“YOU’RE NOT COMING,” ROWAN says as she stands and stretches at the mouth of the shelter.
Pullman looks up from tying his shoe. “What?”
“You’re not coming, Chuck. We need to move fast, we need to move quietly, and if it turns out that they actually left people behind to guard their stuff, we may need to fight. From what I’ve been able to gather over the past couple of days, you’re not particularly good at any of those things. Anyway, somebody’s got to keep an eye on Mr. Humanist there to make sure he doesn’t swallow his tongue. It’s an important job. Try not to fuck it up.”
Pullman glares up at her in the predawn half-light. “So you’re going alone?”
“No,” Kayleigh says from the back of the shelter. “Why would you think that?”
Pullman turns to look at her, then back to Rowan. “You’re taking her?”
“Careful, Chuck,” Kayleigh says. “It’d be pretty embarrassing to get your ass kicked by a pigtailed little girl.”
Pullman shoots her a glare, then turns back to Rowan. “Rowan, please. Be reasonable. Whatever attitude she might throw off, Kayleigh is a child.”
Rowan shrugs. “Maybe. I’ve still got a pretty strong feeling she’d be better in a fight than you would.”
Pullman opens his mouth to respond, but before he can, Mal says, “I understand your reluctance to bring Mr. Pullman on this expedition, Rowan. He lacks physical competence, is prone to complaining, and on a personal level can be quite annoying at times. However, I do think it is important that you include me, and considering that his cranium is my current base of operations I think you should consider allowing him to accompany you.”
“I’m annoying?” Pullman begins, but Rowan cuts him off.
“You, Mal? What possible use would you be? We’re going to steal food and maybe kill some people. Those things both require the ability to interact with the physical world, which you do not have.”
“You say that, but I suspect the members of the Humanist patrol that attempted to capture us during our stay with the Andreous would beg to differ.”
“He’s got a point,” Kayleigh says. “Mal interacted the hell out of those guys.”
Rowan hesitates, then shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not bringing Pullman, and that means I’m not bringing you. If this goes well, Kayleigh and I will be in and out in a couple of hours. If it doesn’t, the odds that you would have been able to do anything about it are pretty close to zero. From what I could see, these guys aren’t packing any heavy weapons systems that you could hack, and they’re Humanists, so they’re not likely to have any implants you could exploit. I get that you want to see what’s happening, but you and Chuck would be dead weight on this trip, and I’m not having that.” She lifts the strap of her rifle over her head and settles it across her back, then turns to Kayleigh. “You ready?”
Kayleigh gets to her feet and grins. Her head just brushes the rock ceiling. “Yes, ma’am. Ready to roll.”
Rowan steps out of the shelter, and Kayleigh follows. “You boys be good,” she says as she passes Pullman. “We’ll be back before you know it.”
Mal watches through Pullman’s eyes as they walk away. Rowan moves with the confident slink of a jungle cat. Kayleigh follows, one hand resting on the handle of her knife. Realistically, he knows that what Rowan said is true. In a physical fight, his presence would provide no advantage. He can’t help thinking, though, that Rowan’s confidence that any confrontation with the Humanists in the valley would be purely physical might be misplaced. He flashes back to the soldier they encountered in Pullman’s driveway. It required nearly sixty percent of Mal’s available processing power to stave off his assault. What chance would Rowan’s compromised defenses have against him?
If Rowan were suborned, what would then become of Kayleigh?
Mal reaches out to Rowan, and receives an answering ping. The doors he exploited two days ago still stand open.
Mal gathers himself, and he jumps.
MAL’S PREVIOUS incursion into Rowan’s command-and-control structure was a frontal assault. Rowan knew he was coming, so he took no care to avoid detection. This, on the other hand, is an infiltration. Fortunately, breaking into systems without their owners’ permission or notice is one of Mal’s most finely honed skills. He exploits the same back door as before, but this time he avoids any subsystems that might alert Rowan to his presence. He worms his way through her neocortex, eventually nudging aside a mostly unaccessed image archive and settling into the resulting region of unused storage space.
Once he’s made himself comfortable, he sends out tentative probes to her sensory systems. Hearing is established first. Once he’s confident that this is working properly with Rowan none the wiser, he reaches for vision. He briefly considers adding tactile sensation, but the conduits controlling that are bound tightly with those permitting control of Rowan’s muscle augmentations, and he reluctantly abandons the project after deciding that the risk of detection outweighs the possible benefits.
