Crashland

by Sean Williams

  “T’s still in transit, so he can’t tell anyone. But I did notify RADICAL that the entity has been found.”

  “Why?”

  “Agnessa is watching this live,” he said with a wounded expression. “If WHOLE knows, I want my people to know. It’s too important. And I bet Forest here has told the rest of the PKs too, now that he has no choice. While he kept the secret to himself, the situation could be contained. Now, it’s anyone’s guess what will happen.”

  Clair checked her popularity stats. The number of people observing her, and therefore the Q situation, was growing so fast the numbers were a blur.

  “The bullet option is off the table,” Clair said, putting herself protectively in front of Q’s cell. “I won’t let you harm her.”

  “It’s a shame she’s not awake right now,” Devin said. “Your spirited defense would surely win her over.”

  The sound of fighting came from outside the prison. Clair assumed it was one of Agnessa’s minions with the key until the WHOLE leader said, “PKs are on the move. So are the dupes. Our gates are under attack.”

  “We are receiving reports of suborbital launches,” said Forest.

  “Some of them are ours,” said Devin. “The rest are probably dupes.”

  “PKs too,” said Agnessa. “LM Kingdon has just pushed through an emergency order authorizing deadly force against anyone resisting the rapid response teams she’s sending. She says the muster is the source of the dupes. Needless to say, we’re not going to take that lying down.”

  “Why did you say anything?” Clair asked Forest. “Why couldn’t you keep it secret a little longer?”

  “To keep the peace,” he said.

  “By starting a war over Q?”

  “Conflict here was inevitable. That was what PK Drader wanted—to bring the peacekeepers and the dupes together until another flashpoint was reached, another flashpoint that would justify harsher crackdowns of civil liberties. Now the eyes of the world are on us for a very different reason. People can see what this conflict is really about. The pursuit of Q is the pursuit of power. Those hungriest for it have just revealed themselves. It is not too late for lovers of peace to stand against them.”

  His lenses were active. Clair was certain every word was being broadcast all over the world.

  LM Kingdon had just been name-checked in the context of a conspiracy to take over the world. Kingdon’s profile was already broadcasting a denial, promising an official statement within minutes, but there was no taking PK Forest’s suggestion back from the public record.

  His expression didn’t change, but he looked satisfied.

  “You know,” said Devin, “you’re a little short to be a revolutionary.”

  “I assure you that I am quite the opposite.”

  “Maybe, but on which count?”

  Clair, at ground zero, felt less than amused.

  “The dupes are still out there, remember?” she said. “Let’s not throw any parties until they’re dealt with.”

  At that moment, her lenses stirred.

  [66]

  * * *

  “WE’RE HERE,” SAID Jesse. Clair saw a black backdrop in his corner of her infield. There were no visible stars. Angular shapes moved in ways that defied terrestrial gravity. “It’s going to take us a moment to put the gear together.”

  “Just let me clarify something,” said Trevin, leaning into shot. “Are we destroying this thing or hacking into it? Because I can see advantages in doing the latter.”

  “That wasn’t the plan,” said Jesse. “This is where the dupes’ original patterns are stored. Destroying it is the only way to stop them forever. They’ll be like cockroaches, otherwise. They’ll keep coming back. Do this now, or we might as well surrender.”

  “There’s no need to be a drama queen. I’m just suggesting—”

  “I know what you’re suggesting, and I say it’s already been decided. Clair?”

  She closed her eyes, thinking of Zep and Libby. For so long, it seemed, she had dreamed of saving them. This was her last chance to do it. When the satellite was destroyed, the last copy of their patterns would be erased and they would be gone forever.

  But did she have the right to put the world at risk simply to save her best friend? Q had done just that, and everything had ended up worse as a result.

  Libby and Zep and both of Jesse’s parents . . . and who knew how many other lost teenagers like Tilly Kozlova . . . versus the fate of OneEarth and civilization as she knew it?

  There was only one possible decision.

  She wished she had squeezed Libby’s hand just a little tighter at the crashlander ball, the last time the two of them had been together.

  Good-bye, she thought. For real this time.

  She opened her eyes and imagined the whole world watching her. No one outside the muster knew where Jesse and Trevin were, so there was no harm in telling everyone what she had in mind. Nothing could stop the plan now. No one.

  “Rest assured,” LM Kingdon was saying in her latest, desperate speech, “that any rogue elements acting in concert with illegal duplicates will be dealt with swiftly and forcefully. None shall remain when our task is complete. The good name of OneEarth will not be stained, except by the blood of our enemies.”

  “Do it,” Clair said. “Blow the dupes to hell.”

  “Roger,” said Trevin. “Give us a minute.”

  “Thank you,” said Jesse.

  If only she could see him. She wanted to say that she didn’t deserve anyone’s thanks—if anything, she should have been thanking him. He seemed to be the only person she knew committed to a philosophy that didn’t make things better for him. The example he set gave her the strength to do what was best for everyone.

  His hands were moving, assembling something that looked like a giant rocket launcher. Distracting him seemed like a bad idea.

  “Clair?” Devin pulled her out of the feed from outer space. “When you can spare a moment from sounding off like an action hero . . . ?”

