Digital Plague

She didn’t blink or react in any overt way. I tried to remember if she’d ever blinked, and couldn’t.

“Hey, Colonel?” Marko said suddenly.

She held up one small hand between them, not taking her eyes off me. I dug the nails of my left hand, hidden from her, into my palm to try and scare up a new jolt over the smear of steady pain that had enveloped me, trying to keep my head clear. She stared at me. I was getting mighty sick of the staring, which was Hense’s prime tactic. I imagined a lot of people broke under that stare in Blank Rooms.

“Colonel,” Marko tried again, tentative but determined. She flashed that hand out again, and he shut his mouth with a click.

We were all silent for a moment, the hover humming beneath us, and I thought I could feel her considering her options as she looked me over. I had her over a barrel in a sense, and she knew it. Maybe Happling and his big shovels for hands could hang on to me, but maybe not. And maybe if we worked together I’d shave valuable days off her trip. An extra couple of days roaming around might mean coming back to an entire East Coast eaten by these things. A week might mean North America gone.

She cocked her head and regarded me. I held her gaze as sweat dripped into my eyes, digging my nails in as hard as I could while she just sat there, completely still. Then, without warning, she straightened up. “Your terms, then, for part-nership?”

I was ready. “Two things, Colonel, and that’s it. One, I am going to kill every last person involved with this. Someone put this fucking hex on me and I plan to make them eat it, okay? No one is going to try and stop me from making whoever it is eat a bullet. Okay?”

She kept up the stare for a moment and then nodded. “As long as it doesn’t interfere with cleaning up this mess, Mr. Cates. If I need someone alive in order to stop this from spreading further, your chances of killing them will be severely reduced.”

I considered this, my whole body starting to shiver, my muscles twitching in a complicated dance that rippled through me on an obscure schedule. Gripping the armrest with my free hand, I sat forward, stiffening my body and hunching over to hide the reaction. “I can live with that, as long as it’s understood that my revenge is deferred, not forbidden.”

She nodded. “All right. Two?”

I shrugged my eyebrows. “I walk away after it’s all said and done. We’re probably going to die, Colonel Hense, but if by some miracle we don’t end up watching each other be eaten alive from the inside out, I don’t want a goddamn bullet in the back.”

Her eyes shifted up over my shoulder and stayed there for an uncomfortable amount of time. Marko leaned forward urgently into the frame my working eye offered me.

“Colonel! There’s a signal-”

“All right, Mr. Cates,” Hense said, bringing her eyes back to my face and extending a hand. There was, to my surprise, a subtle smile in her eyes, and I had the bizarre feeling she liked me. “We have an understanding, and I give you my word that your wishes will be observed, assuming my stipulations. You help us track down whoever orchestrated this. You stick by us at all times to ensure our health and well-being. You get to kill whoever you deem responsible for this mess unless I ask you politely to wait, and you walk away if we happen to survive. Agreed?”

I took her hand, Marko panting in impatience behind us. Her skin was warm and dry, soft, the tendons beneath the skin taut and powerful. I liked touching her. You didn’t touch anyone in the System, not unless you were trying to choke the life out of them or something, or at least not unless you were going to try and choke the life out of them. I was reluctant to pull away but let her extract her hand without protest.

“Yes, Mr. Marko?” she said, still looking at me.

“A signal, Colonel,” he said, touching the brick. “It’s SSF, encrypted, and there’s a lot of traffic.”

She frowned. “And your analysis?”

“I think-”

The hover shuddered, seemed to jump under us as if hitting an invisible bump in the air, and then went dark and dead, all the vibration gone, the three of us plunged into opaque, total darkness for a second. For one heartbeat it was like floating in a void, and Marko’s voice drifted to me through the perfect silence, the perfect dark.

“-we’re fucked.”

XVIII

Day Seven: Littered The Space Around Us Like Sullen Monuments

You never get the easy way, I thought as the emergency lights flickered on, bathing us in a weak green glow. Everything tilted wildly. Hense, too small for the restraints, flew up and around and saved herself from smashing into the ceiling by grabbing my arm, her grip a painful vise on my wrist as her weight yanked me against the chair’s restraints, almost choking me. Marko grunted as he slapped against his own restraints, but his chain of black boxes flew up and dashed against the roof, making dull, heavy noises. From somewhere outside the cabin a tearing sound replaced the muffled humming that had embraced us. As Hense flapped above me like some sort of human kite, I could see flashes of her gold badge.

Happling’s voice, ti

“Boss? You all strapped in back there? I don’t know what the fuck is going on. The stick’s dead, I have no control. Repeat, no control.”

“You’re busted,” Marko gritted out through clenched teeth, his hands white-knuckled on the armrests. “They remote-disabled the brick. Standard operating procedure when an SSF vehicle is stolen.”

“Fucking hell,” Hense said with zero emotion, her voice strained, her eyes on mine. “You hear that, Happ?”

“Copy. Tell Mr. Fucking Wizard that would have been fucking useful fucking hours ago, then send the stupid little fuck up here to see what he can do.”

“Ever hot-wire a brick, Marko?” Hense said, her voice sounding calm and unconcerned, as if she experienced fucking free fall once a day to stay sharp.

The kid looked like he was smiling. “I can take this piece of shit apart and rebuild it,” he spat, one hand working at the chair restraints. “How much time do I have?”

“Happ?”

There was a delay, during which Marko freed himself and almost went shooting off to a broken neck before catching himself. He began doggedly climbing upward to the cockpit, hand over hand, using the seatbacks. Then Happling’s voice buzzed above me again. “Four minutes forty-six until we’ll be too low and too fast to recover.”

I heard Marko curse. “Tight ship you’re ru

“Shut the fuck up,” she said, her dead mass making me feel like my arm was being pulled from its socket. “Do you have anything useful to offer?”

“My job description with this endeavor doesn’t include flying the fucking hover, Colonel,” I said. “Got any emergency packs on this tub?”

Happling’s voice buzzed from her coat again. “We’re over the fucking Atlantic Ocean, jackass,” he hissed. “If you want to kill yourself and all of us with you, please find a quicker way.”

The tearing noise was getting louder, and the vibration made everything jump and sizzle in front of me. I looked up at Hense. I’d never met anyone in the System who was that calm when death was all around-except Monks. I was terrified, holding my shit together by some thin miracle, panic like a bubble inside me expanding and pushing against my control. But Hense, she just hung on to me and looked down at me, her face serene. Suddenly I wanted to be that sure of myself.

The lights flickered and went out. I thought, Fuck, not in the dark.

The lights came back on, and then Happling’s voice was barking again. “Hang on, Mr. Wizard here thinks he can get the displacers back online but I’ll have to dead-stick, so it’s going to be rough.”