“Bloody hell on Earth,” Susan muttered. “I haven't felt this crocked up since I got in a rock-em-up with a couple of slobbered assholes my grad night from ASTROcom.”
“How did his happen, Susan?”
“And how you doing, love?” Susan looked down to her side, found her RIF, and she put it on slowly. “Sorry. To your question! Yes. I seem to recall Peter stopped breathing after I got him up here, and I had just resuscitated him, then I went flying.”
“The explosion?”
“Felt like it to me, love. I would not mind another of Liv's sedatives right about now.”
Susan's eyes widened in an instant of realization, and the women stared silently at each other.
So much death, Lara thought. Too much death.
88
M
ifuro and Anatoly came to a stop at the base of the ladder leading up to docking spiral 12. When they heard footsteps approaching at a furious pace, they drew their lazguns.
“Stop where you are,” Anatoly said, moving out from behind a protective bulkhead into the corridor.
The two men on approach dropped their weapons to their sides.
“It's OK. I'm George Cleopolous and this is Stephen Kreveld. I assume you are Anatoly, and where is Mifuro?”
The Japanese prince revealed himself, his weapon lowered as soon as he saw the two men were not wearing the hauntingly black uniforms of the invading soldiers.
“Where is the rest of your crew? Engineering?” Mifuro asked.
“No,” George said haltingly. “We are the crew of New Terra.”
“Where are our people? You said you'd rescue them.”
George and Stephen looked at each other with defeated glances. George spoke.
“There was a hull breach in SEC 7. We had to come back. It would have taken too long to go any other route. I'm very sorry.”
Before another word was spoken, Mifuro pressed his RIF to deactivate the vocal link, and he ordered Anatoly to do the same.
“Too long? How much is too long? We have three crewmates very much alive and we are not leaving this ship without them.”
“I am truly sorry, Mifuro, but we are showing Front Guard soldiers en route to engineering as we speak. They should reach your crewmates' location within 90 seconds. I wish there was another way, but there is nothing that can be done for them. We barely avoided getting trapped in SEC 7 ourselves. We must go. Front Guarders are closing in quickly. They will be here in seconds.”
As Mifuro and Anatoly stood dumbfounded, George and Stephen moved swiftly past them. Anatoly turned to Mifuro, looking for any kind of words of hope, but Mifuro was silent, his expression nondescript.
Stephen halted, put a hand on Anatoly's shoulder. “You don't want to fight those Front Guarders, friend. They are crazy-ass bastards.”
“Let's go,” George ordered. “We'll put you on New Terra by force if we have to.”
Anatoly turned toward George, took a step toward the ladder, then stopped, turned to Mifuro. “But we can't ... they'll be killed.”
“Yes,” Mifuro said, then raised his voice. “Yes, we can. Let's move quickly. There is another way!”
Anatoly did not have an opportunity to question Mifuro's reversal. More footsteps rounded a bend, charged closer. There were voices.
“Now.” George hustled the Andorran crewmates up the ladder. “Inside, quickly. Prepare to grab hold. The G-stamp is disengaged.”
Flashes of laser light whisked behind Anatoly as he swept inside the hatch and raced to the ladder. Mifuro followed him up.
“I didn't think we'd actually have to blast our way out of here,” Stephen said as he ducked behind a bulkhead, then fired his blast gun around the corner. “You first, fella! Get on up there!”
George complied.
After firing his weapon a few more times, blind as to whether he was actually hitting any human targets or simply making a mess of the corridor, Stephen laughed. “Got these guys pinned down. Hah! Don't tell me I'm a sorry excuse for a revolutionary.”
“Get the hell in here, Kreveld,” George said as he climbed through the docking tube, and his co-pilot complied with pleasure.
“Coming at you.” He raced up the ladder, grabbing every other rung.
He moved fluidly, dived into the weightless cabin of the shuttle.
“Let's get the hell out of here,” George said. “Stephen, I'm going to the cockpit. We don't have time to fire the engines. I want manual de-coupling. Now.”
