Only Superhuman (44 page)

Emry wondered if the guard had left family behind. She wished, for their sake and Psyche’s, that she could have stopped him before it was too late. He’d probably been a fanatic, raised to be willing, even eager to die for his cause; but that still made him a victim. Regardless, she’d asked Zephyr to track down the man’s name. She would remember everyone who died on her watch, innocent or not. She would never let herself treat any life as disposable.

Now that Psyche’s psychoagents were starting to wear off, the delegates were more amenable to reason—or at least they were no longer trying to attack the Troubleshooters. Upon discovering what Psyche had done to them, many were expressing outrage and demanding that Thorne and his accomplices be turned over. Emry knew, however, that Thorne would not allow himself to be taken. The best way to stave off conflict was to see him off quickly; she trusted that he would not attempt to impose his will on Solsys for a while. Indeed, Emry doubted that most Vanguardians had any idea what the Thornes had really been capable of. Once Rachel got the word out, Eliot Thorne and his co-conspirators would probably not stay in office very long. It was a milder fate than he deserved, perhaps … but perhaps there was no fate worse for him than the loss of Psyche.

So Emry escorted Thorne and the rest of the Vanguard delegation to their ship, to make sure they got away cleanly. Kari raised a protest over the comm, but Emry convinced her she’d be fine, and that Zephyr would alert the team if that changed.

That didn’t prove necessary, though. They reached Thorne’s transport unmolested, and none of the Vanguardians caused Emry any trouble. But before he left, Thorne paused and floated over to her. “Emerald,” he began. “I … do regret what happened between us in the observation bay. I overstepped myself in a way that I should not have even contemplated. You must understand—”

“Eliot!” She cut him off, let out an impatient sigh. “Don’t even try to justify it. Just apologize.”

He nodded gravely. “I apologize, Emerald.” He waited for a while, then spoke again. “Do you accept it?”

“I’m thinking about it. I may not tell you. It’s not about you.”

“I understand. Acceptance rather than control.”

“Something like that.”

He studied her a bit longer. “If nothing else, I need you to know that I do truly care for you, Emerald. I simply … tried too hard to control you.”

“Just like you did with Psyche,” she said. “One thing I’ve learned, Eliot. If you want to love someone … if you want to have a relationship with them … you have to learn to let go. Of them and yourself. Love is surrender. It’s about not being in control, and liking it. It’s about being willing to let your guard down and trust in someone else.” She held his gaze. “Sometimes that backfires. Sometimes they betray you, use you. Hurt you. But you still have to be willing to take the risk. Because that’s the only way it can ever work.” She smiled. “Tell Grandma Rachel she’s welcome to visit me anytime. And I’d love to meet my new baby aunt.”

He gave an absent nod. “You are a wise young woman, Emerald Blair. It is truly my loss that I no longer have you by my side. However … I fear I may be too old and rigid to change my ways.”

She studied him. “Just … try to change the way you raise your kids.”

“We shall see.” He took her hand, and she let him. “Good-bye, Emerald Blair.” He pulled it to his mouth and kissed it in a perfect, courtly manner. “For now.”

Emry stared at her hand for a long time after he left.

*   *   *

“I’m sorry, Eliot,” Rachel Kincaid-Shannon told her old friend as he held his hand against Psyche’s life support pod, unable to look away even though the sight within was unbearable. Through the biosupport gel, Psyche’s angelic face was severely burned, her skull half caved in, her golden hair scorched and matted with blood and flecks of bone. Her beauty was destroyed. The butterfly wings on her left hand were charred black; her right hand was gone. “It’s a miracle she wasn’t killed instantly. An ordinary human would’ve been. The crates shielded her from most of the shrapnel, the whipping cables. It was a low-energy explosion, and the flames were snuffed when the bay decompressed. But she was clinically dead from the concussive shock and … her other injuries … when we got to her. If one of our teams hadn’t tracked you there and been right on hand…”

He nodded impatiently. “What are her chances?”

Rachel broke the news as softly as she could. “Her … her body’s on full life support. We can sustain it indefinitely, reattach the severed limbs, repair or regrow the ruptured organs. But the internal hemorrhaging and gross structural damage to her brain are too severe. Even with the most aggressive intervention, at best she will live out her life in a vegetative state.” She paused. “We should let her go.”

