This was logic, not religion. So what if these things had power beyond imagining, yet no physical substance? So what if they lived in the wires and the wireless spaces between, and moved at the speed of their own electronic thoughts? Demon, spirit—shorthand, not superstition. Only metaphor, with more points of similarity than some.
And yet, now Taka Ouellette saw mysterious lights flashing in the sky, and found her lips moving in altogether the wrong kind of incantation.
Oh God, save us.
She turned and headed downhill. She could probably get around the blockage, take some back road to continue on this way, but what was the point? It was a question of cost-benefit analysis, of lives-saved-per-unit-effort. That value would certainly be higher almost anywhere but here.
The collapsed building loomed ahead of her on the road again, gray and colorless in the amplified light. The angular shadows looked different, more ominous from this angle. They formed crude faces and body parts way past human scale, as if some giant cubist robot had collapsed in an angry heap and was summoning the strength to pull itself back together again.
As she began to pick her way around the pile, one of the shadows detached itself and moved to block her path.
“Holy—” Taka gasped. It was only a woman, she saw now, and unarmed—these days you noticed such things almost instinctively—but her heart had been kicked instantly into fight/flight. “Jesus, you scared me.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to.” The woman took another step clear of the debris. She was blonde, dressed entirely in some black skin-tight body stocking from neck to feet; only her hands and head were exposed, pale disembodied pieces against the contrasting darkness. She was a few centimeters shorter than Taka herself.
There was something about her eyes, too. They seemed too bright, somehow. Probably an artefact of the specs, Taka decided. Light reflecting off the wetness of the cornea, perhaps.
The woman jerked her chin back over her shoulder. “That your ambulance?”
“Mobile Infirmary. Yes.” Taka glanced around the full three-sixty. She saw no one else. “Are you sick?”
A laugh, very soft. “Isn’t everyone?”
“I mean—”
“No. Not yet.”
What is it about those eyes? It was hard to tell from this distance—the woman was ten meters away—but it looked like she might be wearing nightshades. In which case she could see Taka Ouellette way better than Taka Ouellette could see her through these fratzing photoamps.
People in the wildlands did not generally come so well-equipped.
Taka put her hands casually into her pockets; the act pushed her windbreaker away from the standard-issue Kimber on her hip. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “There’s a cycler in the cab. The bricks taste like shit, but if you’re desperate...”
“Sorry about this,” the woman said, stepping forward. “Really.”
Her eyes were like blank, translucent balls of ice.
Taka stepped back instinctively. Something blocked her from behind. She spun and stared into another pair of empty eyes, set in a face that seemed all scarred planes and chipped stone. She didn’t reach for her gun. Somehow, he already had it.
“It’s gene-locked,” she said quickly.
“Mmm.” He turned the weapon over in his hands. He wore the look of a professional appraiser. “We apologize for the intrusion,” he told her, almost absently, “But we need you to disable the security on your vehicle.” He did not look at her.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” the woman said from behind.
Taka, unreassured, kept her eyes on the man holding her gun.
“Certainly not,” he agreed, looking up at last. “Not while there are more efficient alternatives.”
Bagheera was one password. There were several others. Morris locked down the whole kit and kaboodle, so that not even Taka could start it up again without live authorization. Pixel electrostabbed any passengers who didn’t match her pheromone profile. Tigger unlocked the doors and played dead until it heard Taka say Schroedinger: then it locked down and pumped enough halothane into the cab to turn a 110-kg assailant into a sack of jelly for a minimum of fifteen minutes. (Taka herself would be up and at ’em in a mere ninety seconds; when they’d given her the keys to Miri they’d also tweaked her blood with a resistant enzyme.)
Mobile Infirmaries were chock-full of resources and technology. The wildlands were chock-full of desperate people literally dying for an edge, any edge. Anti-theft measures made every kind of sense, and more than a little irony: when it came right down to it, Miri was far better at killing and incapacitation than it was at healing the sick.
Now Taka stood beside the driver’s door, white-eyed blackbodies on either side. She ran through her options.
“Tigger,” she said. Miri chirped and unlocked the door.
The woman pulled the door open and climbed into the cab. Taka started to follow. A hand clapped down on her shoulder.
Taka turned and faced her captor. “It’s gene-locked, too. I’ll have to reset it if you want to drive.”
“We don’t,” he told her. “Not yet.”
“The board’s dark,” the woman said from behind the wheel.
The hand on her shoulder tightened subtly, pressed forward. Taka felt herself guided to the cab; the other woman slid over into the passenger seat to give her room.
“Actually,” the man said, “I think we’ll let the doctor here take the passenger seat.” The hand pressed down. Taka ducked in through the driver’s side, slid between the seat and the steering stick as the other woman left the cab through the passenger door. The woman grasped the edge of that door and started to push it shut.
“No,” said the man, very distinctly. The woman froze.
He was behind the wheel now; his hand hadn’t come off Taka’s shoulder for an instant. “One of us stays outside the cab at all times,” he told his partner. “And we leave both doors open.”
His partner nodded. He took his hand off Taka’s shoulder and looked at the dark, unhelpful face of the dash.
“Bring it online,” he said. “Touch only, no voice control. Do not start the engine.”
Taka stared back at him, unmoving.
The blond leaned in over her shoulder. “We weren’t bullshitting you,” she said quietly. “We really don’t want to hurt you, unless there’s no choice. I’m betting that’s a pretty charitable attitude for these parts, so why are you pushing it?”
These parts. So they were new in town. Not that this came as any great surprise; these two were the furthest thing from wildland refugees that Taka had seen in ages.