William Gibson: The Peripheral

They were turning into Lev’s street.

“Daedra?”

“Flynne,” said Lowbeer. “That Hefty Mart buyout has attracted another magnitude of media attention in the stub. We’ll speak tomorrow, shall we?”

“Certainly,” said Netherton, and then the coronet was gone.

Conner was under his crown, when she opened her eyes, nobody waiting to help her out of hers, and Burton’s bed was empty. There was background noise that made no sense, but then she heard Leon’s loudest jackass laugh, so she guessed it was a party. She left her crown there on the pillow, sat up, got her shoes on, and went to look around the edge of a blue tarp.

Most of the other blue tarps, except the ones walling off the ward space, were gone, taken down, making the former mini-paintballer franchise the single room it originally was, or at least the part inside the shingle wall. All the lights were on, bright, and people were sitting on desks, standing around, drinking beers, talking. Carlos had his arm around Tacoma, who was looking like she was about to laugh. Most of Burton’s vets that she remembered were there, some she didn’t, some still wearing the black armored jackets, but nobody carrying a bullpup, just open beers. And Brent Vermette, in jeans and a Sushi Barn t-shirt with SO FUCKING KILL ME across Hong’s artwork, in that fat drippy graffiti marker (because, it turned out, he’d taped a protest video before Homes had even reached the town limits, and doing that would be a factor in what got him on the board as chief council a week later). Madison was talking to him, grinning like Teddy Roosevelt’s teeth, vest full of pens and flashlights, Janice beside him. Janice saw Flynne and came right over, gave her a big hug. “Don’t know what you did, but you saved everybody’s ass.”

“I didn’t,” Flynne said, “it was Lowbeer and them. Where’s Griff?”

“D.C. Doing business with Homes. Or to them, more like it. Getting them a new director, Tommy told Madison.”

“Where’s Tommy?”

“Here somewhere. Just saw him with Macon and Edward.” Janice looked around, didn’t see any of them, looked back to Flynne. “They found Pickett.”

“His body?”

“His builder ass, unfortunately.”

“Where?”

“Nassau.”

“He’s in Nassau?”

“He’s on Homes’ dirtiest no-fly list, is where he is, since Griff got on the phone.” Janice took a swig of her beer. “Meanwhile, looks like your brother’s finally falling for Shaylene.”

Flynne followed the direction of her glance, and saw Burton, on one of those little mobility cart things, a beer in his hand, saying something to Shaylene, who was sitting on the edge of a desk, leaning toward him.

“Hasn’t happened in the biblical sense,” Janice said, “because she wouldn’t want him popping any stitches. Matter of time, though, looks to me.”

“Burton’s cute sister,” said Conner, behind her, and she turned to find him propped in a wheelchair, Clovis holding its handles.

“How’s Daedra?” she asked Conner.

“Getting new tattoos to commemorate it all? Sent her home in a cab.”

“What did you do to her?”

“Berated her ass. Made loud noises. Don’t think it actually impressed her that much.” He looked at Janice. “Beer for a wounded warrior?”

“You got it,” said Janice, and was gone.

“Harsh on Pavel, though,” Flynne said.

“Lowbeer told me to go for it, if I got the chance. That suit had some wingsuit capabilities built in, so I wasn’t just diving blind. Idea was, we’d take Hamed out before he had a chance to pull the trigger on Homes’ drones, back here. Didn’t happen, though. Why I wasn’t Air Force, I guess. Lowbeer’s ordered a brand-new one to replace it. Plus one for me.”

“Easy Ice,” Macon greeted her. He was holding hands with Edward, a beer in his other hand.

“Gimme a pull on that beer, Macon,” Conner said, so Macon held his out, tipping it so Conner could get a drink. Conner wiped his mouth with the back of what was left of his hand.

And then she saw Tommy coming, from the front of the building, right through where the big sandbox for the paintball tanks had been, beaming at her, like she was some kind of miracle.

Back from her Wednesday afternoon walk with Ainsley, along the Embankment, she put on Tommy’s oldest Sheriff’s Department shirt, one that still had a Deputy Sheriff’s patch on it. It was the most comfortable thing to wear over her bump, and it felt like him. Maybe they were getting like Janice and Madison, that way, but he basically wore the same thing every day, in uniform or out, and she had Coldiron’s stylists for anything public. She just had to keep them from making her wear some new designer thing, which could feel like a job in itself.

She went into the kitchen, to get a glass of juice from the fridge, and stood there drinking it, wondering, the way she still did, how they could’ve built something like this without assemblers. They’d built it about a hundred yards from the old house, in what had been disused pasture before, and there was no way to tell it hadn’t been built in the nineteen-eighties, then kept up, and gradually remodelled a little, by someone who could afford that but not much else. And they’d done it all without ever making a sound, and really fast. Tommy said they’d used a lot of different adhesives, none of them toxic. So that if you saw a nail head, that wasn’t really a nail, but just there to look like one. But having so much money for a project that it just didn’t matter, she’d learned, was a lot like having assemblers.

They’d built the barn that way too, but to look as old as the old house, or anyway on the outside. Macon and Edward lived there, and did all their really special printing there, stuff Coldiron needed to make sure didn’t get out too soon. Industrial espionage had been identified as a major concern from the get-go, because Coldiron was really about knowing how to do things that nobody else knew how to do, back here. And they were just at the beginning, really, of mining that jackpot tech-surge. Too much at once, Ainsley said, and everything would go batshit on them, so a big part of the program was trying to pace that. Sometimes, particularly since she’d been pregnant, she wished she knew where it was all going. Ainsley said they couldn’t know, but at least they knew one place where it wasn’t going if they could help it, so hold on to that.

It kept her centered, living here. She thought it kept them all centered. They had an unspoken agreement never to call it a compound, probably because they didn’t want anybody to think of it as one, but it was, really. Conner and Clovis had their own house another hundred or so yards away. Burton and Shaylene lived in town, in the residential wing of the Coldiron USA building. That stood, the whole block of it, where the strip mall with Fab and Sushi Barn had been. Hong had a new flagship Sushi Barn, just across the street, on the corner, looking kind of like the original but shinier, and there was a branch of Hefty Fab beside it. Flynne hadn’t wanted them to call it that, but Shaylene said Forever Fab wasn’t a name with good global legs, plus she’d just absorbed Fabbit in the merger, so she also needed something to call all the former Fabbit outlets. And now there was a Sushi Barn in every Hefty Mart, even if it was just the opposite end of the nubbins counter.

She didn’t really like the business part of it. She guessed she disliked it about as much as Shaylene liked it. Coldiron actually had less money now, way less, because as soon as Matryoshka had stumbled, then collapsed, cut off from Sir Henry’s financial modules, Coldiron had started to divest, to get the economy back to something more normal, whatever that meant now. But they still had more money than anyone could understand, or really keep track of. And Griff said that that was good, because they had plenty that needed to be done with it, more than they could know.