by J D Cortese
“I told you, he’s an SOB,” Tysa said, pursing her lips in anger. “One that's not going to last long,” she added.
“Oh, people,” said Rychar, stretching in place as if readying himself for a run. “Time is precious and we're wasting it on charging me...with what? Being an SOB? I concede that I am one, a big one. But this isn't your most pressing problem. You have to let me go, and then leave the city. Quick.”
“We have already done that,” Agdinar said, nodding to an unheard message.
The floor turned transparent, and the entire city lay underneath them. They were stationary far higher than commercial flights.
Rychar shuddered a little, watching in the distance the thin rim of the atmosphere as the Earth curved on the room's edges.
Agdinar was stunned. The viewing floor extended far enough for the room to be able to contain a hundred planes of Faith's size. It was an impossibility that strained his mind.
“The question now,” Agdinar said, “is if we are going to let you fall down on your own to the city.”
“I don't care about it, friend, about dying. My life is not the point; others will come to replace me, in time—I have seen enough to know that. And I’m tired.”
“You're tired,” Sarinda said, “of killing people like a madman?”
“No, of my life—of being just a face and a voice with nothing behind them. The face of a movement that I don't...you don't know, how hard it was.”
“Hard?” Tysa jumped forward and pushed Rychar with both hands; he stumbled before regaining his footing. “We are going to show you hard,” she said.
“It was hard,” Rychar kept talking, unmoved, looking at the city below his feet. “You don't know how much. The police. The violence after Chinatown. The whole city overrun by criminals in uniform.”
“You are also criminals in uniform,” Agdinar said, trying to catch Rychar's eye.
“Yes, we are—the Hawknights, we’ve come to that. I'd wanted something different for the movement, but we had to fight. Fight fire with more fire.”
Agdinar detected a great sadness in the man, something so deep and complex that it elicited in him a reflex of empathy. But he knew that Rychar, although he wasn't feigning his feelings, had done enough evil to be beyond forgiving.
“So, your solution,” Sarinda said, “is to always use more violence. Kill them all, guilty or not.”
“I'm giving people a way out,” said Rychar, biting his lip. “Hours, a whole day all the way to the end. It's more than what the government gave to the people—and those thousands of tourists in Chinatown.”
Sarinda approached Rychar and he moved back one step. She spoke quite close to his face. “Are you saying that the government had something to do with the bombing, with that dirty nuke?”
“No. What I'm saying is that your father gave the order. You may want to rethink who's a real SOB.”
There was silence, and the large space felt like an empty cathedral. Sarinda whispered a few times the name of her father.
“Now,” Agdinar forced himself to break the dreadful quiet, “don't you think this might weaken your threat about killing Major Paredes if we don't let you go?”
“No, not the least. You are good people and won't kill me, or let me kill Paredes. It is like chess, again, but I am in a stronger position, so you won't risk assaulting me.”
“I'm not going to let you go,” said Agdinar, “if you don't tell us where the nuclear bomb is.”
“You don't need me for that,” Rychar said, regaining his false smile. “You know that the computers in this marvelous ship can, eventually, find the bomb.”
Rychar moved away from the group, talking while contemplating the view of Earth. “You can make an educated guess,” he said, “or kill me, whatever you want. As I said, I am tired of this life—leaving New York would be my last act as the Leader. So, what it's going to be?”
...I CAN NOW MAKE AN EDUCATED GUESS.
Rychar wasn't used to hearing Faith’s powerful mind-voice, and he covered his ears; his eyes closed as he flinched at the sudden headache.
And then Rychar vanished, the power of the elevator so high that it left a trace of spiraling fog.
Agdinar recovered from the shock and the loud thoughts, just a moment earlier than his friends. “Why did you do that, Faith?”
...HE WAS RIGHT...I CANNOT KILL, OR LET BE KILLED, ANY HUMANS.
“It's amazing,” Sarinda said, “how he played us.”
Tysa was fighting a smile while she frowned. “I told you, he's an SOB, but a really bright one.”
“Shouldn’t we have kept him prisoner?” Sarinda said.
“Not sure,” Agdinar said, “as he might be saving people by letting them leave the city. We don’t want them to close the only bridge open on the north side.”
“I guess it will be next time,” Sarinda said, “when we catch him.”
“If there’s a next time,” Tysa said, frowning.
“Well, maybe there will be, as we did get something,” Agdinar said. “He said we have until midnight. Faith, how did you move him back to the surface?”
...WE NEVER LEFT...WE ARE STATIONARY OVER THE RIVER.
“Wow,” Tysa said, her arms open. “I didn't know that computers can lie like that.”
...THE VERY BEST OF US CAN DO IT WELL.
“Good, Faith,” Agdinar said. “That was great.”
...I HAD SOME HELP.
“Help?” Sarinda and Agdinar asked together.
Something moved near Tysa and stepped in between them. They all shivered under a cold spell, the closest they'd ever been to seeing a ghost. It was a human form, dressed in an old yellow overcoat suit with a weird color-matched hat.
...Hello, my friends. It's Dhern here, refreshed and remade after a short vacation break...Faith has nice soft hands, and she’s made me look like Dick Tracy, hasn’t she?
