Long Fall

by Chris J. Randolph

  "An accountant. Someone who does math for a living."

  Shazz looked over at the shelf full of books. "If that's where he's comfortable, maybe it's where he'd hide things. In his numbers."

  Charlie nodded. He strode over to the shelf and started scanning the spines. "Dated and in order. Three months per book. Where should we begin?"

  "The date of Talia Reiser's murder."

  Charlie found the book and slid it free. He took it to Lee's desk and opened to a random page, then started leafing through until he found the spot. "Got it," he said triumphantly. Then he realized the smear of numbers meant nothing at all to him.

  "Ummm..." he droned.

  "Here," Shazz said. He pulled a metal orb out of his pocket, smaller than the desk version back at the office. His hands began to glow and he drew them apart, leaving the metal orb floating in mid-air. "Now read them out," he said, with a voice amplified tinnily through the orb.

  Charlie rattled off numbers, line by line, while Shazz did whatever the hell he did to his machine. Just when Charlie's jaw began to cramp, Shazz told him to stop. "I have enough," he said. "There's something encrypted here. I can see the pattern, but it'll take a minute to crack it."

  Shazz went silent and Charlie turned to guard the door, but he'd never been the patient sort. "Can't you speed that computer up?"

  Shazz continued to work with his lids closed and eyes visibly jittering behind them. "I've told you before, it's not a damn computer."

  "Yeah, yeah... I get it."

  "Nope, don't think you do," Shazz said. "The orb is like a notebook or an abacus. I'm the one doing the work."

  "Oh."

  "So, all this talking... how much do ya figure that's helping?"

  "Gotcha." And with that, Charlie shut his fucking trap.

  After a surprisingly short amount of time, Shazz said, "Got it."

  "And?"

  "He's involved. I think. There are reports here concerning the incident. It doesn't appear he orchestrated it, but he kept notes on protector response and search patterns. He said some things about you, in fact."

  "Really? What?"

  Shazz was quiet for a moment, then went on. "There's no reason for him to be recording such things except to feel out the enemy's defenses. Go get the current book."

  Charlie snapped to and grabbed the most recent volume from the shelf. He put it down and opened to the bookmarked page, and when Shazz gave him a sharp look, he started reading. When he reached the end of the page and looked up, his partner had a disturbingly human look of fear in his eyes. That expression apparently crossed interstellar borders.

  "He won't be back here today," Shazz said. "I believe he intends to set off some kind of weapon."

  "So someone got the mining explosives after all," Charlie said.

  "No, I don't think so. Something else. Something that terrifies him. And how strange... He addressed someone at the end. I love you, Sandra."

  Suicide bomber. Before Charlie could ask where Lee was headed, he heard a tone from his collar. A voice said, "All protectors, report to Birthing Complex. Riot alert. All protectors..."

  Charlie tapped the black communicator and muted it. "Yeah, shit's going down," he said.

  "We go to the riot, then?"

  "No," Charlie said. "Did he say where he was going?"

  "Nope."

  Charlie smirked. "S'alright... I've a pretty good idea where to take a terrifying weapon in this city."

  Chapter 25

  Age of Martyrs

  Gadfly sliced through the air accompanied by her drive fin's warbling. She understood the stakes, and she and Charlie were going to win. They pressed more and more power into their fin until the organ ached from the strain, while Charlie tried to hide how much he'd have preferred to be aboard Remmy right that second.

  Out beyond the sprawl of Amiasha'a buildings and the cover of its glowing ceiling, the first light of dawn had just come to the far horizon. It burned in shades of gold that seeped into the lifeless blue above it. Traffic throughout the city was out of whack, now quickened, panicked, and thrown into disarray. The people knew something was happening. The plume of smoke in the distance was warning enough.

  They'd all begun to live in a state of constant fear and expectation, like goldfish in an aquarium surrounded by shark tanks. Someone wanted them terrified before dealing the killing blow, and they were doing a fine job of it.

  As he flew, Charlie couldn't stop thinking about this attack. The shape of it was sharply familiar, and he realized it'd been palmed from Carbon Corporation's disinformation playbook. He'd seen techniques like these used against some of the larger separatist camps, but never a population this large. Never in a city teeming with millions.

