by Bruns, David
“That’s not possible!”
From the back of her brain, something teased at her memory, something Rahim had said in the department head meeting.
Cassandra might already have viruses trolling Masada…
“No, no, no, no,” Bekah exclaimed, punching keys on the console. The commands were nonresponsive.
Cassandra had outthought them—a backup program was powering up the array, had locked Bekah out. Cassandra must have inserted similar programs around SynCorp facilities all over the solar system. Infiltrator code waiting to be activated whenever she needed it.
“Think, think, think!” Bekah shouted. In the 3D model, green lines became yellow, vulnerable code. Yellow surrendered to red as the code was compromised.
She stared at the Hammer loaded in the quantum port of the mainframe. One twist, and all this would be over. One turn of that platinum key would deny Cassandra victory… But what if Gregor’s magic process for rebuilding the knowledge base failed? What if Cassandra had anticipated the Hammer as she’d clearly anticipated the strategy to shut down the array? What if she was just waiting to trigger a counter-program?
The alarm’s volume rose as the defending code crumbled beneath the piranhas’ assault. It was like a dull metal rod dragged across the naked vertebrae of Bekah’s spine.
“Sound off, goddamn it!”
Bekah reached out, taking the Hammer between thumb and index finger.
She should turn it. Play it safe. Gregor’s tech almost never failed. She should trust in that.
“What do I do?” Bekah demanded of the universe. “What do I do? ”
Simon Franklin appeared in her mind’s eye. He was smiling.
Simplify. Solve the problem .
In that instant, she understood. She had the answer.
“If I can’t turn it off,” Bekah whispered, cautious of the new hope rising inside her, “I’ll overload it.” How that would work appeared in her head like a gift. She pictured it with absolute clarity.
“I’ll overload it!”
Releasing the Hammer, she pulled up the array’s positioning program. Quickly scanning the code, Bekah searched for the command language that would—and there it was. Part of the program’s function was to prevent exactly what she was attempting to do.
Piranha code ripped at the final gate. Red lines of code dissolved like flesh submerged in acid. It would be close. Very, very close.
Bekah overrode the parameters prescribing how the dishes faced outward to deep space. Dishes eight and one began to rotate, as did three and six. Each pair of dishes angled to face its opposite in the horseshoe. No receiver, no way to accept the signal. Even Cassandra obeyed the laws of physics.
A glance at the 3D model confirmed it.
Crimson reflections from the flashing red code lit up the War Room, but there were fewer piranha already. Repositioning the array, interrupting the signal, was cutting them off. They winked out of existence by the dozens, the score, the hundreds.
But there was only one way to ensure the signal was cut for good: short out the entire array. Overload it with a broadcast so powerful, so broad across the frequency spectrum that it would take weeks of replacing burned-out components to bring it back online.
Bekah turned her eyes to Carrin Bohannon’s body. She still had time. Her responder code was shoring up the final gate, gaining ground, driving the piranha back. She still had time!
The corners of Bekah’s mouth ticked upward. Carrin had loved Richard Wagner’s epic Der Ring des Nibelungen and how it dramatized Norse mythology. She’d play it over and over again whenever she encountered a stubborn programming problem. It inspired her to think bigger, Carrin said. Now it was Carrin who inspired Bekah.
She called up the music library, searched for Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and programmed her selection to blast from Masada’s eight dishes at maximum power across all frequencies. Carrin had sacrificed everything protecting Masada. It would be her honor in death to save it.
“Thanks for the inspiration,” Bekah said to her friend. She patched the sound through to the War Room, so she could listen too. It wasn’t necessary. But it was something she needed to do.
Bekah called up the music selection. Strings swept upward, followed by flutes hovering like hummingbirds, holding the strings aloft in the air. Then the woodwinds churned like horses’ hooves cantering, preparing for a grand charge. The flutes and strings became eagles’ wings beating hard as they carried their riders high into a blood-red sky. Then a battle line of brass marched forward, calling the charge, and “Ride of the Valkyries” reached every corner of the War Room.
