The Meek

by Scott Mackay

  Who is the Father? he asked. Does he walk among you?

  She didn’t answer. It was as if her mind, besieged by truth drugs, was spinning out of control. An image from inside her mind hit him with the force of a gale wind.

  She was young. Twelve years old. And her skin was brown, not blue. Her girlish heart beat with ingrained malice. She knew the meaning of arson because everywhere around her the buildings burned. She chased a boy. Her arms were long but not as long as they were now. Her hair was black. She was, in fact, an orphan, tailored to live on the surface of Mars but now here on Ceres, a refugee, loathed by the Ceresians. A girl in a new place at war with the people who had tried to help her, sticking to her clan, fiercely loyal to Buster. At war, running through the burning streets, chasing a boy of seven with a sharpened pole, finally skewering him through the back like a hunted animal. Children killing children. Kids murdering kids. The boy tumbled to the ash-covered street. The girl Lulu, the brown Lulu, the orphan Lulu, watched the blood pump from the boy’s back.

  She woke up.

  She opened her eyes.

  The image disappeared. Cody pulled his lips away. He took a sudden deep breath. His stomach felt full of fuzz. He turned to see Jerry and Dr. Minks both staring at him.

  “You haven’t been breathing for the last seventeen minutes,” said Dr. Minks. “By rights, you should be dead.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Cody sat in a chair and watched Dr. Minks and Jerry gently ease a sleeping Lulu onto a gurney.

  “She should wake up in an hour or two,” said Minks. “And I can assure you, she’ll be perfectly fine. You just sit here for a minute. You just rest.”

  “I’ll be okay,” he said.

  “You look a little groggy,” said Jerry.

  Cody managed a weak grin. “I feel a little groggy,” he said.

  The two doctors wheeled Lulu to the adjoining bunkroom.

  Cody’s body felt stiff, numb. His eyes felt blasted by the bright infirmary, as if, like the Meek, he couldn’t tolerate excessive light anymore. He felt dull and slow-witted. One of Axworthy’s young recruits came into the infirmary, and Cody looked at it him as if the recruit were part of a dream, as if the black uniform and the gold epaulets, the side-arm, and the truncheon were all simply fabrications of his own imagination. The recruit looked alarmed, his face slack with the seriousness of whatever it was he had to convey, and Cody dimly realized that something bad must have happened; the poor recruit couldn’t have had such a bloodless complexion otherwise.

  “Where’s Dr. Minks?” asked the recruit.

  His voice seemed unnecessarily loud to Cody, and Cody wondered if the Meek, with their long, slender ears, were more sensitive to sound than ordinary humans. He worked to formulate a response, but he kept on seeing the burning buildings, a young Lulu chasing the boy with a sharpened pole, blood pumping from the boy’s back.

  “He and Jerry just wheeled Lulu into the bunkroom.”

  The recruit’s eyes flicked toward the bunkroom. The young man seemed to be shaking. He beelined for the bunkroom door but he walked in a jerky weak-kneed way, looking as if he were about to collapse. Cody watched him go but felt only a passing curiosity. He continued to sit in his chair, awake but not awake, squinting against the infirmary lights. He thought of the blue cellophane. Ceres in pink. Earth in turquoise. Thought of the philosophy of eternal peace. Of Lulu’s worrisome evasiveness. Dr. Minks came into the infirmary on his way to the command center, walking fast. Here was another emergency, thought Cody. He now seemed to live in a world of emergencies. Dr. Minks went out the opposite door. Cody felt he should be doing something to help, but he was enveloped in a mental fog, couldn’t control his thoughts—thoughts of trees hung with blue glow-moss, of five moons, of the sound of music played on crystal chimes. Jerry and the young recruit came into the infirmary on their way to the main part of the bunker. Cody roused himself.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Jerry turned to him, looked at him the way a sober person might look at someone who was drunk. The recruit didn’t bother waiting, continued out the door.

  “Danny Vigo and his crew are dead,” said Jerry. Jerry’s voice, sounding as if it were coming from a great distance, was nasal and tight. Cody at first couldn’t comprehend his meaning. The doctor’s eyes were wide. Cody shook his head, tried to clear his mind. “They just dropped dead out on the surface,” said Jerry. “Their biofeedback readouts in the control room flatlined. The recruit told us they have footage from Vigo’s visor-cam.”