  It could only be the work of Major Reyes. Charlie had heard of him soon after enlisting, and had even met him once at an unauthorized party. Rumors had painted Reyes as one of the most talented up-and-coming tacticians in the company, and the impression Charlie took away that night was one of thoughtfulness and carefully measured response.

  The fact the encounter left an impression on him at all was telling; they shared approximately five words over a pair of cheap beers.

  "How're we gonna find Maxwell Lee?" Shazz asked, his voice popping and sizzling around drops of water. They'd left the canopy down, and Amiasha'a warm rain started to come in torrents.

  "He'll be walking deliberately," Charlie said through Gadfly. "No one ever rushes to a suicide mission."

  As he spoke, Amiasha's central stock loomed ahead of them, its cortex bulging at the middle like a knot in a lean muscle. Gadfly ducked down out of traffic and sped low over the wide roads of the Core District.

  Pedestrians filled the streets, men and women on their way to market, pushing ramshackle carts full of food, clothing, tools and works of terrible art. Gadfly's numerous eyes provided a wide-angle view of them all, translating different kinds of information into patterns of light and color which Charlie understood intuitively. With her vision, he could see into and through the figures, watch blood pulse through the countless branches of their veins and arteries, and he saw the queerly slender bones that held all of it upright.

  The Yuon Kwon didn't always give their pilots so much info at once, and Charlie had always found dealing with it particularly challenging. A flood of data like this would give him a bloody nose and a raging headache after just a few minutes, but he pressed on without a second thought. He'd let his poor overworked brain burn to a crisp if it meant stopping whatever was about to happen.

  Maxwell Lee. Middle-aged with hair greying in streaks. Tall, skinny, awkward. Likely the most boring man on the street, by both Doctor Benson and the receptionist's description.

  Charlie sorted through hundreds of people walking below but found nothing. Not a fucking thing.

  Gadfly turned down the next street and continued the hunt, just high enough above to avoid suspicion. Protector patrols were a common enough sight, and anyone remotely familiar with the area would pay them no mind whatsoever.

  Charlie thought better of it. Dive.

  The two dropped and pulled in tight over the rooftops, then flicked on their external lights which swung through the falling rain like steel girders. The ship was now an unmistakable presence, and the citizenry looked up from under their hoods and umbrellas to see what was going on.

  Shazz said, "Thought we didn't want to alert him?"

  "Change of plan. Time's short, so I'm beating the bushes."

  Gadfly came to the end of that block and turned up the next while the groggy people below gaped up at them, dumbfounded. They pointed and gabbed and tugged at each other's shoulders.

  Then Charlie found the most boring man on the street, walking as if he hadn't a care in the world.

  "See him?" Charlie shouted.

  "Yeah."

  "Block him in," Charlie said. "You take this end of the street."

  Shazz said, "Roger," then stepped out of the moving Yuon Kwon. The alien angled his hand
s downward, and through Gadfly's eyes, Charlie could see magnetic fields projecting out like elevation lines on a topographic map.

  The alien floated gently to the ground, an extraterrestrial dandelion seed bobbing in the wind, and Charlie knew he'd absolutely never get used to that.

  "Clear the way," Shazz shouted from the ground. "Maxwell Lee, stop!" The last word struck like an artillery shell.

  Charlie and Gadfly zoomed to the other end of the road, watching their prey carefully as they went. The man had frozen in his tracks, his pulse remaining inhumanly even the whole time, and he showed no signs at all of stress. Could Charlie have been mistaken about a suicide mission?

  If he was right, there wasn't any time for doubt.

  "Everyone get back," Charlie and Gadfly said, echoing throughout the canyon of living buildings.

  The people stampeded away from the slender man, who remained still as an hour-old corpse.

  Gadfly wheeled about and set down, releasing Charlie the moment she was on the ground. He shook off the after effects of linking and found his mouth drenched in blood.

  He vaulted the Yuon Kwon's soft wall and then his feet padded down the chitinous street. He raised his right hand, aiming his thumper-clad fist at the frozen subject.

