Recursion Page 21

  “They need to breath the pure O2—” Shell explained in a rush. “—and the shots are hydroxocobalamin—more help is on the way!” Officer Jesse recognized the medication dispensers and handed each of the others one before staring at me. I busted up laughing.

  There was no way one of those plungers was getting a needle into my body.

  Instead I sat on an old couch and watched everyone for signs of dizziness or short breath until more tanks appeared and I could claim one of my own. Holding my tank and making sure my towel was secure, I went to check on everyone else.

  * * *

  The paramedics brought emergency blankets, better than the scavenged bath towels everybody had been shivering in. Seconds later Sifu returned with Chakra, a spare mask for me, and Dome coveralls and slippers for all.

  “Can we keep these?” Officer Walker asked. “Also, I’m remembering that shampoo brand.”

  “We have lots more.” Chakra took her hands off her. “Astra calls them ‘punishment for trashing your costume.’ And you’ll be fine.”

  It looked like we’d gotten really, really lucky; only Officer Ramus—the uniform who’d opened the cabinet and triggered the aerosol bomb—had inhaled enough of the cyanide vapor for Chakra to call for additional treatment. I’d watched the EMTs administer shots of sodium thiosulfate and sodium nitrite before Chakra worked her own “magic” on him.

  “So . . . this has been a fun experience.” I unrolled and rerolled my coverall sleeves for better comfort. “I thought I was done with locker-rooms—the Dome doesn’t have them.”

  “Sentinels will make it sexy instead of awkward,” Officer Jesse quipped.

  “Nooo!” When I covered my eyes they all laughed.

  “Hey, kid.” Fisher poked his head into the “girls” apartment. He looked naked without a cigarette in his mouth. “Walk with me.”

  We went back across the hall. The CPD had “tented” Nemesis apartment door, though Shell assured me that since I’d opened the window the hazmat team had reported airborne risk was now zero. There might be a dosage risk if you were a mouse who ate off the floor, so they were still going to vacuum up every speck of dust and sterilize every surface.

  Fisher went to the cabinet whose opening had triggered the bomb. “What do you think?”

  The cabinet held only the box with the exploded cannister and a stack of relatively undamaged documents. “May I?” I accepted the latex gloves he passed me, snapped them on and squatted.

  Cash, fake ID and credit cards, nothing else. The fake IDs were for Nemesis. I couldn’t have said what I was expecting, but my heart sank. What made this stuff important enough to booby-trap?

  Wait. That was the wrong question. I stared at the box, the cabinet, and the room. “Fisher? How did Nemesis make the bomb?”

  “That’s your question? Not ‘why’?”

  “How. You can’t do this in your kitchen. Sure you could refine the cyanide from stuff you can buy in the store, if you knew exactly what you were doing. But aerosolize it? Make a bomb out of it? I didn’t see anything in his history that screamed chemistry degree or access to a modern lab.”

  “Okay. So how about why?”

  I glared at the detective. Seeing a bunch of people poisoned hadn’t left me with much patience for his usual quizzing game. “That makes even less sense. Anyone who got as far as the cabinet wouldn’t learn anything useful from this box. The fact that someone he didn’t want in the cabinet was even in this apartment would mean this whole place and its assets were burned for him.”

  “So maybe he just wanted to kill anyone who found his lair.”

  “Then he’d have wired the bomb to the door. And it probably wouldn’t have been a gas-bomb. The whine I heard was a delayed detonator. He’d have been able to open the door and disarm it himself if he’d known it was—” Crap. “He was the target.”

  “Keep going.”

  “This box was his Go Bag. He was the target if he completed his mission and came back here to go. He knew whoever set him on Shokwave.”

  Fisher chuckled harshly. “Got it in one, kid. I’m beginning to believe your whacky conspiracy theory fans. The EMTs told me if you hadn’t correctly identified the toxin we’d have been dead or close to it in minutes. Officer Ramus would be dead. Thank you, by the way.”

