by Sean Platt
Nocturne barked as if in support. He looked unharmed, and Meyer noticed he’d somehow become tangled in blankets. Built-in doggie bed and shock-absorption system all in one.
“Kindred?”
“He’s okay, Piper. We’re all okay.”
Piper turned to Meyer.
“You sure you’re fine?”
“Yes.”
“Absolutely certain?”
“Yes.”
Piper slapped him very hard. His skin stung.
“I told you to get on the sub. I told you.”
Meyer rubbed the spot, meeting her glare. “Someone had to keep them from getting to you before you could launch.”
“How did that work out?”
“I don’t know. Have you been eaten?”
“Fuck you, Meyer. You don’t always know best. You don’t always need to think of yourself!”
“I was trying to help you!”
“We couldn’t leave without you! Don’t you get that?”
“If you weren’t so goddamn stubborn, you sure should have. You’d have been screwed if that wave hadn’t come. It was supposed to be the difference between three of you surviving instead of none of us.” That made Meyer wonder, and his eyes went to the porthole to see what the surface looked like and where they’d ended up.
“No, I mean … ” She sighed. “Tell him, Peers.”
Peers turned around, said nothing, and threw up in the corner.
“You survive,” Piper said.
“Thank you.”
“No. You don’t understand. You survive. At least one of you, anyway.” She looked at Kindred, rubbing his arm. “Peers was telling us. The Mullah know all about this. It’s happened over and over.”
“Good for the Mullah.”
Piper looked like she might hit him again. She was that furious, and Meyer didn’t understand why.
“You survive. No matter what, Meyer Dempsey makes it. Do you understand? If you want to protect us, stay with us. Then maybe we’ll survive, too.”
Meyer didn’t understand. He survived? What kind of nonsense proclamation was that? What loose balls in his usually kooky wife had recent events finally knocked loose?
He opened his mouth but had no idea what to say. Should he apologize for some weird metaphysical discourtesy? Should he ask questions? She was speaking about it all as if it should be obvious, but she’d been doing the same since Cameron died. Maybe she’d finally tipped. Or maybe — and this, he didn’t like to consider — she was right, and he’d almost done something terribly wrong and nearly killed them all.
Except for himself and possibly Kindred, of course. Because he survived.
“Piper … ”
“Hody sit,” Peers said, speaking around his wounded tongue. “Look ad dis.”
Piper gave him a final glance then moved to the portal.
Meyer put his face to the thick glass. They were bobbing along the surface of what looked like an endless ocean. He couldn’t see the dock or inlet. Only water, as far as the eye could see.
“Bad news,” said Kindred from behind them. “We’ve got no power. None at all.” Meyer turned. Kindred flicked the caged light ahead, somehow intact, lit up like a contradiction. “These seem to be solar. But that’s all we have.”
Meyer moved to the sub’s center, tested its stability by rocking back and forth while grasping the ladder, and then, satisfied that he wouldn’t tip them, reached up to open the hatch. Once up, Meyer realized he could see some features invisible from below: one of the other subs, presumably vacant, off in one of the otherwise featureless directions. In the other, a distant mountain that remained above water. And worlds of debris.
On the sub’s rear was a sheared-away stub of metal: the communications/navigation/whatever array, broken off as anticipated.
“Bad news, Piper,” he said, surveying the open water. “I think Plan A to hook up with the other viceroys is off the table.”
Nobody answered.
“Piper?”
Then her voice came up, quiet and tentative.
“Meyer? What’s this?”
CHAPTER 41
The wave hit without mercy.
Carl watched it bombard the bridge’s right side window. The ship was titanic, meant for hauling something — Carl had no idea what — across the open sea. He barely had a clue how to enter the thing, let alone find the steering wheel, or have any clue what it did beyond moving left and right. Carl couldn’t swim, had never been on a boat, and was frankly more terrified of open water than aliens eating his brain. That’s why facing the Titans and shuttles at the gate had felt so easy. If they killed him and all the folks who’d run along behind him, so what?
But now Carl was reminded of why this had been such a terrible idea.
The system of docks at the port was long and complex. Here, where the oceangoing vessels were harbored, docks were sprawling concrete piers. But out on a jut were smaller concrete piers, wooden piers, and a spider’s web of dinky slips for rich people’s pleasure craft and indigents’ fishing skiffs.
Carl watched the wave as it propagated toward them, seeing it crest, ripping the everyman’s piers from the bottom like tearing carpet from the floor. Wood broke apart like a house of matchsticks. Time froze as Carl watched in horror, as Lawrence and the lady that might be his wife stood just behind as if they thought he could protect them. He watched the water rise from flooded but mostly flat to a ski slope, pulling pillars from the inlet’s bed like rotten teeth. The boats came with it. They looked like a giant’s bathtub toys, then the wave rolled and crashed, its sound like a bomb.
“Jeeeeezuuus … ” said someone behind him.
Carl gripped a chrome handle on the control panel. He hadn’t commandeered this freighter because he planned to explore the world’s wet corners. He’d taken it because it could float. And sure, plenty of shit could stay buoyant, but this toy might be big enough to come up top after a wave that size ripped the —
“Oh, motherfucker!” Carl blurted.
