Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

Kane ignored him, The gun completed a neural circuit, and he could see one step further ahead. First the circuit board and then, he knew, the rest would come to him.

  He circled toward the ladder, and the boy scurried away toward the opposite side of the cave.

  Someone was already climbing toward him.

  Kane eased back into the darkness, the gun in front of him, his gloved finger snug in the trigger guard.

  “Kane?” said Takahashi. “Kane, are you up here?”

  “Come on up,” Kane said. “Move slowly and don’t do anything to make me nervous.”

  Takahashi clambered up onto the catwalk and stood uneasily, keeping his hands away from his body. He was sweating and his nostrils flared with suppressed tension. Kane had never seen him so nearly out of control.

  “You okay?” Takahashi said.

  “Okay?” Kane asked. “Okay? What the fuck do you think, man? You and my uncle have been using me like I was one of the robots out of his factory. You move me around like a piece of furniture, you even try to reprogram my fucking brain, and you ask me if I’m okay?”

  “Easy,” Takahashi said. “You think I set you up for this?”

  “You knew about it. You spent nine months in your rowing machine, knowing they were still alive up here, knowing about that goddamned circuit in my head, knowing about this machine that…that scrambled Reese and just blew him away…” His metabolism was devouring itself. He mopped sweat from his forehead and wiped at his running nose.

  Takahashi was not much better off. His eyes kept flickering toward the figures moving below them. “You were dying. The implant operation saved your life.” His sincerity was urgent, frightened. “As to the programming that went in it, that’s Morgan’s doing.”

  “What’s the difference? I’ve seen your file. That whole corporate loyalty thing. Morgan owns you just as much as he does me, only he doesn’t need any chips in your brain to do it.”

  “Kane. There isn’t much time…”

  Kane turned the gun so that the dim light rolled and shimmered off the metal. “Right now all you’ve got is the time I let you have. I could kill you right now.”

  “I’m not your enemy, Kane. Neither is the company.”

  He had shifted into a sudden, intense calm that Kane found more frightening than his earlier display of nerves.

  “In Japan,” Takahashi said, “the company was my mother and father. You think Pulsystems is big in Houston, but that’s nothing compared to Japan. It was the Japanese division that supported the entire corporation for the last ten years.

  “And over there we didn’t just work for a paycheck. The company fed me and gave me my house and clothes and car, and it gave me something to believe in and work for and devote myself to. Morgan doesn’t do that. Morgan is an egotistical, devious incompetent.”

  Kane’s gun hand began to tremble. Bright filaments of pain glowed inside his skull and sweat ran down the sides of his chest. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m loyal to the company, not to Morgan. There are factions that believe this transporter and this antimatter power grid are too valuable to let Morgan have. They got me onto this mission to protect them, and when I get back Morgan will be replaced. As soon as they can find a successor that the Board will accept.”

  “Successor?”

  “Don’t play coy with me. You know who I’m talking about.”

  “I don’t…”

  “You’ve wanted it all along. You’ve been maneuvering yourself toward it since your first summer job in the mail room. And Morgan knew it. He’s used the implant to keep you down since North Africa, and he sent you up here because he didn’t think you’d ever come back, or if you did you wouldn’t be in any position to fight him.”

  “Maybe he’s right. This thing in my head…”

  “Once this is over with, once the program has terminated, it won’t make any difference. You can just leave the current ROM in there, or you can make it work for you.”

  “How? What are you talking about?”

  “You could set up a direct brain link to the Pulsystems computers, and access all their storage. You could expand your mental powers, your senses. The possibilities are endless.”

  Kane rubbed his sweaty, throbbing forehead with the glove of his left hand. “You’re an optimist, Takahashi. First we have to live through tonight, and the Russians…”

  “There’s more than the Russians to worry about. Curtis is out of his mind, and he’s down there right now trying to start World War III.”

  “Curtis,” Kane said.

  “With him out of the way, we can take the panel and get back to Houston. Then nothing can stop us.”

