by Erik Hanberg
Contents
What Happened in The Iron Harvest?
What is The Lattice?
The Tin Whistle
The Year 2082
Part One - Shears
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Two - Saints
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Three - Spheres
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Author's Note
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Copyright
What Happened in The Iron Harvest?
At the beginning of The Iron Harvest, Byron Shaw was still reeling from the consequences of the destruction of the Lattice. His leg was broken, and he was on the run from the Geneva police with two other raiders, Taveena and Annalise. All he wanted was to get back to Saint Louis to see Ellie, but now there were two continents and an ocean between them. With Taveena and Annalise, he hid out in Geneva for a day, hoping to get rescued by the Walden, a perfectly spherical ship capable of operating in orbit or in the atmosphere. When the ship failed to show up at the rendezvous, they escaped Geneva by boat.
Following the Rhine into France, the raiders parted ways. Taveena revealed she and another raider, Tranq, were plotting kill the CEOs of all the companies that made Lattice readers—to make sure the Lattice could never be rebuilt. Repulsed, Shaw and Annalise left her and followed a Blue Skyer (someone who has vowed not to use the Lattice) to a small town in France where Shaw could heal and they could be safe from the effects of the fallen Lattice.
Shaw’s leg was healed by a doctor who eventually came to distrust and despise Shaw. Leading a revolt in his small town, Doctor Bouchard came to worship the fallen Lattice, and whipped up a cult-like atmosphere in the town, with the goal of punishing anyone who might have had a hand in destroying it. Bouchard marched Shaw and his companions in front of a mob, accusing them of conspiring to destroy the Lattice. After watching two of his friends killed by guillotine, Shaw himself was marched onto the platform.
At the last second, while Shaw’s head was under the blade, the military showed up and broke up the mob. The doctor was killed and Shaw’s life was saved. The leader of the military troops was none other than Tim Yang, Shaw’s former right-hand man and the man who had broken his leg.
Shaw escaped the town and fled to a yacht in the Mediterranean. Yang, however, traced him and sailed after him. With the Lattice destroyed, all ability to control weather was lost, and an immense hurricane approached both ships. The storm turned out to be full of sand picked up in the Sahara Desert and it dumped several feet of it onto the Mediterranean, miring Shaw’s and Yang’s ships in quicksand. A battle between the ships took place, and several of Yang’s men were killed.
Shaw himself was nearly killed before Taveena showed up in the Walden spaceship. She rescued Annalise, but Shaw stayed behind when another ship showed up—this one carrying Grace Williams, the CEO of Altair, the company that made Shaw’s ring that allowed him to connect to the Lattice and “jump” to different places.
Grace offered Shaw a deal: if he worked with her, she would help him with his legal defense (for his role in taking down the Lattice) and allow him to see his pregnant wife Ellie. He took the deal and she took him to Altair’s headquarters in Buenos Aires. Grace turned out to be using Shaw as bait. Tranq attacked the headquarters with microscopic spheres that ate all matter they came into contact with and converted it to a black goo.
Ada Dillon, a brilliant scientist working for the cartel of Lattice companies, captured a sample of the black spheres being used for the attack and quickly reverse-engineered a new Lattice based on the technology in the spheres. A new Lattice began to work again, and immediately the cartel used it. Tranq, Annalise, and other raiders were killed instantly. Taveena herself was nearly killed, but she used the Walden to smash a hole in the side of the Altair headquarters and demanded Shaw come with her. She had already rescued Wulfgang Huxley, the creator of the Lattice who had eventually turned against it, and she had kidnapped Ellie to use her as a hostage. She ordered Shaw to board the spaceship with her and Ellie.
Shaw was reunited with his wife, but was once again a hostage.
What is The Lattice?
The Lattice can track every single atom within its range, giving perfect information about anything you want. This allows someone to see anywhere in the world or the solar system, from the rings of Saturn to the thoughts in someone’s mind. And because the Lattice knows the exact location of these atoms, it can know the previous location of these atoms, all the way back through time. That means that all of history is accessible to the Lattice. It can allow time viewing, rather than time traveling.
The Lattice gets its name because it is made up of an elaborate latticework of entangled rhodium atoms that are so sensitive to gravity that they can detect the gravitational pull of individual atoms.
The original Lattice was run off of a one-hundred-meter tower in the Nevada desert (the old Area 51). At that size it allowed users to view the entirety of the solar system. There was also a backup Lattice in Geneva (underground at the old CERN site) in case raiders ever destroyed the Nevada tower.
After the destruction of both installations at the end of The Lead Cloak, work began to create a new and better Lattice. The new Lattice, built after eighteen days, had an even greater scope. Leveraging the molecular machines that created the black spheres (used as communications devices, space ships, and more by the raiders), the Lattice was rebuilt on the back of this new technology. Instead of being present in a single tower of rhodium atoms, the entangled atoms were distributed in a satellite network around the Earth so it wouldn’t be as vulnerable to attack. Because of its massive new scope, the new Lattice can see farther (to other stars) and is infinitely faster than the previous Lattice.
