Paired Pursuit (16 page)

She nodded, but Finn's mood both saddened and unnerved her. “Is he going to be all right? Usually, he's so…”

“Usually our moods are the other way around?” Gareth guessed, and smiled lopsidedly at her agreement. “Yeah, Dr. Felton is a dick. That's why I refuse to deal with him.”

“Finn 01223,” Mari mused. “Do you have the same sur-numerals?”

Gareth snorted at her term. “Yeah. We asked for double-oh-seven, but for some strange reason, they refused.”

“If we live long enough, you can take my surname.” Mari kept her tone light, but the numerals really bothered her. The Twins were dehumanized enough without being referred to as numbers.

Gareth's green eyes bored into hers. “You mean that? Because…yeah. I'd really like to. And of course we're going to live.”

She inhaled his scent as he bent to kiss her, a tender, light touch that managed to both comfort and provoke. Then he whisked her forward, keeping her by his side as they went up a metal staircase. A pair of soldiers ran by them, going downward with set expressions on their faces. At the wall's top, there weren't nearly enough people to control the light-guns. Many stations were left unpopulated.

“The world is running out of humans,”
Mari remembered her father saying. He'd warned her about the dangers of human trafficking, young women being bought and sold for the sole purpose of producing babies. She was glad for Gareth's imposing presence at her side.

He led her toward an unmanned gun. “This one's got juice. Hey, you okay?”

She couldn't seem to bring herself to look over the wall. Studying her shoes, she swallowed. “Just…give me a second.”

“Deep breaths.” She heard the click of the trigger and an ensuing
zap
. “I'll maim a few while you center yourself. They trained us for this, in a way, you know. That was one of the few fun things about our childhood—we played a lot of videogames, spent a decent whack of time in virtual reality. Of course, they had no idea what the Barks were really going to be like, so we've had to adapt our techniques somewhat.”

Sets of Twins had almost singlehandedly saved the entire human population—at least in some countries. The larger, richer countries had all invested in
supersoldier development
, as they'd put it, for decades. It had been a kind of arms race executed with humans, and her parents had been extremely disapproving.

Zap.
Mari tried not to jump. She'd been lucky, in many ways. She had survived, kept a roof over her head, food in her belly—most of the time, at least—and hadn't been among the many women trafficked to ruthless human warlords who used them simply for breeding. Some might even call her sheltered. Not being able to bring herself to look over the top of the wall was stupid, weak, and would prove any naysayers right.

Listening to her inner drill sergeant, Mari took a deep breath and dragged her gaze upward. That breath expelled in a harsh gasp as she took in the massive array of aliens that faced Scar City. They looked like a sea of sickly white. Here and there she could make out individual eyestalks, which made her shudder.

While she watched, one of the larger ones—a leader—ran forward, and she was transported back to that terrible night aboard the broken-down train. Her hands grasped the ragged concrete of the wall, but she hardly felt the discomfort. That was him.
It.
Whatever.

As if sensing her thoughts, the leader bounded forward and looked upward directly at her. Its jaws gaped around a bullet hole—the hole she'd created with her Glock. Eyes glowing, it let out a hideous howl that was echoed by its smaller comrades, baring sharklike teeth.

“Fucker.” Gareth snarled the word, shooting a short volley of lasers into the crowd. The leader undulated away, but some of its companions weren't so lucky. They went down, writhing, black-and-yellow burns opening up in translucent skin. “That one was looking at you, Mari.”

“Yes. I…um, shot that particular alien. That night on the train.”

“Oh hell. Yeah, these creepers don't forget. I'm going to take you back to Patrice's house—” Gareth cut off, eyes going unfocused for a brief moment as he communicated with his Twin. “Damn. Okay, we're going to meet Finn first, because the device is going nuts inside his jacket pocket.”

“I wish I could believe that's a crazy euphemism you've just come up with,” Mari muttered, and was rewarded with a genuine laugh from Gareth.