Bekah watched the overload warnings flash on the comms panel. Her tears made it difficult to see them. At last, a moment to pause, to grieve for Carrin and the rest of her team. In the model, the piranha swarming Masada’s final gate were fewer. Dishes four and five went first, followed quickly by each of the other facing pairs. In less than a minute, Masada Station had dropped completely off the grid of the subspace network, the circuitry of its array burned to cinders.
Bekah turned her blurring vision to Carrin.
Sleep, Valkyrie of Masada Station .
Then the emotion came, not tears alone but sobs that racked her chest, a self-exorcism of guilt for their having died at Richter’s hands. Bekah let Wagner’s music sweep her upward with its emotion, her screams of sorrow rivaling its thundering crescendos.
• • •
The War Room was quiet, now. The Valkyries had carried Carrin to Valhalla a while ago.
“Daniel? Are you there?”
Bekah tried again to raise Daniel Tripp on his sceye. And, once again, she received no answer. Where was he? Why wasn’t he answering?
She returned to her ministrations, dipping the napkin lightly in the glass of water. She drew it slowly across Carrin’s forehead, washing the skin that was already beginning to cool.
Bekah had lowered the gravity and laid Carrin on the small meeting table. She’d buttoned her uniform formally, flattening the fabric with her palms. She’d considered removing Carrin’s clothes and performing the same death ritual she’d performed for her grandfather. Except Carrin wasn’t Jewish, and she hadn’t really been family—except, of course, that she had been. But the most intimacy Bekah had ever shared with her had been to hold Carrin’s head over the porcelain god after a night of too much drinking. So she’d settled for perfectly arranging Carrin’s uniform and washing her friend’s exposed skin as a sign of love and respect, of appreciation for Carrin Bohannon’s life and too-soon sacrifice.
We’re put here to do good, Bekkalleh. That’s really what loving God boils down to. Anything else is just Man placing himself at the center of the universe .
Bekah dipped a handful of fresh napkins into the water and resumed her task. The crusted blood rehydrated. She was doing good for Carrin. She thought her opa would be pleasantly surprised.
Maybe I’m a bit pleasantly surprised myself.
Carrin Bohannon’s ritual was, in one way, more personal than Simon Franklin’s had been. Certainly, it was more horrific. Bruno Richter had sawed through Carrin’s neck, half decapitating her. The violation of Carrin’s flesh gaped at Bekah, a ragged jack-o’-lantern scream. Maybe Bekah couldn’t save Carrin from what was already done. But she could offer her a final act of kindness.
In a little while, the wound grew clean.
No less horrific. No less unnatural in its barbarism. But clean.
And Carrin, Bekah hoped, was at peace.
The comms pinged, startling her. Was it Fischer or Daniel or…
She touched the panel.
“Franklin here,” she said in little more than a whisper. “Stacks, is that—”
“Bekah! Thank God.”
“Daniel! Are you okay? Richter’s out there! You’ve got to—”
“Richter’s dead.”
Those two simple words lifted a burden from Bekah’s shoulders she hadn’t realized was on them.
“What�
�s the status of the mainframe?” Daniel pressed.
“It’s … I fried the array. We’re cut off.”
“Excellent!” he said, taking a moment to breathe. “Listen, I need you to get down to the infirmary—”
“Wait,” Bekah said, “Richter’s dead?”
“Bekah, I need your hands! Fischer’s in bad shape. Come to the infirmary now!”
She blinked once. A need to move injected adrenaline into her bloodstream. Death wasn’t taking someone else from her—not today. Bekah snatched the Hammer from the quantum port and slipped it into a pocket.
“On my way!”
Chapter 25
Kwazi Jabari • Aboard the Freedom’s Herald , Approaching Saturn
They were nearly there.
Kwazi didn’t understand the specifics, but he knew they were headed to Titan so Elinda Kisaan could hand Cassandra a clean victory. The battle over Callisto had certainly not been that. Adriana Rabh was still at large. She seemed to have disappeared into the ether of space itself. And Valhalla Station was already pushing back against SSR occupation, though the colony wasn’t yet in a state of open rebellion.