Stephen turned awkwardly in the weightlessness and slapped hard against the printlock. The spiral docking hatch slipped silently shut. A second later, they heard the sound of laser blasts against the other side of the tube. Stephen released a latch from the cabin's ceiling next to the tube, pulled hard on the lever within, and everyone aboard fell back slightly as the tube hissed, the docking grapples de-coupled, and New Terra drifted.
Mifuro turned to Anatoly and pressed his vocal link.
“Lara? Can you hear me, Lara?”
89
Y
es! Yes, Mifuro,” Lara said. “What's happening?”
- “there's no time for questions. This is what I need for you to do. You are close to the schematics board, correct? If so, look to the starboard configuration, all the way at the end facing the core.”
“Yes, and?”
- “the emergency detachment unit is located at the base. It should be shaped much like a printlock. Do you see anything like that?”
Indeed, there was a small square protrusion just below where the angled schematics merged with the corridor wall. It was red.
“OK. What do I do?”
- “hit it, quickly.”
As Lara raced toward it and did as told, Anatoly's voice interrupted.
- “what are you doing, Mifuro? There's not enough time for that, and you don't have the …”
- “how much time do we have?” Mifuro asked someone else. After a brief silence, he continued: “The soldiers will reach you in about 30 seconds. Lara, the only chance you have now is to detach the stern.”
Lara swallowed hard as she hit the printlock, which fell away to reveal a flat keyboard.
- “but the command codes,” Anatoly insisted. “Emergency jettison of the IPG and the scoops can only be ordered with command codes, and the captain is dead.”
- “no, he isn't,” Mifuro said matter-of-factly. “I am the captain. I reprogrammed the command sequences immediately after we knew the intent of the PAC ship. It had to be done by someone. Now, Lara, I want you to input this sequence as quickly as possible. Ready?”
“Yes, I think so.”
- “eng.dis.alphacom.55.nakahita.mifuro.”
Her fingers stumbled at first, but she moved across the board with all the precision she could render. It was not until she typed the final letters did Lara understand what she was about to do.
- “remove your RIF now! Place the earpiece against the receiver element. Quickly!”
Doing as she was told – for a deeper fear told her this was the only option – Lara placed the black unit flush against the receiver node. She heard Mifuro as he shouted over the RIF.
- “voice confirmation! Nakahita, Mifuro. Classification 44699-B.”
Instantly, klaxons exploded to violent fury, and red flashers joined in throughout engineering.
“WARNING. EMERGENCY ION PROPULSION SEPARATION ENGAGED. YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS TO END PROGRAM.”
For an instant, Lara felt her breathing stop just as it had in the IPG core, and she turned to Susan, who wore a resigned smile.
Despite the chaos of the moment, Lara heard the on-rush of footsteps, and she slapped the RIF on again.
“They're coming.”
- “yes, yes,” Mifuro said less decisively, then after a secondary pause added: “Do you have a lazgun? If so, fire it at will. Perhaps it will be enough to halt their advance for a few seconds.”
Lara turned to Susan, w
ho grinned widely.
“I'm all over this one, love,” she said, removing a weapon from her hip pouch.
The computer counted down. “FIVE, FOUR, THREE …”
Susan pressed down and sent blasts of condensed yellow light racing down the long corridor, splashing hard against the distant bulkhead and exploding.
“TWO, ONE, SEPARATION PROGRAM ACTIVATED.”
Perhaps no more than 10 meters down the corridor, a hatch appeared from the ceiling and closed down rapidly. As it descended, Lara saw dark pants and black boots rounding a bend. She heard blasts from beyond the hatch.
Susan fired again, hitting one of the soldiers just below the knee.
The hatch slammed shut, and then a second hatch much closer, perhaps five meters away, crushed down in an instant.
Echoes like thunder bandied through engineering, and Susan dropped her weapon. She looked at Lara, who fell onto one knee.
