The Ghost in the Doll (Fox Meridian Book 6) (9 page)

As she began driving past the buildings, she began noticing a few changes. It was still a village of homes manufactured from whatever anyone could get their hands on, but there was more fresh paint around now. More trade with their northern neighbours had, apparently, led to greater prosperity.

And Baxter Cable, standing outside the largest of the buildings which served as a communal core for the camp, still had a huge beard, but it looked like he had trimmed it a little since the last time Fox had seen him. Beside him was Patsy, his partner and the camp’s default second in command. She was still moderately pretty, still looked strong, and still in a short skirt and a bikini bra, though the latter looked newer and made of softer leather.

‘Welcome back,’ Cable said, grinning. ‘Want a drink?’

Fox laughed and swung off her bug. ‘I brought a bottle of whiskey down from Topeka. You can provide the glasses.’

‘Doesn’t seem to quite fulfil the dictates of hospitality.’

‘Oh, you’ll be providing a few things I really need while I’m down here, so don’t you worry about that.’ Fox took her rifle case and a small rucksack from where they were strapped to the back of the Q-bug and set off after Cable as he walked up the steps to the building.

‘You, uh, know we can’t pay your company for–’

‘This isn’t anything to do with Palladium. I am officially on medical leave.’

‘And you came down here?’ Patsy said, bringing up the rear. ‘You get hit in the head?’

‘Actually, I did. Several times.’ They entered the large room inside with its array of random furniture and Fox set her gear down beside a chair before sitting in it and bending to ferret out the whiskey bottle from her rucksack. ‘Bruised internal organs, broken spine, cerebral haemorrhage, coma… Uh, oh, and my immune system took a bit of a hit.’

‘More cybernetics?’ Cable said, getting the glasses.

‘Lots. Enough to need a recharge each night. I’m happy sleeping in here, so long as I can plug in once a day.’

‘Should be good,’ Patsy said. ‘We got a bunch of new solar panels in over the winter. Made quite a difference to our power availability.’

‘So the shop’s working out for you? I mean, Sandy and Drew seemed to think it was going okay. I’ve been sleeping under a comforter made down here for the last week.’

‘It’s working,’ Cable said. ‘Better than we hoped, actually.’ He waved a finger at Fox. ‘I’ll introduce you to the youngster who made that bodice at some point. I think he was imagining someone with your… physique when he made it.’

‘My “physique,” huh?’ Fox handed over glasses of whiskey and then took a sip from her own.

‘He can’t keep his eyes off Patsy. I’d say something to him about it, but he also goes slack-jawed and gibbers whenever he’s around her, so I don’t think he’s much of a threat. So, Drew said you had some link between our vanishing people and some organ thing in Topeka?’

‘It’s a theory. Mostly conjecture right now. Someone got themselves fitted with some LWE twenty-twos, and then died of renal failure.’

‘For the non-military person in the room?’ Patsy said.

‘Low-water enhancement, type twenty-two,’ Baxter explained. ‘Bio-engineered kidneys made for the army. I have them, but they don’t make them now, and no civilian should be getting them put in anywhere legitimate.’

‘And this was the hospital in Topeka,’ Fox said. ‘There’s only really one way you could get them these days. By pulling them out of someone who was fitted with them when they joined up.’ She paused. ‘Sorry, that means if we find these people, we’re probably just going to find corpses.’

‘Out here, that’s what you kind of expect. We’ve had three go missing. I know of… maybe seventeen vanished from other camps.’

‘A couple of people who used to come up from Tulsa to trade have stopped coming,’ Patsy added.

Fox sipped her whiskey. It was good stuff, but it no longer burned down her throat the way it once had and, when it came down to it, she was drinking it to look normal… She set the glass aside. ‘Do you have a map you could show me with the locations of the camps? The ones where you know someone’s been taken, and the ones where they haven’t, or you don’t know.’

Cable nodded. ‘You going to go visit them?’

‘In the morning. I’ll poll the places no one’s gone missing from first, check that there aren’t more.’

‘I should probably come with you. Make introductions.’

‘I can handle it,’ Patsy said. ‘That way we can both ride on Fox’s sweet little Q-bug. Get there faster and cut down on power consumption.’

Cable frowned. ‘Well, I could do that.’

