18
It took several seconds for Ava to make sense of what she was seeing. The glassy surface was a pond—no, an inlet—and the white objects glowing beneath the water’s surface—
“Are those robotic gels?” Matt asked.
“No,” Ava said. “They’re bioluminescent jellyfish.”
She had watched a bloom of party-light jellies dying in the surf only last night. The round mantle of the closest one was at least two feet across, with a dark spot the size of a quarter just off center.
Gideon said, “This big one’s the prototype.”
Ava crouched in the slick mud at the water’s edge to get a closer look and noted smaller spots—she counted three, but there might be more—scattered at irregular intervals around the edge of the mantle.
“This is your weapon?” she asked, looking up at Gideon—and trying to stave off disappointment.
“Yeah. And it’s really cool.” He stood beside her, his feet half sunk in mud. “My asshole friends swore they were serious, that there was gonna be a revolution before the handover treaty was signed. A fucking declaration of independence. Targeted military action to back it up. They wanted me to come up with something. So I did.” A contemptuous tsk. “You can guess what happened next.”
“No revolution,” Ava said. “They wised up and called it off.”
Another tsk. “They called it off, anyway. That’s all I really know.” He shrugged. “They were probably watching too much Netflix to begin with. A lot harder to pull off a revolution in the real world.”
“But they didn’t give you a reason?” she pressed, wanting to better understand the scope of the aborted insurgency, and any options that might remain.
Gideon shook his head. “They’re tight with details. And I haven’t talked to them in a while. I gave ’em a working weapon, but I don’t think they got much out of their other developers. It’s not like they have a big talent pool to draw on. So the cops and the guard probably decided they didn’t want to go along with it.” He cracked a cold smile. “Or the kupuna heard about it and told them to sit their asses down before the grandkids got killed.”
Akasha disregarded all this, demanding, “What’s it do?”
“It blows shit up.” Gideon crouched beside Ava. He gestured at the jelly. “You wouldn’t know it by looking at them here, but jellyfish are strong and fast—and these party-light cultivars are common enough they don’t draw much attention.”
“Except from sea serpents?” Ava asked him.
“Well, yeah. The snakes keep the population in check. Serpents are fast, but I couldn’t use them because every serpent is tracked and monitored by HADAFA.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. They’re artificial lifeforms.”
“Sure. Just like the jellyfish. So tell us what you’ve got.”
“You’ve weaponized them,” Matt said, eyeing the crouching kid with a predator’s intensity.
“No. Not the jellies. They’re just a vector.” In the upwelling light, Gideon looked both smug and diabolical as he peered at Ava. “Remember what it used to be like at New Year’s, when the whole fucking city would light up with illegal fireworks? You have no idea how many sealed shipping containers filled with fireworks survived Nolo, all of it smuggled in past Homeland So-Called-Security. No way was I going to waste all that potential—”
“Wait—you unpacked fireworks? You’re lucky you didn’t blow yourself up.”
Gideon scoffed. “Remote operation. That monkey bot’s not just a toy, you know.” He stood up, and Ava stood up too. “So anyway, I did a lot of experimenting. Best thing I’ve come up with so far is robot fish. Easy to print, assemble, and program. They use standard batteries and carry a decent payload of salvaged gunpowder.”
“Navy is on to that,” Matt said, sounding disappointed. “The harbor’s patrolled by robot tuna. You’re not going to get a drone fish past them.”
“I can get a swarm of aquatic drones past them,” Gideon said. “It’s not hard, because the robot tuna are looking for free-swimming devices.”
He’d brought a telescoping rod with him. He extended it now, and, crouching again, he used it to reach into the inlet’s water, poking at the curtain of three-foot-long tentacles beneath the prototype jelly. The tentacles writhed as he touched them, and some wrapped around the pole, allowing him to lift them to the water’s surface.
Embedded among the glowing tentacles, Ava counted eight opaque white shapes, each six or seven inches long, bullet-shaped, with dorsal and lateral fins, and a vertical fish tail. “The payload,” she murmured, starting to see how this might work.