  "I know what you're planning," Charlie said hoarsely. "It doesn't have to be like this."

  He made eye contact with Maxwell Lee and saw only hatred, roiling like the dust clouds of inbound armor.

  Charlie advanced at a steady pace and Shazz did the same.

  Lee reached into his burlap coat and brought out a black cylinder. Charlie might have mistaken it for a coffee thermos in a different time.

  Charlie broke into a sprint.

  Lee brought his other hand to the top of the cylinder and cried out, "For man!"

  Time seemed to shrink. As Charlie rushed onward, he watched Maxwell Lee twist the cylinder's top and raise it upward. The tips of the fingers gripping it quickly turned black, bubbled, and lost their shape.

  Charlie fired. His weapon whumped like the beat of old-fashioned electronica, followed by the whining cry of a mourning dove. Flashes of light struck stomach, chest, face, hands. Maxwell Lee's body jerked back at the impacts like a blindfolded man in a batting cage.

  The canister tumbled free and spun in the air. He reached out with decaying hands while his body fell away, splashing to the ground like a popped balloon full of sewage.

  Still precious steps away, Charlie leapt. It was high school football all over again, his body thrusting from head to toe and propelling him forward, fingers outstretched for the ball.

  The cylinder's grippy surface touched his palm, bounced off his fingers, rattled between his two hands, and he he hit the ground shoulder first while wrapping himself around it.

  He slid a meter and came to a stop while the skin on the inside of his arms began to feel strange, almost like a hundred flees were nipping at him.

  Pain lashed across his arms, his chest, and he hugged the canister as tightly as he could.

  "Charlie!" Shazz shouted as he approached.

  "Stop right there!" Charlie slobbered around the words like a dog that needed to be put down. "No time!"

  "It's open?"

  "Yeah," Charlie said, all the while fighting against the convulsions that were starting to wrack his midsection. He didn't want to say the next part, but he said it anyway. "Kill me."

  "No," Shazz said quickly. "There's gotta be another answer. Just hold on, Char..."

  "Please," Charlie begged through gritted teeth, foam collecting on his lips. One hand began to drip down his body. "Please!"

  "But my kind..."

  "Will die."

  Shazz slowly blinked his eyes, and Charlie watched as a piercing light appeared between those small, antennae-like hands. It swelled quickly, from just a spark to a spinning mass of twisting electrical arcs. It swirled like a thousand cannibal snakes trapped in a snowglobe, hungrily eating one another's tails.

  "Shazz!" he screamed, the word bubbling in his throat.

  The light grew and grew, making a sound like all the aluminum-foil in the world being crumpled at once. The brightness blinded Charlie's eyes, and he thought, It was the only way. I'm sorry, Lisa.

  And then everything was gone.

  Chapter 26

  Impact Crater

  Legacy's network of transport tubes delivered Marcus to the conference room, and he proceeded to the head of the table. His three most trusted associates sat in metal chairs, while the numerous other seats remained empty. An apt metaphor for his fleet if ever he'd seen one.

  "Tell me what we know so far," he said.

  Alex Faulkland grimaced and spread several papers across the table. "The attack occurred at 0527 UTC, approximately ninety-five meters from Amiasha's central stalk. It was carried out by a lone human subject who'd infiltrated the city's inter-species outreach program. We don't have much to go on yet, but we believe he was working for the New Union."

  Faulkland pulled out a picture of the street from overhead, and the image was simultaneously replicated on the wall. It showed a ten meter circle that had been chewed out of Amiasha's shining surface, while the façades of nearby buildings appeared to be melting like ice castles in early March.

  Faulkland went on. "The weapon was an unknown destructive agent dispersed from a nondescript canister. The delivery device has not yet been recovered."

  Marcus looked down at the picture, and a very sour feeling spread in his gut. "No need to be coy, Alex. This is our technology."

  Juliette St. Martin nodded grimly. "The effects are consistent with digestion by omnibodies. But they're not programmed to act indiscriminately like this. They're eating everything in reach, reducing it to minerals and amino acids."

