Ophelia bit her tongue. If he really was on to something, he wouldn’t share details in public.
“You sidle up here, mouth off insane accusations, and expect us to trust you, Harrison?”
“No, please. Don’t put yourself out. I haven’t earned your trust. But if this helps, I’ll tell you something even Brother James doesn’t know. I wasn’t a rogue peacekeeper, as I told James. Yes, I did have a tour of duty, but I spent most of my career in Special Services. Learned all my tricks there. True, I did go native after they botched my recursion therapy.”
He pointed to his eyepatch. “But the life of a rogue is very lonely. The Salvation fleet provided a unique opportunity.”
Ophelia couldn’t resist a jaw drop when her haze cleared.
“You’re a double agent,” she said. “You work for the Guard.”
He tapped her hand and leaned in. “Voice down, please. And no, I’m not working both sides. If I were, I could have given up the coordinates for Black Forest long ago.”
“No,” she said. “You’re still Special Services. This is off-book.”
“Believe what you will. I could have turned you in when I realized what you were up to. Still can. But it will make little difference to him. I used to span the Collectorate in his service. At some level, I loved the man. He’s a remarkable specimen. Yes?” Harrison smiled, but Ophelia saw the irony. “I’ve even been to Earth. Made a special delivery for him. But what I saw today terrified me. Afterward, I asked him for my next off-fleet mission. He said our resources would be stretched thin for some time. In effect, he grounded me.”
Harrison talked to the table, but his mumble came through clearly.
“This fleet will soon leave Black Forest. When it reaches its destination, they will slaughter everyone not hybrid or immortal.”
He confirmed her worst fears. “What’s their destination?”
“A place where we will not be allowed to step foot. I’ll say no more. But I will be in touch. When it’s time, don’t make the mistake of saying no.”
He spun away from the table and left them in stunned silence.
Magnus spoke for them both: “Did that just happen?”
“He has us. He knows we don’t have a choice.”
“Of course, we can choose. We can …”
“We can die when he turns us over to James, or when they kill us trying to escape. I think he wants what we want. Like I said before, Magnus, we don’t have a choice.”
Ophelia sorted through her thoughts, vowing not to paralyze herself in fear. She decided this outcome was probably the one she deserved – at the very least. She ran from her crimes for too long.
Rikhi deserves better. I have to give him another chance.
Ophelia reached the only possible decision.
50
North American Consortium
M ICHAEL COOPER, ON THE OTHER HAND, faced too many decisions. His fourth time manning a navigation cylinder demanded more than he could deliver. Why did I let Rikard talk me into this? I’m gonna get all these people killed. He swiveled through the curtain of holographic panels, trying to input the algorithm for blind flight while pushing the nacelles to max thrust and looking for a new course into a safe zone. C’mon, Cooper. Stick the landing. You can do this.
He swiped pearls of sweat from his eyes as he bore down on the steps to entering a code entirely from memory. Ten segments, fifty keys embedded within them. One mistake, and the Scram’s internal security buffers would reject the program. He finished the second segment before turning his attention to new trouble.
The Scramjet that decimated the mountain safe house was closing. Though the rate slowed as each ship reached max thrust, the calculus was clear: The more powerful vessel was gaining at a rate of a kilometer every two minutes. Michael’s little Scram, a century-older model designed for less arduous work, would be within range of an energy slew in fifteen minutes.
“How does it look?” Carlos Rivera shouted from his still-seat, one of nine occupied by Michael’s nervous passengers.
“Like somedamnbody else oughta be in my chair,” Michael said, unaware how his words might sound to the others. “Beyond that, couldn’t be better, No. 1.”
Michael deemed Carlos “No. 1 asshole” after the incident that exposed the Solomons to their pursuers. He wanted to blame Carlos’s brazen decision to shoot a man in the back for what befell them next, but Michael owned too much blame to shift it entirely.
“What can we do to help?” Carlos asked.