  Vigo. Cody sat up straight. His spine was as straight as a ruler, but he still felt drowsy. Jerry gave him one last look and hurried out the door to the control room. Cody put his hands on his knees. He tried to get the facts straight. Vigo. Recruits dead. He thought of Joe. Of Wolf. Death seemed to haunt this place. Corpses everywhere. And now another ten on the surface. Young men. Yes. He had it right now. At least he thought he did. But he’d better go out and check.

  He got up like an old man and walked carefully into the main part of the bunker. Commander Axworthy was holding an emergency session. Cody listened to the scattered, broken, and sometimes panicked conversation, stood there getting his bearings, at first too dazed to make much sense of it, feeling as if he were still in the thrall of Lulu’s kiss. But as he put it all together he realized that Jerry was right, that Danny Vigo and his platoon, halfway back from the silo, had mysteriously, inexplicably, terrifyingly, dropped dead, falling like stones one after another into the ageless Ceresian dust.

  Axworthy was too busy to listen right away to what Cody had to say about his communication with Lulu. Cody felt too tired to talk about it anyway. He shuffled over to the mess hall section of the bunker, sat on one of the metal chairs, and watched the activity.

  Everyone watched the footage from Vigo’s visor-cam: a view of meteorite-impacted terrain, a hill off to the left, some rocks in the immediate foreground, the sun slanting at a sharp angle from the left, making the shadows long. Then Vigo pitched headfirst into the dirt and that was it. All they saw was the concave shallow that Vigo’s visor made in the ground.

  Bruder came in with two other recruits, his face red, his eyes wide, and told the commander that his brother, first platoon’s demolition engineer, was dead.

  “He died with the rest of them, sir,” he said, as if he somehow believed his brother would have been the only one to survive.

  Bruder sat heavily in a chair. He was a large young man with a square head, his blond hair snipped into a crew cut, his shoulders and biceps huge, his blue eyes tiny, now filled with tears—tears that he quickly wiped away. Bruder’s pain came to Cody in fragments of choked rage, as a nearly uncontrollable urge to run out to the surface to find his brother, and as a smoldering hatred for whoever might have been responsible. Axworthy put a hand on Bruder’s shoulder, and Bruder hung his head.

  “I’ve ordered a remote surveillance robot out to the site, son,” said Axworthy. “The pictures will be coming back any minute. If you want to leave the room …”

  Bruder’s face hardened and his eyes dried up, and he looked like a soldier again. “No, sir,” he said. “I’ll stay and watch, sir. If you don’t mind. Sir.”

  A minute later pictures of the grim scene flickered across the screen.

  Ten bodies in gray pressure suits that perfectly matched the color of the asteroid—standard camouflage in the Belt—lay in the frigid dirt, strung out in a column fifty meters long, some on their backs, some on their stomachs. The hovering robot fluttered for a few moments over each corpse, took readings for possible life signs, potential agents of contagion, toxins. Biological causes were negative. Toxicity, however, proved positive in the extreme.

  “You see?” said Axworthy. The expression on his face was as immovable as stone. “This is what they do. They never fight face-to-face. They like to spring their little traps.” He stared at the dead figures on the screen. His jaw came forward and his massive brow pinched toward the bridge of his no
se, and Cody realized that despite his emotional armor, Axworthy was taking this badly. Axworthy gave his head a shake, turned to his chemist. “Czaplinski, what kind of poison can act that fast?”

  Cody thought of his own attempt to enter one of the surface structures, how he might have lost his own life had he actually succeeded. He now had doubts about the Meek. How could he not have doubts when they had snuffed out the lives of ten young men?

  “We’ll have to roll back Vigo’s visor-cam footage if we’re going to find out,” said Czaplinski.

  They wound Vigo’s video back an hour, trying to determine the exact time of poisoning, starting it just as Vigo and his crew entered the freshly breached structure. Czaplinski enhanced the footage spectrographically. As Vigo went into the main vault of the silo the spectrometer detected a small burst overhead.

