by Gary Gibson
‘It’s me,’ he replied. ‘Where are you keeping him?’
Albright smiled. ‘Don’t you remember?’
He did, of course, although the memory only returned to him at that very moment. Mitchell found he couldn’t tear his gaze from his younger self, his features soft and relaxed under the influence of powerful sedatives.
‘Do you actually understand why there are two of you?’ asked Albright.
‘Because when you brought me back here from that cryo lab ten years in the future, you brought me into my own past,’ Mitchell replied, finally looking away from the screen.
He could barely remember the ward they’d put him after Site 17; they’d kept him unconscious almost around the clock. Someone had rescued him – no, would rescue him – by breaking into the ward and half carrying him to safety, but for the moment that rescuer’s face remained an unidentifiable blur. After that Mitchell had woken up in a motel, alongside everything he needed to get himself to Copernicus.
‘You were delirious when they recovered you from the chamber of pits, but Eliza Schlegel made sure everything you said was properly recorded and transcribed.’ Albright glanced again at his desk. ‘Now, apparently you made reference several times to being ‘sent back’ to carry out some task.’ Albright leaned forward. ‘What kind of task?’
Mitchell licked suddenly dry lips. ‘I don’t remember ever saying that.’
‘Really? I can play it back for you right now.’
The picture on the screen changed to show the interior of a medvac unit. He now lay on a palette with an oxygen mask over his mouth, while Lou Winston passed a diagnostics wand over his body. Mitchell watched his younger self suddenly jerk awake on the pallet, ripping the mask from his face in a panic. A rush of words came spilling out, ones he even now couldn’t remember uttering, and his voice was filled with a terrible urgency. He had a sudden vivid recollection of grabbing Dan Rush’s arm, as they lifted him into the unit, but that was all.
Mitchell gripped the arms of his chair tightly, and waited for Albright to switch the recording off. ‘I don’t remember any of that.’
Albright shook his head. ‘We know you’re lying, Mitchell. The effects of long-term cryogenic storage are well known, and full rcovery of memory takes a week at best. You’ve been here longer than that, and perhaps you don’t remember everything, but you’ll still remember enough to answer most of our questions.’
‘Why does it matter to you?’
Albright laughed, shaking his head. ‘Now you’re just being obstructive. We have recordings of you claiming this task was given to you by the Founders. How is that possible?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why don’t you tell me the truth?’
Mitchell leaned back, staring once more up at the small constellation of lenses overhead. ‘How about I answer a question, but only if you answer one of mine. Is that a deal?’
‘We don’t do “deals”, Mitchell.’
Mitchell stared at him and waited.
‘Fine,’ Albright sighed, after more than half a minute had passed. ‘But I’m not making any promises.’
‘I know you sent unmanned probes into the ruins of the near-future Copernicus City, right?’
‘The same probes that recovered you from the lab, yes.’
Mitchell licked his lips, suddenly full of a nervous anxiety. ‘Did you send them into the Lunar Array itself ? Did they tell you if the CTC gates to the colonies were still open?’
Albright regarded him steadily. ‘There hasn’t been the time to make a detailed enough investigation. Certainly the Array looks half ruined but, as to the integrity of the gates, I don’t have enough clearance to know one way or the other. Now it’s my turn,’ he said, pointing a finger towards the screen. ‘How the hell did you get out of that secure ward and find your way to the Moon, in the first place?’
The corner of Mitchell’s mouth twitched. ‘You mean, how am I going to get out of there? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’
Albright stood up from behind his desk and walked forward to stand in front of Mitchell, his face red with anger. ‘Stop fucking around. There’s too much at stake, and the people who put me in charge of getting answers from you are starting to get very impatient.’
‘Whatever I tell you doesn’t matter a damn,’ Mitchell rasped. ‘You know why? Because, from my perspective, everything you’re trying to stop has already happened more than ten years in my past. The only reason you’re here, asking me these questions, is because the people you work for are too mentally limited to understand that one simple fact.’