“You're too much. Come on.”

There weren't enough soldiers to take over Gareth's abandoned laser. That worry niggled at the back of Mari's mind, although she was too busy navigating the wall to truly fret about the situation. She jogged just behind Gareth, leaping over pieces of rubble and doing her best to avoid all the people running to and fro. Most of them seemed to be desperately repairing the wall, piecing chunks into thinning bits.

Even as she watched, a score of aliens banded together, their six legs wrapping together into what seemed like a single entity. Like a battering ram, they slammed into the wall so hard that she could feel the vibrations deep in her tummy.

“Focus!” Ramsey stood on a turret, pointing at the entwined aliens as he shouted orders through a megaphone. “Bombs in three! Two! One!”

There was a series of flashes and a light rumbling, then half the battering ram collapsed into blackness. The other half disentangled itself, writhing off injured into the mass of other aliens. Mari gripped the wall where she'd paused, and Gareth gently enfolded her hand into his larger one.

“That's going to happen a lot tonight,” he said. “The good thing is they're so thick on the ground that accuracy is through the roof. We're killing a lot of them. Come on—Finn's just gotten off the line with Dr. Dick again, and he probably needs some distraction to get his blood pressure down.”

“So soon?”

Gareth's grip tightened as they navigated their way over a pile of shattered concrete and bent rebar. “Don't worry, he's not a fan of PDA-type stuff.”

“PDA?”

He speared her with a quick look. “Public Display of Affection. You never heard that term?”

“I was a sheltered only child. My parents talked science stuff at the dinner table. They bought me
National Geographic
instead of
Tiger Beat
.” She winced at the crackle-
zap
of a nearby laser, wondering if maybe she should just keep her mouth shut. The geeky, braces-clad girl she'd once been hadn't had a snowball's chance of getting a boyfriend. Now that she'd gotten started, though, her mouth was running away with her.

“Dad used to take me camping, and we'd always have a stack of books with us—bird-watching manuals and insect guides—instead of card games. I would hear kids talking about TV shows at school that I'd never even heard of. I was more familiar with the smell of formaldehyde than that of the perfume du jour. So…nope, some terms go over my head. I can hold my own if we're discussing bugs or birds, though.”

“Strong perfume gives us hideous headaches.” Far from being put off, Gareth actually grinned at her. “And I always preferred discussing animals over popular culture.”

He shifted his grip from her hand to her arm as they began descending another set of stairs. These were rickety, and the much-mended metal clanked loudly as they walked, making conversation impossible. Mari was grateful for that; the feeling of acceptance was overwhelming, and she wasn't sure she could trust her voice not to shake with emotion. So she concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other until they reached ground level again. Down here, people were still rushing around, but the mood was less somber and focused than it had been atop the wall with all the lasers.

“Couldn't someone invent a permanent UV light that acts as a wall?” She frowned at the equipment being lugged around. Most of it seemed to be aimed at shoring up the physical wall, which had taken a rattling from the alien battering ram.

“That invention is already in existence. It's impractical to have a series of huge UV lamps shining for more than a few hours, but some of the better-equipped Cities use them occasionally. They'll never replace physical walls.”

“I sure wish this place had them,” she couldn't help saying. The thought of that giant leader alien staring up at her made her shudder. But if wishes were horses, then beggars might ride, as her mother had been so fond of saying.

They spotted Finn ahead, bending toward the wall with the device in one hand and his commtab in the other. “Dr. Felton called. Again.”

“I hope you hung up on him.”

Finn rolled his eyes at Gareth. “I'm supposed to be the diplomatic Twin.”

“Quit letting them pigeonhole you.” Gareth bent toward the device. “Shit, that thing's beeping so fast, it's almost continuous. It gets worse when you put it to this part of the wall.”

Both men stared at a section of the concrete wall, eyeing a much-patched part. Mari bent, listening to the device. Gareth was right—even she could hear it now, albeit barely. It could hardly be described as
beeping
—it sounded more like an animal mewling, and it made her very uneasy.

