He couldn’t believe how well his plan with the 126 had worked. Not only that, he wasn’t seen. He doubted anyone even on the lower decks could have seen the splash in the dark. So long as no one saw the unearthly battle with gravity, then Michael was in the clear. He waited to hear any type of man-overboard call, but none came. He wanted to whoop for joy. He settled for a silent fist pump.
Michael went to retrieve his precious supply of 126. If it possessed enough gravity to yank someone completely off their feet, it was sure to draw attention. He couldn’t just leave it on the hull of the lifeboat. Gingerly letting go of the door, Michael slowly slid toward the 126. It felt like a pair of hands pulling him from his groin inescapably to the lifeboat. Might feel a little better if it was Vika pulling on—No! Shut up you idiot! He told himself. She would rather castrate me than do that.
He jumped over the glass barrier and instantly felt his orientation change. The life boat was now down. Which was a nice feeling as he knelt parallel to the frothing Atlantic thirty meters away. He did not want to think that he was looking down. The ocean had just gone sideways for a bit. That was all. Perfectly normal. Sure, it happens all the time.
The white hull of the lifeboat was marred with red streaks. They splattered out from a small circle, dripping down in sickly rivulets. The agent must have hit his head, and hit it hard. It explained why he had stopped screaming. Shit. I just killed a man. The realization hit him like a punch to the face. He struggled to rationalize the simple fact that if not for his actions the agent would still be alive. Michael hoped that the man was single, that way he wouldn’t have ruined any poor soul’s life back in Europe too.
The heavy gravity weighed him down in equal parts with his conscience while he wiped the blood away with his shirt. It wouldn’t do to have a bloody lifeboat for cleaning crews to find in the morning. It was hard work. His arms weighed far more than they did normally. A few minutes just wiping felt like half an hour in the gym.
Satisfied, he split up the 126 lump in two. One chunk he threw at the glass wall, the other he held. He jumped off from the lifeboat, falling into the new gravity well against the seabus. He clambered over the short wall and replaced the strange, but increasingly useful element around his belt in its four constituent pieces.
Michael sighed in relief as he tried to walk away nonchalantly. He just hoped the others were okay. They didn’t have guns either.
#
It hadn’t taken long for another officer to pick up on Luthor’s trail. And the son-of-a-bitch carp was gaining. Luthor wasn’t in the shape he’d used to be in. He was flabbier—and older—than he had ever been in his life. Compounding his fitness deficiencies, he had fewer toes than he used to have. Smogging frostbite. Rehabilitation had helped him relearn to walk, but he no longer had the same top speed. Tanya and Vika ran ahead of him, dodging lawn chairs and towel carts by the pool.
Vika threw 126 against the wood-paneled wall above the outdoor music stage. She leaped up and started scrambling for the roof. Tanya was right behind her, she had caught on unnaturally quick too. Maybe it was a woman thing.
Luthor, only steps behind, took out two balls of 126. He pressed them together. He tried to will himself to throw it against the wall exactly like the women, but the newly increased gravity began churning his stomach, amplifying his already significant fear. His hand shook, the thought of climbing up that sheer wall paralyzed his muscles. He couldn’t move. Damn it Luthor, not now!
“He’s almost here!” Tanya shouted.
Luthor tried. But his body wouldn’t work. It was bad enough just being this high on the seabus without having to climb five meters on the side of a wall. It was just too high.
“Smog-it, Luthor. Move!” Tanya screamed. It was too late.
Veneered wood splintered inches from his head. Ducking in panic, he froze, arms up in surrender. The 126 slipped from his hand and fell innocently in front of him. It tugged, willing Luthor to bend over and put his arms down, but he didn’t dare. The carbon agent approached from the other side of the pool, pistol in both hands aiming carefully at Luthor. He wore plainclothes, indistinguishable from other passengers. Luthor wondered how many carbon enforcement agents were assigned to each boat. Would he have backup? Not that it mattered at this point, Luthor was already a dead man. Stupid heights. But maybe if he could distract this guy long enough, Tanya and Vika would be able to get away.
