Crashland

by Sean Williams

The solution to his problem, which was dying. Taking everyone else with him was a bonus. Giving them what he desired most of all.

  He’s gone.

  It’s not the end of the world.

  Wasn’t it? Clair could barely think for grief. But if everyone else was about to follow Jesse and Trevin, that was what she needed to think about. She had to force herself to think.

  “We need to get people to safety,” said Forest. She heard him distantly, as though through a heavy fog. “There might yet be time. . . .”

  “Where are you going to send them?” asked Devin. “The safest place on Earth is right here.”

  “The walls are unlikely to hold,” said Agnessa. “Reclaimed gravel. I can’t guarantee the original material wasn’t fabbed.”

  “Great. The one time you really need Abstainers they let you down.”

  I let him down, Clair thought. I should have found another way. If he hadn’t gone to L4 . . . if I had only realized that Nobody was letting them reach the wrong conclusion . . .

  “How long do we have?” asked Forest.

  “Five minutes. Maybe longer. It depends how that front moves, what it feeds on along the way.”

  “Ordinary matter will stop it,” said Q.

  “Well, that’s a start. Tell people to start digging.”

  Clair snapped out of her useless thoughts. Her cheeks were wet. She hadn’t even known that she was crying.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” she asked Q, her voice so close to a shriek it was painful even to her ears.

  “I didn’t tell you because I thought I didn’t need to,” Q said. “Everything was under control. I didn’t anticipate . . . unconsciousness.”

  “We wouldn’t have knocked you out if we’d known who you were.” Clair resisted the urge to wail wordlessly in frustration. “You didn’t give us a hint. You did everything but help us. You took over PK Sargent and you killed people. You bombed Antarctica and you flooded Washington. You took my mother!”

  “Only so you could understand how I felt!” Suddenly they were yelling at each other. “I lost a parent, so you needed to lose one too. And even then it’s only temporary: I put Allison in the Yard so I can bring her back at any time. But you made me choose. I could have you or I could have my parents: I couldn’t have both. You had it so much easier than I did! That was why I made the flood in Washington.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I needed to know how you would choose. I engineered that to make sure that you would bump into Tilly Kozlova. You had the choice of saving her or leaving her behind. You chose to save her, and I should have trusted you then, I know that now. But I didn’t want to take sides until I was sure. Look what happened last time!”

  They were standing toe to toe, and somehow eye to eye as well, despite the difference in their heights. Clair was the one shaking now, in pure distress. Jesse was gone, the world was going to burn, and somehow this was her fault too. It all came back to the decision she had made in Wallace’s hideout. If she had thought harder and found another solution, things might have turned out utterly different.

  Q’s plan to test Clair felt very much like punishing her, and Clair didn’t have the surety in herself to protest that she didn’t deserve it.

  He’s gone.

  He didn’t deserve it, she wanted to say. But neither did Billie. Neither did anyone hurt in the crash.

  “I’m sorry,” said Clair.

  “No, I’m sorry,” said Q. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this.”

  Clair had gone from wanting to strangle Q to feeling a powerful urge to hug her in less than a minute. She wondered if this was what it was like having a younger sister.

  “You two can argue about who’s most to blame later,” said Devin. “If there is a later. We need to do something to save ourselves, and fast.”

  In Clair’s lenses, L4 was a bright star shining over the Western hemisphere with a halo of blue spreading around it. The halo was caused by powersats and other satellites burning in the terrible quantum cascade. Nothing operational was spared, since everything in orbit apart from old space junk had been sent there by d-mat. Already cities were going dark as their powersat beams were cut off, and that was just the beginning. When the cascade touched the surface of the Earth, cities themselves would begin to crumble, and all the people inside them, as well.

  “What can we do?” she asked. “Is there any way to stop it?”

  “No,” said Q. “There is not.”

  “Well, I’m not going to stand here and wait to see what it feels like,” said Devin. “There has to be somewhere to hide. Underground, perhaps?”

