Children of a Dead Earth Book One
Page 30
Soon, Mei rotated out of sight, leaving Benson alone with his fear. He picked a loop to shoot for and reached out a tentative arm, but his sticky left shoulder kept him from stretching to his full arm span.
“Figures.” He forced the hobbled joint into position. He spotted another loop and tried again, and failed again. By now, Mei was cresting on the horizon, holding a finger to her wrist in the sign for, “Hurry up, you incompetent jerk.”
Assuming third time lucky, Benson lunged at a loop, willing his arms longer to cover the last few centimeters. To his surprise, the carabiner hooked in as if he’d just caught the universe’s largest fish.
“Yes!” he shouted in a moment of triumph, while completely forgetting to unhook the other tether from the safety rail. Benson could only watch in muted horror as the tethers snapped taut, until one of them inevitably failed with a tear he could hear through his suit.
Still connected to the module, he watched as the tether attached to the hub sped out of reach. The look on Mei’s face as she passed was… clinically unimpressed.
“Of course the wrong one broke,” Benson said to himself. “At least my luck remains consistent.” Heart pounding, Benson unhooked his remaining tether from the safety rail and switched it to his good hand.
Before he had the chance to change his mind, Benson leapt clear of the ladder and crashed into the hub. His teeth snapped together from the jolt, and as soon as he hit the deck, he bounced and fell away again. His arms pinwheeling wildly, Benson screamed as if trying to propel himself back on sound waves alone before floating off into total silence forever.
With a last desperate flail, the carabiner clinked against a loop and hit home. Already at its full reach, the tether yanked Benson hard, stopping him dead.
“Fuck,” was all he could think to say. Yet it felt perfectly appropriate. Benson pulled himself back down along the tether and grabbed one of the anchors, then slowly worked his way hand over hand back around to Mei. Reunited, she led him further down the Ark’s spine, methodically swapping tethers from one anchor point to the next.
Mei still had the two she’d started with, but Benson was down to one. Every time he unhooked his carabiner, a small electric shock of panic went through his body until it was firmly connected to the next loop.
Their progress was slow, to put it mildly, but eventually they reached the part of the engineering module commonly referred to as the Aviary. Surrounding them, a flock of enormous atmospheric shuttles, each a hundred meters long, laid belly-up to the stars where their ablative ceramic composite tiles had protected them from centuries of micro-meteor impacts and would soon protect them from the hellish heat of reentry through the atmosphere of Tao Ceti G. Well, just entry, Benson corrected himself.
The shuttles gave him something to focus on instead of just the deck. He could look at them without getting lost in the sea of stars beyond. They totaled a dozen, two of which hadn’t weathered the long journey very well and would be used for spare parts. Enough redundancy had been built into the plan that the loss of two shuttles wasn’t going to be catastrophic; indeed the twin habitats themselves had been a form of redundancy. If some disaster crippled one, humanity didn’t have all of its eggs in one basket. A contingency plan existed to start the colony in the event half the population was lost to a meteor, plague, or mechanical failure.
That plan had been officially activated yesterday. No one, not the Ark’s builders, or the eleven generations that followed, ever thought the calamity would come from one of their own.
“When did we become so naïve?” Benson asked. No one else could hear him. He didn’t expect an answer.
Their pace quickened. The individual anchor points had been replaced by long, straight rails that they could hook their tethers to and slide from one to the next. Apparently, the people building the Ark had gotten just as fed up with the stupid loops as he had and came up with something more practical. They left the Aviary behind, crossed the maintenance hangars and the handful of EVA pods, and soon reached the bulbous compartment that housed the ship’s twin fusion reactors and massive Helium-3 tanks.
The reactors were, thankfully, still there, but of the forty-eight tanks the journey had started with, only six remained. The rest had been jettisoned as they ran empty along the way with enough force to send them off on new headings. Every kilogram of unnecessary mass the ship shed along the way was a kilogram that didn’t have to be decelerated at the other end, which meant more velocity could be built up back at the beginning of the trip. The enormous ablative cone that had protected the bow of the ship for so long would meet the same fate during the Flip.
Provided Benson could stop a lunatic from nuking what was left of humanity. No pressure.
By then, he was starting to feel the heat, literally. They were passing through an alley between two of the reactor’s titanic radiator fins. Pressurized steam passed through thousands of meters of tubing, slowly radiating excess heat from the fusion process back out into space before condensing back into liquid to cycle through the system all over again. It was funny to think, but save for the donut-shaped stars at the heart of the reactors, the actual mechanics of the system would be familiar to any nineteenth-century train conductor.
Benson checked a small data monitor on his wrist and realized his cooling unit was working overtime to try to keep up. But even more worryingly, the monitor very casually mentioned that he had ten minutes of oxygen reserves left.
“A fucking alarm would have been nice!” he shouted into his helmet hard enough to hurt his ears. Benson took a deep breath to calm himself, then realized that was probably even worse. With a hard tug on the rail, he closed the gap between himself and Mei and grabbed her foot to get her attention, then pointed at his wrist screen.
