“Harris, where are you? Where are you?” Franklin’s voice still had that insane tone. KLANK! KLANK! KLANK! Metal hitting metal. He struck the metal walls with a pipe or a hammer to get my attention.
The world started to spin as I pushed forward. I was tired and cold and dizzy from fighting against chemicals meant to paralyze me. I had no idea how they impacted my sensory perceptions. The floor seemed to rise and lower every time I lifted my feet. The walls seemed to bend and close in around me. My breath turned to steam.
I limped ahead.
“I’m coming for you, Harris. Better run. Better run!” Franklin sounded farther away, not closer. Maybe he had taken a wrong turn.
I tried to orient myself.
This had to be an area of the spaceport that was not open to the public. There have to be people. There are people here…seventeen million. Where are they? I thought.
I found a hall that was wide and dark, and I followed it. Here and there I saw signs on the walls; but the dark lighting and the drugs played tricks on my perception. I recognized the letters, but the words made no sense.
I had a trace of a memory, something I had dreamed or possibly something I heard while drugged. I remembered a conversation with Don Cutter. His name entered my head, and a wave of hate rolled over me. I tried to resist the feeling. It was all part of the brainwashing. They had trained me to hate my friend.
Have to keep moving, I told myself. If I could buy myself more time, my strength would return.
The sign over the door said: PISCINE LUNE. Was it a hallucination?
I stopped for just a moment and I stared at it. The drugs had addled my brain. I’d never been dyslexic, not until that moment; but the letters I knew, the words I did not.
My head throbbed. The walls around me seemed to bulge and shrink as if inhaling and exhaling. The floor seemed to roll under my feet. I could hear Franklin behind me, far behind me.
I pushed through the door.
There was something in the air; I breathed it in, and it made me dizzy. The room I had entered could not exist, not on a spaceship and certainly not on Mars. It was a chamber as large as any auditorium I had ever seen, bigger than the ones back in the orphanage.
The metal walls formed a dome, and in the center of that dome sat a pool the size of a football field.
The pool was nearly as flat and smooth as a mirror. The only light in the room was the yellow glow rising out of the pool. Powerful lights shone under that water.
I closed the door behind me and stole over for a closer look. The water was brutally cold but not frozen. A metal catwalk spanned the width of the surface. Placed a mere five feet above the water, it was slick and the iron was cold and some kind of gritty white canker had formed on it.
The moon pool, I reminded myself. Sunny had said “moon pool” and I had not put two and two together. I had heard the term in school and filed it away as trivial. Boats and submarines and underwater buildings had moon pools, open areas that faced down into the water. The water didn’t come in because the air pressure balanced it out.
As I stepped onto that catwalk, I looked up and saw series of cranes hanging above my head.
If I hid in this chamber I would slowly freeze to death. With my body still weak, I could not swim. If Franklin threw me in the water, I would drown. The entire room, with its watery floor and mystic lighting, made me nervous. I peered down into the pool and saw that beneath its lit mouth, it was as dark and mysterious as death, as vast and heartless as outer space.
I backed away from the pool and out the door. If I ran into Franklin at that moment, I might have welcomed a swift end. He did not scare me as much as the chilly and dark depths of that pool. Franklin was in a rage and had lost control. If he caught me, he would kill me, and everything would end, but that was something I could understand. Those dark waters represented the unknown. Somewhere in my subconscious, the moon pool and reprogramming were almost equivalent, unfathomable depths, unknowable mysteries, the end of existence.
“Harrissss!” the voice was far off, but moving closer. It had a frantic quality.
Some of my strength had returned, and I found I could walk better. I could support my own weight.
I followed the corridor that circled the outside of the enormous domed chamber. The way would have been completely dark except for little lights built into the wall at knee level. I traveled from one light to the next, keeping my steps as silent as possible.
I came to a door, eased it open, and stopped breathing.
There in front of me, spread wide and dark and endless, was an entire abandoned city complete with streets and buildings. This wasn’t Mars Spaceport. This place was large enough to hold a dozen Mars Spaceports.
I knew where I was now. I was no longer on Mars, or even in space at all. I was in one of the abandoned Cousteau deep-sea colonies.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Four hundred years ago, when the Unified Authority had just started exploring the galaxy, a nation called France began an undersea colonization initiative called the Cousteau Oceanic Exploration Program. The ocean, according to the French, was closer than outer space, more safely traveled than outer space, and brimming with life. To prove their point, they constructed three underwater domes in which they nested enormous cities, each of them large enough to house a population of three million people.
Four hundred years had passed, and this fossil still stood. The French abandoned the Cousteau program in 2115. Over the last few centuries, mankind established and lost colonies in the six galactic arms. Man had conquered space and been chased back to Earth, where France’s underwater cities still stood.
Somewhere along the line, I had dismissed them as no more real than Cibola or Mount Olympus. Now mythology had caught up with me.
The top of the dome might have been four hundred feet above me. A halo of pale light shone down from its curvature, artificial light; sunlight could not possibly penetrate this deep in the ocean. That much I knew. The French built their underwater cities near thermal vents, in waters several miles deep.
