Trinity's Fall

by P A Vasey

  One of the shooters noticed that he was being filmed and walked toward the camera. The person behind the phone was pleading, begging, but still continued to film. The shooter was seen in close-up, his face showing no emotion, no rage, fear – nothing. His skin was greyed, his mouth open with lips slightly parted and his eyes as wide as they could stretch. Some emotion, some feeling seemed to change his expression, but it disappeared before I could identify it. It was like reaching desperately for an escaped balloon, the string dangling so tantalizingly close but the wind pushes it away and it’s lost forever.

  Then he brought the weapon up and fired. The picture jumped and went dark.

  Harvey paused the video, and I closed my eyes, aware that I’d been holding my breath.

  “Oh my god,” I said.

  “Those shooters were on the president’s security detail,” said Harvey. “Impeccable backgrounds, young families, no red flags.” He paused. “They killed thirty-four people before the army took them down.”

  “Vu-Hak,” I said. “In human bodies.”

  He nodded soberly. “There was no warning. Apparently they were doing their job right up until they ‘turned’.”

  Hamilton spoke up, his voice tight. “Why this particular building? What were they doing there?”

  Cole shrugged. “It’s one of the FBI’s administrative offices. There’s many scattered around the country.”

  The screen had frozen on the face of the shooter. Eyes now burning with anger in a face that a moment ago had been as blank as a canvas waiting for a painter’s inspiration.

  “They’re looking for information,” I said. “Specifically, the whereabouts of Adam Benedict.”

  “And your whereabouts,” said Stillman.

  “This has been happening around the country,” said Harvey, his voice a little shaky. “Break-ins at the White House, FBI offices in New York, CIA at Langley. Multiple perps, indiscriminate deaths, every one unconnected, and yet connected.”

  “They’re not hiding anymore,” said Stillman.

  SIXTEEN

  Stillman and I had booked under false names in to Brisbane’s W Hotel, a trendy modern high-rise with a glass facade overlooking the river in the CBD. I sat on the couch and peered through the curved windows out onto the city’s south bank, where there was one of those sightseeing carousel wheels (or ‘Eyes’) that every city now seems to have. A few passenger ferries buzzed up and down the river at speeds far greater than they should have been able to. These were the CityCats, jet-powered passenger boats that actually looked like a lot of fun from where I was sitting. However, I doubted if I would get to do any touristy stuff.

  I’d spent the day in a fabulously comfortable bed with a selection of pillows that seemed to be designed specifically for me. I awoke after nine hours of dreamless sleep to a sky the sun had dyed pomegranate pink. The beauty of the sunset only intensified my pain. People were dying, and it might be because of me. I glared at the mocking swirls of color, the whites of my eyes looking pinker in the sunset’s reflection through the glass.

  There was a quiet buzz from the door. Then two, followed by three more. Stillman’s code.

  I pulled the robe tightly around me and went over, standing by the door’s side and not looking through the peephole.

  “Hello?” I said softly and with a fair amount of trepidation.

  The voice that returned was hers. “Remember tonight …” she said.

  I smiled. The quote was Dante, and what we had agreed.

  “For it is the beginning of always,” I replied.

  “Great, so open the fucking door.”

  I undid the latch, pulled the chain through the sneck and furtively opened it. Stillman was standing there, also in her robe, hair wet from the shower. She looked up and down the corridor before entering.

  “Sleep okay?” she said.

  “Actually not bad,” I replied. “Considering.”

  She nodded and wandered over to the chaise longue by the window. She picked up one of the magazines and flicked through a couple of pages. Adverts for perfume, impossibly skinny models in clothes no one would ever be seen wearing in the real world, a picture of Roger Federer with a humungous watch on his wrist. The sort of crap I’ve seen in every hotel room I’ve ever been in.

  I folded my arms and waited.

  “We’ve got a couple of hours,” she said eventually. “I think we need to change your appearance.”

  I grunted. “I like a dress-up. Do I get a wig, like yours?”

