Chris Howard's Blog, page 77

SaltwaterWitch.com Update

SaltwaterWitch.com – New background art, with some cosmetic changes, and links to new works–the new edition of Nanowhere and the latest release, Mermaid.

 

Autonomous by Chris Howard – Chapters 16 – 18

16 – Open City

Inahn got Arckale out of lockup early because she wanted to see where he worked, hoping she would be able to gather something that would strengthen the alibis she was propping up for her client.

Plodding forward, Arckale eventually made it to his office, top floor, inside belt, with big windows that overlooked kilometers of farmland in the middle of the ocean. And it was all aquaculture space twenty meters below the hex barges.

Winderrill was the nearest thing to an alien world.

Standing beside Inahn, Arckale glanced across the stretch of green, then down at his feet on the smooth synth flooring, disappointed. He was allowed to move in his own space, but this space was no longer his own. In some painful way this was worse than concrete cell walls and steel bars. He would know what the limits were then. Somehow being forced to walk in the same footsteps that had been his for years—but now weren’t—hurt him.

Inahn broke the hold the pain had on him. “How long have you worked out here?”

He looked up from the floor. “When this started, Winderrill was fifteen platforms and eleven of them were wind and solar dedicated. We had one hex for the crew. Not me. I had to sleep in the gardens, being a patho.”

Inahn made a sour face as she pulled out her tablet, took some notes.

Arckale went on, “I remember the day I landed—Winderrill’s big enough now that you don’t say “come aboard”. You land on the thing, like it’s an island. Anyway, I had my tablet with me and sketched my first approach to Winderrill—Project One for the Open Ocean City Project org. Didn’t look like much then—a hex platform mesh being towed to the middle of the Atlantic, and with the sun coming back at us from the solars it was like landing on a damn mirror at noon. I could barely draw the thing without retinal damage. And we wouldn’t get the thorium salt nuke platforms for another year.

“There.” He pointed to an old print of his first sketch tacked to the wall, fading ink outlines of a grid of hexes on solid blue, the support tug out in the lead with a nice wake. “Talked the hover pilot into floating a few while I got most of that down.”

Arckale waved at the picture. “You have to hand it to the Open Ocean City and Knowledgenix people. At a big wad of dollars per platform—the standard agro and aquaculture platform—they were hooking them up as fast as they could build them—with extra power, crew and rec platforms being added yearly like charms on a bracelet. Our first real commercial establishment was a restaurant—Tania’s Noodle Bay.

He looked over at Inahn, gauged her interest. “Want to know when the real fun began? The first hundred-crew milestone, a hundred crazy people living and working on a giant agro-raft that was growing by kilometers in the middle of the Atlantic.”

Inahn nodded, although Arckale couldn’t tell what she was agreeing to or acknowledging, and decided not to ask.

He quickly tired of his old office, and led the way downstairs, his struct appearing to enjoy walking again, down to the ocean level and into one of the cross-Winderrill shuttles.

Inahn tapped her ear, and brought them back to the phone conversation from the day before. “That was your father calling yesterday? Biologic father?”

“Kidding? No. My real father. Ninety-four years old and still asking the tough philosophical questions. I hope to live long enough to plague my children with the same.”

Inahn looked away, whispering, “Me too.”

Arckale tried to reach out but the hydraulics growled and the carceral struct jerked his hand back. “Oh, sorry. I’m an idiot. I didn’t even think.” He just wasn’t doing enough thinking on the face of things, auto-running a couple of slacker threads of thought to run the show, make facial expressions, nod at appropriate intervals, keep him breathing. Inside, most of his head wrapped around the underlying disease pathology of the thing afflicting Inahn. It’s degenerative, very invasive. He was already working on alteration strategies—which always sounded the desperation alarm. Sometimes a patho couldn’t eliminate the bad guys, but he could change their course, point them at something else that wouldn’t damage the host.

He had completely forgotten about the four deaths he’d been accused of—blood and a birthday party, and the letters MM fingered in red on the wall.

Arckale and Inahn walked all the way to 231, the last of the old hex platforms, one side walled in concave concrete with metallic lines of stun stripping four meters up, and AP charges above that. He pointed. “This was the edge of Winderrill before OpenOceanCity and Knowledgenix bolted on the restricted reactor platforms, and soon after—because, hey, we had a god’s power out here in the middle of the Atlantic—a bunch of residential blocks and a new string of restaurants: the BKK—Break Kill Koffee and a few others surrounding the original Winderrill eatery—the one and only Tania’s.”

Arckale was gripping the warm washout barrier, and it brought up memories. He used to come out here to the edge, lean hard against the railing of 231, earth-the-ocean-world’s sharp horizon coming at him, nothing but open aquaspace for miles below, and something in him always wanted to take a step off the end of this three hundred square kilometer grid of farm barges, into the cool Atlantic, soft folds of Sargasso to hold him and carry him down.

It was the seagulls crying that always brought him back. They couldn’t follow him below the waves, and he could never leave them behind.

“They’re free.”

He heard them now, ghostly pale and chattering to themselves, a few piping plaintively overhead.

Inahn leaned close, running her slim brown fingers up the edge of her tablet, watching him carefully. “Tell me what happened, Arckale.”

He started right in as if he had been preparing for the answer. “I’ll tell you what I can remember. It was a party, and I knew everybody there. I wasn’t invited, I just sort of stumbled into it. Last thing I really remember I was coming down from some testing on 3348, over on the north side.”

“Really?” She was thumbing through files on her tablet. “That’s not mentioned here. Platform 3348. You were there into the evening? Is that confirmable?”

He shrugged. “I left my mark.”

She stared at him for a few seconds. “I don’t know what that means.”

Arckale held out his open hand—a little surprised when the struct let him. “Your hands get dirty from the fieldwork, and it’s tradition to slap your muddy print against the inside wall of the nearest tumble—the walkway—before leaving. I say tradition because even though Winderrill used to be a lot smaller—lot fewer platforms, it also moved around a lot, early reconfigs, that sort of thing, and it was easy to lose the platform you were working on yesterday. We make our marks every time we leave the field. Always have.”

Her focused sharpened, but not on him. “Okay, I’ll look into that. So, there’s this party…”

He looked up, faraway, recalling something. “Looked like someone’s birthday. There’s chocolate cake, candles, and everything.”

“And they were all alive when you walked in?”

“More than alive.”

She was frowning. “What does that mean?”

“Wilma Hertzog—been here since the beginning, even before me. She’s office manager for ag services. We call her ‘The Hearse’—she’s that serious, that grim, morticianesque. When I walked into this party, Wilma was dancing, and with some pretty good moves.”

“Morticians don’t dance?”

“Not that I know of. Met a few in the Service.”

“Then what happened?”

“I don’t know. Everything else, I guess.”

Her voice rose a little against a gust off the Atlantic. “You guess? There was blood everywhere.”

Blood doesn’t sound like me.

He was a quiet, no mess, fall down and don’t get up sort. He didn’t use his skills to send messages, express rage, make messes. “Blood can be created quite easily.”

“By someone like you. And you don’t remember anything else?”

Arckale tried to shrug, but it had become a disallowed motion. “I woke with these on.” Opening his arms to show her the wrist locks, making the servos hiss up the spine of the machine that made every move for him.

The more he heard about this case the less he thought it was him. “I can’t remember what happened, but I wasn’t breaking up parties and splattering rooms with blood. In fact, this is quite possibly the worst set up in history. Just look at my battle record, it’s all low profile BW operations—biological warfare. Hell, I cut myself shaving with bladeless razors. Come on. Pathos don’t do rage killings, we do catch your death when you touch that door knob. Or shake your hand. We do that really well. And during active duty I spent far more time mounting defenses, countering the BW actions of enemy pathos. That’s what’s built into me.”

There was a mass of bio-processing threads running in his head right now, rolling through the sequences of the chromosome-breaker agent that was going to kill Inahn. Arckale had pulled more than enough to work with during their handshake. He couldn’t stop it if he wanted to. That was him to the core—pathogenic detection, decomposition, demilitarization. Not bodies tossed about the room with blood painting the walls.

Still, he was curious. “What were the wounds like? What kind of weapon was used to spill all this blood?”

Inahn nodded, flipping through the crime scene report, not enough glare across the screen to hide the infoshapes, neat framed text, bullet-pointed lists of things, diagrams and dark blocks of images sliding by. She stopped a handful of pages into the report.

“I don’t think that’s been determined. No macro-weapon wounds is my assumption. Blood from their mouths, maybe cellular damage—which points to a patho. The bodies are all in full stasis quarantine. No one’s touched them, and Open Ocean City’s sent for mainland assistance. Be here in a few days.”

17 – Break the Pattern

Malcolm drilled out a slot through the plastic in front of Bartlett’s mouth so they could hear him when he decided to talk. The Director of Port Engineering Services had spent the night in pain, staring in the mirrors at what had become of him, the plastic face mask fogging up with his tears and rapid breathing. The impromptu surgery Nalli had done on his shoulder to remove his GPS implant wasn’t looking good, swollen, red around the edges. Malcolm changed the bandages, but didn’t give Bartlett anything for the pain.

Nalli grabbed one of the two-foot long, one inch-diameter dowels Malcolm was using to drum a slow beat through Bartlett’s mask, and proceeded to give the alleged Wolfsbane op five solid hammer blows to the plastic covering his face and back of the head. Startled by the sudden violence, Bartlett let out a scream—muffled by the open slot in front of his mouth to a thin plastic whine.

