by Rick Partlow
Rows of clear cylinders lined up vertically in some sort of lab, tended by men and women in sealed suits fed by oxygen tanks. The cylinders were bodies suspended in some sort of clear liquid, humans and animals, unmoving and unblinking and yet, she sensed, not dead or preserved.
“Every researcher, every technician I wanted from around a world ruled by him.”
A flood of images, too quick to follow the details but violence and war were the theme, soldiers in green and grey and brown armor riding into cities and finding nothing but corpses. Those same soldiers pulling civilians out of their houses, pushing them into the gates of prison camps.
“I continued research into my own specialty while I used the expertise of the world’s foremost minds in artificial intelligence, cloning, interstellar propulsion…”
He shrugged.
“And yet, I knew the odds were long. I knew none of these might work. And so, I also built this place. Because if anyone does survive the coming conflagration, they have a right to know what happened; and I have a duty to make sure you don’t repeat our mistakes.”
He smiled, and Telia allowed it was meant to seem magnanimous, but instead it managed only sinister and disturbing.
“If things do end, the records will not end with them. I’m leaving a crew here to keep monitoring transmissions, maintaining a history that will not die with our civilization. And when they pass on, as all of us must, there will still be automated sensors to keep watch, to detect what’s left of this world, of our species, and keep the record going.”
Jeddah Valley reached out and tugged the cassette free, and the projector went dark, the sound crackling and fading into a silence threatening to drag on into eternity.
“Sweet Gaia,” Priscilla murmured, hand going to her chest. Her eyes were haunted, filled with horror, and Sam’s could have been a mirror for her expression.
“This is…” Sam trailed off, unable to come up with the words.
Telia frowned.
“What?” Fellows wondered, putting words to her own confusion. “He’s not the warmest soul I’ve ever encountered, but people in power don’t usually get there by being nice. Why do you two look as if someone just yanked your god out of the sky and pissed all over him?”
“This isn’t…” Sam shut his mouth mid-sentence, closed his eyes and tried again. “The history we’ve been taught, the one passed down in the data core of the original Mother probe…” He couldn’t finish. To Telia, it seemed as if the words were causing him physical pain.
“The history we’ve been taught,” Valley took over the explanation, “is that the Earth of the original Consensus was a short-lived paradise, a utopia too good to last, and Charles Dauphin was its philosopher-king, an enlightened ruler unlike any before. He repaired the ecological damage to the Earth and was able to unite her resources for the Gaia program until others perverted his technology for use as weapons.”
“He was a damned monster.” Tejado stumbled forward, still unsteady from the blow to the head. Fellows put a hand on his shoulder to restrain him and the Minister tried to shake it off but couldn’t manage it. “He was responsible for the deaths of billions of people and he built his dream on the backs of the poor, on their corpses.”
“But what about Mars?” Priscilla asked.
Telia eyed her sidelong. It was an odd question.
“What about it?” she wondered. “What does Mars have to do with it?”
But Sam caught the line of her question first.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Mars had domed cities, a huge colony. How else would the Collective be there?”
“Mars was a lifeless rock,” Valley told him flatly. “Every record here says there was only one manned mission ever sent before funding ran out for human space exploration.”
“I don’t understand,” Gage said, shaking his head. He gestured toward Tejado. “Jaime, this is a Godsend for the Naturalists. It’s proof Charles Dauphin was everything you always said he was, evidence everything he created is tainted. Why would you work with the Resolutionists to keep this secret?”
“Because he didn’t discover this place first,” Valley explained, a smile passing over her face. “Our agents did.”
“We had agents on Earth?” Sam blurted.
Valley cocked an eyebrow at him, giving him a look of pity.
“You’re quite naïve, Captain Avalon…but then, I suppose that’s why you were picked for your job.”
Tejado said nothing, crossing his arms, eyes downcast.
