The Price of Rebellion, page 5
“I’ll send them all to you from now on.”
“I’ll settle for a bowl.” Anya took another sip, then sat back with a mischievous grin. “Tell me something about yourself, something few people know.”
“I went into space once. Our first Gen Omega rockets worked, but their readings showed anomalies we couldn’t figure out. The others convinced me to ride in the next launch to discover the problem. It was a test run, so we didn’t announce I was onboard. I was only in space for eighteen minutes before the capsule returned to earth.”
“What was it like?”
“During the ascent, I could tell something was wrong. I was so focused on finding the problem I nearly forgot where I was. Then at apogee, I unbuckled myself. I knew to expect weightlessness, but the view outside the window, sunlight glinting off the atmosphere, nearly overwhelmed me. It was one of the best experiences of my life.”
“Did you figure out the problem?”
“Yeah, with about twenty seconds to spare. I wasn’t completely buckled in before the capsule started its descent. I nearly got thrown out of my chair.”
“What did you want to be when you grew up?”
“Never thought about it. Didn’t even plan to go to college, though when I did, I was recruited by the football team.”
“You’re serious.”
“I wasn’t good enough to play professionally, but they gave me a scholarship.”
“And being on the team got you the ladies.”
“The quarterback got the ladies. I got ice baths,” I said, which made her laugh. She hadn’t seemed jealous, just curious. When I’d met Mina, she’d needed reassurance. And validation. Anya, on the other hand, was confident, smart and grounded, qualities I liked. “Your turn.”
“Well,” she said, drawing out the word as she thought. “I tried for a double major in undergrad: biology and applied robotics. With nanotech playing a bigger role in the health field, I figured if I couldn’t get into medical school, I could help people through robotics.” She cringed. “I hated it. I admire what you do, but working on tiny little machines was so boring.”
“Okay, what else?”
“I’m a horrible card player.”
“That’s all I get? A bad card player?”
“You gave me a space mission.”
“Fair.” I considered. “After Raven was born, I was so afraid of her getting hurt I drove to a baby store and bought every blanket and plush toy they had, then padded her crib so much that the stuff I’d bought nearly swallowed her the first time I laid her down. I had to remove everything, so I placed the blankets and toys in spots around the house I thought were dangerous, even though she couldn’t move on her own for months.”
Anya smiled, then took a breath. “Teen romance movies are better than historical romance movies. I don’t always like the patients I save. And I’m very cautious, which is great as a surgeon but makes life outside the OR challenging.”
She seemed vulnerable. Or conflicted. Gently, I said, “You came with me to save Raven. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have survived.”
She stared into my eyes, and I felt something shift between us. “You’re smooth. But nothing’s going to happen between us tonight.”
“Did I seem like I want something to happen?”
“You are a man.”
“I’m glad you noticed.”
“Have a good night, Dray.” She went to the door, then gestured to the device that projected Talia’s image. “If you turned that off for me, you didn’t have to.”
* * *
The next morning, the nurse was in the med unit bent over Jex’s body, running a violet-colored, subsurface laser over his wound to accelerate his recovery.
His bed had an additional, adult-sized depression. By its contour, I suspected Raven had slept beside him. Since Anya hadn’t mentioned it, I wondered if Raven had waited until she’d left.
“How is he?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“He woke up around three with a fever. I gave him antibiotics, and more pain meds, so he’ll sleep for a few more hours, but he’s improving. So long as the fever doesn’t return, we’ll release him later today.”
I wished Anya would let him stay longer. He was exhausted. I suspected he would be mad at me for shooting him for a while, which was too bad. I’d grown to like him. I still didn’t know if he was right for Raven, but that wasn’t my choice.
“He shouldn’t have a scar, at least,” the nurse added, indicating the laser.
“Let him. He’d like it.”
She frowned at me. “What is it with you people?”
I was surprised to be lumped in with a scrappy eighteen-year-old fighter, especially since before all of this, the most physical battling I’d done the last few years was with Amarjit on Gen Omega’s racquetball court. But that didn’t alleviate my concern, especially since Jex had been shot with a weapon I’d never seen before. Anya hadn’t found any fragments, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any clues. I leaned over his leg and saw a faint discoloration along one edge of the bullet wound. “You have his chart?”
“You his doctor now?”
I raised my eyebrows, hoping my status—however much I had—would work. She sighed and turned away to retrieve Jex’s chart. As soon as she did, I flicked on my ion blade and sliced a tiny piece of skin that included the discoloration, then captured the piece in a gauze pad that had been resting on the nearby tray.
“What the hell are you doing?” the nurse demanded.
“Helping with the scar,” I lied.
“Get out.”
* * *
As I left the med unit, I found Valor leaning against the wall. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Have to watch over you.”
She’d been waiting for me. “Not necessary,” I said, starting off.
“Could be worse. Could have both of us. I convinced the angry exerciser to give you some space.”
She and Senn were fanatical about guarding me, which was both touching and exasperating. Some days, they alternated. Other days, I got both.
While her tone was light, she was tense. Ready for anything. I needed to be, too.
