The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  She let her eyes close. She was so tired, and it was a beautiful spot for it, swaddled on all sides by gold with the noonday sun beating through the grille. She let her hands drop from the wheel and turned the keys in the ignition. The engine stopped trying, which came as a relief. It was no big thing to rest her head on the wheel, with Ravi cozy by her side. It was all right. Snuggled together, if there was any way to go, then wasn't this a good one?

  Thump thump thump

  She smiled at the sound, like waves lapping on the catamaran hull. It was easy to imagine she was a little girl again and Amo was at the front, driving them through the desert. Robert would be alongside him, talking to Amo in soft tones, wearing that delicate pain in his eyes and two silver necklaces round his neck, both hers and his.

  "Anna," he said, as Amo drove them forward and the tires went-

  thump thump thump

  -on the road, and where were they going but back to New LA? There were at least ten good years ahead. Yes, there was Julio to come, and Witzgenstein, and all manner of disappointments, but on the whole it had been good. Maybe she'd appreciate Ravi more this time around. Robert too.

  "Anna," Amo said again, and this time she stirred, because the thumping was getting louder. She tried to shut it out but it pushed through the dream, ruining the last stages of the ride home, until-

  THUMP THUMP THUMP

  Somebody jerked her upright and she saw Peters before her, still in the stairs van. She felt angry and sad at once, to leave such a wonderful world behind, but the look of fear on his face dragged her fully awake.

  He turned and pointed through the window, past Jake's sleeping face, to where some kind of black fly was sailing in a straight line above the corn, making a terrible buzzing THUMP THUMP THUMP

  Its wings whirled and blew up dust. The corn swayed beneath the downdraft of each stroke. She realized it wasn't a fly.

  "It's a helicopter," Peters whispered urgently.

  It was a helicopter.

  A real helicopter. Here. The thumping black bulk of it jarred painfully with the reality of the corn and the van. She'd only ever seen them flying in movies, figments from a past she'd never known, a past that was now pouring into her world, bending reality to a new shape.

  It banked around.

  It faced the stairs van head-on.

  It began to fire.

  INTERLUDE 1

  Gerald '8 Lives' Marshall stood outside the Dome with his helmet on, listening to the progress of his Black Hawk strike squad. Headed up by Manning, captained there by Davies, they were a team of highly competent soldiers. Back in the real world this would be an assault in Fallujah or Tikrit, some sand-swept compound in a sand-swept city, dropping in to flush out terrorists, bag up computers, evidence and bodies, leaving nothing behind but blood spray and boot prints in the dust.

  But here, in this addled facsimile of the real world, few of their maneuvers had gone to plan.

  "We have visual on their tracks," Manning had reported thirty minutes earlier, backed by the muted thump of the helo's blades. The bird had been wheels up for five hours, following the vague outline of a signature on the flattened hydrogen line. The trail had been clear, signs of a vehicle's passage up trampled grass roads heading north from Bordeaux. "It's like they're driving a damn snow plow."

  Marshall had let the obscenity slide. Including the Istanbul raid, Manning and his men hadn't de-helmeted for over twelve hours, which was nearing the operational kill-zone, when brain damage increased exponentially. They were good soldiers following good orders.

  Orders Marshall had given.

  "De-helmet," Control had told him, the regimented voice of O'Flanerhy down in the Istanbul bunker, handing down his own orders from the Seal's civilian Governance. "You've been live for fifteen hours, Marshall. We need you at peak capacity."

  Fifteen hours. You could do a lot in that kind of time. Back on the ranch in his youth, he used to ride the prairie fixing posts to keep their steers in; sometimes days ran longer than fifteen, beyond dusk and dawn.

  De-helmet, was the order. R and R.

  Marshall was not a man to harbor indecision. He made decisions swiftly then held fast until his duty was done. It was the primary reason he's shot up through the ranks, making General by the record age of forty-three, earning a Purple Heart, Bronze Star and Presidential Medal of Freedom in the years before the Emergency Seal was founded and the world decimated.

