Bitter Angels (45 page)

Softly, I told my father what had happened and what I’d found.

He swayed on his feet, and I put my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t look at me. His face remained still as stone, except for the single tear that traced its way down his cheek.

“I should have known,” he croaked. “Really. I should have known.”

“There was no way to know,” I murmured.

“She was the one who got us onto the ship, the one that took us from Oblivion,” he said. He still didn’t look at me. It was as if he had lost the ability to move. “I never asked her how she did it, but she saved all our lives. After that, it was her idea to get you into the secops. She couldn’t save your brothers, but she was going to save you even if it meant…if it meant…” His voice trailed away.

I tried to conjure up a memory of my mother, anything, but there was nothing. Nothing but the blackness of an empty tunnel. All the past had been stripped away from me.

“Go to the saints,” I said to my father. “Ask for asylum. They’ll get you out of here.”

He turned his head, lifting his face toward me. “Why?”

“Because I’m going to make the Blood pay for what they have done to us,” I said.

We stood there for a moment, my father and I, looking at each other, each of us finally seeing into the depths of the other, seeing the tunnel darkness, seeing past and future vanish into shadow.

I nodded. He would choose his ending now, as I had chosen mine, and we would both finally be free.

I clasped his shoulder once and turned away, wading into the crowd.

I was standing against the wall beside the quarantine room. Dr. Gwin’s team had carried Siri inside and barred the door in my face. Vijay had refused to let anyone do anything more than put a field dressing on him to stabilize his broken elbow, then he’d run the whole way back at my side. Once we reached the base house, I had to order him to go with the nurse and get it set. Now he was back, his face white with all kinds of pain and his arm in a stabilization cast.

“What in all the hells have they done to her?” he asked again, looming over me.

“Gwin will find out.” My mind still reeled. I wanted nothing so much as to lean against the wall and vomit, but I couldn’t. As it was, everybody was staring at us, Solaran and Erasman.

“Vijay,” I said to bring his attention down to me and away from the quarantine door. “What did you find out at the yard?”

He blinked like he didn’t understand the question, then ran his palm across his scalp. “It’s a dead end, Terese. They weren’t loading anything but water.”

“Are you sure?”

He plucked his gloves out of his pocket and held them out to me. “You can check it if you don’t believe me.”

Another time I might have reprimanded him, but I saw
the anguish in his battered face. He turned toward the quarantine door again. “She’s got to be all right, Terese.”

“She will be. If Gwin can’t do anything for her here, we’ll pull her out back to Earth. Misao will make sure she gets whatever she needs.”

He nodded dully. “Can I stay here awhile? Just, you know, for when there’s word?”

His cover was totally blown anyway. I nodded and he slumped against the wall. I twisted his gloves in my hands. I tried not to think. I tried to just wait. The answer to so much was inside the quarantine room, inside Siri.

Siri had gotten far more of this horrible riddle right than I’d been able to comprehend.

Time stretched out. I don’t know how long. My feet ached. My stomach rumbled. Vijay said nothing. All I could do was sit there with one thought rubbing a sore spot in my mind.

Siri had been right about so much of this. She’d been right even about what had sounded so insane.

“Vijay?” I said quietly.

He turned his ravaged face toward me.

“How did Bianca find me?”

“What?”

“When I was…being held by the Redeemers. How did she find me? Siri…Siri said I had no idea what she did for me.”

He was getting ready to lie. I could see it even though all the surgical alterations had stiffened his face.

I could also tell when, at the last second, he changed his mind.

“She had one of the inner circle picked up. She got a short-haul ship and she took him to it.

“But it didn’t work. It was the wrong answer. He’d told her what he thought she wanted to hear, to get her to stop.”

“Misao never found out,” said Vijay. “I knew. Siri knew. We didn’t tell you. You’d been through enough, and you thought—
you believed
—that she’d saved you. Siri covered for her. She said…she said Bianca knew it was a mistake. Said she’d been too outraged, too frightened. Said we all make mistakes and she’d done it for a good reason—to save your life—and we found you in the end and that was all that mattered…”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “Stop,” I whispered. “Please stop.”

Vijay turned his face toward the quarantine door. “I knew you’d ask,” he said. “Siri didn’t think you would, but you were always as bad as Bianca. Neither one of you could leave well enough alone.”

“How long?” I asked. “Between what…what she did and when you really found me?”

“A few weeks.”

I leaned my head back against the wall. Those last few weeks, that was when they’d found Dylan. Bianca had not only broken the first precept, she’d given them time to cut Dylan out of me.

I should have known. I should have known from the way she let me go, from the way no one on my old team ever came and talked to me. I hadn’t wanted contact, but they didn’t either. Siri didn’t come because she was covering
for Bianca. Vijay didn’t come because he was covering for Siri.

Bianca didn’t come because she knew I wouldn’t be able to forgive her for committing a murder that did nothing more than get Dylan killed.

Had that murder, that guilt, driven her to attempt the takedown? This time she was going to break the rules and get it right? This time would make up for that other? Save all these lives to make up for the one she’d taken in my name?

Finally, the quarantine door opened and Dr. Gwin stepped out. Vijay straightened up at once, and I was back at his side almost before I’d realized I’d moved.

