Final Days

by Gary Gibson

‘The whole Array?’ Bailey frowned. ‘The only gate you need to shut down is the one leading back to Florida. Why the hell would anyone want to cut off the colonies from each other?’

  ‘Maybe he’s working for the separatists,’ suggested one of the others. ‘Maybe he’s one of them. Maybe that’s the real reason he was there.’

  ‘That’s not how it is,’ protested Saul, feeling a surge of panic.

  ‘But that is what the separatists want, isn’t it?’ Bailey demanded.

  The flat grey bricks, Saul suddenly realized, were explosives. Being knocked unconscious had made it hard for him to think clearly. Things were starting to come bk to him now, little recollections and fragments from over the last several days, but some if it was still disconnected, as if all the thoughts and memories gathered in his head had been knocked out of synch and were now struggling to reconnect with each other in the right order.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Saul, ‘if you reckon all you need to do is close down the Florida gate, ask yourself why Copernicus City was evacuated! Why even bother doing that, if anyone thought the Moon was going to be safe? Shutting down the Florida gate isn’t going to work.’

  ‘What the hell makes you so sure?’ said Bailey, his expression still disbelieving.

  Saul started to form a reply, then he stopped. I’m sure because I’ve seen into the future, he thought, and realized there was no answer he could offer Bailey that they might accept. He had Jeff’s stolen files, of course, but there wasn’t nearly enough time now to go over all of that.

  Bailey nodded, as if Saul’s silence were an admission of guilt. ‘I’m going to need you to give me whatever access code you have, and wherever the hell you got it from.’

  ‘Is that why you were sent here?’ asked Saul. ‘To shut the Florida gate down?’

  ‘No, the man we were escorting here was supposed to shut it down, except now he’s dead. We’ve only got one of the pair of codes we need. So give me,’ Bailey snarled through gritted teeth, ‘your fucking code.’

  ‘I will if you’ll tell me why your truck here is filled with explosives.’

  ‘We were going to try and blow up this end of the Florida gate with HMX,’ Peggy butted in. ‘With our guy dead, we figured that was the only—’

  Bailey turned to glare at her. ‘Peggy, what part of shut-the-fuck-up do you not understand?’

  He turned back to Saul, and slid his Cobra off his shoulder, taking aim at the prisoner’s head. ‘I won’t bother counting to five. Just give me your fucking access code or—’

  ‘Okay!’ said Saul, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Okay, I’m sending it now.’

  The colonel lowered his weapon as he received the code, then turned to one of the other soldiers. ‘Isnard, check it out, will you?’

  A trooper with a shock of red fuzz standing straight up from his scalp nodded, staring off into the distance as he scanned the information now arriving on his contacts.

  ‘They wouldn’t have sent only the six of you,’ remarked Saul. ‘Where’s the rest of your squad?’

  ‘We’re all that’s left,’ said the other woman, apart from Peggy, her expression grim.

  ‘The code’s legit,’ said Isnard. ‘But his authorization doesn’t square with his ID.’

  ‘So it’s stolen?’ asked Bailey.

  Isnard made a face. ‘Guess so.’

  Bailey grimaced and turned back to Saul. ‘Don’t even think about trying to talk your way out of this one.’

  Bailey turned to the surviving members of his squad and started giving orders. ‘Isnard, Jessup, take up positions over at the courtyard. Keep an eye out there. I don’t want to get caught out like last time, and lose anyone else. Merrill, take Dallas with you and get to work placing the rest of the HMX. Peggy, you’re with me.’

  ‘Before you do anything else, you need to listen to me,’ said Saul, his voice sounding ragged. ‘There’s a man named Mitchell Stone . . . he’s going to try and stop you from destroying the gate. When you grabbed me upstairs in the executive suites, I thought you were him, coming to try and stop me.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be the first to try stopping us, Mr Dumont, but we’re more than ready for trouble.’

  ‘That’s not going to be enough,’ Saul insisted, watching the others head off, which left him alone with just Bailey and Peggy. ‘This isn’t any ordinary human being you’re dealing with.’