  I nodded uncomfortably. Shell deserved the credit, and I couldn’t give it to her. “And if the bomb had killed Nemesis, then whoever set the bomb could have just walked in and collected any evidence linking him to all this.”

  “Worse. Whoever used him could have disposed of the body, cleaned out the whole apartment, and let the CPD and FBI feature him on our most-wanted lists for the next few years. With Nemesis dead at the scene of the attack, his employer could have still come in and cleaned up. We found the place faster than he expected. Sloppy.”

  I slumped to the floor, jumped up when I remembered the poison-bomb that had just gone off and promptly itched. Totally psychosomatic, sure, but still. . . I stripped off the gloves, dropping them on the floor to be cleaned up with the rest of the contaminated gear. “That still leaves us with nothing, right?”

  Another dead end. Almost literally.

  He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Fisher . . .” I looked around, listened, but nobody else was in the apartment with us or even close to the tented doorway.

  Straightening up, I stepped close. “Fisher, listen. I can’t go into how I know this, not now, but I know you can’t die. Well, not permanently. I know you’re worried you’re fictional. Okay?”

  Fisher had never been slow; he processed that not right now before he’d fully opened his mouth. “I’m listening.”

  “Your department is corrupt. It leaks. After this is over I’ll be able to give more details, but it’s true—I know it the same way I know about you. So— If you go further with investigating Nemesis, be careful. Please?”

  He gave me a long look, nodded. “Okay, kid, I will. And I have a few ideas.”

  I hoped so, but I knew Fisher well enough to tell when he was just offering hope. I left minutes later, to spend the rest of the day in my rooms where I could read, write reports, and work on everything now fallen on my shoulders. And where I could watch Kitsune sleep, nose under tails, on my bed.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  “‘Always changing, is the future.’ Wise words, but sometimes it seems that only a few of those ever-changing paths lead anywhere safe and sane. There’s something called Fermi’s Paradox. It asks why, with the universe as old as it is, it’s not crawling with interstellar civilizations already. One of the more depressing answers—someone named it Fermi’s Law—is that intelligent and technologically advanced species wipe themselves out before they get off their planet. And that possibility was debated long before the Event and breakthrough powers complicated everything.

  “And so what? So we’re going to beat Fermi.”

  From the Journal of Hope Corrigan.

  * * *

  Shell woke me by gently tapping my nose with a virtual-tactile finger until irritation penetrated my sleep. It was totally unfair; before she’d died I’d have at least been able to launch a counter-attack with tickling fingers or a pillow.

  “Wakey, wakey . . . there you are. Kitsune’s fine.”

  I’d raised my head without thinking to look at the mound of fur warming my left thigh. “What’s going on? It’s . . . three? Is Jacky still out?”

  “Morticia’s back.”

  I dropped my head back on my pillow. “I wish you wouldn’t call her that.”

  “You told me I did.”

  “Yeah, later. You were— Never mind.” The past few days had been teaching me a lesson in degrees of emotional development. Shell had been fifteen when she’d jumped. She was still fifteen, since the Teatime Anarchist had skipped her quantum-twin past those three years, but I’d been eighteen, three years older. Eighteen was different than fifteen, but not nearly so different as twenty-one. On the other hand, the mat
urity gap between Future-Me’s twenty-one and Present-Jacky’s twenty-five wasn’t nearly as wide. So this time around, I had twice the gap between me and Shell as before, and twenty-one year old me and twenty-five year old Jacky thought a lot more alike than she and eighteen year old me had.

  Now Jacky was back, and though Shell and I were still rebuilding our relationship, finding our new balance, Jacky and I had synced. I’d caught up with her. So now Shell was freaking out, and what could I do about it? I couldn’t tell her to grow up; that was what she was doing.

  I pushed my hair out of my eyes. “Why am I awake?”

  “Another call from the White House. Assembly Room, with Artemis.”

