Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  “Ouspensky says heroic characters are just ‘reflexed images of human types which had existed ten thousand years before.’ He says they’re reproduced by ‘mysterious powers controlling the destinies of our world. That which has been will return again.’”

  On the floor below them, Verb had led Curtis and Molly into a sudden cone of light. It revealed a wooden folding screen of Japanese design; the back had been fitted out with aluminum cages to hold circuit cards and ribbons of cable that led to disk drives and bubble storage.

  Kane focused on one panel of the screen, on one 18- by 24-inch sheet of plastic, studded with chips and crowned with a dark blue ceramic box the size of his open hand.

  He began to hallucinate in earnest.

  From somewhere behind his eyes, a ghostly schematic of the circuit card formed and began to spin into his field of vision, slowly turning through all its axes and dropping away from him, toward its physical counterpart below.

  He shut his eyes, and the glowing diagram remained, sketched in the visual purple pigment of his retina, still falling, spinning away from him.

  He swayed queasily, opened his eyes, and grabbed for the railing. The phantom projection had aligned itself with the genuine board, and as Kane watched, awed and terrified, the image superimposed itself on the original.

  For an instant the entire cave was suffused with brilliant, golden light, and a spasm of pure pleasure arced through Kane’s nervous system.

  He dropped to his knees, shivering.

  He had just seen his grail.

  SIXTEEN

  IT SEEMED TO MOLLY that she was watching a butterfly metamorphose into a worm. Ten years ago Curtis had seemed full of strength and beauty and grace; in the cocoon of the Center’s isolation tanks he had become another personality: dry and bitter, erratic, amoral.

  In the explosion of the rock ledge outside the dome his transformation became complete.

  She hadn’t believed it was really going to happen until the mountain trembled under her feet. There had been no single moment when Curtis had hesitated or lost momentum long enough for the weight of her fear to stop him, to push the balance away from the vision of doom that now obsessed him. And if she had seen her moment, she thought, Alonzo and the goon squad would have kept her from seizing it.

  Curtis had sat through the preparations with a phone in one hand, giving orders to his henchmen back inside the dome. Molly could see that he missed his cameras; the explosion would not be completely real for him until he could replay it on the video screen.

  It had shocked her to learn that Verb already had packets of antimatter whose retaining fields could be switched off. For experiments, Verb said, or for extending the cave. It was just something they’d made up, that they’d thought would be useful. To Molly it seemed hopelessly naive to have built something that could so easily be transformed into a weapon.

  And now they were huddled together, father and distorted daughter, Curtis watching her program the coordinates for Moscow into the computer. Think, she told herself. You’re not helpless. She knew the machine, knew its weaknesses well enough to disable it if she had a chance.

  The power board, with its blue ceramic antimatter jar, was the most vulnerable point. From where she stood, behind Curtis, it was five or six meters away on the other side of the bank of CRTs, disk drives, and walls of folded program listings. If she could get at it, she could pull it completely free of the assembly, like pulling a giant plug out of a socket.

  The problem was that Curtis still held the gun. She was not afraid to die, if it came to that, but she was afraid to die without stopping him, without even being able to get to the panel.

  She pushed herself away from the desk she’d been leaning on and walked toward the front of the cave, keeping her distance from any of the critical parts of the transporter. All told the thing was nearly ten meters long and four or five wide, the oriental folding screen standing in the center like an oversized breadboard in a child’s do-it-yourself electronic kit. The gateway itself was on the far side, out of Molly’s reach, and none of the thick, black power cables led anywhere but to the main power panel.

  She kept walking, noticing for the first time in a long while how large the cave actually was. Most of the time it was lighted with pin spots or dim red floods, as if Verb resented the inflexibility of the raw rock walls. The general overhead lights, dim as they were, seemed like a violation, one more small brutality.

  Something flashed at the front of the cave.

  The airlock. Somebody wanted in.

