by A. G. Riddle
Inside the office, Lin turned the old coffeemaker on.
“He’s asking questions, Mom.”
Lin ran a finger down the length of the map of the Beagle, as if mentally walking through the wrecked submarine, trying to decide which compartment to explore next.
“What are you going to tell them?”
“Nothing,” Lin whispered, still staring at the map.
“They want to know exactly what’s down there. What these experiments were about. And frankly, so do I.” Peyton glanced out the window to make sure no one was lurking near the office. “This… code in the human genome—what is it? What does it do? How will it stop the Citium?”
Lin didn’t make eye contact. “Do you trust me?”
“Yes.” Peyton paused. “But obviously there’s somebody out there you don’t trust.”
“You’re wrong.”
“About what?”
“There isn’t somebody out there I don’t trust. There’s nobody out there I do trust. The only person I trust is standing in this room.”
Chapter Two
Desmond hated the prison, but he had to admit that it was effective. His cell was an outdoor pen surrounded by a tall electric fence. The interior was hard, dusty earth with a few patches of grass. A second electric fence lay ten feet beyond the first. Guards marched by every two hours, and cameras atop poles watched him in the minutes in between. Large canopies, printed with island foliage, towered above, providing some relief from the South Pacific sun, but more importantly, they hid Desmond from the satellites he knew were searching for him and the Citium.
At the center of the pen, Desmond stretched out on a cot, trying not to think about Peyton. Trying and failing. There was too much left unsaid between them. But it was more than that. He was worried about her. He would have traded the possibility of never talking with her again just to know that she was okay, that she had survived the carnage on the Isle of Citium. Desmond had sacrificed himself that morning—allowed himself to be captured in hopes that Avery might complete their mission—distributing a cure to the Citium’s pandemic. He wondered if Avery had succeeded, if the billions infected had been saved. Or if the world had collapsed. Or both.
Desmond’s brother, Conner McClain, visited at sunset each day. He sat on a folding chair inside the outer fence. Some days he talked, others he would read, and occasionally he sat in silence. Desmond never responded. He simply stared out at the beach below.
As the blue horizon once again swallowed the sun, Desmond wondered what they were waiting for.
A mile away, Conner walked to the silver double doors and slid his hand into the palm reader in the wall. When the device beeped, he leaned closer and stared into the retinal scanner.
The doors opened, revealing a small room with brushed metal walls. Another set of closed metal doors lay ahead. Conner waited while the scanners embedded in the ceiling and walls checked him for any weapons, explosives, and unidentified devices.
Finally, the double doors parted, revealing a long room with illuminated tiles on the floor and ceiling, providing an even, white glow. Rows of servers and monitoring equipment spread out before him, and lights blinked—red, green, yellow, and blue, like an orchestra playing with no sound. Several technicians milled about, checking the equipment and slipping into the enclosed cages to fix any problems, their faces obscured by the wire mesh, like penitents in confessionals.
To Conner, the analogy was fitting. This place was a sanctuary. A place of reverence, of rebirth. A fresh start for him and the entire human race.
He walked past the servers to the glass wall on the opposite side. The chamber beyond was vast and dark, a grotto with gunmetal gray walls and a thin white cloud at the bottom, floating above a sea of liquid. A hundred black towers rose through the cloud, like skyscrapers with no windows, a model of a city of the future.
Conner admired his creation. Soon Rook would come online, and he would be free.
Outside, Conner marched along a dirt path. Camouflaged canopies hung overhead, blocking some of the sun’s oppressive heat, but also serving a far more important purpose: hiding the Citium base. US, Australian, Russian, and Japanese ships and their drones were scouring the South Pacific, trying to find Yuri and Conner. They were getting closer.
At Desmond’s pen, Conner paused by the outer gate, hoping his brother would make some reaction. He simply stared at the canopy above.
Conner opened the outer gate. Desmond still didn’t stir.
Since Conner had brought him here two weeks ago, Desmond hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t requested food, or shelter from the elements.
Yesterday they had interrogated him—against Conner’s wishes. It was a desperate act that had pained Conner to watch. But they’d had to. Time was running out—and too much was at stake.
Under the influence of the chemical agent, Desmond had revealed that he hadn’t recovered the memory of what he’d done with Rendition. He had hidden the information somewhere else—for a time when he was ready to use it.
Conner desperately wanted to reach his brother and bring him back into the Citium. Their cause depended on it. But it was more than that. Desmond was his only true human connection; Conner felt alone without him. Mentally, he felt like he did before Desmond found him in Australia: hopeless and isolated.
Desmond had been in the same place before they reunited. His only solace in those days was books. They had helped him escape his childhood. And one of his favorite books was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Conner opened another of Stevenson’s classics—The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde—and began to read.
When the sun had set and the moonlight was too dim to read by, Conner got up, locked the gate behind him, and trudged back down the path. As usual, Desmond hadn’t said a word, hadn’t moved or even acknowledged his brother’s presence. That hurt most of all.
