Then they were away. Lara sat in the Airstream and watched while Lin and her kids went stir-crazy with being cooped up. Sometimes she looked over at Alan reading his book, and he looked back at her, and there was a kind of connection between them for all they'd been through.
She requested reports from all the RVs and went through their logistics. Records showed them well stocked in supplies. She registered the few of their number with engineering skills, and had them start reading up on super-yachts. She knew enough herself about sailing to narrow down the selection; she'd been Anna's spotter and catamaran tech-support for years, while she raced out on the New LA waves. The scale of this voyage was just a little bigger.
They didn't go near the crater of Los Angeles; instead they passed through Sacramento two days later and ended up in San Francisco, where they hit the Marina Yacht Harbor and went shopping.
A 59-meter mega yacht named the 'Perhaps' looked best. It barely listed in the water, though it hadn't moved for thirteen years. The kids ran around its many decks in a rush of excitement, darting in and out of the dry Jacuzzi, dashing through the cinema, the master suite, the lounge and gym. Down in engineering George and Abed, one of Drake's husbands, worked on the engines with a team of amateur helpers.
"Engines are flooded, obviously."
"Rust here, here, here. The rest were oiled."
"These wires are shot. Circuitry's solid. Drive chain needs a tune-up."
They combed over the machinery in detail while Lara floated nearby, feeling strangely distant from these events she'd set in motion. Her mind was already many miles away, off to the west where Amo was an incoherent streak of rage, and Anna was trapped, and some new force was rousing from a long slumber.
Everything was changing.
Cynthia assigned the six master cabins and the eight crew cabins, with adults parsed to the children and extra bedding brought aboard. They stocked up on movies and games, along with water, food and fuel. Lara played with Vie and Talia when they came to her, but they were changing now too, lost in the importance of their own unspoken task; rehabilitating Drake's children. They took lead roles in games together, along with Lin and a few other New LA kids, teaching them how to play Monopoly or ten-pin bowling, running impromptu yoga sessions that devolved into wrestling on the gym's floor mats.
Lara watched them, and felt her skin tighten over her burns, and wondered if she'd ever walk again without skin grafts. They didn't have a real doctor with them, only trainee nurses who couldn't hope to perform such an operation. Instead she just hoped, and waited. A lot of the skin was gone, they told her, but perhaps there would be a treatment across the ocean…
In three days they launched. They broke a bottle of '69 Moet & Chandon champagne off the hull and took to the water. Abed was their navigator, George their captain. Lara felt like a payload, watching from outside as people healed and moved around her.
Her kids puked from seasickness, and it was Drake's kids' turn to laugh and offer them tips, like staring out at the horizon line, and chewing on a piece of gum, since they were old hands at sailing, having spent a month already on their Atlantic journey. At night Lara lay with Vie and Talia either side of her, and it felt good, but the absence of Amo became a physical pit in her belly. He'd always been the one to hold their community together. They were going west to find him, whatever kind of man he was now.
She didn't dream of Drake again. Once she thought she spoke with Crow in the night, but couldn't be sure. Most of the time she tried to help out with various tasks, but more often her wheelchair got in the way, so she spent much of her time seated at the prow, looking out to the horizon and floating on the line.
The line rippled above them like an invisible aurora, turning through a rainbow of indigos, greens, yellows and reds. Amo would have names for all the colors and their meanings. She reflected on the past and on the future to come. She let the buzz of her people rock her on the line's tides, as the voyage knit them steadily together.
"We're all right," came a voice at her side. She turned to look, and saw Alyssa standing there. "You and me."
Lara gave her a smile. There was a lot, in those words, as the sun set a russet orange ahead.
"Yeah," she replied.
Time passed. She was a mother and at times a leader, but mostly she was only a literal figurehead, seated at the prow. She felt them pointing to her in back, perhaps making jokes about how far the mighty had fallen, but that was good. Fear was not her friend. It was good they were treating her like just another human.