  “Ha, no. Remember, the Vu-Hak are predominantly looking for you. Looking, being the operative word. They aren’t in your head, and you seem to have a way of preventing them getting access. So I think we should at least narrow the odds of you being recognized on the street.”

  “What d’you have in mind?” I said.

  Her eyes crinkled and she reached into the pocket of her robe and brought out a pair of scissors and a bottle of brunette hair dye.

  I groaned.

  I barely recognized the face in the mirror. We’d found an electric razor in the drawer and Stillman had licked her lips and gone to work. She’d shaved the back of my head and cut the top and sides into a severe bob like something Lisbeth Salander would rock. Then she’d dyed my blonde locks a deep brunette, and she was now sitting in front of me putting the finishing touches to the edges.

  “Maybe a dragon tattoo on my neck, just here?” I said, tracing an outline from my shoulder blade to my jaw.

  “It’s not bad, you know,” she said, pouting. “Really, I’ve missed my calling. I used to do all my brothers’ hair when they were kids. Got so good their friends started paying me to do theirs.”

  I nodded grudgingly as a mischievous thought popped into my head. “Did you do Matt’s as well?”

  Stillman stopped, scissors in mid-air. “Remember I’m armed with a deadly weapon before you go further down this road.”

  I broke into a grin but still raised my eyebrows and waited.

  She groaned. “Yes, look okay we dated for a while. A couple of years ago. But we both soon realized it was a mistake. He’s actually a really good guy. More like a brother, now, actually.”

  “Is he coming with us to Antarctica?” I asked.

  Stillman continued to work on my hair, snip-snipping and occasionally stopping to lean back and admire her work. “Yes. And that Harvey guy too.”

  “Why?”

  She put down the scissors. “Come on, Kate, think about it. They both know too much. We can’t leave them behind in case the Vu-Hak acquire them and find out where we’re going.”

  “Acquire? Is that what we’re calling it now?”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “‘Possession’? ‘Infection’? ‘Violation’?” Any of these would fit, I thought.

  Stillman started cutting again and murmured. “Perhaps it’s time to once again ask ourselves what we really know about this fucked-up shit we’re in the middle of?”

  I raised a hand to stop her messing with my hair. “We know enough. We know they’re looking for Adam, and therefore they’re looking for me in order to get to him. And there’re thousands of them …”

  “Yes, but let’s unpack it,” she said, pushing my arm down and getting to work on my fringe. “The Vu-Hak are here on Earth, but in the form of … what? Ghosts of a sort? In essence I suppose like how they’d existed in their own galaxy at their last evolutionary step.”

  I nodded. “‘Untethered consciousnesses’ I think Adam called it.”

  Stillman stopped cutting. “So how does that work, exactly? Are there some laws of physics that they’re breaking?”

  I’d given this some thought already. “I’m pretty sure a mind can’t exist, can’t think, without the physical structure – neurones and so on – to map on to. Think of the grey and white matter in our brains as the hardware. The consciousness is the software that runs on it.”

  “So, when your brain dies, so does your mind.”

  “Yes, absolute
ly. We know this for a fact. Think about what happens when someone is lobotomized or suffers a stroke. The hardware is damaged and as a consequence there’s nothing to support the operation of the software. So, at the extreme, when the brain dies it’s like there’s nothing capable of generating thoughts anymore. No consciousness. End of everything.”

  “Alright then: how do the Vu-Hak exist as ghosts?”

  “You’re thinking of ghosts the Hollywood way. The Vu-Hak must still exist in some physical sense. Maybe they’re a bunch of molecules floating around but non-randomly. They’re interacting through chemical or electronic bonds we don’t understand in order to remain associated and banded together as an individual entity.”

  Stillman took a minute to process this. “Well here’s the deal breaker. Does the Vu-Hak consciousness ‘die’ when the human it’s infected ceases to exist? Or do they just leave the body and go back to floating again?”