Albright was breathing hard through his nose and, for a moment, Mitchell thoughhe might strike him. But, after a second or two, his interrogator took a step back, wiping his hand across his mouth.
‘You were in charge of interrogations at the Lunar Array, a few years back, weren’t you?’ asked Albright.
‘Sure. Right after the Galileo gate was sabotaged.’
Albright nodded. ‘And how did you know if detainees were telling the truth or not?’
‘We used infra-red cameras to pick up increases in subcutaneous blood flow, and voltage scanners that could remotely map brain wave functions in three dimensions and tell us whether or not they were lying. That the kind of thing you mean?’
‘You’ve already noticed we have the same devices here?’ Albright nodded towards the lenses suspended above Mitchell’s head. ‘You’ve also worked in the ASI long enough to know just what’s going to happen to you if you don’t start telling us the truth.’
Mitchell closed his eyes for a moment, remembering how, after waking in the motel, he’d managed to make his way through the Florida–Copernicus gate, only to be spotted by ASI agents on the lookout for him inside the Lunar Array. He’d found an airlock equipped with pressure suits, and made his escape across the silent lunar landscape, the great crescent shape of the Array rising to one side as he headed for the cryo labs situated further along the crater wall.
‘You want to know the truth?’ he said, opening his eyes again. ‘The learning pools remade me. They pulled me apart and put me together again, better than before.’
Albright frowned. ‘Learning pools?’
‘The pits me and Vogel got caught in.’
He remembered the sense of stark terror as the black, tar-like liquid had started to fill the pit all around them, and then that sense of floating in a timeless void. ‘When Jeff Cairns found me, I was still trying to understand what had happened to me. But one thing above all had changed: I wasn’t afraid of anything any more, not even death.’ He locked eyes with Albright. ‘Or anything you could possibly threaten me with.’
Albright stared at him for several seconds, then stepped back to his desk and swept his hand across it in a practised gesture. The desk’s surface dulled to an inanimate grey.
‘The next time we meet isn’t going to be nearly as civilized,’ said Albright. ‘Because there’s too much at stake. But I want you to think about one thing that’s been puzzling me, before we meet again tomorrow morning.’
‘What?’
‘You were the only thing still alive anywhere on the Moon or Earth, when we found you,’ said Albright. ‘Why you? Why would whatever wiped out every last trace of life everywhere else lve you untouched?’
Mitchell looked towards the window, and said nothing.
NINE
South China Sea Airspace, 28 January 2235
‘Tell me, you ever jump out of a plane? Go parachuting, or anything like that?’
Saul glanced at the man opposite: lean and sharp-faced with deep-set eyes, his head jerking slightly from side to side as the sub-orbital slammed through the stratosphere. Saul’s UP floated a tag next to him, identifying the man as Sefu Nazawi.
‘Once,’ Saul replied. His knuckles shone white where they gripped the padded restraints confining his chest and shoulders.
Up until now, the conversation had been distinctly muted, ever since taking off from
an airfield in Germany. Saul didn’t need a degree in psychology to know that he was the reason.
He glanced up front towards Hanover, who was leaning over the pilot’s shoulder. The two men were conferring quietly as the craft angled its nose downwards at a terrifyingly steep angle. They were approaching the endpoint of a sharply curving trajectory that had boosted them to the edge of space, before hurtling them back down towards the South China Seas, and nearly ten thousand kilometres to the east.
Sefu looked sceptical. ‘For real?’
‘Why do you ask?’ Saul replied, doing his best to maintain eye contact while the sub-orbital bucked and shuddered with profound violence.
‘Just in case we have to evacuate.’ Sefu barely suppressed a grin. ‘I mean, we’re a long way up and, with all those storms scattered around, we could get ripped to shreds before we reach the ground. It happens.’
‘Shit, yes,’ said the man next to Sefu. Saul registered that his name was Charlie Foster. ‘Did you ever see the UP footage from that guy who fell out of a sub-orbital? The one that came apart just fifteen minutes after take-off?’
‘I did,’ Sefu replied, turning to Foster with a snap of his fingers. ‘His ’chute failed, right? And his contacts kept recording, the whole way down.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Saul.