As they neared Saturn, Kwazi wondered if that cycle would start all over again. They’d liberate Masada Station and Prometheus Colony as they had Rabh’s headquarters and Callisto … with smiles and assurances of new liberties and an acceptable casualty ratio. But might not the citizen-workers under Gregor Erkennen’s rule simply follow the example set by their Callistan cousins?
Kwazi didn’t understand their resistance. Didn’t they know what SynCorp was? Didn’t they care about living a life in freedom?
He’d hardly been able to sleep since they’d departed Callisto. His mind kept racing, infected with a kind of self-imposed, impotent responsibility for managing events beyond his control. And even when Kwazi found snippets of sleep, he’d awake in a cold sweat, the same image branded on his brain: Carl Braxton, sighting down his rifle barrel at Kwazi on Rabh Regency Station.
He needed a distraction, if only for a little while. He needed the blanket of serenity Kwazi felt laid over him that was spending time with Amy.
He engaged Dreamscape, and Olympus Mons unfurled in front of him, a painting in dusty reds stretching across the canvas of Kwazi’s mind. Just viewing it calmed his breathing. Puzzle pieces of the idyllic view fell soothingly into place. The bluish horizon of the Martian sunset. Deimos, one of the two moons of Mars, sinking slowly in its orbit. And Amy sitting on the rocky outcropping they’d claimed for their own.
“Hi,” he said, approaching her. Amy glanced over her shoulder and smiled. The light breeze teased a strand of her hair over her eyes. She brushed it away.
“Hi.”
Kwazi sat down beside her, taking her hand. The thin powder of Martian sand felt gritty through the worker’s coveralls he wore. It literally, he thought with a light laugh, made him feel grounded. Yes, this is where he needed to be. Where he wanted to be.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Amy said.
The sound of her voice was like cool water.
“What’s weird?”
“The sunset.” She pulled her hand away and gestured at the horizon. “It has that bluish tint. Kind of ironic for the Red Planet, don’t you think?”
“It’s the dust in the atmosphere,” Kwazi said. “It’s so fine, it allows blue light through but not colors with longer wavelengths.”
Amy nodded. “It’s just not what you’d expect, you know?”
“Yeah.”
He edged closer to her on the lip of the overlook. Rather than take his hand again, as he hoped she would, Amy brought her knees up and wrapped her arms around them.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
Kwazi shrugged. “Fine.”
“I mean, about the battle on the station. About what happened to Beecham and the others.”
The wind blew cooler. It was almost chilly.
“I’m fine,” he said again.
Amy turned to him with an unsatisfied expression.
“Well,” Kwazi began, not wanting to get into it. He hadn’t come here for this. He’d come here to get away from this. “I mean, I’m sad, of course.”
“Sad?”
“I regret that Monk and the others—”
“You regret …” Amy sighed, laying her chin on her knees. Her gaze returned to the horizon. “You sound like you’re reading a prepared statement.”
Kwazi blinked once, twice, while staring at the side of her face. Her profile was beautiful, crafted with Dreamscape perfection. But the peace he’d sought in coming here seemed a distant, foreign thing now. Replaced with irritation and defensiveness.
“What do you mean?”
She didn’t answer at first, squinting at something distant—the white and pinkish pitted surface of Deimos sinking lower in the sky, maybe.
“I just wonder sometimes what happened to the miner from Mars who was so afraid to ask me out,” she said, turning to face him again. “You were happier then. You seem so different now. When did the Kwazi who loved it that I loved it when he spoke French become a sleepless soldier?”
He withdrew from her. The harsh Martian surface dug into his bony frame.
“When the Company murdered my family!”
Amy wiped dust from the side of her face, then reembraced her knees and returned her gaze to the darkening Martian desert. “Some of your family,” she said.
“What?”
Her eyebrows arched curiously. “Helena Telemachus ordered my death. And Beren’s and Aika’s.”
“Yes.”
“But it was Cassandra who killed Max and Mikel in the mine, right?”
Kwazi thought he must have misheard. It was like the needle playing the thoughts in his brain had skipped out of its groove.