  “The— Shell, next time lead with that! Please?” I started to throw the covers aside, stopped and eased my legs out before flying across the room to grab my uniform shorts and top. Pulling them on and snatching up my mask and attached wig on the fly, I left my boots, gloves, and cape where they lay.

  * * *

  Artemis finished pouring my cup when I came through the Assembly Room door. The smell told me she’d broken out her stash of gourmet Dutch cocoa and English cream for her layered Black and White masterpiece. President Touches Clouds and Director Kayle watched from the split-screen and I hid my grin; trust Jacky to sit on an open connection to the White House and mix one of her special creations.

  Veritas already had his own china cup in hand, looking at it dubiously. “Give it three stirs with your spoon to mingle the layers before you sip,” I explained, taking my seat.

  “How many calories does this thing have?”

  He was sitting down to a late-night conference with POTUS and his ultimate DSA supererior and that was his concern? “If you need to ask, you shouldn’t drink it. Really. I’ll take yours. Madam President, Director, to what do we owe the late call?”

  “Good evening, Astra. I’ve been enjoying talking to your Fiend of the Night.” She smiled at my flush. It might have been three in the morning, but with a little concealer on the shadows under her eyes she would be ready for a photo-op. Her voice certainly didn’t show her fatigue. “Her stories of New Orleans are fascinating, but I’m glad she’s returned to Chicago for the duration of this situation. How is everyone since we spoke?”

  “Not good, but okay. Rush and Kitsune are recovering. How are you?” Yesterday’s private conference call had been our first conversation since the state funeral in January. She’d been. . . intense. Despite Blackstone’s brush with death in the Whittier Base Attack, she’d probably thought he was immortal. Hadn’t we all?

  Now her eyes darkened. “I miss him. You’re sitting in his chair, tonight.”

  I used the moment I needed to stir my drink and take a sip to make sure my voice stayed even. “Why?”

  Director Kayle cleared his throat. “With his military intelligence background, Blackstone has always been a conduit into the world of Chicago’s capes and one of our best threat assessors. Not an agent, by any means, but someone cleared to see the most sensitive government intelligence and with direct access to this office.”

  “And now I’m him?” I sent my cup down.

  “You already know secrets of the highest classification. And we understand that Blackstone was training you and Artemis as his apprentices. You had three years with him?”

  I nodded. “Artemis was his main intelligence trainee—I mostly learned how to use the end product.”

  “Then you’ll keep learning on the job,” Touches Clouds said. “And we’ll start with the current situation. I am requiring the DSA to throw every resource at this, and you’re to give them your full cooperation. We’re going public with the threat of both the Ascendant and Johnny Cho.”

  I blinked. “If Johnny knows we know about him, it’ll be that much harder. That’s why we went with my ‘neither confirm nor deny’ cover story.”

  Director Kayle’s brows drew down. “Yes, I watched your press conference. Good word-choices, nothing you said was factually untrue, merely misleading. Astra, it was a good strategy, aimed at concealing your knowledge of the One Land connection to this. But with the pressed attacks on Kitsune, it’s obvious that the operative knows we know.”

  My heart sank. “Or they wouldn’t have gone after him. Twice.”

  “Correct. So hiding what we know is pointless, and gives way to the political consideration. Since we haven’t been able to find the Ascendant, we need to assume that we will fail. We’ll do everything we can not to, but we’re now in failure-management mode. You’re familiar with the Ouroboros Group; did they ever brief you on the Odysseus Dilemma?”

  “I—no, that’s not something Shelly told me about.”

  “I’m not surprised, it’s not something even most who’ve been read in need to hear about. In the Greek myth, one the obstacles between Odysseus’ ship and safe return home was the twin threat of Scylla and Charybdis, two monsters. Odysseus’ ship couldn’t sail safely between them; they had to encounter one or the other. An encounter with Charybdis would destroy the ship, but Scylla would only kill some of the crew—the survivors could escape safely.”

  “I know the story. Odysseus chose Scylla.”

