Final Days

by Gary Gibson

  As the tremors began to abate, Olivia closed her eyes and remained entirely still for a few moments, waiting for her heart to stop beating like a jackhammer. Finally she slid off the bed and peered inside the bathroom; a glass had fallen to the floor and smashed, leaving a pair of cheap plastic toothbrushes among the shards. She grabbed a wad of paper towels and started sweeping it all into a pile.

  Suddenly she stopped. What was the point? The owners of this motel had already fled. People were clearly going to ground, or returning to their families, or else rioting in the streets when they failed to get answers from their governments and realized they had been abandoned. She stood up again, leaving the broken glass on the floor. It would be easier to move to another motel room instead.

  A few minutes later Olivia stepped out on to the veranda fronting the adjacent room, squinting up into the bright Arizona morning as she continued brushing her teeth. A single car whipped along the highway, doing at least a hundred. They had otherwise seen very little traffic since pulling into the motel, though there were reports on the news feeds of a sharp hike in road banditry and improvised roadblocks along Mexical’s disputed border.

  Olivia heard voices, and looked down to see Jeff and Mitch standing next to the truck they’d stolen. Jeff smiled up at her and waved.

  She waved back, as she thought about their reunion a few nights before, and the things she had learned since. A wave of grief and despair washed over her, and she stepped back from the railing before he could see her tears.

  When Jeff had phoned her from out of the blue the day before, it had almost seemed like hearing from a ghost. To her surprise, the first emotion she’d felt was anger that he had left her in the dark for so long without anything like a real explanation. He’d then told her that he was with Mitchell Stone, and asked her to join them both in Arizona.

  Arizona? She had been sitting in her kitchen when she received the call, her knuckles white where they gripped the table. ‘Why Arizona?’

  Jeff’s voice had wavered slightly as he replied. ‘I’d rather explain in person.’

  She caught sight of her own face reflected in the kitchen window, eyes wide and angry. ‘Why not just tell me now?’

  ‘It’s the kind of thing you really have to hear face-to-face, Olivia.’

  She swallowed hard. ‘Does this have anything to do with those things growing in the ocean?’

  ‘Well, yeah, as a matter of fact,’ he replied, a note of surprise in his voice. ‘It has a lot to do with them. You’ll be coming, right?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Jesus, Olivia.’ Jeff’s tone was quietly persistent. ‘You need to come. I didn’t pick on Arizona for the hell of it. Our lives are in danger and I’m trying to keep us both alive. Can you leave right away?’

  ‘But why Arizona?’

  ‘Remember the Roses?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘You mean Lester and Amy?’

  ‘Them, yes. We’re heading for their space-port.’

  ‘And you’re not going to tell me why, is that it?’

  ‘Olivia,’ he said, ‘we’re going to the Moon, on board one of their ships.’

  She started to ask why they couldn’t just go through the Array, then decided she didn’t actually want to know – at least not yet.

  ‘Did you see the news last night?’ she asked him instead.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘There was a press conference . . . the heads of all three republics, including Mexical. Tey said there was no way to stop the growths. They said that they didn’t know what might happen next.’

  She heard the sound of an engine revving, over the link, a voice muttering in the background. Mitchell, she guessed.

  ‘They’re lying. They know exactly what’s going to happen.’

  ‘How could you possibly know that?’

  ‘Well,’ she heard him reply, from a thousand kilometres away, ‘it’s kind of complicated. But you know how the Array allows for a certain kind of time travel?’

  Olivia had felt like a passenger inside her own body as she got into a car, less than twenty minutes later. The surrounding streets had been quiet, with hardly any traffic at all. Somehow she hadn’t expected that, given the recent news. Most people, she guessed, were just staying at home. Where else, after all, could they go?

  The car whisked her out of Jacksonville and on to a highway heading west. Half an hour later it pulled in at a regional airport and she boarded an otherwise empty hopper, spending most of the flight scanning through feeds that were all reporting on exactly the same events – the growths and the million and more people currently camped outside the Florida Array.

