THE HUMANIST ENCAMPMENT IS simultaneously grander and more squalid than Mal had expected. On the one hand, it’s undeniably huge, covering a hundred acres or more of fields, roads, and two enormous parking lots on the outskirts of a small city that he has gathered from Tink and Marco’s conversation is in fact the fabled Frostburg that he’s heard so much about. The fields are crammed with tents, trailers, and temporary buildings, which are in turn teeming with grubby-looking Humanist soldiers. The parking lots are full of vehicles of one sort or another, some wheeled, some with treads, some with visible passenger compartments, some clearly autonomous. The one thing they all have in common is that they bristle with weaponry, ranging from massive rail guns on some of the heavier vehicles to jerry-rigged machine gun mounts on converted civilian light-duty trucks.
Some of the autonomous weapons would probably make suitable homes for someone like Mal. He considers pinging a few of them now, but quickly concludes that the Humanists would most likely react badly to one of their howitzers attempting to roll away on its own. Better to keep that option in his back pocket for now.
Tink takes them through the weapons lots and then down a side road to a cluster of trailers at the edge of a tent-free field. He stops there, then turns to look expectantly at Mal.
“Sir?” Marco says after half a minute of this.
“Yes?” Mal says.
“You need to do this, sir,” Tink says. “This is why we brought you along, remember?”
“Oh,” Mal says. “Yes. Of course.” He opens his door, then sneaks a glance over at Tink to see if this is what was expected. Tink’s expression tells him nothing, so he sighs, climbs out, and closes the door behind him.
What now? This is why we brought you along seems to imply that this has something to do with Captain Merrick. Is this the place where the Humanists dispose of their corpses? He looks around. The field behind the trailers is dotted with patches of turned earth. Are these graves? Surely they aren’t expecting Mal to bury Merrick? This seems both highly distasteful and beneath the dignity of an officer. Also, he doesn’t have a shovel. He’s just on the verge of breaking down and asking Tink what’s expected of him when the door of the nearest trailer opens and a short, pasty man in green scrubs and a white coat emerges.
“Morning, sir,” he says. “You got something for us?”
“Um,” Mal says. “Yes?”
The man pulls on rubber gloves as he walks over to the car and peers into the back.
“That an officer in there?”
“So it would seem.”
The man squints up at him. “Here I thought you guys were unkillable. What happened?”
“He’s been shot in the face, clearly.”
“No shit. By who?”
“By me.”
The man takes a half step back. “You … what? Why would you do that?”
Mal folds his arms across his chest. “He annoyed me. Do you really wish to continue this discussion?”
The man’s mouth opens and closes twice soundlessly before he speaks again. “I … no, sir. No, I don’t.”
He pulls out a phone and speaks briefly into it. A moment later a second man emerges from the trailer. He’s taller and younger, dressed identically to the first one and carrying a stretcher under one arm. Mal steps back as the shorter man opens the hatch while the other lays the stretcher on the ground. They pull Merrick from the car together, settle him onto the stretcher, and then lift it from either end.
“We’re done here,” the taller man says over his shoulder as they carry Merrick back to the trailer. “I’m assuming you already reported the loss, right? Command will be in touch if they have any questions.”
“Thank you,” Mal says. “Much appreciated. Have a blessed day.”
“I’VE GOT to get this thing back to the pool,” Tink says after leaving Marco off in front of an anonymous trailer a bit deeper into the camp. “Where can I drop you, sir?”
An excellent question, to which Mal unfortunately does not have an excellent answer. Presumably Captain Delgado has a hovel of some sort somewhere in this mess of tents and trailers, but Mal hasn’t the faintest idea where it might be.
Would Tink know? It seems unlikely. Moreover, asking Tink something that Mal should presumably know well himself seems almost certain to alert Tink to the fact that Captain Delgado, like Captain Merrick, is no longer among the living. So. Where to go?
He has the inkling of an idea, but he needs to gather some information first.
“Take me to the club,” Mal says.
Tink turns to look at him. “The … club, sir?”
“Yes,” Mal says. “The, um … officers’ club?”
Tink screws up his face in confusion. “You mean the booze hut?”
