When the Dust Fell, page 26
“Do you have a point here?”
“A question, actually.” Nader uncrossed his legs, leaned forward off the back of the sofa, and rested his elbows on his knees. “Are you ready to see with something beyond your eyes?”
“It’s hard for me to see anything right now except for my sister’s face. Which is swollen and frozen in a permanent state of terror. Why are we here? You have the guns. What more do you want?”
He smiled. Sarah stayed with the green eye, hoping it hurt him in some small but cutting way.
“You’re right!” He banged upon the glass tabletop with the knuckles of his right hand. “I nearly forgot. Let’s look at the guns.” He walked to the bag and took it to his desk. “Join me.”
Sarah got up from the sofa as he undid the bag. By the time she got to the desk he had the thing open.
“Impressive,” he said, his smile now looking particularly real.
He took a duster from the bag and examined it as if it was a thing that had fallen from the sky. Which made sense.
“The cleanliness of line is remarkable. What’s it called?”
“A duster.”
“A duster. This is the weapon you used in the park?”
“Yes.”
He gave a small nod of approval. “A good name.”
He took the gun by the handle, pointed it out the window, and looked down the line that went from his arm to the ejector end of the gun. “Boom,” he said. “Or is it zap?”
“It’s neither.”
He pivoted his arm until the duster was aimed at Sarah’s head. “I’ve heard of you, you know. You were semi-famous for a few minutes. The geologist from a little town in Ohio who discovered the ship and then went to live on it. The news window didn’t last long, only a day or two. The world has been too busy falling apart to care much about you since. But I was so intrigued. The things you must have seen…like meeting God himself. Now here you are. Well, there you were, in Lancaster to rescue your sister and take her back to the ship. So said your friend. The French woman.”
“You didn’t have to kill her.”
“She betrayed you. What else should I have done with her, a person who can’t be trusted?”
“She was harmless.”
“Not to you. Apparently.”
He kept himself behind the duster, looking down the length of it.
“What do you want?”
“Weapons.”
“You have them.”
“I want more. I want you to help me get them.”
“What makes you think I can?”
“Yeah,” he let the word draw out. “You’re a mystery, but there’s no mistaking the presence of you, Sarah. It’s so obvious I saw it through a nervous video on an ancient iPhone.”
“Maybe you’re just seeing things. I can’t help you. Besides, even if I could, I wouldn’t.”
“You haven’t heard my pitch yet. You don’t understand the power you have. When you do, I think you’ll see things differently. You’ll come to understand that it’s the right thing to do. The only thing to do. I know this. I feel it at a cellular level. I’m never wrong about my feelings, Sarah. Never. I trust them completely. Which is why I trust you.”
He lowered his arm, turned the gun around, and offered it to her handle first. “Show me how it works.”
“What?”
“There’s no trigger that I can see. So please, show me how it works. I insist.”
She took the gun, not because she knew what she might do with it in that moment. She took it simply because he told her to. “You toggle this switch while gipping the handle.” She flipped the switch, and the gun came to life in her hand. The casing pulsated with a soft iridescence and a nearly musical hum pushed forth from the machine.
“That’s new,” he said.
She thought about the door behind her, and the people behind it, and the guns they surely had. She tried to move the pieces of the chess board in her mind. A part of her knew the board was his and the squares weren’t true. But she had the gun in her hand. She raised her arm and leveled the ejector at his face.
“I want my sister. Now.”
Nader neither blinked nor moved. He somehow looked around the weapon to her. To inside her. “How many people are you willing to kill to get her?”
“I only need to kill one.”
“Then it should be easy,” he said, his green eye suddenly snapping straight. “Shoot.”
She shot.
He was faster than she could think. The eye. The fucking lazy eye. It had distracted her. Not for long—only a fraction of a second. A fraction of a fraction. It was all he needed.
He swatted her gun hand with his left just as she managed to get off the shot and hit her hard in the face with his right. The punch felt like a cannon ball. The surprise of it hurt most of all. How could anyone be so fast? A second later she lay on the floor in front of his desk. She could see the cuffs of his carefully pressed trousers, and beneath them, his polished brown cap toe shoes. She watched them pivot as he turned to face the wall behind him.
“Now this is one damn fine gun,” he said from a far, far distance as the light faded from her eyes and the room went dark.
40
Three years before, when the Kalelah had awoken from its extended Skip and finally rubbed the catastrophic sleep out of its eyes, getting a slot on the Omniscience Team had been among the most prized assignments possible. Its location within the CC was prime, right next to the bridge and Flight and it reported directly to the captain, no middle management department head bullshit. Argen, often with Trin in tow, would be poking his head in every hour, and getting to work with them both in that way, in those early hours of the crisis when nobody knew what was going on, had been a rare thrill for Lukas.
Omni’s job was to achieve as quickly and completely what the field manuals called “Immersive Awareness,” or as Trin would call it in those days, what the fuck are we into? At Lukas’s disposal was an arsenal of intelligence gathering and interpretive probes to paint a picture at near granular detail of the world around the Kalelah.
