Youngbloods, page 23
I roll into a ball, gasping the smell of mold and dry leaves.
Tally stops herself, standing over me, breathing hard.
‘What’s wrong with you, Frey?’ she cries, genuine confusion in her voice. ‘Did X tell you to do this?’
She still doesn’t understand—this is me. I’m not X’s shadow, or Rafi’s, or hers. All that matters is the nuke.
Maybe I can buy Dancy more time.
One word leaks from my swollen lips.
‘Collaborator.’
Tally stares down at me. ‘That’s what you’re worried about? Some mistake I made when I was your age?’
I’ve hit the mark.
‘Betrayer,’ I whisper.
Her whole body tenses, but no explosion of fury follows. She’s still mostly confused—she really thought I would nuke the wild for her.
Healing nanos are flooding my system, but they’re overwhelmed. It’ll be a solid minute before I can stand again.
Tally’s board drifts up behind her, nudging her leg.
‘Shay was right—when you were little, your loyalty was never repaid.’ She turns away. ‘So why would you stick with us?’
I would have. But nukes were my father’s last crime.
As Tally steps onto the board, I shake my crash bracelets to turn them to full.
Their magnetics pull me toward her across the dusty floor. Dragged by my wrists, my pain redoubles, my brain almost shutting down.
But somehow I grab hold of Tally’s riding deck. Her liftoff pulls me into the air.
‘Really?’ she yells, swerving as we climb, trying to shake me off. My body dangles, a wild pendulum in midair. The gale-force wash from the lifting fans beats down on my face. But the tendons in my hands lock like steel.
We rise above the treetops, and I can see Dancy on the cargo flyer. She’s kneeling over the warhead.
Tally hasn’t spotted her yet—all her focus is on me.
‘Just give up, Frey!’ she cries, and the grippy sole of her boot comes down on my left hand.
Duralloy bones can’t break, but I feel them bending. Sick-making pain cuts through the tatters of my awareness, the world turning sharp and glassy around me.
Somehow my other hand hangs on.
I wait for her boot to come crunching down again.
But a mocking cry comes across the treetops.
‘Mind if I borrow this thing, Boss?’
It’s Dancy on the cargo flyer.
Tally lets out an angry cry and flies straight at her, dragging me along. The board shrieks louder, the rotor wash a tornado trying to brush me away.
My crash bracelets vibrate a warning pattern—they’re almost out of charge.
I try to grab for the deck with my bent left hand, but the fingers won’t grip—trying to move them sends fresh torment down my arm.
Tally skids to a halt at the last second, swinging me out like a whip.
My fingers slip at last, my bracelets failing. I slam into Dancy, knocking her from the cargo flyer.
We tumble together, down through the trees.
‘Dead batteries,’ I croak.
Dancy wraps me in her arms.
I feel the jolt of her crash bracelets kicking in, arresting our fall. But it’s not enough.
The ground hits us—a giant’s fist delivering a knockout blow.
In the sudden, sovereign darkness, my awareness trails away, bound to reality only by a few kite strings of agony. The rush of healing nanos finally overwhelms me. For an endless, somehow joyful moment, I leave myself behind.
A shadow of no one.
A long time later, someone calls from the distance.
‘Frey.’
I never liked that name.
‘Frey! Are you okay?’
At that hilarious question, my eyes open.
‘Yeah, I’m great.’
Dancy’s staring at my left hand. No blood, but it’s bent wrong. The duralloy bones are curved beneath the surface, stretching the bulletproof skin taut and pink.
Healing nanos are holding the pain at bay. But I can feel it there, vast and powerful. Like standing centimeters from the thunder and spray of a waterfall.
Dancy gently takes my wrist. ‘We didn’t fall that hard, did we?’
‘No, Boss Tally did that.’
‘Wow,’ Dancy says. ‘The Smoke lives, I guess.’
With a grunt, she hooks my good arm over her shoulder and lifts me up. It hurts too much to ask where we’re going. Then I see something sliding through the trees—her hoverboard tracking her down.
