Children of a Dead Earth Book One
Page 22
Without looking at him, Theresa reached out and grabbed Benson’s hand, squeezing it until he wanted to flinch. He squeezed her back, although not as hard. Everyone shared nervous glances as the habitat groaned like a mythical beast waking from a centuries-long slumber. Benson couldn’t remember feeling so powerless in his life.
No one could do anything except put their heads down and wait it out. The deceleration was slow at first, but as Avalon’s structure absorbed more of the stress without breaking, Hekekia’s people ramped it up. The resulting force pulled everything spinward as the effective gravity pulling down on their feet weakened. Everyone leaned to keep their balance. Several failed, unable to resolve the disconnect between their inner ears and what their eyes told them should be true.
Hernandez threw up with gusto, sending vomit flying diagonally before splattering across the floor.
“Jesus, Hernandez, don’t tell me you ate a big breakfast before this,” Benson taunted.
“Yes, chief,” he answered weakly.
“Should have stuck with bananas.”
“They’re good for nausea?”
“No, but they taste about the same coming up as they do going down.”
This was met with a round of anxious laughter from the entire room.
“I’ll remember that, chief.”
Hernandez wasn’t the last to pop over the next twenty minutes as the Coriolis effect they’d lived in their entire lives weakened and threw their sense of equilibrium into chaos. Even Benson felt it after a while, despite thousands of hours spent in micro. Then, as suddenly as it began, the deceleration stopped, sending everyone lurching to one side. The habitat’s structure let out the same deep, tortured groans as it settled back into its proper shape. Cautious hands grabbed anything bolted down in case it started all over again.
“What happened?” Benson asked no one in particular after the noise subsided.
“Maybe they got all the charge they needed.”
“Let’s hope. How long does it take to restart a fusion reactor?”
The question was met with shrugs and blank stares, confirming that everyone else in the room had just as much physics and engineering background as he did. As the seconds ticked by into minutes, people started milling about again. The good news was Avalon hadn’t lost all of its rotation, but everything was at least a third lighter than it had been only minutes before, so everyone had to recalibrate their legs.
Benson felt like he was high-stepping everywhere. He could handle micro just fine, but this fractional gravity was really throwing him off his stride.
“Well, that’s the easiest weight I’ve ever lost. C’mon lads, we’d better get outside and check on the civvies.”
The daytime lights were still dark overhead, leaving the sickly yellow emergency lights to cast deep shadows onto the buildings and trees. Yet even among this eerie landscape, people emerged. Children and adolescents had already taken to the footpaths to see how high they could jump in the new gravity. One intrepid girl was already eight or ten meters up an apple tree when Benson spotted her.
“Come back down here, young lady.”
“But I’m higher than I’ve ever got!” she announced enthusiastically.
“I can see that. But you could get hurt really badly if you–”
As if to finish his sentence, a thin limb gave way with a snap, sending the girl tumbling towards the ground at two-thirds speed through a cloud of white flower petals. Benson ran to catch her, but she met another branch, altering her trajectory. He pivoted to get beneath the shrieking girl and managed to get a shoulder under her. The impact took both of them to the ground and knocked the wind out of the girl, but a few moments later she was up and running back towards her home.
“You’re welcome,” Benson shouted to her back.
Kids were a resilient lot, you had to hand it to them. Benson felt the pang of an opportunity lost.
Not lost, he reminded himself. Delayed. Would the test tube births resume once they made landing, or would people revert to the more traditional method? Theresa was a couple of years younger than he, and had plenty of time left on her biological clock, if that’s what she wanted for them.
He’d never asked and she’d never said. Partly because Theresa thought their relationship was always one anonymous complaint away from a forced end, but that wasn’t the whole reason. If he was to be honest with himself, Benson felt guilty at the idea of bringing children into the world with a cloud hanging over their heads. Chao Feng wasn’t the only one to remember the crimes of his ancestors. He remembered the taunts of other school kids before he’d grown big enough to silence them with his fists.
