The Peripheral (27 page)

RED GREEN BLUE

T
he only good thing you could say for this toilet was it had a seat. No door on it, and dog-leash man was about six feet away, keeping track of her out of the corner of his eye. He’d replaced his rifle with a pistol, worn on one of those nylon harnesses slung down from his belt and strapped across his thigh, like where a gorilla would wear his gun.

She was glad she just had to pee, seeing as she had company. She’d gotten them to take her here by explaining that she really needed to, that if she didn’t she’d eventually wet her pants, and that that wouldn’t be nice for Pickett, assuming he was coming back, which she told them he definitely intended to, but not for hours. So she’d been right about there being cams, and she must’ve struck some right tone with her prisoner’s assisted urination pitch. Nothing angry, not too urgent. Just sitting there, addressing the door, because she had no idea where any cams might be. She’d gone through it twice, giving it a few minutes in between, careful not to escalate the second time. The two of them had come in, not that much later, put her on the leash, snipped the blue Homes zip tie fastening her to the table, and led her out. About thirty feet to the left, away from the roll-up door they’d first brought her in through, was this doorless single stall.

Sitting there, she thought this could’ve been the place where the heroine of the Resistance, in Operation Northwind, took out dog-leash with an OSS thumb-dagger she’d hidden in her underwear. She didn’t have any thumb-dagger, but then they hadn’t searched her, and maybe Reece hadn’t either. Which meant they were slacker than a lot of game AI she’d played against, and didn’t know she had a tube of lip
gloss, which might be poison or an explosive gel. But then that was all she did have, and it wasn’t either. To dog-leash’s credit as a jailer, though, he’d zip-tied the nylon ring on the handle of the leash to a vertical, paint-flaking pipe, just right of the toilet, which would’ve made it hard for her to take anybody out with anything, short of a gun. When she pulled up her jeans and stood, he came in and snipped the tie. Then they took her back to the bright room.

That was probably when she first noticed the bug, though she barely did. Just a gnat. Fast, close, then gone.

But back in her chair, fastened to the table with a fresh Homes-blue zip tie, both men gone, something whined past her ear. If those tanks outside were standing water, there’d be mosquitos in here. With her hands tied, she wouldn’t be able to do much about them.

She was looking in the direction of the closed door, given that was easiest and she hadn’t much choice, when three bright small points of light moved horizontally across her vision, dead level, one after another, right to left, and vanished. Red, then green, then blue. They’d seemed to be either square or rectangular, and she’d barely had a chance to wonder whether she might be having a stroke, a seizure or something, when they were back, right to left again, same order, closer together, then collapsing into a single longer one. Aquamarine.

Unmoving now, in the middle of Pickett’s white, finger-smudged door.

She moved her head, expecting the pixel-thing to move. But it stayed put, above the tabletop, closer than she’d first taken it to be. Like it was really there, an object, aquamarine, impossible.

“Huh,” she said, mind filling with those things she’d seen kill and eat the woman, then with however many episodes of
Ciencia Loca
she’d watched about UFOs. Hadn’t mentioned any tiny ones. This one descending, now, as she watched, to the tabletop, between her tethered wrists. Straight down, like a little elevator. Its length doubling, on the dull steel, it began to rotate on a central axis, revving to become a slightly blurry aquamarine disk, size of an antique dime, flat
on the table. And she heard it do that, faintly buzzing. Couldn’t get her wrists any further apart than they already were.

Aquamarine to bright yellow, then a stylized red nubbin, dead center. Thing still spinning, because she could hear it. A kind of animation. “Macon?”

The disk flared red.

She’d done something wrong.

Aquamarine again. Then a graphic of an ear, drawn with one black line, like a PSA warning. Becoming a housefly, in the same style. Then both, side by side, the fly shrinking to vanish into the ear. Then yellow again, Edward’s two nubbins instead of Macon’s one. The yellow background went cream, the two nubbins becoming Lowbeer’s emblem, that pale gold crown. Then the disk was gone, leaving an actual bug, much smaller, in its place. Not a housefly. Translucent, waxy looking.

“No way,” she said, under her breath. She leaned forward.