“The swarm is passive when it’s with the jelly,” Gideon explained. “But when the jellyfish gets past security and is close on the target, the swarm activates and the components strike like one.” He lowered the tentacles back into the water. “It’d be better if I had access to C-4, but when the swarm packs together, they’ll still manage a solid bang. Pretty cool, huh?”
“Damn cool,” Ava agreed. “If it works.”
“How do you steer the jellies?” Matt asked, sounding skeptical.
Gideon stood up again. “That part’s not great, but it’s good enough. Party-lights are CRISPRed, too. Their sting doesn’t do much to humans, but they’re good at feeding on other jellyfish. You know, to keep the water safe for people ’cause we get so many wild jellies these days, like they’re the last thing surviving in the ocean.
“Anyway, party-lights were designed so they stay near-shore and close to the surface. A side benefit is that it makes their population easy to monitor. You just have to have an aerial drone count the glowing mantles. Another side benefit, for me, is that I can get a radio signal to that hub at the top of the mantle.”
With the rod, he indicated the dark central spot Ava had seen before. As she looked at it again, she noticed a wisp of wire protruding from it.
Gideon pulled out his tablet. Ava leaned in to look at the screen. A green line traced a complex path against a black background. It took her a few seconds to recognize the display as a map of East Loch. A labeled point marked the inlet where they stood.
Gideon expanded the map. The point grew into a circle with six hash marks around its perimeter. He said, “Jellies are predators, but they get eaten, too. Sea serpents are the main problem for big party-lights. I can fake a serpent attack by using an electric shock. The jelly responds by swimming away from the jolt.”
He tapped the screen. The jellyfish at their feet pumped its mantle and bobbled away from the shore. Ava watched it with a little shiver of horror.
“Sweet Jesus,” Matt murmured in her ear. He’d moved in close to get a look at the screen over her shoulder. “This is monster-movie shit—and this is the best we’ve got?”
With the wind and the rustling leaves, Gideon, fortunately, hadn’t heard him. That was clear when he turned to Ava with an impish grin. “So where’s the target?”
Just like that . . .
She straightened up. “You’ve got just the one?”
“Yeah, like I told you, the revolution got called off. I’m working on my own here.”
“And you’ve done impressive work,” Ava assured him, ready to elbow Matt if he started to say anything else too critical. “We saw that on the way in, but . . .”
She should have worried about Akasha, not Matt. “What she’s trying to say, dear brother, is this whole setup is comic book, not real world.”
“It’s not that,” Ava said quickly. “But . . . you haven’t tested it, have you?”
If he had, HADAFA would surely have observed the explosion and issued a report.
Gideon backed off a step, looking annoyed. “I’ve never actually blown anything up,” he admitted. “But I’ve tested all the components, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’ve run this jelly across the loch and brought it back again. It will work.”
Ava looked to Matt, her chest tight with anticipation. “We might as well try it.”
He nodded, but sounded glum: “Yeah, if there’s any chance at all.” He turned to Gideon. “Let me give you the target. All we want to do is disable the submarine, force it to stay in port.”
“And let Huko batter it?” Gideon asked.
“Yeah. Cost of treason.”
A minute later, Ava watched as the luminous jellyfish shivered and thrashed and then retreated, its wide mantle coiling and snapping, propelling it erratically down the inlet. She trailed after it, edging along the shore, feeling her way, and discovering a path there.
The other jellies in the inlet roused as the augmented one passed by. One by one, they began to follow it, a parade of party-lights.
Ava went with them around the curve of the inlet. The augmented one moved more gracefully now, its mantle working in slow, steady, fluid motion. Its serenity a sharp contrast to her own tangled nervous system.
She glanced ahead. Mangrove leaned in over the mouth of the inlet, framing the bright lights of the eastern shore. She went no farther, but stayed to watch.
