The storm sneaks through the canyons until it's upon him.
Wash is deep in the middle of nowhere, tracking until the signal starts to crackle like a fire going out. He puts his armored back to a thick-trunked tree and waits, right hand curling and uncurling on the barrel of the gun, and listens for orders. The thing he's hunting will hunt him right back if it gets the chance, if it isn't already.
He isn't stupid: he knows that when Command says something is killing Freelancers she doesn't mean a particularly hungry alien animal, even if there might be some of those lurking in the foggy, blue-green woods. She doesn't mean it freaking metaphorically, as in there is a sickness among us because of our sins. If Wash sat down to confession he would do it tired and dutiful and list murder, murder, white lies, murder, contemplation of suicide or perhaps having it contemplated upon him. Command doesn't mean that the Freelancers are being picked off by their own circumstances, although that is also true.
Maine, of course. That's the easy answer, the Occam's Razor. Whatever happened to Maine while Epsilon was dying with Wash. (He's seen the blueprints, the statistics. It is so likely that Sigma made changes, so likely that he took Maine away to die. 100 percent chance of rampancy, so that's something.)
There are bound to be sympathizers, too. The Insurrectionists weren't, after all, actually human Insurrectionists against the UNSC, and security personnel have families. Someone wants to be in the way even of Freelancers corralling other Freelancers, and Wash will look like an extra prized target because he holds the goad.
This time, the first body he finds is folded over a rise on the ground. Dark green armor, a codename of a Freelancer he doesn't recognize. The back of the helmet is cracked in a deep fault line, not following a seam. He can see hair underneath.
A scan shows that the enhancement had been removed more neatly, simply slotted out of the back of the armor. Wash's own skin crawls at the thought of something taking his equipment, suddenly, while he is forced to look straight ahead. The hardware for his augmentation is still inside his suit, useless unless he wants to fry himself, but maybe still good as bait.
The Meta will have captured five or six augmentations by now. If it attacks from behind he won't see it. His mask will crack the same way as the one on the ground had and there would be a bit more blood in the forest, or a lot more, depending.
The body's arms are tucked neatly underneath it, one leg bent up and stiffened but not broken.
Radar-blinding equipment hadn't erased the murderer's footsteps. Long strides point toward and away from the corpse, and the plastic fissure on the back of the helmet grins with broken teeth.
The quiet stretches, and Wash raises Command out of both comfort and necessity. "One body. The AI is missing. I'm sending the ID details now. There's nothing else here."
"Of course there is," she says, challenging him as she usually does. She's usually right to do it.
"Check my trackers," he says. "It's quiet."
"This fog is playing havoc with the signal." It's when she's frustrated that she sounds the most like the pilot she used to be, before the Director ran out of Pelicans and found himself short on personnel for the same reason. "You had to go into the spooky valley."
"I was following the signal."
"And now we've found it again," she says.
"No. The Recovery beacon is here, but that's just because the thing that's hunting AI was here long enough ago to kill this guy. I still don't know where exactly it is."
The camaraderie, the first person plural, is rare from her. There's a city over the mountains to the east, hung about with weeping willows and the fog, and Wash and Command both thought it would be a good place for a Freelancer to hide. There were other people to do the dirty work in the streets - people like CT had been, who could read civilians' personal computer systems like the proverbial open book, and other people like CT had been, who would live efficient, professional lies.
Wash hears something in the forest and turns, scanning the radar. A black shadow moves between the trees. It isn't possible for anything to sneak up on him here, not with the clearing and the steep hill on which the city sits behind him; an enemy or an animal would have to come out of the trees.
"Movement," he says quietly.
"I heard. Was that a squirrel back there, or something actually related to the job?"
"Don't ask me. I just work here."
"You know what to do."
He bends down and deals with the body. He's primed armor to blow enough times that it's easy now; a few switches and a few radio commands, all things he could theoretically do if the person was still alive. The armor is too heavy for animals or one unarmored person to move, and sealed, so the body would probably remain preserved for a week otherwise. It's a very organized, very expensive coffin, and so is the detonation.
The charges pop and Wash runs, then comes back and stomps the small fires out around the blackened pile. His back still twinges as if someone is watching.
He moves heel-toe toward the forest, the barrel of the gun pointing into the trees while his fingers still hover around the guard. What would Epsilon have done now? What would South do? Synch. Synch.
It's murkier inside the forest, but no more or less treacherous. He picks his way between stubby bushes, their thin branches occasionally fuzzy with thorns. Just as he starts to idly wonder about the climate, the mix of wide-leafed water plants with their roots in mud and the weeds that almost look like cacti clinging onto the surface, he hears another noise.