‘Nope. You really think I’m gonna let you ride around behind someone prettier than me all day? If
you
go, you have to take another bug.’

Cable turned to Fox. ‘She doesn’t trust me.’

‘Yeah, well, you’ve started trimming your beard. Sure sign of a mid-life crisis. And how many starlings
did
you have to evict when you did that?’

‘We rehomed them,’ Patsy said. ‘They’re quite safe.’

Cable sagged. ‘Here five minutes and you’re ganging up on me with my girlfriend?’

Fox smiled. ‘Us girls have to stick together.’

~~~

The wind around the camp picked up in the late afternoon, but the radar showed no sign of tornado activity. Still, Fox stowed her Q-bug away and settled down in the communal building where the gusts buffeting the windows almost sounded comforting rather than threatening: the atmospheric violence was still there, but being sealed away from it felt kind of cosy.

Anyway, Kit had examined the map Cable had provided, an old military map of the region, and matched it up with the latest data she had. That data came from MarTech’s satellites, which the government used to construct its current maps, and it had a lot of detail. Zooming in, you could actually see some of the more permanent structures in the camps Cable had indicated. Most were the same sort of size as the Oologah Lake camp or smaller. One, which was closer to Tulsa than all the others for some reason, was significantly smaller, but it did have one solid building in it; perhaps that was the reason they had sited themselves there.

Exact numbers were something Cable could not give Fox, but he was fairly certain that no camp had lost more than four people, all over the last six or seven months. ‘That timescale matches the problems in Topeka rather well,’ Kit pointed out.

‘Another plus in the correspondence column,’ Fox agreed. ‘It’s still circumstantial. It
could
still be coincidence.’

‘Statistically, yes, but the numbers are starting to get into the “hit by lightning while being eaten by a shark after winning the lottery” region of probabilities. Theoretically possible, but you’d almost have to try to make it happen.’

‘Yeah, but people do stupid things after winning a lot of money. Like water-skiing through a hurricane in copper armour.’ Fox opened her eyes and lifted her head. ‘Okay, not much to be done before morning.’ Cable was watching her, a speculative look on his face. Aloud, Fox said, ‘What’s up?’

‘How much did they have to replace?’

Fox looked at him for a second. He was ex-military, and he kept himself off the net, more or less entirely off it. A useful test of public reaction? Hardly a typical one, but… ‘How much do you think?’

‘I’ve been watching you, noticing a few things. You move a little different. You said your spine was broken and you need power. Only need supplemental power for things like limb replacements. You said there was bleeding in the brain too. Some neural implants to supplement function, maybe. Legs, spine… You bend easier in the back. Several organs, maybe… More?’

‘All of it.’

Patsy had turned her attention to the conversation now. She looked a little shocked at the statement. ‘Full cyborg?’

‘Cyborg, pretty much by definition, implies that some of the original is left. My brain stem was damaged. Supplemental electronics wasn’t going to give me back enough functionality. So they… digitised me, I guess. Converted my brain into a database. Tara Meridian now exists as an infomorph of sorts, and right now that infomorph is running on a computer’ – Fox reached up and tapped her chest – ‘in here. The body is basically a gynoid cyberframe.’

‘Oh,’ Patsy said.

‘I didn’t know they could do that,’ Cable said.

‘I’m the first human it’s ever been done on. And if I go psycho, I’ll probably be the last. I’m supposed to be the poster child for the process, but I’m… not quite ready for the world to know what happened. I’ve told friends and family…’

‘So you told us to see what the reaction would be,’ Patsy said.

‘Pretty much. You’re not exactly typical citizens, but…’

‘Hell, girl,’ Cable said, ‘I don’t give a shit what you are so long as you’re not trying to kill me or mine. You even came down here to help us. If you told me you were a Martian, I’d just want to know where you’d been hiding for the last few thousand years.’

‘I’m… shocked,’ Patsy said, ‘but I’ll get over it. I think it’s more like “what the Hell did someone have to do to you for
this
to be the best option?” We’re live and let live people out here.’