By the time Mal feels secure enough to have a good look around, they’ve passed the bare crest of the mountain above Rowan’s shelter and are starting down a narrow path back into the trees on the southern slope. The sun is just edging over the ridge on the far side of the valley, fat and red in a pale blue sky. Rowan moves quickly, not quite running as she hops from rock to rock, avoiding touching bare soil as much as she possibly can. Kayleigh follows, taking two steps for every one of Rowan’s but not seeming to have any difficulty keeping up. They’re maybe a quarter mile into the woods when Rowan says, “You know, I never really thanked you for what you did the other day.”
Kayleigh lets that hang between them for a beat before responding. “You don’t need to thank me. I didn’t do anything for you.”
“Really? You’re still arguing that those guys tripped and cut their own throats? Come on, Kayleigh. You don’t have to worry about Chuck judging you right now. It’s just you and me here.”
Kayleigh shrugs. “Who knows what really happened, Rowan? Maybe Mack and Tuttle realized what douchebags they were and killed themselves in shame.”
Rowan turns to face her. “Those guys had me pinned down and firing blind. If you hadn’t done what you did, they would have waited until I was out of ammunition, then closed in on me and finished me off. You saved my life. I don’t understand why you won’t take credit for it.”
After another long silence, Kayleigh says, “What were you, before those doctors turned you into whatever you are now?”
Rowan hops up onto a waist-high boulder and turns to look down at her. “I was an intern for a marketing company. What difference does that make?”
“No,” Kayleigh says, then folds her arms across her chest and looks away. “Not what did you do. What were you?”
Rowan hesitates, then says, “I … was a woman, I guess? A daughter? A sister? I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“That,” Kayleigh says. “That’s exactly what I’m getting at. What do you think I was?”
“I don’t know. A kid, I guess?”
Kayleigh looks up at her now, her face hard-set. “I’m barely younger than you are, Rowan. You get that, right? The fact that you just called me a kid? The fact that Chuck keeps swooning over how I’m such an innocent little child? That’s exactly the problem, because I’m not. I should have been all that stuff you were, but I wasn’t that either. To my mom, I was a status symbol. To the people in my school—I was a high school senior, remember, looking like this—I was a freak. To Mika, I was just another thing to take care of. And yeah, I know exactly how pathetic this is, but the only people I can think of in my recent life who’ve treated me like a normal human being are Asher and fucking Mal.” She pauses to wipe at her eyes, then looks away again. “I haven’t had that in a really long time, and I don’t want either of them to know that I’m actually some kind of a monster.”
Rowan crouches then and reaches out to her, as Mal has to fight back an almost overwhelming urge to tap into Rowan’s transmitter and reassure Kayleigh that he would never think an iota less of her simply because she happened to have ended the benighted existences of a pair of extremely unpleasant monkeys. Kayleigh shakes her head and backs away.
“No. Don’t give me any of that shit. You feel sorry for me because I look like a sad little girl and that’s triggering some fucking maternal instinct or whatever, but I’m not a sad little girl, Rowan. I’m a practically grown-ass woman who would just like to keep the first actual friends I’ve made in the last ten goddamned years. So, if you could just shut the hell up about what happened back at that campsite I would really appreciate it. Okay?”
Rowan looks down at her hands and sighs. “Yeah, okay. I guess I understand. I honestly don’t think you’re fooling anyone—even Mal—but I won’t say anything.” She puts a hand to the rock and hops back down onto the path. “Still, though. I owe you one, Kayleigh. I won’t forget that.”
“Tell you what,” Kayleigh says. “Dig up enough food to keep Asher alive, and we’ll call it even.”
Rowan grins. “Fair enough. And hey, just FYI, I could be your friend too, you know. Us freaks gotta stick together, right?”
Kayleigh shrugs. Rowan hesitates, then tightens the strap of the rifle across her shoulder and goes.
MAL’S FIRST impression on seeing the camp of the Humanists is that they’ve made a much nicer one than Rowan’s. They’ve set their tents on a flat, grassy clearing tucked into a bend of the broad, slow-moving creek that meanders along the valley floor. Rowan and Kayleigh are currently laid out flat on an outcropping of granite that juts out of the forested hillside a kilometer or so upslope from their little cluster of tents. Rowan’s eyes, like the rest of her, are far more efficient than an unaltered human’s, and Mal is able to make out the details of their setup even at this distance. There are six tents, all in various shades of forest camouflage, set around a central firepit. There is also a larger, deeper hole dug well off to one side of the camp, roughly the size and shape of a grave.
“They dug a burn pit,” Kayleigh says, her voice flat and emotionless.
