Long Haul Ch. 04

"I want to leave... with you," Wren said, eventually. "It was a stupid dream before, but now it's real. It's real, and it's fragile, and I... "

Bonnie kissed the top of her head, and held her, and felt like a heavy warm blanket settled over her. Calmed her. Brought her down to where she could think again. She moved her arms so she could grip her own opposing forearms, and held Bonnie very, very tightly. It was important that the hug was tight.

That was when the plan started to come together in her head.

***

"They don't know we're here," Wren said, repeating herself for maybe the third time, as the Daedalus was jostled into a static position by the maglock system. "They don't know it's us. They would have shot us to pieces the second we shifted back." Her big, light brown eyes stared ahead, not at the display screens but out of the rarely-opened front viewport to the medium-sized space station ahead. If it was going to end in a hail of gunfire, she wanted to see it coming.

"You've gotta calm down," Bonnie said, though Wren was pretty sure that Bonnie's teeth were gritted too.

Wren tried to fidget, but her sharp, stylish dress was not designed for fit or function; it was designed to look, and, if Bonnie's eyes practically falling out of her head was any indication, it was working.

Wren paced back and forth in the cabin, her bare feet the only part of her extremely carefully manufactured appearance that was out of place. That and the nervous look in her eye. It's going to be okay, she kept telling herself. We've done this. I've done this.

Once, and she'd thrown up quite a bit afterwards. She checked the time on her p-comm.

"Fuck it," Wren said, turning and storming back through the ship. She paused in the galley, to overfill Mr. Cat's food bowl. It felt like the least she could do, just in case things went wrong and he was on his own for a little longer than planned. He'd be fine, though, she told herself. He was resourceful, and clever, and way too goddamn spiteful to die on a ship like this just because she never came back. No, he'd escape. He'd escape and hunt down her ghost. When he looked at her, and did that crazy thing where cats blink each eye separately, she shivered.

"Don't hunt my soul," she said, and the look he gave her was unimpressed.

"What did you say?" Bonnie asked, from just behind her.

Wren made a noise in her throat, and said, "Nevermind." Then, as she passed into the hold, she took a few calming breaths, and did the hardest thing she'd ever done in her whole life. She put on a pair of heels with the intention of wearing them out in public.

Most of the aisles, between the racks of supplies running up and down the hold, had recently had flat metal plates welded into place over the diamond-plated decking the ship had come with. She'd needed a smoother surface to walk on, to practice, with some uneven bits so she could learn to track them in her peripheral vision. Then she'd spent most of the previous sixteen days walking back and forth, back and forth, to get her gait right, and every time she gave up and went to her bed to cry, weary and sore, Bonnie had given her a foot massage. The woman had magical fingers.

Those heels were finally being paired with the outfit they were destined for, a sweeping navy number that made her pale skin and light blue hair pop. Whenever she wasn't practicing walking, Bonnie was practicing styling her hair. They'd settled on an asymmetrical look, with her hair swept back and somewhat behind her. She completed the look with a pair of glasses that were twelve seasons out of style, which put them one half season ahead of being retro enough to be back in style again. A true tastemaker, with the mathematics to back up her theories.

Behind her, Bonnie looked every inch the part, a slab of personal security muscle ready to start punching throats the second Wren said, 'that one.' She had dyed her hair all black and cut it even shorter than usual. There wouldn't be a need for any throats to be punched, hopefully, if the plan worked, and Wren was really, really proud of the plan.

She walked up to the airlock, where her wonky, badly functioning security bot was waiting for her, and she laid her hand on its chest. "Ready, Mr. Robot?"

It said, "Twenty one point zero degrees, thirty five percent."

"Perfect," she said.

Did it stand up a little straighter at her praise? She knew that it sort of listened to her, and could understand at least some of her instructions, but its success rate at executing actual commands was pretty low.

"No matter what happens," she said, "I need you to know that I love you."

"I can't believe you named it," Bonnie said, from just behind her. "That's just ghoulish."