“Look, dude, unless you know how to catalyze the Carbedyne to make this bucket go faster, best help is to shut up and let me get us into blind flight.”
He silenced the cabin and didn’t care if Rivera was now “No. 1 pissed-off asshole.” Yet these people were his comrades, his brothers and sisters in arms. The odds favored them dying together before sunrise. Michael wanted their help – needed it – but none were certified short-range pilots. Words like stay calm made no sense right now, since Michael was anything but. He knew blind flight was less than a shot in the dark.
Nonetheless, he grabbed segment three of Rikard’s program and swished his fingers through the ship’s master flight code, searching for the NAC’s stack-grid monitors. He needed to replace them with a precise sequential code that would help block the Scram’s unique transponder beacon.
“Fucking algorithms,” he mumbled as he worked. “That’s when math went bad for me. Soon as they introduced fucking algorithms.”
Michael hated anything that reminded him of Albion High School. He couldn’t believe how far he’d come in two years. If not for the Tier II Education that rewired his brain, he never could have tackled these mathematical sequences. Even so, it wasn’t going to be enough, and he knew it.
The third segment was the most complex, full of translinear dilutions – a concept that still befuddled him. Like differential calculus, he told himself, but assbackward. You got this, dude.
He didn’t. Eight keys in, the security buffer activated a soft red filter over the flight program and locked out any further breech into its transponder stack.
“Shit,” he whispered. “On to plan B. Whatever the hell that is.”
He swiveled around to the aerial topography controls, where the picture grew bleaker. Reaching the rendezvous coordinates always required two assumptions: No pursuit, plus one circuit through the NAC’s eastern quadrant under blind fight. With both eliminated, Michael needed a new destination. Now. And they had to land quickly enough to abandon ship and take defensive positions before the assassins caught up. It seemed impossible.
Time to take charge, Rikard told him before the evacuation. Lead these people to safety. Kill the enemy until you can’t.
Therein lay the solution. It turned his blood frigid, but he wasn’t going to lose these pursuers, and he needed to give his people a fighting hope.
I’m a sorry pilot, but I know how to kill people. He glanced aft. We all do, more or less. He worried about Helene Yaffetz, the Pynn cook who joined the Solomons on a whim. Did she even know how to fire a laser pistol?
“Listen up, folks,” Michael said. “Bigtime change of plans. I can’t make blind flight, and we got twelve minutes till these assholes blow us out of the sky. We’ll never make the rendezvous. We’re gonna have to make a stand. I’m sorry.”
Amid the groans and panicked stares, Maya Fontaine maintained the same placid tone that comforted him during their mountain exile.
“It’s OK, Michael. You did your best. What are our options?”
“We’ve gotta land, get as far away from this ship as we can, and force them to come after us on the ground.”
Carlos unmoored himself from the still-seat and came forward, along with Maya and one other.
“If we ditch right now,” Carlos said, “where will that put us?”
“Somewhere between nowhere and ass-end of nowhere.”
Carlos studied the aerial topography map.
“In other words, we fight the
se bastards in the forest in the middle of the night. Might even up the odds.”
“The cover of darkness,” Maya said, “can be a weapon.”
A new male voice entered the fray. “But most of us will surely die,” said Nell Kusugak, who accompanied Michael on the ill-fated scouting trip to the outpost perimeter earlier that afternoon. “We will have no support, little real hope of eliminating the enemy. If we do win, it will be by attrition. There are ten hours of darkness ahead of us. We must be practical.”
“I’m down with practical,” Michael said. “Anything in mind, Nell?”
Nell, a descendant of the last tribal family never to migrate to Inuit Kingdom, raced his hands through the holofields and pointed to a new destination a hundred kilometers west.
“Harrisboro Prefecture. We can make it in less than eight minutes.”
Carlos acted as if Nell grew an extra eye. “A city? There’s more than a million people there. We’ll be too exposed.”
Michael realized how stupid he was to overlook this option.