The thought struck him like a punch to the face. He let go of the dash and took a half step toward the bridge door before realizing it was too late to de-dock the ship or whatever the shit captains called it when they untied the big ropes and prepared to hit the open sea for a few months of scurvy and sodomy. They’d passed the lines on their mad dash up the ramp to the first of the sealable doors, and those lines had looked as thick as Carl’s upper arms, fastened to cleats the size of small automobiles, bolted to the concrete. He hadn’t a clue what they were tied to on the ship’s side, but the time to analyze and care was long gone. They were about to find out what happened when an unstoppable force hit an immovable object.
Lawrence looked over.
“What? What is it?”
The wave killed the need to answer. It rolled the moored ship hard, the impact that might have shattered the bridge windows thankfully dispersed as the wave’s angle flattened. Carl and his prisoners of misfortune slid halfway down the floor toward the left (port, his mind corrected, unsure how he even knew) of the high-up room before the big dock lines caught with the feel of an enormous dog running into the end of his leash. The ship shuddered, unknown tons of floating metal waging war with the bolts or ropes or whatever else held them in place. Carl lost his footing and crashed to the deck, finding himself suddenly tangled in some white guy’s bare lower legs and running shoes. The pregnant woman landed on her back and, sliding, half crotch-planted against the support pole of a high stool. Carl cringed in spite of the chaos. Good thing that kid inside her hadn’t stuck his head out to see what the fuck was happening in the crazy outside world.
Then the leash snapped them back to more or less upright, the first wave passing, everything apparently still in place. Carl heard a tremendous groan. He imagined a massive section of metal shearing away from their ark’s side as water fought bolts, dooming them.
“It’s okay,” said an older man in jeans, maybe fifty-five, with a midnight-black beard. “It�
�s okay, we’re still — ”
As the ship rolled back to center, they leered back in the other direction, now on the secondary wave’s downside, the metal sides of the freighter sounding like they were raking lines in the concrete. Weren’t there bumpers out there? Carl thought it crazily as the man with the beard quit yammering, his eyes like saucers of milk with chocolate drops in the middle.
The second wave hit, this one cresting instead of rising. It caught them in its surfer’s sweet spot, and for long moments as women screamed and men screamed like women, Carl was certain they’d somehow ended up underwater. This was it. This was the flood, and it had happened in half a minute. The water had risen two hundred feet, and here they were, lassoed to the bottom in an undersea prison.
But then the water rolled over the top and the ship swayed and jerked just as hard, toppling the few people fool enough to try and stand between volleys. They were still on the surface.
But a quick glimpse — all Carl could manage as the horizon dipped and dove, as his footing and stomach lurched in tandem — proved the other docks gone, like the marina they’d seen farther down, and all of the land, everywhere.
The freighter was leaning into the next wave, no longer upright between swells. The ropes were still in place, holding them taut to a pier that was now underwater. They were on their side, about to be swamped.
The people around him were skidding on the slanted wet floor, clinging to whatever they could as the ship struggled to right itself, fighting its moorings.
“We need to get lower,” Lawrence said. “We’re still — ”
The long, low, tortured sound of bending metal grew from the ship’s side like a machine winding up. Lawrence stopped his lips, looking at Carl. Carl wanted to shout at him but saw the next wave coming and gestured in a way that was supposed to mean Hang the fuck on or die. He opened his mouth to shout in case none of them saw the approaching wall of water, as they leaned right into it, but then it came and the sound of metal crested and popped like a thousand shotguns blasting in tandem. A fresh shudder ran through the floor and walls and the handles under Carl’s fist, then the ship lurched in one violent arc to the opposite side, now rolling with the water. Then the roll arrested, and Carl realized that only one of the lines or cleats must have busted and the other was still there. The wave, instead of rolling, swung them hard, wrenching and grating as the ship’s bottom struck God knew what underwater that had so recently been above it, the whole works canting, stuttering and digging for purchase.
As they settled with the bow 30 degrees into the wave, with the horizon 30 degrees from normal ahead, water came like a dam breaking, and the front windows finally did crack and shatter from their seals at the sides and corners. Water flowed in like a fire hose, and the floor became a skating rink, filling from the bottom, flooding trapped in by the watertight doors, the whole thing like unfunny slapstick as they fell and half swam and coughed and gagged and fought for air as it filled with spray.
With a lurch, the final mooring gave way. There was another tremendous racket, and after freeing its bonds the freighter bobbed upward like a cork held underwater, overcorrecting and tossing them all from their feet and scrambling knees in a half second of weightlessness.
Another great splash of water.
Another great lurch, and then another. Carl found his feet between them and was tossed down hard, on the meaty side of his right leg, muscle striking something on the deck, mashing between floor and meat with the force of a bullet.
More water. More bobbing. More tossed horizon, and in the chaos Carl heard someone vomiting.
Then another wave, smaller this time.
Another lurch.
But the worst was over, and the rest was ending. If their violent departure from the pier had put a hole in their side, it was a slow one. They seemed not upright and level, the chaotic rising sea now more like the surf in a small storm.
