by Webb, Nick
James was useless again, sitting by Gabriela’s side and squeezing her limp hands, trying to get her to wake up. How she was still alive, no one knew, and Pike doubted she could recover after so many minutes in the airless cold. He only hoped her passing would be painless, and that her last conscious moments had not been filled with fear, but he had no expectation that she would survive. This planet was a death trap, he wanted to tell them. He kept telling people that and they never believed him.
He was tired of losing things to this planet.
In the meantime, they had to hide the ship. Just because there hadn’t been a patrol yet, didn’t mean there wouldn’t be one—and if a patrol found them, they were never getting off-planet again. Pike stomped into the underbrush and began clearing branches as best he could. A pocket knife was no substitute for a machete, however, and he found himself swearing, missing as many cuts as he made, and cutting his hands on thorns.
When he came back with the first armful, however, it was to find the shuttle already out of the ship and Rychenkov giving commands to the rest of the crew. He’d thrust a welding torch into James’s hand, and was waving for Katya and Deshawn to hurry up their work of piling branches over the green-grey tarps.
“They’ll finish,” he told Pike. “We’re going to go get something to fix her up. Sooner we start looking, sooner we find it, eh?”
“Fair enough.” Pike dumped the armful of sticks, and thought better of mentioning that they might very well not find what they needed. Ship-grade scrap metal wasn’t easy to come by out here. “Come on, Dawn. Lapushka.” The name almost sounded normal to him now.
In the cabin of the shuttle, he brought up a map and stared at it. It took a moment to make out familiar landmarks in the ridges of the mountains, but eventually the ripples resolved into something he recognized. They were slightly south of where they’d been when he’d last been here. Pike fought the urge to ask the girl if she remembered. His memories were of fever-sickness and pain, falling asleep in a ruined shuttle under her silent watch.
North would bring him to where he knew there were camps, or at least, where there had been camps only months ago. And it would bring him to….
The laboratory.
The girl pointed to the map, her finger lingering over the patch of land where they had both seen the laboratory crashed, smoking and destroyed on the foothills.
Pike swallowed. What would it be like for her to return to a place like that? He looked over at her. “You’re sure?” he asked her quietly.
She nodded.
“What is it?” Rychenkov looked uneasy.
“The laboratory,” Pike said uneasily. “Where we, uh … met.” He blew a breath out, crossing his arms.
The girl tugged at his arm. She jabbed at the screen again, and then slapped her hand against the metal beams of the shuttle.
“What? Oh. Their shuttles?”
She nodded.
“Would they have the metal to repair the Aggy?” Rychenkov asked. He looked between them.
Pike only nodded. The conversation was all wrong, just one or two degrees off, and unsettling. None of them were mentioning why they had come here in the first place. Those dreams had evaporated the moment the first projectile caught their ship. They’d never even had a chance to see their opponent’s trajectory.
And Earth had given them accidents and death, as it always did. Because that was what Earth was, Pike remembered: a perfect prize, but far too dangerous for them to capture. Earth was a forbidden paradise, the trap that kept drawing humans back to it to die, turning life on the stations into a morass of depression as humans measured the reality of their lives against some imagined perfect life on Earth. None of them had the first idea what Earth was like.
He wondered what Walker would think of that sentiment.
Still, he wanted to survive, and so when Rychenkov closed the shuttle doors, Pike guided it up and into the air, closely hugging the ridges and hills to evade Telestine surveillance. They would repair, escape … and come back to be shot down again. That was always how it happened.
It was a short journey. Rychenkov hung back to let Pike and the girl pilot the craft. Only now did Pike catch a glimpse of awe in Rychenkov’s face. The man had kept himself busy since they landed, eager to keep them all alive, but now, with nothing to do, he was staring out at the landscape in wonder.
Twice, he pointed. First it was to a flock of starlings in flight, swirling like a cloud of black, silhouetted against sky. The second time, it was to a glittering dome that caught the morning light. He pointed, and there was a question in his eyes.
