Suddenly Olivia was in tears, bursting out despite every effort of self-control. “I didn’t eat them. I didn’t…”
“I know.”
“I didn’t…”
“Those two revenants in the pen were your children.”
“I didn’t eat them…”
She left it hanging there. A minute or more might have passed before she spoke again, squeezing the words out through tears.
“I was going to.”
She gasped as more tears came. I went to her and put an arm around her. For once, she did not refuse the comfort.
“I was so hungry… there was nothing else left… I had the hatchet in my hand…”
“What stopped you? The ship?”
“Yes. I just…” More tears interrupted her. “I didn’t want to die… I thought there had to be someone out there, I didn’t know I was the only one, I didn’t know!”
I held her as the crying went on.
8. Liss & The Group
Liss sat in the remote meeting room, listening to the bad news from the ICT. “It’s a matter of resources,” said her assigned ICT contact, projected into a meeting room chair.
“Resources. You’re kidding, right?”
“I wish we were. But we need the support of member species and a number of them aren’t providing the personnel they promised.”
“How many people does it take to ask a few questions?”
“It’s not just a few questions. There’s a huge amount of legwork involved, across a number of worlds. It’s a massive operation and we have to prioritise. But your case is close to the top of the list…”
“I’m not asking you to turn over every stone! There’s all the archives from the PRG! You don’t even need to go to another universe to start going through it!”
“And it’ll take a long time just to get through the archives. And frankly… with your world being the way it is, we’d have to be very thorough ruling out the possibility the guilty parties were home-grown.”
“You think we did it…?”
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying we have to rule it out or it might be a problem in court. It’s the first defence anyone would use.”
Liss folded her arms. “So who gets to go first? Iokan?”
“We’re looking into his case, yes. I can’t discuss the details.”
“Of course not. And how long before you get to me?”
“It’s impossible to say. But we’ll get there as fast as we can.”
She came to me, of course, but there wasn’t anything I could do. I asked if she wanted to try investigating on her own, as she seemed quite angry; but the anger turned into frustration, and she said there wasn’t any point. She left looking miserable.
Meanwhile, Olivia could not be left alone. She thought this to be a capital nuisance, but her protests were mere mutterings compared to her usual conduct. Liss found her in the common room with a nurse while a newsfeed played on the wall. Olivia wasn’t even watching. The nurse had only put the news on in an attempt to distract her from harmful self-contemplation.
Liss didn’t pay much attention to the first couple of minor items: Ardëe had made the news with its solar flares, or rather the panic among its people as they tried to flee the world despite government assurances; a minor species called Pwller were being welcomed to Hub on their first visit to the IU to negotiate membership, a sign that business-as-usual was returning after the attack; and then the screen went onto its main story, the ongoing reaction to the activation of the ICT, following the issuing of the first subpoenas demanding certain persons appear for questioning.
Liss found herself watching, and hearing opinions from four different universes. One world seemed uniformly hostile, and imitation IU transit pods were burnt in effigy. Another, older world showed no outward display of anger but presented a measured, reasoned argument against the ICT and the potential stirring up of unnecessary trouble. Then came a recently contacted world accusing every species in the multiverse of visiting their planet and conducting sexual experiments on their cattle. And finally another measured and reasoned argument from a well-known IU species who had suffered violations early in their history, saying that Something Must Be Done or else It Would Only Happen Again.
Liss shook her head as the newsreaders claimed the reports reflected the balance of opinion on all surveyed universes. “This is bullshit,” she said.
Olivia realised she was there. “What…?”
“The news. Bullshit.”
Olivia seemed to notice the feed for the first time. “Wasn’t watching.”
“That’s not a balance of views. That’s just the ones who are yelling the loudest.”
“What’s up with you?” asked Olivia, not so much to make the inquiry as to point out that Liss was annoying her.
Liss sighed. “I don’t know what to do…”
“Do whatever it is you usually do. I don’t know.”
Liss was quiet for a moment. Olivia began to think she’d taken the hint. She hadn’t.
“Can I ask your advice?”
“What…?”
“It’s just, I’ve had some news, and…”
“Well I’m sure I don’t know.”
“Look, you’re… I mean, you know what you’re doing. You’re good at making decisions, right? That’s why they put you in charge of that research place?”
Olivia was caught off guard and at a loss for words. Liss took her silence as permission to continue.
“You see I think I know who might have done it. I mean the genocide, on my world. And the ICT won’t investigate, and…”
Olivia cut in, suddenly dagger-serious. “You want to ask me my advice?”
“Er. Yeah. Is that okay?”
Olivia chuckled sourly. “You want to ask me for advice…” Her mirth turned a corner into sobs. The nurse sat next to her as Olivia hid her face and her tears.
“Not a good time,” said the nurse.
Liss watched, open mouthed, as Olivia allowed the nurse to put an arm around her. “Oh. Uh. Okay.” The nurse smiled an apology. “I’ll, um, I’ll… is there anything I can do?” The nurse shook her head, and Liss retreated.