The Tin Whistle
The Year 2082
Part One:
Shears
Chapter 1
Byron Shaw was in a jump.
He was weightless, and once again orbiting Earth as a prisoner aboard a black spherical spaceship. Unlike the last time he’d been stuck on the Walden, though, Shaw had a Lattice-connected ring with him. With the new Lattice up and running—and with its scope increased exponentially over the last Lattice—the ring enabled him to travel nearly anywhere in a jump, despite his confinement to the ship. His consciousness could jump light-years away and look at exoplanets orbiting distant stars. He could jump into the head of anyone and eavesdrop on their thoughts. He could jump into the past and see the Civil War, the Roman Empire, the Stone Age, the formation of Earth or the solar system, or even go back and witness the first few seconds of the universe.
But his jump today wasn’t to any exotic time or location. The jump he’d initiated by touching his ring to his temple implant transported his mind to a windowless conference room in a midtown office building in New York City. When he “arrived,” the Lattice showed him a group of five men and women around a small table. They were approving the minutes from their last meeting. Their clothes were staid, their demeanors placid. There were glasses of cool water on the table and—archaically—pads of paper and pens in front of each person. It looked like the most boring meeting on Earth, and of course it was designed to look that way.
Because the only thing on the agenda was the murder of Shaw, his wife, and their unborn daughter.
At the head of the table was Zella Galway, CEO of Dvorak Systems, who had called the meeting to order and asked for approval of minutes. It was so formal, so overdone. They were using Rober
ts Rules of Order, with meeting minutes and asking for motions, all in order to paper over the lethal nature of the meeting.
Shaw looked around the room. Besides Galway, the only other person he recognized was Grace Williams, the CEO of Altair, the company that made the ring Shaw was wearing on his finger. The remaining faces were new to him, replacements for the CEOs who had been assassinated by raiders while the Lattice was down. Kanjitech, LRI, and T-Six were led by new faces that were just younger versions of the previous executives.
After the destruction of the Lattice the year before, these men and women had collaborated to fund and create a new infrastructure to run the Lattice—this time entirely under the control of these five companies. Previously, the companies had only manufactured the rings, screens, wraps, jump boxes, and other tools to connect to the publicly-owned Lattice. Now they owned the heart of the Lattice itself.
At the same time, they also took it upon themselves to create an array of satellites carrying laser weapons that encircled the Earth, ready to defend their investment should it ever be threatened again. They now controlled the single most important piece of technology for business and communications and they controlled the largest non-governmental weapons system.
Between those two facts, Shaw didn’t think it was a stretch to say these CEOs were the five most powerful individuals in the world. And he was in their crosshairs.
After the minutes had been approved, Galway noticed a small red light that had illuminated on her wrap. “Ah,” she said, a vicious smile on her face as she looked around the table. “Once again we’re joined by Byron Shaw. I thought he might have the decency to sit this meeting out, given the topic.”
On the Walden, Shaw gritted his teeth. The actions, thoughts, and dreams of the four people on board the ship—himself, his wife Ellie, Taveena Parr, and Wulfgang Huxley—were heavily scrutinized at every moment of every day. Someone was watching him and listening to his thoughts right now and reporting back to Galway in real time.
“It’s just as well that he knows what’s coming, I suppose,” Galway continued. “Although I fail to understand why he’s continuing to jump given the state of his marriage. I thought he was supposed to be a better husband than that.” She shrugged it away. “Well, you know why I called this emergency meeting. I’m tired of these terrorists hiding behind a pregnant woman like Ellie Shaw. Frankly, I think we need to consider… drastic measures. We’ve been twiddling our thumbs for months because she’s on the ship with Parr and Huxley. If she weren’t there, these terrorists would be long dead. It’s time to force their hand and make them choose what they want to do. Will they let this innocent woman die with them, or do they have enough humanity left in them to let her go?”
She met the gaze of everyone at the table, daring anyone to argue.
“We don’t have the authority to force them into any decision,” Grace Williams said, taking up the challenge. She was across the table from Galway, and all heads swiveled to listen to her. These were the two poles of the argument. It didn’t matter what any of the other CEOs said—these were the two people who would decide Shaw’s fate.
“This is a matter for the U.S. or the U.N. Why don’t we go about our business of connecting people to the new Lattice and wait for law enforcement to do their jobs? Or maybe we should deal with the fact that the Lattice hasn’t stopped the Italian civil war like we thought it would, and may even be making the war worse. Or—”
“No!” Galway cut in, her face reddening. “I’m not content to merely hope that that woman—” The way she bit off those words made Shaw know instantly that she was referring to Taveena and not Ellie “—keeps running into dead ends in her research. She is still looking for a way to destroy the new Lattice like she destroyed the last one. If we leave her alive, she might eventually find a weakness. We’d be right back where we were during the Dark Eighteen Days!”
After Shaw and the raiders had destroyed the Lattice, it had taken eighteen days to get the new lattice up and running again. People had joked that even though it was less than three weeks, it had seemed like they had gone ages without their Lattice-enabled connections. A mini-Dark Ages, people said, often enough that simply referring to the Dark Eighteen could cause an involuntary shudder.