  ‘Unless he’s driving a tank, I’m not worried,’ Bailey replied dismissively. ‘Right now we’re going to go head down to that terminal suite and shut the Florida gate down.’ He turned aside. ‘Peggy!’

  Peggy moved up beside Saul and pushed him back in the direction of the elevators, while Bailey took the lead, striding fast.

  At that moment a deep and almost subsonic rumble came from the direction of the Florida gate. It’s coming, Saul realized, breaking into a cold sweat.

  Bailey stopped, staring towards the gate, his face several shades paler than just a moment before.

  He turned back towards them. ‘Get moving,’ he barked, ‘now.’

  Peggy shoved Saul forward again, and this time they broke into a run.

  Bailey suddenly made an oof sound, after they’d covered a couple of dozen metres, before collapsing to his hands and knees. At first Saul assumed he’d tripped over something, but then the colonel slid to one side, his jaw slackening. Blood began pooling under his chest, and quickly spread out across the tiles.

  Peggy gaped down at him, her eyes round and wide. He’s been shot, thought Saul, realizing he had heard a sound like a wet cough from smewhere far away across the concourse, just before Bailey had collapsed.

  Peggy swung her Cobra all around, but there was nothing for her to aim at. If the attacker was Mitchell, he was thoroughly hidden.

  ‘We need to keep moving,’ hissed Saul, and began backing towards the elevators. ‘We’re too exposed. He can pick us off easily while we’re out in the open.’

  ‘No!’ she yelled, spinning around until the Cobra was directly trained on him. ‘Stay right where you are.’

  Saul glanced towards the barricades, fifty or so metres away, and saw Mitchell materialize next to Merrill, with alarming suddenness. He drew a knife across Merrill’s throat and the trooper collapsed, blood spurting out from his neck in a gruesome arc.

  There was no sign of Jessup. Already dead, Saul guessed.

  Peggy must have seen Mitchell too, for she fired off her Cobra, explosive rounds digging cavities in the tiled floor at the precise spot he had been standing. But Mitchell was already gone, speeding back towards the central courtyard and the deserted restaurants surrounding it.

  ‘Isnard,’ Peggy yelled across the concourse, her face twisting in panic, ‘where the fuck are you?’

  Saul heard more gunfire, followed by screams.

  ‘Peggy,’ Saul tried again, ‘if you want to stay alive, we need to get to those elevators now.’

  She glanced at him blankly, as if she’d forgotten he was there. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘let’s go.’

  They started running again, Peggy sprinting ahead of him. That subsonic rumble had intensified, he thought: it was definitely a little louder. He prayed that didn’t mean it was already too late.

  The door of one of the elevators slid open at their approach, and Saul allowed himself to hope that his lifespan might still be measured in more than just seconds. Then a shadow flew past him, slamming Peggy against the wall adjoining the elevator, and he then realized it was already much, much too late.

  Mitchell had one arm tight around Peggy’s neck. She uttered a small cry, like a bird, in the moment before Mitchell snapped her spine. As she dropped in a lifeless heap at his feet, he stepped back, his chest heaving from exertion. There was a Cobra slung over one shoulder.

  ‘So you gonna thank me for saving your life?’ Mitchell panted, wiping a forearm across his brow.

  Saul forced himself to meet Mitchell’s calm blue gaze. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he demanded. �
�Aren’t you going to finish the job now?’

  ‘Saul,’ Mitchell’s voice was almost gentle, ‘hey were going to kill you, is what it looked like to me.’ He nodded towards the departure area. ‘Didn’t you listen to one damn thing I said? We’ll be transformed, and so will the colonies. Then we can live for ever. I just wish Jeff and Olivia could have been here to share in it.’

  ‘You’re out of your fucking mind,’ Saul shouted. ‘Back there you said you wanted to kill me.’

  Mitchell laughed. ‘That was when I thought you posed a significant threat, but now you’re unarmed and defenceless. Look,’ he said, gesturing towards the departure area, with a radiant smile on his face.

  Saul looked, and saw a heat-haze like shimmer make the air tremble at the top of the escalators. The low rumble had given way to a kind of ululation, like the wordless moan of a million massed voices, and growing incrementally louder by the second.

