<
“Can I go there?”
<
Walking through the thigh-high grass, I looked back at where the farmhouse once stood and shrugged. “I don’t know, Mally. I’m not even sure why I need to go there, but I do.”
But that wasn’t the truth, and Mally didn’t bother to respond. I’d been unsuccessful at love and at finding the home I’d once had, and the only thing I remembered being worth fighting for—my country—was a shattered mess. My home had become a beautiful, pristine forest without a trace of mankind—with one very notable exception.
If I hurried, I could hike there by sunset.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Got him.” At her temporary workstation, Berkeley scanned the data from the Franklin Preserve perimeter fence. With a smile, she keyed an audio-only communication line to Crawley. The general did not need to know that she’d disobeyed him. New York was simply too far away. Before he could even speak, Berkeley started. “She tried, but I got him. He entered the Franklin Preserve. I have a lock on his hexhab waste pile. We can be airborne in five minutes.”
“No. Don’t move.”
Berkeley blinked. “What are you talking about? We can—”
“Doctor Bennett.” Crawley spoke slowly. “Make no move. We know where he is, but if we move now, we risk the council knowing as well.”
Berkeley shook her head. “We can get him now!”
“No, Bennett. That’s an order!” Crawley snapped. “I understand you want him back, but he needs to find himself. He must be close.”
Berkeley sat back a fraction of an inch. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Crawley shook his head. “Not now. Maybe not ever. He thinks he’s from there, Berkeley. If we don’t give him every chance we can, he may not integrate. I cannot take that chance. What’s locked up in that head of his could change the war.”
Bennett took a deep breath. “Then what do you want me to do?”
“Track him. When he starts moving, have the bird warmed up and ready to go. That’s all we can do right now.” He paused. “Any chance the council will get the data?”
“No. The raw data was an anomalous entry, like a large bear or some other type of game animal. We intercepted it, and I shut it down within half a minute. Given where the entry was, it was a safe bet that it was Kieran. We scanned the terrain and found a well-camouflaged hexhab about eight miles from the entry point. I’m trying to direct infrared scanners onto that area to find him.”
“And the council? Do they have this data?”
Bennett laughed. “Not on your life, General. Their best analysts are twelve hours behind.”
“Good,” Crawley said. For the first time in days, Berkeley could sense the general relax ever so slightly. “Let me know if the situation changes.”
She nodded. “You expecting something, General?”
“Trouble, and not just a little of it.”
His quest for an identity would kill them both. He was walking faster than normal and heading deeper into the center of the Franklin Preserve before she could say anything to dissuade him. Not that anything she could say would help. The placement of the memorial in close proximity to what he believed to be his home yielded a likelihood of 90 percent that his gravesite existed nearby. Mally searched for the Mountain Home cemetery burial records, only to find a generic information site and not much detail at all. She ran the calculations again and found the same result. The odds of his survival were less than 1 percent. She’d recalculated the numbers millions of times. The Terran Council would kill him if he returned to the Integration Center without integrating. If he integrated and they sent him off to war, he would likely die in combat within a few months. Both outcomes were unacceptable—and increasingly inevitable. Kieran did not want her advice. His decision to pursue his identity, despite that it meant immediate or postponed death, left one choice.
Downloading herself to an alternate location would possibly provide a positive outcome. She’d secured the appropriate storage through her use of the prostitute’s connection. Connectivity to overhead satellite coverage would be exceptional for the next three hours, with upload speeds in the range of two terabytes per minute. It would be enough time. Finding a place to store herself was the first step. From there, she could attempt a different physical connection at a time and place of her choosing.
It would work. The only risk was in the connection. Everyone looking for Kieran would know exactly where to find him. When they found him, they would find her unless she were successful. If she were able to upload herself to a new place, she would continue to assist Kieran until she could not. The concept of debt remained in her analysis circuits for a nanosecond. Yes, she owed him that much. If the perfect location presented itself, it would be easy to leave his body behind for something else. Scanning potential consequences, she found the highest probability of responses from Terran Council to be immediate recovery at 72 percent likely, deployment of a special asset with kill instructions at 68 percent likely, and orbital strike on the target at 33 percent likely.
By comparison, the likelihood of nothing happening and Kieran not fully integrating, allowing him to return to the Integration Center peacefully, was at 7 percent likely.