  “The Return,” Kane said.

  “What?”

  “The Pattern, man, the life-enhancing Return…”

  “Forget this pattern shit. There’s no time.” Takahashi’s calm was visibly eroding. “Stop Curtis. Get the panel. You’ve got to be the one to do it. You’ve got the gun, the reflexes, all that berserker shit they taught you in the mercenaries. I’ll tell the Russians we’re ready to deal, stall them long enough for us to get to the ship and get out of here.”

  “That is the Pattern, man. Slay the monster and return with the Ultimate Boon. That is the Pattern.”

  Takahashi looked as if he wanted to smash the wall with his fists. He’s starting to believe what I said about the implant, Kane thought. He really is starting to believe I’ve lost it.

  “I’m sorry, Kane,” Takahashi said, “I didn’t want it to be like this. But I can’t take him all by myself. None of us can.”

  “What are you—” Kane said, but Takahashi had already closed his eyes and begun to recite.

  “‘When I am grown to man’s estate/I shall be very proud and great/And tell the other girls and boys/Not to meddle with my toys.’”

  Kane was paralyzed. Part of his brain recognized the nursery rhyme his uncle had read to him as a child, before his father died, but another, distinct part read the words as a lock reads a key and opened under them.

  He watched as his left hand wrapped around his right, steadying his grip on the pistol, both thumbs cocking the hammer, a shining, live cartridge moving into line with the barrel.

  Program, he thought, watching helplessly as his feet took him toward the ladder. Last-ditch program. Takahashi. Bastard. Didn’t believe I could do it.

  He put one foot onto the ladder, carefully brought his left hand from the Colt to the railing.

  He took a second step, and a third. His shoulders were level with the floor of the catwalk.

  A blast of sound nearly blew him off the ladder. He jammed his hands over his ears and the revolver fell into a pile of plastic sheeting below him.

  Alarms were going off all across the cave. Reese had drilled them on the three different sound patterns; this one, the shrill, one-note siren, was the signal to abandon the dome.

  He could think again, had some voluntary control over his body. But the compulsion remained, the driving, overwhelming need to point the gun at Curtis’s face, to squeeze the trigger, to watch him die.

  The alarm shrieked at him from less than five feet away, from a metal horn mounted on the catwalk support, battering him with sound. Frenzied, disoriented, he thrashed from side to side on the ladder, trying to see where the gun had fallen.

  He felt the slick plastic elbow joints of his suit begin to slide off the rung of the ladder and lunged for the handrail, but he was too late.

  He tumbled backwards off the ladder, his scream of terror lost in the maelstrom of noise.

  NINETEEN

  “THAT’S IT?” Curtis asked.

  “That’s it,” Verb told him. “Type .RUN XLAUNCH, hit NEWLINE, and the machine does the rest.”

  She looked eaten up inside, Molly thought, worse than she’d ever looked before. She stood near Curtis now, and refused to even look in Molly’s direction.

  Curtis turned away from the keyboard with a look of regret and picked up the phone. “You
still have the Russians on the screen?…Yeah, fine…Oh really?…What were they saying?…You what? Jesus Christ, you asshole, why didn’t you tell me you don’t speak Russian? Get somebody in there who does, for Christ’s sake, and replay those goddamn radio signals!” He slammed the phone down and turned to Alonzo. “Those fucking morons—”

  The Abandon alarm cut him off.

  Christ, Molly thought, momentarily stunned. They did it, they hit Frontera, they didn’t even wait for the deadline…

  She saw Curtis lunge for the CRT and knew her options had run out.

  Iain was half turned toward Curtis and didn’t see her until she was already coming off the floor. Her first punch caught him in the throat, and he went down choking.

  She didn’t have time to try for his gun.

  Curtis stood in front of the keyboard, legs spread. He was typing, carefully, one letter at a time.

  “Curtis!” she screamed, but her voice was drowned in the shrilling of the alarms.