Inside the camouflaged building, Conner made his way to the programmers’ team room. As always, it was a pigsty. The trash bin overflowed with crushed cans of energy drinks and microwave wrappers. Server towers with their side panels removed lay on a long table, their silicon guts spilling out. Balled-up papers dotted the floor like golf balls at a driving range.
Conner knew what one of those papers was. The first time he had entered the room, he had seen his own face printed on a sheet tacked to the wall. The scars that covered his forehead, left cheek, and chin were partially covered with Borg implants. The words Resistance Is Futile were printed below the image. He wasn’t sure if they referred to his management style or his plan for humanity, and he didn’t care. He had been ridiculed his entire life. He was used to it.
But soon it would end. The poster that mocked him confirmed that the programmers knew the strength of his resolve.
Them taking it down confirmed that they were scared of him.
The lead developer saw Conner’s reflection in the plate glass window. He ripped his headphones off, spun his office chair around, and stood. The man’s name was Byron, and he was tall and gangly, with pasty white skin.
“Where are we?” Conner demanded.
“On which one?” Byron asked.
“Hughes. The Labyrinth.”
The programmer swallowed. “It’s impossible.”
“Your job is to do the impossible,” Conner snapped.
“Look, this is like a black box inside a black box.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s like—”
“I don’t care what it’s like. Be specific. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is that we have no idea how the Labyrinth Reality app works.”
“So do whatever you do—reverse engineer it. Deobfuscate it.”
“We did that. Five days ago. That’s not the issue.”
“What is?”
“Location awareness.”
“I don’t follow.”
Byron rubbed the bridge of his nose, as if dreading having to explain. “The app sends a
code to the implant in Hughes’s brain that unlocks his memories, but it only does it at certain locations. At first we assumed it was using the phone’s built-in location programming interface, but now we know it’s double-checking with an external server. It’s probably using cell towers, or more likely a private satellite to verify—”
“So hack that server. Hack the satellite. Make it happen.”
“It’s not that simple. The server returns a code to the implant inside his brain—that’s the second black box. The code is encrypted with a proprietary algorithm. We don’t even have a place to start. It’s like a checksum to make sure the request is valid. Sending a malformed code could have unexpected consequences.”
“Such as?”
“Who knows?”
“Guess.”
Byron exhaled. “Best case, the checksum fails, the system realizes it’s being hacked, and it completely shuts down. We’d have no chance to enable him to ever recover his memories.”
“Worst case?”
“Brain damage. The faulty code scrambles the memories or releases the wrong amount of trigger. He could end up a vegetable, or dead.”
Conner closed his eyes. “Where does that leave us?”
“Same place we were on the Kentaro Maru.”
The mention of the massive cargo ship where Conner had imprisoned his brother brought back bad memories. He had made a mistake there. He wasn’t about to repeat it.
“We’re not letting him go again. We barely recovered him last time.”
“True, but this time one thing is different.” Byron held up the phone and opened the Labyrinth Reality app. “On the ship we didn’t have a location.”
A dialog appeared on the screen.
1 Entrance Located.
Byron tapped it, and GPS coordinates appeared. Conner committed them to memory.
“We don’t have to let him go,” the programmer said. “We just have to take him here.”
Conner didn’t like it, but it was a solution. At the moment, their only solution.
“All right. I’ll take care of Hughes. Where are we with rebuilding the Rapture control software?”
“That we’ve made some progress on.”
“How much?”
“Hard to know. We’re maybe… fifteen percent done.”
Conner shook his head. “You have to work faster.”
“We can’t—”
“You will. Time is running out. Those ships out there looking for us will find us within a week. At that point, they’ll attack this island just like they did the Isle. They’ll kill most of us. The rest will be imprisoned for life, or executed.” Conner paused, letting the words sink in. “Rapture Control is our only chance of survival.”
Byron nodded. “We’ll get it done, sir.”
Conner stared at him a moment, then turned and walked out.
He went straight to the situation room. A large screen covered the back wall, displaying satellite photography and real-time stats. Rows of desks ran the length of the room, and almost every station was occupied. It was crunch time, and all hands were on deck.
Conner stopped at the watch commander’s desk. The red-haired woman, Melissa Whitmeyer, was the best operations technician they had left.
Conner scribbled the GPS coordinates on a sheet of paper on her desk. “I need to know where this is.”
Whitmeyer glanced at the numbers and pulled up a map. The location was near San Francisco, and on a road that ran from the coast to the mountains. Conner knew it before she called out the name: Sand Hill Road. For a few months in the year 2000, during the dot-com bubble, office rents along that lonely stretch in the rolling hills of California were the highest in the world. The glowing dot in the center of the map was the building where Desmond’s firm, Icarus Capital, had operated. Getting there might be a problem.
“What’s the American security situation?”
“Airspace and coastlines are locked down. They’re very worried about a conventional invasion given their degraded military status.”
“Land borders?”
“Little more porous. Lots of troops massed on the Mexican border in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.”
“What about California?”
