“Oh, you’re invested in my wellbeing now? That’s new.”
“Don’t be cruel, son. I thought I could make it a little easier on you, but if you’d rather someone else perform the scan.”
“I’d rather nobody do it in the first place! I saved the damned ship, why am I being treated like a criminal?”
His father crossed his arms. “Because we don’t know what happened on your shuttle, Jian. Look, I know you’ve been through hell, but think about what’s happened over the last couple days from the perspective of people who weren’t on the Atlantis with you. First, we discover a million year-old alien base buried in the moon that, for all we know, was left there by the same people who killed the Earth. Then, you took it upon yourself to… circumvent instructions from Flight to gain entry to the base where you make friends with a… what the fuck was that thing anyway?”
“His name is ‘Polly.’ And where is he, by the way?”
“Oh, Christ. You named it. It’s secured in a lab behind eight layers of impact-resistant polymer glass, which is where it’s staying. Anyway, as I was saying, then on the way back a single crewmember, for completely unknown reasons, manages to overpower the rest of the shuttle’s compliment and gain control with the intent of crashing into the Ark at almost the exact same moment a bomb explodes down the well.”
Jian flinched at the news. “What bomb?”
“Didn’t anybody tell you? Someone detonated a bomb during the First Contact Day parade in Shambhala, less than a minute after your shuttle hit the tether. Two dozen dead, three times that number wounded.”
“It was a coordinated attack?”
“No one has claimed responsibility for either of them yet, but the timing makes it hard to believe they’re unrelated. And there’s more you should know.”
Jian swallowed a clump of dread. “Yes?”
“Benexx is missing. Ze was probably injured in the blast. At first, they thought someone had taken zer to the hospital, but ze never turned up.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“The Bensons think ze’s been kidnapped. Maybe for ransom, maybe as part of the larger plan. We just don’t know yet.”
“We have to help find zer!”
“Zer parents will take care of Benexx. They’re certainly motivated enough. You can help them right now by clearing up this distraction.”
“This is ridiculous. You have the records from the shuttle’s computer and the data from my plant. It’s completely unnecessary.”
“We don’t have the shuttle’s records, actually. We couldn’t recover everything, and a lot of what we do have is corrupted. I know I don’t have to remind you, but you’re the sole survivor, Jian. It all looks really strange. People are scared and paranoid. This is the fastest way to dispel everyone’s questions. Now, enough. You’re doing this, right now. Then we can get to the real work.”
“This is bullshit.”
“Yes, it is,” his father agreed. “But it’s also necessary.”
Jian relented to the inevitable and steeled himself for what was about to happen. “Let’s get it over with, then.”
Twelve
Benson woke up to a familiar face, in a familiar setting.
“We’ve really got to stop meeting like this,” Dr Russell said.
“Oh God, not again,” Benson groaned. “How long have I been out?”
“About three hours. Which isn’t really that long for you.”
“How bad is it?”
“Shockingly, not very.” Russell glanced at her tablet. “You have a mild concussion, a sprained right wrist, and hairline fractures on two of your ribs. Guessing from the pattern of bruises on your right side, I’d say that’s where your elbow dug in when you hit the ground. Well, the balcony on the other side from the explosion, actually. That’s where the rescue crew found you. As much as it pains me to admit, it was probably lucky that you decided to act like an idiot and climb that trident. You were further away from the blast than the people at ground level.”
“Benexx!” Benson shouted, lucidity coming suddenly. “Where’s my daugh… child? Where is ze? Is ze all right?”
Dr Russell put her hand on Benson’s shoulder, to comfort and calm as much as restrain. “Calm down. You’re still going to be dizzy from the concussion and the pain medication I pumped into you. You need to stay put for a few hours, at least.”
“My baby. Where is ze?” Benson said, the rush of panic giving way to tears.
Dr Russell took a deep breath. “That… is an open question. And I’m not the right person to answer it. Theresa asked me to call her as soon as you woke up. She’s on her way over. She’ll have a better idea than I will.”
The panic returned, joined by anger. Benson surged up out of the bed and grabbed Russell’s forearm. But as soon as he made contact, an electric shock of pain coursed down his own forearm, leaving his hand numb.
“Ow!”
Russell shook her head. “I just told you your wrist was sprained.” She set her tablet down on a small table.
“Is ze alive? Tell me!”
“We think so, Bryan. But we don’t know. We just don’t know.”
