Seed (33 page)

“Here’s your future, Lewis.” The woman pressed her blade to the general’s neck. Cut it open with the deftness of a practiced butcher. Brood took an involuntary step back.

“
Coño
,” he gasped. The sergeant glanced at him.

“He had it coming.”

“Most of us do,” Brood figured. He steadied himself. Sucked sour ash from his lip. “Just thought you was trying to save him.” The woman grabbed the general’s face once more.

“Look at me,” she commanded. Gurgling sounds came from the general’s gaping neck. His blood soaked the ash around him. He went limp. The woman rose, staggered slightly. Her height astonished Brood. The sergeant reached out to support her.

“You okay, Boss?”

“Never better.” She handed back the knife, then hawked and spit very deliberately on the general’s corpse. She looked towards the survivors. They’d begun gathering near the idling jets, their vibe distinctly unpleasant. They pointed at the planes. Some held rocks. “Time to dust the fuck out of here.”

“Seconded.”

Together the two soldiers stalked through the zep’s teetering skeleton, rodents bee-lining through a mammoth corpse. Brood hesitated, then called after them.

“
Dónde es dirigido usted
?”

“Fort Riley,” the sergeant replied without turning around. Brood hurried to catch up.

“Think I be able to catch a ride to Denver from there?”

“Doubtful.”

A side hatch on the nearest jet popped open with a hiss, lowered as they neared until it became a ramp. The two soldiers clambered up it, the woman growing obviously unsteady. Survivors pressed close, but jets kicked up suddenly and as a group they backed away.

“You killed her!” Someone yelled. A fist-sized hunk of twisted metal flew out of the crowd and clanged off the plane’s hull. The hatch began to close. Brood took in the survivors, looked over the scorched valley. Nothing but ash. He chucked his duffle into the jet and heaved himself aboard.

The two soldiers sat side by side in carbon-molded seats that ran the length of a long cargo bay. Ergonomic hooks clamped down tight on their shoulders. Another soldier lay on the floor, his armor twisted. A black boy, unconscious or dead. The sergeant and the woman eyed Brood as he picked himself a seat.

“Ain’t nothing left here,” he explained.

“We’d take the rest,” the sergeant said. “They don’t seem to like us much.” Something banged against the jet, emphasizing his point.

“Good to go,” the woman mumbled, her words slurring now.

“Good to go!” the sergeant yelled at the cockpit. An ambient moan filled the cargo bay as the hatch sealed and the cabin pressurized. Brood’s ears popped. He saw two pilots up there, speaking into mics beneath their visors.

Jets roared. The floor tilted. Brood fell sideways, grasped at the shoulder hook overhead until it clanked down and pressed him into his seat. Thin titanium ribs ran along the hull between each seat. Brood grasped them tightly—swallowed bile as the cargo bay wheeled and tilted. The big sergeant watched him.

“You ever fly before?” Everything turned smooth except for a hard engine vibration in the hull. Jets wailed just outside, far too close to be safe. Brood’d heard about old military vehicles and their nuke plants. The jets screamed and he tried to fathom their power. He simply couldn’t get his mind around it. He shook his head.

“I’ve done it a thousand times,” the sergeant said. He grinned, exposing the diamond in his front tooth. “And every single time I know I’m going to die.”

The woman moaned. Her head slumped to her chest. The good side of her face crumpled with pain.

“Hold on, Boss,” the sergeant told her. He worked open a panel on the thigh of his armor, pulled free a small white satchel with a red cross on in. Unzipped it and unfolded it onto his lap. Began rooting through it with a finger covered by articulating Kevlar and titanium.

“Fucked up, Gomez,” the woman said.

“Fucked up situation, Boss.”

“I fucked up. Took those kids in there without real weapons. Mission failed.” She winced and shook her head. “Fucked. Up.”

The sergeant shushed her. He peeled open a slip of paper, produced from it a white, circular patch the size of a pinky nail. This he gently thumbed to the unburned side of the woman’s neck. Almost immediately her shoulders relaxed. He peeled open a second and placed it beside the first, then kissed the woman delicately on her burned temple.