The irony of his looming death or incarceration didn’t escape Luthor. I survived a war that claimed over 300 million soldiers, and 2 billion civilians. I lived when two thirds of the 501st are still frozen in Anti. But now I am going to die because I am too much of a pussy to climb a goddamn wall!
Longing to glance up to see if Vika and Tanya were safe, he focused straight ahead. Even if his damn fear of heights was going to get him killed, Luthor refused to give away their position in the off chance the agent hadn’t heard them. Maybe he could buy them enough time to escape. The agent had his gun out and jogged forward. “Don’t move.” Choosing to lead with English indicated the agent knew his target.
The agent slowed his jog and then unexpectedly pitched forward, hands extending to catch his fall. He fell humiliatingly right in front of Luthor’s feet. Bewildered, it took Luthor a moment to realize it had been the 126 that made him trip. It made sense, Luthor himself probably would have tripped too if he suddenly weighed three times normal.
Luthor seized his chance, immediately stomping down on the agent’s gun hand. With a cry he released it, and Luthor kicked it away.
Before he had a chance to think about what to do next, Vika landed with a crash right on top of the fallen carp. He grunted in pain. Grabbing a fistful of his hair she jerked his head back, pulling a knife deep across his trachea. Red blood oozed out of the cut like pus, pulsing with the beat of the dying man’s heart. “What the hell are you doing?” Luthor yelled.
“What needs to be done,” she said, her voice was liquid nitrogen.
Tanya landed next to him after hearing his yell. She looked sick, either from the 126 or the dying man in front of her. He gurgled as the blood pumped out of his arteries, Vika placed a white pool-towel under his head that caught most of it. In moments the noises stopped, his arteries no longer shot as much blood, and Vika dropped his head on the towel.
It was hard to believe it but the man was dead, and he—Luthor was not. I should be the dead one on the deck here. Smogging heights. If I hadn’t gotten lucky with him falling, I would be dead and this would all be over. I escaped again. Luthor felt resolve harden in his belly. Never again would he be controlled by fear. Never again!
She dropped the body on top of the towels with finality. It didn’t feel right. This wasn’t like the black ops in Geneva. This man had just been trying to uphold the law.
Luthor glared at Vika. “I do not see why this man needed to die. He was –”
“You are more of a fool than I thought Tenrel, if you think we could escape with this man alive.”
“I don’t know, we are only on this boat three more days. We could have eluded them and then been safely on American soil.”
She raised her eyebrow, “Right now we only know of two men who know our identity here, it won’t stay that way for long. You think we could hide from them and the entire boat security for three days? Were you planning to eat Tenrel? What about sleep?” Luthor had gone without eating for far longer than that, but that had been in Antarctica. He shuddered; thinking about the experience made him want to retch.
“It doesn’t mean he deserved to die,” Tanya whispered.
“Neither did Eli and you did not deserve to become fugitives,” Vika replied, “this is not simple. You need to be willing to fight—and kill—other men who also do not deserve to die if you want to succeed.”
“How many…” Tanya’s voice caught. “How many more people are going to have to die for us to do this?”
“I don’t know. But if you think this will stop once you get on American soil, then you are ba
dly mistaken.”
Tanya opened her mouth several times before actually managing to speak. “I am starting to think that it might not be worth it. Maybe we should just give up and turn ourselves in.”
“You can’t be serious,” Luthor exclaimed. “This could prevent future wars, provide enough food for everyone again; your parents could move back to the world!”
“How many deaths can you justify with that reasoning? Ten? A hundred? Maybe a couple thousand? What about a million or two? All to maybe prevent a war? So my parents can perhaps live in civilization again?”
Luthor wanted to argue back, but found himself agreeing with her. Death was horrible. He could feed hungry people, heat cold people, but no one could fix death. “What about all the food shortages? This could provide the power to mass produce crops again like during the oil era. It would be like having diesel powered tractors again.”