I looked for anything I could use to seal the door behind me, but I was in an empty street in a vacant city that had never been populated. This place had streets but no cars, apartment buildings without beds, offices without desks or workers. It was the opposite of Mars Spaceport. One hosted millions of people with nowhere to house them; the other had housing for millions and no occupants.
I walked to the nearest building, a four-story framework that had never seen walls. Looking for hiding places on its naked concrete floor, I passed through its unfinished frame. The building was all girders and framework with no place for concealment.
Advancing as slowly as a scared dog, I entered the city. Hearing nothing to suggest that Franklin had followed me out of the cell area, I realized that I now had an entire city in which to hide.
I walked into a tall building, stumbled to a stairwell around which no walls had been built, and climbed until I was so tired that I would have had to crawl to continue. My strength was spent. All of the hormones from my combat reflex had worn off. My muscles ached, and my brain burned.
Somewhere behind me, a door slammed. In the surreal stillness of the abandoned city, it sounded like a gunshot.
Distant shouts. “Harris. Harris! HARRRRISSSSS!”
Sitting four floors up and far away, I leaned against a wall and fell asleep.
Nothing woke me. No sounds. No movements. No lights. My sleep had been deep, and when it ended, it ended on its own terms. When I finally woke up, I felt stronger. How long had I been down here? How long had it been since that half-remembered conversation when I sent Cutter away?
First things first: Where the hell could I find shoes? The floors in this place were so specking cold that the skin on the bottoms of my feet seemed to fuse to the ground.
I sat up and reoriented myself. The building was a latticework of beams and frames with concrete floors and open stairs. The atmosphere was dark,
with a faint haze of phosphorous lumens coming from the dome above.
The dome could have been made of glass, or it might have been made of steel or even cement. It didn’t matter. The French built their cities in the deepest oceanic troughs and trenches. Down this far, the ocean was as devoid of light as any underground cavern.
I went down the stairs and toured the unfinished city. Now that I had rested, I saw my surroundings more clearly.
The silence was absolute. The air was cold and dry. There was not so much as a breeze to disturb the peace. I was hungry, trapped in a world that was vast and sterile, relatively safe but absolutely empty. I could stay here and starve or return to the cells for food, warmth, and destruction. Franklin waited there. Given rest and nourishment, I could kill the bastard; but waiting out here, I would only grow weaker.
I was not starving, but I was hungry. I had no idea how many days had passed since my last meal. Though I could not remember eating, I had never been hungry as a prisoner. Maybe Sunny fed me, or maybe the chemicals deadened my internal sensors.
I needed shoes, food, and water.
The French would not have started a project like this without first installing a desalinization plant, maybe several; but I had no idea how I would find it.
My thoughts ran wild. What if Franklin left me here? He might do just that. Instead of chasing me into the unfinished city, he could abandon me deep beneath the sea. The bastard could report my death—assuming he reported to anyone. To Silas, I reminded myself. Sunny had threatened him with a man named Silas. She said Silas might flush Franklin out a moon pool. Now I knew what she meant.
I knew something else. I knew that I was more valuable to Silas than Franklin. I was the lynchpin in Silas’s plan. Franklin was just a cog on a gear, useful but expendable.
Unless he wanted to answer to Silas, Franklin would not abandon me, and he would not kill me. We were stuck with each other; but there was one difference between us: I didn’t worry about angering the mysterious Silas. Let Silas come after me. Once I finished with Franklin, maybe I’d go for a swim in the moon pool. That sounded better than starving to death.
The thought of killing Franklin made me happy, but I was cold and though my strength was returning, it had not returned. As I thought about this, my head started to hurt, and I went back to sleep.
Once again, I woke with no way of knowing how long I had been out.
The terms “day” and “night” had no application in a man-made bubble two miles beneath the sea. To people living in this trap, the sun and moon would sound as mythological as this city had to me.
I woke quickly but rose slowly, wondering why I should even bother rising from my bed. I probably would not find food or water; and even if I did, how would I protect myself from Franklin? Even if I found food and killed Franklin, I’d still be stuck on the bottom of the ocean.
I remembered fantasizing about going for a fatal swim in the moon pool; but I could not do that. I could not kill myself, not with my neural programming. Liberators had more autonomy than other clones, but it did not include suicide.
I played a game to cheer myself up. I imagined the ways I could kill Franklin. Strangle him, I thought, just like he had strangled Sunny. Beat him to death. Drown him in the moon pool. As he sank, I would tell him, “Give my regards to Sunny.”
Then I came up with the winner. Throw him from a building. Throw him from a third-or fourth-floor landing, just high enough so he’d break an arm or a leg or maybe both. Then I could haul his whining carcass back up the stairs and throw him again. If I dropped him carefully, he might last three or four tossings before his neck finally broke.
When I stood, I found that my legs were strong, but the blood rushed to my head. I waited through a moment of dizziness in which I nearly stumbled, then my head cleared, and I walked to the ledge and tried to make sense of the city below. The streets formed a dark maze of lines and boxes. I had hoped that the designers had laid their project out as logically as a checkerboard with rounded edges. They hadn’t. Instead of spokes and rings, the streets formed cul-de-sacs and spirals. The men who designed this dome had created a community, not a military base, the bastards.
