Rich Gifts Wax Poor
She’d never been so relieved to see the trees.
Being stuck in a transport while Pinga and Uncle Sparx yammered on about boys – strictly above the belt, of course, irked her.
Mentally, she understood that this was normal, but through the fog of teenaged angst, she felt excluded.
Suddenly, everyone but her had become obsessed with men.
Once the safety latch retracted, Lusa jumped out and made a bee-line for her new MobilePod. Having her own space would be a welcome relief. But a splotch of muscled tan and glaring red at the edge of the wood caught her eye. “Mom, Minuschok brought you something again.”
Callie shoved past Sesi and Talia. Minuschok’s ears pricked and the mountain lion bounded across the field.
Standing on two hind legs with the pads of her paws spread apart, absurd and terrifying in equal measure.
All sixty kilos of her collapsed into Callie’s arms, bunting blood-stained fur against her forehead.
“What are you going to do with those?” Sesi nudged Talia with her shoulder.
Talia re-sheathed her knives. “Sorry. Habit.”
Lusa snickered. Despite Talia’s initial apprehension, the local mountain lions had enough deer and rabbit to hunt that they steered clear of the Lake.
The exception being Minuschok, a cub Callie had found, fed and grown attached to before anyone with sense found out and stopped her.
Now, the ridiculous beast would occasionally show up with a carcass, have a quick snuggle, and then disappear for another month or two.
That she now weighed as much as Callie didn’t seem to bother her.
Callie insisted that mountain lions have friends and they share carcasses, even if they live alone most of the time. Lusa wasn’t sure about that, but Talia and Sesi never argued the point, so it might as well be fact.
Siku arrived with a metal box. “I’ve got news. And a present.”
Sesi and Talia exchanged glances. “Leave Callie,” Talia said. “She’s busy playing with her cat.”
Sesi smirked. Talia grinned. Lusa bit her tongue. It was a silly pun, one she probably wasn’t meant to understand. She straightened her face and resumed her trek to her MobilePod before her parents caught her snickering.
“You should come too.” Siku called after her. “The gift is for you. Or Pinga.” Siku looked at the box. “I guess it doesn’t matter which.”
Lusa snapped to attention. Competition with Pinga may be beneath her, but she really wanted to see what was in that box. She stooped her shoulders to hide her excitement. It was probably something stupid anyway.
“From the Chargers.” He held up the box, but didn’t lift the lid. “You should open it in the transport bay.”
Lusa didn’t understand why, but Talia seemed to.
She took the box and walked back into the bay.
Inside she found a small device. Sleek black and red plastoceramic with a corneal projector.
Talia held it up to her eye and then popped off the back panel, revealing a tiny processor.
Her Opti scanned it and then she severed a small wire.
“It’s clean and the voltage is so low, it wouldn’t be able to reach the geosats, but my Opti couldn’t identify that wire.
” She held it out to Lusa. “It should still work.”
Lusa took it gingerly. “What is it?”
“A more advanced version of Sesi’s visor.” Talia said with her lopsided smile. Sesi rolled her eyes.
“I know, you think it looks ridiculous.”
“That’s because it does.”
Lusa fitted it to her eye. Flashing across her vision, a stream of characters caused her to jerk back in surprise. Quickly regaining her composure, Lusa wandered around the hangar scanning various objects, half listening to the adults’ conversation.
“A gesture of good will.” Siku leaned against a tool bench, his bad leg starting to bother him.
“You said the Chargers?” Talia seemed sceptical. “From the tunnels?”
“They’re organised now. And they want to trade.”
“Hence the gift.” Sesi would always put the pieces together with only half of the information. “They knew we would think they didn’t have anything worth trading otherwise. And that we would find retro tech useful.” She narrowed her eyes. “What else do they know?”
“They know that we don’t use cyberware.” Siku pointed to Lusa.
Lusa stopped wandering around and joined the adults.
“Not that some of us can’t. They think your ability to avoid detection is some sort of nullification implant, that it isn’t compatible with cyberware.
” Siku shifted his weight forward. “They think we’re still in the city, controlling things behind the scenes.
They have no idea about nanites or viruses.
But they have enough parts and know-how to have made that bauble. ”
“They made that?” Talia stuffed her hands in her pockets. It caused her to slouch a little with an air of nonchalance. Lusa always thought it made her look cool, though she would never tell her.
“We can make everything we need here.” Lusa spoke up, more to feel included than anything else.
“That’s true.” Sesi placed a palm on Lusa’s shoulder, the way she did every time she was about to deliver a lesson.