The process of de-coupling was over much faster than the program required to initiate it. What they heard next was …
Silence. The silence of drifting in space.
There was no low, steady hum they spent the better part of 34 years hearing. The lights faded, and a red glow fell upon them. But Lara did not experience the fear of the core all over again.
She returned Susan's smile. And then there was a soft voice over the RIF, and it was Mifuro.
- “we'll be coming for you. I promise, we will be home soon.”
And Lara knew they would.
Part Five:
All That Remains
91
12:02 a.m. ECS time
Atlanta Federated District
S
ometime long before the sun set, a man named Bryan Drenette admired the whole of this city from his seat of power behind a red oak workstation on the 37th floor of Dome. To his north and west, he looked out through uninterrupted panes of glass. To his south and east, he watched over the city through computer-generated cycloramas that kissed the ceiling of his office.
Atlanta was beautiful.
At one time, so was the young woman whose mangled body was now plunged deep into the south wall of Drenette's office. Her short lifetime of love, hope, happiness and ambition was blown apart at the torso by a laser mallet. This soldier of deep brown skin, soft pink lips and wide-open eyes was a crushed sculpture visible through a seam in the scrap of a two-ton cyclorama that had been jarred from its mooring, the delicate plates of viop fabric crumpling in on themselves.
This soldier was not the only casualty of the attempted assassination of Bryan Drenette. Five others of the Front Guard also perished, and their blood splattered indiscriminately through the office, intermingling with millions of shards of glass, tatters of leather, foam and fine wood, vioptric components and the aroma of liquor and automated perfumes.
Those five bodies had been removed. But the young woman would remain in her death pose until a full construct team arrived to strike through the cyclorama. Emergency strobes cast a pale aura over the decimation, long shadows falling through the seam in the cyclorama. Streams of forceful light cast the soldier's face as that of someone of far younger than her 22 years. A tinier splash from the strobe illuminated the silver cross on her chest.
The president of the Pan American Community recognized the symbol, and he nodded in solemnity.
“Corporal,” he whispered as he stood amid the devastation.
Sir Jonathan Travert felt a fleeting sensation of nausea.
Glass crackled beneath his spit-polished brown shoes, and he lifted up his right foot to check for bloodstains. His eyes rolled.
“Sloppy,” he mumbled, but proceeded in silence. Two inspectors of the Dome first-strike assessment team allowed him to pass with a simple nod of respect.
Travert walked to the very edge of the office, peered cautiously over the precipice and experienced a soft, chilling breeze where a window had been only two hours earlier. Snatches of jerking beams of light were visible at the base of the old pines that encircled Dome. A pair of armored Sprints hovered in virtual silence no more than 50 meters away, providing an effective blockade against the VidSprints dispatched by various Subgroup news agencies.
“Beautiful city,” Travert whispered between frowns as he stared beyond the chaos, admiring Atlanta after midnight.
He wondered whether the most clever of the VidSprint operators might get a close-up on him standing at the site of his almost-victory. What would they think of a president dressed in such formality – a beige tri-breast with red cummerbund – at the scene of such carnage and so late at night?
Let them wonder. They have no idea.
The oak workstation from which Drenette once oversaw the PAC's security was no longer identifiable – its decimated components shot up by both the Front Guard and by a fully-armored, remote-controlled Sprint that somehow arrived in time to save Drenette. A translucent humidor that avoided the barrage of bullets and laser mallets lay upside-down less than a foot from the precipice, and more than a dozen deep brown cigars were in disarray among the glass and the blood.
Travert found a cigar without blood on it. He bent down, pressed the cigar to test for freshness. The tobacco was soft.
In one quick, clean motion, he placed the cigar between his teeth and bit surgically into the tip, then spat the sliver of tobacco out over the precipice. He tucked the cigar between his teeth and allowed his tongue to roll around it. The tobacco was sweet.
