When the Dust Fell, page 23
“Well, I’m not asking for trouble. I’m begging for it.”
Yorn’s level of discomfort grew steadily easier to see. He fidgeted in his seat and wiped a rolling bead of sweat away with a finger. “You said, safely. We’d find something to shoot, and we’d do it safely.”
“I’m just testing the system.”
“There are smarter ways to test.”
“I don’t want a smarter way. I want a way that’s going to tell me the truth.”
Yorn’s face flushed.
A spot appeared on the float and an instant later a voice from the comm. “18, we have a missile launch along your path at six-zero-seven degrees. Closure in twenty-one seconds. Repeat, 18, we have a missile launch.”
“Wish granted,” Yorn said darkly.
“Copy, Kalelah,” Trin answered. “We’ll let you know when we have visual.”
“No need for visual confirmation, 18. Time to come home.”
“Copy,” Trin said. “Soon.”
He pushed the throttle forward and kept straight on a path toward the missiles. Yorn studied the float as the dot that represented the missiles and the dot that represented the transport moved slowly toward each other.
Yorn panicked. “What are you doing?”
“Trusting you.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Don’t ask me that, Yorn. You’ll break my heart.”
A proximity alarm blared. Yorn threw his hands to his ears. Trin turned down the alarm to a low hum.
“18,” from the comm, “you are ordered to reverse course immediately.”
Trin switched off the comm and there was only the hum of the alarm, the muffled wind against the transport’s skin, and the freaked-out pace of Yorn’s breathing.
“There they are.” Trin tapped the windscreen where the glow of the missiles’ engines came into view. “Okay, Yorn. Here’s the situation. There’s still time to reverse course. But not fucking much. Say evade and we’ll evade. I’d rather trust you, though. With every fiber of my being, I’d rather trust you, Yorn.”
Yorn turned to Trin, puzzled, scared, panicked. He quickly turned back to the windscreen. Even Trin was shaken by the sight of the missiles and the transport racing toward each other. This would be a fucking stupid death.
“Make the call!” Trin shouted. “Do we kill these missiles? Or do we turn and run because we know for certain it’s our only choice? Three seconds, Yorn! Two…one…”
Even as Yorn kept his attention on the insanity barreling toward them, Trin saw his fear and panic be interrupted by a sudden click of understanding. It was only a flash. In a blink the confusion left his eyes, replaced by a shadow of betrayal. In that moment Trin got the answer he’d been seeking.
Yorn took a breath, and with eyes and face held straight ahead, he calmly said, “Kill them.”
Trin pushed the transport into range and hit the trigger on the duster. The windscreen went white with the flash of plasma jet. A second later the sky before them was open. The missiles were gone. Yorn let out a grunt of relief, squeezed his eyes shut tightly, and breathed hard, his chest visibly moving under his jumpsuit. Trin pulled the power back, banked the transport, and pointed the ship on course for the Kalelah.
“You asshole,” Yorn muttered after he’d caught his breath.
“I’m sorry. I had to know.”
Yorn sat looking straight ahead for a long time. His jaw was clenching. The man was stewing. Trin couldn’t blame him. He felt badly about the deception, about letting his anger corrode his loyalties. But somewhere in Trin’s gut he knew he’d soon be facing more than a few easily killed missiles and there could be no room for doubt.
At last, Yorn broke the uncomfortable silence. “I told you there are smarter ways to test.”
“You did.”
“Whatever and whoever is making it possible for those missiles to find you, I have nothing to do with it. If I make you something, if I tell you it works, it works.”
“Understood.”
“It’s an insult, frankly.”
“Agreed.”
“I don’t know why I do this. Why I put up with a constant barrage of insults. It’s maddening.”
Trin let the man cool down another degree and made a peace offering. “Because you’re a better man than most.”
Yorn gave a small nod of agreement and belched. “That’s true. Still, it’s a mystery.”
“You don’t look well.”
“I told you about me and flying. Turbulence. Atmosphere in general. But do you listen?” He belched again. “No.”
“Do not hurl in my ship.”
“A double fuck you to that. Sir.”
“Fair enough.”
“That’s right.”
They rode back the rest of the way in silence. It was helpful, in a process of elimination way, to have the Yorn checkbox ticked. The engineer would smart about this crazy move for a bit, but he’d get over it. He was clever enough to know it wasn’t personal. For Trin though, it would be a long time before he got over anything. This latest missile attack only cemented for him the danger The Circle posed. There was a system in operation. And it needed shutting down. Quickly.
After he found Sarah.
The sun was low in the sky and the land once called Russia was bathed in gold. The color danced and flashed on windows as they passed, and the trees cast long shadows to expand their dominion. From his perspective in the transport, high above the buildings occupied by despair and the streets clogged with danger, it was painfully beautiful.
•
Wildei was waiting for him in the CC. She stood by his workstation, arms crossed, her blaze of red hair softly haloed by the overhead light. He expected to see the Stern Lecture Look on her face, the one strapping cannons to a transport would definitely earn. It wasn’t that look at all. His heart sank.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” she said.