“Dude, seriously. You’re brilliant, Nell. Sure. Harrisboro has a Solomon cell and a weapons locker. When Rikard was listing the NAC cells, he made a point about the underground being strong there. Enough weapons to equip a small damn army.”
Carlos winced. “Not bad, but are they in hiding? Will they help us?”
“If they don’t, dude, then they don’t believe in what we’re fighting for. Ain’t no point in hiding anymore. The damn Guard’s gonna be on Earth any time now.” He turned to Nell.
“You know anybody in Harrisboro?”
“A woman. We go back many years. If she’s still alive and I can stream to her, she’ll see it done.”
Michael saw one possible course, and he intended to give these people the best chance to survive the night.
“One thing,” he told them. “If Harrisboro is thick with our fighters, then there’s bound to be a few assassins already there.”
Maya hummed a short tune Michael didn’t recognize.
“The city is our best chance,” she said. “The most places to hide, easiest access to tech and personnel. So long as we also understand this: We will almost certainly cause civilian deaths.”
“Not if we’re careful,” Michael replied. “Street fighting is nasty shit. Back on first Earth, there were these civil wars where dudes pretty much wasted whole cities. People buried under rubble. A fucking nightmare. We focus on our enemy, it won’t come to that. Nell, try streaming your friend. Tell her we’re riding in hot. I’ll pull up the Harrisboro schematics. Link her into me, and I’ll do the rest.”
Nell returned aft to work his magic, but Michael committed to the plan, support or not. Fighting in the streets, hiding in the sewers, sniping from third-floor windows … it all seemed surreal. Like the battles he saw on cable news from Syria, Iraq, and northern African countries whose names he couldn’t keep straight. Those fighters always struck him as equal parts heroic and suicidal. What did they ever truly accomplish? How many innocent lives did they take with them in defeat?
No. This wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be. If they drew out the partisans in Harrisboro, and word spread to other hesitant cells … would the Admiralty reconsider? Surely, they’d never drop energy slews on Chancellor cities.
He calculated a new course and turned to Maya and Carlos.
“Settle in. Soon as we land, we high tail from this bad boy with every gun we got. This shit is gonna get ugly real fast.”
Michael told Carlos to hold up before returning to his still-seat.
“Listen, dude. About that shit you pulled at the creek this afternoon. I came this fucking close to shooting you myself.”
“Michael, he was …”
“No, he wasn’t. He was a goddamn pawn, and you knew it. I got no problem when you kill the enemy. But we ain’t about to waste innocent people. Killing the bad guys is one thing, but we gotta draw the line. I’m drawing the line. Rikard put me in charge. We can’t be like the Chancellors. You get my speed?”
Carlos turned red-faced. “I do, Michael, but this is war. We can’t always play nice.”
“No, we can’t. But what we do out there has to mean something, or we die for nothing. I’ll be at your side, dude. You’re my brother in this fight. But I’m the one giving the orders.”
Carlos backed down easier than Michael expected.
“So you are. A brother.”
Michael realized all eyes had focused on him during the argument. He gave them the most reassuring smile he could muster and set the Scram on its new course.
Please, God. Give me the strength to do right by these people.
51
M ICHAEL SNUFFED OUT THE SCRAM’S running lights as they approached the city. He sorted through the urban schematics for Harrisboro Prefecture and triangulated the best landing zone. Nell’s Solomon contact had responded seconds earlier, linking into Michael’s amp. He forwarded her data into the primary flight controls. The contact was confident the immediate zone would be clear, but she couldn’t guarantee how long. She also couldn’t promise how many Solomons would venture out. They were pressed from all sides, she said. Four killed just in the past eight hours.
He didn’t hold back the intel from his crew.
“The second we touch ground, gather up your shit and run like you got a peacekeeper battalion up your ass.”
The situation grew increasingly dire. The pursuing Scramjet made maneuvers beyond Michael’s navigator skills and closed the gap, now less than two minutes behind.
