The Machine Awakes (14 page)

“Hey,” said Kodiak. Braben turned; Kodiak pointed to his arm. “You need to get that looked at.”

Braben lifted his arm, his eyes going wide as if he hadn't noticed he'd been injured. “Oh, shit.
Dammit.
”

Kodiak nodded toward the door. “Go get fixed up. We'll stay here—meet back in the bullpen.”

“Roger that,” said Braben, already heading out of the office. He gave a nod to the chief as he passed her; she acknowledged, but was still deep in her conference. As Kodiak watched Braben go, the chief caught his eye. She shook her head.

Kodiak sighed. Dammit, he'd been right. Things were getting much,
much
worse.

 

15

Wake up, sis.

Cait took a breath and blinked, but saw nothing but infinite, formless black.

Come on, you can do this. Wake up!

Maybe she was asleep. Maybe she was dead. Maybe she was dead and dreaming and the reason she could hear her brother's voice in her head was because she was dead like he was.

You're not dead.

Well, okay then. She blinked, and stared, and opened her eyes wide to the dark, but it didn't change. There was a funny taste in her mouth. Sour. Rotten.

I'm not dead either.

I know. I know. IknowIknowIknowIknowIknow.

So wake the hell up, Caitlin Smith. You have to move. Now!

Caitlin Smith. He said it in that certain, cheeky way, mocking the tone their parents used when they were in trouble when they were young, just like every parent in the world did. Back then, that world was full of life and color and light. Now there was nothing but a void. An absence of everything.

They drugged you. It's heavy stuff but you'll feel better soon. You need to move.

She wondered where he had been. Wondered why he hadn't been answering her calls, her cries for help.

I know. I'm sorry. But sometimes … it's like there's a barrier between us. Like they isolate me, cut me off. I'm sorry. But it's time to move. Now.

Cait sighed. It was a deep breath, somehow too deep, making her lungs ache. It was loud too. Loud enough to attract the attention of whoever it was who was standing near. The soft darkness around her was filled with the sound of hard boots on a hard floor; then the darkness was replaced by a bright white light as the black bag was pulled off her head.

Glass peered down at Cait's face, scrunching the bag in his hands. Then he moved away, and Cait was blinded by the bright light hanging directly above her.

“I'm sorry,” said Glass, somewhere to Cait's left. He even sounded like he meant it. There were more footsteps, and then someone else leaning over her. It took a moment for Cait's eyes to adjust as the new person blocked out the light, her silhouette resolving into the hard features of the High Priestess, Flood.

Inside Cait's mind, the voice of her brother told her that she could
do it,
and then it was quiet, and all Cait could hear was her own ragged breathing, wet and heavy.

Drugged. Drugged and black-bagged, again. Cait rolled her head away from the light and she found this helped clear her mind. She had a fair idea now of how things were going down. She knew that she wasn't
working
for Flood's group, not how they had said, back at the beginning, when they had first got in touch that night at the Fleet Academy. Cait, alone in her dorm, the message appearing on her personal comm with, impossibly, no sender. And each night after that for one week, for two weeks. Impossible to ignore. They
knew
things. Things about her. About her brother.

About what had happened to him. What had
really
happened to him. And about what the Fleet was doing. What the war was about. Who they were really fighting.

And what she could do about it. If only she joined them.

But it wasn't like that, was it? No. They were
using
her, plain and simple. And like a fool she hadn't realized that until it was too late. Like a fool she thought she was going to be part of the group, one of them. She had abandoned her family, her training, her old life—
everything—
because she thought she was going to make a difference, because the secrets the Fleet was keeping were too big and that people had to
know.
Because millions of people were being killed for no reason, and that had to stop.

And together, they had promised they would do just that.

And now she was lying in a dark hole somewhere in the wreckage of Salt City. Because they had lied. Because they were the Morning Star.

And nothing the Morning Star said was true.
Nothing.

Cait wanted to cry, but her vocal cords just clicked and she sighed breathlessly. There was a tapping sound, metal on metal, from her other side. Cait turned her head in that direction, and a small metal table resolved in her vision. Flood was fussing with something on it. Metal instruments. Lots of them. They looked medical.
Surgical.

Cait took a desperate breath and tried to lift her head up, straining as hard as she could. She couldn't move it, and she realized there was a restraint across her forehead, loose enough that she could turn her head to the left and right, but that was it. She pulled on her wrists, tried to raise her legs, but they were held in place too. She was strapped to the table.

She lay back and closed her eyes. Her head continued to clear as the drugs wore off. Her breathing settled. Maybe her talent would come back. Maybe it would help her.

She held her breath, willing with all her energy to feel that buzz, the electric prickle on her skin.

There was nothing.

Cait let out her breath and licked her dry lips and, turning once more to watch Flood at the other table, tried to speak again.

“Where is my brother?” she spat between clenched teeth, the effort making her head thump and black stars flutter around the edge of her vision.

“You'll see him soon,” said Glass from somewhere out of sight. Cait turned her head back to the left, but all she could see was the edge of his long pale coat as he stood somewhere just behind her. Flood still hadn't spoken. Cait couldn't work out who was in charge of the group—it had seemed to be Flood, and she had called herself a High Priestess, but Glass seemed pretty chatty, and much more relaxed. He seemed out of place, the opposite of the tightly wound, fervent Flood. Maybe it was just a good cop, bad cop routine.

And maybe they were behind it, behind her brother's voice. Glass was psi-abled, apparently. So maybe it was them, faking it, using his dead voice to string her along.

No, it's okay. It's really me, sis.

Cait felt herself tense up.

Don't answer. They can't hear me, but they'll probably be able to hear you. I'm getting a little boost, is all. All part of the plan, don't worry.

Cait focused on her breathing. In, and out. In, and out.