  Aerial video shots made the Array itself look like a space-age castle under siege. Black Dogs and sonar tanks surrounded the main facility, forcing the crowds back whenever they came too close. Sphere governments were meanwhile demanding the resumption of normal gate services, and once again condemning the Coalition’s monopoly of wormhole technology. There were even ominous rumours of war, and unconfirmed reports that some of the growths had already been attacked with nuclear weapons.

  She arrived in Phoenix less than two hours later, and soon located the hire car Jeff had sent to pick her up. He had already taken care of booking the hopper flight, with help from the Roses, since it was safer for her not to use her UP any more than necessary.

  The car transported Olivia through a busy shopping district, where she saw people going in and out of fab stores, or walking their dogs, while all around them public screens displayed constant images of something enormous and obscenely alien tearing its way through the skin of their world. She realized how people did the only thing they could in the face of such an enormity: they went about their lives the same as always.

  In that same moment it occurred to her she had not told Jeff about contacting Saul, and she could all too easily picture his look of hurt betrayal in response.

  Olivia rinsed out her mouth and went downstairs, finding Jeff and Mitchell waiting in the motel’s foyer.

  Jeff jerked a thumb towards the door adjoining the check-in desk. ‘I scoped out the kitchen,’ he said. ‘Found the refrigerator’s still running and they’re stocked up with eggs and bacon. Who wants to make breakfast?’

  A weary-looking Mitchell slapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’ll make the breakfast,’ he said. ‘See you both in the restaurant in ten.’

  Olivia stared after him as he strode past, the kitchen door swinging shut behind him. She was still struggling to process everything Jeff had told her, after he’d finished apologizing for treating her as he had. Pretty much anything seemed possible now that every day brought further news of growths, earthquakes and tsunamis. Even duplicate Mitchells were no particular surprise.

  Jeff laid his hands on her shoulders and gave her a brief kiss on the lips. ‘Holding up?’

  ‘I guess.’ She nodded towards the kitchen, through which could now be heard the clatter of pots and pans. ‘Have you told him yet?’

  ‘You mean what we discussed last night?’ He shrugged and smiled. ‘I figured we could do that over breakfast. Why? Changed your mind?’

  ‘About Jupiter?’ Shaking her head, she reached out to take his hand. ‘No, if anything, I’m even more certain that it’s the right thing to do.’

  Half an hour later, in the motel’s otherwise deserted cafeteria, she watched Mitchell devour a second plate of eggs before washing it all down with his fourth cup of coffee.

  ‘Sure, of course I remember Saul,’ he responded in reply to her question. ‘But it’s been a while since I last heard from him.’ He put down his knife and fork, and fixed his gaze on them both. ‘Why?’

  ‘I got in touch with him a couple of days ago,’ she explained, ‘when I was worried something bad had happened to Jeff.’

  ‘Where does Saul come into this?’

  Olivia glanced sideways at Jeff, and saw he was deliberately not looking her way, his lips set firmly in a thin line.

  ‘I asked him
to find Jeff,’ she said, turning back to Mitchell.

  Mitchell glanced from one to the other, clearly sensing a tension between them. ‘And you did this when? Before I called you, or after?’

  ‘Just after. When you called me, that’s what made me sure something very bad had happened.’

  Jeff cleared his throat. ‘I still don’t see why you needed to get in touch with him—’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Jeff,’ she snapped, ‘we already went over all this stuff last night. There was no one else I could ask for help, so what the hell was I supposed to do? I know you just thought you were protecting me, but I already told you it was the wrong move.’

  Jeff raised both his hands as if fendhis lips off. ‘Okay, okay, point taken.’

  ‘Just wait one second,’ said Mitchell. ‘How can we be sure that Saul is on our side?’

  Olivia stared at him incredulously. ‘Oh, come on. You know him as well as we do.’

  ‘It’s been a long time since I last saw him,’ Mitchell replied tightly. ‘You’d be amazed how much people can change.’

  She shook her head. ‘Sure, but not that much. It took me a lot of effort to even get him to listen to me. When he said he’d help, he was being sincere. I’ve always been a good judge of character. You must know that.’