  That was a really good question. I pictured the scans of the Adam-machine and the structure in his head, which might have contained the hardware analogous to the human brain. Perhaps the consciousness – human or Vu-Hak – was dependent on some structure there in order to exist in a physical setting.

  “Supposing then, as the Vu-Hak mind maps onto the existing neurones in the brain of a human, it forms a kind of electric-organic bond with the human host. When the human is killed suddenly, maybe the complexity is such that there isn’t time to disentangle and leave – which dovetails with the fact that we haven’t yet seen one jump during a host’s sudden death?”

  Stillman nodded slowly. “That’s as good a theory as any.” She then looked at me, eyes narrowing. “They don’t seem to be able to get into your head. How is that?”

  “Whatever Cain put in here is acting like a sentry.” I tapped my temple with a finger. “The Vu-Hak on the airplane tried to get in and take over but I was able to stop it – at least temporarily. I’m not at all convinced that it’s a foolproof barrier, though.”

  “I hope you’re wrong about that,” she said.

  We were both quiet for a minute. Stillman sat back in the chair and looked at me in the mirror, admiring her handiwork. “Do you think Adam’s destroyed all the machines?”

  “They’re pretty indestructible. A nuclear bomb just peeled the outside layer off of Adam.” I picked up a brush off the dresser and started to tug it through my hair. “What if he’s hiding them at the South Pole and we’re just leading the Vu-Hak right to him?”

  Stillman looked worried but gave a quick shake of her head. “The embedded message from Cain was clear – Find me. Come to me.”

  “Yes, but the message was from Cain! A Vu-Hak! Who definitely was in possession of one of those machine suits.”

  Stillman pulled a face. “Do you really believe Adam convinced a Vu-Hak to help him?”

  “Maybe Cain is the Vu-Hak that was with him all the time?” I said. “You know, the one he said had died.”

  Stillman looked at me as if I was an idiot. “The homicidal, evil one? That one?”

  I racked my brain to try and come up with something that would explain everything, make logic of what was going on. A theory of everything. Something that would package all the chaos into a nice little box of order.

  “Cain didn’t act evil in the slightest. He’s implanted information I can apparently access as and when I need it, not when I want it …”

  Stillman picked up the thread. “When the portal opened, Adam went through and then nothing happened. The invasion didn’t occur and the wormhole stopped opening.”

  I paused for thought, then continued. “A week later, Cain appeared to me at Arlington Cemetery and gave me amnesia, while leaving cryptic clues with Hubert and you about ‘end times’ and such stuff.” I continued combing my hair, pulling the teeth through my wet bangs, trying to get used to the new look. “That was six months ago.”

  Stillman nodded. “Cain told us that Adam was ‘almost ready’ and that the survival of the human race was at stake.”

  “What’s Adam been doing for six months?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  She got up and walked to the mini-bar area, squatted down and peered in the fridge, rattled around for a few seconds and came up with two cans of beer. “Peroni Nastro Azzuro in cans. Never seen these before.”

  She brought them back over and we pulled the tabs together and clicked the cans in a salut. I took a big mouthful and sat back. Stillman took a drink herself before leaning in, our noses almost touching, fighting a smile. “Here’s to nice things in tin cans.”

  SEVENTEEN

  The USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23), a US Navy nuclear fast attack submarine, Seawolf class, cruised at a leisurely twelve knots on the surface of the western Weddell Sea, approximately twenty nautical miles east of the Antarctic Peninsula. Ploughing a white-capped furrow through the emerald waters, its smooth streamlined hull produced a silent, tidy wake in its passing. I was up on the external bridge at the front of the conning tower and the icy wind blasted my eyes, pinpricking my cornea with sharp particles the size of pinheads. My nasal hairs had already frozen over so I’d pulled up my turtleneck for warmth.

  The morning sky overhead was powder blue but there were grey clouds bubbling up and a watery sun was just visible on the horizon. Hundreds of icebergs littered the surface of the sea, creviced walls patterned with geometric shadows and the kind of whiteness that could blind you if you weren’t careful. They appeared static but were gracefully moving with the tide and ocean currents. Beautiful, but treacherous if taken lightly.

