Rapture of the Nerds (16 page)

The Bishop’s eyes roll back into its head, then flip down. “A dozen on the premises, not counting the ones that were on the front door. It seems they’ve been liquidated already.”

“Shit. What’ll we—” Huw dithers for a moment but Bonnie is already heading for the cloakroom door.

“Over here!” She thrusts a bundle of clothing at him. “Quick. Let’s go get the ministers—”

Huw pauses while balanced on one leg, the other thrust down one limb of a pair of denim overalls. “Do we have to?” he asks.

“Yes, we fucking
do
.”

He fumbles with the fasteners on the overalls’ bib and kicks his feet free of the overlong denim legs, reaching out a hand to steady himself on a piece of heavy kitchen equipment—they’ve found their way to the food-prep area where robots build slop, form it, heat it, season it, and dispense it. He realizes that he’s steadying himself on an open-sided microwave heating platform. He thinks of the idiot beacon and where it must be, gives his left ass cheek a good squeeze to make sure, then lies himself down on the chilly surface of the heater. It’s awkward—none of the spaces are really designed for human ingress—but he just manages it.

“Bonnie, turn this thing on, okay?”

She is about to bark something angry, then she catches herself, half smiles at the ridiculous tableau he’s made, and says, “You want me to cook your ass?”

“Just until I start screaming, okay? The bug should start arcing within a few seconds, long before I get too badly cooked.” She looks ready to argue, but he keeps talking over her. “Look, freethinkers have been nuking their minder bugs for decades. I won’t be the first man who’s irradiated himself to get rid of a pesky implant.”

The pain is worse than anything he’d experienced before he met Bonnie and Adrian and allowed them both to drag him into a series of ever-more-painful experiences. Still, even on the new, post-adventure scale of owies, this is a serious pain in the ass. It starts as a horrible stinging, then a burning, and then a sharp, percussive zap that makes him frog-kick and thrash his head so hard, it feels like he’ll snap his neck.

Mildly, Bonnie says, “Was that it, then?”

“Turn. It. Off,” he says through clenched teeth.

The pain doesn’t stop, but it recedes some, and he gets to his feet and tenderly holds his ass.

Bonnie helps him hobble along. “Right, get that jacket fastened: we are going to hit the garage just as soon as we’ve defenestrated all the perverts.” She shrugs backwards into an upper-body assembly that looks like something left behind by a SWAT team. “C’mon.”

Huw follows her back next door, to find a bunch of blissed-out religionists lazily osculating one another on a row of futons. “Okay!” yells Bonnie. “It’s evacuation time! Huw, get the goddamn window open and hook up the baskets.” She turns back to the coterie of ministers, some of whom are yawning and looking at her in evident mild annoyance. “The bad guys are coming through the back passage and you guys are going down right now!”

“Eh, right.” Huw finds a stack of baby blue plastic baskets dangling from a monofilament line right outside the window. “C’mon ...”

Between the two of them, they haul the dazed and tasped worshippers into baskets and drop them down the line. It all takes far too long, and by the time the last one is hooked up, Huw is in a frenzy of agitation, desperate to be out of the building. There are indistinct thuds and stamping noises below them, and an odd whine of machinery from the hall outside. “What’s going on now?” he says. “How do
we
get out of here?”

“We wait.” Bonnie gives the last basket a shove and turns to face him, panting. “The corridors and rooms in this place, the Bishop ’s got them rigged up to reconfigure like a maze. This whole sector should be walled off; you can’t find it unless you can see through walls.”

A loud echoing crash from the room next door makes Huw wince. “What if they’ve got teraherz radar goggles?” he asks.

“What if—oh
norks
.” Bonnie looks appalled. “Quick, grab my epaulettes and hang on, we’re going down the wire!” She steps toward him, reaches around his body, and grabs the monofilament with what look to Huw like black opera gloves. There’s a terminal thud from the doorway behind her that rattles the walls, and then Huw is clinging on for dear life as they drop. A thin plume of evil-smelling black smoke trails from her spidersilk gloves as they descend. “Ow.” Huw can barely hear her moan, and to tell the truth, he’s more concerned with the state of his own stomach, gelid with terror as they drop past two, three rows of windows.

The ground comes up and smacks him across the ankles and he lets go of Bonnie. They fall apart and as he falls he sees a delivery van pulling away, the tailgate jammed shut around a blue basket. “Thanks a million, bastards,” Bonnie says, picking herself up. “Think they could have waited?”