  Jeff snorted in derision, and Olivia glared at him.

  ‘So he offered to help,’ said Mitchell, ‘but what exactly did he do?’

  ‘He went up to Montana to find Jeff, but he missed him by a couple of days. When he took a look around, he found the files Jeff told me he’d brought back from Tau Ceti. He didn’t know how to break the encryption on them, so I told him he should talk to a man called Farad Maalouf.’

  Mitchell nodded. ‘I know Farad.’

  ‘He went to Newton to look for Farad, but that was the last I heard from him. I’ve tried to get in touch, but no luck. I don’t know if that means he’s gone the same way as Dan Rush and the others, or not.’

  Mitchell drummed his fingers on the table top. Olivia guessed they were both thinking the same thing. She tried to pretend to herself that she wasn’t responsible for what might have happened to Saul, but the sense of guilt insinuated itself even more tightly around her, regardless.

  She decided to change the subject, more to avoid thinking about Saul than anything else. ‘I have a question for you: how do you know the ASI won’t target your ship before it can land? A rocket landing on the Moon won’t exactly be inconspicuous.’

  ‘Lester and Amy Rose have been running sub-orbital fights for nearly half a century,’ replied Mitchell. ‘And lunar flights for nearly as long. There’s no reason for them to be targeted. And, since Jeff used to work for them and still knows them both well, he’s been able to swing us a berth.’

  ‘People get hurt,’ remarked Olivia. ‘There’ve been accidents.’

  Mitchell shook his head and laughed. ‘Like we’d be safer staying here?’

  She felt her face redden.

  ‘Look,’ said Mitchell, pushing his plate aside and leaning towards her, ‘the VASIMRs are a proven safe technology. Even the Apollo Saturn replicas they fly are a hundred times safer than e originals. It’s not just that this is our best chance of getting away – it’s our only chance.’

  ‘And what about the people here? What about the billions we’re leaving behind?’

  Mitchell shook his head. ‘There’s nothing you can do for them.’

  Olivia felt her muscles tense in horror. ‘That’s a pretty callous statement, isn’t it?’

  ‘Jeff’s told you what happened to me, right?’ asked Mitchell. ‘About how they found me, and how they brought me back here.’

  ‘He said that . . . that there are two of you, and you’re the one they brought back from the near future.’

  ‘If you look at it from my perspective,’ he said, ‘all this happened a long time ago. The fact is, you can’t mourn what you can’t change.’

  Olivia fought to control her anger. She glanced at Jeff and saw the warning look on his face, and realized she was obviously close to blowing up.

  ‘Tell him now,’ she said to Jeff. ‘Tell him what we decided last night.’

  Mitchell frowned. ‘Tell me what?’

  Jeff hesitated, clearly caught off guard, then he reached out and put one hand over hers. She wondered if that meant he’d finally decided to forgive her for getting in touch with Saul.

  ‘I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you,’ he said to Mitchell. ‘We’re not going to the Moon.’

  Mitchell sat back and glanced between them. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Just think about it,’ Jeff continued. ‘Say all three of us went up there together, that only puts us on the surface of the Moon, not even inside Copernicus City or the Lunar Array itself. That means a further trek across the Moon’s surface from our landing site to either one or the other, which means we’d still have to figure out some way to get inside. And you’ve already failed once yourself, which is why you wound up in the cryogenics lab in the first place.’

  Mitchell nodded, and Olivia had the uncanny sense he was relieved. She found herself wondering if it was just the strangeness of what had happened to him that made her so uneasy, or if it was something else – something she couldn’t put a name to.

  ‘So that’s it?’ said Mitchell. ‘You’re going to stay here on Earth, and just wait until the end?’

  ‘No.’ Jeff shook his head emphatically. ‘You’re forgetting about the outer-system research colonies. The older ones have their own dedicated arrays up north, including the Jupiter platform.’/p>

  ‘And that’s where you want to go? Back to Jupiter?’