Pew, on the other hand, was more than willing to give advice. She found him in the gym, working hard on muscles left unexercised for too long, pushing gravity weights with his legs.
She told him her situation. His reaction was to slow his exercise, and then stop altogether. At which point his foot slipped and the footplate jumped at him. Liss reflexively sprung forward, but the safety mechanism cut in first.
“Damn this thing!” said Pew, then sighed. “I’m so… weak. Damn it.” She helped him out of the machine, and he couldn’t help but notice how firm her grip was. “You don’t have this problem, do you?”
“Uh, no.”
“If you had to fight, you could fight. I don’t even know how to fight…”
“Kinda. I guess. Never used to be any good at it.”
He sighed. “What did you say? You think you know who did it?”
“Something like that.”
“Do you know for sure?” he asked.
“No! That’s the point. It’s just… freaky. You know. I’m not what I thought I was and maybe there’s this species that dumped me on the planet and forgot about me and then killed everyone…”
“So the attack was genetically targeted?”
“I guess. Could have been…”
“Has to be!” he cried, springing up so fast that Liss took an involuntary step backward. “That’s why you survived!”
“Yeah, but I don’t know. And you know me, I’m not the one to do this, I tried it before and I got caught. I just… I know it sounds pathetic, but—”
“I’ll help.”
“Uh. Okay.”
“What will you do when you know for sure?”
“Well, I… I hadn’t really thought about that.” He nodded intently. “Turn them over to the ICT, I guess…”
“No!” A
gain, he made her jump. “They won’t do anything!” He looked around, fretting. “Come with me.”
He dashed off to his room, and she followed, already a little worried. “We need privacy,” he said, and activated it. Later, feeling troubled by his words, she told me what happened.
He was disturbingly earnest. He wanted to know what she would do if she knew for sure who had killed her species. She repeated her earlier answer: she didn’t really know. She wasn’t thinking about that yet.
He seemed to think of little else. He asked if she had resources to do anything; she had to agree that, in theory, she could do something. There were plenty of extremely destructive weapons at her disposal thanks to the PRG. She could certainly inflict a revenge — if she could get hold of interversal transit technology, which was far beyond her understanding. But not his.
He volunteered to help. Liss asked what he wanted to do. He said: punish them. Give them what they deserve. Give them what they gave us. She found herself at a loss. His idea of punishment was clearly far beyond anything she had in mind. She made excuses and let herself out.
Kwame wasn’t available for her to talk to, as he was still secluded inside the bunker simulation. So she went to the last of her peers she could ask for advice.
Iokan was putting his affairs in order. There wasn’t much to do. His few physical possessions were tidied away, his files were archived and he’d written a short will reiterating his desire for the IU to be given anything useful from his world. He was now in the process of erasing his room.
“And there goes the texture…” he operated a control on a pad, and the stonelike finish of the walls and ceiling slowly smoothed, receded and paled into unassigned grey. “We need to step outside if I’m going to do the floor… I’m sorry, what did you want to talk about?”
“Do you remember, you came to my room and said you wanted to help me?”
“Of course! I didn’t think you were interested.”
“Well, heh, yeah, sorry about that. Um. I just wanted to know how you were going to help me?”
He looked at her, gauging her expression. Then shrugged. “It wasn’t much, I’m afraid. I had some intelligence from my world about the people we were fighting. I thought perhaps we could work together and compare notes.”
“You said the people who attacked my world might have attacked your world as well.”
“It’s possible.”
“Did you have anyone in mind…?”
He looked at her again, and frowned in an amused way. “You’ve had some news, haven’t you?”
“Yeah… something like that.”
“You have a suspect?”
“Kind of.”
“And you were thinking I might be able to corroborate your suspicions?” She was about to agree, but he spoke again: “Or… perhaps you want to have a short cut so you don’t have to look into it yourself?”
She looked down, embarrassed.
“That’s fine,” he said. “I understand. You don’t really want to be a detective, do you?”
“Well, I… I don’t know.”
He smiled. “I don’t mind. You can have the intel if you want. It’s not a short cut, I’m afraid. There’s a lot to go through and we never really knew exactly who we were fighting. I’ll sort out access later today.”
“Can’t you…?” She asked for help with trailing voice and helpless eyes.
“Can’t I…?” He looked back at her, forcing her to say it for herself.
“I wouldn’t know where to start with your files. Can’t you help me out with them?”
He shook his head and sighed a happy sigh. “No. I’m not long for this world. And really, it doesn’t matter any more. Now, if you don’t mind…” He indicated they should leave, so he could finish blanking the room.
Liss wandered slowly downstairs to the common room, which Olivia had now vacated. She slumped down in a chair and put the newsfeed back on. After a repeated item about the solar flares threatening Ardëe, they went back to the same old reports on the ICT: endless coverage of the same issue summarised again and again. She watched the clips of people on various worlds, giving the same opinions as before. For it. Against it. It’ll stir up trouble. Something has to be done. Interversal relations would be destabilised. Doing nothing sent a signal that abusers could continue with impunity.