Foster nodded enthusiastically, gazing at Saul with an innocent expression. ‘No lie. Bastard screamed like a banshee right up until the end.’
Sefu noisily sucked air through his teeth.
‘Hit the ground so hard his skull wound up lodged in his ass,’ Foster added, shaking his head sadly.
Saul considered a variety of responses, most of them anatomically impossible.
The sub-orbital hit a fresh patch of turbulence, lurching like a truck dropping one of its wheels into a deep pothole. Saul drew in a sharp breath and wished he had something to cling on to, as the turbojets grumbled and whined in preparation for the last stage of their descent.
‘And there’s a reason you’re sharing this with me?’ Saul managed to say.
‘Well,’ Sefu replied, ‘I got the impression you weren’t enjoying the flight, for some reason.’
‘Me, I love turbulence,’ said Foster, his eyes wide and happy. ‘It’s like being rocked to sleep by Mother Nature.’
Text, rendered in silver, floated on the lower right of Saul’s vision, telling him that the sub-orbital was now only seven kilometres above the ground, having already dropped nearly fifteen kilometres in the last few minutes. The external temperature was minus seventy, and the air still thin enough to qualify as vacuum.
‘Now Mitchell,’ Sefu continued, twisting around in his restraints to catch the attention of the rest of Hanover’s task force, ‘that son of a bitch was in fucking love with jumping out of things.’
‘Fuck yeah,’ confirmed a woman further down the two rows of seats facing each other on either side the craft’s interior. Her tag read Helena Bryant. ‘I trained with him this one time, when we had to jump from about twelve kilometres up. He got to within maybe a half-klick of the ground before he even started to pull back up. Scared the shit out of me then, but the man was fucking fearless.’
‘Wing-suit, right?’ Saul guessed.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ she replied. ‘You know what I’m talking about?’
‘Sure,’ Saul replied, assuming an air of false bravado. ‘I even went on a jump with him once, years ago. He’d been daring me for months.’
‘You knew him?’ interrupted another voice over to his right.
‘We worked together way back when,’ Saul replied. ‘Somehow he . . . talked me into it.’
‘Why’d he have to talk you into it?’ asked Sefu. He was still grinning, but there was a shade more respect in his tone. ‘Because you were too chickenshit?’
‘Too sane, I think,’ Saul replied. ‘The dive was made from low orbit.’
That shut them up.
‘Real orbit, or sub-orbital?’ asked Helena.
Saul grinned. ‘Sub-orbital. I’m not that crazy.’
‘That’s pretty dangerous shit nonetheless,’ someone else said.
‘Sure.’ Saul made a point of shrugging, as if to say no big deal. ‘Maybe one in a thousand orbital divers wind up dead, but Mitch and me did it together, from more than twenty kilometres up. We used foam and Kevlar heat shields for the first five kilometres down, then wing-suits the rest of the way.’
Saul recalled the wide wings embellishing the one-piece flying suit. Rigid stabilizers built into each suit kept them from going into a deadly spin as they dropped down through the thickening atmosphere. At the time, he’d thought the experience might cure him of what had then been nothing more than a mild fear of flying, but instead it had made it much, much worse. He’d never even have agreed to it if Mitchell hadn’t been having such a hard time back then, coping with the death of his brother Danny.
Sefu waved a hand in mock dismissal, and several of the task force laughed. Saul felt himself grinning back.
‘So why the fuck do you look like you’re about to crap yourself?’ prodded Sefu.
‘When you jump, you’re in control,’ Saul explained. ‘Being on a plane isn’t the same, though, since your life’s in someone else’s hands. And anyway, it’s been a long while since I rode in a sub-orbital.’
‘Told you,’ said Sefu, looking around at the rest of them. ‘Chickenshit.’ They all laughed, but when Sefu gave him a grin, Saul could see it was much more friendly than before.
Confirmation of Saul’s temporary transfer had come through a few days after his interrogation by Donohue and Sanders.
