The Peripheral (4 page)

PROTECTIVE CUSTODY

L
ondon.

She’d turned the LEDs down, finding that made it easier to spot the bugs. She left them that way now. She’d been hoping to get the ride down the side of the building, back to the van, because she’d be off duty then, free to look at things, but they’d just bumped her straight out.

Unbent her phone, cracked her knuckles, then sat in tacky twilight, image-searching cities. Hadn’t taken long. Curve in the river, texture of the older, lower buildings, contrast between that and the tall ones. Real London didn’t have as many tall ones, and in real London tall ones were more clustered together, came in more shapes and sizes. Game London, they were megastacks, evenly spaced but further apart, like on a grid. Their own grid, she knew, London never having had one.

She wondered where to leave the paper with the log-in. Decided on the tomahawk case. As she was putting it back under the table, her phone rang. Leon. “Where is he?” she asked.

“Homes,” he said, “protective custody.”

“Arrested?”

“No. Locked up.”

“What did he do?”

“Acted out. Homes were all grinning and shit, after. They’d liked it. Gave him a Chinese tailor-made cigarette.”

“He doesn’t smoke.”

“He can swap it for something.”

“Took his phone?”

“Homes take everybody’s phone.”

Looked at hers. Macon had only just printed it for her the week before. She hoped he’d gotten everything right, now Homeland computers would be looking at it. “They say how long he’ll be in for?”

“Never do,” said Leon. “Make more sense if it’s till Luke’s gone.”

“How’s that looking?”

“’Bout the same as when we got here.”

“What happened?”

“Big old boy, holding up one end of a God-hates-everything sign. Burton says tell you same time, same place. What you’re doing for him. Till he’s back. Says an extra five for every other one.”

“Tell him they’re all an extra five. What they’d be paying him.”

“You make me glad I don’t have a sister.”

“You got a cousin, dickbag.”

“No shit.”

“Keep track of Burton, Leon.”

“’Kay.”

She checked Shaylene on Badger. Still there, still ringing purple. She’d ride over there. Maybe see Macon, ask him about Burton’s phone, and hers.

THE MAENADS’ CRUSH

T
he place was a drinking closet for tourists, Netherton supposed, a walled-in 1830s archway in a corner of the lower level of Covent Garden, staffed by a lone Michikoid he kept expecting to erupt in targeting devices. There was a full-sized, vigorously authentic-looking pub sign, depicting what he took to be maenads, a number of them, mounted above a bar long enough for four stools, and the curtained snug where he now sat, awaiting Rainey. He’d never seen another customer in the place, which was why he’d suggested it.

The curtain, thick burgundy velour, moved. A child’s eye appeared, hazel, under pale bangs. “Rainey?” he asked, though certain it was her.

“Sorry,” the child said, slipping in. “They didn’t have anything in adult. Something popular at the opera tonight, so everything in the neighborhood’s taken.”

He imagined her now, stretched on a couch in her elongated Toronto apartment, a bridge across an avenue, diagonally connecting two older towers. She’d be wearing a headband, to trick her nervous system into believing the rented peripheral’s movements were hers in a dream.

“I’m right off Michikoids,” she said, looking ten, perhaps younger, and in the way of many such rentals, like no one in particular. “Watched the one from the moby, while it was guarding Daedra. Nasty. Move like spiders, when they need to.” She took the chair opposite his, regarded him glumly.

“Where is she?”

“No telling. Her government sent in some kind of aircraft, but of course they blanked the extraction. Ordered the moby away.”

“But you could still watch?”

“Not the extraction, but everything else. Big guy down on his face, the rest of them sliced and diced. No more of them turned up, so no more casualties. Good for us, in theory, assuming the project in any way continues.”

“Would your friend care for something, sir?” the Michikoid asked, from beyond the curtain.

“No,” he said, as there was no point in putting good liquor into a peripheral. Not that this place had any.

“He’s my uncle,” she said, loudly, “really.”

“You suggested we meet this way,” Netherton reminded her. He took a sip of their least expensive whiskey, identical to their most expensive, which he’d sampled while waiting for her.

“Shit,” she said, small hand gesturing to encompass their situation. “Lots of it. Now. Hitting many fans. Large ones.”

Rainey was employed, as he understood it, by the Canadian government, though they were no doubt hermetically walled off from any responsibility for her actions. He considered this to be an arrangement of quite startlingly naked simplicity, in that she probably did know, at least approximately, who her superiors were. “Can you be more specific?” he asked her.