She drummed the arm of the chair with her fingers. Nothing was easy.
She sat up straight, and looked further into the newsfeed: there were plenty of other opinions available from many more worlds, if you were willing to search.
She selected Quillia.
They were against it. Unanimously. There were no Quillian voices of any kind expressing any other opinion than that it would be more trouble than it was worth. And the newsfeed, as it did elsewhere, asserted that the quotes shown reflected the balance of opinions they had found.
She finger-drummed the armchair again. Then shut down the newsfeed, went up to her room and began her investigation.
9. Kwame
Kwame walked through the bunker alone, save for the two medics who kept as much distance as they could.
Beyond the lobby, the heavy steel door opened onto a tunnelled-out corridor that ran left and right. Kwame took a few steps down to the right, and pushed open the guard-room door: a small chamber, again hollowed out from the mountain rock. A table at the centre. Comms console in an alcove. CCTV screens in a bank, all of them showing views from within the bunker: TV Studio. Offices. Living quarters. Galley. Ops Centre.
A weapons rack drew his eye. Ten standard Mutapan assault rifles. The 35MFR-E model, he judged by the electronics on the scope. He took one down and inspected it: the magazine detached properly, and there were rounds pressed within. Nothing in the chamber; good safety protocol. He slammed the mag back in. It even sounded right. He reversed the weapon and brought it to port arms, then shouldered it, standing to attention and stamping his feet as though he were on a parade ground. He smiled, remembering old times.
But then he heard the thunderous clash of other soldiers coming to attention.
He glanced at the CCTV screens: the medics stood outside, oblivious. But in the lobby, two lines of soldiers stood with weapons shouldered while the blast doors opened. He rushed to the loopholes, placed at shoulder height, and struggled to see past the line of men. The soldiers saluted as one. Someone was greeted by a general, someone shook a hand — but he could not see who.
The door to the corridor opened. “Mr. Vangona? You okay in there?” asked one of the medics. Kwame pivoted and brought his weapon up to point at the man. He reached for the trigger — but his old injury left his hand scrabbling along the side of the weapon.
He looked back through the loopholes, and then the CCTV: the lobby was empty.
He lowered the weapon. “I am well,” he said, though there was clearly sweat on his face. The medic glanced down at the rifle. Kwame smiled thinly and pulled the trigger with his good hand: the weapon did not fire, nor could it ever fire. “Please do not interrupt.” He placed it back in the rack, and went out past the medics.
The corridor ran both ways around the exterior of the bunker, looping round until it met itself at the far end — or it was meant to. Halfway along, Kwame found a “NO ENTRY” sign on the ground, blocking the way as though someone was working on the corridor beyond. He stepped past it, put out a hand and found an invisible barrier: the apparent continuation of the corridor was an illusion. This was where they’d run out of space to simulate the bunker.
Sounds reached him. Not the medics this time, who waited just beyond the corridor’s curve. Instead, they came from the door set in the inner wall: the entrance to the innermost chambers. He walked up to the door, and pressed his ear against the hardened metal: it sounded like voices, footsteps, keyboards, computers. He closed his eyes.
The medics crept round the curve and watched him standing there, listening. He came back to himself, and swiped the keycard he had taken from the front desk. The
door beeped, locks tumbled aside, and the interior opened up to him.
The sounds remained distant, just out of reach: things heard from another room, and never the sound from the room he was in. Inside the rough circle of the outer corridor, the bunker was laid out in something more like a grid, with a central cross of two corridors that met in the middle. The walls were artificial here: rough concrete and whitewashed breezeblock. Pipes and ducts lined the ceiling, routing streams of cables around the bunker. Light was provided by more fluorescent strips, tinging everything with their unhealthy green.
He pushed open the first door: an office. Desks, bulky CRT monitors, papers piled up. A map of the bunker on the wall showing the various security zones. A main screen that showed the National Security Status: NSSzero, indicating open war. He closed the door, and could hear voices from within again: mostly female, but indistinct.
He walked on. The nearside of the bunker was largely given over to living spaces. The main galley; the mess; the laundry; the recycling station. And the bunks. He pushed open the door and looked inside. Pipes ran across the ceiling. If you slept on the top bunk, you had to be careful not to bump your head when getting down.
A woman dangled from the pipes by a noose. One of the secretaries. He rushed forward to lift her, shouting for help to pull her down, but only drew the attention of the medics — who saw him trying to lift nothing in the middle of the room. He realised what was happening after they’d stared helplessly for a few moments, then pushed past them and went to the toilets.
There was another suicide in one of the stalls. A general, shoulderboards glinting in the dim light. He’d sharpened a medal and used it to slash his wrists, then slumped against the side of the stall, still staring.
Kwame fled from the toilets. The medics stepped back to let him go as he went down into the ops centre, sliding his card to gain admission and shutting the door behind him.
Twenty people looked up as he entered. They’d long since abandoned the discipline of fresh clothes and shaving. He noticed the smell: stale sweat and rotten chewed khat on everyone’s breath.
The Last Man on Earth Club Page 48