“How can you not know?” Benson said, shouting without meaning to.
“Because,” Theresa said from the doorway, “we don’t know where Benexx is or who took zer. Now stop trying to assault your doctor and calm down, jackass.”
They glared at each other with the kind of venom only people who’d spent many years deeply in love could manage.
Russell broke the silence. “I’ll just see myself out.” The door clicked shut behind her.
Benson closed his eyes and tried and mostly failed to center himself. He opened them on his wife once more. “What’s going on?”
“We’re still sorting through it. But what we do know for sure is somebody hijacked the shuttle Atlantis only a handful of minutes before it returned to the Ark. Whoever it was tried to kamikaze the ship. It looks like somebody regained control at the last second and managed to change course just enough to avoid hitting the Ark itself, but couldn’t dodge the elevator ribbon in time.”
Benson’s eyes grew into dinner plates. “Holy shit! The beanstalk!”
Theresa held up a hand. “It’s still intact, Bryan. But barely. Feng told me in confidence that the ribbon was sliced thirty percent of the way through. There’s enough material left to keep the system in place, but that’s about it. All cargo and passenger shipments up or down the beanstalk have been suspended until they can repair it. They had to cut two of the lift cars loose and let them parachute down to the surface. After dumping their cargo.”
“Holy shit…”
“That’s not even the worst of it. Electrical shorts along the surface of the tether were causing even more degradation, so all our power coming down the beanstalk from the Ark has been shut down. That’s why the lights went out right before the bomb went off.”
“The Atlantis, Feng’s boy was commanding it. Is he…?”
Theresa shook her head, sending little waves through her long raven hair. “He’s OK, but he’s the only one. The rest of the shuttle crew is dead. Jian has been arrested pending an inquiry.”
“Holy shit, Jian’s wrapped up in this mess?”
“We have no idea, Bryan. It’s too early.”
“What happened to Benexx?” Benson said, forcing serenity into his voice.
Theresa moved up and squeezed his good hand. “I don’t know, sweetie. The power was down, so we don’t have any CCTV footage from the surveillance net. We got some glimpses here and there from vid captures various witnesses recorded with their plants, but a bomb had just gone off. There was a lot of running and out of focus footage. Pavel’s sorting through it all, but it’s slow going. We know ze was alive after the explosion, the float absorbed most of the shockwave. A couple dozen folks at the epicenter weren’t as lucky. We lost a lot of people today, Bryan.”
Benson grimaced, but after all he’d experienced, cold recitat
ion of body-counts didn’t faze him anymore. That part of him died with twenty-thousand other people in the Shangri-La module long ago.
“And you really think somebody hijacking a shuttle to destroy the Ark and a bomb going off in Shambhala almost simultaneously is a coincidence?” he said.
“I know it’s not, Bryan. I’m not stupid. But they’re still dead. A lot of them,” Theresa bit back.
“I’ll mourn them after we find Benexx,” he said instead.
“Bryan… I don’t know how we’re going to find zer.”
“I do,” Benson said with steely resolve.
“Oh really?” his wife said without even trying to contain her annoyance. “Enlighten me, coach. How are you going to find our missing child, when your wife, zer mother, who happens to have unrestricted access to the entire city’s surveillance system in her capacity as the fucking Chief Constable is running around trying not to panic over her missing kid while the whole damned city is on fire?”
“I chipped Benexx when ze was six,” Benson said flatly.
For the first time in at least ten years of marriage, Theresa was struck dumb. Her mouth moved up and down mechanically a couple of times, but no sounds came out. Finally, she rubbed a hand over her face, taking a moment to compose herself.
“OK,” she said finally. “You mean to tell me that you, in your capacity as the Director of Recreation, chipped our child without zer consent and knowledge, or, for that matter, my consent and knowledge as zer mother, just in case someone tried to kidnap zer someday?”
Benson nodded. “Yep. Totally did that. Although, in my defense, I was more worried about zer getting lost during one of zer little wilderness outings with Kexx or Sakiko than a terrorist cell abducting zer.”
Theresa breathed hard for several seconds while her eyes bored into him like diamond-tipped drill bits. Just as Benson feared her gaze would erupt out the back of his skull, she spoke.
“You arrogant, delusional, paranoid…” Her face twisted up, but then relaxed with a sigh. “…beautiful asshole. What’s the chip’s code?”