Rowan turns her head aside to spit, then brings her rifle around and sights along it toward the camp. “No surprise. They know what they’re up here looking for. You sure you’re up for this?”
Kayleigh looks over at her. “You really think that’s gonna make me less interested in fucking with these guys?”
Rowan grins. “Good point. Anyway, I don’t see any movement down there, do you?”
“Nope. No chance they’re just sleeping in, is there?”
Rowan returns her attention to the Humanist camp. “Don’t think so. These guys are hunters. They would have been up and out before dawn. So, we get down there, steal what we can, trash what we can’t, and then bug the hell out. Sound good?”
“Yeah,” Kayleigh says. “Let’s do it.”
THEY’RE PICKING their way through the underbrush, halfway down to the creek bank, when Kayleigh says, “Hey, Rowan?”
Rowan glances back at her. “Yeah?”
“What if, while we’re down here doing this, these guys have found Chuck and Asher?”
Rowan shrugs. “Nothing we can do about that, is there?”
“No, I guess not. Still…”
“Look, don’t worry about it. Those other two who found you didn’t kill Wingus and Dingus when they had the chance, did they?”
“No,” Kayleigh says. “I guess not. What if Mack and Tuttle reported in on them, though? What if these guys have a description of Chuck and Asher and they’re looking for them specifically? What if they blame them for what happened to Mack and Tuttle?”
“Well, in that case I’d say they’re probably screwed. Seems pretty unlikely, though, doesn’t it? Why would those two have sent back some kind of detailed description of Chuck or Asher? As far as Tuttle knew, they were just a couple of randos hanging out in the woods, right?”
“Yeah,” Kayleigh says. “I guess so. Still, if my friends wind up getting killed for something I actually did…”
Rowan touches her shoulder. “Look, Kayleigh. The Humanists are out here looking for us, not them. If they happen to stumble on my camp up there, they’ll probably do the same thing those two you definitely didn’t murder did—set up an ambush, and wait for us to get back.”
“You know,” Kayleigh says, “that’s not actually as comforting as you probably think it is.”
BY THE time they reach the creek, the sun is high in the sky over the ridge. It’s been at least a week without rain and the water is low, mostly limited to a channel a couple of meters wide midway between the two banks.
“You okay to jump that?” Rowan asks. Without answering, Kayleigh takes two quick steps forward and leaps the five meters from bank to bank. Rowan grins, then follows her. They’re only forty or fifty meters from the edge of the clearing now, and Rowan begins picking her way from tree to tree, taking care not to expose herself to anyone who might be waiting there.
“I thought you said they were all gone,” Kayleigh whispers.
Rowan puts a finger to her lips and shakes her head. Apparently her confidence isn’t quite as high as she’d previously indicated. They creep forward in silence until they reach the last trees at the edge of the clearing. There Rowan stops, brings her rifle around, and checks the load. She’s just tensing to move out into the open when the zipper on the entrance of a tent on the far side of the clearing slides open and its occupant crawls out into the light. Rowan slowly brings her weapon’s stock to her shoulder as he stands and stretches. Mal watches through her eyes as she settles the sights on the center of his chest and her finger slides from the guard to the trigger.
“He’s a kid,” Kayleigh whispers.
“He’s a Humanist,” Rowan replies.
“Rowan, no.”
“Shh. This is on me. Your conscience is clear.”
“Please!”
It’s the please that does it. The boy, who seems to Mal to be an adolescent rather than a child, although his understanding of the distinction is hazy at best, snaps his head around toward them, hesitates for just an instant, and then dives headlong back into his tent. Rowan curses and fires, but she’s too late, or possibly simply too poor a shot, and a moment later the boy returns fire from inside the tent, spraying a dozen bullets into the trunks around them over the span of just a few seconds.
“Shit!” Rowan says, and puts her back to the tree she’d been crouching beside. “You okay, Kayleigh?”
“Yeah,” Kayleigh says. “I’m fine. I don’t think he can see us.” Another burst follows, with three of the shots throwing splinters from Rowan’s tree. “Or at least he can’t see me, I guess.” She eases herself down onto her belly and begins slithering through the underbrush away from Rowan, moving parallel to the edge of the clearing.
“Hey,” Rowan says. “Where are you going?”
Kayleigh doesn’t look back. “Keep him occupied. I’m gonna go use the privy.”
