by J D Cortese
He turned all his viewers off and knelt near a flower that hang on a bent stem; its smell was deep, complex as a foreign language. And the petals formed a spiraling white staircase. Looking at the flower, he finally understood the negative feeling weighing in every part of his body.
Agdinar had realized that he couldn't both save the world and be in it to enjoy it.
This was his last day on Earth.
“Agdinar.”
He turned to find Sarinda near him, her hair waving on the breeze. “There's no time,” she said, “and the machine wants us to go.”
Agdinar smiled: she had trouble calling Faith by a person's name. Perhaps one day she would, and Faith would be her friend, if she survived the ordeal ahead. Sarinda was the most resourceful person he’d ever known, so he trusted that she would live on.
Sarinda insisted, touching his shoulder. “We need to go. Are you all right?”
“Yes, it's nothing. Just needed a minute.”
“You're not telling me the truth.”
“The truth is that I'm tired. This has been quite hard, and now I don't know if we can save the city...or the people.”
“You're always worrying about others. Why?”
“Is there a reason we shouldn't?”
“I mean,” she said, watching Agdinar’s eyes tearing up before he turned away, “why should someone from the future worry? You do know how...”
His eyes encountered hers again. A bird call broke the silence of twilight but not theirs.
“We don't know everything,” he said, “about this future. It's all so distant.”
“Distant?”
“My world—yours too, one day—is far into the future. You know, five thousand more years.”
“I know, so this is like ancient China for you.”
Agdinar smiled and then waved at the ancient building. “Try the time before there were Neanderthals and cave-dwellers,” he said.
“Are we just cavemen to you?”
“No, you aren’t. Sorry, but this present is more distant to me than the Egyptian pyramids are to you. And it confuses me to be here, that this is real, and that I can touch things.” He wanted to touch her face but couldn't reach all the way. “We know very little about what happened here,” he said, lowering his head. “But we're keeping all the records we can find. We...”
Agdinar couldn’t look at Sarinda, and so he let her reach the conclusion.
“Now, you see it,” he said, after he was sure she knew.
“We, all this,” she said, oddly pointing to the old abbey around them. “It's all going to be gone. A nuclear war?”
“Three, to be precise.”
“And it would take New York?”
He saw the horror on her face, how she was slowly moving away from him. It was as hard for her as it had been for him.
“New York,” he said, “would be the first to go.”
“So, it's pointless. Rychar will destroy the city and kill millions.”
“I don't know. We may have a chance to stop him.”
“I don't know is not the same thing as it didn't happen.”
“It's the best we have.”
“You're now talking about faith, aren’t you?”
“Yes, maybe. I just want to save the city. It's the only home I've ever had.”
“Mine too.”
She traced back her steps and kissed him on the cheek. “Let's go and save New York,” she said.
There was really no other way forward. He took her hand and walked toward Faith.
Faith. How appropriate had been her name.
Two blue lights on her front blinked, as if in approval.
* * *
It took them twenty precious minutes to formulate a plan. Sarinda first wanted a safe one, where they took no risks, but then they considered the running countdown and their fear that, at the end, those numbers might be false and Rychar didn't really care if a million more died trapped in the city. After a burst of strenuous arguing—something that Sarinda and Tysa did much better than Agdinar—they thought on other, more risky options.
“And you think this could work?” Sarinda touched Agdinar's shoulder to get him to look at her.
“It's the best we have,” he said, smiling and making Sarinda smile.
“You are not saying everything about it, aren’t you?” Tysa was acting more distant now, an animal aware of danger.
Agdinar frowned. “If we all go, there’s a risk we could be captured.”
“We're past the point of being cautious,” Tysa said. “We have this ride, and Faith can get us far enough in minutes.”
“No, Tysa,” said Sarinda. “We won't leave the city just to save ourselves.”
“She's right,” he said.
“About what?” Sarinda looked at Agdinar with the same angry face she'd used on Tysa.
“We don't all have to die,” he said, looking down. “If some of us fail and cannot make it back, the one at the controls can get away. If we don't learn where the bomb is, there's no point in all of us dying. Someone would have to tell about the treason Rychar has concocted, keep the world from a global war.”
“Are we going to draw straws?” Tysa was now sitting on the cabin's edge. “I know, Agdinar, that you have no idea what straws are.”
“For sure.”
“We can still find a better plan,” Sarinda said.
Tysa smiled at Sarinda. “You know,” she said, “you two sound like a couple. Are you...? Oh, God, you are.”
It was odd how, in the most perilous of circumstances, the three would behave like children. Still, as Sarinda’s blushing passed, they went back to the planning and spent a few minutes more tweaking their plan.
Faith kept an ominous silence about it.
