by Sean Platt
He backed away and sat, assessing his options.
He could go back. Surely, that was the fire’s intention.
Or he could try to squeeze around the flames. There was room to one side, but the heat was murderously oppressive, and the smoke being released by the blaze was equally oppressive — bad enough that there must be some kind of petroleum product (probably tires) at the fire’s base. Nicolai knew why they’d done that: to overwhelm air systems like the one he was wearing. Only so much airborne debris could be filtered, only so much carbon dioxide could be scrubbed, and only so much oxygen could be generated. Nicolai had recharges for the system, but he’d already run through all but two of them. The fire would easily end the one he was working on now, and maybe kill the other. Either way, he’d be sunk if he encountered a second fire…and given that the tunnel would slope upward until it reached its end, it seemed likely that what remained would be filled with more of what this fire was belching.
If Nicolai tried to go through, he’d suffocate and die — and that was his best-case scenario, assuming he wouldn’t burn to death.
He strapped his crossbow to his back and began to march forward defiantly anyway. So what if it killed him? He was tired of living in limbo. He’d make it to the fabled English airstrip, or die trying.
As he neared the fire, the air converter began to beep. He would have to back off. A quick look at the readout showed him that the current recharge had failed, already overwhelmed by the blaze. He shook his head, popped in the final cartridge, and moved forward to try again.
Now he only had one shot left.
Nicolai felt the heat then began to run toward the fire. It felt like he was racing toward a blast furnace, but he never questioned whether he should turn around. He imagined his skin beginning to blister and moved faster. His mind painted a macabre scene of his flesh melting from his grinning skull as his hair burst into flames.
He ran faster. And faster. And faster.
Nicolai practically dove through the space between the flames and the tunnel wall then barely caught his footing as he sprinted forward. His pant legs had caught fire. His backpack was ablaze. He’d rammed his arm into something sharp in the fire and could feel blood starting to run. Heat overhead told him that his vision had come true; his hair really was on fire. He had to stop, roll, and extinguish the flames, but doing so would mean death. It was still too hot; he was too close; the air was too black with foul smoke — enough that he couldn’t even see with the goggles.
As flames licked his skin, he kept running.
Just as he was beginning to feel safe enough to drop and roll, the air converter began to beep again.
He couldn’t stop. He had to outrun the poisoned air. He could see nothing but smoke. He had to find fresh air that wasn’t there. He was out of recharges, still at least twenty kilometers from England, on fire, out of breath, and about to die. The Chunnel Crew had done their job without even being present. The Italian runner had tried to make his break into their country, and he’d fallen. He would burn, and he would die.
Nicolai began to heave then tripped and fell. He was out of wind, and the last trickles of good air were just now coming through his nose tube. The flow dried, and he sniffed hard, gasping through his nose, willing the recycled smoke to become fresh air. But there was nothing but bile.
He stilled. The IR goggles showed him the ceiling, revealing as some grand joke that he’d muscled past the worst of the fire. He would die with a fine view of the Chunnel ceiling — spiderwebbed with cracks, still holding, with tons of saltwater overhead, waiting to reclaim what was rightly theirs.
Nicolai’s vision failed as he began to black out. He thought, So this is how it ends — in English, no less, because he’d been that ready for England. Hundreds of years ago, some of his ancestors had boarded slow boats across the ocean to America because America was supposed to be the Land of Opportunity. Things came full circle. Nicolai, if he’d found boats instead of planes, would have done the same if he’d lived.
Then a thought occurred to him: If I’ve blacked out, why am I thinking?
It was a worthy question, but it was pointless. He was dead. Blacked out and dead. He must be dreaming the dreams of the dead, because…
There was a beep, surprisingly familiar.
A second passed. Two seconds.
The dream of the dead was vivid with reality. He could hear the crackling of a huge fire. He could smell acrid smoke. He could feel heat and the pain of charred skin.
Nicolai sat up.