Grace shook her head firmly. “Ada Dillon designed the new Lattice to be foolproof. It’s not going anywhere,” she said. “Taveena Parr has already spent months trying to destroy it with no effect. She won’t make the slightest dent in it. She’s isolated and she doesn’t have the tools or the network of accomplices to destroy the Lattice again. Blowing up her ship is pointless. And we will lose customers in the process.”
Grace’s calm and plain speaking style was a sharp contrast to Galway’s, Shaw thought. He didn’t think she was trying to convince Galway herself, but to convince the other CEOs in the room. To his eye, Grace was leaning into the style of the room. She was making it look like Galway was taking this personally, while Grace was making the business argument. For a group of CEOs, it just might work.
Galway didn’t let herself get drawn further into the trap. She took a breath and smiled at the leaders of the other companies. “I’ll ask again. What should we do about the Walden and its crew? We didn’t build a grid of laser weapons around the Earth to just let them sit in orbit during a time of crisis. Inaction is not a solution I am prepared to entertain.”
There was silence for a moment and then the new CEO of LRI cleared his throat. “I’ll make the motion.” He consulted his wrap, and Shaw knew in an instant it had been preplanned with Galway. “I move that at exactly midnight Greenwich Mean Time tonight, we activate all laser weapons within range of the Walden and destroy the ship, no matter who is left aboard.”
“Second,” chimed the CEO of Kanjitech from across the table.
“We have a motion on the table,” Galway said smoothly, as if nothing more was up for debate than approval of the next year’s budget. “Discussion?”
“You know my position on this,” Grace Williams said quietly—but not without force. “Last week Byron Shaw was found ‘not guilty’ of treason and acts of terrorism in a United States court of law. On top of that, his wife is an innocent, and is a month from her due date—no one at this table disputes any of that. And then there’s Wulfgang Huxley. He’s a genius the likes of which the world only sees once every few generations. Are we truly going to kill those three people and an unborn child because we want vengeance on Taveena Parr?”
The CEO of T-Six sat forward. “Genius or not, Huxley willingly collaborated for years with Parr to destroy the Lattice. His brilliance shouldn’t be enough to absolve him of all accountability for his crimes. As for Shaw’s verdict, well… Stockholm Syndrome is about the most bullshit reason to get a ‘not guilty’ verdict as there is, pardon my French. The jury liked Shaw—and his wife and the story of their reunion—and they didn’t want to sentence him to die. It’s as simple as that. We have every justification to kill the terrorists who nearly destroyed our companies.”
Grace stared hard at her. “And Ellie Shaw? And her unborn daughter?”
“Some collateral damage should not sway us,” came the response from Galway, reasserting control of the conversation.
“It’s wrong, and even if it weren’t, it’s a public relations nightmare,” Grace said.
“It likely won’t come to it,” Galway answered. “Parr will see our resolve and let Ellie leave the ship before midnight. That damn woman is a fat fucking psychopath, but even she has shown she’s willing to spare innocent lives when their deaths don’t serve her purpose. She’ll release her.”
“She doesn’t even know we’re debating this,” Grace said. “Parr hasn’t jumped or used the Lattice in months.”
“Shaw will force her hand, even if it means killing her and taking control of the ship,” Galway continued. “I’m sure he’ll do whatever it will take to save his wife.”
Grace glanced at her wrap. “Shaw is thinking that he would kill Taveena to sav
e his wife, but that he doesn’t how he’d do it now that she’s locked herself in the ship’s control room,” she reported—accurately, Shaw noted. “He doesn’t think he can manage it in time.”
“Shaw will figure it out,” Galway said with a small shrug, a shrug Shaw had come to loathe for how easily she used it to absolve herself of the deaths of him and his family. “He’s pulled rabbits out of his hat before.”
There was silence for a moment around the table.
The CEO of T-Six looked at her wrap and then leaned back in her chair and sighed. “My lawyers are reminding me that Tim Yang really stirred the pot in the U.S. after the last time you used our arsenal of space lasers to take out the raiders. He got the military brass in a huff and they in turn have gotten the administration breathing down my neck. I’ve had several official and unofficial visits from the military and the president’s staff to tell me that if T-Six were ever party to the killing of an innocent American we would face immediate legal action. My lawyers think we can fight them—and likely win, I should add. But they would feel more comfortable with their chances in court if we could give Ellie Shaw more time.”
“Time for what?” Galway asked.
“More time to get off the ship. More time for whatever needs to happen to happen. If I’m on the witness stand for this, I need to be able to say we gave a pregnant woman more than twelve hours’ notice.”
“How much time do you want?”
“I don’t know. A couple days? That should be enough for Ellie to escape or somehow convince Parr to come to her senses.”
Galway nodded. “That seems reasonable.” Everyone but Grace Williams was nodding. “It seems that—”
“A month,” Grace cut in.
Eyebrows went up around the room. Shaw felt himself gasp in surprise as well.