Blackfish City(66)
Soq
Soq pretended to focus on the cone. Their screen was stocked with every article that had ever been published on the geothermal pyramid Qaanaaq was built upon, every photograph and secret document that Go’s unruly army of AI henchsoftware could dig up or blast loose or blunder into. The five watch pods, staffed by humans, that rotated around it. The repair bots that slid ceaselessly across its surface, scouring away grit and seaweed and pumping polymers into chinks and cracks and holes and aging gaskets. The complex shifting algorithms that governed the famous ten-thousand-strong aquadrone swarm that circled the pyramid watching for saboteurs both human and mechanical.
But every eight, ten seconds, Soq’s eyes flitted up to Go’s cabin. Still no sign of her. Workers came and went, responding to messaging, but Go herself stayed hidden. Locked inside. Busy with other things. And had been, ever since Soq arrived knowing that Go was their mother.
Soq had requested an audience. Had knocked on the door, pinged her, messaged her every way Soq knew how. Even stooped to sending a message to Dao, who was off on one of his eternal errands. No response.
The shivers still hit Soq every half hour or so. A wash of breaks imagery that Soq could physically feel, trembling up from the soles of their feet. But different now. They had been, ever since Masaaraq dripped her blood over Soq’s wound. Less pain. Less bewilderment and confusion.
Could it be that easy? Was nanobonder blood the cure for the breaks?
Twenty main lines connected each Arm to the cone. Eighteen for heat, evenly spaced from end to end. Two for electricity generation, terminating at substations in the middle and at the tip of each. Big buildings like the Cabinet had dedicated lines, separate conduits that branched off from the main near the surface.
Where was Masaaraq? Soq wanted to share what they’d found, plan assaults, ask a thousand questions about the nanites currently making millions of themselves inside Soq’s body, but she, too, was off on an errand.
Soq deployed drones bought through third parties, sent them on collision courses with points all over the pyramid. The smaller ones were neutralized with sonic stun blasts. Suicide drones slammed into the bigger ones. Others got bogged down in clouds of synthetic hagfish slime, trawled with scrambler pulse lines, blasted with old-fashioned bullets.
So. Lots of defense modes. Soq certainly hadn’t been able to identify all of them; the closer something got, the more violent the response that was probably waiting for it.
Shouts from the railing. Soq sprinted in that direction.
Masaaraq. Riding the orca—riding Atkonartok. With a woman behind her, looking terrified and entirely unprepared for the freezing water they were half-submerged in, arms tight around Masaaraq’s midsection. They got off and began the climb up the side of Go’s ship. The new woman stopped to look back, and the whale waved one sharp massive fin.
“Get me Go,” Masaaraq said to the nearest flunky when they reached the deck. “And Kaev.”
The crime boss came quickly. Soq thought, Maybe that’s what I need to do to get an audience with my mother. Make a grander entrance. But that was silly. Go wouldn’t talk to them no matter how spectacularly Soq asked. Because she was ashamed? In denial? Angry?
“Here,” Masaaraq said, throwing a large wet dark bundle at Go’s feet.
“What’s—” Go kicked at it, and then paled.
Dao’s gray coveralls. Bloody, and soaked in saltwater. Gasps went through the crowd. Soq realized they hadn’t seen Dao for a day or two, had assumed he was off somewhere being a dick to strangers. If I’m going to succeed at syndicate life I will need to get much better about staying tuned in to the gossip mill, they realized.
“He was going to kill her,” Masaaraq said.
“Then probably she needed killing,” Go said, eyes wet with rage and dancing back and forth between the two wet women in front of her.
“I came here the other day, to deliver a message,” the strange woman said. Under her arm she carried a cage with a drenched shivering monkey. “He thought I was, I don’t know, working for your enemies? He chased me, tried to choke me.”
Soq got the sense there was more she wanted to say, but she stopped. Someone went to get a blanket, draped it over the shivering woman. She was striking, dark skin and strong proud shoulders.
“Where’s the rest of him?” Go asked.
Masaaraq pointed to the killer whale, her fin like an onyx knife stabbing out of the water.
Go spat. Her hand moved to the pommel of her machete, then withdrew. “Well? What was this message that got my most trusted friend killed?”
“That’s on him,” Masaaraq said. “He should have known better than to go around choking women. That’s a pretty good way to end up with the top of your skull sliced off.”
“Now, you listen—” Go took a step, but then bit her lip and turned to the strange woman. “Well?”
A door opened. Soq turned to see Kaev emerging from Go’s cabin. And something clicked. Soq saw Go see it, and more than one of the assembled henchpeople. The shoulders, the skin tone, the forever-wide-open eyes. All the same. The shivering wet woman and Kaev were siblings. They had to be. Dao might not have seen it, because Dao didn’t see people. He read people like books, saw emotions, honesty, deceit, but he didn’t see the face beneath those feelings.
“Kaev,” Masaaraq said. “This is your sister. Ankit.”