Chapter 49
There was some movement in the contingent of Hawks when the large flying machine appeared just over the main line of armored vehicles. The troops had been trying to keep the civilian vehicles away, and they were forcefully pushing aside—and in some cases overturned—the auto-cars that were queueing to cross the Hudson Bridge. It wasn't the best crossing, but it headed straight North from the city. The bridge was now called H2B, by the same wave of renaming that had made the Brooklyn Bridge into B2 and the George Washington Bridge into GWB.
People were stunned by the sight. It was clearly something alien to their world, hovering silently in the darkening sky and rimmed by red light like an aura. The edges of the wings were eerily blurry, and some prolongations disappeared irregularly away from the wing. To those standing close by, it might have looked like a black stingray; farther away, the thing was close to a scythe covered in dark blood.
As the ship slowly lowered itself, it added to the chaos of the massive evacuation by pushing even more auto-cars—and a couple of the Hawks’ transports—into the growing sideline of disabled vehicles.
The Hawks moved closer to the alien machine, and they pointlessly fired their guns and grenade launchers at its fuselage. There was some noise and smoke, but the thing was unaffected. After a few minutes of that standoff, one of the Hawks, dressed in a protective yellow suit, advanced toward the ship while handling a huge gun.
There was a clamor rising from the crowd when a laser beam of green light, thick as a tree branch, spurted out of the weapon. A circular patch of blinding light appeared over the black fuselage. And the sound of a thousand gasps whistled like wind rushing north across the H2B.
As if incited by the light show, a wall of green light rose on both sides of the machine. It might have been a dome-like field, but nobody saw it long enough to judge its shape. Auto-cars started to fly around and topple over others; they were like balls being kicked by invisible giants.
The poor soldier in the yellow suit was projected high into the air, trading his suit's color for the orange of flames.
A minute of quiet followed. Then, a blue light illuminated the ground under the flying war machine. From afar, it looked as if it had finally landed.
The young man was heading straight for the Hawks' advanced position, where three of their vehicles were blocking the path to the bridge's entrance. Some troopers were there attempting to take auto-cars in reverse to clear a path across the river.
Agdinar was going to talk with Rychar, no matter what.
* * *
Before Agdinar could be close enough to be heard, Rychar gestured his personal guards to move away and make space for the visitor. His calm announced that the youngster was just an unexpected distraction he was taking as part of his job.
Other heads were not so cool, and orders and bystanders notwithstanding, a slew of guns and launch-grenades targeted Agdinar.
Rychar leaned over one of the two leading transports—the other one was a high truck, and he wouldn't have found a surface low enough to rest his back. Rychar’s head was leaning forward, and he talked with some strain. It had been a long day for everybody.
“Oh, well,” he said. “The alien again.”
“I'm no alien.” Agdinar had stopped, leaving about a dozen Hawks on either side of his way to Rychar.
“I know what you are,” Rychar said, his voice husky, “and who sent you here.”
One of the Hawks stepped into the path, his gun pointed at Agdinar's head. Rychar signaled a Hawk woman who was close to the guard, and she tapped his back and got him to back away. Rychar raised his hand and waved at the crowds of armed thugs that had replaced the civilians. “Not so close, my friend,” he said. “We have plenty of guns, if you haven't noticed. You may want to keep your hands down—I've seen the beams that come out of them, and you won't use those here without causing the collateral deaths of many, many innocent people who are just standing out there.”
Whether because of Rychar's comment or a previous order, a silent agreement made many Hawks retrain their weapons on the crowds being kept away from the bridge's entrance. A Hawk standing on top of the turnstile’s gates carefully aimed a cannon-like weapon at the endless jam of parked auto-cars. There was no more movement in the direction of the H2B.
Agdinar spoke with his eyes set on a distance, beyond Rychar. “Where's the nuclear bomb?”
“We call them nukes around here,” Rychar answered, his smile now broad. “Nukkies if you feel friendlier about the business.”
“You can't do this to your city.”
A couple of Hawks moved uncomfortably in their spots. It was their city too, and Rychar hadn't necessarily been forthcoming about his grand plan.
“It is my city and I'll do anything I want here,” Rychar said.
“But New York has real people in it,” Agdinar said, and he turned back to point at the multitude behind. “You keep saying that the Hawks are here to defend them from the government. And now you want to destroy everything? Kill millions?”
Another shuffling radiated from the Hawks surrounding Rychar and to the throngs of stuck New Yorkers, who were relaying information on their wrist-networks. It all looked like a traffic jam after a big sport event, but the tension started to fit what it really was, the prelude to unfathomable chaos.
Rychar took a step forward, and whatever had ailed him vanished. He was again the public man he'd built over decades, a statue of and from himself.
“You aliens don't understand politics,” he said. “It is like chess, and New York is a piece I have to sacrifice to win the game. Yes, it's a Queen, my Queen, a most valuable piece. But I'm the King and it's my choice.” Rychar now stood as straight as he could; his bent leg had been hurt on his own ordeal to skip town after the battle at Paredes’s apartment. “You know,” he continued, his white teeth flashing, “people think that each piece is being played by the chess master, but it's not like that. The player just carries out the orders of the King. I am the White King.”