"It's gonna work," she said, aloud, as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "It's gonna work. It's a good plan." Wren felt her breath getting short, again, and turned around. It usually helped to say these things to Bonnie, out loud, like that somehow transformed an empty mantra into some kind of inherent statement of truth, but the redhead was closer than she was expecting.

Bonnie was looking about as masculine as possible, under the clean lines of a sharp black suit. She was moving toward Wren, very slowly. She reached up and cupped Wren's cheek, very slowly. She said, "It's a good plan," and kissed Wren.

Very slowly.

"It's gonna work," Wren murmured, as they parted. Then, more emphatically, "It's gonna work."

"行得通," Bonnie repeated, smiling slyly. It's gonna work.

She was still holding Wren's cheek, and Wren's heart was beating like crazy.

Wren's original plan, the one she'd stolen the bot for in the first place, had been to use the thing to infiltrate the headquarters of RK Neuman, the company that had landed the contract to manufacture those security bots. RK Neuman was part of a collective, a loose confederacy of corporations, that included Jyi Bao and Chandless. Her plan didn't go a whole lot deeper than that, as mostly she felt like she was operating within a window of opportunity following the release of a new and potentially vulnerable piece of hardware. The window was what mattered, and what could be gained from breaking into the headquarters of a corporation they didn't have any particular beef with was a waypoint to be reached further along the journey. Break in, improvise, find what can be found, break out.

It was a terrible plan made moot by the fact that she couldn't make the bot do hardly anything. So, as she always did, she went back to the drawing board, and while having a conversation about it with Bonnie, bouncing ideas back and forth, it hit her like a pneumatic crush press. What she should have done was so obvious, so painfully obvious, that she should have surrendered to Jyi Bao and saved them the trouble.

It was someone different who strode first out of the airlock of the Daedalus, with Bonnie and Mr. Robot in her wake: a shark in human skin. The dark smoke stain in her glasses obscured her eyes, adding a calculated air of menace to her ground-chewing stride. The tight fitting dress and suitcase painted such a persona on her that all Wren had to do was not fuck up and, like, smile, and everyone who saw her would come to the right conclusion about the her she wanted them to see.

Matching the body language of every executive she'd ever met was easy. Crowds had a way of parting just in time ahead of Wren. She moved like a knife through water, straight and purposeful, and the people simply moved out of their way. Executives were a common sight on stations like that, and it probably happened exactly as often as she thought it would that one would just barrel into a crowd and expect to come out the other side unruffled.

Port Houston was a shared space, with four corporate tenants. None of them had headquarters there, and the offices were more like embassies, to maintain communication with allies, than they were spaces where work was done. Work was done, but not where the executives had offices.

They moved through the docks, quickly, and started working their way around the transit ring that encircled the station. In the center of the station, within the transit ring in roughly equal quadrants, were the offices of the four corporations. Wren had never been able to understand why big corporations needed so many layers of management, but the glut of humans required had to work somewhere and some of them had been shoved out to this inglorious posting.

The place where the real work got done, and in fact the reason Port Houston existed in the first place, was in the very center of the station, in the shared laboratory and design space. Wren had been there once, many years before, during one of Jyi Bao's many attempts to recruit her and obtain the design of her scanner, and it was the memory of that one afternoon that she was leaning on very heavily.

For the most part, entrance to the lab area happened through each of the interconnected office sections. The UEA engineers had living quarters in the UEA offices, and so on and so forth, but there was one other, nondescript entrance, and it was here that Wren brought them as she had been brought before. It was a long, bland hallway, doing everything it could to look like every corporate space ever: impressionist art, uncomfortable couches, potted plants, with indistinct, unremarkable music pumped in through a speaker in the ceiling, all of which terminated in a guarded, but otherwise innocuous, double door.

The trick, Wren knew, was to look like she belonged.

The guards looked at each other as she approached. One of them stepped forward, arm outstretched, and said, "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but this is—"

Wren cut him off with an upraised hand, tilted her head in supreme frustration, and said, "Do I look lost to you?"

"Twenty point three degrees, forty percent."

The guard blinked, and looked back at his partner. "I'm... uh..."

Wren said, "I know where the fuck I am. I know it's restricted, but this is a fucking PR nightmare and someone needs to do something about it."