“They’ve reinforced the checkpoints at the major roads, but that’s about it.”
“Situation in Mexico?”
“Civil war.”
“Who?”
“Cartels and organized crime versus the new Mexican government. Cartels are winning. They see it as their opportunity to turn the country into a legitimized narco state.”
“Okay. Get one of the planes ready. I need a tac team prepped for departure in thirty minutes. Seven members. I want the best.”
Conner told her the rest of his plan, and she began searching the map, looking for a suitable location.
Conner briefed Yuri in his office. The Russian sat impassively, as if Conner was relating the weather forecast. Conner wondered if living through the Nazi assault on Stalingrad as a child had permanently altered the man. Or maybe Yuri already knew what was going on… or had expected it. Sometimes his gray eyes and placid stare unnerved even Conner.
Yuri’s voice was just above a whisper. “Your brother is sublimely clever, Conner. He may have planned for this contingency. Taking him to the locations where he’s hidden his memories could be the next phase of his plan, which we still don’t understand.”
“We have no choice. I’ll handle him.”
“And if he won’t turn over Rendition?”
“He will.”
Yuri looked away. “He betrayed us once. He will again if given the opportunity. Remember what’s at stake. And that no matter what happens, we can repair him with the Looking Glass.”
“He’s not the only one who betrayed us. Lin Shaw conspired with the Americans during the assault. She ordered our troops to surrender.”
“It seems she’s been playing a larger game.”
“What kind of game?”
“Lin is the last surviving member of the original Citium cell. True believers, committed to finding the ultimate truth. The purpose of the human race. I think we can assume that all these years she’s been secretly working on her own Looking Glass project.”
That could be a problem. “So why hasn’t she completed it?”
“I see several possibilities. We had her son. And I threatened her daughters. But I think the most likely reason is that she lacked the requisite research.”
“The Beagle,” Conner whispered.
“Yes. Fifteen days ago, teams began bringing artifacts and notes to the surface.”
“What have they found?”
“I don’t know. If it’s the piece Lin needs to complete her Looking Glass, she apparently hasn’t used it yet.”
“What does that mean for us?”
“I don’t know exactly. We can assume her work might be a problem—if she completes it. But she never will. I’m seeing to that.”
Chapter Three
In the office adjacent to the ship’s cargo hold, a handheld radio crackled to life. The sound of wind and static overpowered Dr. Nigel Greene’s voice. On his second attempt, Peyton was able to make out the words.
“Doctor Shaw, come in.”
Lin stood from her narrow bed and snatched the radio. “Shaw here.”
“Ma’am, you’re needed on deck.”
Lin shot Peyton a knowing glance.
“On my way.”
Both women downed their coffee and zipped up their cold weather coveralls. Outside the office, the biology team was still crowded around the bank of computers, reviewing the data set from Rubicon. Just beyond them lay two rows of cubicles with a wide corridor between them. The cubicles were wrapped in milky sheet plastic, and inside, archaeologists leaned over metal tables that held bones recovered from the Beagle. Their high-pitched drills played the anthem of their painstaking work.
The biology team was constantly frustrated with the archaeologists’ pace. They wanted
the samples extracted and sequenced quickly, whereas the archaeologists insisted that preserving the integrity of the specimens was the highest priority. Lin had struck a balance between the groups, a fragile detente, but the truce didn’t stop the biologists from name-calling. The archaeologists were referred to as the polar bears—or simply “da bears.” The archaeology labs were the “polar bear cages,” arguments with them were “bear attacks,” and delivering bone samples was “feeding the bears.”
Peyton couldn’t get the bear analogy out of her mind as she walked down the aisle, watching the white-clad figures lumbering around the cubicles, peering down to inspect the bones, then drilling deeper.
Outside the hold, she and Lin climbed the ladders between the decks in silence. At the top, Lin spun the hatch’s wheel and charged outside. Peyton gritted her teeth as the blast of Arctic air hit her.
The deck of the Russian icebreaker was crowded with sailors. The research personnel needed to launch the submersible stood behind them, at the rear of the vessel. The researchers called the shots on what to do, but the Russian Navy was in charge of how to do it. Like the biologists and archaeologists, there was always friction between the two groups.
This morning was no different. The ship’s executive officer, Captain Second Rank Alexei Vasiliev, was shouting at the researchers gathered around the submersible about what he called unrealistic expectations. The massive Russian’s own crewmembers were crowded behind him, like a street gang showing their numbers.
Lin’s lithe form cut a sharp contrast with the burly sailors as she pushed through the crowd, looking like a child wading through a lynch mob. Peyton followed on her heels, sticking close to her mother for fear that the hole she created would close and leave her trapped in the mob.
Vasiliev stopped shouting when he saw them.
Lin’s voice was as crisp as the frigid air around them. “Captain, can your crew support our dive schedule or not?”
Vasiliev threw up his hands and continued shouting. His words came out in puffs of white steam, reminding Peyton of a massive engine revving up, growing louder, more and more exhaust spewing out.