Authors: Paul Melko

Singularity's Ring (22 page)

BOOK: Singularity's Ring

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There on the ground two meters away was Quant, unconscious and breathing shallowly. I pulled her back against a tree trunk and slapped her wrist gently.

Quant blinked, gasped, and released a wave of fear pheromone. I smelled it, pulling away in surprise. Then I knelt back down, holding a finger to her lips.

Together we stood, peering out into the forest. The morning light drove spikes of light through the trees, illuminating some areas and leaving others dark.

Quant lifted her nose, then pointed.

“Over there,” she whispered.

I couldn’t taste the same smells that Quant could, though I had sensed the fear pheromone. The rest of the pod was out there in the direction Quant pointed. I reached out and touched Quant’s wrist, willing the chemical memories to move between us.

For a second I saw a binocular image of the jungle, but it faded into my own view.

I hissed through my teeth.

“Come on.”

We slipped between green leaves, looking for our pod or the duo. The land dipped down into a small ravine, covered in dark soil and hemmed-in tree roots.

Motion ahead caught my eye.

There was the duo, ahead of us five meters down the ravine, watching Quant and me. One of the two smiled grimly, then they launched themselves.

Quant hesitated, unsure of what to do by herself, a singleton. The first of the duo tackled her. But again they underestimated me and my speed.

I dove onto the exposed roots of the tree to my left and swarmed up the tree into the branches. When I was three meters up, I turned, hanging on to a branch above me, and kicked out with my feet, catching the second of the duo in the jaw.

They both winced.

I dropped to the floor and ran. The duo followed, leaving Quant.

I ran at dangerous speeds through the tangled ravine, nearly falling, my feet barely coming free from the twisting tree roots.

I caught a smell, a trace of pheromone. To my left. Then a touch of thought.

Lead them over here.

From the right.

I dodged up the right embankment, slowed enough by the climb to feel the touch of one of the duo on my feet.

Then I was over the side, into a flat, brushless area.

I ran as fast as I could, my poor modified feet protesting that they had been built to grasp, not to be run upon. I had no time for their complaints.

Behind me I heard a yell.

Turning, I saw the remaining three of my pod confronting the duo in an ambush from behind the trees. But we had stopped short of McCorkle.

The duo had drawn his gun.

“Enough running through the jungle,” McCorkle said. “This is over.”

The guns waved back and forth among us.

“Over here, freak,” McCorkle said, nodding at me. My heart was pounding, my breathing shallow. I could have dashed into the jungle, but that would draw his fire. Quant was still out there, somewhere.

I stepped forward, joining Strom, Meda, and Moira.

“Kneel with your hands behind your heads.”

One of him pulled a wad of plastic ties from his belt: handcuffs.

“Where’s your fifth?” one of McCorkle said.

The other cupped a hand to his mouth, yelled, “It’s over. I have the other four.”

Behind the two, a couple meters from their feet, an anthill writhed. A ring of loose dirt marked the circumference of the ants’ domain. Did they realize how close they were to falling in?

I glanced at Strom, caught his eye. With all my strength, I sent,
Anthill. They’re a step away from falling in.

He looked at me, his gaze perplexed, then he seemed to catch my thought, and I heard,
We’ll try it.

“Quiet!” one of the duo shouted.

“Come on! There’s no use hiding from me,” the other added. “I have eighty percent of you, and you’re not even the part that can function on her own.” McCorkle laughed.

“Three times, I’ve tried to destroy you, and each time you’ve escaped.”

“I think we’ll dispense with fisticuffs and go straight to a bullet to the head.”

McCorkle shared a thought, and one of him stepped forward to bind my wrists.

Quant.

Something flew from the jungle—a rock—thumping against McCorkle’s wrist. The gun flew away. The other McCorkle, about to bind my wrists, dropped the bands and reached for his holster.

I pushed from my precarious position on the ground, hopping up to get my feet under me.

The McCorkle in front of me tipped over, spinning his arms. His foot slipped at the end of the anthill, and he fell screaming into it facefirst, disappearing in the loose dirt.

The other McCorkle dove for his gun, but Strom’s path crossed his before he reached it. Strom slammed the man into the dirt, while Moira kicked the gun away.

His fellow was struggling in the anthill, overwhelmed by the millions of deadly insects. I reached in and pulled him out of the trap, dusting the ants from his face and neck. Already his cheeks were red and swollen. They barely struggled as we used their own plastic ties to bind their arms together.

We should leave them on the anthill,
I sent.

It was so natural to slip into my pod’s mindspace.

I felt their rhythmic patterns of thought, their telltale personalities.

Strom laughed.

Too good for them.

I felt Moira’s hand on mine.
Welcome back.

Too long apart.

We dragged the duo into the ravine, where we removed their equipment and any useful items. We bound their wrists, then tied them together. Their legs we left free. They would be able to make their way out of the jungle, but slowly.

We set off to the north.

We’re only a few kilometers from the highway.

It should be an easy trek.

We just have to stay ahead of the sniffers.

I felt myself a part of the consensus, almost overwhelmed by it. Yet, there was no other place to be.

