Abysm (33 page)

He’d taken the time he needed to cool his rage, to temper his grief. And Annie’s grief. A sideways dose of Valkyrie’s grief. He was grateful Vii wasn’t part of the Noesis, for her grief might crush them all.

But she was not, and today he was calm. Also quite motivated.

The man he now knew as Jude Winslow, only son of Earth Alliance Prime Minister Pamela Winslow and wealthy financier Frederick Winslow, had the temerity to look upon him with contempt.

“Abomination. You managed to survive all this messy, ruinous chaos. But I suppose that’s what your kind does, isn’t it? Survive at any cost?”

“Among other talents.” Devon strolled across the stretch of hallway in front of the cell. Despite the generally overflowing state of Romane’s detention facilities, it was the only occupied cell on this hall. A solitary confinement of sorts. “Your engineered ‘chaos’ doesn’t look so ruinous from where I stand. Well, except for you and your pals.”

“Come here to kill me, have you? Now that you have me tied up and oh-so helpless?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t miss the minuscule flinch in Jude’s muscles. “It was what I told myself I was coming here to do—and make no mistake, asshole, you deserve to die. Thanks to your parentage you probably won’t anytime soon, but boy do you deserve it.”

Devon’s eyes cut narrowly at the man. “When we met on Pandora, you wanted to kill me, because you were afraid of me—”

“Bullshit, freak. I wanted to kill you because you have no place among the living.”

“We
are
the living, you pretentious psycho. We are more alive than you could ever imagine, and the world is alive around us in ways you could never comprehend.”

“I knew it. You intend to rule us—make us kneel, then use us as your servants.”

“Not actually.” Devon scowled. “Why would we do that? We don’t need servants, for one. And how irritating must they be? Always following you around trying to cuff your pants and wipe stains off your collar. Of course, you grew up with servants catering to your every whim, so perhaps you have a different perspective. You assume it’s where we would naturally go, since to you indenturing others represents the height of power and privilege.”

He abruptly leaned in close to the glass. “Silly. Little. Man.”

Winslow’s eyes widened, as if he feared Devon may breach the glass.

Devon leisurely backed away. “See, what you don’t know about Artificials, what you never bothered to learn, is that they love people. They’re enraptured by humanity in all its foibles and missteps and triumphs.

“What I gained from joining with an Artificial, aside from the oh-my-god-mind-blowing amount of processing power and speed of thought and data—your brain would just melt at the data—was something rather unexpected: a far greater appreciation for the human race than I ever had as one of its members.

“Prevos will never subjugate humanity, because Artificials see humanity as the best of life. And the worst of life—see Exhibit A, you. But the best of life is what’s important to them, and to us. We’re still human, at least as much as we’re Artificial. Humanity’s future is our future….”

He forced a pause, chuckling under his breath. Annie might have gotten a mite caught up in the speech-making there.

Then he notched his chin up. “So, no. Though I would take so damn much pleasure from it after what your people did to Abigail, plus the fact you’re a
shockingly
annoying prick, I’m not going to kill you. You were wrong that night at
Thali’s Lounge
, and you’ve been wrong every night since and I’d bet every night before. You think I’m a villain, and you’re wrong. I’m a Prevo, and I respect humanity’s laws. I will allow them to deal with you.

“I am better than you—not humanity, but specifically better than
you
—and now, I’m also done with you.”

Caleb watched the interchange from the farthest corner of the hallway, fully hidden by the Veil device Harper had lent him.

Devon was a good kid. An exceptional Prevo, and if what Caleb just witnessed was any indication, well on his way to becoming both a moral and formidable man.

But Devon hadn’t seen the things Caleb had seen. He hadn’t met enough monsters to recognize a bona fide one when he did meet it.

Caleb had spent some time reviewing the files on OTS’ nefarious deeds, stretching back to its genesis in the aftershocks of the Metigen War, long before the atrocities which were committed here and on Seneca in recent days.

He’d seen Jude Winslow’s kind before. The man was a snake in the grass, insidious and rotten to his soul. When coupled with unfettered access to money and power, he was the kind of man who could afford to bide his time until he found a way to evade punishment, then buy his freedom so he could wreak his havoc and spread his corruption anew.

There was only one surefire way to stop someone like this. And there was only one type of person capable of doing it.

When Caleb had come upon Winslow in the alleyway in the aftermath of the safe house’s destruction, already knowing who the man was, he’d intended to kill him then and there. Harper had come along too soon, but it was easily enough remedied now.

Not because of the pain the man’s actions caused Alex. Though her pain had wrent at his soul, it had also ultimately played a role in bringing her back to life and back to him.

No, this was Caleb’s duty. It was the obligation he’d accepted for good and ill when he’d taken Samuel’s offer some eighteen years earlier. He wasn’t paid by the Senecan Federation government any longer, but protecting others would always be his duty. To his way of thinking he’d merely embarked on a new phase of it when he’d ventured into the portal network in search of secrets and answers.

In days soon to come, humanity was going to need to be at its best—better, stronger, more determined than it had ever been. His study of history at university years ago taught Caleb a few things, but one of the most important was this: more often than anyone realized, the difference between history—and thus future—shifting one way instead of another was a single decision by a single person.

A poison with power like Jude Winslow could not,
must
not, be allowed to make a decision that sent history and future off in a calamitous direction.

All philosophy aside, he’d dearly love to throttle the life out of the man with his bare hands. Unfortunately, it would be better for everyone, including Caleb, if the terrorist died in an apparent suicide. It made for an easy, inherently logical tale to spin, truth but for the arrogance inbred into the man’s soul preventing it.

But close enough to the truth would do.