  Czaplinski, after a few minutes, matched the spectrographic readings of the burst to a known toxic agent.

  “It’s ricin,” he said, “a highly lethal derivative of the castor nut. I’ve also detected a chemical demolecularizer, something that allowed the poison to pass through the sub-molecular spaces of the platoon’s pressure suits. Skin contact with even a few grains of ricin causes fatal congestion in the heart, lungs, and circulatory system. I would say it took the demolecularizer an hour to get through. They had the ricin clinging to their suits, and because this particular poison takes such minuscule amounts to be fatal, it wasn’t detected by the platoon. The ricin finally got through when they were coming back. Once the skin comes into contact with ricin it takes about thirty seconds. That’s why they got no warning.” Czaplinski glanced at Bruder then turned back to Axworthy. “That’s why they just dropped dead like that.”

  A silence settled over the group. With the facts clearly established Cody could see they were all thinking about what they should do next, that they were in that moment of stasis where shocked reactions now had to make way for practical responses. He turned to Bruder. Bruder just sat there, looking at the infirmary door. Cody tried to read the young recruit’s thoughts and was at least partially successful. Bruder was thinking of Lulu. Bruder was blaming Lulu for what had just happened to his brother

  * * *

  Ben was back. Recovered from his stroke, thanks to Lulu’s recoding.

  Cody and Ben were out on the surface. The Meek had come out here and wrecked a lot of their work by sabotaging the solar-power generating plant’s optic cable. Dr. Minks had conducted both psychological and medical laboratory testing on Cody and Ben, had ruled them fit and given them the green light to go ahead and work. Cody was glad. Work always made him feel better. He and Ben discussed the deaths of the recruits as they repaired the damaged optic cable.

  “This is what I don’t understand,” said Cody. “How someone like Lulu can try and save us, how she can work for hours on you so your aneurysm repairs itself, and then all these young men lose their lives to a Meek booby trap.”

  Ben, subdued from his experience, went about the work of excavating the damaged optic cable in a quiet remote way.

  “The Meek obviously have their reasons for protecting the site,” he said.

  He bent down and cleared some dirt from around a cable with his fingers. Cody felt something coming from Ben, and, closing his eyes, saw it, a vision of rain.

  “Why are you thinking of rain?” asked Cody.

  “Is that you?” asked Ben. “That flower smell?”

  “That’s me,” said Cody.

  Ben nodded, rubbed a little more dirt away. “I’m thinking of rain … because … because I had this … this weird dream … I dreamed that I was on a boat with a lot of Meek. I was the only human there and we were in the middle of an ocean or a lake, and it was raining and we couldn’t see that far, and the rain was warm, and the waves were getting bigger.” He stopped, sounded out of breath, turned to Cody. “What do you suppose that means?”

  Cody shook his head. “I don’t know.” But if it were a dream of precognition, he certainly didn’t like the sound of it.

  “I can tell you’re concerned about something,” said Ben. “Look at us. We’re a couple of Meek. We can’t keep secrets from each other anymore.”

  “I would never keep any secrets from you, Ben.”

  “Then what’s bothering you?”

  Cody took a deep breath, frowned. “I just don’t like the way Bruder looks at Lulu now,” said Cody. “He’s going to hurt her. I can feel it.”

  Ben stood up. “He’s lost his brother.”

  “So why blame Lulu?” asked Cody.

  “Because he doesn’t know any better.” Ben lifted his hands, looked at the gray dust all over his pressure gloves, brushed them off. “He’s 19. And he hurts.” Cody felt a sudden concern from Ben, emanations carried through his mind on a scent that was reminiscent of citrus. “Were you able to think straight immediately after Christine died? I don’t think you were.”

  “No, I wasn’t. But I didn’t want to kill anyone.”

  Ben turned toward the transmission tower, grew still. “Do you feel that?”

  “What?”

  “It’s Agatha,” said Ben.

  “Agatha? Are you sure?”

  “I can sense her,” said Ben. “She’s over there by the microwave transmission tower. And she’s thinking of you. She wants you to go see her.”

  “She does?”

  “I had Lulu kissing me for hours. She fixed more than my aneurysm.”