Trin steeled himself for the blow.
“The search party has found nothing,” she continued. “It’s like as you’ve said…she’s simply vanished.”
He wished he was surprised. There was little he’d put past The Circle now. The worst of it for him was that he knew firsthand how a body might disappear aboard the Kalelah. It scared the shit of out him.
“There’s more,” Wildei said. “When was the last time you fused?”
“Yesterday probably, why?”
“Did you notice anything different? Anything out of the ordinary?”
Trin shrugged. “I don’t know.” It was hard for him to concentrate. “She’s a little sluggish, maybe. Or not. I’m pretty fucked up myself.”
“She’s not sluggish, Trin. She’s evasive.”
“What?”
“On the subject of Sarah, she dodges. I’m sure of it. About you as well.”
“She can’t dodge, Wildei. Not if you ask a direct question.”
“That’s what I thought too. But she walked away from my query twice, took me off topic into other matters of the ship. That’s weird, Trin.”
“That’s her primary directive—the ship. That’s her world.”
“When she’s working on her own, yes. If she’s working with me, or you, or anyone else, we become the primaries. That’s the pecking order. It’s subtle, and I didn’t even realize she’d done it until after. Her distractions feel purposeful, like she’s consciously manipulating the lines of inquiry away from where I started them, at least when it comes to the search for Sarah. It makes me worry even more about that thing between you two.”
Not this shit again.
It was this way with Wildei and the Code. Next to Trin, she was probably the ship’s best Diver. But it was always a competition with her. He didn’t care for a second what she did with the Code, all he wanted was the same from her.
“There’s no thing with me and the Code,” he snapped. “Look, we both have our own ways of working with her. I know what I’m doing, and I know what she’s doing. Can’t we leave it at that?”
“I’m not sure she can, Trin. That’s my point. Something’s different about her. I can feel it. It’s not like I’m getting responses that are empty because there’s no data, or I’m not asking the right bloody questions. I know how to work with her as well as you do. I get the sense she’s literally hiding something. Something important. Something she’s willing to break the covenant between her and us over.”
Her cheeks had flushed nearly to the color of her hair. He knew he should dial it down. She was the captain, his friend, and as worried about Sarah as he was. But she pushed a button, and he was too fucking mad at the world not to push back.
“Maybe the problem is you’re swimming out of your depth. It’s easy to get fooled by the complexity of her. To forget that the only decisions she makes are the ones we’ve allowed her to make. It’s easy to want her to be something she’s not.”
Wildei waited a second before letting him have it. He knew it was coming.
“My God, you’re so full of yourself you can’t even see when you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes. I know about how you two talk, what she calls you. All the code Divers do.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t know what she is.” Trin wanted to stop there, to rethink his position, to say what he might say if he wasn’t being pushed by a force in his head that was ready tear the ship apart. He did the stupid thing instead. “A machine.”
Wildei blinked at that one, a brief wince, like someone hearing a particularly nasty bit of profanity. “You want to lie to yourself, darling? Fine. Don’t lie to me. She’s an ancient thing, Trin. As old as the Service itself. She’s no less a definition of life as you are or I am. As intelligent as you are, as connected to her as you think you are, it’s wrong to believe you can fully understand her. It’s wrong to believe that because she does our bidding she does so without bias, or feelings. She feels, Trin, like you do, like I do, like any of us, whether you want to admit it or not. It’s not a pretense for her, or programming. It’s real. And you know what that can mean.”
Oh, fuck it. If he was going dig his own grave, he was going to push his shovel in good and hard.
“She can be a bitch sometimes?”
One, two, three…boom.
“It means, you pathetic child, we have no idea what she’s capable of.”
Wildei walked away without even a word about the cannons. For a brief moment it felt like a victory. A conversation about arming a transport without her approval and ignoring an order to reverse course would have been particularly one-sided. He would have no good argument in his favor. Nothing, in fact, to say by way of even explanation. She, on the other hand, would have every right to slam her captain’s knee right between his legs. Which was exactly what she’d do.
It might have felt better than watching her walk away.
33
Could she grab his hand in such a way that she would keep his thumb depressed on the bomb’s trigger while killing him with her other? This question ran through her head a thousand times, along with the thousand potential answers, as her captor patted her down. After all, she had both her hands, two knees, and until he found the last of her stash, a weapon or two.
He was a big man, six feet at least, broad in the shoulders with a wide nose and dark hair that went a deep blue in the light. American Indian, maybe. He had the movements and confidence of someone who knew how to handle himself, and he was smart to have pushed her up against a wall for the pat down. It made clear to her the strength she’d have to overcome. She chose to let this happen. For now.
Though reduced to one hand, he made pretty thorough and quick work of it, retrieving two dusters, her last laser cutter, a knife, and the Bridge Maker she’d taken from Trin’s storage wall. He’d been working from her ankles up and he’d stopped at her breasts. He gave them a long, hard look. She could sense the gears spinning in his head. There were no obvious bulges beyond the two she had with or without a coat packed with gear. His hands were right there, poised to feel. Or not. His eyes met hers for a brief moment and she thought she saw a subtle nod of his head. He moved on to her arms.