“No!”
Thorne cried. “That is
not
an option. We’ll take her back to Vanguard, get her the best care.”

“You’re not hearing me, Eliot! Everything that made her Psyche—her personality, her memories—most of those parts of her brain are irreparably damaged. Even if we regenerated the brain tissue, she’d be a blank slate. She wouldn’t be Psyche. I’m sorry, Eliot. Her body may be on life support, but your daughter is dead.” A tear escaped through her clinical armor.

Thorne stood in silence as her words sank in. Rachel could see his struggle to control himself. “That … magnificent mind,” he said in a slow, quiet voice. “The most beautiful part of her. We spent years designing it, crafting it. It was a work of art. The first of its kind, unequalled in all creation. The pinnacle of Vanguardian science. How can it be the one part of her we can’t fix?”

After a moment, she placed her hand on his shoulder. “Let her go, Eliot.”

“No!”
The bark was so fierce it made her jerk away. “I will not leave my daughter to die within the space of those who killed her. We will take her back to Vanguard. Keep her alive, Rachel.”

“Eliot—”

His voice was dangerous. “Whatever it takes!”

After another moment, Rachel nodded and bent to her task. She expected that once Eliot felt he had returned his daughter home, he would finally let her body meet its natural death.

But what if he has other plans?

Zephyr

“This may not be a happy ending,” Zephyr told Emry as he flew her and the other Troubleshooters out from Neogaia. Bast was still under sedation in the medbed, on her way back to Demetria for imprisonment and probable extradition to Earth. Emry had just come out of the shower tube, using a special rinse Zephyr had synthesized to kill off her hair mites and chemically fry their nanotech passengers, just in case. Her scalp was still stinging from it, but it was better than having to depilate her whole head (though she wasn’t entirely convinced the stuff wouldn’t make her hair fall out anyway). “A lot of bad blood has been created. There may be more violence now—against the Vanguard and other mods, or perhaps among different habitats as they take out their anger and reassert their independence. Building a coalition to keep the peace may have become much harder.”

“For now, maybe,” Emry said, wrapping herself in a warm, comfy robe before she left the head. Kari was waiting outside for her turn, just in case the mites were catching. As Emry greeted her in passing, she amused herself with the image of a bald Kari, and decided her friend would still manage to look insufferably cute that way. “But it’s still a good idea,” she went on as she stopped at the drink dispenser for a cup of grape juice. “And I’m hoping enough people still know that. Hell, Thorne and Tai both tried to disguise their schemes as plans for a cooperative alliance, because that made it look good to people. So maybe that’s still what people want. And I think it’s what we need too.”

“I agree. However, there is still one more conspiracy to expose.” His avatar in the wall display—the winged horse, which Emry had decided she’d like him to use as his primary face—looked uneasy, insofar as she could read equine (pegasine?) expressions. “If we bring down Tai so soon after exposing Thorne, it may create even more mistrust toward the idea of an alliance.”

“But it has to be done, Zeph. We have to get the Troubleshooters back.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “If that’s even possible with Sensei dead. He was our soul, Zephy. He was our conscience.”

The pegasus looked at her askance. “Speaking of conscience, Emry … I need to know about those override codes.”

“I’m sorry, pal. I was ordered not to tell you.”

“Was it Tai?”

She fidgeted. “No. They’ve always been there.”

“Do we all have them?”

He meant all the TSC cybers. “Only the ships. You know how dangerous your drive is. There have to be safeguards, in case … someone takes over your mind, or…”

“Or I go rogue?”

“It’s been known to happen.”

“Far more often with humans. And your body is a deadly weapon too. Do
you
have override codes?”

Emry shrugged. “Maybe. I … kinda hope so, almost.” Although if that were so, she realized, then she was quite fortunate that no Troubleshooter with the knowledge or inclination had gotten close enough to use them.

“If so, then why don’t I know them?”

She met his avatar’s eyes. “Zephy … do you really believe that I’d ever use those codes on you, if you were still yourself at all?”

He was silent for a moment. “I can model no credible scenario in which you would.”

“So?”

He took her point. “And neither would I. Though I admit there have been moments lately when I would have been tempted.”

She grinned. “Only lately?”

“Don’t make me recite a list.”