Almost a week after his meeting with Donohue and Sanders, he’d made his way back through the Copernicus–Florida gate, reacquainting himself with the tug of full gravity and working at rebuilding his muscle strength in a government gym close by his apartment in Orlando. He scored himself some Bad Puppy – a milder derivative of loup-garou – and used it to steady his nerves and kill some of the pain still seeping through despite the medication he’d been given for his injuries. After that, he had hitched a ride aboard a military cargo hopper to an ASI facility near Berlin, where he’d then undergone a brief interview with Hanover in his office.
‘I realize that you knew Mitchell,’ Hanover had said, an operations room clearly visible through a glass pane behind him. ‘It’s too bad what happened to him. You should remember, however, that there’s a reason this is just a temporary assignment for you. Men like Stone are not easily replaced.’
‘I appreciate how that would be the case, sir,’ Saul had replied. ‘Can I ask just what happened to him? All I was told was that he’d been under some kind of secondment when he—’
Saul nodded perfunctorily. There was something distinctly glacial about Hanover’s manner.
‘Now, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,’ Hanover continued, ‘but you weren’t actually the first name I had in mind. In fact, why my original request was turned down remains something of a mystery to me.’
‘I can only do my best, sir.’
‘It’s more complicated than that. The members of this task force have a level of clearance that you don’t. They’re often engaged in highly classified work which you don’t need to know the details of.’
Saul guessed Hanover was digging for something. ‘It wasn’t my idea, sir. I was reassigned, and that’s all I can tell you.’
Hanover regarded him in silence for a moment before standing up and pulling open the door leading to the outer office. ‘You should know it’s my intention to file a complaint with your superiors. Not because of anything you’ve done, but because I’m concerned at the lack of explanation.’
‘Sir,’ Saul replied, standing too.
‘You’ll report for a final briefing at 0800 tomorrow morning,’ said Hanover. ‘I believe you’ve already been briefed on the essential details of our mission. We’re to recover ASI cargo hijacked from Florida.’
‘I was briefed, sir. Thank you.’
Hanover nodded, but his eyes glinted with suspicion. ‘Good. For as long as you’re with us, I don’t think you’ll need to worry about a lack of action.’
The sub-orbital started to level out just as an alert sounded. Saul pushed his head back, relying on the padded restraints around his shoulders, neck and waist to keep him from being thrown around the cabin like a rag doll. The back of his mouth felt sticky and hot still, with the memory of the Bad Puppy, and he found himself wondering if anyone else in Hanover’s squad was holding. Before long the engines kicked in, sending powerful vibrations rattling through his bones in the moments just before they made their final approach.
‘Everybody get ready to move out!’ Hanover yelled, pulling himself out of his own restraints before heading for the rear hatch. Saul glanced in the direction of the cockpit and caught sight of jungle silhouetted against star-speckled blackness, as they scrambled to disembark.
They dropped down one by one into humid darkness, milling around the small forest clearing in which the sub-orbital had landed on its powerful VTOL jets. The subtropical heat seeped in through Saul’s suit, enveloping his skin like a warm blanket and carrying with it unidentifiable scents. The black outline of a mountain rose to one side; the gentle rush of a river was audible somewhere se by.
The briefing earlier that morning had involved detailed orbital maps of a region in the central mountains of Taiwan, an island nation south of the coast of mainland China. Dozens of villages lay dotted around the slopes and lowlands, most of them accessible only by narrow, winding roads. Industrial compounds and mining operations, mostly abandoned and half swallowed up by the jungle, stood along the banks of every river. A few had been reclaimed by paramilitary groups left over from the days of the Hong Kong blockades, the majority of which continued to enjoy a profitable business partnership with the Tian Di Hui. Given that they were operating deep inside a Sphere-aligned nation, their mission was by necessity a covert one.
Saul first checked his Cobra’s fire parameters, then adjusted the temperature control of his suit until he felt more comfortable. He wasn’t quite the outright object of suspicion he had been when they set out, but he didn’t let himself forget that whoever had tipped off the hijackers was almost certainly standing just a few feet away.