The first investigation had been cautious, a single probe launched while the ship was still in its undersea hiding spot. The tiny silver ball, no bigger than a fist, had propelled to the surface water, extended an antenna, listened for twenty seconds, and then descended once again to its launch tube within the nanotecture of the Kalelah’s skin. It was in that quick look that the full horror of what had occurred was revealed. Captain Argen’s worst-case scenario had been proven true. Against all laws, objectives, and odds, the population had not only managed to survive without Guidance for one hundred and twenty thousand years, it had acquired alarming levels of technology.
Mere hours after that discovery, Argen gave the order for full deployment. Every probe on the ship went out. Visual capture, audio capture, mapping, microwave and radio frequency interceptors, conductive wire spies and computing sniffers, water and air samplers, even the tasters. The Omni Team had swelled to more than one hundred analysts and Lukas was on the ride of his life.
The level of incoming was off the charts. No one on ship was prepared for what was pouring in. The ship should have awoken at Epoch Check 2. The population, had it survived in any numbers at all, should have been relatively small and nomadic, confined in territory to the original seeding continents, and in the early stages of tool use. Instead, the ship had awoken at E-37 and the population had exploded to more than seven-point-three billion and was generating data at the speed of a level-six civilization.
The Omni Team’s Spectrum Wall, a long expanse of fiber generation web able to display images and sounds with far more fidelity than float projection, had literally gone down twice in those early hours from the surge of information it was asked to show and catalogue. The constant pulsing and strobing of colors and lights from the thousands of images displaying at once had caused headaches and fainting among the staff. Lukas himself suffered from bouts of dizziness during that time and often had to touch the edges of workstations as he walked to help keep his footing. Eventually medical and engineering staff simply moved in with Omni to keep everything and everyone up and running. Most of the team had stayed awake for days straight to handle that initial learning curve.
That seemed like eons ago now. Lukas, the most senior member of the radically downsized Omniscience Team, the only member, swiveled his chair away from his workstation to survey the rows and rows of abandoned workstations. He looked at the Spectrum Wall and sighed. Like the room itself, the giant wall was mostly empty, the images mostly static. Data generation had fallen to level two—an emerging data culture. He knew that classification was simply based on numbers. In reality, the world outside the Kalelah wasn’t emerging at all. It was declining. Signals popped up from time to time, but few instances were anything more than fleeting. Theoretically, his job was still a crucial one. Few aspects of the civilization outside were more telling than its technological state. But on a shift-to-shift basis it had become soul crushingly dull.
It was time to do a manual check, to walk the Wall, so he hoisted himself from the chair. He started from the oldest detected signal, a terrestrial broadcast band that popped up three weeks ago in the southwestern sector of Continent three. It wasn’t a particularly strong signal, but it had shown remarkable staying power and had so far set a record for the longest sustained broadcast since the Correction. It was a continuous loop of video content twenty-two minutes long. It featured a man and a large hoofed beast that looked uncannily similar to an animal on his homeworld, a flantura, and the two appeared able to converse with one another. Lukas wasn’t cleared for language learning, no one was that he knew of, so the meaning of the content was a mystery to him. He found it amusing anyway. He especially liked the song that played at the start of each loop. Lukas lingered there for a moment, watching the flantura thing stomp its hooves and speak like an intelligent being.
Emlin walked up behind him, the scent of her hair arriving in advance and teasing his appetite. She slipped an arm around his chest and the other to the front of his pants. She had a thing about surprises, and he was always happy to indulge her things, whatever they were. Her job in Flight had become even more uneventful than his.
“Miss me?” she asked.
He turned within her embrace and put his arms around her. “Don’t you have work to do?”
She kept her hand at the front of his pants. “I do. In fact, I’m incredibly busy.”
This was her new thing, breaking shift early. It had started out as shaving the edges off the clock, a few minutes at first, nothing really to worry about. Over the weeks, though, she’d grown more brazen, cutting shift a solid hour early. They’d been lucky so far. But in the back of his mind, he wondered when their luck would run out and they’d get caught. It wouldn’t be pleasant.
“You know I have to check the damn Wall.”
“Yeah, and the Wall hasn’t changed in two weeks.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It’s bullshit make-work, right? Like everything we do around here lately.” She put her chin on his chest and looked up at him, the dark of her eyes and the roundness of her lower lip reflecting back the soft light of the overheads. “Take me to my pod and make me do bad things,” she said in that voice she used when she wanted her way.
“What kind of bad things?”
“The good kind.”
“I should stay.”
“That’s what you always say,” she purred and pressed herself to him more completely. “But a part of you always disagrees. Whatever’s on the Wall now will be here in the morning. And if it isn’t, who cares?”
Who was he kidding? He could never say no to her. “Yeah, who cares?” he conceded.
“Then say goodbye, Wall.”
