Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  Hours later, in the lab now, their conversation having taken turns and twists neither could have expected, Madeline pressed the look of frustration from her face, her restraint like an iron on the frown that Birgit’s obstinacy was wrinkling into her brow.

  “I understand that scaling is an issue here, Dr. Hauptman, and that is exactly why I think we should start by replicating exactly what was given to us and testing how that unit wor …”

  Birgit cut Madeline off, “We have discussed this, Madeline, and I fail to see the benefit of building something we already know works.” Birgit’s German accent somehow made her interruption even more annoying, though Madeline knew how unreasonable that was, and she snapped.

  “It is useful because we know it works. And because we know it is safe,” she shouted suddenly, with undisguised anger. “I for one have no desire to add to the deaths this team has already suffered this week.”

  Birgit was stunned silent, first by Madeline’s tone, Birgit’s own ire rising at the other woman’s faltering professionalism, and then by the revelation of a loss within the team. She saw the subsurface grief hiding behind Madeline’s glazing eyes, and she started to soften.

  For her part, Madeline’s anger had already extinguished itself in the act of flaring, consuming all her rage like oxygen in a moment and leaving only sadness afterward, an ember smoldering in the dark, empty cavern that she felt herself shivering in.

  After more than a week of uncertainty, Madeline had heard third-hand that her friend Martin was dead. The confirmation had eventually come from the British embassy in Ashgabat. Only Jack and one of the co-opted pilots had been among the survivors Shahim had shepherded safely away from the closing jaws of an enraged Iranian army.

  Martin’s death had revived the feelings of helplessness and impending defeat that had started long ago on a terrible night in India. She would never know exactly how Laurie and James had died. What her lover James had been thinking as the crew of the King’s Transom had become the first to die at the hands of the Mobiliei. But since then she had been skating on a razor thin sheet of hope as the threat they had gradually uncovered loomed ever darker and colder around them.

  While the destruction of the satellites had brought some measure of relief from the ever-present fear, Madeline’s own encounter with one of the Agents, Lana Wilson, stood as a stark reminder of what still hunted them even now.

  Birgit watched the American silently. She had just met this woman, and though she obliquely understood that Madeline and her colleagues had been through an ordeal, she saw now that she had not truly appreciated the strain it must have put them under.

  She also knew she could be abrasive and stubborn, and that she typically came across as somewhat arrogant. She normally did not really care. But maybe she should listen to this woman, if only for the sake of her new colleague’s sanity, but also because, for perhaps the first time in years, Birgit might be out of her depth. Standing suddenly, Birgit crossed to one of her bags and started to ruffle through it.

  “You are right, of course.” she said, rummaging for something. Madeline stared at the German woman’s back as she laid her wheel-aboard bag down and unzipped it. Was she being pitied? She did not want pity. Pity was second only to having been given an easy time by some of her older, more lecherous professors on the list of things that really, really pissed Madeline off. She was at the junction between grief and anger when the other woman suddenly stood up, clasping a faded, multicolored jacket.

  Birgit turned back to Madeline with a childlike smile on her face. “My lucky lab coat!” she said, as though it was the most important thing in the world. She pulled on the tie-dyed atrocity and smiled. Eccentricity was the luxury of the rich and the successful, and Birgit had been one of the leaders in her field for long enough now that she was usually the most important person in any lab she found herself in. Thus she had long forgotten how completely ridiculous she looked in the old, beaten throwback to her childhood in the seventies.

  Without meaning to, Madeline started to laugh, immediately trying to hold it back as the initial chuckles brought a hurt look from Birgit. But attempts at restraining her mirth only exacerbated it. She shook her head. Trying to speak and apologize, but after a moment she recognized in the German woman’s surprised look the posturing of someone deliberately making fun of herself, and knew that Birgit was offering an olive branch. Her laughter faded and was replaced by an affectionate smile, and a look of understanding passed between them. It was obvious they were going to rip each other apart in here, but they could at least do so with a mutual respect.

  “If you are finished mocking me, shall we get on with some actual work?” said Birgit, indignantly.

  “Yes, of course.” said Madeline. She turned back to her computer screen and began mapping the design John had given them into the Resonance Manipulator’s control parameters. Birgit came over and stood behind her, watching her work with growing fascination. She offered the occasional comment, more often on the design than the way Madeline was entering it, and soon Madeline began to see how much she could learn from her new colleague. She may be an arrogant, well, you know what, but aren’t we all, thought Madeline.

  An almost identical, though less censored thought was crossing Birgit’s mind as well.

  - - -

  Hours later they gave up. They had tried to manage it, but had eventually resigned themselves to just letting the grid do it. The long, complex process of initiating the device they had birthed in the golden womb of the resonance manipulator had been fraught with a growing trepidation.

  They had known from their schematics that the small machine would yield something disproportionate, and they had planned ahead. Thick cables interwoven with now familiar superconductive fiber worked hard to sap the electricity from the little parcel of pressure and power humming in a corner of the room.