“I wish you could have given your invention away before the Oil Crash and the war, but you didn’t have it then and now the damage has been done. Two billion people already starved Luthor, you know that. This won’t change their fate, any more than it can change Eli’s. We have reached a new equilibrium between population and food production without 126.
“Even if you do get your research out to the world, who’s to say that the new food supply will go to those who need it most? It won’t, it will go only to those who can pay for it, or to anyone who’s marked. You know I’m right.”
She was right. Of course she was. He longed to believe that if there was enough food for everyone that they would all be fed. But it was a lie. He remembered enough history to know differently. At the turn of the 21st century, the world grew more than enough food to feed everyone, but almost a billion people were still malnourished or outright starving. It was hard to wrap his mind around the idea that there could be that many people suffering when there had been more than enough food to feed them. How had people lived with themselves, particularly when food was so cheap?
But Tanya was also wrong. She knew more history than he, but he had lived more history than her. The war was beyond horrible. Even those that survived had scars that would never heal. He had to live with his own irreparable wounds every day. There were still millions of unrecovered bodies freezing in Antarctica for archeologists to discover in the future. Who knew how many of those Oil Crash starvation deaths could have been prevented if not for the bombing of the world’s strategic oil reserves? The war had pitted the world against itself in a struggle not for dominance, but for survival. Nations destroyed each other for rights to the last of the world’s scarce resources, but pissed their existing resources away in order to do it. It was total war in the truest sense. If Luthor could prevent another war over energy he would. If properly distributed, his technology could create a world without scarcity. I will kill again if I have to. If whoever is chasing us wants to take this for themselves and eliminate a chance for peace, then maybe they deserve to die. Hopefully, they don’t have too many pawns.
Vika tucked the man’s pistol in her belt then wrapped the body in more white pool towels. She ripped off the agent’s comm mic and handed it to Luthor. “Tell whoever is listening that it’s over.”
Luthor scowled at the bloodstained mic, but he clicked a button on the earpiece and spoke clearly into the receiver. “Targets eliminated. They jumped overboard. Do not rescue.”
The top of the ship hung over the lower decks maximizing sun bathing space, and it also made a convenient gangplank from which to drop dead bodies. Tanya stood at the side and watched them heave the body into the darkness. Her face clouded with revulsion and anger. Luthor hoped he could make her understand.
With everyone still confined to their quarters, there was no one to hear the splash of a dead body twenty decks below
Chapter 11:
Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois, United States of the West
Qwiz slapped a steel lock around the frame of his bike, securing it next to the endless line of other bikes. Four solitary government cars and a strangely familiar moped were parked in the empty lot. All that pavement looked naked with nothing on it. Qwiz holstered his backpack and strode down the long concrete sidewalk toward the front door of Fermilab. He was vaguely aware of exhaustion eating up RAM in the background of his mental desktop—too many late nights trying to save Luthor and Michael from the clutches of the villains in Europe. Fortunately, the only thing better than a liter of Mountain Dew for a sluggish brain, was a twenty-kilometer bike ride at dawn. It was impossible to feel tired with the brisk autumn air slapping his face. The tired would come later, after an hour or so in his chair with no urgent computer problems to fix.
Qwiz whistled tuneless notes as he approached the front of the old Tevatron labs. Its elegant sloping sides no longer felt like an optimistic portrayal of human potential; they felt more like a mausoleum. It was a monument to a better time when energy was as unlimited as the human imagination. The Tevatron itself had been a multi-kilometer long particle accelerator capable of achieving impact energies in excess of one trillion electron volts. Which was to say, it was the second most powerful subatomic microscope ever built. In the quantum world, things were too small to look at directly. Instead the Tevatron—like other syncotrons—blew them up and examined the explosions. They did this by accelerating particles to near the speed of light and then smashing them together. The faster they went, the bigger the explosion, and the more data they could examine. It was a little like learning about how a watch worked by smashing it with a big mallet to see how the pieces flew apart. But it cost far too much energy to run any more. The massive Tevatron had been scrapped, the rare elements sold, and the rest melted down to build a denser, more efficient Chicago, leaving only the building as a testament to the triumph of science that the Tevatron had been.