“Saudis are out,” she said.

He’d been expecting it.

“Singapore’s out,” she continued. “Our half-dozen largest NGOs.”

“Out?”

The child’s head nodded. “France, Denmark—”

“Who’s left?”

“The United States,” she said. “And a faction in the government of New Zealand.”

He sipped the whiskey. Its small tongue of fire on his.

She tilted her head. “Considered to have been an assassination.”

“That’s absurd.”

“What we hear.”

“We who?”

“Don’t ask.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Wilf,” said the child, leaning forward, “that was a hit. Someone used us to help kill him, not to mention his entourage.”

“Daedra had a significant percentage in any successful outcome. Aside from that, what’s happened can’t be good for her.”

“Self-defense, Wilf. Easiest spin on earth. You and I know that she wanted to provoke them. She needed an excuse, to make it self-defense.”

“But she was always going to be the contact figure, wasn’t she? She was already part of the package when you signed on. Wasn’t she?”

She nodded.

“Then you hired me. Who brought her in in the first place?”

“These questions,” she said, the child’s diction growing more precise, “suggest that you don’t understand our situation. Neither of us can afford any interest in the answers to questions like those. We’re going to take a hit on this one, Wilf, professionally. But that—” She left it unfinished.

He looked into the rental’s still eyes. “Is better than being the object of another one?”

“We neither know,” the child said, firmly, “nor desire to know.”

He looked at the whiskey. “They had her covered with a hypersonic weapons-delivery system, didn’t they? Something orbital, ready to drop in.”

“But they would, her government. It’s what they do. But we shouldn’t even be discussing this now. It’s over. We both need it to be over. Now.”

He looked at her.

“It could be worse,” she said.

“It could?”

“You’re still sitting here,” the child said. “I’m home, all warm in my jammies. We’re alive. And about to be looking for work, I imagine. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”

He nodded.

“This would probably be a little less complicated if you hadn’t had a sexual relationship with her. But that was brief. And is over. It is over, isn’t it, Wilf?”

“Of course”

“No loose ends?” she asked. “Didn’t leave your shaving kit? Because we need it over, Wilf. Really. We need there to be no reason at all that you ever have to communicate with her again.”

And then he remembered.

But he could fix it. No need to tell Rainey.

He reached for the whiskey.

TARANTULA

L
ocked her bike in the alley and used her phone to let herself into the back of Forever Fab, smelling pancakes and the shrimp rice bowl special from Sushi Barn. Pancakes meant they were printing with that plastic you could compost. Shrimp special was Shaylene’s midnight snack.

Edward was on a stool in the middle of the room, monitoring. He wore sunglasses against the flashes of UV, with his Viz behind the glasses, on one side. In the low light the glasses looked the same color as his face, but shinier. “Seen Macon?” she asked.

“No Macon.” Near comatose with boredom and the hour.

“You want a break, Edward?”

“I’m okay.”

She glanced at the long worktable, stacked with jobs needing removal of afterbirth, smoothing, assembly. She’d spent a lot of hours at that table. Shaylene was a solid source of casual employment, if you got along with her and were quick with your hands. Looked like they were printing toys tonight, or maybe decorations for the Fourth.

She went into the front, found Shaylene watching the news: ugly-spirited sign-carriers. Shaylene looked up. “Hear from Burton?”

“No,” Flynne lied. “What’s happening?” Didn’t want to have the Burton conversation. Odds of avoiding it were zero.

“Homeland took some vets away. I’m worried about him. Got Edward to sub for you.”

“Saw him,” Flynne said. “Breakfast?”

“You’re up early.”

“Haven’t slept.” She hadn’t said what it was she’d needed to do, wouldn’t now. “Seen Macon?”

Shaylene flicked through the display with a fancy resin nail, Luke 4:5 tumbling back into the green of some imaginary savannah. “Wasn’t that kind of night.” Meaning she’d pitched the all-nighter because there was excess work to be done, not because Macon needed peace and quiet to fab his funnies. Flynne wasn’t sure how much of Fab’s income was funny, but assumed a good part of it was. There was a Fabbit franchise a mile down the highway, with bigger printers, more kinds, but you didn’t do anything funny at Fabbit. “I’m dieting,” Shaylene said. Flamingoes rose from the savannah.

“That the purple?”

“Burton,” Shaylene said, standing, slipping in a finger to tug at the waist of her jeans.

“Burton can take care of himself.”

