Crashland by Sean Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

her want to cover her ears. At least the air was fresh, a welcome change from the foulness they’d left behind.
    â€œWhere are we going?” Clair asked, filled with the same anger that had fueled her on the station. The dupes had attacked her in a secret d-mat booth in peacekeeper HQ, and now they had come after her in Crystal City. They weren’t going to let her escape easily. Doing nothing in response was only going to get her killed. “What are we going to do?”
    She had originally planned to look for Q. Now the dupes were the bigger problem. But how was she going to stop them? She was just a sixteen-year-old girl with a sore elbow, a bruised throat, and a boy she liked but was still getting to know, a long way from anywhere familiar.
    â€œSomeone? Anyone?” She wasn’t going to be ignored.
    â€œThrough here,” said Forest.
    They turned left into an atrium that afforded them a glimpse of gray skies outside and passed from there into a series of changing rooms, complete with uniform fabbers down one wall. The Air returned, filling Clair’s infield with a new flood of notifications, and five fabbers started whirring industriously.
    â€œShower and change,” said Sargent, indicating three cubicles in a row. “Undersuits and light body armor will be outside the curtains when you’re done.”
    Armor sounded like a step in the right direction.
    â€œUh, I’m not volunteering to defend your little fort,” said Devin, trying and failing to brush the dried blood off his Nehru jacket. “I’m an observer only.”
    â€œYou can observe all you like,” said Forest. “That was the agreement.”
    â€œWell, we’re not going to just sit here while someone attacks us,” said Jesse.
    Clair agreed. “Otherwise, you might as well send us home.”
    â€œThat would never be authorized,” said Forest. “Net One is strictly limited to priority transits. You are no longer a priority now that we are out of danger.”
    â€œYou can hear that siren, can’t you?” said Jesse, pointing at the ceiling. “I’m not imagining it?”
    â€œNo one’s going anywhere,” said Sargent, raising her hands for calm. “Including the dupes, unfortunately. In order to stop them we need to understand them, and in order to understand them we need data. We have drones, but they can’t watch everywhere at once. That’s where you guys come in. Crystal City is short of monitors, thanks to the d-mat shutdown and lags in the Air, and we need all the eyes we can get. If we can track the dupes, we can pin them down, maybe even capture another one of them, see if we can get it to talk. Are you in?”
    â€œObservation I can do,” said Devin.
    â€œWhen do we start?” Clair said. The sooner she got the immediate problem of the dupes off her back, the sooner she could get back to working on the rest.
    â€œShowers first,” said Sargent, pointing firmly at the cubicles. “Don’t think we’re doing this just to make you smell nice. Another common terror tactic is combining chemical or biological agents with light shrapnel, to ensure the agent gets in. I’m talking about poisoned blood and bone darts. Scrub yourself completely clean and report any odd reactions around puncture wounds. We’ll be doing the same, so don’t think you’re being singled out.”
    Clair looked with new concern at the red line stretching down Sargent’s face from where the sliver of bone had stuck into her. Standing there arguing was giving those “agents” a chance to spread through the peacekeeper’s body.
    â€œAll right.” Clair stepped into the cubicle and tugged the curtain closed behind her. She would do as she was told as long as in return she wasn’t going to be brushed off like some inconvenient kid. She had seen and done too much to be pushed to the sidelines, by the