Too fast to see. Into her left ear. Buzzing. Deeper. “Don’t speak,” the buzz became Macon’s voice. “You’re miked, on cam. Pretend nothing’s happening. Do exactly what I say.”

She made herself look at the door. It sounded like him, but she could see the woman’s clothing fluttering down, over that empty street.

“Click your teeth together twice, one-two, without opening your mouth. Quiet as possible.”

She looked down. Clicked her teeth, twice. Loudest thing in the world.

“Need a minute of you not moving much. How you are now, but not moving. Not too still, ’cause I’m going to capture, then loop that back to them, so they’ll see that loop and not what’s happening next. Got it?”

Click-click.

“No major head or body movement. Move too much, it highlights repetition in the loop. I say done, be ready to go. Earplugs first, then the suit.”

Suit?

“You good?” he asked.

Click-click.

“Capturing now,” he said.

She stared at the door. The knob, the smears above it. Hoped her mother was okay, Lithonia still there.

“Done,” said Macon, finally. “Looping. Stand up.”

She put her palms flat on the steel, stood, pushing back the Hefty chair. She heard the bolt rattle.

The door opened. Weirdness came in. Like her retinas were melting. A kind of roiling blob.

“Squidsuit,” said Macon, in her ear. Cuttlefish camo, like Burton and Conner used in the war.

The suit was reading whatever was nearest, emulating that, but part of it looked sprayed with blood. Like a chunk of broken game code, walking in. Then a squidstuff glove, with the head of Burton’s tomahawk, darting toward her, under her hands, to hook and sever the blue zip tie In the bottom curve of the head was a special notch, sharper even than the rest of it, crazy sharp. For ropes, webbing, harness. It nipped back in, between her wrists, to cut the tie that held them together. His other glove a steel-gray paw, offering two orange blobs on an orange string, like low-end Hefty candy. Then she had them in her ears, like Macon had told her to, but had he meant her to trap the bug in there?

Burton dropped to the floor, scooted under the table, popped up beside her. Velcro ripping, glimpse of his eyes. Squidstuff unfolding, shaken out in front of her, instantly going what must be the color of her face under these lights, plus two big smears, the brown of her eyes, trying to emulate her, and then she had her head in it, her arms, was pulling it down, oversized and loose, dark inside but then she could see, the lights mercifully dimmer. Burton closing his own suit, then bending to close hers, starting at her feet.

“Out,” said Macon, the earplugs changing his voice.

Burton picked her up, swung her over the table, came over it himself like a gymnast clearing a pommel horse, pulled her to the door and out. She stumbled. Her foot a concrete blur beside dog-leash’s holster, pistol still in it, splotched with blood.

Stepped over him.

“Door,” said Macon, close to her ear, “move.” The roll-up door they’d brought her in through, open, the night beyond it darker now. The big loose pajama feet of the suit scuffing, threatening to trip her up.

Not game blood, some other part of her said, from some distant sideline.

THAT FIRST GENTLE TOUCH

H
as her now,” said Ossian.

The exoskeleton’s operator, in the stub, had just positioned it in the executive-hauler, in a rear seat facing the inert buggy, black manipulators drooping.

“Who does?”

“The hot-head brother. Commencing exfiltration. Ash says she’s overreacting.”

“Flynne?”

“Lowbeer. Seal the door.” This last, evidently, to the Bentley, its open door obediently shrinking to nothing at all, an unbroken expanse of silver-gray bodywork, Netherton finding the very last bit of closure peculiarly unpleasant, somehow octopoid. “Full hermetic. Vent one third captive atmosphere.”

Netherton heard a sharp outrush of air.

“Take it apart,” Ossian said, Netherton assumed to the operator. “If the tutorials aren’t adequate, ask us for help.”

“Overreacting?”

“She’s about to make a point. Quite a sharp one, irreversible.”

“She needs to get Flynne out first.”

“Shall I get her for you? Couldn’t possibly mind being interrupted just now, by our resident bullshit artist.”

Netherton ignored this. “What’s it doing in there?”