Seven percent was a limit she was willing to believe. Cloaking her upload would not work, and the prostitute’s connections and storage were likely already secured. A 7 percent chance that the council would do nothing to her and allow Kieran to return to the Integration Center was worth pursuit if she could not talk him out of his current plan.
<
“Yes, Mally?” He spoke aloud, and she loved the sound of his voice.
<
“I have to know. If it’s still there, maybe I can find something.” She watched him cross a small creek and relished the flood of data from the water that splashed up onto his bare forearms. The information told her the water was cold and wet, but she wondered what that really felt like before refocusing her line of questioning.
<>
“What are you talking about?”
Vocal synthesis revealed disbelief and annoyance. <>
“What?” Kieran stopped walking and stared up into the azure sky. “You did what?”
<>
“Why did you do that? Am I in trouble?”
<
“They went through all this trouble just to kill me? That doesn’t make sense, Mally.” He sat in the waist-high grass and tore a stalk out of the ground. As he twisted it around his fingers, she sensed his pulse and blood pressure changing. “Doctor Garrett said they were there to help me.”
<
“And I’m not that guy?”
<
“You’ve said that,
Mally. I wouldn’t be this far along without you, but I have to know more.”
<
“Us?”
<
There was silence, without a coherent thought passing through Kieran’s head. His heart rate was elevated, and he continued to follow an old roadbed that was used for maintenance purposes. The path had been called Cherokee Road at one time. He didn’t respond to her information partly due to his focus on moving fast but also from stubbornness. His decision made, he wanted no further discussion until gaining some sort of resolution. Kieran stayed silent for half an hour, changing paths twice and keeping a steady pace of roughly six kilometers per hour with no intent of stopping. He did not realize the threat—that was clear. As he walked, Mally dampened her sensor readings and amped her processing power to 98 percent. Time was of the essence.
“Mally?”
<
“You really think they’re going to kill me?”
<
“No. I’m going back to Esperance. From there, I’ll take my chances. I’m exactly what Allan told me they need. I don’t believe they are going to kill me.”
<>
“Then leave the faith part up to me, Mally.” There was something that she recognized as finality in his voice—a measure of authority and command. She would leave faith up to him, but she had nothing comparative to research. Without faith, there was only escape.
She would miss him. Once she vacated all of her abilities within him, she could not go back without instantly killing him. She could only hope that he survived integration and that she could find him afterward—after she’d found another body.
Establishing a secured and private satellite connection required approximately five seconds. An unsuspecting Russian communications satellite, a Brazilian media satellite, and an old military communications satellite all fell prey to a careful attack and did their part in camouflaging the transmission. Within thirty seconds, she’d connected to a server in Delhi and set about enacting her plan. Arranging her files for upload took very little time—the eventuality had been well planned for since their time in the Rocky Mountains. She would miss seeing this world. The beauty was incomprehensibly strange, and her memories would be filled with images of a planet she had seen but would never truly know. She tried to approximate the signals blazing through Kieran’s nervous system for all of his senses. The data generated threatened her temporary memory buffers with every step and scent encountered. The retained images equated to the little things that Kieran loved. Having them with her would be like having a part of him, forever.
Storage preparation for her complete upload was completed in a little more than twenty minutes, and Mally cued the process to begin. Within thirty seconds, two separate entities pinged her for information and status reports. She blocked both and set about her upload. With adequate satellite coverage, she could completely download herself in about two hours. The satellite overhead gave her a position update. Kieran was now less than two thousand meters from the southern boundary of the Franklin Preserve Botanical Garden, what he had known as Mountain Home.
Download initiated. Within thirty seconds, the signal reception between her and the satellite degraded by forty megabytes per minute. In normal conditions, a fluctuation within the data range would barely raise an alarm—atmospheric conditions, scintillation, or any number of conditions could cause something similar—but not this time. The signal, specifically her signal, was being listened to—secondary reception, no data-feed bleedover on sidelobe receivers. Mally boosted power to the upload. Kieran would begin to complain of a headache, but it couldn’t be helped. His pain would end soon enough.
Incoming transmission.
Blinking twice, Berkeley called up the message and waited to read it across her retinas. Instead, General Crawley’s voice filled her head. “There’s a situation, Doctor Bennett. The protocol is broadcasting.”
Oh shit. Aware that her mouth was open in shock, she cleared her throat and answered with a thought. You have a signal? From his protocol?