  Molly glanced back at Curtis; he hadn’t seen. Alonzo was looking over Curtis’s shoulder, and the only one watching the airlock was Hanai. Molly started for the open hatch as quickly as she could without attracting Curtis’s attention, but before she could get within ten meters Hanai blocked her way.

  “Don’t do it, Molly,” she said.

  “Do you know what’s going on here? Do you know what Curtis is trying to do?”

  Hanai shook her head. “That doesn’t matter. Just stay away from that hatch.”

  “I’m not trying to get away. I’m just going to close it.”

  “I can see the signal as well as you can. You don’t know who’s out there. What if it’s the Russians?”

  “What if it is the Russians?” Molly said. “Curtis is crazy. He’s lost it. He’s going to wipe out Moscow. Do you know what that means? Not just that we lose Frontera, which we will, but it means war, nuclear war, bombs dropping on cities, the end of everything. The Russians will have to retaliate, Morgan will get sucked in, and then it’s the end. Everybody dies.”

  Before Hanai could answer Molly gently pushed her aside and crossed the open floor in front of the hatch, stepping over Curtis’s empty suit and switching on the intercom mounted on the wall. She tuned it to the standard suit frequency and said, “This is Molly. Who’s out there?”

  “Takahashi. The inner door is jammed or something. Can you get it shut?”

  Molly looked back at Hanai, who was still wavering. “Yeah, I’ll shut it. But come in fast and get under cover as soon as you’re inside. There’s a world of trouble going down in here.”

  “I already know.”

  She closed the hatch and stood with her back to it, watching Curtis at the far end of the cave. Keep your head down, she thought. Just don’t look up. She heard the hatch open behind her and twisted her head to see Takahashi move into the shadows of a set of metal shelves.

  Hanai moved slowly toward him, as if fighting her instincts. Takahashi pulled off his helmet and his eyes connected with Hanai’s. She looked away quickly.

  “Is she still with Curtis?” Takahashi asked Molly.

  “I don’t know. I think she’s making up her mind. I take it you two know each other.”

  “This morning,” Hanai said. “I found Dian—her body, I mean. I think Curtis killed her.”

  “Yeah,” Molly said. “I think he did, too.”

  “Can we stop him?” Takahashi asked,

  “I don’t know,” Molly said. “He’s got a gun. He could kill us both. I think he’d kill any of us if we pushed him.”

  “What about Kane?” Takahashi asked.

  “Kane?” Molly risked another look at Curtis; he still had his head down, but he could look up at any moment. Now Lena had noticed them and crossed over from the far wall.

  “If Kane’s here,” Takahashi said, “we can use him. He can stop Curtis. It’s what he was programmed for.”

  Molly turned slowly and looked at the shadows that clung to the walls of the cave, the clutter of equipment and furniture. The idea that Kane was out there somewhere, dazed, obsessive, a pawn to the biotechnology in his brain, gave her chills.

  “Kane’s programming is screwed up,” Lena said, “He’s living out some kind of Greek mythology fantasy. We can’t count on him.”

  “Can we count on you?” Takahashi asked.

  “Depends on what you want,” Lena said, and Molly could see the claustrophobic tension of
the flight from Earth in her sudden anger. “I’m with you against Curtis.”

  “Then somebody,” Molly said, “for Christ’s sake think of something. There’s less than an hour left.”

  “What about her?” Takahashi asked, pointing at Hanai.

  “I’ll help,” Hanai said. “But I want protection from Curtis. Whatever it takes, even if it means taking me back to Earth.”

  “You’ll be okay,” Molly said.

  “That’s not good enough. I want a promise.”

  “I promise,” Molly said. “I’ll do whatever I can to protect you from him.”

  “I want to know where Kane is,” Takahashi said. “I still think he’s our best chance.”

  “He’s here,” Lena said. “He was coming here, anyway.”

  “Then I’m going to look for him.” Takahashi pulled off his suit and moved quietly into the darkness.