He removed his IR goggles, finding that he could see fine by the light of the now-distant, enormous fire. He must have flailed enough to put out his own fires, but by the flickering orange light, he could see that all of the goggles’ readouts had gone dark. They’d stopped working. But judging by the way his head was clearing, the beep had been the restarting of his air converter. He’d lost sight but regained breathing. A fair trade.
But how?
That was another pointless question. The recharge packs were dead, and the recharges contained the scrubbers needed to clean the air. Sure, the pack had gained power somehow, but had the recharges suddenly gained extra abilities to clean air? Had he, Nicolai the Amazing, learned how to breathe without oxygen — or with the half air spit out by dead scrubbers?
He stood up, feeling like a walking contradiction.
The goggles seemed to have expired, but he slung them around his neck anyway. Technology, around him, apparently didn’t feel the need to remain dead. He didn’t see the sparks of more fires ahead, and that might mean he’d return to the dark too soon. He had many kilometers to go. Although he had to be on the English side by now. Should he start thinking in miles?
With the fire at his back, with his skin blistered and his clothes singed, and with the air coming through his nose tube strangely adequate, Nicolai walked on into the fathomless black.
Chapter 2
“I should have died,” said Nicolai, shaking his head and sipping from his glass of Château Lafite ice wine. George Strauss, a ridiculously talented winemaker (and longtime friend of the Ryans) filled his signature bottles from grapes frozen on the vine before fermentation on a single-acre plot in the renowned Amalthea Vineyard, situated far away from district spires in old Texas Hill country. Strauss claimed that he never missed the districts, and with a rare wine that seemed to bring fresh scent and taste to every sip (lime, wildflowers, raspberry), Nicolai could easily see why.
Nicolai wanted to compliment the wine for his host’s benefit, but his mind was still in the Chunnel, his current feeling of breath somehow more present and obvious than normal. He was on his second glass. Ice wine was too expensive for such an occasion, and Nicolai was only holding it now because during the last interview, he’d made an offhand comment about puckering tannins. He’d just been making conversation, not a request. He supposed the fact that he’d been served the wine this time was a sign of respect, but Nicolai found himself unable to appreciate it. The fragile memories he’d been reliving a moment ago were still too real. He was here today, in the NAU, by providence if anything. It hadn’t been skill or perseverance that had seen him through. It hadn’t even been guts. If it was anything, it was sheer dumb luck.
There was no appropriate response to Nicolai’s statement about his should’ve-been end, so they sat in the moderately appointed living room, two men across a coffee table with their legs crossed at the knee, each with a long-stemmed glass of wine at their sides.
“Anyway,” Nicolai continued, “I didn’t die, and somehow that converter struggled on for the entire rest of the tunnel. I continued to breathe the shit air it was feeding me. I have no idea how I did it, but looking back, it feels like force of will. I’d wandered for too long to give up, or something. I’d changed too much. I’d done too many unthinkable things. It was like I was stubbornly refusing to not reach England. But my goggles stayed dead. I had to go hand-for-hand, groping through the darkness, after I’d left the light of the
fire. I went that way through a stalled train, seemingly ripped or blown open at both ends. I saw it in my head as a huge metal sleeve, filled with bodies in seats. I wish I knew what had happened to that train.” He took a sip of wine. “Or maybe I don’t. And maybe my blindness was a blessing.”
The man across from Nicolai had mocha-colored skin, his hair in a large pile that stood almost on end, heaped in dark wiry curls. He had prominent cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and white teeth. He leaned forward, his eyes glancing toward the recorder on the coffee table. The recorder was redundant, meant to double up the documentation being made by the room’s canvas. On the table beside the recorder, charming and clearly the work of a writer’s pride, were two actual paper copies of the man’s book Plugged. On the spine was the title and his name, Sterling Gibson.
“Did you run into the Chunnel Crew on the English side?” he asked.