“And almost killed me and Beren and Aika, for that matter. In the mine.” Again her eyes found his. “And you.”
“I suppose,” he said. What the hell was this? Kwazi was tempted to grab Amy by the shoulders and kiss her to force an end to the conversation.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked. “You’ve changed.”
“I’ve changed?” Her response was nearly offended.
“Look, times are more complicated, I know.” He wasn’t sure where her attitude was coming from, but he wanted it to go back there. This was his fantasy, damn it. She was his Amy. Maybe if he reasoned with her, he could redirect the conversation. Bring her back to being the Amy he’d created in Dreamscape. “But it won’t be like this always.”
“Just a little death for a little while,” she said in a way that seemed to be tasting the concept. “Then it will all be better.”
“War requires sacrifice,” he said. He could hear the testiness in his own voice. The anger at having to defend himself. And Cassandra.
“For the greater good.”
“Yes! Exactly!”
Amy nodded. Deimos had almost disappeared entirely below the thin blue line of the planetary horizon.
“So, if you think about it,” she said, “all those events—the sabotage of the mine, deposing Tony Taulke, killing those atmo-miners on the station—it’s all part of a larger, necessary plan. The Greater Good Plan.”
His brain was starting to throb. “I suppose,” Kwazi said.
“Even me dying. When Cassandra bombed Facility Sixteen.”
The anger built inside him, and Kwazi almost let it out. “No,” he said at last, forcing himself to remain calm. “You died because Helena Telemachus—”
“—murdered me, yes. Just as Cassandra murdered Max and Mikel.”
“Stop saying that!”
Kwazi put his hands against the gritty cliffside and pushed himself to his feet. The breeze and altitude made him feel lightheaded. His legs felt weak. His thoughts seemed half a step behind his emotions. Most of Mars had fallen into shadow. The stars shone in their thousands.
“Monk Beecham died for the greater good,” Amy continued. “Maybe I did too.”
“No!” He backed away. Amy was a shadowy form sitting on the precipice of Olympus Mons. “SynCorp murdered you!”
“As Cassandra murdered Max and—”
“Stop it!” Kwazi pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead. “Stop it!”
Amy rose to her feet, swaying in the wind on the edge of the cliff. She moved from darkening dusk toward him.
“Leave me alone!” he shouted.
“Kwazi, I just want you back,” she said. Words recalling his own weeks before, when he’d been mourning the real Amy Topulos. The red dust crunched under her boots. “I just want us back the way we were.”
Amy stepped toward him, one hand reaching. Her eyes shimmered in the fading light of Deimos. Only they weren’t Amy’s blue eyes … they were a luminescent gold.
“Kwazi, I’m sorry,” Amy said with Cassandra’s eyes. “Don’t listen to me, I’m just—”
“Quit program,” Kwazi said, calling up his sceye. “Quit program!”
• • •
He sat up quickly. His quarters were the dark of shipboard night, but the red capital-D shone brightly on his sceye display. The side of his mouth was wet. He wiped the sleep drool away.
The door chime sounded again. It had been chiming for a while, Kwazi realized.
Sleep? Had he been sleeping or lost in Dreamscape? Had Amy—or her doppelgänger?—been real or just the fatigued fantasy of a weary mind?
In the darkness of his quarters, Kwazi had the sudden gut-memory of staring at a half-opened closet door as a child on Earth. He’d cried out, and his grandfather had come running with anxious questions. He’d sworn he could hear whispers or claws scratching. As he’d clung to the old man’s arms, Young Kwazi had been certain that something waited inside the restless shadows of his closet. Something conjured by the fears of his imagination, the darker Dreamscape of his childhood. Something that professed goodness behind a fake smile hiding evil intent.
The Amy in his dream … or his fantasy … the Amy he’d created. The words she’d spoken, the truths they’d contained that he’d never faced before. Cassandra’s complicity in the deaths of his crew-family. They were his truths, yes? If he’d created Amy and she’d spoken them, the truths must be his truths too. But then she’d become…