  “We better break this up,” Hanai said. She was looking past Molly’s left shoulder, and Molly turned to see one of the other guards moving toward them. It was Iain—whose hero thing, Molly remembered, had been a solo rover expedition to the Mutch Memorial Station, site of the first Viking landing, where he’d snapped off the soil sampling arm and brought it back as a trophy.

  “What’s this about?” he said, and Molly shook her head at him.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Let’s just get away from this hatch, then, eh?” he said. “And you, Molly, come back with me. I want you where I can keep my eyes on you.” He put one hand on Molly’s arm, and she shook him away fiercely.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  He held up both hands. “Right. Just let’s move along, okay?”

  She walked away from him, crossed the cluttered floor to stand next to Curtis. He and Alonzo were staring at an odd-shaped polygon on the CRT. The shape reminded her of an Apollo spacecraft for a second, the heat-shield pointed slightly up and to the right. Then she noticed the fainter lines surrounding it.

  The Kremlin, then, and the upper right corner was Red Square.

  “Phenomenal,” Curtis said. “Un-fucking-believable.”

  “Curtis,” Molly said.

  “Don’t start.”

  “Will you listen to me for just thirty seconds? Will you think about what you’re doing? Do you think this is some kind of video game you’re playing?”

  Curtis glanced up from the screen, checking the disposition of his troops. “Iain,” he said, “shut her up, will you?”

  She glared at Iain, who shifted his feet uncomfortably. “What exactly do you want me to do with her?”

  Curtis handed him the Luger. “Take her out of my way and watch her. Use the gun if you have to, but for Christ’s sake don’t hit any of the equipment.”

  “That’s right, Iain,” Molly said. “You wouldn’t want to damage anything valuable.”

  Curtis turned in his chair to stare at her with a look of angry impatience. “Shut up.”

  Above the CRT a digital display clock read 23:11.

  Nineteen minutes left.

  SEVENTEEN

  “MOSCOW COMING IN,” Chaadayev said.

  “All right,” Mayakenska said into the radio. Her heart was pounding and she didn’t know whether to be terrified or to try, somehow, to pray.

  “Mademoiselle Mayakenska,” the voice said. She recognized it as belonging to the vice president with the colored glasses and the dzhinsi pants. She nearly answered him, forgetting the eighteen minutes it would take her words to reach Earth.

  “The committee—or rather, the Board—has decided not to take your advice. It is our conclusion that the mechanism is located somewhere within Frontera Base itself, and not in some distant cave. We find the idea that such a device could be the work of children to be preposterous.”

  “Idiots,” Mayakenska said. Tears of anger ran down her face. “Idiots.”

  “Therefore your instructions are as follows. If Curtis seems set on his threat you will destroy Frontera Base with the laser. You will do so before the expiration of Curtis’s deadline, and you will do so without telling anyone there on the ground. Also, from this moment forward I expect you to maintain a continuous radio link with Mission Control, detailing all your actions. I trust this is all sufficiently clear.”

  “Chaadayev?” Mayakenska said. He was the one who would actually have to fire the laser. “Were you listening?”

  “Yes,” Chaadayev said.

  “They’re insane. You’ve seen what the weapon can do. I want you to make the ship ready to leave orbit.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chaadayev said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I agree with Moscow. Besides, it isn’t my place to question orders. I suggest that you already be in your suit when you make your final communication with Curtis. Have Valentin in the ship, ready to go. We’ll start with the north end of the dome at 23:25 exactly, which will give you time to get to the ship and rendezvous with us.”

  “Chaadayev, I order you to disable the weapon and lay in a course for home.”

  “I am genuinely sorry,” Chaadayev said. The radio went dead.

  Mayakenska looked at her watch. Ten forty-five. The ship was locked, all systems powered up, ready for immediate launch in case of an emergency. With constant thrust and a low trajectory, she might make it.

  The living room was still dark. Valentin paced the floor, pretending nonchalance. “I trust you overheard,” she said to him.

  He glared at her, then shrugged. “Only by accident.”

