Song of the Badlands Read online

  That was certainly true. The Tenets, those followed by civilians and Deathwatch alike, were the commandments of a modern age describing the attitudes and actions required to guarantee human civilization in a fallen world. They applied whether you were dealing with Pales and their intelligently predatory attacks on Rezzes or working out methods of dealing with the disastrous fallout of the old world weapons which had ravaged the surface of the planet.

  Eshton continued. “Parker doesn’t just pick a direction and run in it. He works out a bunch of possible approaches and works on all of them, sometimes switching from one to another at random or when he runs out of steam.”

  Stein blew out a dismissive chuff. “Sounds stupid. How the hell can he expect to get anywhere like that?”

  “It works for me,” Beck said. “Sometimes when I’m trying to figure out some new mod for my armor and I’m stuck on it, I’ll give up and work on something else. Or even blow it off and go hang out with the team. More often than not, halfway through the other thing I’m doing, the answer will come to me.”

  Eshton pointed at her but looked at Stein. “Pretty much exactly that. Novak might not have a cure for the Fade, but I saw him solve the soy replication problem just the way she’s describing. It was a side project we gave him when he asked for stuff to work on for when his brain needed stretching, was how he put it.”

  Stein clearly did not believe this at all. “You’re telling me this guy, in a few months, solved one of the worst food crisis issues we’ve faced when our people couldn’t do it for a decade?”

  Beck was familiar with it even if biology wasn’t her forte. The bioreactors that churned out raw food slurry like soy, potato mass, algae—all of it was salvaged old world space travel tech right along with the armor worn by the Watch. Along with tremendous stores of data being lost in one electromagnetic pulse or software attack or another, biologists of any skill were taken by the Collapse. The gap created was one humanity was still clawing at the edges of, trying to pull their collective ass free. Novak was put into stasis with the hope that sometime after the Collapse was done, whatever society came next would wake him and use his knowledge to accelerate a recovery.

  Beck highly doubted any of the people advocating such a risky move could have guessed how bad the losses would grow. How much knowledge was destroyed by hackers and madmen with EMP bombs. They could not have known Parker Novak would become the most educated human being on the continent as soon as he awoke.

  “That’s exactly what he did,” Eshton said. “No more batches of soy base suddenly dying out in reactors and needing to be reseeded with stock cells. Which means less hungry people because of the wait for the reactors to cycle up. It’s not a cure, but it’s a damned helpful bit of work.”

  Eshton brought more than word of mouth with him, of course. Every trip also included a heavily encrypted data chip with updates on Novak’s progress. These treasures were guarded by the Deathwatch as carefully as any life might be, even if most members were unaware of the duty. The trove of scientific knowledge represented by Novak and his work needed to be preserved and eventually studied. The idea was to eventually use them to bring the Protectorate up to speed on biology and genetics.

  Beck didn’t bother asking Eshton for the decryption key. She had no need to read the information stored on the chip, though she was given a copy. She and Stein hid theirs in separate locations known only to themselves, and on every trip Eshton did the same. He would give Stein the decryption key, and that was good enough for Beck. Let other people, people who didn’t spend every waking hour patrolling or taking classes, look over the information and work out its significance to the Movement overall.

  That was the one advantage to being low-ranked and in charge of virtually nothing. Beck didn’t have to worry about those command-level decisions. Oh, she was thankful the Cabal still had no idea Parker existed, and she would do anything to keep the scientist safe and secure. His work was critical.

  But Beck was happy to take orders and stay within her area of expertise. That area was growing quickly, but was still limited to things like information gathering, covertly moving against newly-discovered Cabal agents, and occasionally coming up with a new upgrade or modification the armorers in Science division could add to the arsenal for their suits.

  Eshton gave his full briefing as slowly as he dared, fully aware he would have to head home as soon as he was finished. When he finally fell silent, his remarkable memory exhausted of facts and figures about the lab and its needs, the slowly fading look of anxiety on his face reasserted itself.

  Stein took in the progress report with her usual stony aplomb, only giving a slight nod as Eshton trailed off. “Well. It sounds like the good doctor is making progress. And I’m not going to complain about him solving other problems along the way. I’m sure High Commander Bowers will be pleased.”

  “He was,” Eshton said. “Made a last minute detour to the lab yesterday. Said he had business to see to out west.”

  Before being locked away in the lab, Eshton would have kept his eyes on Stein during the entirety of the meeting. Months of isolation robbed him of the sharpest part of the edge years of Deathwatch training had given him. He was still quite good, but no one could endure endless anxiety and boredom without suffering for it.

  Which meant he was looking away when the tiny smirk tugged at Stein’s lips, there and gone in a flash. Beck caught it and understood what it meant in a burst of intuition.

  Eshton started to rise.

  “You were not dismissed, Guard Brogan,” Stein said in a tone of absolute authority.

  Eshton sat down with a speed and force that could only be attributed to pure reflex. His back straightened, his shoulders squared, and the mask of utter calm fell across his features.