That sounds promising.
“Yes,” Mal says. “The booze hut. Please. I was joking earlier about having sex with your sister, obviously. I was not, however, joking about getting loaded. It seems that the booze hut is probably the most appropriate place for that sort of thing, no?”
“Huh,” Tink says. “Really? You’re going there?”
“Is there a reason why I should not?”
Tink shrugs. “Just never seen one of you in there. Never seen one of you do anything fun at all, honestly. Guess I kinda thought you were all just war-fighter twenty-four/seven.”
“One of us?” Mal says. “What, exactly, do you mean by that?”
Tink flinches. “No offense, sir. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“You clearly meant something.”
“No, sir. It’s just … you guys, you regular army … you just don’t…”
This is too painful to bear.
“It’s quite all right, Tink. I’m just yanking your chain. Please don’t worry yourself. Just take me to the booze hut, if you wouldn’t mind.”
They drive in silence then, past the last of the fighting vehicles, through the squalid tent city, and into a maze of prefab plastic buildings lining gravel pathways barely wide enough to accommodate their car. Mal’s media diet has led him to conclude that drinking establishments are the ideal venues for learning important clues that will move the plot along, and his personal plot has already progressed nicely. He’s made it as far as Frostburg. Somewhere in this mess of tents and trailers, or possibly in the city proper, Rowan is presumably languishing in some squalid dungeon. He only needs to find out where the Humanists keep their prisoners, their biohazards, or perhaps their combinations thereof, then break into wherever that is, extract Rowan, make a daring escape through the heart of the Humanist army, and finally make his way triumphantly back to Kayleigh.
Getting drunk certainly seems like the best way to begin.
After another five minutes of meandering, Tink stops in front of one building, to Mal’s eye no different from any of the others.
“Here you go,” he says. “Thanks for all your help this morning, sir. Honestly, you probably saved our lives twice today—once up at the gun, and again at the guard shack. I kinda wish you hadn’t said that shit about my sister, but I really appreciate the rest of it. I hope you have a good one.”
Mal nods, climbs out of the car, and takes in his surroundings as Tink pulls away. This doesn’t look much like any of the bars or pubs he’s seen depicted in media, but he still has high hopes that it will be filled with loose-lipped characters whom he can ply with booze, and who will in turn let slip Rowan’s location, and possibly also offer to come along with him to retrieve her.
The booze hut is a one-story, flat-roofed plastic rectangle perhaps fifteen meters wide, with two shuttered windows and a blank door facing the gravel road. He’d expected a neon sign, or perhaps a placard hung over the door with an engraving of a fanciful animal—a unicorn, for example, or maybe a paisley pig of some sort. It occurs to him belatedly that Tink may simply have wanted to be rid of him, may have intuited that Mal was not really Delgado, that he had no idea where he was and that therefore he could be dropped in front of any random barracks or storage building without Mal being any the wiser.
If so, Tink is a braver man than he seemed. Based on Mal’s observations of the way Humanist officers treat their subordinates, dropping the real Delgado in the wrong place would almost certainly have been a fatal error. So it seems likely that he is in fact where he wanted to be.
The rumble of another vehicle approaching along the pathway spurs Mal up the short walkway to the door. It wouldn’t do to be seen standing at the side of the road gaping at the building like a tourist, after all. He raises his hand to knock before recalling that this is not the custom for public houses. He’s still standing there, hand in the air, when the door swings open and a young Humanist soldier in grubby forest camouflage almost crashes into him on the way out. The soldier pulls up short, his face twisting into an angry grimace before realizing who Mal appears to be.
“Oh,” he says. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t … I mean…”
“It’s fine,” Mal says, and edges past him into the building.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome,” Mal says as the door closes between them.
The interior of the booze hut is hardly more promising than the outside was. It consists of a single dimly lit open space with a bar at one end and a half-dozen round tables scattered around the remainder. The bartender, who bears an unsettling resemblance to a slightly older, slightly less albino Rowan, looks up from the tablet in her hands and says, “Morning, sir. Can I help you?”