They untangled and Emlin and Lukas left to begin their night together, leaving the Spectrum Wall unchecked. By a cursory look at things, that night’s breach of protocol was no more irresponsible than the previous night’s breach, or the one before that.
Because Lukas had already known the total number of signals up on the Wall. That total was the exact same total since his last walk of the Wall. Four hundred and thirty-seven. However, within the composition of that total there had been changes.
A small radio signal, less than fifty kilowatts, from the northeast sector of Continent one had stopped sending. No one would ever know exactly what happened. The equipment generating the signal could have been vandalized or fallen victim to fire. The antenna could have come down in a storm. A dozen other reasons could have explained its sudden absence. At some point a cross check would be made with other activity monitoring for insight into its disappearance, but lost signals never received the same urgent attention as new arrivals. What Lukas had missed by not walking the Wall was that among the four hundred and thirty-seven total signals, one had just arrived.
It was a grainy aerial image showing the roof of a large building set within a small park.
41
Sarah opened her eyes to the slightly fuzzy visage of a woman’s light brown face framed by long, dark hair. Her expression was serious, her lips tight, her brows furrowed. Sarah grunted softly and the woman’s face relaxed, her mouth turning to a small smile as the picture sharpened into focus.
“Hi, Sarah,” the woman said warmly. “I’m so glad to see you awake.”
The side of Sarah’s head throbbed. “Shit.” She reached up to touch her face.
“No, leave it be. I have some ice. Can you sit up to swallow an aspirin?”
“Where am I?”
“The residence.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Kelly. I work for the mayor. How do you feel?”
“Like I got hit by a train.”
“It’s not too far from the truth. Here, c’mon, sit up.”
Sarah sat up slowly. Every bone in her body hurt. She was wearing a light cotton robe. Her clothes hung from the back of a chair next to a desk by a large window. “What’s my face like?”
“He got you good.”
“Fuck. Why does everyone hit me in the face?”
“So you can’t pretend it didn’t happen,” the woman said. “It’s lucky he hit you there. Don’t you think? In the face, I mean.”
The woman handed her some aspirin and a glass of water and got up for the ice pack on the dresser. She was Asian and very pretty, dressed in a tight skirt and high heels.
“How far along are you?” the woman asked.
Dammit.
“I don’t know exactly,” she said. “Nine weeks, ten, twelve. Somewhere in there.” That was the truth, she didn’t know. That only added to the feeling of chaos around her life, a feeling like falling that never stopped.
“See?” the woman said. “Lucky.” She came back with the ice and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“What do you do for the mayor?” Sarah asked.
The woman waited a beat to answer, as if figuring it out herself. “I do whatever the mayor wants.”
Sarah looked at the woman’s manicured nails, her elegant clothes, her precisely painted mouth. “I see.”
“No, not yet. But you will.” She smiled and gently placed the ice against Sarah’s face. “Hold that there for a few minutes and I’ll get your shower ready.” The woman got up off the bed again and walked to the en suite bath.
“Do you know where my sister is?”
“Your sister’s safe,” she called back.
“I want to see her.”
“First shower, then dinner, then sleep.”
“Why are we being held? At least tell me that.”
The woman came out from the bathroom and offered Sarah help with getting up from the bed. “The mayor’s a great man, Sarah. Everything he does he does for a reason. I think you’ll find you and he have important goals in common.” She brightened her smile and pointed to the small sofa at the foot of the bed. “I picked out some clothes for you.”
“I’ll stick to mine, thanks.”
“Yours smell. The shower takes a minute to heat up but should be ready now. I’ll be back to help you dress.”
The woman stepped toward the door.
“The mayor doesn’t know anything about me or my goals,” Sarah said.
The woman paused at the threshold for a moment, but she left the room without another word.
•
By the time the woman returned Sarah had already gotten dressed in her own clothes.
“Kind of defeats the purpose of a shower,” the woman said. “You know, most people would kill for a Michael Kors dress. That one hadn’t even been worn.”
“I don’t have time to kill for a dress. Thanks for the clean underwear, though.”
The woman led her through a long hall that took them to the rotunda. They were on the second story of the building and the space opened up dramatically, with the underlit Romanesque dome curving above them and a view below of the grand staircase and the main foyer. They kept straight and stopped at a set of large wooden double doors on their right. She put her hand on Sarah’s arm.
“He’s a powerful man, Sarah. Be careful.”
“If I get a gun, I won’t hesitate.”
The woman offered a sad smile. “Listen,” she said, “I know what it’s like to—”
“No, you don’t.”
“Okay, Sarah.” She licked a finger and smoothed a few of Sarah’s hairs into place. “Maybe just think about making it through the night.”
The woman pushed the big doors wide. Nader sat at the center of a long wooden table that could easily accommodate forty people. Two other place settings were waiting. One next to him, and one directly across. He stood and motioned to the single place at the opposite center of the table. She took the seat.