Armor creaking, he thought. That was an armored footfall, with none following and no other sounds a body would make in the forest. He angles toward it.
"This is Agent Washington. I am a special agent from Project Freelancer."
"You're doing it again," Command says.
Wash curses.
"Shouting the name of a secret project into the woods."
The shame doesn't bother him. He checks shame off the mental list of things he has done today and considers it a sort of accomplishment.
The trees shake to his right and he turns again. Don't leave me alone out here, he thinks, to Command, and holds the gun steady. The radar is still empty, showing none of the familiar signals. Active radio channels, which he had already monitored before he descended into the valley, contain the same civilian programming they had before. There would be music there, something minor key and driving.
He starts to walk back toward the clearing faster than he came in, feeling the prickling at his back. It comes from the act of turning, he thinks. It's only fear, not eyes in the woods. Fear has done him no good so far, not blanketed as he was in Epsilon-nightmares. Fear is only tiring, but that doesn't keep him from trying to stretch his strides out to cover more ground.
"It's nothing," he says. "The trail is cold."
Command sounds resigned, or disapproving. Her voice has gone rougher. "Then we keep looking."
"The thing would know," he says.
"Would know what?" She sounds kind, but distant. He silently appreciates the fact that she doesn't tell him he just attempted to arrest some trees.
"If it's hunting Freelancers, it would know before I announced my name. I would be the reason that it's here."
"Doesn't give you an excuse to spill secrets, Wash."
She won't tell the Director, he thinks. It probably isn't that important in the grand scheme of the rebuilding, and besides, he can hold enough other secrets over the Director's head to make himself feel comfortable about risking just this one. Let the Director chastise him. There will be a little shame there, but Leonard Church won't find a fight. Wash is a twice-old man, too full of memory, and he will have his chance.
"I'll remember next time."
"You're being sent to the other side of the city. Be there before morning. Acknowledge." She sounds very distracted now, the words all flowing into one another without punctuation.
"Acknowledged. They think we'll finish the job tomorrow?" He starts back across the clearing to the Warthog he left behind. It's too wide to go into the forest proper, but the tires and tusks ate up the ground.
"No need to ask," Command says. Does that mean that he shouldn't worry, or that he won't get an answer? No need to ask.
Lightning had struck a tree six feet away. This side of the forest is thicker and more regular, with the flat-leaved trees following the curve of the river that feeds the city. It is more likely that someone will see him here, but also more likely that they would take him for an authority. On the other side, he could have gone days without seeing a ranger. Over here, shipping barges pass by on the oily river just one hill away. The person, or people, hunting his kind don't seem to have found him.
"It's quiet here," he says, on his mark for periodic checks. If he hasn't heard from Command in half an hour, he checks in.
She talks to someone else while he looks around at the gray-blue sky, gray-green leaves, and black trunks. He nearly trips over the lightning-blackened root that had spasmed out of the earth.
"Command?"
"Just a second, Wash."
Maybe she's talking to other members of the Recovery team, he thinks, or another member of the crew. After a few months of hunting a killer he has gotten to know the other members of the Recovery team as fellow operatives, but that's a completely different thing from fellow soldiers.
Recovery One did not denote leadership; if he was the center of anything, it was of a target at which both the Director and the mysterious assassin pointed. If the other Recovery agents knew that he had been the first one recruited, they did not mention it in front of him. None of them were rated for AI, removing the temptation from which Wash was exempt.
He walks further into the forest, stepping around the root and trying to loosen the tightness in his shoulders. Water drips from vine-draped trees while other trunks peel, dry. Something shakes the leaves at 0100, still meters away and moving. It has either the crashing, directionless gait of a startled animal or a planned distraction. Or both, he thinks. It could be something wounded trying to lead him away from the nest.
The sound continues at erratic intervals. Just as the scrabbling has fallen into a pattern, an organic or synthetic alarm, it waits longer than it had before, or rushes to the next note. Messy, Wash thinks. He would rather be back at the base made from the wreckage of the Mother of Invention.
Don't shoot first; hitting the head could damage the records. If it is the Meta out there, he might hit something it had welded on to itself, something that could blow the whole thing. Killing it was all right, although he'd regret it; Recovery One wouldn't, but Wash would regret killing Maine in the service of Maine's own loss. Capturing it was much, much more useful, if it could possibly be done at the same time as destroying the AI. That would be too complicated, especially for one high-strung agent.
What had the Meta done to itself? What armaments, what abscesses and tumors?
Something shimmers in the trees. He can see the blue of the sky and the green of the foliage bouncing off of it in dull refractions as it turns. Immediately he takes three steps back to put a tree and an awkward angle between him and it, thinking again of the hole in the back of the dead Freelancer's head. The Meta is remorseless, eyeless, all humanity scooped out of it by an AI's careful manipulations and modifications. Maine's mask suited itself to that, didn't it? Wash expects to see the yellow plate come floating out of the fog at any moment, the entire curved lens seeming to stare at him. It gave a terrible impression of being both omniscient and blind.