I could have turned them off. I could have shut my thoughts down, forced a wall up. I could have; the drug had shown me how to do it, but I chose not to.

I pushed down thoughts of what might have been—thoughts of Jol and Corrine—and ran ahead to scout the path.

FIVE

Moira

We found the North-South Highway that next morning, a span of mundane plascrete, built five decades ago by the Community to facilitate transfer of goods between continents. Ageless nano maintained the stretch, keeping the encroaching jungle off the berm and repairing any stress cracks before they became visible. Just like the microwave power transmitters, this was another piece of Community technology that pod society used freely. Along the eight-lane road, one-, two-, and three-engine cabs pulled loads at over three hundred kilometers per hour.

How will we stop one?
Quant asked.

How will we stop the driver from reporting us?
Manuel added.

It was easier than we expected. A truck stop, run by a clan of singletons, served as a bunching point for the long-haul trucks. We asked around until we found someone willing to give us a lift up the Isthmus of Panama into central North America. A jovial duo was glad to have
us: a duo and a trio on a walkabout before starting new jobs. We figured the OG would be looking for a quintet, not two simpler pods.

In hours, we were out of the Amazon basin, rising toward the Andes, Quant listening to the driver drone on while the rest of us tried to sleep in the back.

Safe,
Manuel whispered.

North,
Meda replied.

We’ll find the bears,
Strom sent.

As I listened to our dozing thoughts, I kept my own concerns to myself. Sooner or later we would have to face what we had done, and what had been done to us.

The base camp was barren, the buildings grey and dilapidated, as if they had been abandoned for years instead of months. We had seen no one in our hike up from Old Denver, and here was more of the same. Above us loomed the summits, visible through the trees. Not far away was the river Strom had hiked down with Hagar Julian. It was still turgid with spring rains even though the snow had mostly melted from the peaks.

Nothing,
Quant sent.
No sign of them.

Strom looked away, surveying the landscape, keeping his thoughts to himself. He had grown more silent the farther we hiked. The bears were gone.

Deer, squirrels, rabbits we had found in abundance as we climbed, all unmodified. Even smaller carnivores were present; one night we had heard the howl of coyotes. Strom’s bears remained hidden, and Strom took it personally.

The OG spent weeks looking for them. What chance do we have?
Manuel sent.

Strom did not reply, his gaze on the peaks.

I, sensing stress in our unity, said,
Strom found them once, he can do it again.
As it came out, I realized how
much pressure my words placed on Strom. But I couldn’t take my thoughts back, and Quant’s halfhearted consensus faded away unanswered.

Strom sent me a quick thought,
Thanks, Moira.

We had been running for weeks, since we’d left Columbus Station, to the Ring, down the elevator, up the Amazon, and finally through Central America along the North-South Highway. I had known this could be a fool’s errand, yet I had accepted consensus. Looking for the bears was a goal, some quest, some respite while we healed our sundering.

In the distance a waterfall caught the sun’s afternoon rays scattering the light.

It’s not like the Amazon at all,
Manuel said. His thoughts still felt muffled, his emotions distant, but every day he was closer and stronger. The drug he had been administered in Bolivopolis was slowly wearing off. A wave of relief passed among us as I thought this. It had not been easy for the four of us to watch as Manuel drifted farther away.

It’s almost desolate,
Meda agreed.

We had passed great swaths of empty land on our trip north, areas where biological agents or radiation had destroyed everything in huge radii of death. These mountains were the first wild areas we had seen, yet the diversity was nothing compared to the Amazon.

Strom gazed across the shallow valley behind us.
Bears cover a large area,
Strom sent. He was now an expert on bears, though he had no more knowledge than the rest of us. What one of us knew, another could access.
They travel far.

These aren’t really bears,
Quant pointed out.
They are gene-modded bear clusters. Bear behavior will be overridden by the intelligence built into the pod.

We still have human patterns of behavior,
Strom argued.

Overridden by pod behavior.

Let’s rest,
I said, wanting to deflect the argument.

While the rest of us sat, Strom remained standing. His
gaze followed the river into the mountains. We sat silently for a moment, as we passed a water bottle around.

He said three times,
Strom sent, staring at the mountains.

I thought he miscounted,
Quant replied.

Confusion for a moment as our thoughts circled and I tasted what we were thinking: Anderson McCorkle had said we’d evaded him three times.

Quant counted for us.
Once on Columbus Station, once in the Amazon.

Twice in the Amazon,
Manuel countered.

He could have counted that as one,
Quant replied.

Strom’s memory of the avalanche whisked between us. A flash of light on the mountain before the second avalanche. He had always assumed it was another aircar that had come to rescue the rest of us.

But the first had already landed. Why would they send two?
Quant asked.

If they had it would have landed right then,
I said.

It was the flicker of moonlight on moving snow,
Strom sent.

Or an explosion meant to kill us,
Quant replied, saying what we had been avoiding.

No, I can’t believe that,
Strom sent.

I started thoughts in the other direction, distraction.
Are we camping here?

But Strom was already adding,
We’ll check. We’ll go see for ourselves.