  He had a prodigious gift for reading human nature. He saw a man and intuited who he truly was with uncanny accuracy; what his capacities would be, what his drives were and just how far he could be pushed, and he did not shrink from pressing when pressure was applied. He'd been studying the leader of New Los Angeles for twelve years now, a man known only as Amo, and he knew what was coming.

  It didn't allow time for R and R.

  The war was far from over. There was no time to de-helmet now, not when they needed to strike a decisive, finishing blow within the next twenty-four hours. After that the survivors of New LA would be too far in the wind to hunt down again, undoing years of patient waiting for them to gather together. It had to happen now.

  So, this.

  He surveyed the sweep of their temporary base a final time, meticulously angled on Sabiha Gokcen International Airport in the suburbs of Eastern Istanbul, as neatly ordered as his own mind. Clear sight lines spread in all directions, overseen by Sergeant Riggs in the makeshift crane-tower. Grass spread like a rich lawn across the runway, rising in unruly tufts, like clumps of pampas on the prairie round his South Dakota ranch.

  The Dome behind him was occupied now; Brocas and Reeler had dehelmeted, after entering the geodesic habitation ball under protest. They'd hauled it atop an eighteen-wheeler trailer from the arid depths of Eastern Turkey, along with two UH-60A Black Hawks, each representing a team's worth of lives to fetch and repair. The Dome itself represented dozens of scientists lost to the kill-zone; a composite sphere of octahedral crystal panels jointed by a thick, rigid armature of tungsten coils in a semblance of a Faraday cage, smaller than the lunar lander from Apollo 11. It could comfortably berth two at a time, four at a push; the best portable shield they'd been able to construct. Their resources were not the same as they had been before the decimation.

  He turned back to face the row of five cubes aligned in a perfect row to the west, each a temporary haz-mat tent built with a carbon-fiber frame and rigid plastic sidings. Bolt-gunning them to the asphalt had been the work of moments, but gave them the impression of sleek, technological strength.

  The decision was a simple one.

  He had no family now, no friends, no relations but the bond of respect between him and his soldiers, and that had been souring for years as the hope leached out of them. Too many times in the last years he'd buried his own people in the bunker walls, lost to a creeping enemy that murdered them with their own trembling hands. Young men and women with such opportunity ahead, lost on the doorstep of the empty world that was to be theirs.

  Suicide watch had done nothing to stop the trickle becoming a flood. Counseling was fruitless when the counselors themselves were unable to function. Hope had been a rare commodity ever since the cleansing primary agents had failed two years earlier, replaced by the insidious spread of despair.

  Despair had unraveled his ties to a country long dead, to a system of living eclipsed by the reality of what his leaders had done. The words of their great Declaration were losing their meaning every day, just sounds left in his head, and damage to his own mind was a small thing next to that. There was work here that only he could do, and the orders were wrong.

  So, mutiny.

  He advanced toward the first of the cubes. The door was clipped with a magnetic catch that opened with a satisfying click. In a slim vestibule beyond, Master Sergeant Yugyong Park was scrolling a ball-pen down a list mounted to a clipboard. She looked up, and through the dark glass of her helmet showed her surprise, then raised a hasty salute, snapping upright.

&
nbsp; "Sir! I believed you were in the Dome, sir."

  "At ease," he said, as old as the habit of geeing on a horse. "Control came through with new orders. I'm going to begin the interrogation."

  Park frowned. "Now, sir? Ought you not de-helmet?"

  He gave her a warm country smile. Even now, she could still upend his decision. The disparity in rank would mean nothing if she resisted, and she might. His soldiers still loved him, he knew that, and would protect him even to their own detriment. "Old minds last longer," he said, tapping his helmet. "You know that from the briefing. It's just another resource."

  Her frown faded though a trace remained. She was a good soldier. "Sir. It's been twelve hours. Well into the kill-zone."

  "I don't feel it. Trust me, soldier."

  Park looked at him a moment longer, wavering. Perhaps she knew. It wasn't hard to grasp. The failure of the raid, the failure of the missile, these facts were undeniable. They were all facing their end, and what difference did a few more hours in the helmet make? "Very well, sir."

