“She’s okay,” the old man said.
“We don’t need a repeat of the Takanawa incident. Fuel is limited, and we’ve already had to alter our course once.”
“She’s not bugged, goddamn it. I checked.”
“What the fuck?” I was out of it, but I counted four of them. I put one palm on the floor and used the JZI to set off a stim. It hit me, but not as hard as it should have.
“You okay?”
I went for him, and I would have had him, but I was still fuzzy. Even with the stim, I was too slow. His pant leg slipped through my hand; then a big mitt grabbed my arm. It squeezed, and I was hauled up on my feet.
“Easy!” Buckster snapped. The hand let up, but not much. There were two jacks in front of me, plus the one in back that had my arm. It spoke, and I felt its cold breath on the back of my neck.
“They know we’re taking them. Takanawa got them too close.”
“She’s not one of them, I told you. Take it easy.”
“Where the fuck am I?” I asked.
“You’re on the KM
“The what?”
“A cargo ship. We’re off the UAC coast.” If it was true, then I’d been out a long time.
“Why the fuck am I on a ship?”
“It was that or kill you under the bridge. Besides, in a few hours this is going to be the safest place to be—trust me.”
I tried to call Wachalowski, but there was no link. I kept the channel open.
“He won’t pick up,” Buckster said. “Local communications only; nothing leaves the ship.”
He gave a nod to the revivor behind me, and it shoved me toward a hatch on the far wall.
“Come on,” Buckster said.
“Where?”
“To the brig. Look, this is how it has to be. If you stayed in the city, you’d get killed for sure. You helped me out, so I’m helping you, but I can’t risk you causing any trouble. You’ll cool it in the brig until this is over. Then you’ll be free to go.”
He went through, and I followed. The revivors pulled up the rear. Past the hatch, I saw dried blood on the deck—a lot of it. Balled up near one wall were a bloody shirt and a pair of pants. I kicked a shell case when I went by.
“What the hell are you mixed up in?” I asked him.
“Our country has an infection, Cal,” he said. “It’s not about politics. It’s about freedom. It’s about the freedom to make your choice, whatever that choice is. It’s about the freedom to act according to what you believe in, not what someone else makes you believe. Someone has to stop them.”
“How?”
“With fire.”
“What are you going to do? Blow up the city?” I asked. He didn’t answer. He just kept walking.
“Buckster, what the fuck are you guys going to do?”
“Can you be sure anything, or even everything, you’ve lived hasn’t been a lie?” he asked. “Knowing even the little bit you know, can you say with complete certainty that everything you did while you were over in the grind happened the way you know in your heart that it did?”
“Are your actions truly your own?” he asked. “Or are you a tool, a machine, used by someone else, the same way you used those revivors back in the grinder?”
“Answer me. What are you going to do?”
He pushed open a hatch and the jacks behind me pushed me through after him. I stumbled through a bunch of junk and shell casings that were scattered across the floor. A big table had been knocked over and used as cover, but it looked like the bullets had gone straight through. Blood spatter had dried on the walls and floor, but the bodies were gone.
Before we could reach the door on the other side of the room, it opened and three guys stepped through. That made Buckster stop short, and I almost bumped into him. Two of the guys had guns, and one had a metal case in his hand. They made right for us and stopped in front of the old man.
“This the one?” one of them asked.
“Yes. What is this?”
The one with the case opened it and took out a big needle. It was full of black shit.
“What the fuck is that?” I asked.
“Hold her,” he said.
The jacks grabbed me from behind. One held my arms and another one held my head. I tried to move, but they had me pinned. It felt like my neck was going to break.
“What are you doing?” Buckster snapped.
“Don’t struggle,” a voice said in my ear.
“She’s not one of them!” the old man said. “She doesn’t want to be—”
One of the men bashed Buckster behind the ear with the grip of his gun, and he went down onto his knees. He leaned over, and dots of blood started to cover the floor in front of him.
“We don’t need him anymore,” someone said, and the guy that hit him aimed the gun at the back of his head.
“Wait!” I yelled, but never even got the word out before the shot went off. The old man jerked once and went facedown. Blood started to pool around his head.
“Hold her still,” one of the other men said.
The guy jabbed the needle into my neck, and I saw him push the plunger.
“I said hold her still!”
I had only one shot. I brute-forced my way through one of the M8s behind me and dropped in a virus that shunted the command hooks over to me. One, two, and three, they all came up in my HUD. I pulled up their specs, vitals, and visual feeds, then took control of them.
The gun went off behind me, and the guy with the syringe jerked as the back of his head blew out. The case fell out of his hand, and the needle spun across the floor as his body fell in a heap. The other two raised their guns, but they were too late; the jacks shot them to pieces.
With the command spokes in place, I had full control of all three. In the feeds they streamed over, I could see what they saw and hear what they heard. It was like being back in the grind.
“Get me off this b—” I started to say, when a sharp pain stabbed me in the gut. It hurt like hell, and my link to the revivors almost cut when the JZI’s power dropped.
I pulled inventory from the jacks; they each had a sidearm, extra ammo, and three grenades. They were all strapped with enough C4 to sink the ship. I used another virus to turn off their inhibitors.
“Get me the fuck off this boat now—”
The room spun, and I felt like I’d been drugged again. I set off a stim to cut through it as warnings flew past. My heart rate had dropped, but as the chemicals spread through my bloodstream, it spiked back up.
The pain hit again, worse this time. It felt like a hot coal in my gut.
“What the fuck did they stick me with?”
I ran a check on my systems and saw that something in there was drawing power. Whatever it was, it wasn’t tied into the JZI’s control system. There was something inside me that didn’t belong there.
A map blinked on in front of me. There was a helicopter I couldn’t fly up top, and a small ship-to-shore craft down below. I set a route to it.