“Denver,” Pike said shortly. “There’s a viewscreen back there. You can zoom in if you want.”
He didn’t look back to see if Rychenkov did. He knew he didn’t want to see it. He’d gone close enough, once, to see the ruined remains of humanity’s Denver. They lay in constant shadow below the Telestine city, crude next to the sleek lines of the alien architecture, and their destruction made all of it too real.
Had anyone stopped to think what life would be like when they returned to Earth? When they had to rebuild?
He wasn’t himself. Pike shook his head impatiently and guided the shuttle down along the recommended path. He only saw the laboratory when they were close. No longer flaming, its windows pitted by blown dust, it appeared common. Like every other ruined building on the planet, it was covered in dirt and mud, holes gaping in its sides. It looked oddly vulnerable.
Pike exchanged one last look with the girl. Her jaw was tight, but she nodded.
They landed the shuttle under the leaning edge of the laboratory. It was risky, but cover was worth a little risk. A short scramble brought them up the side of the hill against which the structure had collapsed, each hole in its side a potential entry point. A spot of red in the broken earth caught Pike’s eye—he bent down and loosened an ancient, crushed Coke can of all things. Humanity’s original presence on the planet was still, after all this time, making itself known.
Pike tossed the can aside and shifted his gaze to the first of the two gaping black holes. He peered into the dark, and then, as the familiar drone sounded in the sky above him, he gave up on caution and ushered Rychenkov and the girl in, following them and crouching in the shadows. He watched as the formation of feathers soared overhead, then angled off to the north.
Good. They hadn’t been seen.
He turned and followed the girl’s already receding shape into the darkness of the crashed laboratory.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Between Mars and Vesta
Koh Rong
Walker’s quarters
Walker repeated the words slowly, trying to wrap her head around them. She was no scientist, and getting an actual scientist to dumb it down from the technobabble and jargon was a feat all by itself.
“So you looked at the actual spectrum of the Io blast, and saw a nuclear profile consistent with hydrogen fusion. But you looked closer, and saw a signature that suggested a slightly higher concentration of iridium than normal, except it wasn’t … normal iridium? I’m not sure I understand, Dr. Sargent.”
He shrugged. “To be honest, I’m not sure I do either. It matches the spectrum of iridium all right, except … it’s off a bit. When we looked closer we realized that it was an issue of isotopics. Iridium comes in two main flavors. Iridium 191 and iridium 193. Meaning, one has two more neutrons than the other. What we’re seeing is that the blast contained an unusual concentration of only one of those isotopes of iridium. Just like how we enrich uranium to end up with more uranium 235 instead of the more common 238, someone has done the same to some iridium, and it somehow ended up on Io before the blast.”
Walker scratched her forehead. “But, correct me if I’m wrong, doctor, but iridium is not a nuclear fuel. You can’t make a bomb out of it. Why in the world would someone bother to separate those isotopes?”
“I can’t say for sure. But we have a hypothesis. One of my theorists ran some simulat
ions, and there’s a chance … a very small chance, that this particular isotope of iridium might have an interesting property that no one has noticed before. This is still very preliminary, but the electron structure of iridium 191 is such that it might be able to capture exactly four hydrogen atoms from a surrounding medium, and if it gets hot enough, allows them to fuse into helium. It’s acting like a … like a nuclear catalyst, if that’s even a thing.”
Walker was getting impatient. “Spell it out for me doc.”
Sargent gave her a surly look, before taking a breath and slowing down. “What I’m saying is, it might be possible that someone is enriching iridium 191, packing it into an explosive, and then if that packaged iridium is placed in a hydrogen-rich medium like say rock or water, it turns the medium itself into a nuclear source that fuels a chain reaction. Boom.”
She considered this, trying to put the pieces together with what she knew. Which was not enough. “And the Denver blast?”
