Dirty Burnout: Amsterdam Institute, #2

By R. Z. Held

Genevieve has been working for nine years to remove the nanites from retired Pax Romana military Installs and accidentally infected civilians like herself, to allow them to return to a normal life. When unaltered soldiers show up at her door, she assumes they're here about the trial her team buried: burnout did remove the nanites, but it also caused unimaginable pain, driving all those it reached to suicide.

 

Instead, the soldiers accuse her of working for the resistance on her home planet, and when they can't find any proof, they butcher her back to remove her carbon composite wings and arrest her. Imprisoned, awaiting execution, Genevieve sees only one way to escape and join her partner and friends somewhere safe. But releasing burnout will have unimaginable consequences across the whole empire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rhiannon Held
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781943545124

Book preview

DIRTY BURNOUT

By R. Z. Held

Copyright © 2020 by Rhiannon Held

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover design by Kate Marshall (www.katemarshalldesigns.com)

https://rhiannonheld.com/

Amsterdam Institute Series

CLEAN INSTALL

DIRTY BURNOUT

FAIR EXCHANGE

UNJUST THEFT

PURE MOTIVES

BASE INSTINCTS

Table of Contents

PART I

PART II

PART III

PART IV

EPILOGUE

Part I

The longer Amsterdam Genevieve waited after hearing the head of the Pax Romana military’s Science Division had arrived at the lab facility used by Genevieve’s research group, the tighter her nerves wound themselves. She’d told the other members of her misfit band of nanite Installs—that strange mixture of retired military and infected enemy civilians—to take an early lunch, leaving her in the lab alone, staring into space as she had her system overlay endless permutations of plots of nanite survival rates over her vision. In every one, the research group’s lack of progress in their quest to find a way to uninstall the nanites was stark.

And Genevieve couldn’t do a thing about it, because of what that supposed lack of progress was hiding.

And now Abidjan Lemna was late. The Head of Science Division liked to throw everyone as off-balance as possible, so on any other visit she’d have been inside the lab by now, looking over people’s shoulders and asking pointed questions.

Genevieve banished the data plots and pushed to her feet to go in search of Lemna, then she thought better of it and hovered, fingers of one hand digging into the polymer surface of the lab counter she’d been seated at. Maybe instead of a surprise inspection of the lab, Lemna instead had her sights trained on the security company that was the original front for this facility. Tsuga Security did guard shipments through this planet’s only port, but that job was the merest bone thrown to the sanity of all the retired Installs who’d been dumped here. The empire’s super-soldiers were too dangerous to let wander around, so if they weren’t on active duty, they were here. Genevieve’s research group had been grafted on to give them not only something else to do with their time, but also a hope of ever leaving: if their nanites could be uninstalled, perhaps they could build a normal life.

Genevieve paced a couple restless steps, the polymer of the floor eating the sound of her footsteps. If that was Lemna’s purpose, she was Malao Carex’s problem, as he was the CFO of the front company and the highest on-planet authority, most of the time. She’d honestly be happy to hide in the lab and let the two of them be dicks to each other to their hearts’ content, but she didn’t trust that Lemna wouldn’t stop by on her way out. And if Genevieve allowed herself to relax now only to let something slip by mistake when Lemna finally arrived—

She had her system smooth out her heartrate. This was getting ridiculous. She’d founded the research group nine years ago, and it had taken them the first six years to succeed in creating a replacement nanite line that wouldn’t infect civilians who touched dead Installs—or touched someone who had, as she’d done. Finding an uninstallation process was arguably an even more difficult task, so the three years they’d spent so far was nothing, really. Lemna and the military brass above her wouldn’t be expecting anything near success just yet.

What Genevieve had to hide was that they had found a way to uninstall the nanites; the problem was that burnout worked by putting the Install through unimaginable pain. Of their two ex-military volunteers, one had died during burnout. The second had taken two more of Genevieve’s researchers down with her—she’d been too traumatized to speak, and the people who’d opened channels to her had immediately begun burnout themselves.

The burnout process was a lot like the original nanites, in that way—under certain circumstances, it loved to spread.

The worst part was, the actual burnout process hadn’t killed those three Installs. They committed suicide, unable to take the shock of being without nanites after the pain. The decision to go back to the drawing board had been unanimous, as had been the one to keep it from military leadership, lest they convince themselves a risk of suicide was acceptable in the face of the slowly but steadily accumulating Installs who couldn’t be allowed to go back to a normal life after retiring from active service.

That military leadership had decided a 50% survival rate among soldiers undergoing purposeful installation was acceptable, after all. It might have climbed as high as 60% by now. That military leadership had also been perfectly happy to infect enemy civilians—until Genevieve, 100% of those had conveniently died. Those were not the hands she wanted control of burnout to be in.

Pyrus, the facility’s unofficial medic and her partner, spoke over a private channel, though private was debatable at the moment, given that Lemna had the codes to eavesdrop on whichever of their channels she damn well pleased. Thus his formality, she imagined.