Malcolm shook his head, and backed off. Apparently Nalli was tired with his slow but steady progress in cracking Bartlett, offering him hope. That’s how he was playing this one. The offer of hope. The chance to walk away with his fingers, toes, face intact. The chance to see his wife and two daughters again.

The values people held like blood, like gold, the values these people surrounded themselves with…all part of Malcolm’s interrogation toolbox. There were training manuals and self-defense experts who advised kidnapping victims to fill in the conscience gaps with real stories and names, mothers, fathers, children, birthday parties, hoping to drive enough of a wedge into the conscience of the kidnapper to stay alive.

Malcolm welcomed that sort of knowledge. He would ask for it specifically. In his book, there were few things that brought fear to the surface more rapidly than asking a man to say his daughter’s name. Bartlett had already spilled his whole family to Malcolm.

Nalli grabbed the mask, shook Bartlett hard, shoving at the small but well-calculated slack Malcolm allowed in the cabling anchored to the walls, floor and ceiling.

Tilting his head up as much as the cables would allow, Nalli shouted in his rigid plastic face. “Who did you kill? Were you recently in Arizona? Canada? Why are you killing with such an obvious pattern? A then Z, then B and Y? Why not break up the pattern?”

Malcolm walked out, knowing Bartlett wouldn’t answer the questions. Not yet. The Wolfsbanes had multiple divided personalities. It might take days to break down the walls to the others, if it could be done at all without a lab and a significant research budget. The personality Nalli was railing against was a director level exec in a port services company. Nothing more.

Malcolm leaned against the wall just outside the room, rubbing his eyes, and didn’t bother looking up when Nalli moved like a hungry cat past him. She punched the wall, breathing hard through her nose, then turned her anger on him, pointing over his head.

“That worthless fuck was in Canada three days ago—in Vancouver where Zia was killed.”

Malcolm nodded, pushed himself off the wall, and came to her. “That’s fine. I expected some evidence of him being involved in at least one of the killings.” He reached out, put a hand on her arm. “But this guy is a lot deeper than this. Think of Raymond Bartlett as the mask the Wolfsbane op underneath wears—a nearly permanent mask that we will have to remove a layer at a time.”

Nalli spun on him, still angry. “And what? We talk to this piece of shit like he’s—”

Malcolm wheeled toward the sliding glass doors, following her gaze.

His focus started out at the horizon, the Bay, something that caught her interest in the “stunning view” promised from the balcony of his new condo. He reeled it in when something solid was blocking part of the sky. A killer in black, barely visible against the deep blue, crouched—balanced—on the balcony railing, twenty-one floors above the street, pointing what looked like a long black tube into the room. Malcolm had a fraction of a second to wonder about the wisdom of shooting a gun while balanced on a railing only inches wide, then noticed the black vertical lines of cables running from his shoulders into the sky where—presumably—a gunship hovered.

There was a pop, a sharp crack as something very fast went right through the glass and hit Nalli in the face. Another crack when it exploded. Then she was in the air, her hands in the process of swinging up to block something, her toes pointed like a dancer. Malcolm watched helplessly, turning to shout a warning way too late, mouth wide open and empty. Nalli seemed to drift by him, the shape of her face remaining, but everything else above her shoulders in runny dark fluid motion. It seemed to last minutes, the slow thud of his heartbeat like a fist against his chest, Nalli coming apart right in front of his eyes.

He screamed something that was supposed to be her name, reaching out for her, but the room shifted under his feet and she was flying away from him, thrown into the wall by her own jump for safety and the explosive round’s impact. Malcolm couldn’t find his balance, didn’t have time to look for it. He was falling backward, eyes squeezing shut as a fist-sized hole erupted in the wall next to his ear, plaster and sharp wedges of painted wallboard slicing across his arms.

Somersaulting backward, Malcolm ended up feet in the air, his head slamming into the condo’s front door. Vision blurring, he reached over his head, grabbed the doorknob and used it to get back to his feet.

That’s when all the glass in the sliding balcony door blew in. That also explained the faint slapping sound of a limpet charge adhering a moment before.

Twisting to one side to lower his profile, Malcolm yanked up his arm, bent at the elbow across the side of his head. You could get by just about anywhere bleeding from any place but the face. People took notice when a strange, quiet, or distraught man boarded a bus or hailed a taxi with a bleeding face.

He swung the door in, using it for cover as the killer on the railing jumped through the window frame into the living room, the soft punching noises of silenced rounds hitting the wall just behind him.

Malcolm ran, left everything behind, the prisoner in his custom plastic torture shell, Nalli dead, her body twisted unnaturally, one knee up by her shattered face and skull, her right arm folded too sharply behind her back, the hand sticking out at her hip on the opposite side of her body, fingers stabbing at nothing. Nalli, like a doll ripped apart, bloody, and thrown against the wall.

Malcolm jumped the stairs four and five at a time, slamming into the wall at each switchback landing, springing off painted concrete with both hands thrusting him into a spin to conserve momentum, so he could hurl himself down the next flight of stairs.

Never looking back, he crossed the courtyard at a sprint, cutting back through the north tower, heading for the freight entrance, the way he had come in.

The world, so solid a few minutes before, had turned to mist that threatened to drift off with the dawn. Nothing solid, nothing real, except the hard street under his feet, a serious question about the break in the killing pattern, and one name—the name of the other Wolfsbane operative identified by the Cons.

Nathan David Isenart.

18 – Long and Lat

Nathan Isenart thumbed in Tom’s number and the old trooper picked up after the first ring. “Hey, Nathan?”

“It’s a coordinate passing scheme. The numbers Valerie was keying in were her longitude and latitude, cut down to two six-digit numbers stuck together. A zero or one in the middle represented a positive or negative.” He glanced down at his own phone. “So 4295600707800 is 42.9560 north, minus 70.7800 west, which puts her right where she was killed.”

“So what was with the other set of numbers?”

“I think I have that worked out too. They’re just off the coast. My fairly certain guess? It’s Avi—stands for Active Vehicle Identification, her autonomous submarine calling her back every time she initiated a call. She was using this scheme as a homing mechanism.”

“Sort of a ‘hey submarine, where are you now’?”

“Right. And as long as Valerie kept calling it, the sub would continue to make its way back to her exact position—or close enough to be picked up, given the coordinates.”

“You’ve seen this kind of thing before?”

“Never. This doesn’t even fit with the rest of what I know about Bennefield. She was sharp. This seems like a total hack to me. Maybe something scared her and she just rigged it together.”

Tom sighed and came back with his usually wisdom. “Always a why.”

That was something Tom said repeatedly. Nothing was ever done without a reason—in Tom’s experience-filled book.

“Yeah, when I was with some of her colleagues at UNH I brought up the idea of Valerie using secret codes over the phone, and they looked at me like I was from a different planet.”

Tom made a small humming noise, intrigued. “Reason for her secrecy?”

“That’s what I was trying to figure out. Things were getting pretty tight around her projects, money promised, investments, DARPA involved at the grant level. I don’t think she was filling in her advisor—not with the details. She was keeping a lot of people in the dark, not because she thought her colleagues were thieves. I’m pretty sure it’s because she was moving fast, and just didn’t have time to slow down to tell anyone. I don’t believe it was because she wanted to keep data or project specs to herself. She doesn’t seem like that kind of person. But this was valuable stuff. Someone may have wanted it all, cutting Valerie out of the picture.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that.” Tom sighed loudly over the phone. “The rest of this case is for someone else, Nathan.”

“That’s the way it’s going anyway. The office called. Hand everything over to North Hampton PD, get back as soon as you can.” He didn’t like the disappointed sound in his own voice.

“Good.” Tom seemed a little pushy, but Nathan had known him a long time, and it was probably the old man’s way of keeping him out of anyone’s line of fire. “What do you have on this right now? A research rival who hires a pro killer for a possible payout years from now?”

“Possibly.”

“This has to be bigger than some other grad student trying to cut in on the action. This was a hit. By someone with money and power. It was either drugs, money, or…a mistake.”

“The killer took out the wrong person? That’s unlikely.”

“It’s a possibility.”

Nathan threw back Tom’s own, “Always a why.”

“Yeah, yeah. Doesn’t really matter, does it? We’re talking about a professional hit, so you’re in over your head, Isenart. Leave it to North Hampton or the FBI org crime guys. Stick to computation, encryption, image enhancement, code breaking.”

“Thanks for your concern.” Nathan ladled in the sarcasm. “I promise I’ll be home for dinner.” He pulled in a deep breath, let it out slow and thoughtful. “I’ll hit up Detective Smiles one last time. I just want North Hampton PD to understand this communications piece. Could be the key to the whole case. Has to be.”

Tom went silent for a few seconds as if giving the coded communications a second look. “The long and lat thing doesn’t seem right to me.” He kept it serious, turning the talk back to the cryptic phone tag teaming, as if he really was determined to help get the communications part solved for North Hampton and get Nathan off the case as soon as possible. “Why not just encrypt all communication if it was about eavesdropping?”

