Smoke's Fire Read online

  “I’m not a traitor,” she said. “I was in the Army, remember?”

  “You mentioned that. I ask for no betrayal,” Grandmother said, holding her smile. “I just want to talk with you. Surely you can understand that. Surely, you can.”

  You can. She heard the emphasis. Jessica stared at her. “I don’t…what?” She shook her head, her face was growing hot. “I’m not who you think I am. What you think I am. So please, stop asking. I can’t talk about it.” She looked at the ceiling. “You should go. Thank you for the treats.”

  Grandmother frowned, pursing her lips. She hesitated, looked as if she was about to speak, then nodded. “I do not wish to harass you,” she said. “Old women are long-winded and curious, that is all. Thank you for talking with me.” She rose, smoothly and without wincing. She turned to Jessica and bowed once, from the neck. Formal, Jessica thought, is this a thing here?

  Jessica nodded to her, and watched as the old woman turned and glided out the door. Like a snake, she thought. She curled up in her chair, hugging her knees to her chest. She groaned, rocking back and forth once, twice, three times. What was the purpose behind that, she wondered? Smoke and Gold and Silver were in some sort of cabal now? Working against Grandmother? And with this Alpha? She reviewed their conversation in her mind.

  What did I reveal? She wracked her mind. The old woman was here for something, to learn something. Did she really think Jessica was an expert on the structure of the US Military? Or was that just to keep her talking? She shook her head. It didn’t matter. She’d never know what the old woman wanted, she was too cagey. Jessica had interviewed enough liars to know when she’d met her match.

  But, she realized, the thought coming with a coppery tang in her mouth, Grandmother could probably see more of her reaction than she was conscious of. She and Murn had always assumed Grandmother and the rest of them were listening in. Probably with all manner of high-fidelity bugs. They could see breath and body temperature and analyze her voice. Murn had shrugged at the idea. For her, it was just the way things were. The Select knew all and saw all. But it made Jessica sweat, just thinking about it. Sometimes she found her hands shaking.

  That was a pass, she thought. The old woman is bringing her gifts, good news, a peace offering with an overt invitation. Let me help you. Familiar words for any woman in the Army. She sighed. Let’s help each other. Familiar words for someone who hadn’t served in the Unit. Her unit. She closed her eyes, squeezed them shut. They knew. It was clear they knew. They knew about her past, and that meant they probably knew everything. How?

  Chapter Sixteen

  Smoke looked up at Chen’s carapace, lashed by an elaborate mesh of wire, leather straps, and ropes to the front of Truck’s cage. “Comfortable?” he asked.

  Chen’s teardrop-shaped head swiveled slightly. “This was unnecessary,” he said. The stumps of his legs whirred, one after the other. It didn’t look like he’d taken too much damage. His righthand rear leg had been snapped off at the first knee-joint, the others at the hips. Chen was crippled.

  Truck had done it, after Alpha showed him a picture of what he wanted. Truck had chuffed into life in the early dawn, steam rising from his dorsal vents. He’d flipped the Spider over onto its back, pinning him with one of his great yellow hands. The other had, rather delicately, plucked the spider’s legs off, one by one. Chen hadn’t made a sound. Smoke and Gold had watched the operation.

  “Huh,” she said, nodding. Then she turned and stalked off towards her tent.

  “This was dangerous,” Chen continued, buzzing voice. “I could have been damaged, and unable to communicate.”

  “I was willing to take that risk,” Smoke said, watching Gold’s back. She began hauling gear out of her tent. Packing up. “It was this or twist your head off.”

  “Excessive,” the spider head whirred, lens cluster focusing on him. “I did not mean to hurt the girl.”

  “Regardless,” Smoke said. “You did hurt her. And these people don’t trust you.”

  The lenses rested on him. In the depths of one Smoke could see an iris shutter slowly narrowing. “Regrettable situation.” Pause. “I suppose we are leaving for the Elevator today?”

  “Yes,” Smoke said. “We’re leaving.”

  “The weapons might be useful,” the Spider said, voice buzzing slightly. Some damage to his vocoder, Smoke wondered. “I recommend we bring at least one.”