  Devin was in Q’s cell with Forest, and together they had raised Sargent to a sitting position.

  Clair hurried to join them.

  “Is she awake?”

  “Just coming around.” Forest was leaning into the unconscious woman’s face. There was a medicinal blister stuck to her neck, something from her own suit, Clair presumed, since Forest had lost his.

  Clair squatted down next to him. Sargent’s eyes were moving behind her eyelids, as though she was dreaming. Her hands shook at her sides. Seeing that made Clair anxious: she had witnessed such tremors before. What if Agnessa’s goons had punched her too hard and damaged something permanently?

  Sargent’s hands settled. Her eyes opened, revealing the same jade green Clair remembered from their first meeting.

  “What happened?” Sargent tried to sit up and winced. “Why does my head hurt?”

  “Tell me who you are,” Clair said.

  Sargent sank back onto her elbows. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not PK Sargent. I want to hear you say your real name.”

  A shudder rolled through Sargent’s body, as though Q had momentarily lost control of it. Her gaze focused on Clair, then twisted away.

  “I was attacked. From behind.”

  “Only because we thought you might be a dupe,” Clair said.

  “But I’m not a dupe. I’m . . . I’m . . .”

  “Kari,” said Forest. “Stay with us.”

  “I’m Kari Sargent,” she said, her wandering gaze settling for a second. “And at the same time I’m not. I’m . . . new. I’m . . . a secret. I’m . . . still here. I’m . . . deciding.”

  Clair recognized that uncertain, childlike tone. With a lump in her throat, she reached out and took Q’s shivering hands, as she had in the Farmhouse. This time those hands didn’t grip her back. They just hung limp in hers, slowly growing still.

  “Whatever you’re deciding,” said Devin, “hurry up and do it, will you? We haven’t got
all day.”

  Clair shushed him.

  “I want to say I’m sorry,” said Clair, “but I want to be sure of who I’m talking to, first.”

  Sargent slumped back onto the floor and her eyes closed.

  Before Clair could try to rouse her again, Jesse’s voice came over the twin-link.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’re ready. Fire on three. Clair, are you seeing this?”

  “Yes,” she said, squatting back on her heels. This was a moment she didn’t want to miss. “I’m here.”

  “One,” said Trevin. “Two. Three.”

  The image of the rocket launcher jerked. A flash of thin blue light filled the view for an instant, then it went to black.

  Two cells along, Nobody closed his eyes and tilted his head back, as though bathing in distant fire.

  “It’s done,” he said.

  [67]

  * * *

  CLAIR WAITED A second for the visual to return. Until Jesse confirmed the destruction of the station, she wouldn’t believe it was real. When the patch stayed dark, she folded Sargent’s hands carefully on her midriff and glanced at Devin.

  “Interference,” he said. “But we’ve detected the detonation. There’s a debris field.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yes.”

  “So why are you frowning?”

  “Interference,” he said, eyes shifting, “is not acceptable.”

  She directed her attention to her own lenses, which were still empty.

  “Can you hear me, Jesse?”

  No answer. If the blast had disconnected the twin-link between Devin and Trevin, that would be much weirder for Devin than it was for her, Clair thought, since the twins were used to being intimately connected to each other at all times. That didn’t mean there was a serious problem, though.

  The important thing was that the satellite was dealt with. The source of the dupes was destroyed. Whatever happened with LM Kingdon and the rest of the lawmakers, that threat was finally gone.

  “The dupes have seen it,” said Agnessa. “They’re pulling back. If they die now, they stay dead.”

  “It worked,” Clair said. “It worked!”

  “Are the PKs going to withdraw too?” Agnessa asked Forest. “Even the ones loyal to Kingdon?”

  He nodded. “That is the most likely outcome. Kingdon’s secret war was lost the moment it became a public war. People won’t support her now they know she’s been using dupes. She’s being arrested as we speak. The world is best served by talking, not fighting, at this juncture.”

  “Good.”

  That single word couldn’t convey her immense relief. The war against the dupes and their masters was effectively over. Whatever happened next would depend on the Consensus Court, not LM Kingdon. With the flood of dupes dammed, the future belonged to people like her and Jesse. Their choices would be their own. When the temporary communications glitch between her and Jesse was fixed, she would celebrate. They had saved the world!

  “Whoa,” said Devin. “That’s weird.”

  She came out of her thoughts. “What?”

  “I’m receiving reports of an energy burst.”

  “We’re seeing it too,” said Agnessa. “Is this related to something you did up there?”

  “No, it’s way beyond the specs of the missile Trevin was using.”

  “What is?” asked Clair, trying not to feel prematurely alarmed.

  A video feed came from Devin. It showed a grainy, shaking image of an expanding blue sphere.

  “This is what we’re seeing,” he said. “Several orbital assets have been affected.”

  “How?”

  “We don’t know, exactly, except that we’re losing signals all over L4.”

  As Clair watched, a second bubble appeared at the attenuating edge of the first, as though spawning a new one.

  “It’s spreading,” she said.

  Everyone was staring into their lenses. Another new bubble appeared, closer to the source of the video than the previous one. Then another, closer still. Blue filled the screen, and the image winked out.

