“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.
74
Has 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.”
75
Homes 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.