  Smoke blinked at him. “I’m not strapping a thousand-year-old nuke to the back of a thousand-year-old tank, and driving it across China,” he said acidly. “I’m surprised you haven’t had an accident yet.”

  The Spider was silent. “We gathered them to safeguard them. There had been a mutiny. Warren was concerned.”

  Smoke nodded. “Surely you didn’t get every nuke on the planet. Just the ones within reach, correct?”

  “This is correct,” the Spider replied. “I believe Warren grew to believe that the mutineers did not pose a threat. Several centuries had passed since the last contact with them.”

  “Where did they go?” Smoke was only idly curious. He watched Gold packing up her gear. She ignored him. They had been lovers, once. But that was another lifetime ago, and they had both been pretending to be other people. Still, he watched her shake out her bedroll and carefully fold it up.

  “South,” the Spider said. “I tracked one group for eighty-one years before they destroyed my scouts. They were in Australia at the time.”

  An image rose up in Smoke’s mind. “Like in the Road Warrior?”

  “Exactly,” Chen buzzed. It almost sounded like laughter. “Australia is almost completely empty now. Maybe five thousand people by my estimate, and that was almost two centuries ago.”

  “You stopped looking?” Smoke asked. “Why?”

  “Resources,” Chen said. “I only had a few drones left. Now, none. Just this…husk.”

  Smoke looked up. Silver was approaching. He saw her pause near Gold, and exchange words he couldn’t hear. Gold straightened, shouldering her bag. They both walked towards him.

  “Gold and Silver approach,” Smoke said. He wasn’t sure, from the angle, if Chen could see them.

  “I am aware,” Chen said. One of his eyes swiveled towards them. “They are a danger to you, you know.”

  “I am aware,” Smoke echoed, trying at the last moment to soften his sarcasm. “They’ve tried to murder me before.”

  “And will again, be sure of it,” the Spider buzzed. One of his middle leg-stumps traces a lazy circle through its broken hip joint’s range of motion. Lubricant oozed a few drops.

  Silver reached him first. She eyed Chen skeptically. “Picked off his legs?” she asked, frowning at the Spider’s tied thorax. “You sure he’s immobilized?”

  “I’m sure,” Smoke answered her. “He has a destruct circuit, which he’d probably like to use if he could, but I’ve got the keys. I’m Supervision for him. Superior officer.”

  Gold spat. “I don’t like that thing,” she said. “I’d like to burn it.”

  “I am sorry I accidentally hurt your friend,” Chen buzzed. “I regret any harm.”

  “Burn it,” Gold repeated. She looked at Smoke. “With fire.”

  “We’re not burning it,” Smoke said. “We need Chen to get us to the Elevator.”

  Gold spat again. “Save your breath,” she said, and stalked off to the rear of Truck.

  Silver caught Smoke’s eye. She jerked her head for him to follow.

  They walked some distance away, and she looked back at Chen. “Think he can hear us?”

  “Almost certainly,” Smoke said. “These machines were built for surveillance.”

  “Let’s walk, then.” She led him around the edge of the courtyard, behind a low wall in front of the gate. A defensive position, Smoke assumed. From here, fighters from the fortress could defend the gate itself. Traffic had to snake around the wall to reach the gate. Silver crouched, motioning for Smoke to do the same.

  “I know we haven’
t been allies before,” she began. “Not really.” She looked at him. “Before, we were allies of convenience. You had me, and I was on a short leash.” She gave him a meaningful glance. “My…masters wanted me to go with you, to get to that data center in the mountains.”

  He nodded. Together they had assaulted the nascent Alpha’s data center. But it was tangled, and their relationship was full of betrayals. Smoke regarded her. He had hunted her across a half dozen worlds, and in some of those threads she had almost killed him. Almost easily killed him. “We need to trust each other,” he said, prompting her.

  “We do,” she nodded. “Can we?” She waved at the fortress. “Warren and the Unit are good fighters. I’ve seen Marines at work, and these have had a thousand years to refine their craft. She’s cagey, but I think we can trust her. She wants revenge.”

  “On those who stranded her here?” He supposed it made sense.