The companion jellies did not share their leader’s motivation and they soon fell behind. But the augmented jelly moved with steady determination as if on a mission. Or did she see it that way only because she knew it was true? Without that knowledge, would its behavior still seem aberrant? Would the robot tuna tag it as suspicious because it moved with more purpose than any jellyfish should?
She crossed her fingers. Let this work. Please.
The jelly entered open water. She watched it until it was just a faint glow some two hundred feet offshore. Then she drew a sharp breath and turned, making her way back to the others.
“How long will it take to get there?” she asked Gideon.
The faint, upwelling light of his tablet revealed a thoughtful frown. “All the way to navy docks? At least a couple of hours.”
A couple of hours before they knew if the tactic would work . . . a couple of hours to come up with a backup plan when this one failed.
“Have you got anything else?” she asked.
“Nothing that’ll get past navy security.”
Matt said, “You mentioned other developers working for the insurgency.”
“I can’t tell you who.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t. Because I don’t know. Security protocol, right? In case some jackboot comes asking.”
“But you could get word out,” Ava said. “Contact your contact.”
“Why? I don’t think they’ve got anything.”
“But you could ask,” she pressed.
“I told you,” he said, his voice low and defensive, “it’s been a while since I talked to them.”
“Ah, geez,” Akasha said. “You had a meltdown, didn’t you, when you heard the revolution was off? And they dropped you. They cut you off. They’re not taking your calls.”
He shrugged, but didn’t deny it—and Ava felt an avenue of opportunity close.
“I gotta go by the houseboat,” Gideon said. “Take care of something before I head out. You guys might as well come. It’s not far. And anyway, if you take off on your own, you’re gonna get lost.”
◇
With his red lantern lighting the way, Gideon led them up the eastern side of the peninsula, to a little cove bordered with the ubiquitous mangrove. The houseboat was moored close to the trees, a dark and angular silhouette against the bright lights across the water—headlights, streetlights, and a cluster of pinpoint blue lights flashing silently as HPD attended to some unknowable emergency.
Gideon followed a path down to the water and waded in, thigh-deep. Ava followed, so wet already it didn’t matter. She felt clouds of fine silt rising from the bottom with every step.
The houseboat had a flat deck with a little plywood-walled cabin occupying the middle half. The cabin’s flat roof extended out to cover the open deck on both sides. The nearest side was furnished with a tiny round patio table and a matching chair. And at the edge of the deck, a pile of . . . something.
Gideon tugged at the something. It spilled over the side: a ladder made of plastic-coated cable and three plastic steps. Still clutching his tablet in one hand, he climbed up with practiced grace. Ava followed more awkwardly, grateful to get under a roof. Across the water to the south, she saw the dark wall of another heavy rain band moving in.
“Welcome to my former base of operations,” Gideon said quietly as Akasha and Matt came aboard. “I don’t know where I’m going to rebuild, after, but it won’t be here. The boat won’t survive and the peninsula is gonna get scrubbed into an empty mudflat again, if anything’s left at all.” He sounded dejected—a display of emotional vulnerability that surprised Ava after all his bluster.
A moment later, he shifted back to chipper cynicism. “Okay, so who wants to drive the jelly while I finish up here?”
“I’ll do it,” Matt said, taking the proffered tablet. He scowled at it. “But your jellyfish is moving damn slow.”
“High tide and storm surge. What do you expect? Just keep hitting it. Big jellies can move against the current.”
Ava eyed him, trying to imagine how he’d survived on his own . . . how he’d protected himself. “Have you always been by yourself out here?” she asked.
“I like it that way.”
“You’re not worried about . . .” Her voice trailed off. She didn’t know quite how to phrase it.
“Creeps and weirdos, like me?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
A flash of teeth. “I know. You’re a lot nicer than Akasha. It’s actually been good here. Quiet. No one comes in by land and the handful of people like me, living on the water, are here because they don’t want anybody’s nose in their business. And anyway, there’s a rumor along the shoreline that the one time a zombie thought it would be fun to mess up my boat, he left with a nasty dose of Angel Dust eating at his lungs.”