  ‘If you’re not going to kill me, that means you’ll let me go?’

  ‘No, I want you right here with me, because I can’t take any chances on you doing something stupid, not now. Come on.’

  Mitchell stepped closer and took a grip on Saul’s upper arm. Saul tried to break loose and Mitchell yanked him closer still, twisting his arm behind his back, and then putting a stranglehold on him before pushing his face up against the wall.

  ‘Saul,’ he hissed in his ear, ‘be reasonable. I know you don’t believe me, but I’m genuinely trying to help you.’

  The ululation had begun to infiltrate Saul’s brain, like a score of icy needles working their way into his skull. He was finding it harder to concentrate, to even think.

  He realized that an icon was blinking in one corner of his eye. How long had it been there without him noticing?

  Seeing it was from Amy Rose, he activated the link.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Mitchell, stepping back while dragging Saul along with him, his other arm tight around Saul’s neck.

  Barely able to breathe, Saul tried to break loose, but the slightest movement sent shards of agony shooting through his shoulder. Mitchell was meanwhile dragging him towards the escalators, closer to the strangely shimmering air.

  ‘Saul?’ he heard Amy say inside his head. ‘Give me a sign that you can hear me. I can see you, but where is he taking you?’

  I’m not sure, Saul tried to reply, but Mitchell’s grip around his neck was too tight.

  Mitchell came to a halt. ‘You’re talking to someone.’

  ‘No,’ Saul managed to croak. How the hell could he have known?

  ‘Bullshit, you think I can’t tell?’

  He let go of Saul, shoving him down on to the tiles, where he sprawled helplessly, his right arm completely numb.

  ‘I can see you,’ Amy muttered inside his head. ‘I’m some way back, next to a fountain in a courtyard. I could take him out from here.’

  Mitchell checked the readout on his Cobra, then gazed intently across the concourse towards the courtyard. Had he, Saul wondered, somehow heard Amy over all that distance?

  If Mitchell had any idea where Amy was, she wouldn’t even see him coming.

  ‘Mitchell,’ Saul croaked, ‘there’s something I have to tell you.’

  Mitchell spared him only a brief glance. ‘Whatever it is, I don’t have the time,’ he muttered.

  ‘It’s about your brother, Danny.’

  Saul licked his lips and struggled to avoid looking at the courtyard. He wondered if Amy had picked up one of the Cobras; there had been plenty of them scattered about. Of course, she was getting old, but the Cobra targeting systems were designed to do most of the work for their users.

  ‘Jesus, Saul,’ said Mitchell, his expression almost pitying. ‘I don’t know what you’re up to, but this is low.’

  ‘I never told you the truth about him,’ Saul persevered. ‘He wasn’t dead when I found him. He was still alive.’

  Mitchell blinked and shook his head. ‘What?’

  ‘You asked me to try and find him.’ Saul remembered telling Olivia the same story back in Orlando, but with one vital difference. ‘Well, that much I did manage. I tracked him down, all right.’

  It felt like lancing a festering wound, with all the old poison spilling out in a rush. ‘He’d been left there to guard the place and, when I turned up, I tried to talk him into leaving with me. I told him I could keep him safe, make sure that no one ever knew he’d been involved. Instead, he tried to kill me.’

  ‘No.’ Mitchell shook his head. ‘That’s not possible. Danny would never—’

  ‘He was in very, very deep, Mitch. He shot at me, but he didn’t know how to use the gun properly. All I got was a flesh wound.’

  ‘You told me you’d been in an accident,’ said Mitchell, his tone numb. He had turned his back towards the courtyard, the Cobra dangling forgotten from one hand.

  ‘I killed him. To save my own life, I had to. I never toldat because I didn’t think you could handle knowing what really happened.’

  ‘You’re lying!’ Mitchell screamed. ‘You miserable son of a bitch, you’re making this shit up!’

  He lunged at Saul, enraged, locking both hands tight around his throat.

  Do it now, thought Saul, desperately pushing the heel of one hand against Mitchell’s jaw, to try and force his head back. The shimmering haze had spread, tiny specks of light like fireflies dancing everywhere under the high ceiling of the concourse.