Under normal circumstances, I might have admired that decision—at a time when I was not trapped and hungry.
I looked for lights in the city. If Franklin was looking for me, he’d use a flashlight, or he might illuminate a section of the city…or he might use the night-for-day lenses in the combat armor of a dead Marine. Just because he had the armor did not mean he could use the complicated optical interface, but I suspected he knew how to use it. Franklin was part of something bigger and more organized than a gathering of fanatics. Behind the rage was a regimented logic. He could have killed me anytime he wanted, but he’d waited. He was undoubtedly a criminal, but a war criminal. He might have been a spy, an assassin, an interrogator, or a mercenary, someone with intelligence training.
If Franklin did come after me in combat armor, I’d have another reason to kill him…for the temperature-controlled bodysuit and the armored boots. I was so specking cold, and that left me weak.
And then I saw it. The key to understanding this city was not in the streets, it was in the sky. What I had mistaken for random lights were actually markers. The city was an octagon with eight triangular sectors, each marked by a phosphorous pillar in the sky.
As I figured out how to read the sky, the streets made sense. I shuffled down the stairs to the street level and exited through the rear of the building. In recon training, I had learned to stay in the shadows when possible. Now, it was impossible to leave them. This entire world was shadow.
I cut through unfinished buildings and moved along the narrowest streets. After an hour, I found what I was looking for, a doorway leading into the circular, dark hallway that led around the moon pool.
I was returning to the wing that I had escaped. I had no choice. Franklin and Sunny and fifteen hundred reprogrammed clones ate food there. They drank water.
The air was cold, colder than I remembered.
I followed the hall to its end and entered the port with its glowing moon pool. I approached the bridge that ran across the top of the pool. I could not help myself. The moon pool fascinated me because it opened into the ocean with its bottomless depths. Held back by an invisible cushion of air were Earth’s final secrets, creatures that glowed and fish and squid more strange than anything man had encountered in space.
I stepped on that metal catwalk, trying to ignore the way its cold metal bit my feet. I was halfway across when I stopped and stared down into the illuminated depths.
Had those lights burned for the last four hundred years?
Indistinct shapes moved in the water below me. I understood the cycle. The light attracted swarms of small creatures. The availability of small creatures attracted minor predators that hovered just outside the light. Larger predators lurked lower still.
As a teenager, I studied biology in the orphanage, but that class had more to do with venereal disease than fish. The instructor mentioned something about sharks and giant squid. I imagined a squid staring up at me through the darkness, a big one, something sixty feet long with tentacles the size of fire hoses. I imagined it blending into the shadows, staring up at me from the darkness, ready to pull me into the inky depths. Ready to hold my body with two tentacles while tearing off each of my limbs with others.
Was I scaring myself? Hell yes.
Whatever Franklin and his friends had planned, I could ruin it for them with a short leap from this bridge. I would land in the water. Maybe a shark or a squid would kill me, maybe I would freeze or drown or both. The creatures that lived in those blackened depths represented the unknown to me; they gave shape to my fears.
I had vague memories of the tortures Sunny had inflicted upon me. What she had done to me was worse than drowning. If Franklin caught me, it would start all over again. Given a choice, I would take a few moments of water filling my lungs over hours of tortur
e, then betraying my friends.
But I could not kill myself, my programming would not allow it. Liberators had been designed to fight an unknown enemy in the unexplored center of the galaxy. We had been designed for dark duty. The people who made my kind needed an army of soldiers that would continue fighting no matter what happened, no matter what they ran into.
My knees buckled, then they gave. As I fell down on that cold, metal catwalk, I tried to catch myself on the rail; but my arms did not respond. I fell flat on my face.
Franklin stood at the edge of my vision. “I’m not done with you,” he said.
I could not turn my head to follow him, so he vanished from my view as he stepped onto the catwalk. I heard his footsteps, the soft soles of his shoes padding on the cold metal until he stood over me. He said, “You should have jumped, Harris; but then you couldn’t. I’ll fix that.”
He did not kick me as I expected he would. He did not urinate on me. He just stared down at me as I lay on that bridge, then everything went dark.
PART II
THE LOST SHEEP
RETURN
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Location: The Churchill
Date: April 6, 2519
Travis Watson entered Admiral Don Cutter’s office with a casual air that the admiral interpreted as a swagger. As a civilian, Watson seemed to see himself as exempt from military protocol. Cutter did not share that view. He asked, “When was the last time you heard anything from Harris?”
Harris must have taught the boy something. He knew enough military culture to remain standing until invited to sit.
“Have a seat,” Cutter grunted.
Watson sat.
Cutter didn’t have anything he specifically needed to discuss with Watson; but he wanted to vent his anger on somebody close to Wayson Harris. Watson was the closest target. Had Harris been around, Cutter would have gone after him instead; but Harris’s communications went dark two days ago.
Sometimes Harris did not bother checking in. He was like a cat. He prowled and fought his battles, then returned to base when he felt like it.
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