  “Our cellars will be full of my people,” Agnessa said. “I’m not risking their lives on the off chance Q is wrong.”

  Clair understood, even though fear was starting to cut through the grief and self-blame. If anyone deserved to survive, it was the Abstainers and WHOLE. Forest obviously agreed; he had already opened Nelly’s cage and was doing his best to wake her and the two thugs. They would need to get to safety.

  But where were Clair and the others going to go? They could commandeer one of the airships, she supposed, if they were quick enough, but what would be the point of that? They couldn’t possibly outrun the coming storm. Perhaps a submarine hiding deep in the straits would be an option, but there had been no sign of one down at the pier. And simply swimming underwater wouldn’t work. The straits were freezing—and how could they possibly hold their breath long enough? They would drown long before the front passed over them.

  Underground, she thought again, internally echoing Devin’s suggestion.

  Underground where?

  “Prison,” she said, although that didn’t feel like the answer she was reaching for. “An underground penitentiary. That’s where we’ll go.”

  “You want to ride out the apocalypse in a tin can full of murderers and rapists?” asked Devin.

  “What choice do we have?”

  “I’m not sure we even have that one. There’s no booth in here, remember?”

  “If we’re quick,” she said, “maybe we’ll make it to the freighter we came in on.”

  “Not without the hovercraft, we won’t.”

  “My god,” said Forest. He was standing stock-still in the center of the prison, staring into grim infinity. “It has begun.”

  Clair didn’t want to look, but she had to. The front had touched the Eastern Seaboard of North America and the effects were being perfectly captured by drones. New York was exploding into a thousand hurricanes of gray dust. Washington wasn’t far behind. On the other side of the Atlantic, London was a swirling storm of ashes, and Paris was already half-gone. Each glimpse came and went in a strobing catalogue of disaster as one by one the drones recording them succumbed in turn, leaving nothing but dust.

  [69]

  * * *

  HE’S GONE.

  The pain in her chest was undiminished, but the terrible gyres sweeping up from the remains of civilization were all she could allow herself to think about. Jesse had died trying to save her. She wasn’t going to let that count for nothing.

  “There is a booth,” said Q, in her grown-up voice.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t see how it changes anything,” said Devin. His eyes were red and the skin around them looked papery and white. How did it feel to lose an identical twin? “There’s still nowhere safe to go.”

  Clair ignored his fatalism. She wasn’t giving up. “Where, Q?”

  “Shall I tell them, Agnessa?”

  “No need,” said Nelly. The big woman was standing in her cell holding the two thugs by the scruffs of their necks. Sandler Jones was groaning and shaking his head. “I’ll take you. But let’s be quick about it. I can see what’s coming as well as you can.”

  Clair looked to Q for an explanation, but she was already moving for the door, ushering Clair, Devin, and Forest ahead of her. Nelly left the thugs to fend for themselves.

  “Don’t l
eave me here,” Nobody called after them.

  “You’ll be all right,” said Devin. “I’m sure the walls won’t actually fall in.”

  “Exactly!”

  Forest hesitated, then threw him the pistol.

  “Good-bye, Cameron Lee.”

  As they went through the door, a single gunshot sounded behind them.

  Nelly hurried to the utility. They climbed in after her, seeing no trace of the defense of the prison that had played out earlier between the escapees and Agnessa’s enforcers. Everyone had fled for shelter. There were bigger things to worry about now than who was locked in where.

  Wheels spun and the utility sped through New Petersburg. The front was spreading across Russia at a frightening rate, along with the rest of the world. Tokyo was gone. Hong Kong was gone. New Delhi was under threat. Tehran would be next. There was confusion and panic in the streets. No one knew what was going on.

  Was it better to know or not to know?

  Clair had one last chance to speak to the world, and she had only moments to make it count, before the world really ended, this time.

