The Peripheral

72

Netherton watched as Ossian transformed the decloaked baby buggy, glossy as a wet peppermint toffee, red and cream, into something surprisingly if only vaguely anthropomorphic.

The two rear pairs of wheels, now flat on the garage’s floor, had formed figure-eight feet, from which sprouted candy-striped legs. Its gleaming armor, around the actual baby seat, had flattened laterally, widening at the top, emulating a muscular dynamism. The tires at the ends of each arm suggested clenched fists. Netherton could actually imagine this having some appeal, for a child. It didn’t look as though it were armed, particularly, but cocky, certainly, belligerent.

Thumbing its cream-and-red controller, Ossian guided it to the open door of the Bentley executive-hauler, into which it climbed, wheel-paws gripping the silver-gray bodywork. It sat on a backward-facing seat, freezing as Ossian gave the controller a final tap.

Ash had insisted Netherton remain with Ossian while she and Lev dealt with Flynne’s apparent abduction. She and Ossian were in contact, but Netherton could only hear Ossian’s side of any exchange, and that in their morphing gibberish.

Netherton had watched Ossian put a pair of grotesque gloves, or rather hands, on the white exoskeleton. These had far too many fingers, black and unsettlingly limp, like oversized, anatomically incorrect rubber spiders. The second one had given Ossian some unspecified trouble, so he’d left it for the meantime, choosing instead to decloak and transform the buggy.

“When will they reach Flynne?” Netherton asked.

“As you know,” Ossian said, “I don’t know.” He dropped the controller into the wide pocket on the front of his apron, bent to adjust the yellow kneepads he wore over his black trousers, then knelt before the white exoskeleton.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“You might try buggering off,” Ossian suggested, without looking up.

“Burton’s gone to bring her back?”

“Seems likeliest.”

“I’d think him competent,” Netherton said.

“Tendency to fly violently off the handle aside.” Ossian prodded a black, penlike instrument into the recalcitrant glove’s jiggly black digits, causing a small red light to strobe briefly.

“He was disoriented,” Netherton said. “Understandably. When you came barging in, he reacted.”

“I might disorient you,” Ossian said, “if Zubov didn’t need you to lie to your girlfriend’s face. Is it true, that she periodically has herself flayed, her entire epidermis, to hang in whatever establishment might be willing to display such a thing?”

“If you want to put it that way,” said Netherton.

“Kinky, are we?”

“She’s an artist,” said Netherton. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“My hairy arse,” said Ossian, as if naming the root precept of a long-held philosophy, then pressed the penlike tool repeatedly into the black spider, managing to briefly produce a steady green light.

“Why are you putting those on?”

“For Macon’s technical. Field manipulators, military. Anything from stone masonry to nanosurgery. Once he’s locked in, can’t have him coming up short the right size spanner.”

“Locked in?”

“There,” indicating the windowless silver vehicle. “Put them both in, seal it, depressurize it, partial vacuum. Should anything escape, it stays inside. Really, though, this is all to satisfy Zubov. Those assemblers are self-terminating. If they weren’t, nothing in this vehicle would stop them.”

Netherton looked at the exoskeleton. Ossian had bodged a domed, transparent cylinder onto the thing’s shoulders, during Burton’s visit. Within this, immobile, legs akimbo, stood the homunculus that had driven him, along with Lev, to the house of love. Though really, he knew, Ash had been the driver.

Ossian got to his feet, dropping the black tool into the pocket with the controller. “Lowbeer,” he said, “has someone in the stub. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“No,” Netherton lied. “Who?”

“If I knew, would I be asking? Whoever it is, they aren’t being paid. Not by us. Ash signs off on all monies spent, there. Lowbeer has someone at her beck and call, apparently able to get in anywhere, learn anything.”

“I’d think that would be exactly what you’d want.”

“Not if it means someone on our team who’s an entirely unknown quantity. Becomes Lowbeer’s game, then.”

“She’s an unknown quantity as it is. And it’s quite obviously been her game since she had that private talk with Lev.”

“He doesn’t see that,” said Ossian. “She’s leveled his game up for him. That’s all he sees now. He might listen to you, though. You’re halfway posh.” He blinked, then, distracted. Looked away, listening. Said something in that moment’s Esperanto. Listened again. “Closer to her, now,” he said to Netherton.

“She’s safe?”

“Alive. Tracker in her stomach’s giving them basic vitals.”

“Tracker?”

“We’d have had no way to find her, otherwise.”

The exoskeleton’s new hands, with an unexpected dry rustle, sprang suddenly to a state of bristling attention, hyper-manipulative readiness.

“Hold your horses,” Ossian said, neither to Netherton nor, evidently, to Ash. “I’ll need to get you inside first, then depressurize.”

Netherton saw the homunculus, under the transparent dome, lower its own hands and the exo’s simultaneously, black digits drooping.