  ‘Even if we managed to get past all the heavy security, all the way through the Lunar Array to the colonies,’ said Olivia, ‘we’ve no idea how bad things there are going to be, or how much turmoil there’ll be or how long it’s all going to last. Especially if the same people who’ve been trying to kill us here end up in charge there. But we can be safe on the Jupiter platform as long as we sever the wormhole link with Earth.’ She shrugged. ‘Besides, we don’t know what things might be like on Earth, or on the Moon, in fifty years or a hundred, or however long it takes for things to get better again – if they ever do. After all, who’s to say the Earth won’t become habitable again? But, even if it doesn’t, we still have a fighting chance at building something new out there.’

  ‘Those platforms aren’t set up to be self-sustaining,’ Mitchell pointed out. ‘They constantly depend on supplies from Earth.’

  Jeff shook his head. ‘Maybe that was the case when you were still running security there, but things have changed a lot. The station’s grown enormously. I’m not pretending it’s going to be easy, or anywhere near it, but we learned a lot from building large-scale, self-enclosed habitats on Newton as well as the other colonies. We can do the same not just around Jupiter but out at Saturn as well. We have seed banks available, and the means to gene-alter anything we need to. That means we can farm oxygen and water from the Jovian moons and asteroids.’

  Mitchell sat back. ‘What about the people already there – the station staff? Have you been in touch with them?’

  ‘I already talked to Jacob Morello this morning,’ said Jeff. ‘He was working in groundside admin when I was stationed on the platform, but he spends most of his time out there now, and he says they can use both of us. Besides, both me and Olivia know the station inside out, so we know what it’s capable of.’

  ‘And don’t forget the Inuvik–Jupiter gate is a lot more isolated than the one in Florida,’ said Olivia. ‘They won’t be dealing with the kind of mobs Florida’s been getting – not all the way up in Alaska.’

  Mitchell gazed at Olivia, his pupils deep and blue and seemingly infinite. ‘What about me?’ he asked. ‘Are the Roses still going to take me on board, without you there to back me up?’

  ‘Of course they are,’ said Jeff. ‘We’ll all go to the space-port first, and help arrange everything. B
esides, they’re expecting us. They confirmed they had room for three, so they’ll definitely have room for just one.’

  ‘And you’re both absolutely set on this?’ asked Mitchell, looking back and forth between the two of them.

  ‘More so than anything else for a long time,’ Olivia replied, clutching Jeff’s hand more tightly.

  Mitchell sighed and stood up. ‘Then you’ll have to figure out how to get north. Remember, most of the flights to Inuvik are run by the ASI.’

  ‘Already thought of that,’ said Jeff. ‘Bob Esquivaz runs mission control for the Roses, and they have a sub-orb that can fly us out there.’

  Mitchell looked impressed. ‘Sounds like you’ve really thought this through.’

  Jeff stood up as well and nodded towards the door. ‘But, for the moment, we’re all still heading for the space-port. I’ll go pack our stuff in the car. Olivia?’

  ‘In a minute,’ she said. ‘There’s one other thing I want to ask you first, Mitchell. Jeff told me two of you were caught in those pits. What happened to . . .’ She waved one hand, momentarily unable to recall the other man’s name.

  ‘Erich Vogel,’ Jeff finished for her, stepping back from the doors and gazing at Mitchell. ‘I already asked you about Vogel, but you never gave me a straight answer.’

  One corner of Mitchell’s mouth twitched. ‘He’s not dead, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Then where is he?’ asked Olivia.

  ‘He went ahead.’

  Olivia frowned. ‘Ahead to where?’

  The corner of Mitchell’s mouth curled again, into an almost apologetic smile. ‘To the very end of time.’

  Olivia stared at Jeff, then back at Mitchell. ‘What?’

  ‘Look,’ said Mitchell, ‘the exploration teams went a long, long way into the future, but there are routes through the Founder Network that can take you much farther still – so far ahead in time that I don’t even know how to describe it. Except that it’s long after the universe, as we know it, has effectively ceased to exist.’

  ‘You believe this?’ she asked, looking at Jeff.

  Jeff shrugged helplessly. ‘After what I’ve seen during the past couple of weeks, I think I’ll believe pretty much anything.’