The Meta is going to kill him. If he can get to high ground, he can look down on the thing and at least know whether he's taking the the clearest possible shot.
He angles around the nearest large tree, putting the trunk between himself and the sounds. If it wants to shoot now it will at least have to move again, or to fire one just to spook him. He has almost thirty shots left before he has to reload, and that is comfortable but getting close.
Just as he shifts one hand in preparation to go after the clip, he hears a noise like a growl or scraping metal; something that slides staccato up the scale and peters off. The Meta hums with energy. It's trying to figure out what he is, he thinks. Maybe it wonders why he didn't leave it alone yesterday, or why he doesn't have an AI. It is used to hunting two people in one body.
The foliage flails again.
"Sorry," Wash says into the fog, and means it.
He shoots twice into the forest. Jumps when the bullet-spray outlines the silhouette of shoulders in red and yellow. The silhouette moves, whipping saplings back and forth in its passing while the growl deepens and something, either a chamber or a throat, clicks.
Then the silence comes back, worse than the noise. (Had the dead man felt a tug on his hair? The pain wouldn't have registered. Not from a wound that deep.)
Wash reaches out and grabs the thin branch of the bush and shakes it, holding his gun propped up against his other arm. The branches flail and an animal runs out, something fast and gray, and disappears into the canopy.
"This is embarrassing," he says, in case Command is listening. She ought to know, even if she can't do anything about it, that he is nervous and fed up.
Hair trigger, he thinks. Next time, shoot first. Next time, know what you're getting into. Next time, the fog will be as white and the trees will be as dark.
A sidewalk leads out of the city and down the steep embankment to the north, ending unexpectedly just before the swamp. Wash had chosen this route because he had begun to desire and abhor the forest. There were tours in this area, rarely, which came down on the same sidewalk from the city. Guides on those tours would tell visitors what species of tree they could see and how high the seasonal tides rose.
Why here? Why take the long road, when Agent Washington is ambivalent toward the things he wants? Why trace a man-made path? It's like the lines on a circuit board. The signal has to go somewhere.
It will be his last day on the outskirts of this city if he doesn't find anything today. Less a pulling out and more a gradual wandering toward the next populated area, the next unexpected death. Any or none of the sim bases could call him or could catch Command's wide-seeing eye between now and the next job. He is a screen inches from his eyes and an outdated gun.
Venturing into the swamp itself seems unnecessary and messy unless he receives a signal. There isn't much room for anything to hide out there, much less anything in powered armor. The feet would sink. The seals would be fine, but it wouldn't be fun. Maybe it's already dead out there, Wash thinks. Maybe some horrible fight erupted between the hunter and one of the survivors - York, maybe, who would like this stark, well-connected city. Maybe there are already bones in the grass.
Epsilon - not the hardware but the memory - twitches. There are always bones. Wash sighs, bitterly bored of them. Send the burnt-out ghost-ridden one to finish the hunt, indeed.
Not that way, then. Southeast, toward the plain at the edge of the forest.
If the Meta moved through the water here, it would be easy to hear the splashes. He kept looking for a shimmer, or a reflection, six feet off the ground, where light shouldn't be moving. Without the radar, he had to do old-fashioned soldiering and look around.
Because of that he walks fast, and finds himself enjoying the watery sunlight turning the fog yellow, just as he sees the signal coming in from Command. He tells her he hears her.
"Wash." Her voice is crackly.
"Read. There's a lot of weather, Command."
"That wasn't related. What're you doing?"
"I'm near the north side, where I'm supposed to be. What's going on?" The lines of sight in the swamp are long. He would see someone or something even if it was coming from the southeast.
"You need to go back to the program."
"If you say so, Command. Is there news from somewhere else?"
It begins suddenly to rain hard. He hears a clattering in the treetops and realizes a moment later that hail is coming down too. Strange weather, but he wasn't expected to be an expert on the climate, and there's a certain joy in seeing something so out of place. The wide horizon is a stark comfort.
"You need to go back."
"Acknowledged."
"Acknowledged." She signs off, fast and dismissive. Maybe one of the other Recovery agents did find something.
After a few minutes, a few tens of steps with the steep cliffs and the city at his back, Command's voice comes back. "What?" she's saying in the thick static.
Going back to the ship seems like a chore, now: he has to be more careful what he says there. The only place he can return to is the place he is trying to leave, and he will have to wait there. "Wash, were you trying to reach me just now? I can't hear you."