Seed (35 page)

“You used white skin, Doc,” she croaked. Her mouth didn’t work right. She gingerly touched a fingertip to her face. Felt Nu Skin where her lips used to be. The doc shrugged.

“All we had. It’ll be easy to transplant once we get a hold of something that matches. In the meantime it’ll keep out infection and speed up the healing.” He moved to the foot of her bed, lifted a medical chart hung there and bit his lip while he perused it. His brown eyes exuding preternatural calm as he regarded her.

“Got yourself pretty messed up,” he said.

“That your professional opinion, Doc?”

The ghost of a smile passed over the kid’s face. His eyes flicked to the chart. He listed her injuries as though they were a logistics inventory. Second and third degree burns along the left side of her torso, over her left shoulder and arm, over the left side of her face. Heavy bruising, pretty much everywhere. She was one big hematoma. Four deep puncture wounds through her left pectoral muscle, just below the clavicle.

“Rehab for that one’s a bitch,” he informed her, then his eyebrows arched severely. “Things could be worse. Nothing’s broken.” Doss rolled her head feebly towards Jake. He breathed deep and slow, his face serene.

“What’s with him?”

“Concussion, as far as I can tell. He’s been out since you brought him in. Seems fine, otherwise.”

“He saved me,” Doss remembered. “He held me on the ground. He piled bodies on top of us.” Her voice trailed off as memories of the assault came to her. She stared up into a bank of fluorescents overhead, suddenly afraid to look at the baby doc. “Anybody else make it?”

“Outside of your sergeant’s troop…No. From the first three chalks, just you two and some migrant kid. Not one of ours. Nobody survived the crash.” Doss closed her eyes, swallowed hard.

“How long’s it been?” she asked. “Since we came in?”

“Three days.”

“Shit.”

“I had to keep you under while the skin grafts took.”

Doss said nothing. For a time her thoughts took the form of the people she’d failed. Rippert. Gomez. Fiorivani. Her father. The young Rangers.

Emerson.

This last caused her chest to constrict. Grief welled up in her. She sobbed, once. It brought pain. Pain made her clear.

“The Tet,” she remembered. The doc nodded.

“The sergeant had me acquire samples from all the crops in the area. I ran them through a sequencer looking for any obvious anomalies.”

“And?”

“At first, nothing. But the sergeant said we were looking for the Tet. So I took a blood sample from a migrant kid who had it, and ran that through the same program. I found this.” The doc pulled a flexpad from his hip pocket, unfolded it, tabbed through several windows. He held it close to Doss’ nose. A double helix rotated on the screen.

“The Tet?”

The doc nodded. “It’s a mutation. I ran the crop samples again, this time looking specifically for this combination.” He folded the flexpad and replaced it in his pocket. “There were no anomalies in the first run because the Tet was the baseline.” His small face looked grave, and far older than eleven. “It was in all the samples.”

“So it does come from Satori.”

“I don’t see where else it would come from.”

“And it’s in all the crops.”

“Everything around here.”

Doss exhaled between lips that didn’t feel like her own. “Get me up and functional, Doc. I need to get on the horn with D.C.” The doc didn’t move. Doss eyed him. “That’s an order, Corporal.” The scar on his forehead rose in a way that gave him a philosophical air.

“Thing about medical conditions,” he said, “is they don’t really care about orders.” Doss tried to sit up, and failed. Pain crashed down on her like a breaking wave.

“Make it happen,” she whispered. “Get me upright.” She pulled tape off one hand with the skin-grafted fingers of the other, revealing the multiple IV insertions. She pulled at these. “Now.” The doc stepped forward, placed his child’s hand over the IVs, looked into Doss’ face.

“I’ll see what I can do.” He looked scared now, the way he’d been scared of the dark when Doss’d first met him. He placed his other hand against her chest and eased her back against the bed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

….

“Colonel Doss,” Rippert had ordered, “you are relieved of duty.”

Doss perched at the edge of a metal folding chair in the little coms tomb buried somewhere deep beneath Riley’s tarmac. Its heat made her sweat; sweat made her itch. The doc had helped her don fatigue pants, but a loose hospital gown was all she could handle up top. Everything she touched with her grafted skin felt made of sandpaper and broken glass.

She stared at the sat radio’s LED: zeroes across the board. Rippert had cut the signal. Brick-sized speakers mounted high on the tomb’s wall issued static. The sound of the end of things.