Given the high chance of eavesdropping, Genevieve swallowed several questions as she strode for the map location Pyrus had sent after his message. Foremost among them: what good could she do? She’d been suffered to live in the Pax Romana empire for the past nine years, dirty fronti from a conquered planet that she was, because she was doing useful research, but her word hardly carried weight. She supposed she was more tactful than most in the facility, though Pyrus was the kindest of them all. Besides, Eriope was her friend.

When she arrived at the conference room, more bland polymer surfaces in the form of a central table and surrounding chairs, she found Pyrus frowning over a case of different injection pens. The really good shit Eriope had come back with from her last illicit trip off-planet must indeed be quite good, if the usual antagonists weren’t working. Any substance, recreation or medical, had to be damn powerful in the first place for an Install’s system not to just shrug it off. Eriope worked hard to accomplish as much with her self-destructive behavior as she did.

Lemna stood at a slight remove, arms crossed. Even in stillness, she projected a concentrated grace. There were traces of wrinkles on her skin, and gray in her tightly braided hair, because of her age when she’d undergone installation, but they only enhanced her intimidating air. In contrast, Eriope was slumped in the chair in front of Pyrus, a small smile of pleasant dreams on her expressive face, her short, black curls tousled over her forehead and up the back of the chair where she’d slid down. She and Pyrus had skin of a middle ancestrally sunny shade, while Lemna’s was slightly darker.

Pyrus applied one last pen, and stood back. That should get most of it, I hope.

Eriope groaned extravagantly. "Why do you have to be like that, Pyrus? That shit was expensive." She coughed, gulped air, and sat up straighter.

Thank you, Toledo. Lemna nodded to Pyrus and shot Genevieve a narrow look. Apparently she was allowed to stay, however, as Lemna stepped up to Eriope, turning the woman’s chair to face her with a jerk on one of the armrests. "I give you a little leash—all of you, but you especially, Cusco—with the understanding that you will not make me regret it, do you understand? Brass thinks you’re confined to the planet, and then you go and do stupid fucking shit."

Lemna tipped her head as a physical sign of the picture her system had just sent to the main wall display: Eriope, nude, back to the security camera and her photovoltaic carbon-fiber wings open wide as she rode someone just out of frame. Eriope’s second favorite way of taking her mind off the feeling of being trapped, though that one was usually practiced among the other Installs around Tsuga. Genevieve couldn’t imagine that photograph had been taken here.

Eriope glanced at the photograph, but not even a twinge of embarrassment showed in her body language. It was nothing Genevieve or Pyrus hadn’t seen before, she supposed; they had invited Eriope to join them on a few occasions. She was delightfully enthusiastic, but too uninterested in power play for it to be a regular arrangement. Eriope tipped her chin up and met Lemna’s glare without flinching. There are Installs taking their downtime on planets across the empire. I don’t see the problem.

"The problem, Cusco, is when the brass—who know that you are not on active duty—find out you fucked the leader of a terrorist movement selling drugs to finance said movement’s efforts against the empire." Lemna took a bruising grip on Eriope’s chin and trapped her wrist against the armrest with her other hand, fingers digging in until Eriope grunted. It was very much in line with the casual violence all the ex-military Installs in this facility displayed with each other, even Pyrus when he forgot himself, but Genevieve still didn’t like it. She rocked forward, reminded herself that interference at this point wouldn’t make the situation better, and settled back again.

Eriope tried to wrestle her chin away and failed. I didn’t know what she was doing with the money!

How’s this, then? That shit you were on is killing people. It works great on Installs and kills everyone else within a few months of regular use. Lemna switched her grip to both of Eriope’s wrists and slammed the chair into the table, cracking Eriope’s head against the headrest. "Stay on the fucking planet so I don’t have to have you executed, Cusco. Because I will, if I have to, to make sure other Installs retain the choice to retire."

Eriope surged up, breaking Lemna’s grip now she was trying properly. She planted herself toe to toe with the woman. "Or you could let me go. Let us all go. What are Installs going to do if you let us pick some peaceful planet and try to build some kind of life? Build a family? We wouldn’t need to sneak away to find something, anything, to take our minds off being trapped, if after the decades of our lives we gave to fighting for the empire, we weren’t confined to this boring little facility on this boring backwater planet for the rest of our damn lives, who knows how long those will even be!"

Lemna didn’t give a single centimeter. You want interest, sign up for another tour.

Suicide by indefinite tour was what the ex-military Installs here called that. Keep fighting until eventually something swamped nanite healing and killed you. Genevieve had gathered that that was the way most Installs went. Direct suicide was generally unnecessary and thus much rarer. And that left them with the ragged, self-destructive dregs who’d retired to Tsuga.

Genevieve stepped up, touched Eriope’s shoulder—she knew better than to grasp the woman’s hand or arm without warning—and urged her away from Lemna when Eriope turned into her. promise.> Lemna could no doubt guess what she was saying without even bothering to eavesdrop. Time that would stretch long, for