  “You’ve put up with a lot,” Stein said. “Your command was taken from you, as was your home. We asked much because we knew you could handle it. Starting a week from now, that changes. The High Commander thinks it’s time to move into a more secure facility, one we’ve had drones working on since Novak was discovered. As a result, you will no longer need to act as his personal guard.”

  Eshton’s composure broke as his jaw dropped slightly. The intensity of his gaze was so powerful that Beck was a little shocked Stein didn’t immediately catch on fire. “Ma’am, are you saying I get to come home?”

  Stein let her own mask fall away and favored her protégé with a grin. “Yes, Brogan, you’re coming home. This is your last week guarding him full time. You’ll still have to put in a shift here and there, but once the new facility is fully secured, you’ll be back here in Brighton.”

  Beck studied Eshton as he processed the news. He was much like her in a number of ways. Both had lost their families to Fade B—that being what made him interested in recruiting her for the Watch in the first place—and each had an almost fanatical dedication to dealing in facts. They kept their emotional distance from other people, yet Beck knew he had begun growing closer to Novak just as she had with her team.

  When his eyes grew shiny with unshed tears, Beck understood how he felt completely. She had shed a few of her own when Bowers let her come back to Brighton as her home post.

  Knowing he would be close again gave Beck a sense of security and rightness she hadn’t realized was gone until just then.

  If only it could last.

  3

  Parker Novak ate better than the majority of people living in the North American Protectorate. He knew this. It was one of a thousand little facts floating around in his brain at any given time. On the one hand, he hadn’t asked for preferential treatment—and indeed that wasn’t why the quality of food served in his lab was so high. He ate what his Deathwatch guardians did, and they grew much of their own food.

  He shouldn’t have felt bad about it, but he did. Even during the Collapse, food had been one of the few small joys available to survivors. That was true up until he was put into the experimental stasis chamber, at any rate. The epic
amount of reading he’d done trying to catch up on the century-plus he’d been frozen in time illustrated just how bad things got after he went to sleep.

  Considering the sorts of things the survivors walled up on Manhattan Island had to eat in those early days, the idea that most people now made do with bland meal bars half the time was less upsetting than it might have been.

  Still, every time he sat down to a meal and there was real food in front of him, stuff that didn’t come from a vat, he felt a twinge of guilt.

  Which didn’t stop him from eating every crumb.

  “I can’t wait to get out of here,” Remy, his new lab assistant said. She was technically a prisoner of the Watch, kept away from society because she was one of the fifty or so people who knew about Beck’s so-called Cabal and their infliction of Fade B on the people of the world.

  Parker, who stood at the front of his lab with a plate of food balanced on one hand while writing on a giant monitor with the other, glanced over his shoulder. “You do know you won’t be allowed out of the next place either, right?”

  Remy gave him a flat look. “Yes, Parker, I know that. I’m not an idiot. But it’s supposed to be bigger and have more people. This place is too cramped. I’m looking forward to the garden.”

  Parker smiled. “Me too, even if it’s just a food garden.”

  “What other kind is there?” she asked, her fine brows drawing together.

  Parker blinked, shaking his head. Every time he thought he’d worked out the ways this more…not primitive, but certainly more brutal, society was different from the one he left behind, another minor detail would trip him up. Parker had been born before the Collapse, before the Fade existed at all. He remembered the halcyon days when man had finally overcome the huge problems facing the species.

  Energy capture and storage? Check. Growing basic but nutritionally balanced food without the need to farm, fast enough to feed an army and infinitely scalable? You bet. Parker had watched the first launch loop go into operation when he was six, the 1,200 mile long cable slinging craft into orbit with a regularity unimaginable a few decades earlier. He saw previously unsolvable problems worked out over the course of his youth and watched the world become a more beautiful place.

  His world—the old world—was as close as humanity had ever come to paradise. Despite the fact that he’d also watched it fall, the memories and culture were too deeply ingrained to ever be erased.

  He sat the plate down and took a chair across from Remy, who was organizing slides. “You’ve never seen a flower garden?”

  Remy shook her head. “I’ve seen flowers in pictures before. Not in person. I’m sure some people grow them, but I don’t know anyone who has.”

  Such a small thing to have missed out on, but it loomed large in his head. He couldn’t blame the survivors who built the Protectorate, not really. They did the best they could with the resources at hand, forging themselves into what was needed to keep the human race alive. Even before he went into stasis, Parker knew about the plans to turn Manhattan into a giant safe zone. The preparations took years, the final desperate scramble by those not immune to the Fade to create a refuge for those who were.

  The propaganda was powerful. Video of volunteers slowly mutating into Pales working themselves to death to build the walls around the island were commonplace. Parker remembered seeing a clip of Central Park being walled off from the rest of the island first so it could be used as a staging area. The men and women who went into it were nearly at the end stage of the disease, allowing themselves to be locked in so they could annihilate the Pales in that area.

  Even then, the huge construction drones known as dragonflies had been in use. Eshton had been surprised Parker knew about them, but he remembered well. The giant machines ate through anything in front of them if they were programmed to, rendering buildings or bedrock down to constituent materials and using them to print the walls around the island.