We step gingerly on together, like friends who’ve had too much bubbly helping each other home.
But it’s a battle we’re headed toward, not bed. Somewhere in the distance, the shooting has already started.
‘Don’t think I can help much,’ I say. My nanos are slowly returning my other limbs to me, but that hand needs surge.
‘Me either.’ Dancy has a black eye, and she winces as we start to climb. ‘Still, I want to watch.’
As we rise up above the trees again, the sparkle of a firefight paints the horizon. We fly closer.
The rebels have surrounded a white ruin on a sprawling prominence. Ragged buildings rise up from the overgrowth, decked with blinding floodlights pointed outward in all directions.
‘A castle on a hill,’ I say with a sigh. ‘Just like the Futures to pick an obvious spot for their base.’
Dancy shrugs. ‘Easy to defend, at least.’
Still closer, there’s no sign of the hovercar—it must have made it back inside. Maybe Astrix and Croy went along with it. With everyone taking cover, I can’t make out individuals.
One by one, the floodlights wink out, hit by sniping from the trees.
But the rebels don’t make a concerted rush against the fortress. There are too many pinpoints of return fire along the walls.
Tally was right—the Futures showed up in numbers for her historic arrival. Twenty-odd rebels can’t take this fortress without bloodshed, and it’s all my fault for giving them a warning.
Which leaves Tally and her nuke.
‘You broke the warhead, right?’
Darcy hands me something. ‘You tell me.’
I stare at the sliver of metal, shorter than my pinkie, a plastic square at one end. Shaped like an old-fashioned key, it’s covered with exposed circuitry.
‘What is this?’
‘No idea,’ she says. ‘It looked important, kind of.’
‘I got my hand broken for a kind of? I thought your crew’s thing was technical expertise!’
Dancy laughs. ‘My thing is sustainable farming. Next time you want a warhead defused, give me more than thirty seconds.’
‘Okay, sorry.’ I slip the key into a pocket. ‘I guess we’ll find out.’
She shoves a bottle into my good hand, and I drink deeply. The water feels as powerful as the rampant nanos in my blood.
Something flickers in the sky.
I flinch, ready to be blinded, expecting the ruined city to be lit for a hundred klicks in every direction.
But the boom that rolls across the hills is gentle.
‘That’s not a nuke,’ Dancy says. ‘It’s an orbital entry.’
More of the flashes follow, a sudden web of heat trails crisscrossing the sky. This is the first time I’ve seen reentries from this range with my new vision. They’re beautiful, like bold strokes of watercolor fading into black paper.
I’d almost forgotten the transmitter, but its message must have made it home.
The machines are here.
54. ORBITALS
In the war against my father, I saw half a dozen orbital insertions.
Normally there’s the pop of reentry, the sound barrier snapping, then the flutter of parachutes. Finally heat shields scatter like embers, and a handful of combat drones springs forth to do battle.
But the vehicles falling around us don’t fragment—they arc from the black sky in one piece. Furnace-hot from plunging through the atmosphere, they sprout solid metal wings, like birds pulling out of a dive.
No shielding drops away, no chutes open. These machines don’t try to arrest the speed of falling from space—they use it.
The first one streaks overhead in an instant, a knife across the sky.
Below it, three rebels fall from their hoverboards.
I don’t even know what hit them—maybe a flurry of invisible projectiles. Or the shock wave of the orbital’s passage was enough.
Sonic booms rattle the hills around us.
The next one thunders over the Future’s base on the hill. Ancient walls buckle and shatter. A sudden dust storm trails in the orbital’s wake, a pale finger stretching across the sky. Debris rains into the forest.
I reach for my knife. It’s still broken, not that a pulse weapon could do much against these orbitals. They look a decade beyond anything in the city arsenals.
‘Guess you were right,’ Dancy says.
‘We can’t fight them.’ More booms set the hoverboard shuddering beneath my feet. ‘But we can still kill the data.’