  “It’s a chain reaction,” said Devin. “What the hell is going on up there?”

  A hand gripped Clair’s shoulder. Sargent had struggled back to consciousness.

  “L4,” she said weakly. Now she sounded like Sargent rather than Q. “Did Devin just say L4?”

  “Yes,” said Clair. “Wallace had a station there.”

  “Had?”

  A new image appeared in Clair’s lens. This showed what looked like a cluster of blue bubbles spreading like fireworks against a black sky.

  Sargent pulled herself upright, almost yanking Clair down in the process.

  “Tell me what you’ve done.”

  “We took out the source of the dupes,” she said.

  “The Yard.”

  Clair nodded. “Yes. That’s what Nobody called it.”

  “In the Baikal borehole, yes?”

  “No, in space,” Clair said. “That’s what we’re looking at right now.”

  “No.” Sargent’s eyes grew wide. “No. No. No!”

  Her voice changed. In new, panicked tones Clair heard again the Q she had known.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What are you trying to tell us?”

  “That station is not the source of the dupes at all,” Q said. “It was designed to look like it is, but it’s not.”

  “Seriously?” said Devin, tsk-ing in annoyance. “Still, it’s not the end of the world. We’ll just attack the real thing now.”

  “Too late. L4 wasn’t just a decoy. It was also a trap, and you’ve triggered it.”

  “What kind of trap?” asked Clair. “What does it do?”

  “It solves the problem,” said Nobody, and Clair turned to look at him.

  Don’t trust him.

  Nobody’s dangerous.

  “What have you done?” she asked him, coming to her feet and leaving her heart behind. “Jesse was right on top of that thing.”

  “It was his decision to be there,” Nobody said, “and your decision to send him there. Don’t blame me.”

  Behind her, Devin helped Q stand.

  “V468 contained a charge of unstable matter,” Q said, “rigged to catastrophically decay if anything attacked it.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Forest. “Exactly.”

  “Unstable matter releases a quantum cascade when it disintegrates, a wave spreading outward that affects other pockets of unstable matter. Decay triggers decay, forming a chain reaction. If there’s enough unstable matter, the reaction becomes explosive.”

  “Just how much of this stuff is up there?” asked Clair.

  “Well, all of it is unstable,” Q said in a trembling voice. “Anything that’s been through a d-mat booth comes out that way.”

  Jesse had called anything that came out of a fabber “fake stuff.” Like Charlie and every other impermanent thing. Like her. Like him.

  Jesse, Clair thought, the true situation only slowly becoming real to her.

  “We’ve lost contact with all the satellites inside those bubbles,” Devin said.

  “Ashes to ashes,” said Nobody. “Dust to dust.”

  Clair’s thoughts vanished into a white noise of grief and fury. Without thinking, she ran to Nobody’s cage and lunged at him.

  His stolen body leaned just out of reach of her grasping hand and grinned.

  “Give me the keys,” she yelled at Forest. “Give me the keys!”

  “It’s too late,” said Nobody. “He’s gone.”

  [68]

  * * *

  JESSE.

  The boy who had walked her home to meet his father had started off a complete stranger. Somehow, against all odds, that boy had become the most important person in the world. She felt closer to him than she ever had to Zep. And now . . .

  “Jesse can’t be dead,” she said, pulling back from the cage on legs that barely had the strength to hold her upright. She felt like she
might throw up. “He can’t be.”

  “It’s just the beginning,” Nobody gloated. “Soon everyone else will be gone too. The end has come at last, in devastating blue.”

  Clair shook her head violently, the image of expanding bubbles taking on new significance.

  “No,” she said. “It’s not true.”

  “He’s right,” said Q from behind her. Devin and Forest were helping her walk. Devin’s face was a waxy gray, blank with shock. “Each quantum cascade spreads until it meets more unstable matter, where it triggers another cascade, which triggers another. The cascades overlap, forming an expanding front.”

  Clair struggled to get her head around what Q was telling her. She was still unable to accept what Nobody said had happened to Jesse.

  “It’s the light?”

  “No, that’s just a side effect. The cascade follows more slowly, triggering the light.”

  “And you’re saying that everything that’s been through a d-mat booth is potentially unstable?”

  “Yes, when exposed to the cascade. Early d-mat engineers knew about the effect, but they thought it was only a theoretical quirk, nothing to worry about. There has to be a trigger event, one that is highly unlikely to occur naturally.”

  “They used one too many shortcuts,” said Devin bitterly. “The idiots!”

  “Wallace’s engineers found a way to weaponize the effect,” Q went on, “using the decoy satellite as a lure. He thought the only people who could find the source would be those in OneEarth who knew his secret, turning on him, and if he was going down he was taking everyone with him. He thought he was going to live forever, remember? He didn’t count on you and me, Clair.”

  “What happens when the front reaches the Earth?” Clair asked.

  Q didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. She had said enough already.

  Clair backed away from the triumph in Nobody’s eyes. He had tricked her. No—he had let her believe what she wanted to believe. He hadn’t actually said that the satellite was the source of the dupes, just that it plausibly might be, and that attacking it would be a good solution.