  “More than that. Everybody died in the Bloom. Everybody.” Silver looked at him, her pale blue eyes flashing. “She wants payback for that. The ones who did it went up the Elevator, and they’ve never been able to reach them. Can Chen get us a car? To come down from the Station?”

  He reviewed what he knew about Chen, what he’d learned. “I think so, but he’d need to interface with the control systems at the pad. For that we need to get him there. Once we do I can probably help. Me and Alpha.” He waved in the direction of Truck. “She wants to burn him.”

  Silver’s teeth showed in a tight smile. “Let me worry about her,” she said. “She’s just protective of her new girlfriend. The thing did almost kill her, and Li is upset about Uncle. He’s offline.”

  He nodded, and changed the subject. He didn’t want to get into Chen’s and Uncle’s struggles. Not yet. He needed to think about that more. “Warren thinks there will be resistance. At the Elevator complex,” Smoke said. “What do you think we’re walking into?”

  Silver pursed her lips. “I don’t know. They bugged out of there pretty quickly it sounded like. I think there were some kind of war drones from what Gold told me. We’ll have time to talk with Warren on the journey. It will take a few weeks to get there, maybe longer, with Truck.”

  Smoke nodded. “What do you want out of this?” he asked her. “I think the Bloom is part of what is causing the Tangle. Maybe it did cause the Tangle, I don’t know.” He spread his hands. “I do know that someone caused the Bloom. Somebody was experimenting with some pretty sophisticated nanobioengineering here. Who?”

  “Not the gods,” Silver said, shaking her head. “Mine are gone.” She frowned, staring off into the middle distance. “Offline.”

  Should he tell her, he wondered? In for a penny… “They may not be gone forever, just…dormant.” He looked at her, raising his hand when her eyes flicked up at him.

  “What do you know?” she asked. “Tell me.”

  He licked his lips. “Chen was involved with the Bloom,” he said. “He was the system that his superiors entrusted with it. With pulling the trigger.”

  She blinked at him. “Wow,” she said after a moment. “Warren will not like that. Good thing you pulled his legs off.”

  He nodded. That was a deep betrayal, a monumental deception. “He’s still dangerous, but that should help. I think we need to go up to that thing, that station up there, and get to the bottom of whatever the plan was here. The Center seemed to think that this place, this thread, your thread, caused the Tangle. It’s central to it somehow.”

  “Can they help?” she asked, eyeing him.

  “They are too far away,” he said. “We were able to get a message out, but Alpha thinks it was garbled in transmission. The Tangle is fucking everything up.”

  “Where is Alpha?” Silver asked him.

  “It’s complicated,” Smoke said. “She’s not really anywhere. Or she’s everywhere.” He tapped his temple with one finger. “She’s in here. I can talk with her a little.” He gave her a half-smile. “She says Hello.”

  “Where is she physically?” Silver asked, brow furrowing. “There’s nothing left on this planet for her to run on, right?”

  Smoke held up a finger for her to pause. “She’s running on the Center’s hardware, or dreamware, whatever they have. I don’t understand it.” He shook his head. “She can reach me because we have a link. You saw that happen. But the Tangle is making that difficult, I gather.”

  Silver remembered Smoke’s slim form flashing and strobing with a powerful actinic light, in the data center on the California border. It seemed so long ago and far away. She shook her head. “She’s on our side, right? She’ll help us, correct?”

  He nodded. “She’s on my side,” he said, “so if we’re allied, then we’re working towards a common goal. She’ll help us.” He looked at her. “You haven’t said. What do you want out of this?”

  Silver looked up at the fortress. “I needed to help you find Alpha,” she said haltingly. She traced a line in the dirt at the base of the wall with a finger. “I needed that. They needed that.” She frowned. “Now?” She shook her head. “I need to do something. Carter…he thinks there’s a crop of old-school elites, politicians and rich folk, up there.” She pointed up, towards the blue sky of the early morning. “I’d like to see that. I’d like to know what happened here. See an end to it.” She nodded to herself. “See this through.” She looked at him. “Does that make sense?”

  “As much as anything makes sense here,” he said. He sighed. “There’s more.”

  “What?” she said, mouth pressed into a line.

