“Q, I don’t care what you do. Just make it end!”
Her infield filled with bumps, all saying the same letter over and over again:
qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq
“Come on,” said Jesse, pulling Clair into a thicket of random memories and shades.
She braced herself for the end of the world, but it didn’t come. Not then. Combining her and the exit wasn’t the disaster RADICAL had feared it might be.
The real disaster was still unfolding outside.
“Whatever happens,” Jesse said, “we’ll always have the Mystery Caves.”
She did remember, but it took her a moment to realize what he meant. That was where the two of them—this Clair and this Jesse—had first kissed. What happened to the others didn’t matter. This was about them, and they were together.
“I love you,” she said.
Cheeks wet with tears, she pulled his head down till his lips met hers. Q and the Yard were being overloaded and there was nothing they could do about it. Hand in hand they stood in the entrance of a corridor that curved on and on, endlessly for all she could tell. She wept, but she had Jesse, and they were—
[57]
* * *
Clair Three
CLAIR’S STOMACH WAS in her throat as the Satoshige dropped out of the sky. Its instruments told her that they were still flying, not falling, but that wasn’t remotely how it felt. The icy surface of Lake Baikal came up at them with frightening speed.
“Q, you have to unlock the rudder,” Embeth shouted. “Otherwise we’ll crash!”
“Q?” said Clair, adding her voice to the pleas of the pilot. “Can you hear me?”
From outside the Satoshige came nothing but the sound of rushing wind. It had been bumpy during their descent, as Embeth had predicted. One particularly bad patch had nearly sent Clair falling over the side of the bridge that no longer had a rail. Only the quick hand of one of the crew members had saved her. It was entirely possible—
Don’t think it, Clair told herself.
But maybe—
But don’t.
If they hit the lake too hard and they all died, she didn’t want her last thought to be that.
“Brace yourselves,” said Embeth.
Clair didn’t need reminding. The Satoshige’s landing lights threw back a bizarre landscape of frozen waves and shattered ice sheets ahead and below. They were blurring by at a terrifying pace. The balloon wasn’t capable of great speed in the air, but it certainly seemed fast when they were coming down out of control.
Devin had assured them that they weren’t going to crack through the surface of the lake and plunge into its icy depths. She hoped he knew what he was talking about. Drowning was not much better than being battered to death on the rough surface of the lake.
The Satoshige shuddered like a living creature knowing it was about to die.
A relatively level stretch appeared ahead. Embeth raised her left hand, defiantly crossing two fingers. Clair understood. There was nothing she or anyone could do to change course without setting off the bomb.
An alarm went off.
“Time to ditch it!” Clair called. Behind her, the three crew members who had volunteered for the task opened a hatch, letting in a howl of icy wind. They bent down and picked up the bunker buster and, after a count of two, tossed it outside. It tumbled silently into the darkness.
That was the easy part.
When the Satoshige touched down, Clair needed both hands and both feet desperately braced against a stanchion to stop herself from being flung about the inside of the bridge. There was a deafening crash, then sudden silence as the airship bounced, followed by another sustained crash as it came back down again, and stayed down this time, dragging violently across the ice. Clair, eyes tightly shut in terror, was wrenched from side to side as the gondola acted as a brake, dragging the balloon over onto its side. For one brief but terrifying second it seemed as though the giant head might roll over and smash them onto the ice, but then with a tearing sound the balloon burst, and the gondola crashed back down in the wake of the deflating air sack.
Deafened by high-pitched shrieks of crushing metal and plastic, Clair only slowly realized that a desperate wail was coming from her own throat. She locked her teeth together and turned it into a moan. Then a deeper boom sounded from behind them—the bunker buster, beginning its pointless journey down into the depths, far off target. What primitive sensors it possessed would fail to find the Yard, Clair had been assured, so even if they died right now that job was done.
The Satoshige juddered across the frozen lake, pulled along by wind alone.
“Anchors!” called Embeth in a shaky voice. Clair relaxed her death grip and staggered back to deploy the makeshift grapnels they had fashioned. Devin had joked that Sandler Jones would do the job just as well. Clair, although sorely tempted, had decided to let the ringleader sleep unharmed. She would figure out what to do with him later.
Rope unspooled into the ice-spattered night and then snapped straight with a whip crack. The anchors dug into the ice, dragging the Satoshige to an unsteady halt, leaving the floor canted at an awkward angle. Clair’s footing slipped, and she dropped a meter before finding something more secure to take her weight. When she was stable, she took stock of the situation.
The interior of the airship was a mess, but no one seemed critically injured. From outside came the howling of wind mixed with a loud flapping sound. The ragged remains of the balloon were like the wings of a giant bird, straining hopelessly to take off again.
Clair slid down the sloping floor to the open rear hatch and looked out across the scarred surface of the lake. By the few remaining navigation lights of the Satoshige, it looked bleak, hopeless, and very cold. A wide furrow stretched behind them, pointing in a straight line across the lake. There was no sign of any fractures.
There was no sign of Q, no matter how desperately she called.
