Asante’s legs, under new management, pick up the pace. His vision blurs. At least up here, in the wind and blinding sleet, it doesn’t make much difference.
A sound drifts past: the roar of some distant animal, perhaps. Nearer, the unmistakable discharge of an ε-40. Not ET’s. Asante’s eyes remain virtuously clouded.
The wind dies in the space of a dozen steps. Half as many again and the torrent of icy needles on his face slows to a patter, a drizzle. Asante hears great bolts unlatching, a soft screech of heavy metal. They pass through some portal and the bright overcast in his eyes dims by half. Buckles and bootsteps echo faintly against rock walls.
Downhill. A gentle curve to the left. Gravel, patches of broken asphalt. His feet step over unseen obstacles.
And stop.
The whole squad must have frozen; he can’t hear so much as a breath. The supersaccadic tickertape flickering across the fog seems faster. Could be his imagination. Off in some subterranean distance, water drip-drip-drips onto a still surface.
Quiet movement as ZeroS spreads out. Asante’s just a passenger but he reads the footsteps, feels his legs taking him sideways, kneeling. The padding on his elbows doesn’t leave much room for fine-grained tactile feedback but the surface he’s bracing against is flat and rough, like a table sheathed in sandpaper.
There’s a musky animal smell in the air. From somewhere in the middle distance, a soft whuffle. The stirring of something huge in slow, sleepy motion.
Maybe someone left the door open, and something got in …
Pizzly bears are the only animals that come to mind: monstrous hybrids, birthed along the boundaries of stressed ecosystems crashing into each other. He’s never seen one in the flesh.
A grunt. A low growl.
The sound of building speed.
Gunshots. A roar, deafeningly close, and a crash of metal against metal. The flickering tactical halo dims abruptly: network traffic just dropped by a node.
Now the whole network crashes: pawn exchange, ZeroS sacrificing their own LAN as the price of jamming the enemy’s. Moore’s MAD gun snaps to the right. An instant of scorching heat as the beam sweeps across Asante’s arm; Moore shooting wide, Moore missing. ET breaks cover, leaps and locks. For one crystalline millisecond Asante sees a wall of coarse ivory-brown fur close enough to touch, every follicle in perfect focus.
The clouds close in. ET pulls the trigger.
A bellow. The scrape of great claws against stone. The reek is overpowering but ET’s already pirouetting after fresh game and click the freeze-frame glimpse of monstrous ursine jaws in a face wide as a doorway and click small brown hands raised against an onrushing foe and click a young boy with freckles and strawberry blond hair and Asante’s blind again but he feels ET pulling on the trigger, pop pop pop—
Whatthefuck children whatthefuck whatthefuck
—and ET’s changed course again and click: a small back a fur coat black hair flying in the light of the muzzle flash.
Not again. Not again.
Child soldiers. Suicide bombers. For centuries.
But no one’s shooting back.
He knows the sound of every weapon the squad might use, down to the smallest pop and click: the sizzle of the MAD gun, the bark of the Epsilon, Acosta’s favorite Olympic. He hears them now; those, and no others. Whatever they’re shooting at isn’t returning fire.
Whatever we’re shooting at. You blind murderous twaaaaase. You’re shooting eight-year-olds.
Again.
More gunfire. Still no voices but for a final animal roar that gives way to a wet gurgle and the heavy slap of meat on stone.
It’s a nuclear waste repository at the north pole. What are children even doing here?
What am I?
What am I?
And suddenly he sees the words, All tautologies are tautologies and ET’s back downstairs and the basement door locks and Kodjo Asante grabs frantically for the reins, and takes back his life, and opens his eyes:
In time to see the little freckled boy, dressed in ragged furs, sitting on Riley Garin’s shoulders and dragging a jagged piece of glass across his throat. In time to see him leap free of the body and snatch Garin’s gun, toss it effortlessly across this dimly-lit cave to an Asian girl clad only in a filthy loincloth, who’s sailing through the air toward a bloodied Jim Moore. In time to see that girl reach behind her and catch the gun in midair without so much as a backward glance.
More than a dance, more than teamwork. Like digits on the same hand, moving together.
The pizzly’s piled up against a derelict forklift, a giant tawny thing raking the air with massive claws even as it bleeds out through the hole in its flank. A SAsian child with his left hand blown off at the wrist (maybe that was me) dips and weaves around the fallen behemoth. He’s—using it, exploiting the sweep of its claws and teeth as a kind of exclusion zone guaranteed to maul anyone within three meters. Somehow those teeth and claws never seem to connect with him.
They’ve connected with Acosta, though. Carlos Acosta, lover of sunlight and the great outdoors lies there broken at the middle, staring at nothing.
Garin finally crashes to the ground, blood gushing from his throat.
They’re just children. In rags. Unarmed.
The girl rebounds between rough-hewn tunnel walls and calcified machinery, lines up the shot with Garin’s weapon. Her bare feet never seem to touch the ground.
They’re children they’re just—
Tiwana slams him out of the way as the beam sizzles past. The air shimmers and steams. Asante’s head cracks against gears and conduits and ribbed metal, bounces off steel onto rock. Tiwana lands on top of him, eyes twitching in frantic little arcs.
And stopping.
It’s a moment of pure panic, seeing those eyes freeze and focus—she doesn’t know me she’s locking on she’s locking on—but something shines through from behind and Asante can see that her eyes