“I need you in here, Field Commander. Not you.” She added to Vijay, “You stay put.”

She ushered me inside, through the clean lock, and shut the inner door behind us. The sound shuddered all the way through me.

The quarantine room was white and sterile. Screens had been mounted onto the walls and a whole spiderweb of cables connected them to junction boxes, gloves, and glasses. Siri lay on the table in the center, a pale sheet pulled up to her chin. Blue cuffs circled her wrists, pumping sedatives into her system.

“What can you tell me?” I said, forcing my voice into a brisk tone.

“I can tell you we are all in serious trouble.”

“What?”

Gwin laid her hand on one of the screens and lit up a video: blood vessels, brain, and bone, all alive for me to see. I recognized the veinlike thread of the Companion implant
laid against the shimmering grey matter. “Since you said Siri’s instability was manifesting as voices, I scanned her Companion to make sure the nodes were solid and the output levels were what they should be.

“This is Siri’s implant after we got her out of the peeled core. See these branches here and here?” She pointed at two threads.

I nodded.

“They weren’t there when she left Earth. I did a close-up.” Gwin touched the pane again. The video zoomed in farther, until the threads turned into neat lines of black squares laid over with white threads. “They’re artificial, and they were probably tracked in there by a nano injection.”

An injection? Like the pressure spray I had permitted Emiliya Varus to administer to Siri for her pain.

“I haven’t had time to fully analyze this yet, but we’ve seen some of the resulting instability. And I’ll tell you something else.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, but she wasn’t looking at me. Her face had flushed darkly. “These were clones.”

“Clones?” I said blankly. “But they’re chips.”

“Term of art.” She opened a second pane, to display a second set of little black squares, with the same pattern of threads as the ones in Siri’s node. “These”—she tapped the second set—“are from Bianca Fayette’s implant, back when it was whole.”

Pain filled the empty space in my skull. Sick, hard, relentless pain. The idea of Bianca’s body spread out for the slaves and vultures of Hospital, of her blood measured and microscopically analyzed, of Jerimiah laid bare for their analysts…

Jerimiah had been damaged. Oh, yes, he’d been damaged.
I saw them taking the lace filigree of his network from Bianca’s vivisected skull. I saw them laying it on a pure white table and gathering around it, bent over it, whispering and wondering at what they’d found, recording, measuring, analyzing.

Some of Jerimiah’s nodes had been “disconnected.”

Bianca hadn’t sold out to the Erasmus System. She hadn’t gotten Jerimiah cut out to keep him from informing on her. She’d been dismembered. She’d been an experiment. They’d taken her apart to see what her body could teach them, and it had showed them the defense and protection of every single field officer in the Guardians.

The Erasmans were creating a network of human voices that were being implanted in the Clerks, Siri said. It sounded insane. Unless you substituted a couple of words.

The Erasmans were creating a network of Companions that were being implanted in the Clerks.

“Can you neutralize this?”

Dr. Gwin shook her head. “Not in these facilities. I’d have to wake her up and scan the interactions while she’s in communication with it, and I can’t wake her up because I can’t disable her off switch here either.”

Unstable as she was, if Siri woke up and saw that she was in the hospital, there was a very real chance she’d hit the switch and be gone.

Pain swam slowly upstream to my consciousness and I realized my hands had curled into fists. I opened them and saw the neat lines of red crescent moons on my palms.

“Can you keep her out and safe?” I asked.

Dr. Gwin nodded.

She nodded again, and I left her there. I walked through the clean lock and out into the battered foyer.

Vijay was there. “What is it?”

I looked up at him. “I found the war.”

“You will stand down, Captain!” I bellowed.

Vijay stared at me, wide-eyed with panic. I watched the realization of what he was doing dawn on him. He lifted his hands away and snapped to attention.

“At ease.” I was oddly grateful he’d pushed me to the wall. Without the support, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stand. “And upstairs now.”

I led him up to the third floor and into Siri’s room. I bolted the door behind us. Probably the illusion of Siri was still on the other side. At this moment, I couldn’t afford to care.

I faced Vijay. I felt hard as steel and sick to my soul. There, in the middle of Siri’s listening room, I told him what had been done to her—to all of us.

When I finished, Vijay was white as a sheet. Anger rolled off him in tsunami waves. His hands clenched and unclenched and his eyes had gone distant. He was elsewhere. He was with the ones who had taken Siri’s mind from her, and no service oath could reach that place.

“We’ve got to get you out,” I said.

His eyes snapped back into immediate focus. “They don’t know about me.”

“This is not a request, Captain. You are at risk, and you’re now putting the mission at risk. We have no counter for
this attack, and we do not know how many ways they have to deliver it.”

He swallowed, and licked his lips. “I want them dead, Terese,” he croaked. “I want them all dead.”

“I know.” I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Believe me, I know.”
Bianca, are you listening? Are you laughing at me?
“We’re going to take the place down, and the one responsible is going to get to watch.”

“We’ve got no orders.”

I almost smiled. “We’ve got the ultimate order. The war’s already started. Listen to me, Vijay, I am trusting you to get every last one of our people off this rock before I make it all hit the fan. Get through to the embassy and try for the flight permissions, but if they can’t pull it out, you leave anyway.”