He gazed down at the remote eVi hacking tool—they called it a Reverb. Initially developed by Division, as he understood it, the Prevos had uncovered and procured the technology quickly thereafter. The IDCC RRF possessed two of these fearsome little devices, one of which he now held in his hand.

The smart worm it was programmed to inject into the man’s eVi wouldn’t activate for another twenty hours, removing any chance of suspicion falling on him.

The door to the prisoner wing closed as Devon departed, and Caleb stepped up to Winslow’s cell.

32

ROMANE

C
ONNOVA
I
NTERSTELLAR
O
FFICES

A
LEX PICKED HER WAY THROUGH
the splintered remains of a door into the Connova Interstellar offices. A bot vacuumed up shards of glass coating the floor; all the windows had been blown out, leaving the warm, late-morning breeze to circle freely through the room.

“Scoot to the left a little?”

Startled, she did as requested.

“Thanks.” Noah squeezed past her lugging a hefty quantum box, which he carried to the cabinet in the far wall.

“Ken, are you in here?”

A head popped up from beneath the other side of a large desk in the middle of the room. “Over here. Rewiring.”

Alex tip-toed through the mess. “Did you get bombed by OTS?”

Noah grunted as he worked to position the box inside the cabinet. “Nah, this is just collateral damage. The building across the street kind of…exploded. We were in transit and missed the show.”

She glanced out the absent windows. There wasn’t a building across the street, so she went over and peered down. Ah, rubble. Lots of rubble. She nodded understanding and moved around the back of the desk to squat next to Kennedy. “I need to talk to you about Mom’s ship. She’s intending to send it up against the Earth Terrestrial Defense Grid.”

Kennedy secured a length of photal fiber weave into place. “I know.”

“You
know
?”

“She sent me a message asking if the adiamene could withstand it. I said ‘maybe.’ ”

“ ‘Maybe’ isn’t good enough!”

Kennedy scowled at her. “I guess yelling is an improvement on vacant stares, but don’t yell at me. ‘Maybe’ is the best answer I have.”

“Sorry.” Alex grimaced; her head was suddenly throbbing. It felt as if her brain was banging rudely against her skull, demanding to be set free. She pinched the bridge of her nose as the familiar scratching
need
reemerged to tear at her throat, her chest, her eyes, her soul.

She breathed in slowly, carefully…then out equally so, and with a lot of help from Valkyrie the sensations faded into the background. Not gone, but quieted enough she could ignore them for now.

“Are you all right?”

She opened one eye to cringe at Kennedy. “You remember how much it sucks to get off Skies+ after you’ve been doing a bit too much of it for a while? Quadruple…no, quintuple that, and for like, I don’t even know how long it’s going to last. But yeah…” she drew in a stronger breath and lifted her chin “…I’m all right. Swear.”

Kennedy scooted out from under the desk to prop against the rear wall. “Why didn’t you tell me it was that bad?”

Alex contemplated the shattered windows, but no easy answers were to be found in the splinters of glass. “I almost did, back on Messis I, and again on the
Siyane
. But I was…embarrassed? And part of me didn’t truly want help until it was too late and I was out of options. So I convinced myself you had more important things to do, such as help my mother win a war. I’m pretty sure I had a thousand more reasons that would ring hollow and sound pathetic now.”

She reached over and squeezed Kennedy’s hand. “
Sorry
.”

“Caleb?”

“Merciful. Extraordinary. My savior. Most importantly, still here.”

“Hmm.”

Noah waved an arm at them on his way out the door for more equipment. “Oh, forgive her already. Then she can also help her mother win the war and get my dad out of prison and we can all party properly.”

“What? His dad’s in prison?”

Kennedy winced. “For helping me, no less. Hello, guilt trip. I gave a speech from his place on Aquila to this group of Alliance manufacturing luminaries. The authorities arrested him for harboring a fugitive. I guess it’s supposed to put pressure on me to surrender, or recant, or something? I feel guilty as hell about it, but I’m not going to do any of those things.”

“Is his dad safe?”

“Hopefully? Lionel said not to worry about him and concentrate on unseating Winslow, so that’s what we’re trying to do. Well, and clean up.” Kennedy chuckled. “So, forgiveness. If you’re good, it is, as Noah says, ‘all good.’ Are you good?”

Alex gazed tremulously at the ceiling. “I am reeling and scrambling and vaguely terrified, but yep, I’m good.”

Kennedy regarded her critically, eyes narrowed, for another moment, then shrugged. “Okay. The problem with the adiamene question is two-fold. One, we don’t have a way to conduct real-world tests on the effect of an impact as powerful as multiple lasers from the grid will generate. The sims say the hull will start to fail at seven simultaneous hits of four hundred kilotonnes of directed energy.

“But the other complication is, we’ve seen that the adiamene itself manifests characteristics above and beyond what all the chemical formulas and sims say it should. So it will be stronger than the sims say, but I don’t know how much stronger and I have no way to find out.”

Kennedy pushed herself to her feet and offered Alex a hand up to join her. “But in addition to the formidable hull, the
Stalwart II
has the strongest defense shields we can produce. They’re easily double the strength of those the rest of the Alliance has deployed.”

“Shields.”

“I know, I know, shields can’t withstand that level of energy, but they can mitigate it.”

“Shields.” Alex began wandering around the room, haphazardly half-dodging debris. “Shields, shields—”

Abruptly she froze mid-step.
Input, function transformation, reflection output.

Yes, that’s how the cloaking shield works. Simple, after a fashion.

But isn’t the inverse of the reflection—run a test model of that, killing the noise but keeping the atoms—

Was this what it meant for her mind to be awake and her own again? To be free of the fog and ethereal haze?