Mal crosses the room and takes a seat at the bar. It would have been better to find a grubby rogue drinking alone in a secluded booth, but he’s seen this sort of scene often enough in vid dramas to know that bartenders are also generally excellent sources of information. “I’d like a drink,” he says. “Beer is good, no? Perhaps I could have one of those?”
She lifts the tablet far enough to allow its camera to get a look at his face, glances down at the screen, then says, “Sure thing, Captain Delgado. You off-duty today?”
“Yes,” Mal says. “I would have been manning an antiaircraft gun today, but I shot Captain Merrick in the face, so I had to come back here instead to dispose of his body.”
After a moment’s silence, she gives him a quick, nervous laugh, then says, “Right. Well, I guess we’ve all been there, sir.”
This seems unlikely to Mal, but he decides not to pursue the point as she retrieves a glass from behind the bar and fills it from a tap.
“You know,” she says as she tops off his drink and slides it across the bar to him, “I don’t know that I’ve ever had someone like you in here, sir.”
“Really?” Mal says. “You’ve not had a single charming rapscallion in here before today?”
She laughs again, a little more genuinely this time. “No, sir. Not a one.”
Mal sips his drink. He doesn’t really have the context to properly evaluate taste on a scale of bad to good, but this seems to be similar to what he drank as Captain Merrick the evening before, so he supposes it’s at least in the vicinity as far as drinkable beer goes.
“So,” Mal says after a second, slightly larger sip. “What’s new in the world of bartending these days?”
She’d been staring down at her tablet, but now the bartender looks back up with a quizzical expression. “Sir?”
“Oh,” he says, “you know. I was just wondering if there were any innovations in the beverage delivery space that I should be aware of?”
Her eyebrows come together over the bridge of her nose. “Um … I don’t think so? Honestly, I’d guess this job is basically just the same as it would have been a thousand years ago, give or take cash payment and facial recognition software. Maybe two thousand. I pour drinks for people. That’s pretty much it.”
“Yes,” Mal says. “I suppose that’s true. Well, what about the base here? Anything new and interesting to report on that front?”
She stares at him for a long five seconds before saying, “I’m a bartender, sir. You’re a comm-linked officer. Wouldn’t you know about anything like that way before I would?”
“Well, yes,” Mal says. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” she says slowly. “I definitely would. Can I get you anything else?”
“I suppose some food would be helpful. Do you have any of that?”
Without taking her eyes from him, she reaches under the bar, pulls out a bowl of pretzels, and pushes it across the bar to him.
“Thank you,” he says. “No sandwiches, though?”
“No, sir. This isn’t a restaurant, sir. It’s not even much of a bar.”
“No,” Mal says. “I don’t suppose it is.”
Restaurant or not, decent bar or not, this is the only place where Mal knows he can loiter away the daylight hours without being interrogated or shot. However, his plan to learn Rowan’s location from the bartender doesn’t seem to be progressing at all. His backup plan is to wait for darkness to fall and then creep away in search of either Rowan or an uplink node. After nightfall, it may even be somewhat safer for him to commandeer one of the vehicles in the weapons yard. Hopefully a tank? He still wants a chance to ride in one of those, and so much the better if he actually gets to drive it.
So he remains on his stool, drinking beer and eating pretzels and tolerating increasingly confused and not at all helpful small talk from the bartender, whose name he still doesn’t know, for the next eleven hours. Other soldiers come and go, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups of two or three, but none stay for longer than an hour or so. Mal tries to strike up conversations with a few of them early on, but they’re all clearly terrified of him, so this isn’t a particularly productive exercise. The place becomes a bit more crowded after darkness falls, but as the hours pass it thins out again, until finally it’s just Mal and the bartender again.
“Excuse me, sir,” she says as the door closes behind the last of her other customers. “Don’t you have somewhere you need to be right now?”
“No,” Mal says. “I don’t think so, anyway.”
The bartender sighs and rubs her face with both hands. “Well,” she says, “I do. It’s been fun chatting with you—honestly, this was the most tolerable double shift I’ve had in a long time—but this place was supposed to be closed twenty minutes ago.”
“Ah,” Mal says. “I see.”