“What? You don’t want to tell them, Jaime?” Valley was teasing the Earther now, and Telia had the sense there was no love lost between them. “I’ve confessed the sins of my father. Do you lack the faith to do the same?”
Tejado’s head came up, a sharp glare at the woman. He scowled, worked his jaw as if forcing himself to speak. When he did, he addressed Gage, as if he considered the rest of the group beneath him.
“It was the war,” he said, sullen reluctance dragging his voice into a lower register, as if he needed to clear his throat. “It was worse than we thought. Worse than Dauphin thought it could be. This place,” he motioned as if he were swatting away a noisome insect, “kept track of atmospheric readings, background radiation, temperatures. Within a year after the final war began, the atmosphere was gone, stripped away. There was no magnetic field, the temperatures were near a hundred below at night, seventy above in the day. The background radiation would have cooked anyone who had the resources to live through all that, anyway. The Earth was dead.”
Gage stared at him like he’d grown another head while Telia found herself waiting for the punchline.
“Talk sense, man,” Gage snapped. “If the Earth was uninhabitable, why the hell are we all here? Why are there birds and animals and trees?”
“That’s a damned good question, Minister Gage,” Valley interjected, still apparently enjoying Tejado’s discomfort. “Because most of those animals and birds were already extinct before the last war, hunted down for their fur or their horns or their bones to make folk cures for the superstitious. And some for even longer.” A smirk. “The last living mastodon died ten thousand years before the final war. There’d been talk of cloning them from DNA samples, but no one had ever followed through.”
“If that’s true,” Telia finally spoke, pinning Tejado down with her glare, “then why isn’t the Earth still a lifeless rock?”
“Because,” he spat out, “someone terraformed it. The automated atmospheric samplers show the husks of terraforming nanites in their scoops, and the optical telescopes concealed in the mountainside detected the probe when it came down.”
“Came down from where?”
Telia waited, but Tejado clammed up, apparently unwilling to go further in his explanation. Valley, of course, was less reticent.
“Mars,” she told them. “The telescopes record the trajectory of the probe as coming from Mars.”
“This is all bullshit,” Sam Avalon snapped. He was pacing back and forth, an agitated lion in a cage. “I don’t know how or why you arranged this place, these fake records, but there’s no way any of that could be true. We’ve checked Mars for nanites! There’s not a trace! And if Earth had been terraformed, your people,” he nodded toward Gage, “would already have detected the husks of the assemblers!”
“Not under several meters of new topsoil,” Valley countered, sounding reasonable and measured next to Sam Avalon. “Not after so many thousands of years of erosion and buildup.”
“It’s only been three thousand years since the first Gaia probe launched,” Priscilla said. Telia saw the woman’s throat rippled with a hard swallow. “Hasn’t it?”
“Another convenient lie we were told.” Valley didn’t seem as pleased to let down her…Sister? Telia wondered. Is that the word?...as she had to puncture Tejado’s world. “Jaime, would you care to inform these people how long it’s been since the war?”
The Naturalist Minister obviously would rather have not, but he d
id.
“Twenty thousand years.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Priscilla felt her world teetering on the brink, ready to go over the edge with just one more gentle shove. The revelation of Valley’s existence had been enough of a shock to the system, but the rest, the knowledge every bedrock truth of their civilization, their religion was a lie…
And it must be worse for Sam.
She wanted to hold him, wanted to comfort him, but she knew she still had a duty, to herself and her honor if not to Mother anymore.
“The bomb,” she pressed Valley, pushing through the film of unreality that had descended over her perceptions. “If you left all this here until now, why did you bring the nuke?”
“Because you were supposed to die on the station,” her sister avatar said with brutal honesty. “We figured once you were out of the way, there was no chance at all Brecht would make any overtures to the Resolution…and I knew Mother wouldn’t offer to help again. When you came to Earth, I knew we couldn’t chance it and Jaime here was happy to take the opportunity to get rid of the evidence.” She cocked her head to the side, her expression changing to something almost apologetic. “I’m sorry, sister, but it’s best for everyone if no one ever knows about this. Now!”