“Finn 01223,” Finn snapped into his commtab. “Yes, Doctor, I believe we have the location, but I don't think it's a good idea—okay. Are you sure? No, I'm not questioning whether you have clearance, goddammit! I'm asking whether this is a good idea.”

“Fuck this. Let's get it over with before he screams about disobedience and court-martials.” Mari stepped back as Gareth stepped forward. Without preamble, he ripped several bricks from the crumbling wall until he'd exposed a small hollow, in which the other half of the device nestled. Mari blinked. Was that a note underneath it? She nearly reached out—and let out a yelp as the device flew toward Finn.

The mewling—and now she realized it had been coming from both devices—stopped, melding into a brief, primal scream. Everything in the world seemed to pause, then the device went quiet, with only a single red light flashing where the two halves had melded themselves together.

“Dr. Felton, I'm going to need to speak to your superior,” Finn said quietly.

Everything seemed to be limned in red. Gareth wasn't sure whether that was because his rage was through the roof, or because he was still holding the device with its red light shining through the gloom. His hands ached from his fifth serious attempt at breaking the thing—on panicked orders from Command.

The silver lining was that Dr. Felton's reedy voice was no longer piping over the comm. Now it was others, higher up the chain of command. Dr. Felton was screwed seven ways to Sunday.

Arguably, however, Scar City was screwed worse. The device coming together had roiled up the aliens even further, and they'd been forming battering rams almost continuously for the last two hours. Despite taking serious damage, they kept coming, probably desperate to reach this newly activated device.

There were a thousand theories flying about. Gareth listened, his commtab still tuned into the agitated conference call. Some speculated that the device had already woken the cryogenically frozen breeders. Others questioned why the aliens still wanted the device back if it was working. Still others pointed out that Scar City was about to fall, so why wouldn't the aliens attack?

In the safety of the Complex, sitting around a table drinking coffee, it was easy for them to talk. Gareth picked up the commtab and switched off mute. “Tried again. It's indestructible in my current situation.”

“Have you tried melting it?”

“No, because I don't have the equipment for that. We're focused on survival here. There's more than a thousand aliens outside the walls, and all of them are slavering to get in.”

Gareth knew his tone was disrespectful. Hailey had cautioned them against that kind of thing, warning that many of the older people viewed the Twins as tools to be used on a whim. She was right too—he'd heard of several disappearances, or
reassignments
as the powers-that-be preferred to term them.

Couldn't get a worse reassignment than Reno, though. So he gave clipped responses to a few more questions, then was given permission to sign off and go back to his attempts to destroy the device.

Once he'd terminated the call, Gareth tucked the device in his pocket and strode up the steps to the top of the wall, ready to get back to fighting.

“Mari's all set,”
Finn sent.
“Patrice has set up camp in the living room with two guns and the dog, so they're together and safe.”

“Good. Come back and let's kill some aliens. Got another good six hours of darkness left, so maybe we can beat our previous score.”

It helped somewhat, thinking of it as a game. That had been the scientists' intention, of course, desensitizing them to violence, training them to kill without compunction. In some countries, Twins had run double duty as soldiers, waging war against other humans. Gareth was glad that hadn't happened here. Despite his gruff exterior, he truly cared about the people here and had the deepest respect for the hard-working people just trying to survive.

“You, with a soft spot?”

“Yeah, don't get all soppy now.”
Gareth squeezed the trigger on an unattended laser and got an alien through the throat. The blackened creature slammed to the ground but was immediately replaced by two more. That gave him pause. How many Barks had been inside the spaceship Mari had inadvertently opened? Two thousand? Three? The aliens could fold themselves down fairly compactly, so maybe he was underestimating the bastards.

Motherships held even more than the intact spaceship they'd stumbled upon, of course. Gareth shot another alien, watching it stagger back into its fellows, briefly impeding their progress.