“That sounded bad,” Chen observed. Tits framed his head as he watched Doss. A poster stuck to the concrete wall behind him, yellowed by age, faded lines barely more than pencil shadows. He crossed his feet atop a monolithic metal radio so ancient it had actual dials, big as turnips. “Isn’t the army supposed to give you a court martial or something before they start talking about a firing squad?”

Doss, drifting on morphine and static, stared at Chen’s sneakers. Old things, cocooned in duct tape and epoxy. She began to feel heavy, and pressed her forehead to the cool steel of her rolling IV stand, to which she was still attached by multiple tubes. Antibiotics and immune suppressants for the skin grafts, morphine for the pain.

“He lost both of his kids,” she said after a while. “One of them was my fault.”

“No.” Chen pushed long black hair back into a severe widows peak and pinned it there with his specs. “It’s Satori’s fault.”

“Maybe.” A disgrace, Rippert had called her. Doss couldn’t disagree. Chen watched her closely.

“You going to be okay?”

Doss absently traced the index finger of her good hand along the Nu Skin seam on her forearm. Hunted for the place in herself where normally she found resolve. Discovered instead only a hollowness, a sensation inside her belly like snow falling.

“Fine,” she said, and looked up at him. “I need you to get a line for me to someone in D.C. All I’ve got is a name.” Chen pursed his lips, rubbed his hands together.

“Sounds like a challenge. Who is it?”

….

Hours passed. Doss found herself alone in the cafeteria, haunted by the sense that she’d wandered. Paced the empty lengths of Riley’s dark halls, her IV stand rattling in tow. Her fork plowed furrows in a heap of mashed potatoes as she tabbed through the Satori files on her flexpad. Satori Corp’s four CEOs had taken up residence in Satori Tower. The Fathers. They lived directly under the dome’s center. The fact that this was important tried to press itself through the morphine haze.

Her flexpad beeped. A high-rez pic appeared in one corner. The version of Ellen Vokle that Doss had met during her mission brief—a grey face made ageless by restorative surgeries. It spoke.

“Agent Doss?” Doss blinked. Her spine straightened, a soldier’s reflex.

“Ma’am.”

“I understand you’ve been trying to reach me, Agent Doss.” In 2-D, Vokle looked like a doll, porcelain lips barely mobile. A black net, attached to an atavistic hat consisting entirely of the feathers of some tropical bird, hung over laser-sculpted eyebrows.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I also understand you should be back in our lovely capitol by now, being debriefed and sent on to your next assignment.” Something subtle shifted in her expression, and Doss understood Vokle to be glaring. “An assignment, I gather, that will involve body cleanup out on the fringe.” Again came an infinitesimal shift in her face. “You do look like you have seen the miles, Agent.”

“My mission isn’t finished, ma’am.”

“It is according to Rippert.”

Doss fought through the morphine gauze that filled her skull. She spoke slowly, precisely.

“General Rippert is a fine commander and good soldier, ma’am. But in my opinion he is too emotionally involved with this mission. His judgment is not sound.” She stared at the stiff mask of Vokle’s face. “There have been developments. Developments Rippert was too emotional to hear.” Vokle said nothing, just stared, blank, inanimate. Doss thought perhaps the sat feed had gone dead, left the woman’s face frozen on the flexpad’s screen. Then Vokle blinked.

Doss told her what the Designer had said. Told her about the Tet in Satori’s seed, about the results of the baby doc’s tests.

“It seems likely that all the crop seed Satori distributed this year is contaminated.” She waited, let the implications reverberate. “All of it, ma’am.”

Vokle’s eyes flicked upwards for a beat. She seemed to take a deep breath.

“That does sound like Bill Coach,” she admitted. A thin hand appeared, brought a glass of something to Vokle’s lips. They pursed stiffly, made little kissing sounds as she sipped. “I used to know him. A truly dreadful man. Do you know he once proposed mandatory work camps for those who couldn’t afford to pay for seed? So that they could make themselves useful, growing food for the rest of us. Concentration camps, Agent Doss. Just dreadful.”

Vokle looked away. Doss sensed movement as the woman concentrated on something outside the screen’s view. Old-school dub beats rose from her end of the feed. The woman’s feathered head bobbed to the rhythm.

“Ma’am,” Doss implored. “We need to take our people to the well. We need to take Satori.” Vokle looked at her.