Agdinar squinted, trying to interpret the slight wavering of the air that surrounded a vaguely human silhouette. “You did this?”
...Faith is quite capable on her own, but I have a weakness for chess, and wanted to beat the White King in his own game...I played a little chess on him.
“A little chess?” Sarinda had joined the game of trying to pinpoint where Dhern was.
...He wasn’t thinking much about the atomic bomb, so I couldn't read his mind and find it...but he did think on the call to free your father, so I made it for him.
“You freed him?” Sarinda said. She sounded more incredulous than delighted.
...Yes, now it's up to him to make it out of town.
“And everybody else,” Tysa said, her hand unable to resist the impulse to reach and try touching the ghost. But the shape remained steady in place.
“So, nothing about the bomb?” Agdinar was slowly drifting away from the group, his body pushing him to start pacing and wondering what to do.
...No, nothing to report about it, but he kept thinking on midnight, and the explosion, while seeing over and over that time in a primitive gold clock, kind of small and with several faces.
The two girlfriends looked at each other. Agdinar saw a suddenly happy Sarinda. “What?” he said.
“I know,” she said.
“We know,” added Tysa.
“You know what?”
...I AM INTERESTED TOO.
“Where the bomb is,” Sarinda said.
A nauseating second later, they were all seated in Faith's cockpit, the room vanished—or they vanished from the room, wherever that place and its reality had been.
Agdinar smiled, relaxing in his seat. He had been placed in the back seat, with Tysa.
His ethereal friends had decided for him that this time he wasn't the real leader.
“How do we run this thing?” Sarinda said.
She was now in the front seat, commanding Faith's controls.
The next second, they were heading east across town, slaloming between buildings.
To Grand Central Terminal.
Chapter 51
As soon as they approached Grand Central from the air, it was apparent that the train station was overflowing with Hawks. Blue-hooded ants were patrolling the streets and had built a line of defense, a blockage extending all the way to where large drones hovered over Bryant Park. Agdinar could see snipers in dark clothing on the roof of the old New York Public Library.
“Well, it looks like we are in the right place,” Tysa said.
When Faith spoke next, it was in her loudest mind-voice, and everybody flinched.
...THEY ARE NOT THE WORST OF OUR PROBLEMS.
Before anyone could say, or think, anything, the view on the outside window turned into a comprehensive, and all-too-scary 360-degree view of the city around, coated by an undefinable iridescent cast.
“Oh, God,” Sarinda said.
“God?” Tysa said, almost yelling her irony. “What the rats is that?”
With Faith's eyes, they could see all over the outside of Grand Central, and even into the streets underneath them, a scene reminiscent of a medieval painting about the hierarchies in the citadel of Hell.
Thousands of robots were crawling, walking, or flying, checking and recording everything that moved, while pointing at the streets with weapons of every shape and size. These things were after every human who hadn't left yet and was stupidly watching the commotion on 42nd Street.
Thousands of invisible robots.
“They are defending the station, aren't they?” Sarinda said.
“But, for what?” Tysa asked.
“They're trying to keep the future from being changed,” Agdinar said. “The city will be destroyed, and the world will follow.”
“I thought, really thought,” Sarinda said, “that your people were here to protect us.”
“We were here to watch,” he said, every word loaded with doubt.
“That doesn't look like just watching,” Sarinda said, still pointing down to the crawling mass of monsters.
“I might have been wrong,” Agdinar said.
“Kind of a big understatement,” Tysa said, peeking at the edge of the cabin's windowpane.
“It's not your fault,” Sarinda said, reaching back to take Agdinar’s hand. The cabin had returned to its normal panels of lighted windows; Faith was trying to spare them from seeing the horror.
“Oh, yes, it is my fault,” he said. “I am as responsible as everyone else above.”
* * *
The three humans and the two artificial intelligences—one incorporeal and the other ship-bound—were all but certain that the bomb was hidden somewhere in Grand Central. But they couldn't agree on an uncomplicated way to get inside the terminal and disable it without being detected by the hordes of Tower machines.
Below them, visible and invisible forces were fighting an information battle. The invisible robots kept rerouting and distracting police drones in the air and scouts on the ground—very few members of the police remained in the neighborhood, and the Hawks were leaving in mass. Fifth Avenue was deserted in the early evening, foreboding a tragedy on an apocalyptic scale. And the Towers' equipment left there was bent on not letting any police recording device get close to the station's entrances. A few of the police drones, confused, hit buildings or exploded in mid-air. The madness was an obvious attempt to eliminate any surviving records of the coming disaster.
It was both a treason to history and an abhorrent loop in time. The future was making sure the future would never know what had happened there.
When Agdinar realized this, he froze in the middle of another argument about how they could be easily detected by those low-level robots on the ground.
He finally understood the origin of the Watchers' decision to come back in time, seemingly with the purpose of studying mankind and preventing its falling. A group of them—but maybe, he hoped, not his father—had made it impossible for anyone to learn how the Second Descent had begun.
So that they would come.
Thus, the loop in time. The future coming to the past to create the reasons for the future to come to the past.
