Broken: A Plague Journal (15 page)

“You bitch!” Her stage frown became a smirk. “What’s he like? I mean, in real life?”

“Didn’t say a lot. Didn’t smile, either. His hands—”

sorry to interrupt, darlings, but we’re closing on-target.

“Okay, Sam. Meet me after the dance in the construct?”

“Sure thing, Al. Let’s lube up.”

“Bang their bottoms out, hon.” Wink.

“Later!”
Mindel Frost’s gelatin form drizzled back into the bridge tide.

Alina sighed and sank back into her gauntlets. “You get that?”

it’s all recorded. Judith ME confirms Delta bleed on Fort John Wayne patterns.

“Bring them to visual.”

All around her, the dusk of Sam’s bridge faded to the intense white of the Timestream. A scattering of Judith vessels flocked according to home forts.

“Secondary confirmation?”

neurological extrapolation confirms Delta bleed. tainted code. she’s silver.

“Sweep for crawlies?”

negative on enemy pattern.

“Okay, open channel to my kids.”

done.

“Judith Ft. Myers fleet,” her fingertips raced over the projected timescape, “close on these targets and engage on my mark.”

Her finger hesitated over Mindel Frost’s vessel, Judith Kate.

“Open fire.”

tracing these constellations of flesh, greater silences than stars provide

“You, too. No more coffee.” Benton pushed back from the table. She was about to stand up when she saw Samayel and his captain approaching.

“Yes, dear.” Paul’s eyes were locked on hers. He hadn’t seen Sam & Co. yet.

“Al, don’t—”

The young woman walked right up to Paul’s side and struck him across the face before Sam could grasp her flailing arms, hands pulled to fists. West jumped up and took one of the fists harmlessly to his barrel chest. He growled as her forced her arms behind her back, slammed her to the tabletop.

“Shit. Fuck. I’m sorry, Paul. She’s—”

“The fuck’s your problem?” West bore down on her, incapacitating her against the metallish table.

Paul said nothing. He wiped a line of blood from his crumpled nose, upper lip split by that inherited chisel of teeth. With a thought, it was gone. Silver burned behind muddied eyes.

“I don’t care who you are.” Alina struggled beneath West’s heft. “If you send me on another mission like that, I’ll fucking kill you.” Her bared teeth looked entirely too sharp.

“Wanna help me out here?” Paul searched Hope’s eyes.

She activated her glass, waited. “They went on a bleed containment run today. Took out the Fort John Wayne fleet remnants.”

Paul sighed.

“She was my best friend!” Alina blinked back tears.

“Captain Mindel Frost.” Benton snapped the glass shut. “Delta-infected, 99% certainty.”

“We met her... When this all—”

“Get off me.” Alina shrugged from underneath West. He lifted her with one hand to her feet.

“You gonna control yourself?”

She didn’t answer as she fixed the tie in her hair.

“Have a seat. You three let me handle this.” Sam, West and Benton faded from the construct, now empty except for Alina and Paul.

She sat. Two distinct lines of tear wet her too-big cheeks. She wiped them away.

“I’m sorry. Really.” He reached out to take her hand, reconsidered and withdrew. “I know it wasn’t easy.”

She scoffed. “It was easy. All I had to do was reach out and think.”

“I know the feeling.” He thought a scotch into his hand, drank most in one draw.

“Listen—” She studied the tabletop where she’d been splayed and writhing a minute before. “I shouldn’t have hit you.”

“It’s okay. I can’t feel anything anymore.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I do.” He placed his now-empty glass on the table and extended his hand. “Let’s try again. I’m Paul.”

“Alina.”

“Sam’s told me all about you.”

“Ditto.”

Awkward silence.

Paul’s glass filled itself again. Sip, swallow, clink.

“I’m sorry about Frost.”

“Yeah.”

“You know you didn’t really kill her.”

“I know she’s out there somewhere, outside of this.”

“A ghost.”

“Shaking chains in the attic, droning amps in the basement.”

Something twinged behind Paul’s eyes.

“It’s all going to be okay. Trust me.”

“I can’t.” She took his glass and drained it. “I don’t know you.”

“Then know me.”

Flush of red. “I’d better go get sliced. More fun tomorrow.” She stood.