  “Hide,” she broadcast. “Get underground or underwater if you can. Don’t rely on anything or anyone that’s been d-matted or fabbed. Stay covered until it’s passed over you—and even then, don’t move until you’re completely sure. Do it quickly. Do it now. There’s no time to ask why or to argue about it. Just know that this is happening, and that there will be time to lay blame later.”

  I hope, she added silently to herself.

  The usual babble of replies from the Clairwatch crowd was muted. That sobered her more than the sight of whole cities turning to dust. Half the people on Earth were already dead. The only person she knew who had any chance of surviving was Tash, who as Clair spoke was already running for the jungle’s edge. There was no reply from Ronnie. Miami was gone. Clair choked on the thought that they would never have that conversation now.

  A wind was rising through the muster’s empty lanes.

  “How much farther?” she asked.

  “Nearly there.”

  They were in familiar territory. There were the dorms they had occupied so briefly, and there was the common area. It all reminded her of Jesse, awakening the shock of his death anew. Nowhere had Clair seen anything that looked remotely like a booth, but she presumed it was safely hidden. A demonstration unit, she guessed, to teach terrorists how best to sabotage one in the wild. Or contraband seized from one of the muster’s many recent arrivals. As long as it was connected to power and the rest of the world, Clair didn’t care where it had come from.

  Blue dawn flared on the western horizon.

  “Shit,” said Devin, ducking down. “It’s here already!”

  “The light’s just a side effect, remember?” said Q.

  “Yes, but the cascade can’t be far behind. Get a move on, will you?”

  Nelly ignored him and kept driving just as recklessly as ever.

  Clair guessed where they were going twenty seconds before they skidded to a halt in front of Agnessa’s L-shaped building.

  “This is it?” Devin said.

  “Yes.” Nelly opened the utility door and bundled herself outside. Ordinary dust whipped in after her, stinging Clair’s eyes and making Forest sneeze.

  “You’re saying there’s a booth in here?” Devin was dragging his heels, and Clair didn’t understand why.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s using it to keep herself alive, of course,” Q said, holding up a hand to keep the wind out of her face. “You know, like you did on the seastead? She won’t fix herself completely, but she’ll do just enough to keep on living. Who could blame her?”

  Devin muttered something about principles that Clair didn’t catch.

  There was a sizzling noise and a flash of blue light. Devin fell back against the utility, fountaining gray dust from where his right arm used to be. He screamed in pain and shock, and his wide eyes twisted to meet Clair’s. She automatically reached for him but something heavy hit her in the right shoulder and suddenly she was facedown in the dirt.

  Q was pushing her flat with all of Sargent’s weight and muscle. Dust was flying everywhere, blinding her and filling her nose with the stink of electricity. The sizzling noise grew louder and closer. Next to her, Devin’s feet exploded into dust. Clair kicked out against the earth, rolling both her and Q under the utility, where the shadow was deepest. The blue light receded, then flared again. Over the sound of it she thought she heard Forest cry out.

  “Inspector!” Q called. This time her voice was all Sargent. There was no answer.

  He’s gone too.

  They clutched each other until the wind receded and the dust began to settle. Clair was crying and so was Q. Their tears left muddy tracks down the ash on their faces. Some of that ash had come from their friends. Maybe, she thought, the ash that had once been Jesse would rain down on the destroyed world and mingle with hers. That was cold comfort.

  “Come on,” said Nelly, holding down a hand. “I think it’s clear now, but you’d better be quick. There’s no predicting how it moves.”

  Clair checked her lenses. What Nelly said was true. The front rippled and wriggled across the surface of the Earth, missing small pockets that it occasionally twisted back to snare later.

  She took Nelly’s hand and let herself be hauled out into the light. The sky was wracked by a flickering, electric-blue aurora. Everywhere she looked she saw scars left in the cascade’s wake, from wide slashes across buildings and roofs to craters that had opened up in the Earth—a shocking demonstration of how far fabbed material had penetrated the world, even in areas where it was supposedly forbidden.