Nicolai shook his head. “No. Shockingly. I came out clean at the next dawn, same quiet time of day as I went in. I got a kilometer or so away then inspected my skin and found the burns not nearly as bad as I was sure they’d been. They healed without scars, same as the gash I’d felt on my arm — which, again, I was sure had been much worse. I found fresh water and a few cans of food then drank and ate and breathed for most of the day, feeling fortunate to be able to do any of the three.”
“And the airstrip you’d heard about?”
“I found a shipyard first,” said Nicolai. “I figured a bird in the hand was better than two in the bush. They were still sending off passenger ships, not just military. It seemed like a good break, and I’d heard that America was starting to knock aircraft out of the sky. At the time, the notion of them jettisoning a ship was absurd.” He laughed. “I obviously didn’t have proper credentials, so I stowed away. It wasn’t really that difficult. It took a few weeks at sea to make the crossing, given the weather and our shoddy navigation at the time, but it wasn’t like the tales you hear about the first immigrants. Once onboard, I came out and was able to get real food. The ship was modest, but paradise compared to the life I’d been living. They were actually beginning to close immigration as our ship arrived, but they let us through. I was at the back of the line, because I had to wait until the ship had emptied. That’s why I said that I may have been the last.”
“What was the date?”
“September 7, 2034.”
“I’ve seen the close date as September 6 both times,” said Gibson, tapping at a tablet as if searching for information. He paused, then added, “Here: September 6, 2034 for civilian immigration, then the same day in 2036 for special cases as authorized, with documentation. They tried to make it look planned: two years to handle the rest of the loose ends from the East, then the doors close forever on the anniversary.”
Nicolai nodded. “I found that too. It’s the sixth in some places and the seventh in others. We were on the seventh. I have a theory.”
“What’s your theory?”
“I think the intended date was September 6, but they gave it an extra day at the last minute.”
“Why?”
Nicolai touched his index finger to his chest.
“What? You?”
Again, Nicolai nodded. “We hit a storm. Everyone was throwing up. It was a big ship, very seaworthy, but the storm cost us time. We came in around 3 a.m., maybe seven or eight hours late. We found them staffed and waiting as if it were business as usual.”
“You’re saying they held the border open and waited for you?”
“Yes.”
“You specifically…not just the ship as a whole?”
“Yes.”
“But you told me earlier that they didn’t know the ship was coming. How could they? In ’34, with the network outside of the NAU being how it was…”
“Right. ‘Scheduled arrival’ is by our definition, not Philadelphia’s. The ship had RadioFi, and we knew about the deadline. That’s how the ship saw it — as a deadline, meaning that if we didn’t make it, we didn’t get to enter the country. I think that’s half the reason everyone was puking in the storm: They knew we were just going to be turned away because the borders would be closed. But we steamed ahead anyway because we were so close. And found the borders open. Coincidentally.”
“Maybe they were disorganized.”
“Maybe,” said Nicolai. “But I was met by Isaac Ryan. And I’ve already told you about the nanobots.”
Gibson nodded. “Do you think that the nanobots you were carrying saved your life by reactivating your air converter somehow? Like with your Doodad?”
Nicolai sighed. He’d thought of that. Ever since his revealing talks with Micah and Rachel Ryan, he felt as if he’d relived every second of his years hiking the Wild East ten times through. His entire existence had been called into question. The way Micah talked, a godly technological hand had reached down and lifted him up, given him a map and communication, held the NAU’s door open for the mysterious stranger bearing unseen gifts. He knew he must have picked up the nanos when accessing his father’s arsenal, but Nicolai’s deeper mind couldn’t help but wonder at even earlier days. Had nanobots followed him to school, recording his fingers as they typed messages on his handheld, feeding him serendipitous information at the perfect times, helping him to cheat at quizzes and find his way?
“It makes sense. But then why did my goggles fail?”
“Maybe they shuttled power from one to the other. Making the air system work at the expense of your vision.”