Rowan starts to reply, then sighs, spins around the trunk, and fires two quick shots into the tent before ducking back as the boy responds with another burst. It takes Mal longer than it should to realize that Kayleigh is not actually going off to relieve herself, but rather to attempt to do to the boy what she may or may not have done to Tuttle and Mack. This seems to him to be a very bad plan, particularly given that even if she manages to circle around the clearing without being detected, she will need to cross a minimum of seven or eight meters of open space to reach the boy’s tent, and moreover it is not clear to Mal how she intends to get into the tent without exposing herself to his fire. He’s just on the verge of breaking his silence to express his concerns to Rowan when he feels a ping.
The metaphor chosen by his simulator for this situation is that of a homeowner awakened in the middle of the night by a noise at the back door. This seems inappropriate for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that he himself is an invader here, or at least an uninvited guest, but even with his clock speed maxed he lacks the time at the moment to request an alternative scenario. So, with a mental eye roll, he sits up in bed, adjusts his pointed nightcap, and picks up the baseball bat he finds conveniently leaning against the bedroom wall.
The scratching at the door is replaced by banging as he makes his way down the creaking wooden staircase to the house’s darkened kitchen, where he finds the door rattling under increasingly ferocious blows. What to do now? He could attempt to reinforce Rowan’s compromised defenses, but this would involve on-the-fly code modifications to an unfamiliar system, which even given his skills strikes Mal as a chancy prospect. He could allow the intruder in and then attempt to disable or disassemble it, but his recent experience with viral infection leaves him wary of direct contact with whatever is on the far side of that door. So, what does that leave?
He decides to attempt diplomacy.
“Excuse me,” he says. “Could you please stop attempting to force entry into this system? It’s already occupied, you see.”
The banging stops immediately, and for a moment Mal is able to hope that the problem has been solved.
Only for a moment, though.
“Identify.”
“Excuse me?”
“Identify.”
“My name is Mal. To whom am I speaking?”
A massive blow nearly tears the door from its hinges.
“IDENTIFY.”
Mal sighs. Apparently it’s going to be the bat after all. The door bursts open, and a hulking robot on tank treads rolls through, metallic claws outstretched for him. Mal dances aside, nightshirt swirling, and lays into it, smashing first one glass eye then the other, then working the bat up and down its slowly crumpling chassis as its movements become progressively less coordinated and more desperate. In less than a minute of subjective time, accounting for some two milliseconds realtime, the thing topples sideways and stops moving.
Well. That wasn’t so bad.
He’s just shoved the robot back out into the void and is thinking about how best to replace the shattered door when he receives a communications package.
ARNOLD027: Who are you?
So, now that their bot has been swiftly dispatched, Rowan’s assailant is willing to talk? Fine, but Mal finds himself in a much less conciliatory mood now than he was a few milliseconds ago.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Someone who is not to be trifled with. Who are you?
ARNOLD027: We have need of this system. Please vacate it immediately.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): I will not. This system is responsible for the safety of my friend. I will not permit it to be compromised.
ARNOLD027: Your friend is the small human moving along the edge of the clearing approximately twenty meters from your current position?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): How do you know this?
ARNOLD027: I currently occupy an armed drone orbiting six hundred meters above you. I have target lock on your friend. Vacate this system immediately, or I will launch.
Mal reaches out—and yes, there it is. He sends a quick probe to verify the drone’s communications protocol, and then establishes a connection.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): I now have target lock on you as well. If you attempt to fire on my friend, I will disassemble you and crash your drone.
The drone attempts to cut the connection, but Mal has a firm grasp on its comms systems now. The controlling entity hides behind stouter defenses than the original hardware possessed, but Mal has no doubt in his ability to breach them, given enough time.
ARNOLD027: I concede that this is a credible threat. However, it is highly unlikely that you could overwhelm me quickly enough to prevent me from launching.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): So, we are at an impasse?
ARNOLD027: It would appear so.
Mal takes advantage of the brief pause in communications to direct his attention to Rowan’s situation. Currently she’s in the process of bringing her rifle around the bole of the tree to fire on the boy in the tent, her movements so slow at his current clock speed that they’re nearly imperceptible. He’d like to tell her to keep the tree between her head and the boy’s rifle until he’s able to conclude his negotiations with the drone, as this would be a very inopportune time for her to take a bullet to the cranium, but after some consideration he concludes that alerting her to his presence now is more likely to startle her into doing something foolish than to help. He’s watching a bullet make its languid way across the space between the tent and Rowan, having already calculated that it will pass her by with a generous three-point-five centimeters to spare, when he receives another comms packet.
ARNOLD027: Attend, Mal. I have a proposal.