  "Someone's managed to weaponize them," Faulkland said.

  Marcus turned. "Vijay, how quickly can we expect it spread?"

  Vijay Rao looked disquieted. He spun his chair back and forth and fiddled with his fingers nervously. Unlike the others, he'd never taken to a uniform, and instead wore a replica of his favorite clothes from home. His button-up shirt was white with beige plaid, and he wore corduroy pants in a matching color, every last tuck and fold executed with meticulous precision.

  "Difficult to calculate," Rao said. "It'd depend on their navigation routines and replication rates. I can't make an accurate prediction without samples."

  "Ballpark?"

  Rao reached across the table and snatched up the photos. "Based on this, a few meters an hour at first. If the engineers weren't idiots... not such a big if, really... that'll accelerate quickly. The entire city could be liquified in a few days. Maybe a week at the outside. The survival rate will likely be less than one-percent unless they evacuate immediately."

  There was simply no way to evacuate a population that size with winter approaching. Marcus felt ghoulish when he next spoke. "It should be moving faster than that. How large was the initial infection?"

  Faulkland pulled another pair of pages from his report. "Minimal, thanks to efforts on the ground. The attack was obstructed by a pair of Amiasha's Civil Protectors... a Sey Chen alien named Shazz, and his human partner, Carlos Hernandez. Mr. Hernandez didn't survive the encounter."

  Marcus' eyes went wide. "Carlos as in Charlie? Jack's brother?"

  "Um," Faulkland said. He leafed back through his papers and pulled out a personnel file with attached photo.

  A moment later, the image came up on the wall and Marcus' breath caught in his throat. It took him a few long seconds to realize it wasn't a photo of Jack Hernandez. The man was stockier and cleanly shaven, but the resemblance was unmistakable.

  "Son of a bitch," Marcus said quietly and to the side. Every time he looked up, he found himself just a little further behind the eight-ball.

  "How could the Eireki fail to safeguard against something like this?" St. Martin asked angrily.

  Marcus was glad for the change of subject. "They never had to. The Eireki and Nefrem used sim
ilar technologies, and their versions of omnibodies protected against one another. As for internal threats, they simply weren't a factor."

  The room was silent. He added, "So... Thanks to our stunning lack of forethought, Amira's little petri dish has cancer. I need remedies."

  "That's going to be difficult," St. Martin said. "Our sources in the Arkangel Compact say the entire city is in a panic. Everyone is suspicious of one another, and they trust us even less."

  Marcus' expression hardened. "That doesn't matter right now. Let's figure out the cure first, and we'll deal with anything else when we get to it. Could we use our own omnibodies to fight off the infection?"

  "Possibly," St. Martin said. "But what if the rogue strain's programming is viral? We could just heap more fuel on the fire."

  "How about excision?" Faulkland asked. "We bring a Humboldt in and train fire on the wound."

  St. Martin shook her head. "Might slow it down, but unless we eliminate every last one, the infection will continue to spread. There are probably millions in the wound already, and who knows how many more beyond."

  Marcus latched onto the cancer metaphor, and he remembered his history books. "How about some kind of chemo therapy? What's toxic to omnibodies that Amiasha's body could tolerate."

  Rao said, "Nothing we know of. They're very durable, even by Eireki standards." He stroked his chin for a moment. "I think I can slow them down, though."

  "Don't leave me hanging, Veej."

  "Well, I don't know their movement patterns, but I'd bet they still use the same pathfinding pheromones as ours. We disrupt that network and their progress should stall. For a little while, at least."

  "How do you know that won't just speed them up?" St. Martin asked.

  Rao smiled toothily. "Whatever they're programmed to do is no doubt highly optimized, and any change is likely to be in our favor."

  "Alright, let's consider that stage one, which should buy us time for stage two. Gimme a stage two." Marcus fluttered his fingers and looked at the others as they flipped through their notebooks and files. "Anyone?" he said.

  Nothing.

  Marcus thought back through the conversation and stopped, while pale yellow light came to his eyes. "Juliette, you worried the rogue omnibodies might be able to reprogram ours. Could the reverse be true?"