“Shit.” It hit Nathan like a lightning strike. “But it’s not. This wasn’t about secrecy. It’s about location, room to maneuver. Using cell hardware gave her the sea-room she needed to change her plans. This has to be about location. Maybe she knew she was being followed, or feared that she might be. Or maybe she didn’t like the possibility of her sub falling into the wrong hands. This was a rigged up way to talk to her AUV—her autonomous underwater vehicle—and be able to confidently guide it to her no matter where she happened to be. It only responds to her phone number is my guess. She could feed it long and lat numbers for Cape Hatteras and take a ride down to North Carolina to pick up Avi if she needed to.”

“Whoa, hold on. So the sub is still out there? Waiting for her to call it home?”

“I think so.” Nathan looked through his windshield at the soft folds of the Atlantic curling into North Hampton Beach. “Somewhere.”

He could picture Tom shaking his head on the other end of the phone. “This was a professional hit. Do you think the shooter had the ability to intercept her phone calls to Avi?”

“Probably not. The stuff the FBI has access to is barely authorized—and certainly not approved of by your average citizen. But I doubt she’d spot a tail—well obviously not. She was followed to North Hampton Beach. Plus the shooter knew where she lived, and knew who she was.”

There was a pause on the other end, Tom typing something. He came back a moment later. “Where are you?”

“Sitting in my car, about twenty yards from where Valerie Bennefield was killed. I was just hanging around, thinking, and…letting go. As I said, got a call from the office—busy as usual, and I’m being moved off this case. Onto a new one. Happy now? I have a couple things to wrap up here. Going to head into town to talk to Smiles about borrowing Valerie’s phone, or at least the SIM.” The SIM—Subscriber Identity Module—was the little card in almost every phone, used by the cell carriers to identify the person using the phone. The SIM allowed the network to route calls to the right phones, and it could be swapped out or placed in a different phone to send and receive calls.

Tom made some noises that made it clear he was trying to make up his mind, and then came back with, “Right. I agree. It’s time to move on.”

Nathan could hear something different in Tom’s voice over the phone, but it didn’t match what he knew of the old man.

Tom was afraid.

“What is it?”

“I have a favor to ask first—before you leave it all to the guys with guns and move on to a case with computers, not killers.”

Nathan had to smile. “Guns? I consistently shoot in the top five percent. I don’t even practice. Drives the guys with guns batshit—the secret codes computer guy beating the crap out of their accuracy numbers every week.”

Tom laughed, thin and not very sincere. “Do a favor for me? Before you hand the case back to NHPD?”

“Sure, what is it?”

“Come out to the house, see me before you go to the police. I want to run another idea by you, something I can’t talk about over the phone.”

“Okay.” Nathan dragged out the second syllable. “Now I’m intrigued, but no problem. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

Driving the point home, Tom said, “See me first, then you’re off the case.”

“What else am I going to do? Professional killers aren’t my thing.” Nathan started his car, tucking the phone between his ear and shoulder as he threw one arm over the passenger seat and looked out through the rear window as he backed out of the space at North Hampton Beach. “Talk to you soon.”

Nathan thumbed off the call and dropped the phone in the seat.

Autonomous by Chris Howard – Chapters 4 – 6

4 – Home

Nathan Isenart climbed out of Tom’s truck at four in the morning, reaching over the seat to pull out his duffle stuffed with dirt, dead leaves, and a heavy load of ACUs—a tight bundle of sleeves and legs, dried mud and pixelated camo—for the laundry.

Umiko Kurasawa met him at the street door to their Cambridge apartment building, a flood of warm light glowing around her—like the light from another world. It made Nathan stop and smile, a genuine, letting down his guard, release everything that held him to the earth kind of smile. He gave into it, dropping his bag—which Tom, coming around the other side of the truck, picked up and carried into the building and up the stairs for him.

Then he was in her arms, hands shaking, hard to breathe, holding her as if the rest of the world were slipping by, and he could only bring it back with her help.

“Missed you, Umi.”

Umiko kissed him softly, and whispered, “Come up. I’ve made some tea, just for you. Something to loosen you up.” She didn’t let go—not yet. “You’re off work tomorrow—or the rest of today?”

Nathan sighed. “Unless something comes up.”

5 – Salvage

“Drifting,” Ty said to himself. “Has to be the Gulf Raider. Homing beacon isn’t working, though. She’s adrift, just over forty kilometers southeast of us, captain.”

A solid block of shadow cut across the daylight coming through the windows, and Tychasis looked up from the radar and proximity screens to find the bridge of the salvage ship Marcene empty.

Stretching to work the knots from his aching back, Ty felt the tension of a scowl forming on his face, muscles tightening like a fist, and down deep there was the sense of an alertness that should have been there—that hours of staring into mindless fucking machines with screens had dulled.

He had been hunched over them since noon, elbows on the metal, hands cupped around his face, intensely focused on the search, and—apparently—hadn’t noticed when the entire bridge crew had gone off duty. Or vanished like the Gulf Raider from the worldwide views of ship tracking services.

“Captain Wilraven?” He straightened, let his arm drop, one finger still pointing—now at the floor instead of southeast.

“Adista?” Eyes blinking, still adjusting to the low light, Ty whispered the First Officer’s name, and wheeled away from the bank of drive and navigation panels—to take in a bridge of empty stations and chairs. He didn’t like the ragged edge of darkness angling up the back wall and across the floor, something massive off the starboard side blocking half the sky and sunlight.

At least someone had hit the DPS—dynamic position system, which pinned the salvage ship, Marcene, to the waves, to a fixed point on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, almost four hundred kilometers south of Louisiana. Ty felt the comfortable motor-hum under his boots, of the ship’s thrusters working to hold the vessel steady against the heavy and continuous sea rolling into Marcene’s bow.

“Disappointed.” He whispered the word across the bridge, to the empty chairs and stations, a sudden gnawing raw regret that no one was here to celebrate the finding of the Raider. Or what made it stand out, the extraordinary means of finding the ship using the Marcene’s ordinary—although advanced—technology.  He could have found the ship an hour ago using his own special techniques, but Wilraven, as a learning exercise, had restricted him to the scanning devices on the bridge—with their “user interfaces” and silly acronyms and soul-blinding LED field arrays.

The solid slam of a door on his right, and Ty spun, startled, to find Captain Wilraven just in from the access way to the starboard flybridge. The man looked like a cowboy more than a sea captain and salvage master, tall and wiry in faded jeans and an Ocean Eight Salvage windbreaker—a wild west movie cowboy because Tychasis had never seen a real one. He had never even seen a real cow, and only once a horse from the deck of a bulk ore ship he and Adista had worked a decade ago.

“Cap?”

Standing in shadow, Ty couldn’t read the expression on Wilraven’s face, and then the captain was twisting to gesture back the way he had come, his voice excited.

“Ty, you have to see it.” With a trace of shame, he added, “Sorry, man, forgot you were heads-down in the x-band.”

“It?”

Wilraven was already opening the door, holding it for him. “The Thirty-one Eleven. She’s above the waves.”

Tychasis moved, trancelike, starting to shake his head, and then he was past Wilraven and through the door, standing in the cool air with the rest of Marcene’s bridge crew. His friend from childhood—who he followed to every post and position—First Officer, Adista Anastasatos, waved him over, and Ty nodded, just an acknowledgment because he couldn’t keep his gaze away from the “Thirty-one Eleven” for more than a few seconds at a time.

His neck was cranked back. He kept saying, “What?” with gasps of breath where the rest of the words were supposed to be dropped in. One hand gripping the railing, he found the fingertips of his other tapping lightly against the pad of muscle in from the thumb, melodies gathering, twisting, braided together in his head, the words of something special begging to be released, but trapped inside and tumbling around, a tickle at the back of his throat.

Until Santo Sequeira, one of Marcene’s navigators, helpfully laid out the complete question, “What is that?”

Tychasis glanced over, coughed to clear his throat, and nodded.

Behind him, looking up—like all of them—at the massive structure of an oil production platform, Captain Wilraven pointed out the four blocky numerals painted down the spar’s central cylinder, barely visible in the corrosion streaks and crust of algae, sponge formations, and the lively tangles and plates of corals.

Wilraven whispered, “Aurora Thirty-one Eleven. The whole platform went under—just vanished—during a tropical storm.” He looked around. “Fall of 2012?” And got a few nods.

The platform loomed over the salvage ship, a hundred meters of structural decking, broken cranes and booms, holes through the flooring of the helideck that jutted out of one side.  It was a spar platform, with the topside—all the production facilities, crew quarters, offices, cranes, derricks, operations machinery—sitting atop a massive cylindrical hull that was bottom-weighted and anchored to the Gulf’s floor a couple thousand meters under them.

Most of the gigantic structure was covered in sea life, bulbous growths of sponge and coral. Seaweed draped and folding wetly over the bracing and angle-structure of the production decks, hanging along a gantry crane and fluttering in the gulf wind.  There were already a dozen seagulls hopping over the feast, wings opening and shuddering territorially. A few soared over the newly surfaced wreck, keening sadly, looking for unguarded ground, landing to pick their way through fields of tubeworm colonies and mussels.

Ty gestured toward the platform. “What’s it doing here?”

Wilraven nodded, frowned a little as if the question had stumped him, and he had to give it some serious thought. “Still anchored, obviously.” He shook his head. “No idea how the ballast systems could suddenly decide to start functioning, to bring her above the waves.”

Adista looked up at the sky—as if reading something there, and then turned back to Captain Wilraven frowning. “I don’t believe the platform is anchored.  This isn’t where she was operational. Besides, there’s too much—” A gust of wind whipped away her words as she dropped her gaze to the water and leaned over the rails to study something at the base of the Thirty-one Eleven’s cylinder, where the sea sloshed and broke against the coral-crusted steel. “She doesn’t appear to be adrift either.”