‘You don’t look ready for a battle,’ Dancy says.
I look at my left hand, a dead spider with five legs.
‘Just give me your pistol.’
We head toward the fortress, dropping into cover whenever more orbitals come screaming overhead. Dancy’s bracelets are spent from catching us both, so a hard fall will end this ride.
The rattle of gunfire has faded around us, the rebels scattered into the ruins. The Futures must be huddled in the depths of their base, waiting for whatever Diego has coming next.
Maybe in this lull, we can get inside and find the memory cores …
Then something big drops from the sky. It slows itself with retro rockets, landing in the mountains to the north. Some kind of mobile command post?
We ignore it, riding hard for the Future’s base.
We’re closing in when Tally breaks comm silence.
‘Pull out, everyone—fast as you can!’
An orbital swoops overhead, the shock wave sending Dancy’s board into a tailspin. For a moment, there’s nothing in my ears but a drumbeat of sonic booms.
When I can hear again, Tally’s still talking. ‘—any bare skin, and don’t look back! Ninety seconds—mark.’
Dancy skids us to a halt. ‘Is that what I think it was?’
‘Yeah. She’s going to use the nuke.’
I set a countdown in my eyescreen.
‘What do we do?’ For the first time, Dancy sounds nervous.
‘We go in,’ I say. ‘We’ll be safer under cover than out here.’
Dancy stares into the sky. ‘All those orbitals rushing around—how’s she going to get it high enough for an airburst?’
‘She’s Tally Youngblood. Come on.’
We break from the trees, flying heedlessly now. In my eyescreen, the countdown is ticking …
Seventy-three seconds.
We climb the hill on a crumbling road, our lifting fans at full, magnetics pushing off the rusting hulks of ancient groundtrucks. A ring of shattered floodlights surrounds the ruins, spilling a waterfall of broken glass.
The outlying buildings pass under us, broken by three centuries of decay even before the orbital attack. The interior walls are zigzagged with the remains of fallen staircases, the marble floors cracked by the flexing roots of trees.
Nothing looks intact enough to be a working base.
And no one shoots at us.
An orbital zooms low across the hill, but the afterstorm of shock waves seems muted. Their work done, the attackers are backing off.
There must be a second wave coming—infantry or tactical drones.
I scan the sky. Maybe half a klick over my head, twin pinpoints of heat are spiraling upward, like birds riding thermals.
The cargo flyer carrying the nuke … and Tally too. She’s threading it through the thunderstrikes of passing orbitals.
But her board’s maxing out its altitude—she starts to drop away, arcing into a power dive to get clear of the airburst. The six-engined flyer keeps climbing.
Forty seconds.
She’s cutting it close.
So are we.
We jump a shattered wall and swoop down into a courtyard, looking for an entrance to the base—for any cover at all.
Parked on a hoverpad below us is the Futures’ car, its loading ramp standing open. The cargo hold is empty.
There’s no one around, just a door set into the ground, five meters across and firmly shut. It glimmers with the dull sheen of duralloy, like the vault in the deepest basement of my father’s tower.
‘Uh-oh,’ I say.
Even if I had my pulse knife, there’d be no getting through that.
I look around. None of the structures have solid roofs. We’re stuck here in the open.
Twenty-one seconds.
‘Frey …’ Beside me on the board, Dancy’s looking up.
As I follow her gaze, a boom reaches us. The trail of a passing orbital is fading up there, next to a small ember of heat spinning out of control.
The cargo flyer is falling.
It’s not going to airburst kilometers up. It’s going to explode down here.
Not far from us, looks like.
Eleven …
‘Come on!’ Dancy lands us on the hoverpad, drags me from the board into the car’s cargo hold.
I stumble to a halt, staring at the roof. Maybe half an inch of metal between us and the blast. The cargo door isn’t even closed.
‘Dancy, I don’t think we’re …’ My voice fades.
I shut my eyes, but the countdown is still there in my vision.