“No,” Huw says, looking past her. “Listen, the Inquisition are round the front, and they’ll be after us any second—”

She grabs his wrist. “Come on, then!” She hauls off and drags him the length of the filthy alleyway beneath a row of rusting fire escapes.

By the time they hit the end of the alley, he’s up to speed and in the lead, self-preservation glands fully engaged. In the distance, sirens are wailing. “They’re round the other side! So much for your wait-and-get-away-later plan.”

“That wasn’t the whole plan,” she says. “There’s a basement garage, when the building reconfigured we could have dropped down a chute straight into the cockpit of a batmobile and headed out via the service tunnels. Woulda worked a treat if it wasn’t for your teraherz radar.”

“
My
radar?” Huw says, hating the note of weakness in his voice. He swallows as he looks into Bonnie’s fear-wide eyes. “Right.” he says. “We need transport and we need to get past the Inquisition shock troops before we can get to the out-of-town safe house. If they’ve ringed the block and they’ve got radar, they’ll see us real soon—”

“Shit,” says Bonnie, her grip loosening. Huw looks round.

An olive drab abomination whines and reverses into the alley toward them. Cleated metal tracks grind and scrape on the paving as an assault ramp drops down. It’s an armored personnel carrier, but right now it’s carrying only one person, a big guy in a white suit. He’s holding something that looks like a shiny bundle of rods in both hands, and it’s pointing right at them. “Resistance is futile!” shouts Sam, his amplified voice echoing off the fire escapes and upended Dumpsters. “Surrender or die!”

“Nobbies,” says Huw, glancing back at the other end of the alley. Which is blocked by a wall conveniently topped with razor wire—Bonnie might make it with her spidersilk gloves, but there’s no way in hell he could climb it without getting minced. Then he looks back at Sam, who is pointing his minigun or X-ray laser or whatever the hell it is right at him and waiting, patiently. “Surrender to whom?” he says.

“Me.” Sam takes a step
back
into the APC and does something and suddenly there’s a weird hissing around them. “Ambient antisound. We can talk, but you’ve got about twenty seconds to surrender to me or you can take your chances with
them
.”

“Monkeyflaps.” Bonnie’s shoulders slump. “Okay,” she calls, raising her voice. “What do you want?”

“You.” For a moment Sam sounds uncertain. “But I’ll take him too, even though he doesn’t deserve it.”

“Last time you were all fired up on handing Huw over to the Church,” Bonnie says.

“Change of plan. That was Dad, this is me.” Sam raises his gun so that it isn’t pointed directly at them. “You coming or not?”

Bonnie glances over her shoulder. “Yeah,” she says, stepping forward. She pauses. “You coming?” she asks Huw.

“I don’t trust him!” Huw says. “He—”

“You like the Inquisition better?” Bonnie asks, and walks up the ramp, back stiff, not looking back.

Sam backs away and motions her to sit on a bench, then throws her something that looks like a thick bandanna. “Wrap this round your wrists and that grab rail. Tight. It’ll set in about ten seconds.” Then he glances back at Huw. “Ten seconds.”

Huw steps forward wordlessly, sits down opposite Bonnie. Sam throws him a restraint band, motions with the gun. The assault ramp creaks and whines loudly as it grinds up and locks shut. Sam backs all the way into the driver’s compartment, then slams a sliding door shut on them. The APC lurches, then begins to inch forward out of the alleyway.

Over the whine of the electric motors he can hear Sam talking on the radio: “No, no sign of suspects. Did you get the van? I figure that was how they got away.”

What’s going on?
Huw mouths at Bonnie.

She shrugs and looks back at him. Then there’s another lurch and the APC accelerates, turns a corner into open road, and Sam opens up the throttle. At which point, speech becomes redundant: it’s like being a frog in a liquidizer inside a bass drum bouncing on a trampoline, and it’s all Huw can do to stay on the bench seat.

After about ten minutes, the APC slows down, then grinds to a standstill. “Where are we?” Bonnie calls at the shut door of the driver’s compartment. She mouths something at Huw.
Let me handle this,
he decodes after a couple of tries.

The door slides open. “You don’t need to know,” Sam says calmly, “’cuz if you knew, I’d have to edit your memories, and the only way I know to do that these days is by killing you.” He isn’t holding the gun, but before Huw has time to get any ideas, Sam reaches out and hits a switch. The grabrail Huw and Bonnie are tied to rises toward the ceiling, dragging them upright. “It’s not like the old days,” he says. “We really knew how to mess with our heads then.”