Priscilla had a half a second’s warning, the time it took for her to process the sudden change in Valley’s demeanor, her shift in stance, and it was barely enough. She grabbed Sam by the arm and pulled him down beneath the level of the storage shelves just as the first shots echoed across the chamber. Venomous fireflies made flat smacks through the air, their miniature rocket engines accelerating them through the ancient plastic and crystal in sprays of shrapnel and flares of detonating warheads.
“Shit!” Sam yelled, leaning over and trying to shield her from the rain of burning plastic shards.
They’d missed someone; there’d been another Executive Protection agent, or maybe two, hiding somewhere or patrolling outside when they’d come. She tried to shrug Sam off of her, desperate to know what was happening, desperate to do something; she’d just squirmed out from beneath him when John Gage’s body toppled across her legs, a smoking, fist-sized hole in his chest.
Valley…where the hell is Valley?
She had to be heading for the bomb.
Priscilla dosed herself with a jolt of artificial adrenalin, the kick sending her into sudden motion. She threw Gage’s corpse off of her and scrambled to her feet, ignoring the incoming gunfire, ignoring Sam’s shouts of warning, ignoring everything but the bomb. And her sister.
***
Telia wanted to curse, but she couldn’t spare the breath. The first shot had hit at the joint of her right shoulder, hard enough to spin her around, hard enough she knew it wasn’t a glancing blow, hadn’t just burned away clothes. The pain was an electric shock coursing through the nerves and tendons and muscles attached to and wrapped around and controlling the arm, and the agony more than the impact of the round sent her stumbling sideways.
Her first instinct was to shoot back, but her bionic hand had gone slack, the weight of the powerless arm dragging at her, and the pulse rifle had clattered to the floor. She followed it down, trying to shut out the staccato chaos of incoming fire, trying to compartmentalize the pain, desperately trying not to go into shock. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps and she felt a spastic twitching and jerking of the muscles all the way down her back. She rolled herself over with her legs, slapping at the floor with her left hand, grabbing for the fallen rifle.
Then Fellows was crouching beside her, blood trickling from a slice across his cheek where shrapnel had scored it, and he was pushing the rifle into her hand, the smirk on his face infinitely comforting.
“We got two of ‘em on the other side of the room,” he told her, sounding as calmly ill-tempered as always. “Musta’ come through another door over there from somewhere. One’s laying down covering fire while the other tries to flank us from that way.” He nodded to his left. “Tejado beat feet when the shooting started and Minister Gage bought it---too bad, I liked the guy, but I fucking told him not to come. Looks like our Resolution friends took off after the weird bitch with the nuke, so it’s just us.” A leering grin. “Which one you want?”
“You take the one holding us down,” she decided immediately. “That’s going to take stealth and I’m feeling fresh out right now. I’ll get the one coming in.”
“Roger that, Cadet.”
And he was gone, running down the row of shelves, crouched over, a burst of gunfire following him, blowing through the plastic just centimeters over his head. She had to smile, a half-grin tugging at the artificial half of her jaw. He had called her “Cadet” for a full year after she’d earned her commission and it had used to annoy the hell out of her.
The grin faded as the firing ceased for a moment, and the hyper-sensitive auditory pickups in her cybernetic ear caught the tell-tale click-clack of an empty magazine dropping from the well. She lunged over the top of the blasted shelving in front of her and opened fire before she’d even seen the target, using the sound as an index.
Plasma tore through the stale, chill air of the underground chamber, searing and crackling and pushing oxygen away from it with a thunderous roar, and she caught a glimpse of the shooter fifty meters away across the room as he dove for cover. The burst from her rifle chewed into the stone walls where he’d stood, igniting gouts of powdered rock and leaving behind a row of charred and blackened scars.