Ava considered this, considered what she’d already seen, and then asked, “That’s just a rumor . . . right?”
“You asked what else I had.” He cocked his head toward the cabin. “Come inside.”
“Hey,” Akasha said. “You’ve never let me inside.”
“And I’m not letting you in now. Wait here.”
Ava wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to see what Gideon kept hidden, but neither did she want to piss him off. And if he had another device that might be useful against Denali, she needed to see it.
So when he opened the door—just a few inches, clearly determined to frustrate Akasha’s attempt to peer inside—Ava slipped past him, into the lightless interior.
She heard him follow; heard the door close. A dull red overhead light came on.
“You like red.”
“Saves the night vision.”
The day’s heat lingered in the interior. No windows looked out. No source of ventilation. A second door, on the opposite side, would open to the houseboat’s back deck. With both doors open, there would be the hope of a breeze, but the doors were closed. Despite her wet clothing, Ava started to sweat.
A glance around showed her everything there was to see, which was mostly nothing. A wide wooden shelf on one side had probably served as a workbench, but it was empty now. So were the two bracket-mounted shelves above it. Underneath the bench, small circles and lines of dust on the rough plank floor showed where other objects had been recently removed. A couple of raggedy hand towels hung on a laundry line. She wondered why Gideon had brought her inside.
“God, it’s hot in here,” he said, over a sudden clatter of rain on the roof. “The AC unit went with the rest of the equipment. It’s all stashed in a village dome house—and I’m planning to ride out the storm with it. Only one thing’s left here.”
Ava cocked a skeptical brow.
From him, a slight, anxious smile. “It’s hidden.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing clever. Call it a mistake. I was going to leave it. Let Huko chew it up. But hell, we’re talking nukes now. My mistakes don’t seem so bad.”
Ava did not like the sound of that.
“Is there any way you or somebody else can physically get to that submarine?” Gideon asked.
“I don’t know. I mean, not me. Matt, maybe. Why?”
He knelt, put his finger in a little notch at the end of a floorboard, and lifted it up. Water glistened a few inches below. He reached in, felt around under the floor, and came up with a chain. Small steel links, clean and shiny. Couldn’t have been in the water for much more than a day. He pulled it up.
The chain was only a couple of feet long. Attached to its end with a locking carabiner was a small, squat, stainless-steel, wide-mouth vacuum bottle, the kind hikers use to carry whiskey or a cup of hot coffee. He unscrewed the lock on the carabiner, and unshackled the bottle, which looked as clean as the chain.
“What’s in there?” Ava asked uneasily.
“Nasty shit.” He grabbed one of the towels from the laundry line and used it to dry the bottle. “That zombie who died of Angel Dust? I didn’t kill him on purpose. He went after me. Beat the shit out of me for no reason. Then broke in here. Went through my stuff. Infected himself.”
“You were working with Angel Dust.” Her skin crawled as she stared at the bottle; adrenaline shivered her heart.
“I didn’t kill the zombie, but I was not in a good place at the time.” He tapped his forehead. “You know. Up here.”
Ava weighed her options as he unscrewed the top. The door behind her was probably locked, while he stood between her and the door they’d used to come in. Could she get past him before he released whatever was in that bottle?
He said, “I’m in a better place now. Like I said, I was going to leave it to Huko to take care of, but if you want to take it, if you can find a way to use it, it’s yours.”
The cap came off. Ava held her breath. She couldn’t help it.
Gideon dumped out the contents of the bottle on the built-in bench. Six clear-plastic ampules, an inch long, with snap caps. A dark substance half-filling each. Not a gel, because it flowed. And not a liquid. Only a powder could settle like that, at an angle within each ampule.
“Angel Dust,” Gideon said, the contrition in his voice letting her know he regretted the whole enterprise.
She gestured at the ampules. “How did you manage to collect all that without killing yourself?”
“How does anyone? I used a remotely controlled bot, of course, just like with the gunpowder.” He held up his hands, thumbs and forefingers tapping together. “Pinching appendages, controlled by gloves. The only hard part was harvesting ripe spore sacs without popping them open.”