Rychar was trying to project his power, calling attention to his white robes and his mane of snowy hair. But he seemed to be talking mainly to himself, to a mirror where a long time before he had perfected this skill.
“I am the White King,” he repeated, “and my army would move first. New York. Gone. Then, Washington, also gone. And then, San Francisco and New Detroit. All the cities the Hawks, we, have taken, they all will fall. A great fall, of all of them. That's it. Like it was here before, when we had the First Descent.”
The words were being carried by the vehicles' speakers and into the individual wrist-phones, probably all over the country. A collective memory spread through the crowd, a vibration that soon became a noisy wave.
“Now, we will have a Second Descent,” Rychar said, his voice booming again, “and it will be...”
Agdinar wanted to stop the historic moment, the creation of a name that would besiege humanity for millennia. "You forget something," he said, knowing he'd undercut Rychar's speech. Agdinar's hands waved over his unpowered, black suit.
“I do not...”
Agdinar raised his right arm and pointed to Rychar's chest.
He spoke, and his voiced leaked into the speakers.
“Blacks move second.”
Rychar looked at his own white suit and stylish pants, and to Agdinar's black attire, seemingly pleased by the fitting imagery.
One of the Hawks, who'd been standing with his back toward Rychar, pulled his gun and shot Agdinar between the eyes.
The sound carried over the multitude, shaken like a pond hit by a very large stone.
Chapter 50
It happened so fast that almost no one saw it. The bullet targeting Agdinar passed through him, hit a Hawk on his protective vest, and projected him backwards as a domino piece—he took three Hawks down with him.
The image of Agdinar disappeared, and most people nearby might have thought he'd fallen like the other man.
Agdinar had never been there.
Rychar realized it a second too late. Agdinar, now standing behind, grabbed him by the neck with a threatening glow on his hand-glove. He had stayed invisible, waiting for the right time to capture the Hawks' leader.
Rychar smiled and spoke, his voice distorted by the grip on his throat. “I like it,” he said, “a bishop's attack, straight down the diagonal. You did well; good move from the Black team.”
Agdinar retreated, dragging Rychar a couple of steps back, enough to stand boxed between the truck, a transport angled on the side, and another big truck at their backs. Still, it would likely take just five minutes for the Hawks to surround them.
“And now,” Rychar said, “I wonder how you plan to take me away from here?”
“That's not a problem.”
A couple of Hawks had their rifles trained on him, waiting for the slightest movement to shoot.
“You may want to reconsider,” Rychar said, absently straightening his robe and palming away some dust.
"Say goodbye, Rychar," Agdinar said, his smile as wide as Rychar's.
The crowds gasped audibly, as Faith rose and jumped forward in fractions of a second, moving over the bridge's gates faster than any military plane could close to ground. That was for sure an alien machine, and the whispering multitude knew it.
The black silhouette hovered over Rychar and Agdinar, and before anyone could take a step or pull a trigger, the Hawks' leader and his assailant were gone. A second later, the ship disappeared and left everybody contemplating an immense, purplish, and completely empty sky.
* * *
The four of them—Rychar, Agdinar, Sarinda, and Tysa—were standing in a large dark room. Unbeknownst to Rychar, his kidnappers were as uneasy and disoriented as the White King.
Nobody knew how they'd made it there, and worse, the three crewmembers had an eerie feeling that the dimensions of the dark space were far larger than what could have fit within the ship. Agdinar knew a likely reason: they had the ability to modify space geometry without involving gravity, although in a very tricky way. But it was troublesome that their ship possessed so much power. He wouldn't tell Sarinda, or Tysa, how at some point his (or their) civilization had (or would) relinquish control of their progress and trust in millions of AIs like Faith to carry out research and build their technologies. What they might have done with this freedom was a story most of the Watchers collectively avoided to discuss for what—now, for him—seemed to have been too long a time.
Rychar stood immobile between them, three overgrown children in full-body blue suits surrounding an impeccably white-dressed old man. A light without any visible source shone painfully on the man's face.
“Let me try again,” said Agdinar. “Where is the bomb?”
Rychar looked at him, now completely at ease. “If you expect me to tell you,” he said, “I'll conclude that you aliens are dumber than us.”
Sarinda took a step toward Rychar, and Agdinar interposed his shoulder to stop her. “Where's my father?” she said.
“That's an easier question. We have him in a secure place—here, in Manhattan. So, if I don't give the right order before long....Boom!”
“You are a son of a bitch,” Tysa said. She encroached toward Rychar as if ready to pounce on him.
“No, my child, I'm not. I was a son of a bitch when I took over the Hawks. I had to kill a lot of opposition to get this job.”
Sarinda was angry; the coolness of the man could irritate the dead. “You don't care about killing people,” she said.