After a few more minutes of tossing, the world seemed to still, and Carl lifted his head from crossed arms, his face wet and dripping, clothes soaked. He found his feet, smarting at whatever blunt protrusion had slammed into his thigh. He looked down, found his pants still in one piece, no blood apparent. But it hurt like a beaten whore, and he was going to have a motherfucker of a bruise.
But to be alive? That was something.
Carl stood. Slowly, the others around him — battered and shocked, but seemingly unhurt — stood to join him.
They looked toward what used to be the shore.
But as far as Carl could see on what he thought must be the northern horizon, South Africa was gone. Floating debris was the only thing left. Other freighters had come untethered and floated around them like a child’s game of Battleship.
The man who’d shouted when it started pointed through the window and yelled, “Look!”
Carl did, along with the others. They saw battered-but-alive people on the nearest ship, and the one a bit farther on. There were many boats between their freighter and the large thing in the far distance that had to be the Astral vessel, safely off and upright, and on each, Carl saw survivors who’d thought ahead. Or who’d got lucky.
Then he heard a buzzing.
A crackle of electricity.
And a small explosion, followed by screams.
They ran to the far side of the bridge, toward the sounds, and again Carl struck a console and felt that same blunt pain wallop his bruising thigh. He winced but didn’t feel it for long; his attention was stolen as they all watched a shuttle settle over another of the surviving ships.
An energy blast.
A rain of twisted metal.
And then the shuttle moved on to pick off its next target.
They watched as one by one, shuttles cleared the world of unauthorized survivors.
Carl couldn’t speak, could only watch it happen. His hand rubbed his chin. His fingers clutched unknown controls on the unpowered freighter’s panel. He touched his leg where it hurt.
There was something in his loose pants pocket. Something big that explained why it had hurt so much when he’d hit the deck. Whatever was in there had slammed hard into his leg.
The shuttles, now moving systematically across the lawn of survivors in a coordinated group, picked off more. And more. And more.
Then two of them turned to the freighter. Came closer. And closer. The shuttle’s humming engines set Carl’s neck hairs on end. They all watched as the things came to them broadside, hovering, electricity in the air, charging their weapons.
Carl’s hand touched the object in his pocket. It was like a ping-pong ball but harder — smooth and almost powdery, like fine brushed aluminum. He pulled it out and saw it was the ball the man had given him — the strange magician who’d told Carl not to try the cutthroat, but to survive another way.
Carl looked at the shuttles. Felt the gathering charge. Waited for death.
The ball warmed in his hand.
The shuttles seemed to power down, then made small, searching circles in the air.
The shuttles moved away.
And went about clearing the rest of the surviving ships, leaving their freighter alone.
CHAPTER 42
Between the blonde and Sadeem was a sort of projection he’d never seen. The closest was something one of the Mullah Elders had shown him after too much wine: an artifact said to have been left behind by the Horsemen —something that would, if you touched it, pull you into a sensory-immersive memory. This effect was similar but more distant. Sadeem, watching the scenes, didn’t just see the world rendered in three dimensions like a hologram. It was more like he’d been there.
Or maybe that was simple human empathy. Watching the ships capsize in Hanging Pillars and then seeing the sharks take the swimmers had sickened his stomach as accurately as if he’d witnessed the blood firsthand. And that fit because he’d see it firsthand forever, in his dreams.
The projection ended. A soft blue circle of light appeared in the center of the all-white floor. It
faded slowly, then the room was again featureless, disorienting as a stroll through nothing.
Eternity turned toward Sadeem. “It is done.”
“How long will the flooding last?”
“In the past the cleansing phase has lasted forty days.”
“And forty nights?”
Eternity looked at him as if he were an idiot.
“And then you will leave.”
The woman nodded.
“Why?”
“Because it is not our purpose to be humanity’s stewards. You will be granted another epoch, and when you feel you are ready, we shall return.”
Sadeem wanted to press on and ask more but got the impression that there would be time for that before the Astrals left Earth alone to try again — apparently forty days and nights to ask Eternity questions. Seemed that some facts and figures could indeed survive a few thousand years of telephone without distortion.
“So now we wait.”
“The cleansing will continue. But yes. You will wait.”
“Continue?”
Sadeem waited for the woman’s curious gaze to depart. She knew he was Mullah and might be able to read his mind, but Sadeem wasn’t a Temple Elder. Perhaps the scrolls had survived somewhere — hell, maybe the Astrals even had their own copy from the last intergalactic contract-signing. But Sadeem wasn’t senior enough to have read them. He didn’t know all she was assuming, and wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to.
“The human population remains excessive. We estimate your race still numbers in the hundreds of millions.”
“It used to be in the billions.”
Eternity was unfazed. “The cleansing is not complete until the proper seed number has been achieved. Your species requires a diverse gene pool for a new epoch, but not one so broad-branching that it introduces variables we cannot control for.”
Sadeem wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.
“Optimal target population is an order of magnitude less than is current.”
“You’re going to reduce us to tens of millions? You’re going to kill another 90 percent?”