He nodded. “Similar blast signature, but much lower yield. Probably because it occurred in the atmosphere where the concentration of hydrogen atoms is much lower than, for example, under the crust of Io.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Earth
North America
Northwest of Denver
As they climbed through the hallways, Pike struggled to make sense of where they were. The ground was tilted steeply, and occasionally the whole structure had warped, sending them scrambling over broken beams and up onto what must once have been the walls. The emergency lights had long since burned out, and the only light came from a flashlight Rychenkov carried, though the girl didn’t seem at all bothered. She continued on ahead, just close enough to be found, just far enough ahead that if her pale skin winked out of sight, they wouldn’t know how to find her again.
It took Pike several minutes in the claustrophobic darkness, the air still around him, to realize what felt so wrong about all of this: no animals had come here since the laboratory crashed. In his childhood home, it had been a constant struggle to keep rodents and larger animals alike out of the house. Mice and squirrels came to steal grain, mountain cats prowled at night, looking for food, and raccoons and badgers occasionally raided the pantries as well—the former being fairly easily run off, and the latter sending everyone scrambling out of the house. Even when they were mostly kept away, the house smelled earthy, of crushed leaves and the faint scent of animal droppings.
This place smelled like nothing but metal and chemicals, and the fact that animals had shunned it made the hair on Pike’s arms stand up on end. In the dark, crouching to go through warped passageways, there seemed no end to this unnatural place.
When they burst into the hangar bay, hauling each other up an improbable incline, Pike at least felt that he could breathe a bit better. A faint touch of sunlight spilled in through the cracked side of the building. He pulled himself along the wall to the hulking shape of a shuttle, and Rychenkov came to shine the flashlight over its hull.
“Good stuff here,” the captain said approvingly. “I can work with this.” He nodded over to the corner of the hangar bay. “You going to go after her?”
“What?” Pike looked round just in time to see the girl vanish into a hallway. “Goddammit.”
“Go.” Rychenkov waved a hand. “I’m good here. Here. Take the flashlight, I’ve got enough to work with. Go make sure she’s not getting into anything she shouldn’t.” From his tone, he worried about the same thing Pike did: that the girl was going to find the labs where Tel’rabim had changed her from human into something else.
He set off into the darkness with a few stubbed toes, and a hearty oath. Where had he found her before? He remembered a staircase….
The laboratory creaked around him as he walked. The winds that battered the plains were hurling themselves at the hull, and the whole building swayed—with the wind or their footsteps, he wasn’t sure, but either way, it was far from comforting. Every once in a while, the scent of charred plastic and scorched metal caught his nose. It was quickly gone. There had been little for the flames to catch on here.
He found the girl by chance along a side corridor, and though the beam of his flashlight was bright in the darkness, she did not turn to look at him. She moved with purpose, sometimes stopping to peer into rooms, sometimes walking past without a glance.
Pike could find no rhyme or reason to why she stopped or didn’t. Some rooms were entirely bare, as far as he could tell—though he wondered if some of those smooth walls were interfaces for the computers. Some were clearly operating rooms, with metal tables and strange instruments meant to fit in Telestine hands all crashed together against the side wall. He shuddered and hurried on.
She stopped once at a smear of blood on the wall, but stepped over human bodies in the hallway with hardly a look. Pike whispered half-remembered prayers as he walked past them, and hoped he would not remember the sight of them. They hadn’t decayed, he realized a few turns later, and then he both did and didn’t want to go back and examine them.
When the hallway ended at last, it was in a large room with a single beam of sunlight slanting down across it. Pike switched off the flashlight and watched as the girl walked unerringly to an entirely blank section of wall and pressed her hand against it.
“Wait.” His voice seemed unnaturally loud in the stillness.
She turned her head slowly, eyes downcast. There was no surprise, she had known he was following her. But she was wary.
“Are you—are you sure?”