  Saul heard a damp cough, much like the one he’d heard before Colonel Bailey had died, and Mitchell jerked forward. He stared down at Saul, his mouth hanging open with shock, and a look of utter disbelief in his eyes. He staggered upright, with evident difficulty.

  ‘You don’t know what you’ve done,’ he gasped at Saul, then sat down hard on the tiles. There was a dark circle of blood in the middle of his chest, growing wider.

  Saul pushed himself upright and grabbed hold of the Cobra that Mitchell had dropped. ‘I’m sorry,’ he wheezed, meaning it.

  ‘True?’ asked Mitchell. ‘About Danny?’

  Saul nodded. ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

  Saul peered across the concourse, and spotted Amy crouching to one side of the fountain.

  Mitchell nodded. ‘I wish . . . I wish things had been different.’

  Saul realized his own cheeks were damp as he levelled the Cobra between Mitchell’s eyes. ‘That makes two of us,’ he said, and squeezed the trigger.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Lunar Array, 11 February 2235

  Saul let the Cobra rifle slip out of his fingers and tried to make sense of the emotions warring inside him. There was anger, but also regret and sorrow, in equal measures.

  He turned away from Mitchell’s lifeless body and saw Amy Rose come jogging towards him. She was still wearing her spacesuit, minus the helmet, her grey hair tangled into knots. She bent over, once she reached him, hands resting on knees and gasping for breath.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Saul, and quickly made his way back to where Bailey’s body lay. He dug through the dead man’s pockets until he found the same keycard Bailey had deprived him of.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked, standing up straight again as he came back.

  ‘You saved my lifere damp as he said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It was a pleasure. Have you done it yet? Shut the gates down, I mean.’

  ‘No, but it shouldn’t take long.’

  ‘Good.’ She glanced uneasily towards the gate itself. ‘Do you need any help from me?’

  Bailey had mentioned that he had a second code, which they might have been able to use to shut the gates down together, but now that code had died with him, and they were back down to just the one code again. Saul could only hope it would prove enough this time.

  ‘No,’ he told her, ‘I can take care of it on my own.’

  Amy nodded, and sat down on the floor, with her arms resting on her knees. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll wait here,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty winded after all that running around.’

 
; ‘When I left you in the lander,’ said Saul, ‘I felt sure you were going to stay there.’

  ‘No, that was never my plan. I just . . . I just needed time to say goodbye.’ Her eyes glistened as she drew in a sharp breath. ‘Then I suited myself up and got out of there.’

  ‘Amy . . .’

  She made a shooing gesture. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Do what you have to do to fix things. I’ll still be here when you get back.’

  Saul nodded and stepped inside an elevator, watching her disappear from sight as he was carried downwards once more.

  Saul sprinted past workstations and conference booths, feeling the seconds weighing heavy on him as he raced for the second elevator that would carry him even deeper beneath the Array. The EDP information overlay slid back into place as he stepped inside, and a minute later he was running along the hallway towards Fowler’s office and the terminal room there.

  Once inside, he pushed the keycard back into the same slot he’d used before, and again entered the access code, quickly navigating through the menus.

  A message appeared, telling him there had been a remote-server malfunction. Saul interpreted this to mean that the Florida communications server had finally failed.

  ‘CONFIRM TO RESCIND TWO-PERSON ACTIVATION PROTOCOL,’ advised another message.

  Yes, Saul confirmed, working his way through several more menus until he found what he was looking for. He reached out with a trembling hand, and ordered the ASI’s computer systems to close down every last wormhole within the Array.

  ‘EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN PROTOCOL INITIATED,’ read a new message. ‘TERMINAL WORMHOLE FAILURE IN 1800 SECONDS.’

  1800 seconds: just thirty minutes from now.

  He thought about the flickers of light he’d seen dancing beneath the concourse ceiling, and wondered if even only thirty minutes was too long. An alarm began to sound, low and urgent, and he turned to run back through the main office and down the hallway to the elevator.

  Saul found Amy waiting for him when he stepped out of the elevator and into the main operations room.

  ‘What happened?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you were going to wait for me up on the concourse.’