One … zero.
Nothing.
No flash, no vast roar a moment later. No shock wave punching in the sides of the hovercar, no heat blistering our skin.
When I open my eyes again, Dancy’s huddled in a corner, body armor pulled up over her face. I’m frozen, waiting to be flayed with fire.
Maybe Tally set a limit on the airburst, to protect the Futures down in their duralloy vault. To protect the wild. The cargo flyer might be climbing again, primed to explode when it hits the right altitude.
But an endless, anxious minute later, still nothing. Even the rumble of passing orbitals has faded.
I have to know.
I walk down the hovercar’s loading ramp.
‘Frey!’ Dancy’s voice follows me. ‘Where are you going?’
I flinch a little, looking up into the sky.
Less than a hundred meters overhead is a silhouette, steady against the stars. I adjust my thermal vision.
It’s Tally and her board next to the flyer, like she’s working on it.
‘Whatever you did, Dancy, it worked.’
The sound of armor shifting. She starts laughing, half hysterical.
‘Are you kidding? Sustainable farming for the win!’
I pull the key from my pocket.
Its circuitry glimmers in the starlight, tiny rivers of silver. Some kind of safety lock, so small that Tally didn’t notice it missing in the heat of battle.
I slide the key into the small pocket in my riding boot, where I keep spare pulse batteries. Even if Tally searches me, she won’t find it.
Our comms are still locked, so I yell into the sky.
‘Tally! It’s broken!’
No answer at first, but the silhouette above me shifts—she’s peering over the side of the cargo flyer.
The comms unlock.
‘What did you say?’
‘Your nuke is broken,’ I tell her, trying to sound calm. ‘Come down and let’s finish this together.’
‘What did you do?’ Her breath is racing in my ear—like she expected to die a minute ago. ‘Can’t you see you were right? The AIs are here!’
‘Tally, we can still erase the data, but we need to work together!’
She drops her board halfway, close enough that I can see her pleading expression.
‘No, Frey. You need to fix this nuke!’
Her glare cuts through the darkness, all the weight of her cruel beauty, her historic fame, falling on me.
I shake my head.
I am the animal that says no.
That’s when Diego’s second wave arrives.
55. AVATARS
They must have been falling all along, silent and invisible among the shrieking winged orbitals.
Looking up at Tally, I finally see the stars winking out here and there, covered up for an instant by small forms descending through the dark.
They’re shaped like people, but have no body heat.
They aren’t using parachutes—each descends inside its own huge, translucent cloud. Made from some kind of weightless foam, the clouds drift down like wisps of pollen.
‘Tally,’ I whisper. ‘Do you see them?’
A moment’s silence, then she answers, low and wary.
‘Aerogel parachutes. Ever seen those before?’
‘Just in theory.’
‘Why are they sending avatars at us?’ she asks, a shudder in her voice. ‘Why not drones?’
I have no answer.
At the base of the hill, one of the wafting clouds of aerogel touches down. All at once, it blinks out of existence, a soap bubble popping.
The form inside drops gently to the ground, landing on hands and feet. More cat than human.
My eyes drift across the dark sky—hundreds of the aerogel bubbles warp the pinpoint stars. Hundreds of human forms within, all controlled by artificial minds. Or maybe just one mind, a hive.
‘Still don’t want to fix my nuke?’ Tally asks.
I walk toward the giant duralloy door. ‘Just get down here, Boss. If anyone can talk sense into those kids, you can.’
She sighs, and seconds later, her hoverboard lands next to me. She waves it and the cargo flyer away to hide themselves in the trees.
Dancy has emerged from the hovercar.
‘Hi, Boss,’ she says in greeting.
Tally ignores her, stepping onto the huge door.
‘What do we have that cuts through duralloy?’ I ask.
She smirks at me, kneels, and taps out a pattern on the metal.
A few seconds later, a rumbling stirs the ground beneath our feet. The door starts to slide away, revealing a set of permacrete stairs stretching down into darkness.