  Curtis reached for the NEWLINE key.

  She had nothing to throw, no weapon to use but her body. She hurled herself at his legs, knocking him off balance, and as they fell over together, she saw his right hand come down.

  Curtis had fallen underneath her. She got to her hands and knees, saw green letters scrolling up the screen of the CRT.

  XLAUNCH was running. The metal doorway began to swirl with color, washing out the dark blue of the ceramic canister that lay balanced inside it.

  She got to her feet, felt Curtis’s hands close around her left ankle. Her right leg was free and she pulled it back, then drove the point of her toe between his legs, using all her strength.

  He must have screamed, but she couldn’t hear it. He thrashed and shook like a drowning fish, and she pulled her leg free and ran for the Japanese screen in the center of the room.

  “Molly no!” Verb’s voice, higher, louder than the sirens.

  With her gloved hands she grabbed the power board and yanked it loose from its connections.

  The voltage kicked her ten feet across the floor, sparks dancing in front of her eyes and smoke trickling from the forearms of her suit. She couldn’t breathe, but air wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to see…

  She pulled herself up, literally crawling up the side of the wall.

  The canister was still there.

  Thank God, Molly thought. That much saved; that many more that didn’t have to die.

  The dome, she thought. Had the Russians really done it?

  She couldn’t stay on her feet. She slumped to the floor, one foot sending the power board skittering away across the durofoam.

  The sirens wound down and the sudden silence hit Molly like a physical blow. She passed out for a moment, and when she forced her eyes open again, she could see Curtis moving toward her.

  “—the panel back in and we’ll have another go,” he was shouting to Alonzo. He had the gun again, and now he was looking at her. “And you, bitch, are going to die.”

  She put out one hand, tried to lever herself up. Her muscles had no strength. As her fingers clutched uselessly at the durofoam floor, she saw Verb, standing behind a row of machines, watching her.

  Curtis picked up the panel and held it under one arm. He brought the gun up, and Molly watched numbly as his elbow locked and his shoulder moved in toward his chin.

  Somebody stepped in front of her, and she couldn’t see Curtis anymore.

  “No, Curtis,” Lena said. “It’s over.”

  “Over?” Curtis, said. “They destroyed the dome, they killed God knows how many people, and you say it’s over?”

  Molly felt a hand pulling at her and managed to stand up long enough to brace herself against the rear wall of the cave. The touch of the fingers was strange, hesitant, and Molly looked over into the face of her daughter.

  “I’m sorry,” Verb said. The girl’s eyes were red, but she had stopped crying, “I screwed everything up. I just got so hurt and angry, and I…”

  “It happens,” Molly said, the words coming out a little breathlessly. “You’re just human, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know if I like that,” Verb said. There was a tension around her eyes, a distance that had never been there before. She’s growing up, Molly thought. She hasn’t got long now at all.

  “I know,” Molly said. “I know. And I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have kept anything from you. Whatever…whatever time we have left, I’ll try to do better.”

  “Okay,” Verb said. The pressure of the girl’s hand on her shoulder was strong, comforting. I can’t remember the last time, Molly thought, she touched me on her own.

  Curtis was staring at Alonzo. “Come put this panel back in,” he said, “while I watch these assholes.”

  Alonzo stayed where he was, behind the CRT. Molly heard the beep as he switched it off. “They’re right, Curtis. This is where it has to stop.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Curtis said, “I don’t fucking believe it. You’re going to just lie there and let this happen to you? I could kill you all.”

  “Not all of us,” Hanai said, moving over to stand near Lena. “One or two of us, but not all of us.”

  Curtis began to back away, toward the airlock. “I know what you think, all of you. You think I’m the Fisher King or something, that I’m all dried up, that maybe you can sacrifice me and get a new king and everything will be okay again.” He stepped into the bottom half of his suit, and then he had to put the panel down to get into the upper half.