* * *
The sun had retreated below the horizon to the west by the time Benson, Theresa, Korolev, and recently-deputized Atlantian constable Cha’ku stacked up outside of the reddish adobe building on the skirts of the Native Quarter in a neighborhood even the Atlantians living there would describe as “rough.” It was a two-story affair not so different from the traditional Atlantian homes found in the villages overseas, and almost indistinguishable from every other building on the narrow, curving street.
Benson waved the tablet he was using to scan for the subdermal chip embedded in Benexx’s thigh.
Magistrate Okuda was aware of the potential raid and had been standing by waiting to sign off on a search warrant as soon as they’d gotten probable cause. It wasn’t a hot pursuit situation because no one had actually seen Benexx being carried into the dwelling, so they couldn’t just go stampeding inside. One had to respect the niceties of the legal system, even with murderous, kidnapping, terrorist scum.
Korolev passed the time double-checking his weapon again. Both he and Theresa carried standard law-enforcement side arms only a little bigger than an old-fashioned handgun, except they threw self-contained taser cartridges instead of lead slugs. The little devils had enough capacitor charge to dole out fifty thousand volts for a total of twenty seconds and knock even an adult Atlantian fully on their ass. It was more than enough time to get them in specially-made elbow cuffs that pinned their arms behind their backs. Atlantians were real handfuls in hand-to-hand combat, but their nervous systems were still bioelectric and just as vulnerable to tasers as humans.
And if things got really hairy, Korolev had a military-issue P-120 Personal Defense Weapon slung over his shoulder. Benson knew what the rifle was capable of after the Battle of Black Bridge. Not even the rage boiling over inside of him from the abduction of his child made Benson want to see one of them open-up on another living being. Not again.
And Cha’ku was really good with them. Sometimes, diplomatically, it just really helped to have an Atlantian around when you needed to straighten some of their own people out on a particular point of etiquette. Like, not blowing up a parade and stealing people’s kids, for example.
Theresa’s countdown reached her index finger, then collapsed into a fist. Go time.
Benson, unarmed civilian that he technically was, lined up behind his wife and Cha’ku, with Korolev and his heavy artillery taking up the rear. Truth be told, he would have preferred to be at the head of the stack, with Theresa as far behind him as possible. But he’d given up that job years ago, and it wasn’t like he could have held her back anyway. Someone had their kid, and mama grizzly was likely to sink her claws into anybody that tried to get in between her and finding Benexx, her husband included.
As was traditional in Atlantian construction, there was no door to kick down. The heat at these latitudes made keeping out the cold unnecessary, and the cool-blooded race hadn’t really taken to air conditioning for obvious reasons.
It also meant there was one less thing to go wrong while executing a search warrant.
“Constables! Search warrant!” Theresa shouted as they swarmed into the first floor. Cha’ku shouted the Atlantian translation from the back of the line, even if two-thirds of the words didn’t exist in Atlantian. Theresa, Korolev, and Cha’ku cleared the first floor with practiced fluidity.
owed, rough-cut sheet made of pressed plant fibers. Dark brown ink, off register and smeared in a couple of spots, covered the page in Atlantian characters. Benson’s plant automatically overlaid translated English text in red letters. Some separatist wack-job boilerplate about three spears divided being better weapons than a trident.
Benson handed the page back to Korolev.
“Bryan, get up here!” Theresa shouted with her real voice. Her tone nearly paralyzed him. There was no relief in it, only more panic. Whatever she’d seen, it wasn’t good.
After a moment’s hesitation, Benson took the stairs three at a time, not caring what his knees would think about it in the morning. In his haste, he missed the top step and painfully ground a shin against the hard mudstone lip. He ignored it.
Once he reached the landing, Benson saw a flash of movement in a doorway off to the left and followed it. The room was cramped and unlit, a large closet at best. Korolev had switched on his rifle’s spotlight to illuminate the scene. Lying unmoving and curled on zer side, an Atlantian rested on the hard floor, zer body and face completely covered by a blanket seeped-through with blood.
So much blood.
The locator’s beeping sped up until it became a steady, uninterrupted tone.
Benson’s heart beat so hard it threatened to detonate inside his chest. His knees wobbled and his skin went clammy with cold sweat. Theresa buried her face in his shoulder and screamed, her ragged voice half inconsolable pain, half incoherent, blind, murderous rage. Benson held her tight as their tears began to flow, both to comfort, and to keep her from lashing out. They huddled together, discovering the anguish that only parents who have outlived their own children can share.
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