Benson shook the thought from his mind when, far above, a million clicking sounds rained down as the pillar’s bulbs began to cycle. The power was back on. This development was met with a round of cheers that seemed to roll through the enormous space like thunder. Benson had never heard anything like it. Not even five thousand shouting Zero fans could match it. The celebration took on a life of its own, growing still more as more people ventured outside and onto their balconies to see what the fuss was about.
“They did it, chief.” Korolev came up and slapped him on the back. “Now what?”
“Now, we go find the people who tried to kill us and crack skulls.”
“While respecting all of their civil rights?”
“Naturally.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The first order of business was to form a posse, Old West style. After Mahama publicly confirmed the reactor damage had been sabotage, the crew declared a state of emergency and took immediate steps to curtail movement between modules and ramp up security. Benson and Bahadur were put in charge of the response in the habitats. Benson had no shortage of volunteers for his response.
Just under seven hundred people showed up outside of Lift Spoke Number One within twenty minutes of Benson putting out the call. He deputized the lot of them in a mass ceremony. Theresa had misgivings about using civilians in the search, but they needed lots of eyeballs to search an area as large as the basement levels. Even with this, keeping Mao’s people from slipping through the net and doubling back was going to be difficult.
More than anything, Benson was hoping to rile them, throw them off balance enough that they made a mistake. Maybe he’d get really lucky and one of them would crack under pressure and turn state’s evidence. Although he wasn’t at all sure what kind of deal the prosecutors would be willing to cut on fifty thousand counts of attempted murder.
The plan they patched together was simple enough: divide into four groups and line up on each deck from one bulkhead to the other, then walk around the entire circumference of the habitat in unison, a four-story wall of searchers.
Based on what he’d learned of the Unbound over in Shangri-La, Benson ignored the first two levels. He arranged the search groups so that the larger, younger people would search levels five and six, while the smaller and older volunteers stuck to three and four. If Mao’s group followed Kimura’s pattern, they could be expected to retreat to the lower levels once they saw the search party coming, right down into the path of his strongest people.
As plans went, it had about as many holes as a lemon zester, but it was the best he could do on short notice. He’d assigned three constables to play shepherd over each group, and everyone was plant-linked back to the central computer grid where their visual feeds could be assembled into a single landscaped image of the entire search in real time. Any sightings would be passed out to all four groups instantly, along with a replay of the encounter and location information through their plant interface.
Theresa was back in the stationhouse where she could stay on top of the mountain of data streaming in and do her best to keep the four teams coordinated. She wasn’t particularly happy about that, either.
Benson keyed up his plant and opened a call to the entire party.
A tidal wave of yes, yeah, yup, sure, uh-huh, mmm, and a
half dozen other affirmatives in hundreds of individual voices crashed into his consciousness so hard he actually took a step back as if he’d been struck. He wasn’t alone; quite a few people in the crowd covered their ears against the noise.
The crowd chuckled back and nodded understanding.
They did.
The first people in line headed for the far bulkhead. Once they were ten meters out, the next deputy followed, and so on until two kilometers and almost half an hour later the lead man reached the other side of the module. With the lines fixed in place, everybody faced spinward and marched ahead. Benson keyed a command that turned on all the lights. As far apart and dim as the bulbs were, it wasn’t much, but it beat the hell out of total darkness.
Benson led the party on the sixth and last level, and it was cold. He thought the command module was cold, but he’d never seen his breath up there. The volunteers down here were almost exclusively men, several of whom had been on the Mustangs in years past and were only too eager to help their old captain. Korolev was there too, several hundred meters further down the line. He was shaping up to be a very good constable, but still needed supervision.
The scenery this far down was sparse, to say the least. Stretching out in every direction was an uninterrupted grid of catwalks set on top of a honeycomb matrix of insulation cells. Each was a meter wide, two deep, and made of aerogel, so light and translucent that it looked like frozen smoke.
It was also the best insulation mankind had ever devised. While the air down here was only a few degrees above zero, only two meters of aerogel and a thin composite/aluminum weave outer hull separated him from a degree above absolute zero, so named because the temperature had nowhere else to go. The habitat’s aerogel blankets here and in the level above were so efficient, they needed no heaters. The rate of heat lost to space was actually less than the heat given off by the fifty thousand human bodies and waste heat from the machines that kept them alive.