Now they were all frowning. They could feel the Marcene straining against the Gulf currents, working to maintain her position lock—GPS managing the ship’s thrusters. If you weren’t anchored or under power, the current would eventually shove you into the shallows or a rocky coast somewhere. If the Thirty-one Eleven was not anchored that meant she had to be drifting.

The paradox kicked Ty’s thoughts back to the missing supply vessel, Gulf Raider—forty kilometers to the southeast, drifting.

“Captain, I found the Raider.”

That brought everyone around, the captain’s steady gaze locked on him, the rest of the bridge crew exchanging looks that Tychasis read as quickly-made connections between the coral-covered wreck of a platform looming over them and the mysterious disappearance of the platform supply vessel, Gulf Raider.

Wilraven glanced around, caught the conspiracy-building in the air, and nodded approvingly. “Awesome.” He tilted his head and gave Ty a knowing grin. “I assume you found her using nothing but the mundane and sometimes simplistic equipment of a moderately bright surface-dwelling humanoid species?”

Tychasis, whose thoughts and focus had wandered up to the drowned hulk of an oil platform, had to pull them back and take in the question. It took him another second to give the captain a sharp smirk. “You know I did.”

Nodding, Wilraven jabbed a thumb over his shoulder to the Thirty-one Eleven and said, “I know you’re keen to see what this is about. Leave it for later.” The captain turned and waved them all back inside. “Adista, can you give Rusty a call? Fill him in on the Thirty-one Eleven and what Ty has found?” He gestured to Tychasis. “Come on. We’re losing the day. Let’s go catch our casualty.”

Adista was already on the phone, nodding, her look of contemplation—of what could possibly make the Thirty-One Eleven float unanchored but not drift with the currents—shifting toward surprise in sharp intervals.

Catching Tychasis’ eye, she nodded to something someone on the other end of the phone said, and then waved to get the captain’s attention. “Ocean 8 wants us off this for a week. They want us up in the Atlantic, backfilling project work after tropical storm Carolin. Rusty’s called in the Buealiev Salvor from Maine, and he wants us on standby at Port Everglades.”

Captain Wilraven pointed south, an angry finger-jabbing gesture. “What about the Raider? She’s adrift. And she’s ours.”

After relaying that to Rusty, Adista frowned back at the captain. “He’s calling in a contract crew to catch the Gulf Raider. The casualty’s ours. It’s a promise. He’s just going to have them set an anchor until we can return—says no more than a week and we can pick up everything where we’re leaving it off here.”

With one more glance back at the Thirty-one Eleven, Wilraven said, “Well shit. I guess we’re heading home for a bit.”

6 – Half-Patho from Barnhouse

Arckale Darsey felt alone with the salt and soya shoots on a city-sized agro-raft called Winderrill in the middle of the endless shining Atlantic Ocean.

Feeling alone was nothing new, and he was used to it. He could still pretend to be free, but that was always the difficult part.

At least his hands were dirty, wet and alive with enriched mud, tiny flecks of white and perfect pink cubes—one of the new slow-dissolve nutrients in the dark soil.

There was a taste of ammonia through his fingers as he climbed backward down the ladder, stepped off three rungs above the circle pattern plank floor, landing hard. No one there took every ladder to the top or bottom. They learned quickly to jump on a ladder a few rungs up, and they stepped off a few rungs before the end. There were daring soyouts who scaled Winderrill’s slip-paint walls barefoot using only the ladder’s vertical rails. Everyone admired their independence and skill. No one, not even the fisherbelles, wanted to live in a world where someone else—especially not some aquamanager in Savannah or Salem—mapped out every single one of their footsteps.

Who does?

Arckale marked his place in the universe, slapped a muddy hand to the inside wall of the access tumble—insulated rectangular passages that ran end to bloody end of each row of linked floating platforms. They were called “tumbles” because sometimes the Atlantic liked to play with people, tilting the giant hex-shaped barges on end, kilometers of them linked and sawtoothed, up and down across the waves, and he’d swear there was laughter in the crests and storm swells as he curled up, tucked in his knees, locked his gloved fingers over his head, and rolled with the game, hoping the ocean would let him go. Arckale hoped like everyone else, but some of them also prayed to God, or Poseidonis, or even to that soyout-loving electric sewer-conduit god, the Flow Engineer. The Winderrills were not necessarily a religious lot, but he figured most people would pray to any listening god when the Atlantic was playful because there was nothing but the cloth of your long sleeved workforms between your skin and the hungry no-slip floor. That stuff would take your flesh off and eat it, then rinse your bones away with your own blood.

Running his fingers along the tumble’s wall, Arckale smiled. It must take an unusually cruel person to invent new kinds of no-slip flooring—it was always sharper, grabbier, with more teeth.

Just one more thing to hold your feet to this world. “Damned no-slip flooring.”

Out on Winderrill in the middle of the Atlantic, only the birds were free.

Free as in not attached, not as Besner put it to Arckale, laughing when he spoke the words aloud—“Damn seagulls. Free to roost, breed, and shit all over—free as in loader, you over-thinking Barnhouse pathojen.”

* * *

Then he wasn’t even free to pretend he was free.

“Arckale?”

Someone called his name and his construct responded, servos hissing, a thump of hydraulics waking up. Even the pretend freedom had vanished, left behind when they had taken him into custody. The construct woke Arckale with a sharp pain up his spine, bending his body at the waist, legs pivoting, knees unfolding so that his feet touched the floor.

The construct moved for him, because he was no longer allowed to move on his own.

We are born puppeteers, all of us, setting our own bones and muscles in motion. And short of falling off a cliff or rolling in the Atlantic’s undertow, the motion was all your own. Every footstep, bend of a finger, every over-the-shoulder glance, you owned them and you were responsible for every one of them.

Until they thought you’d done something wrong.

“Arckale?” The voice again, a woman’s official-sounding voice, and Arckale was wheeled left, hydraulics pumping to face the locked door of his room. The privacy slide was open—usually was, and he could see two dark eyes and the bridge of a nose through the rectangle. The eyes blinked at him, then small creases at the corners, a fraction of a frown.

“I thought…” Her first expression washed away, then her eyes widened with an uneasy surprise. “I was told you were a…”

Arckale completed her question. “Pathojen?”

She nodded, backing away from the door, glancing down at something she was holding, some kind of backlit slate, her case notes, his bio, something that made her nod. “From Barnhouse.”

He cleared his throat, spoke carefully. He didn’t want his words to be misunderstood. “I’m only half. That’s close enough for most of you. And yeah, I grew up at Barnhouse.”

People normally said raised at Barnhouse. Arckale didn’t like the term because it sounded too much like reality—that he’d been engineered, fed, trained, shown the light at Barnhouse. Like some fucking gen-engineered food or fuel crop.

That wasn’t far from the truth.

She was back at the slot in the door, looking him up and down, the surprise shifting fractionally into wonder—interesting how similar those two looks are. Maybe it was just in her eyes, and if he could see the rest of her face, he’d be able to see the fascination that gripped normal people when they knew they were walking into a trap, a demilitarized shopping zone, or an asp nest.

He could work with that.

Arckale didn’t pick up hatred, disgust—the usual responses to his in-between form of failure. No flurry of warding gestures, no sense of the word “abomination” or “damned before the Lord” on her lips—or at least not on any part of the face he could see. He was pretty sure abomination would make its presence known along the bridge of her nose, with some wrinkling, maybe nostrils flaring. There’s definitely some connection with the word to the sense of smell.

There was a hard not-quite-focused look in her eyes now, questions surfacing. Slight muscle movement. She was chewing her lip on the other side of the six centimeter thick door, broadcasting a very real sense that he was wrong and not rightable.

He was a thing with a somewhat normal appearance, but with wrongness to the core, like an inside out poison apple. No need to dip him in anything lethal. In a long-sleeved shirt and a hat he even looked human, a blemish here and there, a hint of something different, but still approachable. More like a poison apple right off the tree, picked and packaged for consumption. A prosaic deadliness, they used to say at Barnhouse.

But imagine apples that could—at a single touch—rip through a man’s genome and stack up his vulnerabilities like skulls in a game of Tyrants. Another saying at Barnhouse: use their own code against them.

And instead of an apple, let’s say it’s a handshake.

Arckale’s skin wasn’t the dry many-layered shield against the world it was in unaugmented humans. With a whole stack of extrasomes guiding development, his skin was a warm, moist, porous, world-absorbing layer, rows of biocap plates and interpreter scales up his arms, along his throat, spine, and behind it all there were several biological engines that took in every sample from the air he breathed and the world that touched him. Then it identified threats and plotted revenge, sometimes in very nasty ways. He could be repurposed for agricultural management and agri-gene malfunction, but deep down everyone knew pathojens were made for biowarfare. Frontline biothreat operations, that’s why Barnhouse created them.

“More information is always better, Arckale.”

Her voice brought him back to her eyes at the door, and his voice came back slow and withdrawn. “What?”

“Get dressed. I’ll wait for you in case room Blaker,” she said, and as she turned to walk away, “In the meantime, you decide how much you want to tell me about the killings.”