He’d be moving and so should she. She ran hunched over, letting her depowered right arm twist her downward in that direction and heading off to the right, the opposite way from Fellows. She could hear the shooter’s foot-falls tip-tapping on the stone from that direction and even if she hadn’t, she knew he’d want to head away from his ally to avoid getting caught by friendly fire…and toward the exit.
She’d rarely had the chance to run this fast; much of her career had been spent aboard ships or space stations or on sealed outposts on moons without breathable air, with no opportunity to cut loose with the full capabilities of her bionics. There was a breakneck, barely-controlled, roller-coaster quality to the motion, the sensation of riding a bike down a steep hill and knowing you were going too fast to break, too fast not to pedal, knowing your only hope was to take it at full-speed till the end.
A clacking sound reached her cybernetic audio sensors over the crash of footfalls; he was finally replacing the spent magazine. Time to try something different, something that would have been risky even if she weren’t dragging the dead-weight of her damaged right arm.
Like Adrian always says, you only live once. May as well get it over with.
She jumped. It could have been disastrous, could have sent her tumbling out of control, smashing her head into unyielding stone floor, but it didn’t. She landed two rows over, legs still moving, hit the ground running but only took half a dozen steps before she jumped again.
More confidence, more power; three rows this time.
“Shit.” It was just a breathless hiss, but she picked it up. He’d noticed the leap, knew what he was up against.
One more jump before he decided to stop running and open fire and now she’d halved the distance between them. Rocket-assisted slugs chopped through the upper layer of shelving, but she was too low for the burst to hit her; more gunfire but no penetration and she knew he’d tried to adjust his aim downward but the rounds couldn’t make it through all the rows of storage bins between them.
He was hesitating, she could tell, uncertain whether to stand his ground and keep shooting or run the other direction or just keep pressing toward the exit, only twenty meters away. She did not hesitate; she jumped, farther still, with all the power in her legs and hips and spine, feeling the compression against her living body, knowing he’d shoot but chancing he wouldn’t be able to track her in time. He came close; plasma sparked from the edge of her right palm, swinging her arm slightly backwards and nearly throwing off her balance.
It
was the last chance he’d get. She had her first clear look at him, the dark grey of his unmarked uniform, the pocked almond hue of his rounded face, the tight curl of his close-cropped black hair and the multi-barreled assault gun cradled in his meaty hands.
Multiple rotary barrels because you can’t fire as fast with a single barrel; the rocket exhaust from the last round launching would set off the warhead in the next one. Nasty, effective weapon.
So was hers. She squeezed the trigger in mid-air, held it down for the two seconds of flight her leap had afforded her. It was an off-handed shot, a prayer, but the sort of prayer her particular God always answered. Flashes of ionized gas, as hot as a star and accelerated to hypersonic speeds wiped the Executive Protection agent from existence, leaving behind something ripped and torn and burned and obscenely wet, something inhuman, unreal.
Then it was gone from view and she was hitting the ground hard, slightly off-kilter, the jolt running up her spine as she stopped herself just short of plowing face-first into the stone. The soles of her boots scraped against the floor, slowing her to a stumble, and she steadied herself with the buttstock of her rifle, sucking in a long, shuddering breath.
She paused for the space of three or four pounding heartbeats, debating whether she should head into the antechamber and help Sam and Priscilla or go back and help Fellows. Her head snapped around at a choppy burst of gunfire; it was Fellows’ pulse rifle and there were no answering shots from the enemy weapon.
“Clear over here!” Fellows called, his voice a haunting echo across the broad chamber.
“Clear on this side,” she yelled back, her voice hoarse, her throat dry. “I’m going after the others.”
None of this made sense to her, none of the machinations or secrets or the lies or the Goddamned politics. She didn’t know whether she should be trying to save this place or blow it up, didn’t know who was right or wrong. But she knew Sam and Pris were her friends, and for now, that was going to have to be enough.