“I’m going looking for her,” she said to Embeth, her teeth chattering now with more than just the cold.
“Take the compass and a flashlight. We’ll stay and put things in order. If I find anything here, I’ll let you know.”
Clair nodded. She trusted Embeth completely. No one else could have gotten her here in one piece. If she had wanted to betray Clair, she would’ve done so days earlier.
But she knew Embeth would find nothing, and that no amount of trust could fill the gaping hole in her chest. Q would never have let her crash had she been able to prevent it.
Putting on every warm item of clothing she had and tucking her head low out of the wind, Clair headed into the night, following the path of the fallen Satoshige across ice as solid as stone.
The crater left by the bunker buster was surprisingly small, a soot-edged hole barely two yards across. Clair skirted it, wary of the black water roiling in its depths. All around her she could hear the ice flexing and fracturing, strange squeaks and cracks that were sometimes as loud as gunshots. It was eerie. At any moment, she expected a giant insect to rise up over the frozen waves and snatch her up in its jaws. As far as waking nightmares went, it was tamer than many she’d had lately.
The drag mark left by the Satoshige had stopped not long before the crater. Using the direction of the former as a guide and the compass to keep her on course, she headed on into the night, sweeping the ground ahead of her with the torch.
“All quiet on the western front,” said Devin. “By which I mean there’s nothing coming out of the Yard.”
She forced herself to talk, although she didn’t want to. “So what’s new?”
“I mean, absolutely nothing. Before, even when no one was talking, the channel was still there. It was open but empty, if that makes sense. Now there’s not even that anymore. It’s like everything’s . . .
closed up shop for good.”
Clair shook her head, knowing he couldn’t see the gesture but needing to make a physical denial anyway.
“I can’t think about that right now.” The ice was slippery and with snow as powdery and treacherous as ash. Her shoes were soaked and feet hurt. How much farther?
Devin was silent for a minute as she trudged on.
“You might also like to know that we’ve taken a more detailed inventory of the borehole station,” he said. “There’s a booth. Nothing fancy, but it’s there. Once the powersat breeder arrives, we can try to boot it up.”
“How long?” she asked.
“Eight hours.”
“Great.” Where would she go? If the Yard was closed and the world was dead . . . “As long as you can turn the central heating on, I’ll be happy.”
“Already done. It has enough battery power for a week. I’ll turn on the lights so the others can find it. Won’t take them longer than an hour to get there.”
“Home sweet home,” she said. Thinking, Maybe literally.
Another silence, during which she traversed a treacherous patch with slabs of ice like crazy paving.
“What are you going to do with Sandler?”
“I don’t know,” she snapped. “I haven’t thought about it. I haven’t thought about anything. Will you just let me do this?”
“Sure. Sorry. I thought you might need the company.”
“I do, but you don’t need to say anything.”
He let her trudge on in silence.
Fifteen minutes later, a shape that wasn’t ice or snow appeared in the beam of the flashlight.
Kari Sargent’s body was unmoving and cold. She lay with one arm bent behind her back and her legs splayed, eyes closed and a peaceful expression on her face. Clair couldn’t tell if the fall or the cold had killed her, but either way she was dead, and Q had died with her. There was no Air anymore to hold Q, not in the real world: just one frail human body that had fallen too far.
Clair pressed her face to Kari’s chest and wept. For Q. And for Sargent, the last of her kind on Earth, who would have singlehandedly brought the peacekeeper corps back from the dead. Or perhaps not singlehandedly: fighting lawbreakers might have been a fine career for Clair 7.0, if only they’d had the chance to do it together. But now it would never be. Kari and Q were dead, the Yard was silent, and nothing could ever be worse than this.
Clair wept until the cold started to hurt. Then she called Embeth to come meet her.
The pilot and one of the crew members improvised a sled from the wreckage of the Satoshige. Together, they brought the body back and wrapped it in a shroud made from the fabric of the balloon. Then they retraced their steps to the hole made by the bunker buster. The dark water was already beginning to freeze over.
They arranged the body and stood in a circle around the hole.
“You were a good friend,” Clair said. “Both of you. I wish I could think of a quote. . . .”
But her throat had frozen tight, her brain with it, and all she could do was nod. Do it.
Embeth bent down and slid the body across the ice. It slipped through the hole and vanished from sight.
Clair went back to the Satoshige with the others, grateful for the darkness and the hood covering her head so she could cry in private. Her apparently never-ending supply of tears froze on her cheeks, and she wiped them away every minute or so, wondering if she might weep forever, for Kari Sargent and Q, for Jesse and her other self, and for everyone else who would never see the weak sun that grudgingly eased over the horizon.
Hope had come to nothing. Plans were cold comfort this time.
Her tears dried up at last. A day of trudging back and forth between the borehole station and the wreckage lay ahead of them. At least the exercise would keep them warm. The temperature was well below freezing and, judging by the bank of clouds moving in from the west, wasn’t likely to get much warmer any time that day.
“You can talk now,” she said to Devin.