The leaders’ declaration of war hung over us—and was already transforming the place, which buzzed with anxious energy. A team of rebels assembled weapons racks in the central hub, while technicians laid down more cables along the edge of the hallway. Higher-level commanders hurried past and headed up the north hallway to where people gathered near the leaders’ chamber, and the message boards filled with assignments for training, logistics coordination, and other preparations for war. Clenching my jaw, I led Valor into the south hallway, where more men and women passed, some in full battle gear.
Three hundred feet down, the hallway split, both pathways busy with activity. We took the righthand fork and passed a couple of Lafontaine’s men who stared at us suspiciously, especially Valor and her eyepatch.
Speculation ran high about the patch. She’d confided to me it hid a camera hardwired to her optic nerve. The camera was closed-loop, but she risked the leaders kicking her out if they discovered it—especially since I suspected she’d used it to record Lafontaine’s announcement. Yet she was one of only a few in this country who didn’t have a neural net, though she’d had one in the past. We’d crafted a broadcaster for her that mimicked a ‘net, but it wouldn’t pass scrutiny if The Agency ever captured her. How she’d had her implant removed and lost her eye, she wouldn’t say, though she did make a game out of me trying to figure out what happened.
As if reading my thoughts, she asked, “New guess?”
“You were in a dart-throwing contest and stepped in front of a player at the wrong time.”
She snorted, though the edge of her mouth curled upward. “You’re not even trying.”
The air thumped with gunfire as we followed the passageway past training rooms and tactical simulations, all of which were noisier than usual, the air thick with what felt like desperation. Or maybe it was just me. I didn’t think we stood a chance against the U.S. military.
“Sir,” a man with neck armor and shielded arms said as he passed, then two men in their twenties with thick facial hair approached. “Mr. Quintero, it’s an honor to see you,” one said.
Groupies. Beside me, Valor made what sounded like a growl. I thanked them and propelled her onward.
Our passageway led to the motor pool, the largest space in the mountain, what had once been the loading area for the salt mines. Instead of continuing down, we took a side passage that led to two rooms. The larger one contained the production equipment Garly’s assistants utilized to generate the multitude of weapons, implant shields, and other tech we relied on.
I didn’t go to that room, stopping in front of a soot-stained door instead. “Coming in?”
Valor shook her head. “I’d break something. I’ll hang here.”
I ran my thumb along the ridge of the handle to unlock the door before me, twisted the knob, and entered Garly’s lab.
The room, three times as long as it was wide, was crammed with robotics, drones, plasma generators, electrical enhancers, clean boxes, and leftover food. We’d reinforced the wall at one end so we could shoot devices to see how well they worked, leaving it scarred with indentations, gouges, and scorch-marks. Lab stations gripped the walls toward the center of the room, containing bottles, sketches, 3D printers, and a mess of equipment and gadgets.
Garly sat in front of a small mound of electrical components, wearing a black armband over his lab coat. For Talia. He’d worn it since I told him.
He stood when I entered, unfolding his six-and-a-half-foot frame, his head nearly hitting the ceiling as his bushy goatee stretched into a smile. “The only and greatest! Welcome back to the abode, my Yoda.”
“Good to be back.”
“How’d it go? I bet Bhungen coinage you’d get clinked.”
“Nice vote of confidence.”
“Didn’t hope it, but they were choice-o odds.” A line of small, five-legged robots, each about the size of a key ring, linked together behind him. They moved awkwardly, as if they were still learning how to use their appendages, although four of them were managing to drag a liquid-core motherboard behind a printer. I also spotted clusters of various-shaped magnets being manipulated by a trash-can-sized robot. Nothing that could help me.
I needed to fix my failure, find the nodes, convince the leaders to wait. “I couldn’t hack in.”
“That’s unbelieves! Their system must’ve been lights out.”
“Are you aware of The Agency overlapping data?”
“You sure it wasn’t some anomaly?”
I shook my head. Before he could reply, an energy coupler suddenly turned on. Six of the linking robots dangled from the lever that activated it.
“Oop,” Garly cried as he lunged and flipped the lever off, jerking it so hard he sent three mini-bots flying. I reached out, caught them as they curled into a loose ball, and handed them to him.
“Sorry,” the twenty-seven-year-old said. “They don’t mean harm.”
While he tried to herd the growing spread of linking ‘bots, I set up his microscope analyzer and transferred Jex’s skin sample. We had bigger issues, but I had to see what The Agency was up to. As I readied the slide, I told Garly about Jex getting hit by The Agency’s strange weapon, me shooting him, and that I’d obtained a sample of skin.
Garly dumped a handful of linking ‘bots into a container I realized held hundreds. “Did Nurse Snarly give you that?”
“Why do you ask questions you don’t want the answer to?”
The sample appeared on the attached monitor, with the results of a spectral analysis displayed next to the image. “There are traces of liridecane,” I said, surprised. It was a fast-acting agent, numbed skin on contact. I scanned the rest of the results. “There are traces of aluminum and a coating agent. No gunpowder, though.”
“The projectile was fragilio in some way.”