  He gave a short, perfunctory nod, as if this were normal. "De-helmet," he said. "Take your Dome-time. I'll begin here."

  She saluted again, rattled off a sharp, "Yes, sir," then hurried out into the sun.

  Marshall faced the partition wall; another magnetic catch, another plastic door, and the possibility of salvation beyond. He picked up the man's file from Park's desk. He'd memorized every piece of intelligence a year earlier, back when today had been a strategy of last-resort sketched out on a whiteboard. Now it would serve as a useful prop.

  He entered the inner cell.

  The man was sitting at a table, cuffed at the wrists to a metal loop embedded in the tabletop. He had short salt and pepper hair that in his last MARS3000 photograph had been a rich black. He had a slim face with angry blue eyes and a taut, wiry build. On his chin were the wisps of a thin beard. The rich scent of his old sweat carried even through the helmet's particulate matter filter.

  The traitor, still in his yellowed lab coat.

  "Lucas Fallow," Marshall said. "It's time we talked."

  * * *

  "I have nothing to say to you," Lucas answered.

  The square cell was hot, and the chair uncomfortable. He'd been sitting there for hours, ever since the stunning violence of the raid. Rendition, it was called, he remembered. He'd been rendered to a black site, and now they would do what they wanted with him, and most likely he'd die.

  Well, that was one path. Everyone else in his life had died, from Farsan to Salle Coram. One more wouldn't mean much.

  "Nothing to say," repeated the man, his voice a rich mid-Western timbre. He was older, his gaunt face darkened by his helmet's visor. "Not even a question. You wouldn't like to know what has become of your colleagues?" The man consulted a clipboard. "Sulman. Macy. Jonathon. Josiah. Wanda. I don't know their last names yet. The only person we have records for is you."

  While he spoke he advanced slowly, then put the clipboard down on the table. He pulled the chair out and sat, placing his gloved hands flat on the table's surface, fingers splayed symmetrically. He took a moment to appraise the angles, as if checking everything was in order.

  "I assume they're dead," Lucas said.

  The man regarded him. "You shouldn't make assumptions. They're not dead, Lucas. They're here, within several feet of you. Sat on chairs at tables much like this one, in square tents like this. Waiting for me."

  Lucas looked into his cold, gray eyes. This was a man who had lived in a bunker for twelve years. Who didn't want to live in one anymore. "And you've come for answers."

  "No. Quite the opposite, in fact. I've come to help you. I want to answer your questions; I'm sure you must have many. So, in your own time."

  It was a gambit. Lucas had lived long enough in the Maine dystopia to know a handling technique when he saw one. This was the first stage of rapport building, establishing a relationship. But a rapport relationship could work both ways, even in an asymmetrical power dynamic like this. He'd always played Salle Coram on both sides, extracting more information of value than her brutal security ever drew out of him.

  "Then tell me your name."

  "I am General Gerald Marshall," the man said, "of the Emergency Seal, restored Congress of the United States-in-waiting. I've been wanting to speak to you for a long time."

  "Why?"

  "Because you're a genius. Because your research into the hydrogen line has catapulted our understanding a decade ahead. It's thanks to your input that we've been able to iterate these new helmets." Marshall tapped the darkened faceplate glass. "I'm sure you remember the ones in Bordeaux. Crude devices, capable of scrambling a brain irreparably in less than half a day. No glass apertures, only a video camera and a screen. Not maneuverable. We owe this to you."

  Lucas snorted. "Then why the raid? We're closer to the cure than ever. Put me back in my lab, with my team, and I'll have you out of the bunkers in a week."

  Marshall gave a tight smile. "Our scientists have been working on your algorithms. As I said, enormous progress has been made, but it was judged the date for a safe, certain cure remained up to another decade away. I'm afraid we don't have that kind of time."

  "Not a decade," Lucas protested. "Let me explain my work to your scientists; there was a breakthrough on the hydrogen line just moments before you raided us. Something was happening."