Travert fumbled through a side pocket in search of a finger strobe. There was crackling of glass just behind him, and at the instant he had the strobe in his grasp, a hand reached out to within inches of the cigar. The hand was drawn into a fist except for the forefinger, from which sprouted a black, military-issue strobe. The white glow from its oval head was a perfect match for the cigar's ring size.
“A light, Daddy?”
The president kept the cigar tight between his teeth as he pressed it against the strobe, inhaled and savored.
Col. Dana Travert pop-closed the strobe and kissed her father on one cheek, just above his thin beard.
The president admired his daughter. She stood almost an inch taller than he. She was in formal dress – her battle stars arranged along her chest against the black tri-breasted suit, her command bars silver against heaven-blue shoulder stripes.
“What are you doing in this place?” Dana asked, poking a smile out of the corner of her lips. “It's very unsightly for the likes of you, Daddy.”
“Ho! And what of you? I expected to see you at my suite. I told Hickman to prepare a late dinner for you.”
“And he was waiting. Said you ventured over here.” She did a quick analysis of the office. “Nasty. I understand this didn't finish exactly ...”
“As planned? No. A little curl at the last moment. But these things are always possible. I believe the casualty estimation for your team in Barbados was also exceeded.”
“Only by an acceptable margin, daddy. Anytime you allow the enemy to infiltrate your lines, there are going to be difficult losses all around. So, have they gotten to him?”
The president released a long billow of smoke as he sighed. “No. But I expect we'll have Drenette within the hour. His maneuver gave him about three minutes on us. But at last report, a lock-on of his shuttle had been secured.” He placed an arm around his daughter and brought her closer. “I wish he hadn't fought this, Dana. What will happen to him now will be dramatically more painful.”
“I've heard very little on the Grid,” she said. “Still planning to put all this on Adam Smith's group?”
“Certainly. We still haven't heard from Mr. Raymonds, but we anticipated that delay. He could have had trouble getting out of their base. Might have needed alternate transport after blowing the place straight to hell. Once we hear from him, we'll announce what Second Sunrise did to poor Bryan Drenette, how our troops traced the raid back to the source and eliminated Smith's group. And just as soon as Raymonds
gives us the coordinates, we'll send in our people to fry whatever is left."
“You, Daddy, are the single most efficient man I have ever had the privilege to love. Your vision for the PAC is almost complete.”
The president ran a hand through his daughter's swooping black hair and smiled. “Almost. But not until SkyWeb is online. It’s the last piece for all the ECs. Remarkable to think this is 70 years in the making. Still, there is the issue of Andorran.”
“I'm sure our people are on schedule.”
“Possibly. Last report confirmed that the troops had docked. They were under comm blackout from that point. They should need another 90 minutes to reprogram the ship's course and remix the ion scoops. They should be home before dawn.”
Dana frowned. “Do I sense concern, Daddy?”
“Realism, Dana. Always realism. The Andorran segment to our web was always the trickiest. Greatest potential for error – human or otherwise. We took a strong enough risk exposing the shuttle in Barbados. Fortunate our people made the rendezvous without prior orbital experience. And there's always the matter of Smith's shuttle.”
“If Raymonds did his job, then that's not an issue.”
“If.” The president dropped the cigar to his side and wet his lips. “Raymonds was a traitor all the way, and we put him into play for us. Lots of dominoes in this one, Dana. That's the only reason we didn't trigger the whole thing days before Andorran reached orbit. Had to be certain about all the dominoes. We took considerable risks holding back our aces until very late in the game. And the nature of the man made Raymonds a dangerous variable.”
“You're not certain this is going to work.”
The president looked over his shoulder. The two inspectors who were still combing through the ruins were at a safe distance.
“Drenette was not supposed to leave this room alive,” he said, looking into his daughter's eyes. “There are always variables.”
“And if things haven't gone well with Smith's group? Or Andorran?”
He handed the cigar to his daughter, who promptly tucked it in the corner of her mouth and puffed.
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