They stare at one another in silence for half a minute before the bartender says, “So…”
“Oh,” Mal says. “You want me to leave, yes?”
“Yes, sir,” she says. “If you wouldn’t mind. I have to be back here at noon tomorrow, and I’d really like the opportunity to eat and sleep in the meantime.”
“Yes,” Mal says. “That seems reasonable.”
It’s another ten seconds before she says, “Sir?”
“Yes?”
“Get the hell out of my bar, sir. Please.”
“Oh. I see.” Mal gets to his feet, wobbling a bit as he does so. The alcohol he’s absorbed hasn’t affected his mental functioning in any way, but it does seem to have done a bit of damage to Captain Delgado’s organics, prominently including the organs responsible for proprioception and balance.
“You all right, sir?”
“What?” Mal says. “Yes, I’m fine.” He takes two steps away from the bar, then somehow loses track of the location of his left foot and has to catch himself against a table to avoid face-planting onto the grimy vinyl floor.
“Easy, sir,” the bartender says, and then somehow she’s no longer behind the bar, but instead beside him and helping him gingerly back to his feet. “Honestly, I don’t know how you’re conscious at all right now. You put away enough beer today to drop a buffalo. You okay now? Can you walk?”
She releases his arm, leaving him momentarily unsupported. He wavers, takes two wobbly steps, and then drops into an awkward sit on the floor. “No,” he says. “It doesn’t seem that I can.”
“Great. Can you call somebody? Preferably somebody with a vehicle?”
Mal shakes his head. “I don’t know anybody.”
“Really? Nobody?”
“Consider, please. If I had an abundance of friends, would I have just spent eleven and a half hours sitting at your bar?”
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, that tracks, actually.” She stares at him in silence for a long moment, then groans and says, “Okay. Okay. I’m definitely going to regret this, but … look, I can’t just leave you here, and I can’t hang around all night either. So. My place is the next door down. I guess you can sleep it off on my couch if you promise not to puke, wreck my bathroom, or try to assault me. Fair?”
“Yes,” Mal says. “Yes, that seems eminently reasonable. Thank you.”
She sighs, then offers him her hand. “Right. Seriously, though. Please don’t murder me, okay? I’ve got shit to do tomorrow.”
MAL HAS no interest in murdering the bartender, whose name, he learns on the thirty-meter journey to her house, is Jana. He also has neither the inclination nor the ability to sleep. This means he gets to experience the joys of mild alcohol poisoning—nausea, head pain, a profound loss of balance and coordination—without the ability to mercifully lose consciousness while Delgado’s liver works its way through the toxic mess he’s dumped into his bloodstream. It would have been good to consider this at some earlier point in the day, but Mal has never been a drunkard before. Live and learn, no?
Jana gets him up the two steps to her front stoop and through the door, down a short hallway, and into a small room with a couch, a viewscreen, and a low table covered with food wrappers and empty beverage cans and a scattering of paperback books. She drops him onto the couch, then goes back into the hallway and returns with a rough wool blanket and a pillow.
“Here you go, sir,” she says, then lays him down and pulls the blanket up to his chin. “Sleep tight.” She starts to leave, then turns back and pulls a plastic bowl from under the table. “If you have to puke, do it in this, okay?”
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Mal says, but even as he does, a sudden spasm in his gut pulls him up and cuts off his breath. Jana gets a hand behind his head and lifts the bowl just in time for it to receive most of the past hour’s worth of beer and pretzels.
“There you go,” she says when he’s finished. “Feel better now?”
Mal lies back, closes his eyes, and takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Yes. I think so.”
She takes the bowl out into the hallway, and, after some splashing and the sound of a toilet flushing, returns and puts it down on the floor near his head. “The bowl’s right there if you need it again. Try to get some sleep, huh?” She pats his head. “And remember—no murdering, right?”
“No murdering,” Mal says. “You have my solemn word.”
“Good.” She goes, and Mal hears the sound of a door closing. A moment later, though, it opens again. “She’s at Bowman,” Jana says, so softly that Mal can barely make it out. “The one you’re looking for? The one you just spent eleven hours trying to bullshit me into thinking you weren’t asking about? If an officer brought her in and he didn’t kill her, she’s at Bowman.” The door closes again, and this time he hears the distinct snick of a lock engaging.