“All good now, Boss.”

The woman’s eyes grew glassy. Her pupils dilated, big as eight balls. They drifted around the troop bay in a way that reminded Brood of Pollo. After a while they settled on him.

“Hi,” she said.

“
Hola
.”

Her eyes widened suddenly. She looked intently at the sergeant.

“Tell the baby doc,” she said. “Tell him to test the crops around Riley for the Tet.”

“Okay, Boss.”

“Tell him,” she pressed, and squinted at the sergeant like he was very far away. “Priority number fucking one.”

“Don’t worry, Boss. I’ll make it happen.”

The woman nodded, satisfied. She looked at Brood again. Smiled with the unburned side of her face, then passed out.

The sergeant lifted her chin and inspected her burns for several minutes. His brow furrowed with concern as he probed the wound still bleeding near her collar bone.
He pulled a thick compress from the med kit and pressed it there until it stuck. Then let out a breath and sat back. He eyed Brood, jerked his chin at the duffle Brood had stuffed possessively beneath the seat behind his sandaled feet.

“What’s in the bag, homes?”

“Semtex,” Brood told him. The corner of the sergeant’s mouth turned up. His scar twisted and he gave a slight nod.

“Cool.”

They said nothing for a while, lulled by the jet’s throbbing white noise, the hull’s vibration, which Brood had begun to enjoy. It reminded him of the wagon, cranking down a smooth road on Herc power. After a while the sergeant spoke.

“Ain’t seen Semtex in a decade. Used it back in the day.” He inclined his head towards the unconscious woman. “We found some in Iran once, hidden under a goat pen. Probably been there forty years. We used it to blow the shit out of a dam.” His eyes crinkled with pleasure at the memory. “What’re you doing with it?”

Brood regarded the sergeant. Saw a hardness in the man’s face he decided he liked.

“Satori,” he said. “They took my brother. They going to give him back.” The sergeant gave this some thought, then nodded once more.

“Cool.”

CHAPTER 21

umedha stood naked atop the dome, skin green and tingling in the sun. He marveled at the simplicity, the efficiency of the nearly closed system. The tunnel entrance, a white concrete hump at the airfield’s north end, emitted landrace teams. They shimmered with sweat in the fierce spring heat. Meaty legs churned; heavy shoulders leaned hard against the cartilage yokes of wagons brimming with ripe Satori vegetables. The season’s first outdoor harvest from the fields four miles north, beyond the ruins of the old factories. Crops ready for Satori’s children. Crops ready for Satori herself. Still more landrace teams hauled wagons full of seed and compost out of the verdant swell of the secondary dome, Pihadassa’s dome, where she’d built her seed. They hauled the seed into the tunnel, headed back towards those same fields where they would replant, beginning the cycle anew.

Both domes sizzled with photosynthesis. Animal kinship overwhelmed Sumedha.

“She is beautiful.”

He reached out to touch Pihadassa. Felt soy-epoxy armor under his fingertips.

He turned. Found the leader of his security detail, visor pushed up, staring. Her lean face twisted with revulsion at the Designer’s fingers, which caressed her armored shoulder. Sumedha withdrew his hand. Paduma’s face, swollen under his choking grip, flashed in his mind. He closed his eyes, breathed, steadied himself. He looked once more at the dome.

“She desires to know herself,” he told the security head. “She is an empty beast, but she craves a mind. You can sense it, yes?” The woman’s mouth opened as though to say something, and hung there, agape and silent. After a moment it snapped shut. Sumedha smiled. “Soon she will have one, I think. She will know herself.”

He turned and looked down on the old city, sprawling east towards the limitless brown prairie. Spring had brought migrants in force—those without seed, who hoped to scavenge or beg at the source. They camped along broken remnants of the old boulevards, took up residence in the forsaken steel frames of old high-rises. They’d built shelters from scraps of corrugated tin, or draped tarps over wood frames. Some of them lay naked on the sidewalks. Their cook fires smelled like petrochemicals. Sumedha breathed, took in the ragged jangle of their collective helix.

