data logs," he said patiently. "She started some preliminary studies, but nothing that would catch the eye of the government. And, as I have told you several times now, DARPA didn't get any of their data. That's because when I secure a network, it stays secure."

"I would never doubt you," Gloria replied. "But what did Clio say about it?"

Seth blew out a breath, and turned to look Gloria in the eye. "I don't know. I haven't talked to her since her lab was raided."

Gloria perked up. "Really? But that was almost two weeks ago. What happened? Did you two break it off?" Max walked in and overheard this last part. Gloria scowled at him. Every time she came to find Seth for a little private conversation lately, Max appeared. She found it disconcerting.

"You should call her," Max said as he made himself comfortable on Seth's couch.

Seth turned back to his sculpture, tweaking the colors to get a more realistic hologram of a fluffy little dog. "The last time I saw her, she told me to go away. As a gentleman, I complied with her request. I feel it only courteous to wait until she initiates contact. I don't want to burden her with my company if she does not want it." That sounded good, he thought. It should. Seth had practiced that little speech a hundred times in his head.

Max laughed. "It sounds good, but a little too stuffy. You'll want to phrase it less bitterly when you talk to Clio." Seth gave him a dirty look. Sometimes he wished his uncle didn't know him so well.

"Why are your making a hologram of such a repulsive little dog?" asked Gloria. Dimly realizing that what she just said was insulting, she added, "It's a beautiful sculpture though."