She shook her head and pointed at her own wrist, then made an “OK” sign with her fingers. She raised her hand, then flipped the palm over and lowered it again, repeating this gesture slowly several times. It took Benson a moment to realize she was telling him to slow his breathing. Apparently, she thought they were close enough for his supply to last, if he was cautious.
Breathing shallow, Benson followed Mei as they left the reactor compartment behind. Ahead of them, the immense disk of the ship’s pusher plate eclipsed all of the stars behind it. Benson felt like he was running out of superlatives, but nothing about any component of the Ark was small. Ahead of them, and much deeper than Benson had ever ventured into the ship’s bowels, was their destination.
Behind the reactor module, deep storage loomed, but no one called it that. The few techs who ever had cause to come back here had dubbed it the Bomb Shelter. The space served as a repository for most of the hardware and construction materials being carried to seed the new colony, but its most important cargo was a repository of tens of thousands of nuclear bombs.
Mei unhooked from her rail and pushed off in a new direction. Benson’s fingertips tingled from the diminishing oxygen, making it hard to unhook. Hopefully, they didn’t have far to go.
Just off the main street of rails sat an odd, lumpy-looking structure about three meters tall and as many across, a sun-faded yellow that clashed against the uniform white of the hull. It looked out of place, almost parasitic sitting against the hull. It wasn’t until Mei climbed on top of it and disappeared inside that Benson realized what it was: a lock, but not like any of the standard locks he’d ever seen. It looked like an afterthought, and maybe that’s exactly what it was. A temporary lock set up by the builders to make their work easier, then forgotten as they moved on or ran out of time. That would explain why it wasn’t on the security grid or any blueprints. The Ark was the most complex object mankind had ever built by a wide margin. Alterations and oversights along the way from paper to reality were inevitable.
Little shooting stars flew across Benson’s field of vision, sending a fresh jolt of dread through him. For a fleeting, paranoid moment, he realized that if Mei had been playing some elaborate double cross, now would be a perfect t
ime to just lock the door and leave him out in the cold, gasping like a freshly-landed fish.
Benson scrambled up the side of the temporary lock to get at the hatch. With a sigh of relief, he pulled the loose hatch open and slipped inside head first. It had enough room inside for himself, Mei, and maybe half a sandwich, so cramped that she had trouble spinning the hatch shut behind him.
His suit finally sent out a warning bell when his reserves had been completely depleted, but by then, Mei was already cycling the lock. Even as grey crept into the edges of his vision, Benson could feel the air rushing into the tiny compartment, deflating the shell of his suit as the pressure equalized. Benson wasted no time getting his helmet off and sucking down a big lungful of air the moment the light turned green. It was dry, stale, and tasted like an unsealed tomb, but he didn’t care one bit. Mei tapped him with her foot and pointed at the inner hatch.
Benson spun it open and floated into the darkened space beyond. Weapon in hand, ready to face down a monster.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Benson didn’t even know where to start. He’d never studied the schematics of the Bomb Shelter in any detail and had no idea where he was or where he should go.
He pulled off his suit’s gloves and tossed them back in the lock with his helmet. Normally, he’d just pull up a map with his plant, but connecting to the network would give away his position to the floaters before he was ready.
“Mei, can you show me where they are?”
She shook her head. “I not go so far before.”
Benson sighed. Figures, no map and a blind guide. “OK, you stay by the lock. If anyone comes by, hide. Agong probably isn’t going to be happy to see you, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”
She didn’t offer up a fight. He’d hoped she wouldn’t. Benson reached out for her wrist and brought the young woman into a bulky hug, like two people wearing sumo suits.
“Thank you, Mei. You’ve been so brave already. I’ll take it from here, OK?”
He let her go and pushed off down the small corridor nestled between the double-hulls.
“Benson-san!” Mei called out. He flinched and put a finger to his lips, pleading with her to lower her voice.
She held a hand over her belly and gently rubbed at the tiny life growing inside her, completely unaware of the drama playing out that would decide its fate.
“Stop him,” she whispered. “Please.”
Benson pulled the FN free of its lanyard and slipped the handle into his palm.
“Count on it.”
He decided that without a map any old hatch was as good as another. Benson had a basic understanding of the Bomb Shelter’s layout. Very basic. Essentially, the vault was nothing more than a giant magazine designed to feed bombs through barrels at the center of each of the Ark’s three dozen shock absorbers, themselves each fifteen hundred meters long, and out the back of the pusher plate.
Magnetic conveyor belts cycled the nukes into electromagnetic railguns at the top of each shock absorber, which then fired the bomb through a small aperture in the plate itself. Only three bombs detonated with each cycle, giving each railgun a full twelve cycles to cool down, recharge, and reload before firing again. This way, ablative wear on the pusher plate remained evenly distributed.
But as far as the actual internal layout of the mechanisms went, Benson was in the dark. Quite literally, since none of the lights were on. Here and there, a small display or status light cast a red or amber glow across the thin corridors, reminding Benson of every low-budget sci-fi horror movie he’d ever seen, leaving his lizard-brain to fill every dark corner with scaly alien monsters and decomposing zombies. It wasn’t helping his heart rate.