Thirteen days in, nearly two thousand miles into their voyage, she was first to see the craft in the sky. There was nothing to feel on the line, as they came in remotely piloted, just high enough to be hard to see but not so high that they were invisible.
Lara welcomed them like old friends. She felt no need to raise the alarm. Only when Cynthia stood at her side, gazing up and amping herself toward fight or flight, did she speak.
"It's OK."
Cynthia scoffed. "OK? Jumping Jehoshaphat, Lara, what do you see up there? Those're drones. I count three. We have to do something."
In back they were rifling through their weaponry. Shouts bounced back and forth.
"Do we have anything ground-to-air?"
"Like what?"
"Homing missiles. Heat seekers. Something military."
"This is a pleasure yacht! It has flares."
"Then we need to run! Turn around and get out of their range. Send out some flak. Deploy the rafts at a minimum. One clean hit on the 'Perhaps' and it'll all be sunk."
"It's OK," Lara said again, and turned around to see them. Fearful faces, not knowing what to do. They'd seen a nuclear bomb explode a city. For months they'd been running, afraid of something just like this.
But this was different.
"They're flying low enough for us to see," Lara said. "They want us to know they're here."
"So what the hell?" Cynthia asked. "What is this, Lara?"
Lara remained calm. This was what the line was telling her. It was all there, if you were still for long enough, if you let it wash over you and learned to read the flow.
"It's our welcome party," she said. "They've come to guide us home."
SIEGE
INTERLUDE 4
Rachel Heron watched on a remote feed as Olan Harrison went out to meet Amo. It was a long walk, and he walked it like a man, not the god that he was. He could have been there in an instant, if he'd so pleased. There were plenty of vehicles, helicopters, heavy duty drones too, if he'd preferred any of that.
Instead he walked.
"What do you think they're going to talk about?"
Arter stood at her elbow, watching the same screens. He was loyal, though more to Olan than to her. She could feel his eagerness on the line, to ask the question they were all thinking: 'Why the hell is he going out to meet a madman?'
But that was one of many questions they'd all learned to quash a long time ago. You never knew when Olan might be listening in. You never knew when he might conduct one of his 'audits', leading to a mental boxing, or worse. Rachel's thoughts drifted to the Severing, and skipped away.
It was better not to think about those things.
She turned away from Arter, not offering any answer. On her way out of the pod she called over her shoulder. "Monitor them closely. Let me know if there's anything out of the ordinary."
"This whole thing is out of the ordinary," Arter called back.
By the elevator bank she'd built up a head of steam. It was easier not to think, really. Olan had gifted her with this time, unobserved, with his attention wholly focused on the 'Last Mayor'. She'd been meaning to take another look at the missile bays anyway; their stocks were running low, now that the Istanbul bunker was on the move.
Fresh payloads were being fired off constantly, flying thousands of miles to their various targets in the twelve global hydrogen line segments. The first round had been just the paralysis shots, each carrying T4-enabled 's
hield-breakers' that cracked the bunkers on the line and left the people frozen.
Now all the shield-breakers had flown the nest; coordinates fine-tuned and frequencies honed with new intelligence gleaned from their captive, James While. They'd watched with bated breath as the blasts rang out at eight stations, excluding Maine, the watch-station at Bordeaux, as well as Gap, Brezno and Istanbul, taken out by Amo himself.
Reports confirmed the remaining eight were all frozen.
The elevator went down, and Rachel Heron rubbed at her temples. The feeling Amo had put into her was still there. Regret. Frustration. Uncertainty?
Lights blinked on the control panel.
Everything about Amo seemed to sow uncertainty. Even Olan himself had been stunned the day the global change blared out on the line from Los Angeles, when Amo, Matthew Drake and Lara came together, touched, and unleashed some kind of cataclysm.
The line had instantly become less virulent. The full effects hadn't become clear until later testing, but it had changed the shape of the T4 infection, interrupting the phase that turned 'retrograde humans', the non-immune, into type ones.
Instead they froze.