  Sizzling from nearby. The cascade wasn’t done with the muster yet. Clair grabbed Q under one armpit and, feeling like a child between two such enormous women, allowed herself to be dragged into Agnessa’s sanctuary.

  [70]

  * * *

  IT WAS DIM and quiet inside. Behind a Faraday shield it was easy to pretend that they would be safe, when there was no safe anymore, for either of them. The deadliest girls in the world, she thought with a slightly hysterical edge. Everything they touched, they destroyed.

  “Where’s the booth?” she asked.

  “In the ward,” said Q. “Behind a false wall.”

  “Is it going to work?”

  “There are subterranean power networks. They can carry a signal if the Air is too degraded.”

  “Where are you going to go?” asked Nelly.

  That was the question, a question that was hard to contemplate in the wake of so much grief and shock. How could she be alive when Jesse, Forest, and Devin were not?

  She was too stubborn to give up, though. If their patterns could only travel via cable, that meant space wasn’t even an option now. . . .

  Underground, she thought again. Was prison really the only possibility? Maybe RADICAL’s Antarctica contingency would be safe, along with Hassannah and Akili—but how would she get there? She didn’t think Devin’s friends were going to let her or the entity barge on in.

  The ward was empty apart from Agnessa’s curled body, silent apart from the hissing and beeping of machines.

  “Why isn’t she talking to us?” Clair asked. “Is she all right?”

  “She’s angry at me for giving away her secret,” said Nelly. “But it would be wrong to deny you the chance. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

  That the new leader of WHOLE was a secret user of d-mat?

  “No,” said Clair. She doubted she would have the opportunity anyway. Or that anyone would care, in the face of Wallace’s revenge.

  Wallace, she thought as Nelly shifted the stack of chairs and unlocked the panel behind it, and Q did whatever she needed to do to get the booth ready. Wallace had done nothing at all since she had killed him. The dupes, with the recent exception of Nobody, had been controlled by LM Kingdon and her allies. But once again his actions had profoundly changed the wo
rld, thanks to Nobody and his deadly trap. Was anyone immune to the effects of the cascade? Was anywhere safe on Earth now?

  Baikal, she thought.

  Tash had found two odd locations in the data. One was the satellite uplink that had led to V468. The other was the lake on the other side of Russia.

  The Baikal borehole, Q had said.

  The Baikal Superdeep Borehole.

  Where better to hide than the deepest artificial pit in the world? One that had its own geothermal power supply, to boot?

  “The Yard,” she said, gripping Q by the arm. “That’s where we’re going to go.”

  Q came out of her focused state. “What?”

  “You know where it is, don’t you? You’ve known ever since you took over Wallace’s space station. You know where the dupes come from, and you know where everyone’s patterns have been stored.”

  “Yes.”

  Q’s matter-of-fact tone was excruciating. How long had Clair been hunting for that information? If only Q had told someone . . .

  Another thought hit her with near-physical force: Jesse was in there. She had seen him duped earlier that very day. He wasn’t dead yet.

  But would he let her bring him back?

  Clair forced her own tone to remain level, even in the face of near-crippling confusion.

  “So what’s in there, exactly? Is it just a big data cache or is there more to it?”

  “Just data, right at the bottom of the pit,” Q said. “The cascade won’t touch it.”

  “If you could get down there,” said Nelly, “you’d be safe, but it’s on the other side of Russia.”

  “The only way we’d get in there is as data,” Clair said, seeing the flaws in her idea now. It was too crazy. “Anyone could erase us and we’d never know. We might as well go to prison and take our chances.”

  “Hang on,” said Q. “There are processors there as well. Big ones. I could try kick-starting a virtual shell. You know, like the Maze and its shortcuts? This would be the same—constantly in the act of transmission except we’d never arrive anywhere. We’d be nothing but what Devin called a shortcut. Entirely virtual, until we decided to come out.”