It was a perfectly logical abomination, a futile cycle of causes.
He started to think what he needed to tell his forebears in the future, when the explosive thinking of Faith hit him—and the others—with the force of a hand slap.
...WE MUST GO.
“What's going on?” Tysa said.
...A LARGE VESSEL IS COMING...WE WILL BE DETECTED.
“We need to get into the station,” Agdinar said, knowing it was almost impossible to do.
Seeing the Towers' Explorer airship froze everyone. It was a reconnaissance vehicle, much larger than Faith, and it seemed stuck inside the Chrysler Building, as if it had crashed there but didn’t get all the way through. They were seeing only an image of the invisible machine, its metallic luster agreeing in a disturbing way with the building, as if the Chrysler had a malignant tumor growing at its waist. The thing resembled a monster from the sea, tentacles hanging and a somewhat flattened body with spikes and writhing folds.
They only had seconds before the Explorer’s sensors sweeping the area would detect them, and Faith rose almost vertically to the skies between the earth and the Towers.
They couldn't feel the effects of gravity and speed, but the vertiginous climb was dizzying. Faith leveled off in seconds, staying just below a cloud.
“We need to go back,” Tysa said.
“But how?” Agdinar was watching a view of Grand Central from straight up.
“That's it! Can't you see it?” Sarinda turned and pointed at the screen from over Agdinar's shoulder. “Central is a train station,” she said, “but mostly a terminal. Look at the trains.”
“She's right,"” Tysa said. “Trains keep entering the station...the auto-trains are still working.”
“And we can use them to get in,” Agdinar said.
...I CANNOT GET INTO A TRAIN.
“I know,” he said, touching the cockpit's surface as if patting a friend.
* * *
Faith had been strategic in how she'd placed herself on the distant node that collected all the auto-trains before they headed underground to Grand Central. A few of the Metro-North Line trains still had human conductors, but they were only tokens to avoid concerns from passengers—who had never accepted how the unattended machines drove them at the high speeds of magnetic rails. But on that night, all that was left from the computerized organization were empty shells, shuttling back and forth from a dead terminal.
They hadn't used Faith's elevator to get to the ground, as she was getting concerned about the Towers’ constant scanning of Grand Central for intruders. Agdinar was worried about the likelihood of every available Watcher desperately checking viewers to ascertain what the hell was going on with the city.
Or worse, he could see how Management would lie and assure those same Watchers that everything would be fine by morning.
There would be no morning for New York.
“Are you all right?” Sarinda said, touching his shoulder. They were all standing near a madness of crisscrossing magnetic rails. It was dark enough for Faith to blend completely with the night.
“Maybe it's too late for this,” he said. “What was Faith's estimate?”
“She said that we have two hours at most,” Sarinda said. Her breath was easy to spot, as the night had turned sharply colder. “Are you sure you want to do it? We can still—”
"Yes, I know,” he said. “But I won't be able to live with myself if we don't do everything we can to save the city.”
“Well, then, let's go.”
“Dhern, where are you?”
Agdinar felt a weird vibration on his abdomen. He had a new belt, with a series of blinking lights around his waist; it had been transferred from the ship using the elevator.
“What's this?”
...It's me, Agdinar...I’m getting tired of jumping between things, and Faith wants me to be with you.
Agdinar could see the slight irre
gularity of the air near him, the ghost tethered to him by the belt. “Well, I can't say I disagree with getting help,” he said. “We will be moving fast.”
A train was approaching them, its positional lights bouncing and flashing. The cars’ circular windows were like eyes shining into the night. It began to decelerate, still silent.
Before it passed them—three shadows in an open yard full of old rails and new, levitating tracks—the train stopped completely and the doors of the car nearest to them opened without a sound.
As soon as they finished climbing the extended emergency ladder and got inside, the doors closed, and the machine restarted its march to Grand Central. It wasn't the newest of the magnetic trains, but an early model of New York’s computer-driven lines.
Agdinar got to see Faith receding, barely a shadow added to the night, which they had left to enter the even deeper darkness of the tunnels.
* * *
The train stopped on one of the underground tracks, and they stepped out with uncertain movements. They could have been chased by any of their many enemies—the Hawks, the police force, or the Watchers’ robot advance—and any of them could have prepared an ambush. Their train, a smooth silver tube, was now catching the last city lights and turning them into rainbows; it didn’t have any screens turned on, and Agdinar saw it as a nefarious development.
At the station’s underground, a huge black screen welcomed them, projected virtually as a curtain between the ancient staircase and the main concourse. It was a shocking message in changing red numbers the size of their heads. The digital countdown had hundredths-of-a-second digits that were changing too fast to see.
Only 58 minutes left. A minute after midnight the countdown would end.
New York would end.
Chapter 52
There were countdown projections on every arch that led to the main concourse. And for Agdinar, alert quickly gave way to fear. It wasn't the absolute emptiness of the usually crowded space, but the presence of a dozen large white robots from the Towers—land fighters just like the ones that had attacked them near Lincoln Center, busy patrolling the perimeter and the corridors coming off the central space. Their laser weapons were up high and primed for discharge.