  “Yes.” Below the level of his camera angle, I could hear his drumming fingers. “The Ouroboros Group uses the story to illustrate the choices faced by the Teatime Anarchist and the Dark Anarchist before their mutual end.” He grimaced. “Couldn’t you have chosen a better name? Now whenever I need to brief someone on them I feel like I’m jumping out of a cake. TA-DA!”

  Jacky snickered and I reddened as even the President chuckled. “Sorry.”

  “The potential futures TA reported more than half depopulate the globe and almost crash global civilization by the end of this century. A lot of the population decline will be due to plummeting reproduction rates, but much of it will come from multiple mega-death events and the collapse of most current governments. A few nations will manage to ride it out intact, keep the world from going completely over the edge. But nobody will survive without losses impossible for us, here and now, to comprehend.”

  “I know that part.” I curled my fingers around my cup, taking comfort in its fading heat. “So DA decided to fix it. By any means necessary.”

  “Yes. DA tried to create a strong and fascistic United States, free and democratic in name only. It was to be the center of a hegemonic alliance system capable of stabilizing events and bringing the world through this century with much less pain. This is his Scylla Option, and he may have already succeeded.”

  “But— No. He’s dead.”

  “Which doesn’t mean he didn’t succeed in lining up all his dominoes first. The Ouroboros believe that unless we handle this current moment very carefully . . . How much do you know about the Finnish Civil War?”

  “Just that it was an attempted coup by a hard-right pro-breakthrough group.”

  “In a nutshell, yes. Eventual resistance to their own early National Public Safety Act created the movement, and the coup almost succeeded. Fortunately, Finland’s small urban population made the New Order Party’s attempt a knife-fight for control of key sites rather than a protracted insurgency. It was bloody, but it was brief.”

  I nodded. I’d met one of the veterans of that fight, a Finnish national hero named Kukkuu. As in Princess Kukkuu of the Magical Kingdom of Fairy Funland. Fifteen when she’d had her breakthrough, she’d become a huge child-star with her colorful cape persona. When I’d met her at an international joint-training event she’d been scarred, grim, and not at all Funlandy. “You’re saying we might have our own civil war?”

  “If the National Public Safety Act passes by a majority large enough to prevent a presidential veto, yes. The Ouroboros are split on what happens next. They predict a Second Civil War, but don’t know if the result will be the North American Republic or new North American republics, plural. It could all come completely apart. Our situation wouldn’t be substantially different than the one we see with the new Chinese states.”

 
“And the North American Republic is . . .”

  “The fascist, hegemonic America DA wanted, yes.” He sighed. “The truth is, at that point it could be the desirable outcome. A completely fractured USA would remove one of the vital anchoring governments that keeps the world from total disaster. The Ouroboros are pretty clear that, eventually, there might be nothing left. Complete civilizational collapse.”

  “Okay. Okay.” I tried to digest it. “You’re saying it might be fascism or extinction. But the National Public Safety Act didn’t pass.”

  “Not in your history. But you didn’t have another mass-fatality event this close to the California Quake, did you? In your timeline, the Ascendant didn’t carry out any plots now, correct?”

  “No, he didn’t,” I whispered.

  “Because the One Land operation spearheaded by Johnny Cho was canceled. You met only its individual parts, later.”

  “Yes.” I looked to see what Jacky thought of all this. Her face was unreadable. “What was the Teatime Anarchist’s solution, then? How was his Scylla Option different?”

  Touches Clouds sighed wearily. “His solution, the solution the Ouroboros have been trying to guide us to, is a stable, non-hegemonic alliance. A tight, strong, League of Democratic States. And we’re getting there. But we’ve put all our eggs in the one basket: the League. If we—the USA, the League’s anchor and one of the most stable post-Event liberal regimes—blow up, the future may be unrecoverable. Which brings us to now.” She rubbed her forehead.

  “We have to plan for failure in Chicago. If we don’t go public with the danger of the Ascendancy and One Land’s connection to it now, then if we fail to stop whatever is planned the public backlash will sweep the National Public Safety Act into law. It will sink my administration.”