Didn’t see that coming.
Not that she wanted his hand on her, but he was good with beating a woman swollen and strapping her to a bomb…but a quick feel was somehow, what—not cool?
When he’d finished, Sarah did a mental inventory of what he took and what she still possessed. Everything lethal or matter reducing was gone. The damn communicator was gone. She had nothing she could use to subdue him or free Margaret. They’d both have to endure whatever was next. That was clear. And frightening as hell. Still, his odd courtesy toward her breasts had left one tiny pocket unexplored, and it might contain a sliver of a chance to get the guns back. A thin sliver.
They went out to the big SUV parked in the back. The two kids next door were nowhere in sight. It had gotten dusky out and she saw a few lights from nearby windows, but no one in them to witness what was happening. What good it might have done anyway, she didn’t know. He kept Margaret close to him and forced Sarah to pack the car. There wasn’t much to do. Just her bag to place in the cargo hold. She marveled that he hadn’t tied or taped her hands and feet. Why bother? He was handicapped by the dead-man’s switch. He couldn’t really handle two tied-up women. Besides, he already knew Sarah wasn’t going to leave her sister—their bond at least as good as duct tape. She’d shown him that. If she were to run, he’d leave Margaret behind, drive off, let the vest blow, and still have what she suspected he really wanted anyway. The weapons. So why were Margaret and she still alive? None of the possibilities gave her any comfort.
He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a fob, and tossed it to her.
“You’re driving,” he said. “If some lunatic ambushes us I don’t want to have to do too many things at once.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll find out.”
She closed the hatch and saw the New York plate. Her mind flashed to Solli, his kindly wrinkled face and his words of caution. Stay away from New York. She heard again the gunshot in the distance as she and Gabi ran through the park behind Liberty, the one she worried had killed him. When would the insanity stop? She couldn’t help but think it might never.
“Take 70 eastbound,” he said. “I’m guessing you know the way to the freeway.”
Sarah backed out of the driveway, seeing Margaret’s terrorized face in the back seat, and knew for certain she’d never see this house or Lancaster again. She felt stupid now and naïve for feeling like this town had ever given her anything other than heartbreak.
It was fully dark when they reached I-70. The moon was no larger than the previous night’s and again the shadows crept in close to the vehicle, shrinking the landscape to a cone-shaped world of LED light. Two headlamps, though, were better than the bike’s one had been, and she felt safer as they rode. Strangely, having this man in the car helped too. She knew he was a murderer, but she knew, too, that she and her sister were meant to be kept alive, at least as long as it took to get to New York. If something were to happen on the road, it was better to have this asshole along.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Kino.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“A short one.”
She kept quiet after that. Two hours out, right after they’d made the merge onto I-76, they passed a polished sign for Alcoania, a twin she figured to the one she’d seen before on the other side of the road. She let the mile go by and looked left. A soft glow of light floated into the sky a few miles from the big, empty road. She thought about Bobby, his smile and his offer for her to come and stay in that nearly normal place. A place that had given him hope. Had he been thinking about her since she’d left? The question instantly shamed her. To even imagine another life when Trin was likely going crazy back on the Kalelah, when their child was sitting with her now, next to a murderer.
The tears came without warning. Dammit. She’d already cried once in front of this man. She tried to will the tears dry. They continued anyway. After a mile she gave up. The crying, it occurred to her, could be put to good use.
She pretended to search inside her coat for something to wipe her face. Not a big show, only enough to open the overlooked breast pocket and grab the tiny recorder bot inside within a curl of her middle finger. She kept the tears coming and brought her hand with the bot in it to her face to stem the tide. As she wiped her eyes and nose gently, she said seven words softly out loud in Origen. She felt him looking at her as she spoke.
“Do I need to hear that alien shit?”
“It’s a prayer,” she said, keeping her eyes on the road, her hand to her face, not daring to see if he believed her or not. “And it’s Latin, for your information.”
“Doesn’t sound like Latin to me.”
“And you don’t look Catholic to me.”
He turned back to the windshield. “Whatever.”
She glanced in the rearview mirror to see how Margaret was doing, to see if there was any reason to worry that she might say something to accidently derail Sarah’s story. Margaret, however, seemed to have withdrawn entirely from what was happening around her. Sarah doubted she’d even heard a word of the conversation in the front seats.
“It asks God to watch over the ones I love,” she finally said. “Roughly translated.”
Kino kept his eyes on the road ahead. “Good luck with that.”
She let another minute go by.
“You mind if I open a window?” she asked, taking one last dab at a tear.
He gave her a quick look. She did her best to appear in desperate need of a little fresh air.
“Knock yourself out.”
The glass rolled down and the wind and tire noise crashed into the car like thunder. She cracked the rear window on the other side of the cabin to balance the air pressure and lower the din. After a beat Sarah put her hand out and let her palm ride the wind, casually unfurling her middle finger, and the little bot left her hand and took to the air.