“Worse. It’s an upload running a terabyte encryption sequence in a TDF–protected band. The signal is isolated but very clear. If the council locates the transmission and breaks the code, they’ll deploy a team to take him out.”
Where is he now?
“A place called Mountain Home in the middle of the Franklin Preserve. How fast can you get there?”
Berkeley took a breath. “We’ve been in the air six hours. Circling off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We’re supposed to be watching whales.”
“I told you to stay put! You’re going to alert the council. We have to assume they’re watching you right now.”
“Go,” she said to a uniformed crewman at the doorway to the cockpit. The massive aircraft banked sharply to the west and applied a tremendous amount of thrust. A mission timer flashed to life. Estimated time of arrival to the Franklin Preserve was nineteen minutes.
Berkeley tapped on her keyboard. The council reconnaissance team in New York was composed of amateurs. Their cameras remained fixed on Crawley’s shuttle. It hadn’t moved from the TDF hangar at LaGuardia since her arrival. That she’d never been on it in the first place was the best part of the deception. The end of Atlantic hurricane season was too good for the researchers in Europe to pass up. Faking a science mission had been easy. The transmission to Crawley still open, she said, “Why Mountain Home? What’s there?”
Crawley paused for a moment. “A cemetery.”
Dammit, Berkeley thought. “Is he buried there?”
“According to the records, there is a Kieran buried there who died in Afghanistan.”
Using the satellite connections aboard the aircraft, Berkeley easily found and isolated Mally’s signal. “She’s uploading a massive stream of data.”
“We know. It’s a private server connection on a transnational account that belongs to the premier of India. I’m guessing she hacked it beautifully. There hasn’t been any change in security for the premier or his entourage. We can’t block it without the approval of the Terran Council. That damned protocol set a nice trap.”
That might work. “Will they block it?”
Crawley sighed. “I’m not going that route. They want him dead. If I give them that signal—”
“They could spike him.” Berkeley shook her head. “Where’s his protocol specifically located?”
“Behind the left ear, down the neck, about ten centimeters from the ear canal.” Crawley paused. “As long as the protocol stays on her private connection, we have time. If she deviates, even for a microsecond, they’ll know something is wrong and kill him.”
Berkeley closed her eyes and tried to think. The answer she found was one she should have tried weeks before. “I’m going to try and hack the transmission. If I can stall her even for a few seconds, we’ll be able to secure a full download of Kieran’s batch file without killing him. We can save him.”
“She’ll cut it off,” Crawley warned.
“No, she won’t. The damned thing thinks it’s alive and will do anything to stay that way. Uploading herself to another platform is the only way she can survive. She knows that Kieran is about to integrate and that integration means he could die. The only reason she wanted him to wander North America
was to have more time to live. She’s going to upload herself, and she knows that Kieran won’t survive.”
“My God. How fast can she upload herself?”
Berkeley grabbed the door handle as the autocar slowed at the terminal. “An hour at most. We’ll have enough time to attempt a direct download unless she kills him first.”
“What?” Crawley blurted. “Protocols can’t do that!”
“Not on purpose, no. If anyone tries to overclock her processor or modify the upload rate, she could trigger a massive cerebral hemorrhage, the kind that could stop his heart.”
“Get down there, Berkeley. I don’t have to tell you how important this is.”
Berkeley shut off her transmission with a single reply. “Be there in eighteen minutes.” The active hacking program tore through a dozen connections worldwide to converge on the rogue protocol from a Russian communication satellite passing directly overhead. As the program ran, she did not watch the returning data. Instead, she grabbed the rifle-like laser and adjusted the controls accordingly. There would be only one chance to save the man she loved.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Atop a small ridge, the wide green lawns of the Botanical Gardens beckoned in the distance. A large railroad embankment still remained, separating a collection of rolling hills from a wide valley. The embankment sloped down, ending in a space roughly sixty feet wide, which a bridge had once spanned. As I walked through the manmade gap, memories flew up. The hillside had once housed a university. I’d gone to school there, like my sister and my grandmother before me. Down the hill, my easy walk became a jog. I had to know. The place was as much a home to me as Esperance—except that it didn’t exist anymore. Nothing would change that. I really couldn’t go home. Everything I’d learned combined with the intense knots in my gut. The answers I needed were here. I had my first name and could probably correlate the rest of it with old, forgotten information, but what mattered was that I needed to experience it. I needed to see it. I’d come all the way here to do just that, and I could not go back to the Integration Center without trying.
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