  He hadn’t been around to see the immune populations from across the globe be brought to the island. Parker considered it a small blessing. From what he knew now, at that point nuclear weapons were used on major cities. Drone weapons varying from the micro scale to the size of buildings attacked the land itself in ways that still made him sick to think about. The Collapse took decades, but those final few years it accelerated as humanity did all it could to stem the tide of Pales.

  All for nothing. Billions dead, with a scant few left to survive on the scraps of a dying civilization.

  In the face of that, not having smelled a rose seemed trivial.

  Their work day ended when Remy decided it had. This was a new development in Parker’s life; before her arrival he worked until he was tired and started whenever he felt like it. Which is not to say he slacked. Most days he put in ten hours in the lab.

  Remy changed that. She came from a rigidly structured life that had not yet had the chance to have its moving parts worn away by the constant sameness of this place.

  “Come on,” she said, standing up and motioning toward the door. “Let’s get dinner and then you can impress me with stories.”

  Parker grinned. He loved talking about his world, painful as remembering could be, almost as much as she enjoyed hearing them. To her they were akin to fairy tales, a time out of myth and legend she drew strength from. Remy saw the things humanity had lost as goals to reach for—and indeed rebuilding that world was the purpose of the Protectorate, at least on a technical level. For him they were a reminder of how far his people had fallen. How badly their hubris and obsession with pushing the boundaries of science could go wrong.

  Perspective was a hell of a thing. Two people could sit at the foot of the same mountain and see two different landscapes depending on the angle of their view.

  “Sure,” he said, following her out the door. “What do you want to hear about tonight?”

  Remy chewed her lip in thought, a mannerism Parker found impossibly adorable. “I don’t know. I always say that, but it’s hard to even know what to ask about. Your world was so big. Ours is so small.”

  Parker thought about it while they filled their plates. The trick was in not trying too hard. He approached this pastime with the same clinical eye as his work. He observed what Remy reacted to, mentally cataloging what she liked and didn’t, and realized that trying to tailor his stories to fit her was a fool’s errand. It wasn’t the content that mattered, but the authenticity.

  They ate, Remy bolting her food down with wolfish efficiency. The novelty of having real food to eat almost all the time had yet to wear off for her, but she barely paused to actually enjoy it. His pace was more sedate but still hurried by almost any standard. Keeping her waiting would only lead to impatient looks irritation.

  Once the pair sat in the common room each with their back against opposite armrests on the same squashy sofa, Parker cleared his throat in the way that told her he was about to start.

  “This isn’t a story,” he began. “Not the way you’re used to. Normally I tell you things that happened to me, like the time I went to the Rocky Mountains and camped out in the wilderness for ten days. You laughed when I told you I lost my clothes taking a bath in a stream. This isn’t going to be like that. I want to try something different.”

  She gave him a wry smile. “Okay, weirdo. I’m game.”

  “Good,” he said, pulling out his tablet. “I realized while we were eating that I would never be able to get across to you exactly how some things back then were. A man blind from birth won’t know what you mean when you say something is red, for example.”

  Remy nodded. “No frame of reference.” She raised an eyebrow. “Am I blind, then?”

  “In a way, I suppose,” Parker said carefully. “I can’t tell you how real beef tastes, because all the meat you’ve ever eaten was grown in a vat. It’s the same with lots of things, but this much I can do.”

  He swiped through several searches on the local network, rapidly pulling up a handful of images. “I want to paint yo
u a picture. Close your eyes.”

  Remy, still smirking, did as she was asked.

  “Imagine the sky,” Parker said. “Not the one you’re used to here. Not that faded blue-white that passes for a clear day. Think about an endless stretch of blue.” He raised the tablet up level with her face. “This color. Open your eyes for a second.”

  She did, taking in the soft blue blazing from the screen. That nearly electric blue exactly the shade of the noonday sky. Her eyes widened along with her smile; Remy liked brightly colored things. They were certainly rare enough to make their beauty exotic to the average citizen.

  Without being asked, she closed her eyes. She was a smart girl—woman, he reminded himself. She was a grown woman. She worked out where he was going with this.

  “Good,” he said. “That’s your sky. Your background. Think about that color. Let it seep into everything. Do you have it?”

  “It’s a color,” Remy said. “Not that hard, Parker.”

  He chuckled. “Okay, good. Because this isn’t me showing you what was.”

  “Oh, no?” she asked, eyes still closed. “What is it, then?”

  Parker swiped to another picture. “I want to show you what might be. Look at this.”

  When Remy opened her eyes, she saw an image of Rez Brighton, given to him by Beck on one of her infrequent trips. “I don’t get it.”

  Parker nodded. “That’s okay.” He swiped to the next image, an old snap of a deeply wooded forest. Then to another, containing a small herd of deer. “Keep those things in your head and close your eyes again.”

  Remy rolled her eyes before closing them, and he could see her patience ticking away.

  “Put that sky behind the Rez. Imagine those trees around it. Those deer standing just inside the tree line. If you want, see yourself there too, walking on new grass. It would be emerald green, springy and tough beneath your feet. There is no dust, just cool, clean air. Can you see it?”