They were not migrants really. They were refugees. They had been thus for thousands of years, ever since they had fled the African savannah as it turned to desert in another time of climate flux. That was what had shaped them: the savannah. They were not fit for the world they had built themselves. They were not fit for this world that had come after, shaped by climate forcings of their own reckless creation. A thermal increase of seven watts per square meter. Sumedha’s mind worked over the figure. It struck him as piddling. The world to come, Satori’s world, would not be so fragile.

“They are fit only for what happens to them.” He turned once more to Pihadassa.

The security head stood there, watching. The woman exchanged a glance with one of her three armored men, who stood a few paces off. Sumedha breathed, righted his mind. Saw fear in the woman, contempt. Sweat rolled from beneath the swell of her helmet, a machined composite of soy and carbon fiber. Sumedha took in her helix. Found it no different than any other migrant’s.

“We are primates,” he said. “Solitude does not suit us. Do you have a partner?”

“Yes, sir,” the woman stiffly affirmed.

“Do I know him?”

“He works in the Fathers’ detail.”

“It is good to have a partner.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sumedha trembled with the sudden need to connect, so intense it seemed to scorch away all other sensation. His mind conjured Pihadassa’s face.

“I think she must still live.”

“Couldn’t say, sir.”

Thunderheads, burly and dark, piled up to the east. Something had happened out there. Kassapa’s wild-born spy had received word that the government agent had found Pihadassa. Then the spy had lost touch with his source at Fort Riley. There had been no word since.

“I talk to her as though she is here. I think that must mean she lives.”

“Sir.” One of the security men pointed a black-gloved finger towards the airfield far below. Four heavy landraces had entered the outer gate and now lumbered towards the dome. At their center limped a slim woman. Even from this distance she exuded a coiled ferocity. An advocate. As the distance closed, Sumedha saw scorched canvas robes, burned skin. It was Grace, Kassapa’s favorite. One of her arms had been torn off at the shoulder. A violent shiver ran through Sumedha’s hairless body. The wait had ended.

….

“The autism no longer grips you,” Sumedha observed. Bacilio regarded him calmly, chin held high, defiant. Muscle had built itself beneath the swirl of animal glyphs on the boy’s torso. Sumedha reached out, touched the pink lip of scar tissue on the boy’s forearm where brown skin ended and the pale skin began. The boy lifted the hand, flexed fingers. Sumedha nodded. “You have taken well to the graft.”

“I’m hungry,” Bacilio stated. Sumedha smiled, nodded at one of the two thick landraces who stood nearby.

“Food,” he commanded. The landrace nodded with an emphatic chuff and disappeared back through the door. Sumedha’s black eyes flicked back to Bacilio. “How do you feel?” The boy stared for a long time at Sumedha’s face.

“Awake,” he said. He held his palm lightly to the lab’s skin wall. “How
you
feel, homes?”

Sumedha breathed. Sensations moved through him. They frightened him.

“You have shown me the graft’s key,” he told the boy. “I have adjusted it, but I must make sure. Give me your hand.” Bacilio lifted the hand not touching the wall. Sumedha took it, closed his eyes. The boy’s helix turned in Sumedha’s mind. Mutable, but stable. Sumedha opened his eyes, released the boy’s hand.

“Satori. Graft thirty-eight, please.”

“Yes, Sumedha.”

The sound of Pihadassa’s voice speared Sumedha’s chest. It conjured laughter, a harsh bark that emerged from between his teeth. The laboratory’s walls turned a troubled color of ash. Sumedha breathed, collected himself. The walls turned pale again. He spoke calmly:

“Table.” It rose from the floor and articulated into place before him. Bacilio’s quick eyes followed the pod as it descended on its fat umbilical and came to rest on the table. The umbilical detached and retracted. Bacilio’s hand stayed against the wall.

“I lost my Other.” Sumedha leaned heavily on the table and leveled his gaze at the boy. “She is dead.” More laughter escaped him, its source a mystery, which for some reason made him laugh even harder. Biolumes pulsed, as though they wished to reach out and touch Sumedha, comfort him. The remaining landrace chuffed anxiously.