Our plan became twofold as we followed the river into the higher elevations: first, to find the bears, to understand what they were, and, second, to prove our consensus wrong, to prove the avalanche that had killed one of Hagar Julian had no human attribution.

Our course meandered as Strom and Quant tried to find
the best path up, back and forth through foothills and valleys, but ultimately higher and higher into the mountains. The summer heat had melted most of the glacial ice around the summit, but still the weather was chill at night, causing us to find heat among ourselves in the tent.

Of the bears we saw no sign. Though Strom thought nothing publicly, I knew he had expected to find them immediately, to discover their secret by only looking once.

We did find houses, pre-Exodus buildings, decrepit and aged, many reclaimed by the forests. One such building appeared as we climbed a cliff face, scooting up a dihedral into a clearing, the backyard of a mansion. It was larger than the creche, larger than Mother Redd’s farm, yet we knew such places usually housed single families.

I guess we could have taken the road,
Manuel sent. He glanced at us, and we saw the image of ourselves, covered in dust. Quant was biting at a hangnail. Meda’s hair hung across her face. We shared a laugh, the first in a while.

Explore?
Quant asked. She spit out her nail and took a step toward the house. Uplink dishes adorned the roofline, tastefully hidden in the gables.

No,
I sent.
Kilometers to go today.
That and I didn’t want to come across any signs of Community tech. All of these reminders had been left behind us for weeks. Meda needed no new reminders.

Why not?
Quant asked, nettled.

I tried to share a private thought with Quant, so that she would drop it, but Meda must have caught some of it. She cast me a look, but Quant dropped it, and we moved on.

We turned away from the river then, climbing into forests of deciduous trees. A rain shower doused us before we could find shelter under an overhang of rock.

Strom stood in the rain, looking into a ravine.

Strom.

Rain washed the thoughts from the air.

He turned back to us.

I know this place,
he sent.
That’s where we spent the night.
He corrected himself,
Not us, but Hagar Julian and I.

I nodded, and I pulled him tighter into our huddle. I wondered again whether we should have been searching here.

Three days later we reached the treeline. Clumps of snow covered the ground in shaded places, but mostly the mountain was rock-covered barrenness. Here and there, misshapen pine trees jutted from the ground.

Quant spotted the pattern first, pointing out the chutes where the two avalanches had flowed.

There and there,
she sent.
You can see the path where the trees are gone and the rocks are turned over.

Through her eyes, it was obvious where the rubbled chutes ran: no trees, eddies around large boulders, rock that was just starting to weather. Following them up with my eyes, I saw the ledge some three hundred meters up where they had started. An outcropping of rock split the streams.

If there’s any evidence,
Strom sent.
It’s there.

We camped near our campsite of a year ago, though the pines that had shielded us had been whisked away. During the night, the wind sang in the ropes of our tent, and I’m not sure that any of us more than dozed.

At dawn we attacked the slope, using our spider silk rope and the few anchors and carabiners we’d purchased in Old Denver with the scrip we’d taken from McCorkle. Manuel led the way, though he could have climbed it by himself in minutes. I found myself lost in the game of hand holds and path optimization.

Cold as the air was, we were sweating, removing coats
and tying them at our waists. Around noon we reached the summit of the outcropping, a tabletop of granite around which the avalanches had flowed. From there, the river valley spread out below us, a green cut in the mountains.

Base camp,
Manuel sent, pointing to a patch of grey near the river kilometers away.

I looked down the chutes, and the destruction was clear from this vantage. From below, it had taken Quant to see it. From above, the trails of destruction were swaths of dark grey rubble.

Those avalanches took a lot of rock with them,
Meda sent.

Claw marks,
Quant sent.
An aircar deployed its stabilizing claw here.

She squatted on the stone, stuck her finger in a groove of punched stone. Manuel found the second, and then paced off the distance to the third hole in the triangle.

Ten meters,
he said, giving us an estimated body width.

Conojet or a Thalit,
Quant replied.

Military uses Thalits.

Strom erupted in veto.
We don’t know when this car was here. It could have been afterward, during the search.

I agreed, and our consensus derailed.

Manuel scrambled up the wall a few more tens of meters, right up to the top of the sheer.

“Careful,” Strom said.

Manuel didn’t bother to reply and began sliding along the edge.

He stopped, hanging at a slight corner in the wall.

“Found it,” he said.

“What?”

“Someone drilled a hole here.” He stuck his hand into the wall. He sniffed at his fingers, then slid-climbed his way back to us.

He held up his fingers, covered in white dust. We all shared his conclusion based on the odor.

Explosives.

We spent the night on the windy outcropping, our tent spiked into the rock. There was nothing I could do to fight the depression that swirled around us. It seemed that when we could confront our nemesis—Anderson McCorkle—face-to-face we were more willing to accept someone trying to destroy us, but this new evidence that someone had wished us dead even before our internship on Columbus Station crushed us. An invisible hand was more sinister.

We have to go back now,
Meda sent.

What does this change?
Manuel asked.

It’s proof of conspiracy against us.

We are safer here from any attacker.

BOOK: Singularity's Ring

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