The second guard cleared his throat and stepped forward. "Ma'am, this isn't the—"

"Do you," she said, raising her voice and cutting them off, "recognize this?" Then Wren stepped to the side and gestured behind her, to the security bot.

Both guards narrowed their eyes.

"The correct answer is yes," she said. "I know you recognize it. This piece of shit was designed here."

"Ma'am, we're really not—"

"Call me ma'am again," Wren said, voice low and cold.

Both men stood up a little straighter, and swallowed.

Right on cue, the bot turned around, shifted its gun to a stow position behind the right shoulder, and started toward one of the couches.

"You don't want to know what I paid for this thing. I paid for security! I paid for peace of mind! I paid through the fucking nose, and what did I get?" She turned, shrill laughter echoing, and pointed. "I got a fucking feng shui machine!"

"Twenty point four degrees, thirty nine percent."

"What is it doing," one of the guards said, as the bot started dragging the couch from one side of the hallway to the other, while the other one said, "Hey, put that back!"

To the first guard, Wren said, "Oh, can't you tell? It's protecting my life by improving the efficiency of the air quality system."

The bot stepped back to judge its work, and then turned to one of the taller plants, which was maybe some kind of potted tree.

Wren raised her voice, and said, "I feel much safer now. Thank you."

"I'm sorry, but—"

The guard stopped, wincing, as the bot reached into the plant and snapped the top half of it off at the central stem. It then waved its hand through the empty space, tossed the dying half of the plant on the floor, and turned to find more 'improvements'.

"I brought this waste of space here to get it fixed. This isn't just a bug. This is something worse, and I am doing you, and Chandless, a favor by avoiding an inter-corporate incident. We get this piece of shit fixed, nice and quiet, so I can finally fire this nitwit" —she jerked her thumb over her shoulder at Bonnie, who remained impassive— "and I can get back to the job I'm supposed to be doing."

"M... uh... Miss," the second guard said, "this isn't a repair facility. We can't—"

"Do I need to get Addleman down here? Hmm?"

Both guards balked.

"Your boss's boss's boss?"

She'd heard the name once, in passing, while eavesdropping on two other engineers, and for whatever reason it had stuck in her memory. Those engineers hadn't wanted to disappoint Addleman or his timetable, and judging by the way the guards recoiled he had a reputation. She might have been off on the layers of management between those two peons and Addleman himself, but it didn't seem to matter. They looked at each other and winced.

She said, "I wouldn't expect you two to understand how a misbehaving prototype can ruin a carefully crafted marketing strategy, but Addleman does, and Addleman will bury both of you if he finds out you delayed fixing... this!" She turned, aghast, and shook her head as she watched the bot carry an armchair toward her. "Seventeen million credits, and it's moving the furniture."

The guards winced, one more strongly than the other. "Wait here," the second one said, and disappeared through the double door.

Wren drew herself up, affecting every inch of height she could manage, and, despite being a full head shorter than the guard, he shrank from her gaze. The leather in the handle of her suitcase creaked when she squeezed it.

"Twenty point six degrees, thirty five percent."

"That's enough," she shouted.

At the end of the hallway, passersby ducked and scurried away.

The next minute passed in nerve-wracking silence. Wren checked the time twice. It had been a gamble to use Addleman's name. She'd never met the man, and really had no idea if he was still based out of Port Houston. Or if he was even still alive. The guards' reactions said that his legacy was intact, which had been a lucky break, but she couldn't rely on that working with anyone but thick-skulled rank and file. Behind her, the bot continued to rearrange the accoutrements as it saw fit, and, as near as she could tell, would continue to do so as long as it stayed within thirty meters of her.

Muffled voices on the other side of the door, getting louder, made her draw herself up again.

"—not responding," said a wiry, dark skinned man with a sharp, crisp accent, as he came out into the hallway. "Doesn't look like it's attempting to identify itself." He was looking down at something in his hand.

Wren's stomach twisted into a knot, and she had to force herself to focus on keeping her expression neutral.

"就是他吗?" Is that him?