  “The Bloom,” he said. “Everybody died, all at once. Just poof, into a cloud of dust?” He shuddered, remembering Jesus’s grandmother, from his ill-fated expedition to a post-Collapse Brazil. Poof, all gone.

  She nodded. “That’s what they say happened,” she said. “Lawson, the big one with the bow, he didn’t want to talk about it, but that’s what he said. Carter, too. I think it fucked them up, living through something like that. Everybody dying at once?” She shuddered.

  “That’s the thing,” Smoke said. “Alpha has a theory about the Bloom, what it was. What it is.”

  She looked at him. “Explain,” she said. “Clock is ticking.”

  “We don’t think they died,” he said. “We don’t think they died at all.”

  “They turned to dust,” she said, eyes narrowing. “That means they died.”

  “Their bodies did,” Smoke said, echoing what Alpha was telling him. “But we’re pretty sure they’re still alive.” He pointed up, to the blue eggshell sky. “Up there.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Silver sat atop Truck’s turret, watched the countryside slowly slide past, and thought about Byzantium. The countryside here had reminded her of that long-ago, faraway city. She had, she thought, two sets of memories of Byzantium. One was of a sleepy village, on a bluff overlooking the Greek side of the Bosphorus. That one was clear, and seemed to span several seasons. The other was shorter. She remembered a villa, with the most exquisite mosaics. She’d had servants there, and a grand bathroom. Several rooms, actually.

  She’d fled the villa, she remembered. In broad daylight. There had been men skulking about, hard-looking men with hard eyes. Something in her told her to run, and she had run. She didn’t remember why the men were there, what they wanted, or if she had been their target. Or perhaps a man? Her memory…she saw a face, a man with an oiled beard and deep brown eyes. He was smiling at her. He wore a rust red shirt. That was all.

  There had been rolling hills in the country surrounding the villa. They were like these, the hills rising several hundred feet of gentle, grassy slope. Flattening out on their tops. You could see for miles from the crest. That was her last memory of doomed Byzantium, of crouching in the dirt atop a hill and watching a line of horsemen swerve around her hill, heading away from her. She felt her breath, remembering her ragged panting; she had sprinted up that hill like a rabbit.

  Truck was grinding his inexorable way up the hill. Silver looked b
ack at Warren, who eyed her from horseback. Silver pointed uphill. “We can camp up here,” she called. “There’s plenty of room!” She half-shouted over the whine of Truck’s turbine.

  Warren just glared at her and didn’t bother trying to respond. She had dignity to preserve, Silver knew. Warren couldn’t be seen arguing with her in front of the Unit. There were about two hundred or so of them, each with at least a handful of men. Lawton, the big one with the bow, that the Chinese called the Archer, had almost fifty. Others had as many. The Red Marine, she knew, had eighteen troops with them. She’d counted. Warren needed to maintain discipline.

  Silver could sense it. She knew this dynamic. Knew it of old. Men, gathered for combat, but all equally suspicious of each other. Here there were women too. Mistrust, born of long association. Time had been at work here, she realized. These people had been together for so long that they had become more than just a military unit, they had been welded into a family. Now they were gathering, and like all family gatherings, Silver thought, there was drama.

  More troops were joining almost every day. They’d left word at the Citadel, of course, with the skeleton garrison left behind. They were heading due west, across the central Hubei grasslands, bending towards some mountains and a narrow pass. After that, Warren confirmed, there was a fuckload of Russian steppe to cross.

  At the crest of the hill Silver gave Truck’s pitted skin a slap, and he slowed to a crawl, then a stop. She hopped up, and ducked out from under the canopy she’d rigged to keep off the sun. From Truck’s front left fender she saw Smoke rise, and beat at his jacket. He usually just sat, lotus-style, on the fender, or walked beside Truck if the going was slow enough. Silver hadn’t seen him sleep yet.

  Gold and Li were in the cage, masked off with dirty cloth blankets Gold had scrounged from the Citadel. Li’s skin was far too pale for this sun, and Gold didn’t want a few hundred warriors ogling the girl. They usually stayed well hidden when traveling. Silver wrinkled her nose in annoyance, then hopped down.