Neither was the heat. Despite the bone dry air, the temperature was stifling. Heat bleeding through from both the reactor compartment and the radiator fins outside kept the bomb shelter cooking, but since few people ever came here, little point existed to spend energy cooling the air down.
Benson soon felt like a plump carrot trapped in a vegetable steamer. He wished he’d just taken the entire suit off and left it back at the lock with Mei. Fortunately, one of the suit’s few positives was an LED spotlight built into the chest piece. Turning it on risked giving away his position to Kimura and his men, but short of evolving night vision in the next handful of minutes, he didn’t see an alternative.
Still unsure of exactly what he was looking for, Benson switched on the light and illuminated the hallway. At the far end, just before the curve cut of his line of sight, he saw the body floating limply in the corridor dressed in the gray and blue uniform of the maintenance crew. A bright slash of blood clung to the dead man’s chest due to the surface tension.
“Well,” Benson said to himself. “This is the place.” Quietly, he floated up to the hatch adjacent to where the body floated. He span the hatch unlocked and, very gently, pushed it open, trying not to let a squeaky hinge announce his presence in the deathly silence. Peering into the compartment beyond, he had to muffle a gasp.
Hundreds, no, thousands of perfectly spherical nuclear bombs, each little bigger than a beach ball, sat in a stacked queue waiting for their turn. It was like looking inside the gumball machine of the apocalypse, and this section was only one of thirty-six identical compartments.
However, it was the first one down the hall from the temporary lock he’d arrived through, and as it happened, was also the first one Kimura and his two henchmen had found. They hovered around a single nuke, dislodged from the queue and wired up to a tablet. Alerted by the noise of the hatch spinning open, the same three people stared up at Benson with looks that were, in order of appearance, surprise, admiration, and rage.
Quickly, Benson flicked on his plant’s video capture feature to start recording, set it to stream onto an open, unencrypted public channel, then pulled off the aluminum foil hat from his head.
“Detective!” Kimura called out with genuine enthusiasm. “Welcome.”
“It’s just Bryan, now, David.”
“Trouble, Bryan?”
“Just a little headache. You’re not going to be so happy when you hear what I have to say.”
“Oh, I expect I know already. You’re here to stop the madman from stealing a nuke and bringing his evil plan to fruition.”
Benson shrugged. “Something like that. I had a talk with Mei, I know the lies you’ve been telling these people.”
Kimura, still wearing a full suit complete with custom helmet, waved his hand dismissively. “There’s nothing more subjective than the Truth, my son. My people have done very well following their own.”
“Your own, Kimura. You’ve been filling them with hot air about their destiny as the chosen, or whatever. Maybe you’ve kept them isolated and naïve enough for them to believe it, but you know damned well that a few dozen people don’t stand a chance of starting a new colony. You don’t have the labor force, or the genetic diversity to make it work. You’re only leading them to extinction.”
Kimura glared at him for a long moment, then shook the tablet in his hand at him. “Good show, my lad, trying to turn these two against me at the eleventh hour. But the trouble is, they already know.”
“What?” Benson was genuinely shocked. He looked at the faces of the others and saw only determination. In a flicker of recognition, he realized they were the same two men he’d played cribbage with before his first meeting with Kimura. They knew they were going to die, but were helping him anyway?
Kimura evidently decided the convers
ation had gone on long enough and barked something at his goons in Japanese. Each man drew a knife from their waistbands and pointed the tips at the intruder. On command, they turned on Benson like a pair of angry pitbulls and pushed off hard.
Working off instincts honed on the Zero field, Benson sized up their speed and trajectories in an instant and pushed off at an oblique angle to their flight path that would leave him just out of arm’s reach. But then they surprised him. The closer man rotated ninety degrees until he was perpendicular to his partner, then pushed off him and straight into Benson’s new flight path.
Without access to the stadium, Benson had assumed that the Unbound would wallow around in micro like children learning to swim, but the clever move proved he had severely underestimated them. These men flew well, they knew how to work as a team, and both of them were free of their bulky suits.
Caught off guard and with almost no time to react, Benson pointed the muzzle of his gun at the man barreling at him with an outstretched knife and a face twisted with adrenaline and hate.
With a jerky pull of the trigger and a flash, Benson fired the shot heard around the Ark. The sharp snap of the gun’s report was instantly replaced by a ringing in his ears, while the recoil sent him spinning as though someone had punched him in the chest.
Benson’s arms and legs flailed as he tried to halt the unexpected spin until he struck the far wall like a sack of potatoes. The suit’s layers absorbed most of the shock of impact, but the ringing in his ears remained. A metallic, almost sweet smell filled his nostrils as he scanned the compartment for the different threats.
The second goon had been pushed to the far side of the compartment by the midair maneuver, while the man Benson had shot had drifted into the ceiling. He floated near a corner, whimpering softly, curled up in a ball with his hands pressed tightly to his shoulder while droplets of crimson hovered around him. His knife hung in the air, out of reach.
Just above the threshold of the ringing in his ears, Benson heard a tink as the spent brass cartridge reached a wall and bounced off.