  In the middle distance was a snow-capped landmass with craggy rock formations sculpted over tens of millennia by the movement of glaciers, crashing ocean waves and howling winter winds. I peered through my binoculars and saw that the snow and ice stopped directly at the water’s edge. The shore consisted of a grey rocky beach covered in snow for a few hundred yards where it gave way to a vertical granite cliff. It looked like an inhospitable place, made even less attractive by a blanket of cloud pouring off the distant mountains like dry ice at a rock concert.

  “First time in southern waters?” said Captain Benjamin Powell, who was standing next to me, scanning the cliffs with his own binoculars.

  I nodded. “Pretty much. I was expecting the sea to be more … you know, frozen. There’s just all these little icebergs bobbing around.”

  Powell grunted and continued his lookout. His face had an angular structure, with high cheekbones, deep brown eyes and a tanned skin that betrayed his mixed heritage. I’d heard he was a serious man – ‘taciturn’ was the crew’s kindest description of him – with a ten-year history of commanding Seawolf-class nuclear submarines.

  “They used to call this ‘Iceberg Alley’ a decade or so ago,” he said after a comfortable silence. “There were tens of thousands of the buggers in those days. Polar scientists gave many of them actual names. After their kids, comic-book heroes, sports stars. Global warming’s melted most of them of course.”

  I gave a short, ironic laugh. “Well, we could start naming these new ones. You go first.”

  He laughed as well, a deep throaty noise, which had a surprising amount of warmth in it. He pointed at the nearest iceberg, a bluish-white snow-topped oval mass floating a few hundred yards off our starboard side.

  “I’m gonna call that one Caesar,” he said. “Take a note please, and prepare a report for your boss.”

  “Right.” I chuckled. My boss. Hubert. Who also happened to be Powell’s brother-in-law and the reason we were ‘passengers’ on a US Navy submarine in the Antarctic Circle.

  “I had a dog called Caesar,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Beautiful nature. Golden Labrador. Died a few months ago.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Was he old?”

  He shook his sadly. “No. Six. Hit by a truck.”

  “That sucks,” I said.

  It did. I remembered that I had a dog as well. A dog that was left behind when the shit hit the fan in Indian
Springs and I was given a false identity and disappeared for six months. I wondered what happened to her. I hoped my neighbor, who’d been looking after her, had just adopted her after I ‘went missing’. I doubted whether I’d ever be able to call and check.

  “Your turn,” said Powell, interrupting my reverie.

  I spotted a smallish iceberg, resembling a glacier mint. Strangely squared off and symmetrical, bluish snow sticking to its sides, the sun glinting off bits of exposed ice.

  “Alright, see that one over there? I hereby name it ‘Luna’.” I glanced up at Powell who was looking puzzled. I shrugged. “I had a dog as well. She was a cross between a spaniel and a poodle. Lovely girl. She … went missing.” Close enough.

  There was a clanking sound from behind us, and Matt Hamilton emerged from the conning tower hatch. Stillman had said he was one of the FBI’s rising stars, a high achiever who graduated first in his class and was on a fast track all the way to the top. He’d been on Hubert’s personal staff for a month before the Vu-Hak arrived and everything went pear-shaped. His history with Stillman, a brief romantic fling before settling into an easy, platonic relationship, needed further exploration.

  Maybe later.

  I noticed that he was wearing a Navy woolen hat and a big white rope cardigan. He’d sneaked off to do a bit of shopping before we boarded the sub in Hobart, and now I knew where he went.

  “Been to knot-tying classes as well, sailor?” I sniggered.

  He shot me a lopsided smile along with a single raised middle finger as he maneuvered into the space between Powell and me. He brought a steaming flask to his lips and took a sip.

  “Whatcha doing out here?”

  Powell ignored him, resuming his survey of the icebergs.

  Taciturn.