“Keep up the good work.”

“I’ll try.”

i want to know your midnights
to bear witness to your
yawns, twists and turns
your valleys and
your breath, neither better
nor worse than mine.

i want to be your stars
and sunrises, first kisses
of ever and of morning.
i want to see your
first smile and hear
sleeping mumbles and sighs.

i want to see your waking face
in the stillness of our quiet dawn.

i want to be your

Cowboy lately?” He shrugged off the drape of sleep as he got out of the slicing chamber, the blades retracting, still wet with the flesh fragments of his previous day’s body.

Benton not-shyly toweled pattern scum from her pubis. “Haven’t heard anything from Jud. Adam?”

“Nah. Last I knew, they were heading outer. Trying to draw a bead on young Windham.”

Paul blew pattern from his nose, wiped it from his ears. He felt the final touches solidify: scars, wrinkles, hair. He caught Benton’s stare.

“What?”

“New scar.” She approached, touched the right side of his face. “Blade impact.”

“Yeah, well—” He wiped his face dry. “Your tits are bigger today.”

She scowled. “Glad you noticed.”

“It’s true.” West chuckled. “What have
you
been dreaming?”

She ignored him, snapped her glass open. Figures illuminated face and chest. “We’ll be out on runs for a few days. Recharge in the forts. A few little hotspots to seal up before we hit half-and-half.”

West shielded with a ssschiick and sheen. He flexed the blades of his right arm and slammed a needle cartridge into his right shiver pistol, repeated the process with his left, flipped both back into their forearm holsters. “Let’s fucking do it right this time. I’m getting old, kids.”

Benton shielded and locked her glass into place on her chestplate. “We’ll be good to go. Coordinates are golden.”

“Silver.” Paul pulled his faceplate down, locked it into place. His cardiac shield hissed and frosted blue as it blinked an affirmative. “Coordinates are silver.”

They went

back into the wind and it amazed me, all of it, the incomprehensible enormity of the system within which I now operated, the Judith Mind Essence. They’d taken some of the best parts of each book and combined them into the hive mind generated by the countless Judiths held in metastasis in the construct.

A twinge: too much. Right eye watered, from pain or from the sunlight reflected from white stretching away in every direction.

“That ridge. We’ll find the cave there.”

The hulk of Task’s vessel still smoldered on the ice plain of Lascaux. I smelled, tasted his blood in ice crystals, in the bite of the wind, the singe of melting metallish.

We trudged, West and I crunching down through the surface skin of melted and re-frozen snow, Benton walking along beside us, sweeping the field with her instruments and colorless eyes.

“I got a reading. Faint.”

“Human?”

She shook her head. “Two hearts. Berlin or Task?”

“Don’t know.” And I didn’t.

“We takin’ ‘em, or bleed?” West unslung his shivers.

“This one’s pure Judith patty. We’ll take him.”

They walked from wind into the dark of the cave, flooded it with schools of halo dust, lighting their way over ridge and around protrusion and under overhang.

“Reading’s close.” Hope’s voice was barely a whisper.

She need not have consulted her glass to conclude the proximity of their target; the two lines of tacking blood in the snow draped on the cave floor were barely freezing, two imperfect plow rows through drifts, the scrape of shattered femurs across ice.

It was an ugly place to die.

The tunnel widened, bubbled, tapered off into a series of smaller shafts into the rock. Laying propped against the ledge, the dying man who was Task gasped his agony through bloodied mouth. His glass eyes swung to view his three visitors in a way that suggested he was already dead.

In the plastic interface glove of his left hand, he still held a twitching, sparking something. It appeared to be the index or ring finger of his dead lover, the near Elle.

His right hand was crushed into a smear of bone and strips of flesh.

His legs were held on by what muscles hadn’t torn completely through in the crash of his vessel.

As Benton crouched beside him, surveying his damage, another twinge needled through and besind and before Paul’s eyes.

“Who..? Who—”

“Don’t try to talk.” Benton injected him with numby mist from the kit at her side.

West remembered a young doctor from Michigan who’d designed something like that once. Sweeping, flailing, tides of memory and something else, deeper and darker and alien.

“Task,” Paul took a knee. “Where are they?”