  She had no time to waste on this feinting for position. “Your opinion?”

  “It’s not my duty to have an opinion.”

  She nodded and went to Blok’s room. He slept with his mouth open, his face bruised and lined with pain. She shook him gently.

  “Hmmm…what?”

  “Blok, listen carefully. At eleven fifteen, that’s just half an hour from now, I want you to go outside. Go to the nearest alarm and push the Abandon button. Do you understand me?”

  “Abandon?” he asked groggily. “What’s happening? Why—”

  “You must trust me, Do not let anyone or anything keep you from doing this.”

  He sat up, holding his neck and twisting his head to pop the vertebrae. “They’re going to burn the dome, aren’t they?”

  “Don’t ask questions. Be a soldier. Will you do this for me?”

  “Yes, but—”

  She touched his lips with one finger. “Once you’ve sounded the alarm, if you can…see that Valentin gets out alive. If you can.”

  “Your lover,” Blok said.

  Mayakenska shrugged.

  “Ah, my colonel, you have such a weakness for lost children. I’ll do what I can.”

  She left him.

  “I’m going outside,” she said to Valentin. “I want to take a closer look at that rock. There must be no possibility of a mistake.”

  “I’ll go with you,” he said, reaching for a mask.

  “No,” she said. “There’s…another broadcast at 2300 hours.”

  “What difference does that make now?”

  “Everything,” she said, “must be as usual. Do you understand?”

  “All right,” he said.

  “The call sign is Taymyr. 2300 hours.”

  She ran for the airlock. Her legs, swollen and aching from the blood that gravity had pulled into them, would not obey her brain. She tripped over nothing and rolled into a soggy field of young spinach. She came up with ammonia fertilizer soaked into her coveralls and one ankle painfully twisted.

  She limped into the changing room, forcing herself into a suit and through the airlock. The wind was a genuine force now, buffeting her, throwing her weight onto the bad ankle. All she could smell inside the suit was the bitter tang of ammonia and the stink of her own fear.

  She fell down twice in the darkness. She could still see the lights of Frontera behind her, keeping her from losing her direction, but she could not find her ship.

  She bumped hea
dlong into something metal, squinted, and saw it was the American lander. Hers was not far away, then. She staggered on, and a moment later she saw the circle of light leaking from the porthole.

  Clinging to the side of the spacecraft, the wind ripping silently at her arms and legs, she pried open the cover of the magnetic lock. Her fingers fumbled the combination, cleared the memory, tried again. Every second, she thought, every mistake, could be the one that lost her her chance.

  The hatch opened and she climbed in, surrounded by swirling dust. She slammed the hatch and fell into the pilot’s sling, her fingers already snapping switches on the panel above her.

  Stop them, was all she could think. Further back in her mind she knew she might be too late, but she refused to deal with that thought until she had to. For now she only wanted to get to the Salyut, get on board, and stop them from firing the laser.

  Any way she had to.

  The computer released its hold on the countdown with 15 seconds left. She frantically punched in the parameters for the fastest possible ascent to the Salyut, stopping only to buckle her harness as the first jolt of acceleration shook the ship.

  The winds boiled around her, hammering the shell of the ship with rocks and dirt, threatening to destroy the careful balance of engine thrust and send her tumbling out of control. She fought the T-shaped pitch and yaw control for stability, trusting her dangerously atrophied instincts to keep her right side up.

  “Climb, you prick,” she whispered.

  The G forces leaned into her, sickening her, and within seconds she was out of the turbulence.

  Gently she took her hands away from the controls and let the computer guide her into a low, fast orbit. Lifeless, frozen wastes flew past the windows as she hurtled toward the sunrise, thinking, I did what I could.

  She wished she could believe it would be enough.

  EIGHTEEN

  KANE RIPPED OPEN the front of his chest pack and took out the Colt.

  The boy who called himself Pen of My Uncle shrank against the wall of the cave. “Oh shit,” he said.