The construct—the “carceral construct” bolted up and down his arms, legs, spine—didn’t let him answer, somehow aware of the conversation’s end. It gripped his body in its human framework and walked him to the bathroom. One foot in front of the other.

For a second, he imagined being dead, and the thing carting him around like a zombie, servos whining, brain-hunt mode enabled.

It got a small smile that faded quickly when he caught it in the mirror.

The smile was gone, but he continued looking at his own face, the open slots in the skin along his throat, the burnished metallic panels implanted along his arms and chest.

How far does a parent’s responsibility cover their own children? And, assuming it does, for how long? Can there be decisions that carry responsibility into other lifetimes, into forever?

Arckale asked the questions to the biolocks on his wrists and ankles, the throat and jaw collar, the spinal struct running up and across his shoulders, down his arms and legs, into the gloves and boots that walked him to the basin, opened his mouth, and made him brush his teeth.

Pathojen? I didn’t ask to be born this way. It was decided for me.

It also meant—and he had a mouthful of minty foam as he was thinking it—he never had to brush his teeth, because there wasn’t a single cell, chemical agent, bacterium, or protein-coated bit of viral info in his body he wasn’t aware of and managing.

For pathos, teeth brushing was one more useless, time-consuming activity, like hand washing, nail-clipping, and most grooming—all about as useful to a patho as a wild goose chase.

That cleanliness stuff came with the code, it was built into them.

Arckale glanced in the mirror, shot a brief smile back at himself. The wild goose thing refused to leave for a moment, sticking around to nag at him, then ran away, leaving only the question. Who chases wild geese anyway? Why not just set a trap for them? An ID&D—identification and drop protocol is simple to put together and release. Takes a minute, maybe ninety seconds. Only decision to be made is how hard to drop these fleeing geese, are we talking temporary or no-revival?

Behind him he heard the room’s door locks snap apart, but there was no freedom in that sound, only hope for it.

The carceral construct turned Arckale Darsey from the sink in his prison cell and walked him to his trunk of clothes.

Autonomous by Chris Howard – Chapters 1 – 3

1 – Surprise

Katren was a ship without a port. She was a ninety-four meter OSV—offshore supply vessel—with big hydraulic knuckle cranes looming over an aft deck stacked with suspiciously positioned and locked shipping containers, some with armed guards. It had been years since she had last touched any legitimate world port, rarely coming in sight of land, but Katren was a ship with an active and deadly purpose, and as her captain, Reyes Lacourse, made his way from the bridge down to the mid deck, he pondered a word his ship was full of: surprise.

Reyes nodded to a tall, cold woman in a starched white labcoat passing him just down from the command crew quarters. “Laura.”

“Captain.” Laura didn’t return a nod, or anything that looked warmer than the Atlantic beyond the thick all-weather windows.

Reyes didn’t notice, or care. He was concerned—at the moment—with surprises and being surprised.

He quickly turned at the next corner, took another set of stairs deeper into the ship’s interior, fiddling with an adage from his line of work: only the fragile had trouble with surprise. The strong expected it. Anticipated it.

But there were certain times, and there were certain operations that could not cope well with surprise.

“Juggling, for instance,” Reyes said to himself as he ducked through the heavily-latched deck door behind the two giant drums of the ship’s towing winches. “Juggling with chainsaws.”

Sliding sideways through the narrow space, Reyes stepped into the open along Katren’s port side, the cool North Atlantic wind trying to shove him around, snapping at the collar of his shirt.

Ambush. Just one kind of surprise.

Harv Marsh, one of Katren’s DPOs was coming up the outside stairs with another kind of surprise—an entirely new kind—someone’s spying little submersible, an underwater vehicle that seemed to able to track his ship. Reyes walked out of the port-winch’s shadow and into Marsh’s path, hooking the half-meter long cylindrical machine right out of the man’s hands.

Marsh stumbled back, caught the railing and just managed to keep his feet. His eyes were widening, the quicker parts of his body already reacting. Reyes saw the angry expression forming, a snap response, muscles tightening across his face and throat. Marsh’s mouth opened with an infuriated shout before a few necessary pieces of reality came together in his head to guide him. The DPO suddenly recognized the captain. Just in time. He clamped his mouth shut, blinked a few times, and shuffled back several steps.

Reyes waved him off, smiling. “Thanks, Marsh. For bringing up the prying piece of plastic and propellers.”

Marsh nodded with a nervous gesture. “Captain, sure. No problem.” And then backed up a few more steps, wheeled, and took the stairs a little too quickly.

A minute later Reyes—“Captain Reyes” because he didn’t tolerate the written or spoken use of his last name—followed Marsh down to the ship’s main deck, seawater running off the sub, up his arm into the thick folds of his rolled shirt sleeve.

In fact, it was the man that Reyes took orders from who did not want his full name, Reyes Lacourse, used in any document—or even spoken aloud. In their line of work there was always the possibility of someone recording conversations—the CIA, NSA, MISTIC, MSS, Mossad, CGI, or just someone new.

There was always someone fucking new.

Parallel with that, there was no such thing as being too careful, and the appearance of the little sub in his hands proved the point.

With a sudden stab of paranoia, Reyes scanned the horizon off Katren’s port side, marching through the shadow of one of the ship’s knuckle cranes, toward a village of orange and blue shipping containers crowding thirty meters of aft deck space, some of them stacked two high with narrow spacing between them to allow access. Most of them were stores for gear, food, and other everyday work and living related items. At least three had round-the-clock armed guards.

Reyes nodded to one of these, and did a slow turn to take in the length of open deck along the starboard side, the hull’s blue showing in a machine-straight line from the stern. The blue passed behind the massive white-painted superstructure, a mountain of angled metal planes and windows that formed the bulk of the ship’s working spaces and living quarters. Reyes ended up making a complete circle, and then returned to the port rail to continue contemplating someone’s clever use of surprise, still holding the little sub in one hand as if he didn’t want it too close.

Katren was a heavily armed multipurpose offshore vessel with a crew of fifty, about half of them captive “employees” that Reyes and his soldiers—the ship’s “command crew”—had taken from ships they had seized, looted, and sunk—sometimes sold or set to drift. Katren’s home was international water, mostly Atlantic, a ship with a shifting identity, that could drop in and out of global mapping and tracking data like a ghost—a ghost with the occasional need to slip into the real world to refuel, stock up on supplies, find a victim, and do some damage. Or play host to even scarier people directing secret activities all over the globe.

So it was quite a surprise to find that something so small and intelligent—the interesting device with dive planes and propeller Reyes held in one hand—had been stalking them up the eastern seaboard of the US. It was a tiny autonomous sub with video capabilities—and who knew what else? The sub had doggedly followed them across several thousand miles of ocean—and even scarier—managed to track and pinpoint Katren’s location without a trail, somehow knowing the ship’s ever-changing course without close and continuous pursuit.

The sub had to be able to record and match the sound of the screws. And that really surprised Reyes. Identifying the Katren by listening and matching what it heard against a stored propeller-noise signature meant a rare level of sophistication in a commercial project.

Or it was an experiment in someone’s military.

Reyes had spotted the little machine himself a few times, sightings off the Carolinas, and once when the man he took orders from came aboard to remotely oversee a particularly dangerous and bloody rendering operation in progress somewhere near Vancouver.

Captain Reyes held up the autonomous underwater vehicle, seawater running down his arm to the deck. The shrouding around the propeller had been broken off during capture, exposing the blades. Tilting the sub on end, he inspected the clear bullet dome of the fore with the camera equipment on a panning mount, the lens sticking out like an eye. Some intelligence in the machine’s programming had the glossy black circle pinned to him, shifting on gyros as if trying to keep his face in the center of the frame.

Questions about the sub’s purpose kept piling up. Why would an autonomous ship-tracking sub have what appears to be built-in face identification?

“Hey, Cap. I saw the dive team fish it out of the water.” Katren’s Second Officer crossed the deck toward him. “The fuck is it?”

Reyes looked up, gave Mowen a sour look. “The little machine that’s been videoing our movement and operations.” He sighed, used the little sub to point east toward the American coast, one handed, his other hand gesturing toward his ship, Katren, her crisp blue hull standing out bright against the deep gray Atlantic waves. It was a dramatic gesture, as if Reyes was about to quote some early Yeats, or at least say something profound. “The question to ask is who the fuck is Valerie Bennefield?”

Second Officer Mowen stopped beside Reyes, leaned an elbow on the port side railing, turning to the captain with a confused expression. He gestured, twisting one open hand up to show that he had no idea what the captain was talking about.

Reyes smiled, rolled the autonomous sub around to display the name in clear block letters printed up by the sub’s tail. “A graduate student at the University of New Hampshire. Apparently this is her project, some sort of ship tracking service using these little autonomous subs. Says so right here.” Reyes tilted the end up, made a face that seemed to show he was impressed by the technology. “And this one happened to find us and follow us up the east coast.” He paused, gestured to the waves. “And way the hell out in the middle of the North Atlantic.”

Seawater was soaking through his shirt sleeve. The hull slippery under his fingers, Reyes tilted the machine away, resting it along the length of his outstretched arm, but at an angle to let the water run down the half meter length toward the transparent end with the camera. The sea and salt slid through his fingers, over bands of flexible solar panels, which made up most of the sub’s exposed surface. A rectangle of sensor arrays broke through a section of the exposed hull just up from the video gear.