Wren realized that her shoulders must have been showing the tension if Bonnie could spot it from behind her, and so, counterintuitively, she tried harder to relax.

Yes, but shut up! "对, 对, shh!"

He hadn't changed. His hair was a little longer, and the frames of his glasses were a slightly different style, but he still carried himself like the smug little bastard that had challenged her years before. She couldn't remember his name —she might not have ever known his name— but it was definitely the same little weasel. Seeing him again made her proud all over again for shorting out his stupid bot.

At the sound of their voices, the engineer looked up at her and narrowed his eyes. "Who are you? How did you get this unit?"

I don't think he understood. "他似乎不明白." Then, switching to English, Wren said, "That doesn't matter. What matters is that your multi-million credit toy is going to get me killed. Did you know Chandless and RK Neuman are marketing these as a personal defense unit?"

"Get it inside," he said, irritably. "Hurry."

"Don't touch it," Wren said, when both guards started to move. Then, with a roll of her eyes, she added, "Some of its programming still works, and the last person who tried to move it was killed instantly. It'll follow me, just... get out of my way."

The engineer squinted at her, in surprise, and said, "It follows you?"

"Yes," she groaned, as she stepped past him. "That's what it's supposed to do, isn't it?!"

"Those fucking idiots," the engineer grumbled. "I don't know how many times I had to tell them. It's a synthetic soldier, not a bot."

He put so much disdain for the term into his pronunciation, and Wren smiled privately.

"You're a fool," she said. "Yes, a military contract is enticing up front, but the real money is in the private sector. Selling it to entitled brats and execs who wouldn't know real danger if it shot them between the eyes is how they'll make their money. That's what you should have designed."

Behind her, the engineer snickered. She was pretty sure he was laughing at her, but that was fine. Let him.

The lab space was exactly as she remembered. A big open area in the center, four stories high, with multiple semi-enclosed work spaces branching off from the main atrium. The spaces had walls, but none of them were entirely closed in. Some of the other engineers and programmers looked up as they walked through, and from the look of it they were more intrigued with the fact that 'an exec' was in their space than anything else. Under any other circumstance, Wren would much rather have been out in the wings, looking over people's shoulders and sharing ideas... except she knew that wasn't how it worked. She'd only been in the room five minutes her first time before someone was challenging her. Competing against her.

In its own way, it was everything she wanted to get away from. She wanted cooperation. She wanted camaraderie. She didn't want to backbite and battle for favor. She could see some of the other designers trying to gauge how influential she might be, from a distance, and it made her sick.

"Sixteen point four degrees, twenty one percent."

Almost immediately, an alarm sounded. It was short, turned off quickly, and then sounded again.

"Who is messing with the air system again?" came an exhausted voice from above.

"It's this thing," Wren said, turning and pointing. "It's trying to optimize this fucking freezer, and I've gotta say, I'm on the robot's side." It was a little chilly, but that wasn't a surprise; there was a lot of electrical hardware packed into a small space, and those always ran better in the cold.

"It's not a bot," the engineer said, angrily.

"Whatever," Wren said, groaning exaggeratedly and rolling her eyes. "Just make it stop."

He hustled to a platform elevator, and once Bonnie, Wren, and the bot were situated on it with him, they went up to the second floor. That's new, Wren thought. Before, his workspace was on the third floor.

"Why can't I interface with it at all?" he whined.

Wren knew he was being rhetorical, but relished the opportunity to say, "Because you have no idea what you're doing?" Then, because it was in character and fun, she added, "Because this boondoggle of a lab has never produced what was put into it."

The engineer corralled the unit into place, careful not to touch it, then walked around it slowly with narrowed eyes. "This isn't one of RK's prototypes. This is one of mine."

Wren gulped. She hadn't known that.

"Where did you get this?"

In a desperate deflection attempt, Wren spat, "What does it matter? Look at it! It's not supposed to be like this, is it?"

The engineer scowled at her, and grumbled under his breath as he reached over and grabbed a tool from his mess of a workbench. Wren couldn't make out what he was saying, but she was sure it was about her and that it wasn't nice. Which she kind of loved.