“VA aren’t doing shit, to help him recover.”

What Shaylene saw as Burton’s primary symptom of traumatic stress, Flynne thought, was his ongoing failure to ask her out.

Shaylene sighed, that Flynne didn’t get it, how her brother was. Shaylene had big hair without actually having it, Flynne’s mother had once said. Something that came up through any remake, like marker ink through latex paint. Flynne liked her, except for the Burton thing.

“You see Macon, ask him to get in touch with me. Need some help with my phone.” Starting to turn to go.

“Sorry I’m a bitch,” Shaylene said.

Flynne squeezed her shoulder. “Let you know as soon as I hear from him.”

Let herself out the back, with a nod to Edward.

Conner Penske blew past on his Tarantula, as she was turning out of the alley behind Fab, what was left of him a jagged black scrawl behind the two front wheels. Janet sewed him these multizippered
socklike things, out of black Polartec. They looked, as Janet worked on them, like fitted cases for something you couldn’t imagine, which Flynne guessed they were. Town’s only other HaptRec vet, he’d come back in one of the ways she’d been scared Burton would: minus a leg, the foot of the other one, the arm on the opposite side, and the thumb and two fingers of the remaining hand. Handsome face unscarred, which made it weirder. She smelled recycled fried chicken fat hanging in the trike’s exhaust trail, as the single huge rear slick vanished down Baker Way. Rode at night, mostly county roads, this county and the next two or three over, steering with a servo rig the VA paid for. She figured he got loose, that way. Basically didn’t stop until the fuel was running out, hooked up to a Texas catheter and high on something wakey. Slept all day if he could. Burton helped him out at home, sometimes. He made her sad. A sweet boy in high school, for all he’d been that good-looking. Neither he nor Burton ever said anything to anyone, that she knew of, about what had happened to him.

She rode to Jimmy’s, letting the hub do most of the work. Went in and sat at the counter, ordered eggs and bacon and toast, no coffee. In the Red Bull mirror behind the counter, the cartoon bull noticed her, winked. She dodged eye contact. She hated it when they spoke to you, called you by your name.

That mirror was the newest thing in Jimmy’s, a place that had been old when her mother had gone to high school. Everything old in Jimmy’s had at some point been painted in one or another generation of dark shiny brown, including the floor. The onions were starting to sizzle for the lunch dogs. Stung her eyes. She’d have the smell in her hair.

Hefty Mart would be open. She’d walk up and down the aisles, while forklifts brought in shrink-wrapped pallets. She liked it in there, early. She’d spend one of the shiny new fives on two bags of groceries, things that would keep in the cupboard. The neighbors had all grown more vegetables than they knew what to do with, out of a random stretch of rain. Then she’d go by Pharma Jon and put another
five against her mother’s prescriptions. Then ride home, get the panniers unloaded, contents into the pantry, lucky if she didn’t wake anybody but the cat.

The edge of the counter was trimmed with LEDs like the ones in Burton’s trailer, under a sloppier application of polymer. She’d never seen them on, but it had been at least a year since she’d been in here with the place in bar mode. She pressed the polymer with her thumb, feeling it give.

Burton and Leon, before they enlisted, learned you could use a syringe to inject this same stuff, still liquid, into the part of a shotgun shell that held the shot, then quickly epoxy over the hole you’d made. The polymer stayed wet in there, most of the time anyway, between the little lead balls, so it didn’t expand. When you fired one, it solidified as the shot left the barrel, producing a weird, potato-shaped lump of polymer and lead, so slow that you could almost see it tumble out of the barrel. Heavy, elastic, they’d bounce these off the concrete walls and ceilings, in the county storm shelter, trying to hit things around corners. Leon had gotten keys to the place. Looked weird when you weren’t in there with everybody else, hiding from a tornado. Burton, after a while, actually could hit things around corners, but the sound of the Mossberg hurt her ears, even with earplugs.

Burton had been different then. Not just thinner, gangly, which seemed impossible now, but messy. She’d noticed, the night before, how everything she hadn’t touched, in the trailer, was perfectly squared up with the edge of something else. Leon said the Corps had turned Burton into a neatfreak, but she hadn’t really thought about it before. She reminded herself to take that empty Red Bull can out to the recyc bin, spend some time straightening things up.

Girl brought her eggs.

She heard Conner’s trike pass again, out beyond the parking lot. Nothing else on the road sounded like that. Police pretty much gave him a pass, because he ran mostly late at night.

She hoped he was on his way home.