“If we had resources for such an action, Agent Doss, we would have done it years ago. Being beholden to Satori was never something we wanted and never something we planned.” Vokle seemed to shrug, but only with her eyebrows. “It just happened that way.”

Her hand appeared again, this time with a cigarette. The screen went momentarily green with overexposure as she lit it with a silver lighter.

“We need to do it, ma’am,” Doss pressed. “Soon. Before the spring harvest.” Small Cheshire teeth hovered in Vokle’s face as she laughed, the humorless sound of pebbles grinding under surf.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. Her eyes drifted. “The oceans are a slow engine, Agent. The world will keep getting hotter for a long time to come. Things will not get better.” Her delicate hand raised the glass. Ice cubes clinked as she polished off the drink.

“You hold Rippert’s leash. Make it happen.”

“We all go.” Vokle’s eyes closed. Her head listed sadly back and forth to the rhythm of dub. She seemed inclined to say no more.

“Ma’am,” Doss said. “My partner. Agent Emerson. Is there any news?”

Vokle went still. Her face changed, looked genuinely sad. Her eyes opened, seemed reluctant to settled themselves on Doss, but finally did.

“I am truly sorry.”

….

“Lewis had our radios jammed, mos def.” Gomez held a can of chewing tobacco in one hand. With the other he picked at the scab of a sun sore on his shaved head. “Chen said the jammer was easy to find once he knew to look for it. Right up there on the radio tit.” He raised the can towards the nipple-like nub atop the zep hangar. “Blocked certain channels only. Let us talk to each other, just not with D.C.”

“Makes sense,” Doss figured. She sat on the tarmac at Gomez’s feet, huddled around the IV stand. She watched Lewis’ kids do tight marching drills up and down the airfield. The older kids had stepped in, assumed rank and preserved Lewis’ fetish for military order. To what end, Doss had no idea. Doubted they did either. She eyed Gomez’s dip. “Fuck did you find that?”

“I know people,” Gomez grinned. “With access to deep storage.”

“Shit’s probably older than you are.”

“Yep.” Gomez shook the can, whipping it expertly with a limp finger until it was packed, then opened it and offered it to Doss. She pressed her tongue to her burned lip, winced, shook her head. Gomez stuffed a thick pinch behind his own lip. His face turned sour. “Tastes about my age.” He cocked an eyebrow at Doss’ IV stand. “Maybe the doc can sort you some nicky through there.”

“Already got me on morphine.”

“So you in righteous condition to make decisions.”

“Righteous,” Doss agreed. She squinted south across the plains, where a massive wall cloud churned demonically fifteen or so miles south, luminescent in the late afternoon sun. A breeze wafted through her hospital gown, making the Nu Skin itch all over.

“I got on the horn with Rippert.”

“And?”

Doss said nothing, just turned her face up to the sun. Gomez spit black juice eloquently onto the tarmac.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Yep. Wants us back in D.C., pronto.”

“The doc tell you what he found?”

“He did.” Doss closed her eyes for a moment, let the sun paint her retinas red, then looked at Gomez. “If you were D.C., what would you do?”

“In my experience, what D.C. does and what needs to get done are never the same thing.” Gomez shoved the can of dip into a rear pocket and spoke without looking at Doss. “Know what I’d do if I was you.”

“Kick Satori in the balls.”

“Fucking A.”

A wave of pain rolled through Doss, epicentered at the wound in her chest. She thumbed the button on her morphine drip. The stuff exploded at the base of her skull, a soft orgasm to which she lost moments, her thoughts dissolving in the sublime glow of an internal sunrise. Her head grew heavy. She let it settle into her IV’d hand. Listened to the cadence of the marching children, the moan of far off winds growing violent.

“Fucked us up righteously, Gomez.”

“It was a fucked up situation,
Jefe
. Lewis buttfucked us with those Satori bitches. You hadn’t done what you did, they be prancing home right now with our balls between their teeth. Instead, they’re charred meat out there on the prairie, and a-fucking-men to that. No matter what D.C. says.”

Doss felt the cold lick of snowflakes against her patched skin. The young voices out on the tarmac warped under the fluctuating pressures of oncoming weather. Sounded like screams.

She saw the pit. Saw Alyosha. He grinned at her, teeth black with his own blood, eyes gleaming with revelation.
Sometimes our ideas feed us
, he’d told her, and held up fingers stripped of flesh.
And sometimes we feed them
.