For the first time after that, she'd seen Olan uncertain. That had scared her, even as it lit a strange fire in her heart, one she'd long since tamped right down. Perhaps Olan didn't know everything, that fire dared to whisper. Perhaps there was a force stronger than him out there, able to overturn all the tables he'd set to his own benefit.
Was that person Amo?
That had to be part of why he was walking to Amo now. That's what this whole thing was about.
She realized the elevator had stopped a long time ago. A bead of sweat trickled down her neck. The doors hadn't opened because this level was restricted access. Of course, she thought, the missiles. I'm only checking the missiles.
She scanned her card. That was a record in the security system. Olan wouldn't register it on the line because there was nothing unusual about her visiting the missiles. She would probably have a chance to wipe the logs on her way back out.
The doors opened on floor 3-minus. As she walked into the secure cement foyer, she pictured the intercontinental ballistic missiles that lay beyond the blast doors; a thatch of nearly fifty, enough to annihilate twelve bunkers four times over, as long as they didn't move.
They'd already wasted a dozen shots on Istanbul, eventually wiping out the bunker but failing to catch all the people.
There was no guard at the blast door. Nobody was trusted with access to this area other than Olan, and Rachel Heron when she came with him. The security was keyed to only open with his signature on the line, but she'd prepared for that.
From her pocket she took the signal scoop. Once they'd been commonplace, essential research tools from their dark early days, back when they'd been figuring out how to make shield-breaker bombs and clone generation two bodies that wouldn't reject new Lazarus-captures. Back then when it had just been Rachel Heron and her handful of other SEAL heads, guided but not controlled by the 'Little Olan' AI, she'd really had a choice.
In the end, she'd chosen Olan. That was a disappointment, to learn that about yourself. That you were afraid. That was also probably the regret, because Olan was surely the greater danger. Survival mattered, and he increased their chances, but at what cost?
Yes. When it came down to the facts and the reality, she was the one who had built the Lazarus protocol, and aimed it to the sky, and pushed the button that sucked Olan Harrison right out of the line.
Everything since was on her.
She'd kept her scoop since those early days, never using it. In the lead up to the Severing, when uncertainty had bogged down their advancement and led to the loss of so much, she had kept it hidden.
The revolution had been a mistake. The Severing was always an obvious outcome.
But this? Thoughts of Amo were making her crazy. In that state of craziness, she'd activated the scoop in the meeting with Olan. Normally he would have sensed it at once, scooping up a record of his signal, but he'd been distracted by Amo too. Into that crack in his defenses she'd jammed a lever and was now working it back and forth.
She held the signal scoop up to the scanner. Only going to the missiles, she thought. If Olan cast his mind backward, that was all he would feel.
The door opened. Her eyes were closed.
Silo bays, she told herself. She focused on it using the skills he'd taught her, so that when she opened her eyes, that was all she saw. She started in, thoughts buzzing recklessly round her constantly shifting mind. Was she really doing this now? But then if she'd done something sooner, more of this could have been undone. The Severing might never have happened.
Clack clack went her heels on the cement floor. It didn't match the sound of the metal walkway grilles in the missile silos. She thought of something else.
She'd been lured deeper, that was the reason she was here now. The Logchain had become her life's work, and human advancement was a natural inclination for her. There'd always been so much potential in RNA. Elongating telomeres in a bid for eternal life was only scratching the surface of what was possible.
Not only powers. Not only wisdom. Also answers.
In the early days Olan Harrison had stoked that drive in her. In gratitude, she'd enabled him every step of the way. If she was honest with herself, which was a sequence of thoughts she'd avoided for as long as she'd been under his thumb, she knew that she'd always wanted more than this.
In her mind, missile bay one passed her by on the left. She tried not to see that it was a glass cage containing a type one retrograde infected, one of the very first, salvaged from Joran Helkegarde's Alpha Array. Olan liked his mementos. Crudely stitched scars radiated out from its gray skull and down its spine, where countless tests had been conducted. She blinked and willed herself to see not a fallen human, but a missile.