  Well, it was not humming, so much as the systems being barraged by it were. They watched the spiking voltages as the machine drove a phenomenal surge into the facility’s transformer network. The research campus’s grid had been designed to feed the many projects, both large and small, that the electronics giant had conducted over the years. Now it was doing the opposite, driving voltage outward, back into the high-voltage power lines that had once fed it.

  Birgit stared in amazement. Decades of research had come to this. A part of her may have been capable of anger. Anger at the wasted years she had spent trying to get to this point, when in the end, one day, this day, the answer would be presented to her on a platter. But the simple, artistic beauty of the solution was such perfection to her, a lost piece in a puzzle she had sought to solve for so long, the crucial page in a book that had been full of confusion, suddenly becoming clear as the misplaced paragraphs were revealed. So many questions answered.

  Her scientific soul rejoiced at it.

  Even as it did so, she also started to look outward from this point. Seeking how to take it forward. In time she would battle nightmarish fears at what Earth’s enemies must already have accomplished with this knowledge, she may even have moments of despondency as she contemplated how long ago their enemies had been walking down this road that she was just now starting upon. But the scientist in her would always respond with grim determination to outstrip them even from here, to show them that she had not needed their help to find this start to her new path. She was an excellent and vibrant mind, and she would prove it to them, through victory.

  But all that was a long way from now. For now, she simply sat next to her equally mute companion trying to absorb some measure of what they were witnessing.

  The state electric board would be seeing something extraordinary as well: their demand would be falling off dramatically. Their dispatching systems were even now struggling to manage the variance, peak generation stations powering down, transformers dumping load as this new, tiny power source flooded the grid with energy.

  After half an hour, they eventually turned away from the machine, leaving it
to generate, leaving it to add of itself to the world. They had greater miracles to perpetuate. They had just germinated the first shoots of the end of fossil fuel. The small device they had just made with a day’s work could generate more power from a pint of water than the building they occupied would use in a century.

  Madeline thought of the space-based fighter known as a “Skalm” that John Hunt had shown her in a fit of frustration while watching his friend Shahim fight alone in Iran. The quixotic engines that humanity would need to make that ship possible would need exponentially more power than even their little friend over there could deliver. Add to that the fact that the coming Armada they faced brought with it over a thousand of these Skalms, and the task ahead of them started to seem inconceivable. But seeing this machine and knowing that they had an insider’s knowledge of their enemy’s capabilities couldn’t help but spark some measure of hope.

  The two women set to. They needed a plan. Not just to develop individual systems, but to encompass how they are going to be able to escalate their abilities. A plan to help them capitalize on their new source of knowledge. Birgit’s and Madeline’s imaginations were wide open as their talk turned to how to protect themselves, and the world, from the boundless experiments they knew they must soon undertake.

  Talk of containment. Talk of remote, uninhabited locales where potential collateral damage might be limited. Experiments that expanded out past humanity’s known boundaries into fantastic new avenues. Madeline and Birgit talked of the only place that they could conceive of where they could truly stretch the legs of the fabulous new creatures they had to breed, and so it was not long before their unleashed imaginations took their sights skyward, into the vacuum.

  Chapter 9: Street Fighters

  They rode in the car together, itself a strange sensation. John drove. He had downloaded the detailed information coming in about the whereabouts of Ayala and her team, along with the reports on the activities of their target.

  The two Agents could share information in ways hard to conceive of. When they were in close proximity, their onboard subspace tweeters were able to communicate directly and instantaneously with each other, tiny hammers in their brains thrumming the fabric of space, sending out minuscule vibrations that instantly reached anywhere in their radius. Their range was linked directly to the power of their internal hammers, and the Agents had a range of almost a mile. Since they had been within range of each other, John had communicated a lengthy and exhaustive account of what had happened in the last weeks directly into Lord Mantil’s own memory.

  In return, John had felt a surge of information from Lord Mantil. He saw the launch of the missiles in Pakistan, he saw the death of Preeti Parikh, and he felt the speed and devastation of the battle that ended with the searing laser bolt into Jean-Paul Merard’s brain. When they were done, Lord Mantil knew all that John knew, and John knew all that Lord Mantil knew. Not in terms of access to files, but in terms of knowledge as accessible and known as the most vivid of memories. The two men were up to date.

  Once they were on the same page, Lord Mantil considered the reports of Agent Raz Shellet’s movements and, like John had before him, he saw that they were calm and calculated, the actions of an aspiring terrorist. From her pattern of purchases, she was clearly constructing an arsenal, and a considerable one at that. Primitive but brutal bombs appeared to be her staple, but no doubt she was using some of the more exotic materials she was managing to get her hands on to create more complex devices. Lengths of copper wire and amounts of substrate, old computer chips from calculators and defunct PCs, spoke of homemade computing machines that may be used for any number of projects. Detonators perhaps. Monitoring devices. They could not know. But it was clear that she was not being idle. What her intended targets were was pure conjecture, and maybe she was merely preparing herself so that she could respond to what humanity, and its new allies, would do next.