Unlike the levels above, no tangle of pipes cluttered the space down here, no conduits, no fiber optic bundles, and no air ducts. The air was dry and stale, yet had a sharp, metallic edge to it like ozone. The mold and decay Benson had seen visiting the Unbound in their lair on level three was totally absent. This far down, only a single layer of radiation-reflecting meta-materials lay between them and the torrent of high energy cosmic ray particles assaulting the ship from all directions. They very effectively sterilized any mold spores or bacterial colonies that wandered down here and tried to take root.
A bright light flashed in Benson’s right eye as one of these particles crashed headlong into one of the cone cells at the back of his retina at the speed of light, reminding him that spores weren’t the only things they would sterilize given enough time. It’s what made the lowest levels the perfect hiding place; no one wanted to be here in the first place.
Still, the utter lack of scenery had one benefit. Benson’s people could see hundreds of meters fore or aft without any obstructions, and the only thing blocking their views to spinward or anti-spinward was the upward curvature of the floor and ceiling, which would also prevent their quarry from spotting them until it was too late.
They had six point three kilometers to walk. Benson maintained a brisk pace; indeed, he found it difficult not to break into a jog. Still, the other three teams had far more cluttered spaces to navigate. Theresa had to tell him to slow down and keep his team in line every few minutes. After the first two kilometers, the inflection and cadence of her reminders sounded suspiciously consistent.
She cut the call.
Good old Esa. Never afraid to knock him down a peg. It was probably for his own good, in the long run. She ordered stops several times while volunteers on other levels either had a false-positive sighting, or came across remnants of temporary camps and supply stashes, but Mao’s group was thorough. The most interesting thing the searchers found was a fifty liter bucket with DRINK ME painted on it in blocky letters. Upon closer inspection, it was filled with piss and shit.
This is pointless, Benson thought. They saw us coming, how couldn’t they? Seven hundred people don’t exactly move around as quiet as church mice. But then where did they go to?
Benson growled loud enough for the man to his right to hear him.
“Everything all right, sir?”
“Fine, fine… Just keep your eyes open.”
“OK, but another thousand insulation cells and I’m going to go cross-eyed permanently.”
Benson snorted. The endless pattern of hexagons really was starting to strain his eyes. He had no point of reference for them to get a fix on the distance, like getting lost in floor tiles.
“I know what you mean.”
Someone had tipped Mao off, probably whichever floater had been helping him all along. Feng was the only one he could safely cross off the list, which left hundreds of possible…
A thought jumped out at Benson. He’d given up on Laraby’s files because Feng had altered them. But Feng had altered them to conceal their relationship, not to cover up whatever had actually caused someone to shove Edmond out of the lock. Those clues might still be in there, waiting to be read. Benson had given up on his best possible lead for entirely the wrong reason.
He opened his plant and tried to retrieve the files. Maybe he could run a few more searches while they completed the sweep. But his exhilaration hit a wall when the query for the files came back with an error message.
[File Not Found]
Bullshit. He tried again, but the files were completely missing from his plant memory. Benson pulled up his download history and backtracked the file address and network transfer paths to a single holographic data node. He tried again from the source.
[File Not Found]
Benson queried the node’s network ID and tried to open its entire directory. He’d go through the files one at a time if necessary. But the effort was cut short by the next error message.
[Data Node Inaccessible.]
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Benson opened a call to command.
Benson blinked several times before he answered.
Benson pinched the bridge of his nose. Just once, he wished his stun-stick didn’t require a line of sight to work.
Benson savored the man’s naiveté, a trait apparently shared by the entire crew. A single data node blows out that just happens to contain files critical to the only murder case in the last decade, and nobody smells anything suspicious about it.
The gears kept on turning as Benson cut the call. Someone really didn’t want Laraby’s files read, and now they’d succeeded. But the million dollar question remained. Had they simply taken advantage of the power outage to wipe the node, or had the entire blackout been a window to delete the files once and for all?
And what were the odds the plan ended there?
A new call rang through Benson’s mind. It was Jeanine. He accepted the call.
<…maybe. But you’re sure no one’s listening?>