“Even so, the recharge was dead. So what if the device itself was functional? It couldn’t have been feeding me more than quarter-strength air. And even that seems unlikely, based on what I’ve looked up.”
“Maybe your trip had made you superbly fit. Like training at altitude, where the air is thin.”
“Or maybe it was luck,” Nicolai suggested.
Gibson shrugged.
“Do you have any idea how you’ll use this?”
Gibson shrugged again. “Unauthorized biography of The Beam?”
“You did that in Plugged.”
“Not like this. Not as anthropology. Maybe I can disguise it as a book about nanobot development. ‘Uncredited fathers of technology,’ that kind of thing. Now, you understand that I can’t go right at it. Even assuming I can verify what you’ve told me, which I doubt I can, I won’t just print it flat-out. I can’t say that the hovertech nanos Ryan Enterprises and Xenia Labs brought to market arrived on your back, nor can I just use a source’s word to grant the credit for them to an Italian nobody’s heard of.”
“I don’t want credit.”
“I meant your father.”
But of course, that had been the point. For the hundredth time, Nicolai asked himself why he was here, talking to one of the NAU’s most celebrated and controversial authors. He wasn’t a snitch, or a whistle-blower. He’d learned things about The Beam and the powers playing in the NAU over the past few weeks but hadn’t contacted Gibson to blab. He hadn’t confirmed the author’s suspicions from Plugged, about a secret upper class with access to technology the rest of the population didn’t. He hadn’t mentioned the phrase “Beau Monde.” There was plenty that Nicolai could blow the lid off of, from hierarchy to politics to backroom deals to exploitation and corruption, but in their first meeting and this one, he’d only told Gibson about the pieces of the puzzle that touched his family.
Nicolai had come here because of his father. That was all there really was to it. The world didn’t necessarily need to know the name “Salvatore Costa,” but for most of his life Nicolai had believed his father died for nothing. Now he knew better. The Ryans hadn’t murdered Salvatore for what he had, but they’d built their empire upon his death just the same.
“He doesn’t need credit either,” said Nicolai.
“I thought that’s what you wanted.”
Nicolai shook his head. “At this point, it would complicate things. The dots are there, and once people have a reason to connect them, they will. The house of c
ards is fragile. I’d get attention and don’t want it. It’s enough to know what my father did.”
“I don’t understand,” said Gibson. “I told you up front that I can’t do a dirt job on the Beam’s true roots. I ask questions. I don’t do exposés. There’s a subtle difference between prompting curiosity and making accusations.”
Nicolai looked at the books on the table between them. Besides Plugged, Gibson wrote a regular, widely read column on The Beam, had authored many scholarly articles along with several books in a similar vein, and generally carved a niche for himself as a thinker worthy of the NAU’s attention. But Nicolai was an artist in his own right and knew that especially in Enterprise, bills were rarely paid directly from what moved an artist’s heart.
“You write fiction, don’t you?” he said, looking up at Gibson.
“What?”
“Novels. Not published, though. Or published under another name because ‘Sterling Gibson’ stands for something else.”
A small smile tickled the corner of Gibson’s mouth.
“Then you know,” Nicolai went on. “You understand that when you’re writing a story, what appears on the page is like the part of an iceberg above the water. Much of the world is in your head, or maybe in notes. You’ll never publish most of it…but you, as the writer, still need to know certain things. You need to understand why characters act as they do and why the world is how it is, even if you never spell those things out for your readers.”
“Sterling Gibson doesn’t write fiction,” he said. But that smile was still there, and Nicolai knew that he’d pinned a secret hobby right on its nose.
“But even Sterling understands the value in knowing what’s behind his stories, even if those things can’t be printed.”
“If I believe you.”
“That’s your choice,” Nicolai said.
Gibson shook his head slowly then leaned back in his chair. After a moment, he bent forward and clicked off the redundant recorder. He swiped a window open on the coffee table, hit a few buttons, and again made himself comfortable. A large red square appeared on the table, reading OFF RECORD.