Emry laughed, but the pegasus still looked stern. “This isn’t funny to me, Emry. I joined because Sensei promised me freedom.”

“It’s not about you, honey. It’s just the ship.”

“Still, how would you feel if something took away all control of your own body and left you helpless to resist?”

Emry fell silent. She remembered Ruki and Daniel. She remembered Elise. She remembered what Thorne had almost done to her in the aquatic lab … and what Psyche had done to her mind. “I understand,” she told her friend.

“I appreciate it,” Zephyr said after a moment.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Emry went on, starting to smile. “I thought you were the one who didn’t care about being installed in a ship. I thought physical reality was too abstract and detached for you.”

“Yes, but as long as I’m in control of this vessel…”

“Bullshit! Honey, you called it your own body. Admit it—you think of yourself as a ship now.”

“I do not,” Zephyr insisted. After a moment, he added: “I think of myself as
your
ship.”

“Ohh, Zephy! Gimme a soligram so I can hug you!”

As the soligram formed, Zephyr clarified, “Not in the possessive sense, you understand. ‘Your’ as in ‘your partner’ or ‘your friend’ or—”

“Oh, shut up and gimme some sugar.”

*   *   *

Kari and the others proposed finding a safe place for Emry to hole up until they found definitive evidence against Tai. But Emry had other ideas. “I’m going to turn myself in,” she told them. “Let the Cerean courts try me publicly, and trust that the whole system isn’t corrupt. If Tai wants to make a case against me, we can make one against him, and expose him for the fraud he is.”

“If we’re lucky,” Kari countered as the five of them sat together at the dining table on the residential deck. “He’s pretty good at falsifying evidence.”

“That’s right,” Ken said. “I … helped him do some of that myself. In other cases,” he added as the others stared at him. “Nothing deadly or anything.”

“And I wouldn’t put it past him to arrange an ‘accident’ to silence you, Emry,” Vijay said.

“Okay, so it’s a risk. So what? They don’t call us Safetyshooters. In the past twenty-four hours, I’ve been … tried to be killed by—well, you know what I mean!—by two Thornes, a small zoo, a mob of diplomats, and a whole vacking warehouse! Hell, I’m just getting warmed up! Tai wants to come after me? Just let the punker try it! I’ll kick his ass right back to Earth!”

The other Troubleshooters roared in support. “Yeah!”

“We’re with you!” Vijay said.

“We’ll take him down together!” Kari said.

“Whatever it takes,” Maryam affirmed, “the Troubleshooters will bring him down.”

“Damn straight!” Ken added. Emry was moved and comforted to know she would not be alone in the difficult struggle ahead.

The next morning, Zephyr awoke them with the news that Gregor Tai had been indicted and placed under arrest on multiple charges of conspiracy, information fraud, blackmail, torture, and assassination. Their response was a collective “Whaaaaat?”

“Apparently,” Zephyr explained, “the evidence was gathered due to the diligence and attentive eye of a TSC employee who, with assistance from Lodestar, Tor, Peregrine, and a dozen other Troubleshooters, has devoted the past month to assembling a data trail conclusively linking Tai to the assassination attempt on Malik Yohannes, the torture of Joseph Mkunu, the viral infection of the Cerullian mainframe, and numerous other instances of crime and fraud. Said employee, one Mrs. Salome Knox, declined to comment on the case.”

Emry gasped.
“Sally?!”

But Vijay was laughing hysterically. “Of course!” he managed to get out after a while. “Who else? Nothing gets by our girl Sally!”

“Don’t I know it,” Emry said.

“We all take her so much for granted,” Maryam observed. “Even though we couldn’t get a thing done without her. I suppose Tai did too. It would lend her a certain … invisibility.”

Ken scoffed. “What she has is an endlessly judgmental nature. She’s never approved of anything anyone has done in the history of Solsys. No wonder she brought him down.”

Kari just sat there staring. After a while, very softly, she asked: “‘Salome’?”

Demetria; the Sheaf

On the trip back, Emry spent her nights with Vijay, welcoming the distraction from her memories of Thorne. But they turned out to be more relaxed encounters than were usual for her, and she was content to spend most of the time just snuggling with him. She cried on his shoulder a few times, and actually acceded when he asked if she wanted to talk about it. It was relaxed, friendly, nothing profound, but that was what she needed.