“Attempting to relieve a pram of two autonomously targeting, self-limiting swarm weapons. Shouldn’t be too terribly difficult, you might suppose, having just seen me shut the bastard down cold. Not
that the sadistic shits who engineered it would let life be that simple. And now our technical is broaching the matter . . .” Ossian was listening to something Netherton couldn’t hear. “And there you have it. I was right.”

“Have what?” Netherton asked.

Ossian seemed quite satisfied now. “It didn’t fancy that first gentle touch, did it? Projected assemblers. Ate the better part of Zubov’s father’s leather upholstery, and the biological elements of our left manipulator. They wouldn’t believe me, that the bugger never sleeps. Has no off switch. Waiting all this time to kill anyone who tried to get it out of the pram. We’ll have them both, though, now, in short order. And the one that triggered expended no more than a few thousand bugs. Millions yet to go. Can’t be reloaded, you know, not this side of Novosibirsk Oblast.”

The gilt coronet appeared.

“Is she safe?” Netherton asked.

“Told you I don’t know,” said Ossian.

Netherton moved away from the Bentley.

“Apparently, yes,” said Lowbeer.

“Ossian tells me that Ash thinks you’re overreacting. That was his word.”

“She’s bright, Ash, but unaccustomed to operating from strength. Pickett is entirely unlikely to find his place in our scheme of things. And someone did recently attempt to kill you, Mr. Netherton. Pickett, we can assume, already has some relationship, at whatever remove, with whoever ordered that. Would you like to go there?”

“Go where?”

“Lev’s stub.”

“That’s impossible. Isn’t it?”

“Physically, yes. Virtually, however crudely? Child’s play.”

“It is?”

“A bit too literally in this case,” she said, “but yes.”

PRECURSORS

H
omes would put you totally away, if they caught you trying to fab a squidsuit. More than printing parts to make a gun full-auto, more than building most drugs. She’d never expected to see one, except in videos, let alone be wearing one.

The night out back of Pickett’s seemed impossibly quiet, what little she could see of it from the suit. She kept expecting somebody to yell, start shooting, set off an alarm. Nothing. Just the wheels of this ATV, crunching over gravel. Electric, so new she could smell it. Paid for with some of Leon’s lottery win, she guessed, or that Clanton money. She could feel it had major torque, like if you put a blade on it you could grade this road up right. They’d run rappelling rope through the factory gear-anchors, to make it easier to hold on. Had those skeleton wheels, nonpneumatic. On the gravel they shaped themselves like mountain bike tires, but when Burton swung right, off the gravel, she saw them widen out. Even quieter on the grass.

“Macon?” Not sure he could hear her.

“Here,” said the gnat in her ear. “Getting you gone. Talk later.”

She couldn’t see where they were going. Burton’s suit was too close to the part of hers she was supposed to see through, so they were doing that mutual feedback thing, trying to emulate each other, ramping them both up into a headachy swarm of distorted hexagons.
Ciencia Loca
had had that on. Now Burton braked, cut the motor. She felt him swing his leg over, get off the ATV. Heard him rip his suit’s Velcro, then he reached over and ripped hers, near her neck. Night air on her face. He reached in, squeezed her upper arm. “Easy Ice,” he
said. She could barely hear him, with the earplugs. She pulled the left one out, on the orange string. “Keep ’em in,” he said, “might get loud.” So she pressed it back in, turning her head to do that, and there was Conner, in his anime-ankled VA prosthesis, behind Burton, in the shadow of a metal shed.

Then she saw it couldn’t be him, because the torso and both limbs were all wrong. Lumpy, like someone had stuffed one of his black Polartec unitards full of modeling clay, too much of it. And had put, in dreamlike randomness, she saw, stepping closer, one of those shitty-looking Gonzales masks on it, the president’s iconic acne scars rendered as stylized craters across exaggerated cheekbones. She looked into the empty eyes. Blank paleness.