  How she had been getting hold of her raw materials had been a mystery at first. But it had not taken long for the experienced if cautious team tracking her to discover her clandestine sources. She was prostituting herself to several local men of varying prominence and power. Each was giving her different parts of the list of ingredients she sought, both in terms of money and access. All seemed ignorant of her destructive intentions. Certainly they were unaware of who her ire was aimed at, for even if they had managed to surmise that she was using them to enable an unparalleled campaign of terrorism, they would naturally have assumed it was against the usurping Israeli state that they all lived in the shadow of.

  As they drove the final miles to Ayala’s position, John considered a completely unrelated question that had been bothering him. In Mobiliei society it was normal, as it was here, for someone to have a given name and a family or clan name. For Lord Mantil, that family name was one of tremendous age. The name of the heir to the Protectorate of Hamprect, the highest office other than king in his country. But it was not a name. Its owner took it as his name when the title became his, and often the memory of his original name faded with time. His inner circle still knew it, no doubt, but outside of that, such things were taboo, the most vulgar of conceit to even discuss.

  But John Hunt and Lord Mantil shared a danger and ideological solidarity that brought them far closer than any inner circle Agent Hunt had ever known, and if Agent Shahim Al Khazar had decided that his Agent’s name was tainted by its bloody cause, then John felt a desire to know what name he might call his brother in arms in its place.

  Deciding that the subject was too delicate to discuss over their open link, John spoke out loud, “Lord Mantil. May I ask you a question?”

  The other Agent turned in surprise, and John felt a system’s query ping in his subconscious to check that their link was still active.

  “I did not want to use subspace to ask this.” John said.

  came through John’s link, and then Lord Mantil smiled. “Go ahead.” he said aloud, shaking his head a little.

  John paused a moment, deciding whether this was really appropriate, and then went forward. Lord Mantil had proven many things to John over the months since his violent conversion, not least of which was that he was, above all, reasonable.

  “I certainly do not want to broach any protocols, or make you feel uncomfortable, Lord Mantil, so please do not feel any pressure to answer this if it makes you feel in the slightest bit uneasy …”

  “Quavoce-Annat,” said Lord Mantil.

  John’s eyes left the road for a moment, and he looked confusedly at his sometime friend.

  “My name,” said Lord Mantil. The phonetic and local spellings appeared via the link in John’s mind: kwa-vōs, ən-ət.

  “Quavoce-Annat.” said John.

  “Quavoce. My family calls me Quavoce.” and after a pause, Lord Mantil continued, “In truth, I miss hearing it. If it would not make you uncomfortable, I would be honored if you would refer to me by it, when we are not in company.”

  John restrained a friendly laugh at the noble’s polite manner, a laugh that the real him would have found impossible to contain. But the Agents’ control over their bodies was absolute, and he remained politely grave as he replied, “I would be honored to, Quavoce, and I would be equally honored if you would call me by my real name.”

  “A pleasure. Shtat-Palpatam? It is an unusual name,” Quavoce went on, calling up the name of the man he had met at the ceremony where their personalities were downloaded.

  But John shook his head, smiling.

  “No, no, my friend. A traitor to the cause would never have passed the plethora of mental tests and probes that you all underwent in the lengthy approval process the nominees all had to endure. No, I could not have gotten past those exams, my real purpose would have shown up like a beacon. I was implanted at the last minute. When the transfer was being completed, I was one of the men operating the port into the Nomadi nominee’s mind, only our link was not as it seemed, and my personality instead of his was implanted, along with
a virus that allowed me to fake my way through the final confirmations that followed.”

  As John Hunt spoke, a thought struck Quavoce. A terrible thought. And as John went to tell Lord Mantil his real name, Lord Mantil spoke and signaled John at the same time, shouting:

  John fell mute, shocked, and Quavoce went on more calmly, “I had assumed you were Shtat. But this, this changes everything. I must ask you to not to tell me your real name.”

  John sent a mental query at Quavoce who went on, “John, I do not know where the real you is right now, whether it is back on Mobiliei or with the Armada, but the real Lord Quavoce Mantil deshamer Annat rides aboard the fleet that is even now descending upon us, Representative to the Council and the Captain of the Mantilatchi fleet contingent. If they manage to get close enough in the coming war, the AIs aboard his … or rather my capital ship will begin probing the earth for signs of my mind in the hope of reestablishing contact and updating the link between my real mind and the copy that inhabits this body.”

  John nodded and pinged his understanding but Quavoce went on, “It is strange to imagine, but we must remember that it is only this version of me that has undergone the fundamental change in ideology that has brought us together since we were all downloaded back on Mobilius.”

  The reality of the divide that Lord Mantil faced hit John for first time. John had known at the time of his transference to this body that he stood firmly against the invasion. When his two minds met again they would be exchanging only memories. But Quavoce would be exchanging two opposing sides of a war, a war that would then rage within himself, and it would be like two enemies uniting in one mind.

  Lord Mantil went on, quietly, his machine body expressing freely the reticence he felt, “I now stand on the opposite side of a chasm from the real me. We cannot know how the coming war is going to play out. I am sure you have plans, a set of strategies that you know each version of you will try to accomplish, but we both know there is a very real chance we will fail here.