“What’s also interesting is—”

The sub’s propeller spun up, a buzzing whine and chopping sound as the sharp blades cut into Reyes’ forearm, a spray of blood whipping across his face, splattering the front of his white shirt.

The sub hit the edge of the deck of the Katren, skidded up against the lip, into the air, and through the gap running the lower edge of the railing. It went over the side, nose down into the cold dark water, and Reyes, blinking blood from his eyes, went over the rail after it, a straight vertical dive into the angry Atlantic.

He surfaced a few seconds later, kicking wildly to turn his body toward the west, pointing over the waves. “Do you see it? Where did it go? I want it dead in the water!”

The panic in the captain’s voice stunned Mowen for a moment, and then he snapped out of it, tapped the comm plug in his ear and started mobilizing the ship’s forces.

Reyes kicked closer to the Katren, over ninety meters of metal-walled ship sliding by in the dark water, already slowing with the man-overboard signal. He had to kick back to see two of the command crew’s gunners already active and scanning the waves for signs of the little sub.

Lots of looking, and leaning into the scopes of their rifles. No shooting.

Rising to the sharp crest of a wave, Reyes jabbed a finger at his first officer, Mowen, who was leaning way over the portside rails and relaying orders to someone behind him on deck.

“Mowen, I want the nearest operative turned on. I want Bennefield dead inside twelve hours. I want a reduction and wash. Tonight if we can. Understood?”

The first officer was nodding at the orders before he could make himself act on them. After a few moments, he said, “Right,” and scanned through a list on a small tablet cupped in the palm of one hand. “Mourn just left for Canada. Not too late to bring her back. Numerology’s on the west coast—in operation. We have Asphodel coming in from Cypress in time for it. New Hampshire’s his neck of the woods.”

Reyes wiped saltwater from his eyes, looked up at his First Officer curiously for a minute, and said, “Isenart?”

Mowen glanced down at the tablet’s screen, a scowl at the captain’s sudden lapse in security—matching an actual name with the operator’s coded identity. “Yup.”

Maybe it was the cold Atlantic getting to Reyes after losing the sub. Maybe it was the fear of what Dagger was going to do to him when he found out. Because Dagger always found out.

The rescue team was lowering the sling for the captain of the Katren, with a diver on stand-by, and Reyes kicked for the web of bright orange straps as they curled and folded into the water.

Just as he reached them he gave Mowen a curt nod. “Give the kill to Asphodel. And I want a grab team deployed for Bennefield’s residence. We need to find out everything about this submersible project she has going.”

2 – A Pair from Wolfsbane

Nathan Isenart hadn’t slept in seventy-two hours, and moving through the streets of Levkosía at two o’clock in the morning felt like dreaming with his eyes open.

That’s how deployment usually felt. Distant and connected at the same time, sharing his head with another similar person—only colder and closer to some social edge that kept normal people from killing each other. Over there he was dreaming of predators and someone else’s blood running through someone else’s fingers.

That was with the idle-line side of his mind.

To his online side, everything going on over there in idle-line felt a bit deeper than an ordinary dream. It felt more like a game, with questions and puzzles to keep the killer occupied until he was needed. Over there, it was like a full sense-depth and scoped interactive, shapes sliding by in slow motion, angled red shades of death, a dance with fine bones—and the sounds they made when they broke. Over there, Nathan Isenart dreamed of questions and killing and the streamlined predatory rocketing of dolphins.

So many questions.

Do dolphins dream of razorfishes when they’re on assignment? When the assignment is delivery or the assignment is reduction? Any particular species of delivery or reduction? Any particular species of razorfish? Do dolphins dream of Iniistius celebicus? The crunch of fine bones between their teeth? And what do they taste when those teeth open up the flesh of the fish?

Nathan let the questions flow, and let his momentum walk him twelve meters vertical, up the wall of the castle-like office building adjacent to the target’s location.

In Cyprus it seemed to fit right in. Turrets and banners, like something out of that crusader movie with Brigette Raia.

That was a sudden and strange thought. He had no idea who Brigette Raia was, and no idea where the images of a fortified medieval city had come from. Was it possible to pick up memories from the Prime Nathan Isenart, who knew nothing of the two identities currently in command?

He dismissed it. Leave it for the killer to ponder.

With one hand hooked over the parapet, he stopped to catch his breath, kept his legs spread, toes bent in climber’s shoes digging into brick, clinging to the side of the building like a spider.

Let the other side play, he thought with his online side. Let it dream and question things all it wants.

For now.

Timecheck. Three hundred thirty seconds more, and then he would let the dreams out.

Deep breaths, two of them.

And when he finally did—three hundred and twenty seconds from now—allow the other side to shift out of idle, he would let this side fall into dreams. Of calculating and puzzle solving. And dancing. Both sides could dance up walls and into ductwork, move silently through any city, speak half a dozen languages, and blend into a hundred different social forms and strata around the world. But only the other side—now idle—had learned to kill without feeling.

And it was nearly time to kill.

Noise in the alley below him. Nathan went still without a thought, his body blending into the shadows and the brick, his breathing already silent and slowing. He tilted his face forward to focus down between his legs, on the movement twelve meters below.

One of the target’s security detail: male, about 80 kilos, submachine gun, training down in Lemesos, desert tactics in North Africa, and seaport infiltration in the U.S. northwest.

Nathan knew everything about them, and it drove his plans. A rapid spread of future steps fanned out in his mind, the tree branching at decision points, a handful of them already flipping and crossing, calculating when and how and where they’d come back together if he had to drop and remove the threat.

The guard walked on, and alternative plans folded away in Nathan’s head like a map he didn’t need any more. He knew the territory. He was already over the top edge, swinging his body through the air and then panther-moving across the gravel roof of the castle, crouching under support cabling for a communications rig that branched black lightning across the sky, a haphazardly bolted together mass of microwave and satellite concaves and shields, and in between it all, a hundred beam reflectors gleaming in the night like ornaments on a Christmas tree.

Nathan jumped the north end of the castle’s roof, a good four meter drop, impact and roll, and he was up sprinting for the roof access door, his right arm curling back, one hand snaking through the backpack’s webbing, coming free with the chemcutter.

Thumbing off the safety, he pulled the cutter’s trigger, sprayed a tight circle around the doorknob. He tucked the chemcutter back into the web. The door eased open after the knob came off in his other hand.

And it was time.

The idle-side of Nathan’s mind reared up, banked into a roll that folded over his logistics side like day sliding under the dark of night. He felt dizzy for a moment. He felt empathy drift away like debris in a storm, and the killer came online. All in the time between an eye blink.

Nathan Isenart the Killer set down the doorknob, and tried to pick out shapes in the dark on the other side of the door. Nothing yet. It always took a few seconds for the needier parts of his vision to come online.

And there were other senses. Tilting his head back, he pulled in a long slow breath through his nose and open mouth. People had scents, everyone did, sweat, food, perfumes, the smells of their favorite clingy pets, and the detergent in their clothes.

Nothing out of the ordinary in the air.

His audio senses was also highly tuned, enhanced with implants—for hearing as well as localizing sounds.

Shifting his stance low to the ground, he swung the door wider, and he was inside, down the stairs, three at a time, footfalls sure and quiet as the night.

Now he could see in the dark.

Twenty-four stairs, gloved fingers light on the rail. Twenty-six. Turn at the landing, down one more flight, and he was through the fire door on the second floor.

Silence.

A big guy in ten grand of Fioravanti tailored suit came around the corner at the end of the hall, black hair pulled back in a ponytail, eyes and fingers on some app on his phone, loaded H&K MP7 swinging free under one arm. Free and clear because he’s too busy fucking with his gear to notice me. Too busy worrying about looking like a bodyguard—dumbass ponytail. Too busy to keep a hand on the only thing that might save him now.

Nathan slowed his breathing, pasting himself to the wall.

The armed suit approached, bent over the screen, the glow lighting his face, bright against the dark hallows of his eye sockets, like a shiny superhero mask.

Nathan spent a couple seconds studying the material of the suit. Perfect fit. Charcoal gray. Some obscenely high grade of merino wool. What the fuck is the target wearing if his bodyguards dress like kings?

He decided right there that he would really try not to ruin the suit. The work of an artist. It would be criminal.

His hand shot out with the injector as the guard swept by. A quick squeeze and Nathan felt the jolt, a soft thump in his bones as the needle slid into the guard’s throat just above the shirt’s collar, carried and delivered a pulse of current to immobilize, and pushed the marionette load under the skin. By the time the guy in the lovely suit knew what had hit him, he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move on his own. He no longer owned any movement of his body.

Nathan did.

Steering the human shield through the door at the end of the hallway, Nathan reached under the guy’s arm left-handed, fingers sliding over the grip of the H&K, thumb sliding it into full auto.

That’s when the disappointment rammed home.

There was nothing he could do. The guy’s suit wasn’t going to survive the next few seconds. It’s going to be like a circus in here, isn’t it?

The target stood at a tall dresser across the room, back to Nathan, wearing a bathrobe, a big soft towel rolled around his neck, short dark hair glistening wet from the shower.

A glance in the mirror, and the target wheeled whip-quick and there was a big ass throwing knife thrumming in the center of the guard’s chest, the blade pinning a sharp wedge of the jacket’s left lapel, blood running to the handle and dribbling to the floor.

Nathan tilted up the gun, squeezed off a burst, punching the target against the dresser, another throwing blade that hadn’t been quite ready slipped from loose fingers to the rug.