This was the silo. These were the weapons of their salvation. She would get her own continent, under Olan Harrison's auspices. That was the drive, that was what he had to see.
In the second bay was a type two. This one came from the foothills outside their base, the first charted natural outbreak of type twos in the world. It was on its knees in shackles, eyes glowing and furious, and again she blinked, and forced herself to see the cool, calm steel of a missile.
The corridor extended. She couldn't help but think back to the tour she'd given James While fourteen years ago, beneath the Donut where she'd hidden their earliest expressions of the thirty-two types. Here they all were again.
A shudder ran down her spine. Now there was a thirty-third.
Bays passed; the blue ones, the wraith ones, each a missile in her mind, soon to burst around the world. When she finally came to the end, it took all her considerable concentration to only see the sheer flank of a cold weapon. This was the emotional reaction she had to guard against most of all. Still, she couldn't help but let a little of the truth slide through. For a moment she looked through the glass, and saw the true occupant of the cell, staring back at her with pain and disbelief in his glowing eyes.
It was James While.
11. SKULL MOUNTAIN
I'm a different person, now.
It's not much of a revelation, but it changes how I see things. Every day I learn a little more about myself, and it casts all my prior actions in an inconsequential light. How could I ever have thought I was in control of anything? That's pretty funny, to be honest.
Rachel Heron's gone and I'm sitting on a peak of the frozen ocean, these foothills of the dead mounded up against the edge of Olan Harrison's realm, wondering what's going to happen next.
I absently drum on the skull top before me. Inside this hard gray skull there's a brain, maybe turned to stone, at the least shriveled back to the spine. Olan Harrison did that; what a sad story.
I wonder if I'm going to kill him today.
I'm not so sure, this close to his warping signal on the line. Right and wrong seem different out here, like t
hey're scorekeepers for lesser mortals only. Maybe you only get this kind of ambivalence after killing your first ten thousand, I reflect. That's a helluva XP bonus. Ravi would love that notion; he was a real gamer. I wonder what Olan Harrison's experience bar would say, with a body count of seven billion to his name. You can't really get any higher than that. Top score, Olan, forever!
I tire of my own giddiness, as is the new pattern, and look around at the progress of the dead. My army are done dancing and are off clambering over the body hills, looking for the edges of this strange invisible wall, where I sent them. I don't feel the wall distinctly, it's more a kind of numbing confusion that hits when I get near it. If I try to walk the way Rachel Heron went, it weighs heavy on my head and turns me around, so I always end up back here.
Now I'm charting its reach. My ocean each carry a fragment of the black eye, and with it they bounce off the wall to mark the curving boundary line. The furthest are a few miles away already, circling steadily, like dark lines of coffee spilled down a cup to form a ring mark on the tabletop.
Olan Harrison's shield.
Of course, I've blown shields before, in Gap and Brezno and Istanbul. I'll blow this one too, if I want. The question that fascinates me most is; what will I do once inside? Will I rescue James While? Will I kill Olan Harrison? He did wipe out the world. I can get angry about that still, though it's a distant kind of anger, from very long ago. I'm not sure what use revenge will be to me now.
It's a mystery.
My mind's like a roulette wheel, and I can't predict where it'll land. The only thing I know for sure is that this place will be the end of the road for me. I'm all out of whack over sin and forgiveness, and I need to either be put back into alignment or put out of my misery for good.
Maybe Olan Harrison will have the answer.
He's drawing near now. I've been watching him for a while, walking toward me with his signal shining like a sun on the line. He's tall, young, powerful, dressed in navy slacks and a crisp cream shirt, like he's just stepped out of a fashion catalog. He's not the decrepit, dead Olan Harrison from the records, with his chest cracked open and gore everywhere. This is a turbo-charged Olan with a freshened genetic design, augmented with a disconcerting pair of glowing white eyes. Still, I can feel that it's him inside this new body, carrying a sour old man stink.
Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light Page 9