“And the dust is viable?” she asked.
“Yes. I mean, I haven’t tested it on anybody lately, but the zombie popped an ampule and sniffed it—must have thought it was a designer drug—and went down hard.”
“I saw that report. The body turned up on the grounds of the old Waiau Power Plant. There was speculation about an infestation in the underground piping—but I guess nothing was ever found?”
“Probably not.”
“That had to be, what . . . eight or nine months ago?”
“Eight months. But I kept the dust in the freezer until I took the unit out a few hours ago.”
“And what do you think I can do with it?”
“Nothing, if you can’t get to that submarine. But if you can, if you drop it into an enclosed atmosphere like that, with all those jackboots rebreathing each other’s air, no one would last very long.”
Ava’s skin prickled with the memory of Robert Bell on his knees, his shoulders rising and falling in short spasmodic jerks as the fungal toxin shut down his ability to breathe. “Put it back in the water. I don’t see how it could work.”
He gathered the ampules. Dropped them back into the vacuum bottle.
“No, wait,” Ava said. “What if that bottle survives the storm, or some of those ampules?”
“I don’t have a safe way to get rid of it.”
“Then give me the bottle. I’ll turn it over to hazmat as soon as I can.”
“Assuming there still is a hazmat, after the nuke hits.”
She hissed softly. “Right.” She took the bottle, secured it to her belt. It hung awkwardly against her hip.
Gideon kicked the chain into the water, replaced the floorboard, and then they went back outside.
Akasha looked around reproachfully. She was holding the tablet now. With a slight thrust of her chin, she indicated Matt. “He’s back online,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the rain. “And I don’t think it’s going well.”
Matt didn’t even register their reappearance. He stood by the houseboat’s corner post, staring out over East Loch through the lens of his smart glasses, fist clenched as he demanded answers from someone not present. “I don’t care if you’re on the move! Get my comms cleaned now.”
“He’s compromised,” Gideon concluded, all his cocky bravado gone. “Idiot! Come on.” He crossed the deck, his glance taking in Ava and Akasha. “If you don’t want to go down with him, you need to get out of here now.” He slipped with hardly a splash into the water.
“Go,” Ava told Akasha. “Keep the tablet safe. I’ll be right behind you.”
Akasha nodded, and followed her brother.
Ava flicked on the red beam of her flashlight. “Matt!”
He didn’t answer.
She stepped closer. Touched his back. For just a moment she felt the heat, the hardness of the muscles beneath his shirt. Then he jerked away, half-turning to eye her with a dangerous gaze.
“Just me,” she snarled. “And we need you. So leave your gear and move out. Now.”
“I can’t leave the gear, but it’s being scrubbed. Let’s go.”
Rain fell hard as Ava slid first into the water. She waded to the shore, the red beam of her flashlight picking out Gideon’s well-worn path. Matt followed a step behind.
“What happened?” she asked as the blue beetle lights came on to show the way.
“The EmLoc—the Emergency Locator—responded to a rogue signal as soon as I went online. That access has been closed, but my position is known outside the circle of trust.”
Her feet slipped in the mud with every hurried step. “So what’s coming? Who’s coming?”
“My guess is, navy security. Not that they’re part of this. They’re just doing their job.”
“And Lyric? She’s still on the outside?”
“Status unknown.” Bitterness in those words.
“You’re kidding?” Ava blinked against the rain, moving as quickly as she could without falling down. “Who were you talking to then?”
“Tech support,” he growled.
An answer so mundane that doubt clutched at her again. She rejected it. This is real. Kaden had denied nothing.
Past the sound of her breathing, beyond the squish of her footsteps, and the fast patter of rain, a new noise reached her. A low hum, felt as much as heard, familiar from her years on the battlefield. A stealthed quad-copter. No, probably more than one. Large enough to contend with the weather, and no doubt well-armed.
Ava switched off her flashlight and unholstered her gun.