“But think strategically. Printers go down. Repairs take time. Even if you don’t need anything now, you will in the future.
If you already have a relationship…” Sesi held out her hand, presenting the answer.
Lusa had to accept that it made sense, but she was bad at relationships.
She was larger. Stronger. Her feelings would erupt in wild and unpredictable ways.
A certain wariness from the other girls had developed.
She kept her emotions, too large and too intense, walled off and locked away.
Her darkness, Talia had called it, once.
Pinga seemed to take everything in stride and everyone gravitated toward her.
It hurt, but at least she’d been able to channel it into other pursuits away from the public eye.
Talia slipped an arm around Lusa, pulling her in for a side-hug.
Lusa needed a reminder that Pinga wasn’t always the favourite. “Why don’t you take the girls?”
Sesi’s eyebrows rose and then tented into a pensive frown. “Callie won’t like that.”
“Of course she won’t.” Talia leaned to see out the door. Callie lay sprawled out on the grass with Minuschok’s head on her chest. “She’ll probably kill you if one of them gets hurt. Or she’ll make that cat do it.”
“Do cats obey commands?” Sesi asked. “The only ones I ever met were strays in the city. And they never listened to anything I said.”
Talia shrugged. Lusa saw it as a tacit agreement that they could go, but they probably wouldn’t be letting Callie know until it was too late. She tried not to bounce giddily back to her MobilePod while the adults discussed the details.
She hated the way the damp clung to her boots underground. Above, exposed to the ever-grey sky, it would freeze or trickle somewhere lower. Here, it ran down the walls, saturating the ground. Lately, whole sections had washed out where the permafrost had become less permanent.
Piston had co-opted an old office, left over from when the tunnels were still under construction. Not large, by any means, but central enough that everyone who needed to be there could get there and small enough to be semi-private. Kerr pulled the heavy metal door shut.
“He put it in a Faraday cage immediately.” Cinder slouched against the wall in an effort to appear relaxed, but the way he crossed his arms over his chest betrayed him.
“As soon as it’s out though, there’s a passive tracker that has phantom power.
Not great, but if they’re close enough to a tower, we’ll get a general idea of where they’re holed up. ”
“I still don’t like it.” Piston stared warily. “It’s a bollocks way to start a partnership.”
Cinder had been told a hundred times before and countered before he’d even finished. “They’re expecting it. The gift was only to show them what we’re capable of. They won’t respect us if we don’t try.” Cinder added with a hopeful note, “Unless you want to hear what the Styx are proposing.”
“Fuck the Styx, yeah?” Kerr stood as tall as she could manage with her chest puffed out. Cinder curled his lip.
“I agree.” Piston made the point final. “I let you set up the meeting and I let you install the tracker because I want to avoid relying on the Styx. Do the Adlets have what we need?”
“Kind of. They won’t give us a late gen DocPod, but they have single-use override chips that can expand the capabilities of ours.” Cinder may have pushed them to partner with the Styx, but he wasn’t entirely useless. “They say they can make more.”
“If they expand capability, why can’t we do that ourselves?” Kerr had grown up under the impression that the Chargers could fix anything.
Chalice arrived late, freshly showered and blonde hair immaculately tousled. She knew what it would make Kerr think. She knew it would stoke Kerr’s jealousy. But Chalice did it too often and Kerr found herself growing more and more apathetic. They were done, whether Chalice agreed to it or not.
“Blackbox AI,” Chalice answered Kerr’s question like she’d been there the whole time. Like Kerr was stupid for asking. “Opening it renders the Pod unusable, you can only program it with single-use chips.”
“EosTech’s way of making things proprietary,” Cinder continued. “And the chips will shorten a Pod’s lifespan. Make it do things it wasn’t designed for.”
Piston leaned back in his chair, brushing off Cinder’s concerns. “We have the parts to repair our Pods. We don’t have the parts to repair the late gen models that the Styx have access to.”
Cinder chewed his lip, but he looked like he wanted to say more.
Piston turned his attention to Chalice and Kerr. Are you two going to be able to work together long enough to do this?” He hadn’t said anything to her, but Kerr could imagine how the conversation had gone with his daughter last night. She hoped she’d done the right thing.
Chalice and Kerr looked at each other. Kerr was ready to move on, at least emotionally. The situation between their mothers and Piston taking her in made her feel obligated, but the love she used to feel had died. Working together might round the corners off of those feelings. “You’re the boss.”
Piston snorted his approval, turning to Cinder. “Set it up.”