  Marshall's smile widened slightly. "Something still is. The line has become unstable. I suspect you are feeling this, a pain in your head perhaps, or a lowering of affect."

  Lucas did feel it. There was a sharp ache building behind his left eye, but he was not about to admit that. There were a dozen other things it could be caused by other than a change in the line.

  "I'm fine."

  General Marshall lifted a few fingers from their flat position on the table in an approximation of a shrug. "Is that so? No matter, then. Suffice it to say, work on the cure has been abandoned. It will not be taken up again."

  Lucas tried to puzzle this out. Was this part of the strategy? "That doesn't make sense. I just told you, look at my data. I'm within days of formulating a cure. It's not genetic, or at least not hereditary, and not only that either. It's in the T4, a special breed with a unique sensitivity to the hydrogen line. It's so simple. All this time I've been trying to force the lock, when I should've been looking to change the key. I haven't thought about the line. It needs to be cured too."

  The General watched him impassively. "Really, Lucas, we'd do well to move on from this subject. As I've said, the project has been canceled. The new mission is infinitely simpler."

  Lucas stared. He'd been thinking about it for the last hours anyway. They'd already tried it once with the demons. Salle had tried it too.

  "Wipe us out."

  Marshall inclined his head slightly. "Not you."

  Lucas laughed involuntarily. It was part panic, part mockery, and wild. So this was the play, but the purpose was still unclear. "Not me. But why save me? I'm useless for the cure, you've said it yourself, and I'm no good for anything else."

  "I think we both know that's not true," said the General. "Don't we?"

  He stared. Lucas stared back, feeling lost. Perhaps he'd guessed wrong. There may be no reversing this dynamic. There was only the hard choice left.

  "You want me to help you with what, our radio codes? 'Military secrets'? I know precious little, but I'll die before I tell you any of it."

  The General gave a sad smile. "Like you died to gain revenge on your MARS3000 colleagues? No, Lucas, I know what your promises are worth. You value your life too highly. You'll help because you want to, when you see what our new world has to offer."

  Lucas snorted. It was time to push back. "A new world of genocide. Do you really think you can kill them all? Every one of them, even Amo, even Anna? You can barely even get to France in your helmets without dying."

  Marshall lifted his hands from the table, not a fast or violent movement, but still it gave Lucas p
ause. It suggested violence. It implied the threat.

  "You want to talk about genocide. Lucas, I seriously question the wisdom of your loyalty to the people who killed three thousand of your own. You're an intelligent scientific man; I cannot see how you have reasoned out this position. Amo's group number scarcely one hundred people, yet he has murdered far more, and you stand by him. Why? What makes this man so attractive? What allows him to commit mass murder and still retain your faith?"

  Lucas shook his head. Marshall wouldn't listen that he followed Amo because he believed in the cure, because he wanted to save the bunkers in spite of everything they'd done. He wasn't here to listen, but to persuade, and Lucas wouldn't help him in that. Arguing would achieve nothing.

  "You've got a file on me," he said, nodding at the clipboard. "Good. None of it is up to date. I know that the last time MARS3000 talked to you was before Salle took over, and that's eight years ago now. You think you can manipulate me, but you don't know a damn thing about who I am."

  "People don't change."

  Lucas laughed again, this time under control. "I changed at the genetic level. I was trapped like you. I lived in a bubble. Now I'm free."

  "And you're so confident I'm not free," said Marshall. "So confident that your cure is the only way." His smile widened, then his hands lifted slowly to his helmet. His fingers found clasps recessed in slight dimples in the glossy material and flicked them; three on each side.

  Lucas watched with mounting confusion. What was happening?

  Marshall brought up his forearm and tapped through various menus on the built-in touchscreen, resulting in a satisfying click coming from within the helmet. His smile didn't change. He reached up and twisted the helmet. It slotted smoothly a few degrees to the left, then with a tinny hiss of gas lifted free.

  Lucas stared. Marshall stared back. There was no darkened visor between them now, as Marshall set the helmet on the table between them.

  His eyes didn't flare white.

  His skin didn't turn gray.