Knees folding sharply, the target skidded down a wide slick of his own blood—now painting the face of the dresser, arms limp at his sides. Then he thudded to the floor inelegantly. He stared at Nathan, watching him without fear or pain or disgust. Just watching him step out from behind his shield. Then he stared at nothing.

Nathan came over, crouched down to check the target’s pulse. He fingered a couple of the bullet holes, lifted the target’s robe to see two knives remaining in the belt of sheaths across his chest.

Blood running through his gloved fingers and he wondered if the guy showered with his knives. I would.

He looked over his shoulder, lining up the scene: bodyguard betrays target, gets off a good dozen rounds just as the target unleashes his famed knife-throwing skills. Both dead.

Nathan stood, crossed the room, tipped the bodyguard in the ruined suit to the floor, and slipped out the door.

Then he was a shiver of motion in the shadows up the stairs, spider scaling walls, slipping clear through the windows of a neighboring building, out the other side, and he was gone.

* * *

Nathan Isenart was squeezing into the seat harness at the back of the gunship two thousand meters over western Cyprus, signaling mission success to his extraction team before he allowed his calm calculating side to come back online.

For now. The Killer would be needed one more time tonight.

Five hours later he was back in the States, driving up the coast of New England on one final operation before some well-deserved downtime. A quick kill the command center told him—commands came from a ship, code-named Krystal, operating outside any territorial water.

It was a quick one: sniper rifle—a G22 with suppressor—was under a blanket in the car when he picked it up in the Starbucks parking lot in Seabrook. One shot, dump the rifle, torch the car, and take a commuter bus to the station just outside Newington, New Hampshire to be processed by his ops manager.

Hands wiped. Operation complete.

Then he was sitting across the same pressboard writing desk from the man with the pink notched scar down one cheek and into his upper lip, in the room that looked like someone’s half-assed office-in-the-basement remodel.

“Thank you again, Nathan Isenart.”

“No problem.”

“Listen to me carefully.” The briefest pause, as if Scarlip was about to say something terribly insightful.

Nathan leaned forward to catch everything.

“Wolfsbane procurator asphodel one zero zero four dazzle is constrained.”

Nathan blinked and swung his arms up, fingers clawing the air, a bloom of heat and sweat across his chest and shoulders, tracing lines of fire up the back of his neck. He felt that rip-current sense of disorientation, of not knowing which way to turn, and then he almost fell out of the chair.

The room felt alien, fictional, as if it didn’t belong to any reality Nathan knew, and he looked around to see if he could spot some piece of it that might provide a sense of place.

Spinning in his chair, his gaze stopped, fixed on the flowering plant on the filing cabinet in the corner.

That’s an Aconitum, one of the wolfsbanes or monkshoods. Had to be careful touching them. Poisonous. His fiancé collected them, loved them, and Nathan wondered if Umiko had placed the flowering plant in the room to help him find his way.

Whether she did or not, it worked. It calmed him down, and showed him the way home.

The world smeared by, then locked into position with an almost audible snap.

He cleared his throat, focused on the man with the cut through his lip, sitting and smiling in the chair across from him.

“Tom? What are you doing here?”

Nathan blinked at his old friend, Tom Cronall, a retired New Hampshire State Trooper, realizing at that moment that he was sitting in Tom’s basement.

He looked down at his faded camos, his boots planted squarely on the floor. It came back to him, a few stray memories clicking into place. He’d been at Army Reserve training—his Annual, two sleepless weeks of dicking around with guns and mud in upstate New York with a bunch of other reservists.

Tom slid a measured dose of worry into his look, leaning forward. “You must be tired. Umiko called, said you needed a pick-up in Portsmouth. Coffee? Need a ride into the City?”

Nathan rubbed his eyes, nodding as he stood and followed Tom upstairs. “Yeah, great, coffee, I think I need it.” Still disoriented, Nathan waded through the mess in his head to find his fiancé Umiko. God, it seemed like a month since he’d seen her. “Umi say anything else?”

“Nothing important. Let’s see…” At the top of the stairs, Tom shrugged and returned a laugh. “Yeah, I think it was something about how deeply she missed her true love. Come on, let’s get some coffee.”

3 – Malcolm Marx and the Farm

Malcolm Marx opened the door and froze with his mouth open, the blunt, perforated muzzle of a gun leveled on his face. He tried to get his focus to move beyond the barrel and got as far as the big knuckles of the hands that held it. The gunman had it gripped two-fisted in light gray synthetic gloves. Two words surfaced through the fear in Malcolm’s head.

Law enforcement.

“Detective Reely, SFPD,” said a man’s voice on the other side of the gun, a deep relaxed voice.

“And I’m Isabel Torrella.” She held up her ID, impatient.

Malcolm registered a smear of gold shield somewhere in the background, but there was no way he could pull his gaze away from the hole at the end of the gun.

Isabel continued, “The detective’s with homicide. I’m with the Behavioral Unit. Malcolm Marx? We’re here to ask you some questions. Can we come inside?” Then to her partner, “Reely, can you get that out of his face for a second so he can answer me?”

“Sure, Iz.” A swift mechanical motion and Detective Reely of the San Francisco Police Department folded everything deadly away, stowing it all under a long tan overcoat with the collar pulled up.

Malcolm started breathing again, and the two cops moved inside without being asked.

Godless neanderthals. Go kill each other in your dirty lawless streets. Go pretend there is law. Go serve and protect, you mindless, shit-eating…

“Hey, now.” Reely, the homicide cop spoke first, his tone matter-of-fact, not a hint of sarcasm. “That’s a pretty good act, or it really is like the interviews tell it—you weren’t one of the combat trained twenty-six at The Farm.”

Malcolm gathered his thoughts for another time, nodded, said calmly, “Nalli is the combatant.”

It was common knowledge. The whole world knew their names. The twenty-six alphabetically-ordered members of The Farm had been on the covers of People Magazine, OK! and TimeOut—several times for celebrity introductions, a few individual spotlights, and then a decade later in big detailed Where are they now spreads.

The secrets were in the depths. Very few knew what they were really capable of, what they were raised and developed for.

Isabel Torrella made a couple screen stabs on an old iPad in a beat up ruggedized case, slid a finger like it was on ice, gestured with three across the face. Malcolm counted another six light finger taps before the Behavior Unit cop came back with, “That would be Nalli Nascas?”

Malcolm didn’t bother to curb his sudden irritation with the obvious. “The combatant.”

Reely cracked a smile. “And what are you, Mr. M, her tool or her toy?”

He got an elbow from Isabel Torrella for that.

Malcolm just stared at him, calmly planning the cop’s painful death, something drawn out, where the victim saw and understood what was going to happen—without being able to stop it, perhaps something involving anesthetics and live amputation? And then it swung fully formed into view. Two chairs facing each other, Reely anesthetized and immobile in one while Malcolm slowly took the cop apart… Start at the feet. Two tourniquets just above each ankle, let the saw slide smoothly between them, keep the spilling to a minimum, then a slick stainless steel whine, the wound sucking on the teeth. What he wanted the cop to see was his own body being taken apart piece by piece in one chair and reassembled—and posed like a mannequin—in the opposite chair. Toes, the left foot, then the right, then one calf, then the other, fingers, arms, shoulders. It wasn’t about physical pain. It was about composition and decomposition, about being in two places at the same time—or part of you being in one place while the rest was waiting to catch up—one part at a time—in another. Physical pain could be handled. What about the pain of seeing your body taken apart, slowly, and turned into inanimate parts that can’t be reassembled? It would be like seeing yourself becoming a toy, something made of plastic, unreal. That was the source of the fear, right there. He wanted this ignorant cop, Reely, to realize that Malcolm Marx could make him feel unreal. Permanently.

What is your first name, Reely? Even Isabel Torrella calls you by your family name, last name, surname, Reely. Why is that? Because she doesn’t know it? Because it’s a big secret? Malcolm’s internal claw and info retrieve systems, almost always on and ready to track things down, spoke to him and gave him the answer. No, it isn’t a secret, is it?

“I am the SII, Detective Kenneth Reely.” He slowed down, as if Reely was a child, and he had to construct the next three words out of their syllabic parts. “Strategy, Inference, Interpretation. Nalli does the killing. I plan who we are to kill, and how we are to do it.” He paused, continued staring hard at Reely. “And how long it will take to die.”

Reely gave him a narrow-eyed look for a moment—not the least bit frightened, but clearly not missing the use of his first name. Then turned to his partner. “Present tense use. ‘Does’, ‘plan’, and ‘how long’?” His gaze slid back to Malcolm. “Not in the past anymore, Mr. M? Maybe we should be talking to Miss N.”

The Behavior Unit cop stepped forward. “You’re a well-connected smart guy, Malcolm?”

She said it in a question, but he just stared at her, taking it as self-evident.

Torrella went on. “Laws are an inconvenience at best, aren’t they? You’re not really afraid of us?” She went on after another brief pause. “I can assume my partner and I wouldn’t be able to leave the room alive if you didn’t want us to?” She looked around, up along the sharp lines where the walls met the ceiling, taking in the rows of books in columns of built-in cases. Nothing deadly stood out.

He studied Isabel Torrella for a minute, and decided he didn’t really hate her. “It’s possible.”

Her look sharpened. “Possible that we might die, or possible that I can assume we might?”