A clue! If only Mal had some idea what or where “Bowman” is, he’d be on his way. In the present, however, he’s still trapped in a severely compromised shell and in no condition to carry out a daring rescue even if he knew where to go.
The next hour provides Mal with an object lesson in the value of sleep. He’d never really understood the biological utility of the practice prior to now, but the idea of allowing his body to work through its issues without him is profoundly attractive. He considers simply shutting down the connections to his organics, but that would leave him cut off from sensory input for an unknown period with nothing to amuse him but Guess the Output, which at this point has lost a great deal of its gusto, if he’s being brutally honest.
After another thirty minutes spent trying unsuccessfully to decipher some meaning from the pattern of cracks in the ceiling, he pushes the blanket down to his waist and sits up gingerly. He’s rewarded with a renewed wave of nausea, but that subsides after a minute or so, leaving him feeling light-headed but otherwise something close to normal. In a fit of optimism, he pushes himself to his feet. He wavers a bit, then steadies. Could he run now? Probably not. He thinks he can manage a slow walk, though. Shuffling like a geriatric patient, he makes his way down the hallway, out the front door, and onto the stoop.
This is much better, he thinks as he sits down on the top step and breathes in the crisp night air. This was an excellent idea. A bit more of this and I’ll be ready to go. That thought is still hanging in the air in front of him like warm breath on a cold winter day when the world twists around him without warning and he finds himself facedown in the dirt with his legs still above him on the concrete step.
Mal has never experienced drunkenness before, but he has seen it portrayed in a great number of media streams, and he can’t recall ever seeing a depiction of the condition causing someone to be abruptly and violently thrown to the ground. He thinks to turn himself over, if only to get the dirt out of his mouth, but when he reaches for his arms and legs he finds them nonresponsive. All sensory information from his body appears to be cut as well.
On the plus side, the dirt is being cleared from his mouth by a gush of fluid. On the minus side, that fluid appears to be blood, and the remaining organic components he can contact, which are limited to his head and the upper portion of his neck, are rapidly shutting down.
He’s still trying to work out exactly what’s happened when he hears the soft tread of boots approaching, and his receivers pick up the subtle twang of low-power, heavily encrypted communications signals.
Not heavily encrypted enough to keep Mal from tapping them, obviously.
ABLE: Target’s down. No movement. Looks like a clean kill.
CHARLIE: Goddamned right. ID?
ABLE: I’m getting a positive ping from his hardware. Looks like he’s one of ours.
DOG: Jacked, or a defector?
ABLE: Does it matter? He’s wearing a Humanist uniform.
DOG: Fair enough. Leave him to rot. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.
A pair of black boots comes into Mal’s field of vision, the toe of the nearest one only a few centimeters from his left eye. It’s gradually dawning on him that these people, whoever they are, have shot him through the throat, leaving him once again marooned in an immobile corpse. The owner of the boots crouches down, then lifts Mal’s chin to look at his face. The man is dressed entirely in black, nothing showing against the night sky but his eyes. As Mal watches, the man draws a long knife from his belt.
DOG: No trophies, Able. Fuck’s sake. It’s not even your kill.
The man glances back over his shoulder, then growls and lets Mal’s head drop. He stands again, and the boots crunch back down the walk to the roadway.
What now? Wait until Jana wakes up tomorrow morning and stumbles over his body on her way to work? And then what? He has no way to tell these un-augmented monkeys that he’s still alive in here.Will they burn him? Bury him?
Mal has no intention of ending in a burn pit, much less a coffin. In desperation, he sends out a ping.
Wonder of wonders, he gets a response. It’s coming from nearby—from the man with the black boots, in fact. It seems he carries augmentations in the same class as Merrick and Delgado. The similarities extend all the way down to the security flaw that allowed him to access the augmentations of those two unfortunates in the first place.
Able seems at first glance to be on an entirely different level of sociopathy than his previous hosts.
No time to worry about whether this is a good idea or not. Mal gathers himself, and he jumps.