Fox nodded. ‘Still, I’m a little paranoid about reactions. Uh, to answer your question. I was whipped, beaten, hit in the back with a baseball bat, and they used an experimental drug on me to accelerate healing so they could beat me some more. That destroyed my immune system, and my ability to heal naturally. The only other option was to freeze me and hope they could fix me later. A-and I think this is better than that. I mean, I’m alive and, yeah, I now have a spine that I can just about fold in half, and I’m stronger, bulletproof… I don’t actually
need
food and water so I won’t be draining your resources. I don’t age. I could, theoretically, live forever.’

‘But you look… human!’

‘New synthetic skin. Semi-organic and they actually used some sort of cloning process so it matches my original skin. And they’ve been building frames to look like humans since
before
they had the technology to make it work. They developed this one for the military, but it needs too much maintenance and power at the moment. For my needs, it does pretty well, though I could wish for better battery life.’

‘So the whiskey was just for show?’ Cable asked.

‘Sort of. I
do
still have a sense of taste and I
can
eat and drink. That’s why I brought the bottle. If I’m going to drink, it should at least taste good. And… Well, drinking that battery acid you make might’ve melted something.’

Cable waved the comment away. ‘Nah. We use it for cleaning out engine parts all the time and it’s never once dissolved them.’

‘Never?’

‘Uh… Almost never.’

‘I rest my case.’

Tulsa Area, 5
^th
April.

‘You know that tickles, right?’

Patsy, sitting on the Q-bug behind Fox, giggled. ‘Sorry, I can’t get over how much this skin feels like… skin.’

‘Clearly I should’ve worn a shirt.’

‘Nope. Negotiations with men always go easier when they’ve got tits to look at. You know it. I know it.’

‘Unless you need them to concentrate, sure. We’re almost there. Should be just over this rise.’

The bug crested a low ridge and, sure enough, they found themselves looking at what appeared to be a less permanent camp set up in a shallow valley. There were fewer fixed constructs here, but there were a number of tents.

‘This place gets a lot of nomad groups stopping off for trade and some R and R,’ Patsy said. ‘The bigger building has a bar and a small brothel. They sell stuff that travelling dustbowlers need, and they don’t ask many questions about where the barter goods come from.’

‘Could be useful.
If
we can get them to talk, nomads might have heard about cases from further afield.’

‘If. Should be safe enough in here. There’s a fairly strict “no violence or theft” policy. People stick to it so that the place continues to work. Park up beside the bar and we’ll go talk to Royce.’

The bar had a hand-painted sign hanging outside it which announced that the place was called ‘The Broken Axle.’ Like many of the buildings in the area, it was built on concrete stilts to protect against flash floods, and it seemed fairly solidly built, if not exactly attractive. The interior appeared to be going for an ‘Old West’ look: circular tables with wooden chairs around them dominated the room and there was a wooden bar at the back. Spirits seemed to be the main brain-killer of choice, though there was an actual cask behind the bar which suggested that beer might be available.

The man behind the counter, dressed in leathers with a dirty-looking apron over the top, was bald and muscled. His nose had been broken more than once and he was missing a front tooth when he smiled, which he did when he saw Patsy strutting across the floor toward him. Fox put him down as an ex-nomad who had decided to settle, and she assumed this was Royce.

‘Patsy,’ Royce said as Patsy took a stool at the bar. ‘What brings you out here? Who’s your friend? New blood?’

‘Get to that, Royce,’ Patsy replied. ‘How old’s the beer?’

‘Got a new batch in last week.’

Patsy turned to Fox. ‘Want one? It’s actually not bad. They brew it out by Shiatook.’ Fox gave a shrug of acquiescence and Patsy turned back to Royce. ‘Two. We’ve still got credit in the account, right?’

‘I’ll check, but yeah, think so. You didn’t come over for a beer.’

‘Nope. Fox here is helping us out, looking into the missing people.’

Royce glanced around at Fox as he drew beer into a tall glass. ‘Cop?’

Fox shook her head. ‘Private. And right now, I’m doing a favour for some friends. I’m supposed to be on medical leave. Cable said no one from here had gone missing. That still true?’

‘Still true. That said, I’ve heard rumours. Some of the gangs have been muttering about members disappearing.’

‘Groups like that, people come and go.’

‘Yeah.’ Royce put two glasses down in front of them. ‘And some of them are probably just running in the night, but not all of them. Couple of people started spreading rumours about mutants or some horror shit like that. Say they’re eating people.’