The labs themselves remained relatively unaltered, apart from a drastically reduced staff. At one point they housed almost 2000 employees, now they were down to 320. They only utilized a tenth of the available space to save energy. The remaining scientists now focused on more practical projects than mining the quantum lattice that made up the universe. The only particle accelerator remaining was a puny cyclotron that fit in an average room. It had been appropriated from a much smaller facility in the late ‘20s. That cyclotron had been Luthor’s focus. He and a small team had been assigned the dead-end job of trying to create new super-heavy elements. It was the equivalent of a 4th grade science project for the government and everyone knew it; the only things missing were the gushing parents and blue ribbons pinned to tri-folded posters.
Qwiz thought he saw a dark figure out of the corner of his eye, but upon second glance, saw nothing, so he ignored it and pushed open the formerly automatic doors. Hard to believe the world used to be so lazy that they couldn’t even open a door without electricity. Even more frightening was that the electricity had come from coal-fired power plants. All that carbon in the atmosphere just so people didn’t have to open their own doors. Qwiz had never been through an automatic door and burning coal had been made illegal when he was a child. Now electricity was far too expensive to waste on such frivolities. Qwiz could open his own doors, thank you very much, and help save the planet from the greenhouse effect.
As soon as he crossed the threshold into the lab it became clear something was drastically out of place. Men in official black suits flashed badges, talked to employees, and scribbled on note pads. Several sat behind computer screens reading through documents. They’re here for Luthor. Without a word to anyone, Qwiz slunk back to his small office next to the computer mainframes.
He slumped down in a chair that might have been comfortable 30 years ago. Leaning back, he laced his fingers behind his head trying to get his mind around all the nameless agents swarming the bottom floor lab. He quickly concluded that they were not the same men he had narrowly avoided days before. They weren’t driving SUVs—presuming the electric cars in front were theirs—and they had badges. Whoever had destroyed the apartment
would have been working for Europe and wouldn’t be sanctioned by the USW. These men would be investigating Luthor’s “terrorist” activities.
Qwiz’s nerves bubbled uncomfortably under his skin. He had been house-sitting for Luthor; Luthor had spoken with him on the phone. He’d been his friend and confidant. It was conceivable that he could be detained for questioning or even suspected of committing terrorist actions of his own. Qwiz was also Asian. He wasn’t Fermilab’s only one, but there weren’t many and he was the only one who knew Luthor. World War III was still too fresh for people to forget their prejudices. The temptation to escape cut through his other emotions like Superman’s heat vision through a locked door.
A movement out of the corner of his eye caught Qwiz’s attention. Outside his office door a lab technician talked to a suit, pointing his finger at Qwiz’s office. His eyes darted around the utilitarian office looking for a place to hide. Every spare nook and cranny was crammed with steel shelves overflowing with computers, components, wires, and cables. There was no space next to his faux wood desk either; it was occupied by a bookcase of old software disks.
Qwiz had almost decided to duck under his desk when his eyes fell on an old picture he had taped to the white matte wall in front of him. A pencil sketch of a chiseled man in superhero spandex stared out of the picture. His fists defiantly placed on his hips emphasized the stylized V on his chest. A compartmentalized belt girded his waist while a black cape flapped in an unseen breeze. On the top of the picture was written The Vanguard. Qwiz had drawn the picture as a teenager. The Vanguard never graced the covers of any comic or the screen of any movie because Qwiz had invented him. He represented everything Qwiz wished he could become. In his mind The Vanguard was a citadel of justice in a crumbling world, clinging to honor and truth even as the world unequivocally embraced evil. His only superpower was his will, his only asset, courage. As Qwiz stared at The Vanguard, his own personal superhero, he found the strength to not hide. True heroes still felt genuine fear—and his was quite pronounced at the moment—what made a hero was not letting that fear control them.
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