She looked at him then, silent. Her eyes were pools of black in her pale face.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Pike said awkwardly. “I just know … sometimes the truth hurts more than the wondering.” As he said it, the thought of his sister’s charred body lying in a field resurfaced—he had no idea if that’s how she’d ended up, and, in a way, he didn’t want to know.
Her face softened at that. She nodded to him, one orphan of Earth to another. But still she turned back, hands splayed.
And then the pictures started, images scrolling past so quickly that at first Pike could hardly make sense of them. Then the pictures become bodies and faces, and the blocks of text gradually resolved into an unfamiliar alphabet. Snatches of sound came from somewhere—the start of audio tracks, hastily cut off. A slow suspicion dawned on him as he watched faces scroll by, and when they stopped, he understood.
The girl’s face stared out at him from the wall. Information about her scrolled down one side, facts about her that Pike couldn’t read in Telestine, and didn’t want to know for fear of what he might learn about the experiments.
Still images came up, hovering over the main entry: videos, he guessed. She scrolled through them, going back, and back farther….
“You want to know where you came from,” Pike said softly.
She did not look at him as she pressed play, but there was a tear running down her cheek.
The video showed an empty room. No sound, no movement. The girl hunched her shoulders as she watched, and she flinched when a figure came on-screen: a Telestine wearing nondescript robes, carrying a naked human body. Pale brown hair had been cut unevenly, and the skin showed bruises and burns.
“Turn it off,” Pike said desperately.
She shook her head. There were tears streaming down her face now, but she pressed her hands into the wall desperately. She had to see, that much was clear. She had to know.
The body was deposited on a table, limp, head lolling, and Pike flinched at the too-sharp turn of the head. It wasn’t natural, even in a sleeping human. In fact—he walked closed, eyes narrowed—there was no rise and fall in the chest, and not even the faintest movement in the fingers and toes. The Telestine dictated, turning its face partway toward the camera so its voice would be caught.
“Is she…?” It was too strange a question to ask. Pike looked at the girl, at the life in her now, and back to the still form. The child was younger, but the resemblance w
as clear. He didn’t want to ask, but he had to know. “Were you dead?”
She only looked at him. She hadn’t known this, he could see, and he went to wrap his arms around her shoulders. For a moment, she leaned her head against his arm and her tears soaked through the fabric. The video cut off.
“We should go,” Pike told her.
But a new video started. She wasn’t done watching how she had been made.
She was just getting started.
Chapter Forty
Venus
Constantine City
Constantine Gardens
Nhean had only just disembarked at his private landing pad on the upper level of the Constantine Gardens when he caught sight of them. The emissaries from the Funder’s Circle. Priests, cardinals, pastors, bankers, secretaries … he even glimpsed a man in flowing crimson robes, an indication the Dalai Lama himself had sent a representative. His secretary held them all at bay, and grimaced as he sidled up behind her.
“I’m afraid you have a welcoming committee, sir,” she said.
“Indeed.” He eyed them over, and several tried to speak at once. He held up a silencing hand. “Please tell your superiors that I’ll be with them shortly. I assume the meeting has already started?”
The one nearest him, a cardinal, gave a curt nod. “It has, Mr. Tang. Your presence is required immediately.”
Nhean hit him with an icy glare. “I will be there shortly. After I’ve attended to some urgent business.”
The cardinal’s eyebrow shot up. “More urgent than meeting with His Holiness?”
Nhean struggled to suppress any facial expression that might betray his annoyance. “Absolutely.” He started walking towards the other side of the bay. “Unless His Holiness wishes that I delay my brief visit to the lavatory?”
The cardinal actually went slightly red. Nhean gave a non-verbal signal to his secretary, indicating that she usher the crowd out of the bay while he exited through a different door that led to his private estate. He walked right past the lavatory—that urgency had already been satisfied aboard his ship—and straight to his operations center, monitor screens all displaying their streams of data, news broadcasts, intercepted communications—both Telestine and human.