  “It’s easy to blame me,” he went on. “But it wasn’t my fault. I never lost my faith. I always believed we could change this place, and I still believe it.” He picked up the panel again and held it over his head. “With this kind of power we could have started those changes months ago, maybe even years ago. But you kept it from me, you refused to trust me with it. But now I have it, and I’m going to build the new Mars I promised. And if you won’t help me, I’ll find somebody else who can.”

  “How many have to die first?” Molly said. She reached her right arm across and held onto Verb’s hand for just a second, then took a couple of shaky steps away from her. “We can’t build a new world and then turn it into Earth all over again, with factions and war and bombs…”

  Curtis’s expression was feral, crazed, a cornered animal’s. He put on one glove at a time, keeping the gun up and trained on the room with the other hand.

  “Even Morgan,” he said, “even Morgan would not be this stupid. He’d know what to do with power like this.” He grabbed a helmet and slid into the airlock feet first.

  The ship, Molly thought. He was going to take Reese’s ship.

  He could do it, too—any of them could; in an emergency, it would only take a single crewman to get the lander back up to Deimos, to refuel the Mission Module, to pilot the big ship all the way back to Earth.

  “Don’t—” she said, but the hatch had already closed, and the indicator over the door flashed red.

  No one else seemed to understand what was happening. They stood frozen in place, their shoulders starting to relax, Frontera forgotten, Curtis dismissed.

  Somewhere she found the strength to walk. She looked at the charred spots on her gloves, couldn’t see any serious damage to the suit. She pushed a helmet over her head and got a green telltale on her chest pack at the same time she started the pumps to fill the airlock.

  She looked back, saw the others starting to move, the fear taking hold in their faces, but she couldn’t hear them in the sealed environment of the suit. The airlock light went green, and she opened the hatch and got inside and slammed it shut again.

  The wait seemed impossibly long, but there were no thoughts at all in her mind, just an agonizing awareness of how slowly time was moving. And then, finally, the outer hatch cycled open, and she crawled out into a hell of blowing sand.

  Hydraulics drew the hatch shut behind her. She took a few staggering steps into the night, unable to see anything but the billowing dust in the light
of her helmet. She switched off the lamp and let the darkness close in around her.

  There, in the distance, barely visible through the storm, were the lights of Frontera.

  She dropped to her knees and held onto a chunk of frozen lava, weak with relief. There was time yet.

  “Hello?” she said into her suit radio. “Hello, is, anybody monitoring?” She fumbled with the switch on top of her chest pack and tried the emergency frequency. “Mayday, for Christ’s sake, somebody answer me!”

  No one there. Of course not, the alarm had gone off, they had abandoned the dome. She tried the short-range frequency again. “This is Molly, I need to get through to Mayakenska, is she there? For God’s sake, if you can hear

  me—”

  “Mayakenska is gone,” said a voice in her ear. She thought she recognized the voice of the other Russian, the tall blond.

  “Gone?”

  “It is too late,” the voice said. “There is nothing you can do to stop it now.”

  “No,” Molly said. She stood up again, lost her balance, and rolled four or five meters down the slope. “No, you have to stop them—”

  She looked up to see a line of ruby light, narrow as a spotlight beam, connect Frontera to the sky overhead.

  “No,” she screamed, and then she screamed again without words.

  It was not a spectacular death. Where the laser cut through a living module there was a tiny burst of flame, barely visible from where Molly lay; before the fire could spread, the carbon dioxide smothered it. The beam moved steadily down the length of the dome, then crossed it from side to side.

  Molly saw the Center explode, a brighter flare that sent glowing chunks of concrete into the dust and darkness. And finally, just before it disappeared, the creeping line of red touched the reserve oxygen tanks in the north wall and melted them in a hot, blue sphere of fire.

  She hardly noticed when the airlock opened and a single, suited figure came out, wearing an infrared helmet and carrying a gun in its hand. “Kane?” she said, but the helmet only paused for a second as its gaze swept past her, and no one answered. The figure bounded down the slope and disappeared into the swirling sand.