My team, the rebels, depended on me, yet I didn’t understand what the object had been—or what it was for.
Raven entered the lab, jaw tight. We’d barely spoken since the med unit. “Did you have to shoot Jex?”
“He was hit with something.”
“So shooting him was the answer? You didn’t do it because we’re together?”
“If it was, I would’ve shot him weeks ago,” I joked.
Her eyes widened in disbelief. I suspected she was trying not to laugh. Then her gaze shifted to the monitor, and her face slackened. “Is that his skin?”
“I’m trying to help,” I told her as Garly nervously started fiddling with a miniaturized electrical decharger.
“You can’t treat him like this, Dad.”
“I like the kid. He’s loyal, and he makes you happy. Just…give him a razor, would you?”
She tensed as if to argue but didn’t, a ghost of a smile appearing instead. “Don’t shoot him anymore.”
I smiled back. “Did you come here to yell at me?”
“And let you know Cole had to go on a recon mission. The hackers claimed one of their dark-web servers went offline.” The hacker group used a series of servers scattered across the country that had been around for years. One going offline was cause for concern.
She picked up one of a pair of thin, brushed-metal objects that each curved around a set of fingerholes, what reminded me of futuristic-looking brass knuckles. “What’s this?”
Garly puffed his chest. “Made it myself. First of its kind. It’s a glowing blade, chi’.”
He showed her the switch, then stepped back so she could activate it. The tightly-woven laser energy glowed as it spun along the curved edge of the seven-inch-wide device, the glow highlighting the joy in her face. The curved blade was a powerful weapon, able to cut through nearly anything, but would it have helped when we fought Britt? The Agent had overcome our tech, knew who we were, and nearly defeated us.
We needed a better solution. And I needed to protect Raven, both against The Agency and the Army.
Garly handed her the blade’s twin, which she also activated. Standing in the lab, feet planted, Garly’s glowing weapons in each hand, she looked formidable. I didn’t know how I felt about that.
She turned off the blades, though her smile remained. “You know I’m taking these.”
Garly chuckled. “They’re for you. Gifts for the huntress.”
“Let’s talk about this,” I said.
“Talk’s lame,” she said. She kissed my cheek before heading to the door, blades in hand. “Don’t work too hard.”
I threw Garly a harsh look as she left, but he seemed too pleased with himself to care.
With an irritated sigh, I gazed about the lab, taking in sound condensers, a laser Garly hoped could turn water into a weapon, charge emitters, and portable dischargers. He’d become obsessed recently with large-scale harmonics. I’d been obsessed with finding the nodes. I feared my efforts had been a waste, however.
One of the tiny robots bumped into my hand. It seemed unsure, though one of its pointy-tipped legs was hooked with another ‘bot, and that one to a third, the three seeming to have wandered off from the main group Garly had corralled.
“They’re getting brave,” he said. “I’m linking their command protocols to the user’s emotions. It’s quicker than trying to link them with users’ intellect, as emotional signatures are more uniform, though it’s grisly to tinker. Got the idea the other day when de Vera was all puffy.”
The tiny ‘bots had been his idea, a hive-robot-network he wanted to explore, but together we’d built surveillance robots—from high-flying recon drones to ant-sized roaming ones—and a defensive ‘bot. They didn’t feel enough. None of this did. We had one lab compared with who knew how many the government owned.
“Sorry about your new broadcast,” he said.
I had recreated my call to rise up, and we had posted it online three weeks ago. “Why are you sorry?”
“Lafontaine ordered the hackers to turn it off. Did that yesterday, before his big speech. Thought you knew.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said, unable to mask my frustration. I was proud of the video.
Garly looked distraught, though his face lit up after a few seconds. “I forgots. The hand shields you conceived are ready-o.”
He extracted a pair of gloves from a high shelf, the backs covered in electronics, with support bands across the center of the palms and wrists.
He smiled. “Take ‘em for a spin.”
I slipped on one of the gloves and activated it. The phased-array projectors emitted high-compression, multi-layered, eddy-current-derived waves to form a curved shield two feet in front of my wrist, almost like a trapped concussion wave. As I watched, the curve became visible, the waves capturing light and tinting the shield a faint, dark-violet color.
The gloves made me feel marginally better. “Have you tested them?”
“Worked like a charm.” By our calculations, bullets lost ninety-nine percent of their momentum when they struck the shield, melting as they tried to punch through. “They deflected plasma blasts as well.”
The projection—smaller than screenshields but providing better protection—was bulky and slowed my movement, the intense waves blocking the air more than gliding through it. I opened my mouth to tell him, but from the arch of his eyebrows, I could tell he hoped I liked them. He didn’t need accolades from anyone. Yet he wanted them from me. “They’re a little heavy, but good job.”
“Think they could’ve flipped the tide yesterday?”
I hesitated. “Probably not. The Agents had hoverbikes, which means The Agency probably has dozens.”
Garly’s face fell. I could relate. We’d developed a number of weapons, but we didn’t have anything that directly countered hoverbikes, which gave The Agency superior mobility and expanded the battlefield to the skies. Except for drones, we had nothing that was airborne.