“Why did you take us?” Huw says after he finds his footing. Bonnie gives him a dirty look. Huw swallows, his mouth dry as he realizes that Sam is studying her with a closed expression on his face.

“Personal autonomy,” Sam says, taking Huw by surprise. The big lummox doesn’t look like he ought to know words like that. “Dad wanted to turn you in ’cause if he didn’t, the Inquisition’d start asking questions sooner or later. Best stay on the right side of the law, claim the reward. But once you got away, it stopped being his problem.” He swallows. “Didn’t stop being
my
problem, though.” He leans toward Bonnie. “Why are you on this continent?” he asks, and produces a small, vicious knife.

“I’m—” Bonnie tenses, and Huw’s heart beats faster with fear for her. She’s thinking fast and that can’t be good, and this crazy big backwoods guy with the knife is frighteningly bad news. “Not everyone on this continent wants to be here,” she says. “I don’t know about anyone else’s agenda, but I think that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. That’s practically my religion. Self-determination. You got people here, they’re going to die for good, when they could be ascendant and immortal, if only someone would offer them the choice.”

Sam makes encouraging noises.

“I go where I’m needed,” she says. “Where I can lend a hand to people who want it. Your gang wants to play postapocaypse; that’s fine. I’m here to help the utopians play
their
game.”

Huw has shut his eyes and is nearly faint with fury.
I’m a fucking passenger again, nothing but a passenger on this trip
—the alien flute-thing in his stomach squirms, shifting uncomfortably in response to his adrenaline and prostaglandin surge—
fucking cargo
. For an indefinite moment, Huw can’t hear anything above the drumbeat of his own rage: carrying the ambassador seems to be fucking with his hormonal balance, and his emotions aren’t as stable as they should be.

Sam is still talking. “—Dad’s second liver,” he says to Bonnie. “So he cloned himself. Snipped out this, inserted that, force-grew it in a converted milk tank. Force-grew
me
. I’m supposed to be him, only stronger, better, smarter, bigger. Kept me in the tank for two years plugged in through the cortex speed-learning off the interwebnet then hauled me out, handed me a scalpel, painted a line on his abdomen, and said ‘cut here.’ The liver was a clone too, so I figured I oughta do like he said unless I wanted to end up next on the spare parts rota.”

“Wow.” Bonnie sounds fascinated. “So you’re a designer
Übermensch
?”

“Guess so,” Sam says slowly and a trifle bashfully. “After I got the new liver fitted, Dad kept me around to help out in the lab. Never asked me what
I
wanted, just set me to work.
He’s
Asperger’s. Me, I’m just poorly socialized with a recursive introspective agnosia and a deficient situational relationship model. That’s what the diagnostic expert systems tell me, anyway.”

“You’re saying you’ve never been socialized.” Bonnie leans her head toward him. “You just hatched, like, fully formed from a
tank
—”

“Yeah,” Sam says, and waits.

“That’s so sad,” Bonnie says. “Did your dad mistreat you?”

“Oh mercy, no! He just ignores ... Well, he’s Dad. He never pays much attention to me, he’s too busy looking for the alien space bats and trying not to get the Bishop mad at him.”

“Is that why you were taking Huw into town?” asks Bonnie.

“Huh, yeah, I guess so.” Sam chuckles. “Anything comes down in the swamp, you betcha they see it on radar. You came down in Dad’s patch, pretty soon they’ll come by and ask why he hasn’t turned you in. So you can’t really blame him, putting on the Holy Roller head and riding into town to hand over the geek.”

“That’s okay,” Bonnie says as Sam’s shoulders tense, “I understand.”

“It’s just a regular game-theoretical transaction, y’see?” Sam asks, his voice rising in a near whine: “He has to do it! He has to tit-for-tat with the Church or they’ll roll him over. ’Sides, the geek doesn’t know anything. The shipment—”

“Hush.” Bonnie
winks
at the big guy. “Actually, your dad was wrong—the ambassad—the shipment requires a living host.”

“Oh!” Sam’s eyebrows rise. “Then it’s a good thing you rescued him, I guess.” He looks wistful. “If’n I trust you. I don’t know much about people.”

“That’s all right,” Bonnie says. “I’m not your enemy. I don’t hate you for picking us up. You don’t need to shut us up.” She looks up at where her wrists are trussed to the grab rail. “Let my hands free?”