Carlos stepped around it, bullpup under his arm. All in black. Burton too, under the open squidsuit. Carlos wore a black beanie pulled down over his brows, his eyes solid black with night-vision contacts. “Need your suit for our guy,” Carlos said. She let it fall around her ankles, stepped out of it. Hex-swarm gone, it instantly did grass. Carlos picked it up and started undoing zips, more Velcro. Draped it over the big tall backpack she now saw the prosthesis wore. Burton was putting his own suit on it from the front, the Gonzales mask poking out through an unzipped slit. They worked on this, making little Velcro noises, joining the suits. If you did it right, the two suits wouldn’t do that feedback thing and hex out. The black of their clothes swirled on the squidstuff. When they were done, they both stepped back, and it became the shadow it stood in.

“Outfit’s go,” Burton said, to somebody who wasn’t there.

The thing took a first step, out of shadow. The mask was all you could really see of it, except for the ankles and feet. Like a glitch in a buggy game. The dog-leash man’s blood would still be on it somewhere. She couldn’t remember his face. It took another step, another. That gait she remembered, Conner going to the fridge, but leaning forward, here, under the weight of the pack. Tramping out, flat-footed, thick-ankled, to the gravel. She couldn’t see the mask now. It
was headed back, toward Pickett’s ugly, flood-lit house. “What are you doing?” she asked Burton.

He raised an index finger to his lips, mounted the ATV, motioning for her to get on behind him. Carlos climbed on behind her, reaching around to grab a stretch of rappelling rope, and Burton took off, across the grass, away from the gravel road.

Pickett had a golf course, she saw, as Burton drove further from the house, the sheds and machinery. The moon was coming up. Smoothness of the turf, polymer or GM grass. She saw a raccoon freeze, seeing them, its head turning as they passed.

Beyond the green, the land slanted up, into uncut pasture with a few paths through it, maybe made by cattle or horses. She could see white up ahead, and then she saw it was that same ugly fence, but along a different stretch of road. Two figures in black rose up, as they drew closer, running to the fence, lifting a length of it between them and moving it aside. Burton drove through the gap without slowing, out onto blacktop Pickett must have paid the county to keep in such good shape, then they were on that, speeding up.

About half a mile on, Tommy was waiting by his big white car, in a Sheriff’s Department helmet and his black jacket. Burton slowed, pulling up beside him. “Flynne,” Tommy said, “you okay?”

“I guess so.”

“Anybody hurt you?” Tommy was looking at her like he could see inside her.

“No.”

Still looking inside her. “We’ll take you home.”

Burton got off the ATV, walked across the road, and stood with his back to them, peeing. She climbed off. Carlos scooted himself forward, to the driver’s part of the saddle, took the handlebars, started the engine, swinging around. He was gone into the dark before Burton could cross the road again, headed back the way they’d come, she guessed to pick up the other two.

Tommy opened the passenger-side door for her and she got in. He
went around, opened the driver-side passenger door, then his own, got in. Burton got in behind him and they both closed their doors.

“You okay, Flynne?” Tommy asked, again, looking over at her.

She closed her door.

He started the car, and they drove for a while in the dark, opposite direction to the one Carlos had gone in. He put the headlights on.

“Pickett’s a dick,” she said

“Knew that,” Burton said. “Was it Reece?”

“Pickett said they’d kill him if he didn’t bring me. Said Homes could find him anywhere.”

“Figured,” Burton said.

But she didn’t want to talk about Reece, or whatever else it was that they were doing. She didn’t feel like she could talk to Macon through the bug, because they’d hear her, and Tommy was concentrating on the road. So it felt like a long ride back to town, and everything that had happened before felt kind of like a dream, but still going on.

They were almost to town when Burton said, to whoever it was that wasn’t there, “Do it.”

They saw the light from it, the fireball, behind them, throwing the cruiser’s shadow ahead of it on the road. Then they heard it, and later she’d think she could’ve counted off the miles, like after a lightning strike.

“Goddamn,” Tommy said, slowing. “What the hell did you do?”

“Builders,” Burton, said, behind her, “still managing to blow their own asses up.”

Tommy said nothing. Got back up to speed. Just looking at the road.

She hoped Reece hadn’t stopped at all, had got out of the county, headed someplace interstate, gone. She didn’t want to ask Burton about that.

“You feel like a coffee, Flynne?” Tommy asked her, finally.

“Too late for me, thanks,” she said, her voice like somebody else’s, someone none of this ever happened to, and then she just cried.