Malcolm had to smile then. Clever cop. “The latter. I have not prepared as well as I should have for a visit by your law enforcement.”

She nodded, understood. And he could clearly see what she was thinking in her expression. With the twenty-six from the Farm, it was us and the rest of the world—angels and lower humanity. And it went deep. Your law enforcement. Your streets, your world. We’ll just take it from you at the right time because you don’t deserve it. You don’t seem to want it bad enough.

Torrella looked around the room, nodding again.

Her expression was clear. She could see he was closing up the whole show, moving on, and going underground.

Malcolm looked over and caught Reely’s grimace at his above-the-law-they-were-trying-to-enforce attitude. Malcolm said nothing. Let the cops ask their questions. Then he could continue packing in his operation, his belongings, kitchen tools, clothing, furniture, whatever he could safely and cleanly bring into hiding with him.

“Abbey Alder is dead, the first to be killed. Zia Zahniser was next. Then Brenden Bensing takes a couple shots to the head.” Isabel Torrella tapped a gun-barrel fingertip to her temple, dropped it—still smoking—to scroll down on her screen, and went on. “There’s a pattern emerging. You want to tell us about it?”

Malcolm said nothing. The prayers were in his head. He would let blood later in offering to the angels brought home to God.

Reely moved into threat range. “Someone’s cleaning out the Farm. First to die was A, then Z, then B… then Y? First off the bottom, then one off the top. When will it end? All twenty-six of you?”

Malcolm backed up a step. He wished Nalli were there with him.

Torrella finished up for her partner. “So, given that you’re M, that puts you—with N—Nalli, right in the middle.”

Malcom nodded.

“Right in the fucking middle. In the middle of it all. Safely in the middle.” Reely gave them a dramatic expansive gesture. “And how are we—a couple of dumbass cops—not supposed to think it’s one of you? One of your fellow Farmies who finally got tired of the other letters in the alphabet soup?”

Smartass cops.

Torrella added what didn’t need to be. Repeating herself, thought Malcolm, just to make me angry. “Burning down starts at the ends. Puts you in the middle, Malcolm Marx. Kind of makes you last to get a turn in this game. What if you’re the killer?”

Malcolm shook his head.

Reely smiled thinly, jabbed at him with a finger. “Well then, farmboy, why don’t you fill us in with some of your magical Strategy, Inference, and Interpretation?”

Malcolm stared at Isabel for one long minute, ignored Reely, held up three fingers, then slowly curled one down into his palm, leaving the index and ring standing up. “Have you talked to any of the soldiers in Wolfsbane? Any of the Barnhouse disease-throwers?”

Reely shared a sudden confused glance with Torrella, turned back to jut his chin at Malcolm. “Barnhouse, the biowarfare school?”

“It’s never been just a school, Detective Reely.”

Torrella looked lost. “What’s Wolfsbane?”

“The scariest of us all.”

“Us?”

“Three of us. The Farm, Barnhouse, Wolfsbane. Rivals. Someone else might say more than rivals? We didn’t start out competing for anything, but the world is different now. We have the Cons—or MISTIC—doing who knows what behind the scenes. We have battles planned down to individual casualties—and then set in motion. Like a game. If I were assigned to your case, I would start with the others.” Malcolm kept the two fingers in the air, and said quietly, “The deaths in the Farm are clearly about who we are. Only two ways this plays out, but it doesn’t point to who it could be. Just why it’s moving the way it is. My colleagues—my angels—were hunted down and killed for who they were.” He shrugged, a new thought coming to him. “Or they were asked to do something because of who they were.”

“Do something? Then what happened to them?”

Malcolm sighed. “Obviously they refused.”

Read AUTONOMOUS for free!

I post a lot of art—sketches, paintings, book covers. I occasionally post one of my short stories online. but I have only posted an entire book online once, and that was a long time ago—2005-ish. This is a serialization type thing, in which I will post three to four chapters every week until every last word is available to read. Free. Just so you know, Autonomous is complete and in editing, so there is no chance that I will post the first fourteen chapters and skip town without letting you read the rest. Well, there’s a slight chance of that, but it’s nearly zero.

About the story.

Autonomous is about wild-ass technology, the future of intelligence, floating cities in the middle of the ocean, murder, and autonomous underwater vehicles. It’s a stand-alone story, loosely connected to my book Salvage (Masque, 2013). If you’ve read Salvage then you’ve already met a few of the characters, but if you haven’t, what’s the worst than can happen? Right, but besides that?

If a story can have a shape, then I think Autonomous is funnel-shaped. It begins sort of loose, with a wide spread of characters who appear to be moving in different directions, and as we progress, the funnel walls impose on the narrative. They close in—metaphorically—and most of the characters and their stories slip into the more concentrated flow with other characters and their stories until we have a richer, deeper, more complex story that carries everyone through to the end. (Almost everyone).

Then again, maybe that’s every story ever told?

Scratch all that. Autonomous is a murder mystery at its core, but it’s also about many different people, and groups of people, taking sides to solve a serious problem. And by serious I mean civilization-ending, or deadly on a global scale. Not all of these people end up on the same side. Some of these people do not survive. Some of these people are inside one person—the principal character, Nathan Isenart, is made up of three very different aspects of the same person, sharing the same name, sharing the same physical form, but not much after that. Autonomous is also about three fairly-secret military programs with rival visions for the world’s future.

There, I think that covers some of it. If that sounds daunting or just weird, don’t forget that Autonomous is really about wild-ass technology, the future of intelligence, floating cities in the middle of the ocean, and autonomous underwater vehicles.

—Chris Howard, 2014, Somewhere near the Atlantic

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Saltwater Witch Chapter 17 Update!

Saltwater Witch Comic

I know. I know, it’s been too long. I’ve been busy working on the Salvage comic, and left Saltwater Witch to just sit there for a couple months. Well, I’m back in business on Saltwater Witch, with three more pages–the rest of chapter 17 scripted and storyboarded. I just need to do the art and lettering. Soon. Very soon! In the meantime I’ve posted a new page for chapter 17, Kassandra and her grandmother still discussing the coming problems with Tharsaleos. The talk’s getting a little more intense.

Character Concept for the Salvage Comic – Laenia

Salvage character concept for Laeina, who is seaborn (note the webbing between her fingers). The comic’s based on the book Salvage (Masque, 2013), but I’m bringing the fantastical elements of the story closer to the surface in the comic, ship-sinking monsters, people who live in the sea—the Seaborn. (Salvage is part of the Seaborn series). http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com

New Complete Seaborn Cover

Salvage on Goodreads

There’s a day left on the Salvage Goodreads giveaway. Still time!

Enter to win!

To tease you a bit, here are two more panels from the Salvage comic, the opening page of the next chapter.  That’s Martin in the Knowledgenix control room, and below that, a kilometer off Moss Landing in Monterey Bay, it’s John Andreden chatting with Theo–who’s starting to look like a cyborg killer whale.

Check out the Salvage comic preview on the Salvage site.

The Wine of Ravens is live!

I’m happy to announce that my story collection, The Wine of Ravens, is live! (I have to add that I love this cover!)

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple iBooks

Like a lot F&SF readers, D&D players, and geeks in high-school and college in the 70s and 80s, I was into Norse mythology, Vikings, longboats, and everything that went along with that chaotic, and often violent, world–although I probably went a bit far, and thought Vikings so passé that I changed my focus to the Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and Frisians instead. Enter my character, Aldred the Saxon, a sort of geeky version of a teenager living at that time, among the chaos, expansion, tensions with a fading Rome, and other territorial disputes.  If you ever liked Robert E. Howard’s Cormac Mac Art stories, or Andrew J. Offutt’s Cormac books, you’ll be a fan of Aldred.

From the back cover:

If you can see into the future, gods will take notice of you. Aldred’s brother is killed unjustly, and Aldred is forbidden to bury or honor him. He defies the decree, and makes a pact with strangers, an old man who won’t show his face and a giant who requires a final battle before he lights the pyre for Aldred’s brother. Aldred returns to face his doom and discovers that an agreement he has made in life pursues him after death.

The Wine of Ravens is a set of six stories that cover a good part of the life of Aldred the Saxon, from his first meeting with old One-eye (Diminisher of Peace), his journey across Europe, tangling with the unjust, with various forms of death, to the Near East exploring belief among the ruins of the once great Roman city of Caesarea Maritima (The Breaker of Gods), and then back north to his homeland and across the channel to Britain.

The story “Diminisher of Peace” was originally published in The Harrow, and later as part of the short story collection Always Becoming. The other five stories, “The Witch of Khoreios”, “The Breaker of Gods”, “The Feeder of Ravens”, “Wonderdeed”, and “The Wine of Ravens”, along with Diminisher, were serialized in Sacred Twilight. Together they form a fairly complete tale of the life of Aldred, a Saxon who can best be described as a researcher with a gift, working around 420 CE for Wodan, a god who gave up one of his eyes for wisdom. This apparently gave him a leg up on how to deal with the Ragnarok, but also gave him the drive to spend a good deal of time trying to plan and prepare for that final battle of the gods. Aldred was presumably just one of several people Wodan gathered up from an unfortunate end to send on dangerous missions.

I started writing about Aldred in the early 1980s, and wrote the first drafts of most of these stories around that time. I refined them in the mid-1990s, and did a complete edit pass before sending them to Sacred Twilight around 2006. Look for the comic edition of Diminisher of Peace in 2015!