“There’s not much to tell you. Mom’s doing what she can from this end, but it’s really a waiting game from here on. We don’t know if the channel has closed for good or if the entire Yard has crashed. It may just be a bug, but it could be a catastrophic failure that no one can ever fix.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t the bunker buster?”
“The Yard shut down well before that thing went off. So it has to be something on the inside. If it is fixable, whatever it is, Mom-as-Dad will be working on it, and she won’t stop at the first hurdle. Mom says she was a lot more driven when she was a he, if you can imagine it. That was one reason why she changed: too stressful, she says, being a man. The Yard is probably like paradise for the old her. She’s probably got everyone wired up into a giant superhuman brain ready to take over the world when she gets out.”
“I hope you’re joking.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Clair thought about that.
“Do you ever get the feeling old people don’t really understand how much danger we’re in?” she said. “They either want to use technology to change everything, or they want to ban it forever. They’re never anywhere in the middle.”
“Says the Abstainer.”
“Yes, but I’m not stupid. I know that d-mat isn’t evil. It’s just a tool. And tools don’t kill people. People kill people. Tools won’t save people either. Nothing will save us but . . . us.”
“Mom said, ‘Dream on.’”
Clair sighed a cloud of white mist. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Instead of dreaming about what d-mat can do, why not dream about what we can do? Isn’t that the better dream?”
“You have to sleep in order to dream,” said Devin. “Maybe that’s the part these old guys forget. Sleeping means letting go. And they don’t want to.”
“What does your mom say to that?”
“She just laughed. Hysterically. I don’t think she realizes how profound we’re being.” A slight pause; then Devin said, “Mom asked me to clarify that she’s not laughing at us, but at the thought that she wants to run the world. The new her, not the old. Too much responsibility, she says.”
“Honestly?”
“Yes. Mom never lies, but she said she used to. That’s another reason why she changed. RADICAL has mellowed a lot since she was a dude, she says, and I believe her. I mean, she’s still crazy, but at least she’s willing to share. With me, with Trevin—and with everyone else, as long as they’re not telling us we’re monsters or anything. You’re not saying that, are you?”
“No. We’re just different.”
“That’s a good thing. Diversity increases the human race’s chance of survival, Mom said. The more of it, the better for all of us.”
Clair nodded, and despite her circumstances actually felt a little more hopeful. She was stuck on a frozen lake, where if she wasn’t careful she might actually freeze to death. Her hopes of saving the world appeared to be dashed. But at least Eve Bartelme wasn’t going to fight her for control of the ashes.
“Tell me that heater is running,” she said as the wreckage rose up before them.
“Ten degrees centigrade and rising.”
“Good. Because that’s all I want to think about right now.”
[58]
* * *
BAIKAL SUPERDEEP BOREHOLE Station consisted of a dome sitting low in the ice, surrounded by a narrow plastic deck. The station was designed to float in exactly the same spot when the lake melted, Devin said, and there was something in the curve of the walls and the low ceiling that did put Clair in mind of boats. The interior consisted of four rooms and one central area that housed the squat two-person booth Devin had also mentioned. There was a pair of dusty fabbers. Although the central heating provided blissfully reviving heat and humidity, very little else was operating. Trevin set to the task of working out what related to the station itself and what to the Yard’s hardware, several miles below, the station’s interface meaning nothing to Clair as
it was in Russian.
She and Embeth and the others ferried the prisoners to their new, hopefully temporary home. By the time they were finished, Sandler was stirring. Clair dosed him and his friends with more sleeping tablets, not caring much if she exceeded the recommended intake, took half a tablet herself, and finding a dark corner in one of the rooms fell sound asleep for four mercifully dreamless hours.
When she woke, it was sleeting outside. Only one of the crew members was sitting awake, listening to the empty airwaves while everyone else rested. Clair sent him to bed and took the remainder of his shift, chewing on a stale granola bar and sipping at a mug of instant coffee. Neither satisfied her hunger. As the ice creaked and cracked under the cold winter sun, her thoughts turned around and around and settled nowhere.
Far away, Nellie and everyone else in the muster were also asleep. Clair felt like she was the only person awake on that side of the Earth.
She knew, though, that that wasn’t true.
“Tell me what’s going on,” she said to whoever was listening at the South Pole.
“Okay, so,” said Trevin, his voice bouncing around the globe off the Earth’s sole remaining satellite, “we know that the servers are still drawing power. Physically, they appear to be fine. Every diagnostic I run comes back clear. Beyond that, I’ve got nothing. It could just be spinning its wheels down there, cycling the same data over and over, perhaps a string of meaningless zeroes, or it could be building the Taj Mahal of virtual paradises. Until someone or something chooses to communicate with us, we can’t know.”
“So there’s hope,” said Clair, without feeling.
“If hope looks like a massive question mark to you, then yes, run with that.”
Clair was going to. Otherwise she had only a long list of the dead, and that was too bleak to deal with right then.
“If it keeps giving us the cold shoulder,” Trevin said, “we’ll fab a submarine and haul the whole thing up to the surface and take a closer look there.”
“What if there’s another booby trap?”
Hollowgirl Page 34