Remember that time when I climbed that tree in the front yard, and you told me not to but I wouldn't listen? And you were right, because I slipped on the high branch and fell and cracked my arm on the ground. And then we both ended up in the hospital, because when Mom found us we were both laid out at the bottom of the tree, both of us with broken arms? We had to tell them we had both climbed the tree and fallen out, because there was no other explanation for why we had both got hurt.

Tyler's voice filled Cait's head like warm morning light. It was him, had to be. His voice wasn't faked. He really was alive. Which meant her captors were telling the truth.

Cait screwed her eyes tight. A thousand thoughts crowded her mind. The members of the Morning Star were delusional. She knew that much. Everything they said about the Fleet, about the war, was a lie. Their worldview was skewed far, far into the realms of fantasy.

But they were telling the truth about her brother. And if what they said had happened to him was true, what did that mean for everything else they said was going on?

Were they actually
right?

Cait opened her eyes and pulled on the straps holding her wrists, enough to rattle the table. Flood's face reappeared, floating over her own.

“Time for your next task,” she said, “and the glorious future that awaits you.” Flood pursed her lips and turned her face as she looked down on Cait, like she was waiting for an answer.

There it was. The crazy. The Morning Star disciples were psycho zealots. Samantha Flood a prime example.

“Glorious future?” Cait whispered. “You really are one screwed-up bitch, aren't you?”

Cait flinched, waiting for the sting of the blow she was sure was coming as the High Priestess lost her very short temper again. But all Flood did was laugh.

“You'll understand soon enough,” she said. Then she stood up and vanished from Cait's vision.

The table jerked suddenly, and the room began to move, rotating slowly from right to left as the table to which Cait was strapped was turned over with the grinding hum of an electric motor. Cait pulled against the restraints on animal instinct, fight or flight, as she saw Glass standing nearby, and then Flood's guard dogs, watching. She saw another table and then cables, thick and thin, trailing away from equipment.

And then the table stopped with a shudder, and she was looking at floor. It was shiny, plasticky, covered in more of the cables.

She felt the strap across her forehead tighten, removing her ability to turn her head. Her senses now cleared of the lingering effects of the drug by a fresh surge of adrenaline, she realized that there was nothing behind the back of her head and neck—there was an opening in the table, running from her occipital bone down to the middle of her shoulder blades.

Now she knew what she was on—it was an operating table, the same kind used by the Fleet, when direct access to a psi-marine's central nervous system was required. But she was not in a Fleet medical center. The equipment had to have been stolen, or someone had built a pretty good version of their own.

Cait struggled against the restraints, but hanging upside down was disorienting, and the more she strained, the dizzier she felt.

“Let's get it over with,” she heard Glass say. Cait cried out in protest, screaming as many curse words as she knew at the bastards who were doing this to her. Then she felt something cold and wet applied to the back of her neck.

And then she felt something exquisitely sharp, pain like nothing in the world, and the room and its contents were once more, thankfully, replaced by the infinite and pillow-soft blackness.

 

16

The Bureau bullpen was
even fuller than before, if that was possible, thought Kodiak as he stood back to survey his work. On one side of the room, close to his desk—bathrobe from the safe house still on the back of his chair—he had wheeled in a new operations board, a sheet of translucent material four meters wide, two meters tall. With it, he could call up any data a holodisplay could, but with a real board, he could do something you couldn't do with a hologram—stick things to it. Kodiak felt a little old-fashioned, but screw it, this was how he liked to work.

The Fleet was in trouble. Big trouble. It had been from the moment their leader, Sebela, had fallen in front of millions of viewers at the Fleet Memorial. But now, with his replacement taken out the same way, the buzz of everyone working at the Bureau felt like it could tip over into full-blown panic. The work helped—for Kodiak too, burying himself in it, not allowing dangerous, fearful thoughts to cloud his judgment.

But as he turned, arms folded, to look out across the bullpen, he began to feel better. The room was full of anxiety and stress as dozens of agents worked furiously, coordinating the city-wide lockdown and collating reports that came in from the marines and agents out there enforcing it, analyzing data from the crime scenes, examining forensic data.

But that anxiety was good. That stress.

If you weren't afraid of failure, then something was wrong.

Kodiak walked back to his desk, the holodisplay floating above it showing a stack of unread messages. Kodiak sat and began sifting through the most urgent ones.

They were mostly reports on the lockdown. New Orem had been flooded with marines, who were conducting a building-to-building, door-to-door sweep. The city itself was, for all intents and purposes, closed and sealed: no one in or out, all road traffic stopped, bridges and tunnels sealed, air traffic likewise grounded and the public spaceport shut down. The Fleet's own space facilities continued to run as required, more marines arriving and only vital supplies being sent on automatic, the cargo loaders checked and scanned manually before they headed to orbit and Earth's quickspace jump point.

The lockdown itself had actually been easy to implement, the process following a standard set of procedures and orders established in the wake of the Spider attack on Earth forty years before. That was the only time the war had struck at the heart of the Fleet, the surprise attack destroying the moon and most of the Southern Hemisphere. It had happened before Kodiak, Braben, and Avalon had been born, but there were agents in the bullpen who remembered that day well. The jagged shards of the moon had remained in the sky for a year afterward—a horrific memorial to the millions of dead and a reminder that humanity was fighting for its very existence—before they'd been mined, cleaned up by the Hollywood Mining Conglomerate. To save Earth from the devastating tidal effects of losing its only natural satellite, the Fleet had constructed a series of gravitational platforms, orbiting at a quarter of a million klicks.

And now they had a new kind of conflict to deal with. Out there, on the Warworlds and in deep space, the Fleet engaged the Spiders. Here, on Earth, the very heart of the Fleet had been ripped out in a crisis unheard of in Fleet history.