He studied the landing zone, looking for the quickest route to a solid defensive position. Harrisboro, like most Chancellor cities, was tightly constructed with narrow avenues, gleaming residential skyscrapers, and a sophisticated web of intracity transport links and bridges. There were no suburbs, no outlying bedroom communities or extensive highway networks. Beyond the edges of Harrisboro lay a natural world unspoiled for centuries, the way Chancellors planned it when they reclaimed Earth for themselves. The population density was greatest in the towers just north of the landing zone.
Maya was right. Civilian deaths would be unavoidable if this battle got out of control. The landing coordinates would drop the Scram into a small park surrounded by residential housing and entertainment venues. They had to find cover, or they’d be picked off if assassins were closer than their contact believed.
They’re after Solomons. They won’t risk killing Chancellors. Michael needed to hear himself say it, although he didn’t believe it. If Chancellors were cut down in the crossfire, wouldn’t they become martyrs for the Guard to use as justification for more brutal tactics? If so, why not kill whoever moves and blame it on the Solomons? He’d seen enough Chancellors in action to know they wore the hearts of stone-cold murderers.
At thirty seconds to landing, he entered the city’s transport temperate zone. If DayWatch or Celia Marsche’s assassins were patrolling airborne, they’d pick up the Scram’s transponder. The pursuing ship might be reduced to a secondary problem.
The adrenalin of the past few hours kept his terror at bay, but it also clouded his mind beyond the immediate crisis. As the Scram entered the city and banked sharply on final approach to the park, Michael remembered.
Sam. He’d forgotten about Sam.
Michael tapped his amp and opened a live connection. Unlike the past few days, he didn’t have time to drop data on her admin stack. Instead, he sent it fast and sloppy. Who cared if the monitors picked up on the Solomon-to-Chancellor live stream and triangulated his location? No one was hiding anymore. He forwarded the landing data to her along with a simple message.
“I love you, babe.”
The last time Sam dropped a message on his admin stack, she promised to bring her newly-acquired strike team to the rescue. They’ll hold their own against any of Celia Marsche’s assholes, she insisted. So long as you’re not with them, he told her on the next drop. Promise me. The last thing she told him: She was going after help. Sam never addressed h
is requested promise.
“Here we go, my brothers and sisters,” he told the crew. “Time for some nightlife, Harrisboro style.”
He programmed the Scram for an emergency landing, which relieved it of safety protocols. He wasn’t concerned about damage to the nacelles. The vessel buckled and squealed upon impact.
Michael jumped from the swivel as others unmoored from the still-seats and gathered their weapons. Carlos tossed Michael his blast rifle. The starboard bulkhead pixelated and ten Solomons fled.
Nothing was what Michael expected.
This part of the city was electric, bathed in spotlights, as high above the park, a holographic drifting opera serenaded citizens in a multi-tiered window perhaps a hundred meters wide and tall. The crowd – many sang along from the ground while others hovered in open-air duopods – seemed as delirious and joyful as any concert he attended on first Earth. But … opera?
The nearest crowd, fifty meters away, did not yet notice them, a feat of sheer luck, Michael deduced. The singing overwhelmed all else; the accompanying orchestra was likely heard across the city. Michael knew they had seconds to find a new path. The spotlights of uplifts – likely DayWatch patrols – poured like narrow moonbeams over the crowd as the vehicles moved toward the crashed Scram.
“Why here?” Carlos asked Nell. “Why did your contact think this was a safe place to land?”
“I don’t understand.” Nell shrugged. “Maybe she thought we’d be safer near civilians.”
“Maybe,” Michael said, blast rifle at his side. “But we go into that crowd, we’re gonna get those people killed. Besides, they’ll riot when they see our guns.”
“Then where?”
Michael tapped his amp and threw open a holocube. He surveyed his options. While doing so, he became aware of the first locals who caught on to their presence. Fingers were pointing.
“Full retreat,” he announced, pointing to the towers on the far side of the Scram, away from the concert. “I don’t see much activity up two avenues. We can find cover before we …”
The Impossible Future: Complete set Page 91