  Cody stared at the microwave transmission tower. The tower rose up into the black starry sky, matte-white, a simple and elegant piece of engineering. He now whiffed the vague scent of pine, Agatha creeping into his head.

  Agatha said: Don’t be afraid. It’s just me. Buster wants to see you.

  Cody looked at Ben; the sun glistened like a bright nugget of gold in Ben’s yellow-tinted visor.

  “Should I go?” asked Cody.

  “I think you better.”

  He turned to the transmission tower again. Agatha stepped out from behind the tower into the harsh glare of the sun, wrapped in orange tape from head to foot, reflective and fluorescent, a slit for her eyes, her hands and feet bare, dim blue. Like a creature from a dream. The skintight orange tape—the same tape Lulu had used to fix his pressure suit—accentuated her curves, made her arms and legs look slender, perfect. He felt an unexpected concern coming from her. For Ben. He wanted to reassure her.

  He said: Ben’s okay.

  She liked Ben?

  She said: Are you going to come with me? Buster wants to see you right now.

  He turned to Ben. “This might be our chance to talk to them.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Ben. Cody heard him sigh—he was a more melancholy man since nearly losing his life. “How much oxygen do you have?”

  “Seven hours.”

  Ben looked at the exposed optical cable. “She wants you to go alone. I’ll stay here. I might as well work.”

  Cody stared at Agatha, and he did indeed sense this, that she wanted him to come alone, that this was what Buster expected.

  Agatha said: You love my sister?

  Cody was surprised. The notion had never occurred to him. She was digging into levels of his mind that not even he knew about. He was going to have to think about that. But not right now. He unlatched his location transmitter and handed it to Ben.

  “Here,” he said.

  “Good luck,” said Ben.

  * * *

  He followed Agatha east of the solar-power generating plant. Strange to see her bare feet leaving impressions in the gray dust. Strange to see her eyes exposed to the cold vacuum of space, to see her hands free and ungloved.

  They continued east past the oxygen mine, past the slag heaps of carbon dust, Cody white and bulky in his suit, Agatha orange and streamlined. They ventured into hilly, cratered terrain. The sun shone directly ahead of them—sunrise on Ceres, an angry white ball. They climbed a ridge. On the other side of the ridge he saw untouched asteroidal terrain. Not a sign of
civilization anywhere. The black sky of outer space stretched from horizon to horizon, with its stars and its sun, and the tiny crescents of the Ceresian companion asteroids drifting along like a pack of ghouls released from their graves.

  Agatha said: Get ready to jump.

  He looked ahead, thinking he might see a gully, a crevice, a small crater. But the land remained flat, uninterrupted by any particular landform one way or the other.

  He said: Jump where?

  She said: Right here.

  She jumped. Onto a flat spot in front of him. And disappeared feet first into the ground.

  He stopped. Remained frozen for several seconds. Then examined the flat spot. It looked just like the ground everywhere; bits of rock and little unevennesses cast distinct shadows, and those shadows matched the length and direction of the shadows everywhere, something a standard holo-image would never have been able to do.

  She said: What are you waiting for? I’m way ahead of you.

  He squatted and pressed his hand flat to the ground. It went right through. What high technology was this? A holo-image that changed and blended with its environment according to time of day? He lifted a rock and dropped it on top of the flat spot. The rock stayed on top. Pitted the holo-image ground in a natural and convincing way. He shook his head. He remembered how Axworthy had been so amazed when Azim’s scanner showed hundreds of Meek burrowing right through the solid rock of Newton’s eastern bulkhead. Now he knew how.

  He jumped …

  He slid down a long tube. He had no idea what the tube was made from; it was unlike any material he had ever seen before, frictionless. He moved at great speed, eventually slowed by wind blowing up the tube, a progressively stronger wind. He kept rolling and spinning against the walls of the tube until, eased by the updraft, he finally sank into a large cavern.

  The cavern was lit by glow-moss and populated by blue people, seventeen altogether, one of them Buster.

  Buster stepped forward and peered at him closely, his violet eyes glowing in the light of the luminescent moss. Cody tried to sense something from Buster, tried to read his emanations, but he might as well have tried to read the brain-wave patterns of a rock. Buster blocked. Buster was as tight and as impenetrable as an airlock.