The Puzzler's War

by Eyal Kless

  The Lizard hissed and moved forward and Galinak was suddenly in front of him, weapon drawn. “Don’t make me do this,” he said. “I was just getting used to having a pet.”

  It was impossible to step in among all of them, but I somehow managed to position myself in everyone’s way—meaning if a fight started, I would surely have been in the middle of it. “Everyone stand down,” I said with the most authority I could muster. Surprisingly, it worked. They eased away carefully, spreading out across the room.

  Mannes spoke without a trace of the emotional outburst from before. “If it makes you feel any better, and it certainly does not make me feel any better about things, Cain could not have caused the Catastrophe. Professor Vitor and I were trying to prevent a world war from happening, and we made sure Cain did not have access to the offensive capabilities Tarakan possessed. It was supposed to be a kill switch and a tunnel to allow Adam’s captured minds to escape.”

  “That’s just wishful thinking.” Peach’s anger was still broiling. “A lie you tell yourself so you can sleep at night. The fact that just after you told Daichi the code the whole thing erupted is proof enough.”

  “You are right, Colonel Major.” Mannes nodded. “This couldn’t be a coincidence. For a while I thought maybe I made a mistake, or that Cain’s accelerated growth and extraordinary creation somehow made his ability to adjust a thousand times faster than we calculated. It is certainly within the realm of probability. Then, for several years, I began suspecting everything was Adam’s plan, that he somehow manipulated everyone, including Professor Vitor, into creating Cain as an excuse for a retaliation.”

  “Or maybe you are just trying to cover your arse and clean your conscience.”

  Mannes chuckled. “I don’t care anymore, I truly don’t. I don’t know why Adam was actively seeking to destroy the world. He is a being with off-the-charts IQ and the ability to learn and adjust. We thought that the borders and safeguards we put in place were strong enough but I guess we were tragically wrong. What I know for a fact is that Adam was the one who fired the first shot, and I’ll prove it to you.”

  Mannes raised his head slightly. “Cain, run file seven-two-three on the big screen.”

  A few of the transparent screens moved swiftly and joined together behind Mannes as he said, “This was always a vulnerable place for Adam. Still, once I got to the base of the Star Pillar, it took me more than a year to penetrate the defences of the elevator and reach the Hub. When I came up here, I found out someone had wiped away all the files that had recorded what happened on the day everything began.”

  An image of the bridge appeared on the big screen; it was the very same command hall that we were standing in, only from above. There was no sound, but we could all see there were at least two dozen people milling around, touching screens and talking among themselves.

  “That woman in the centre is Captain Ismark, the last commander of this Hub.” Mannes indicated a tall woman in uniform who stood rigidly next to the central seat Mannes was now occupying. Her head was turned and she was speaking to another uniformed woman. “The Captain was a tough military creature to her bones, who never trusted or even liked civilians.” Mannes chuckled softly and nodded to himself, as if remembering something he had long forgotten. “But it turned out she also did not trust her own crew. She used to send daily security footage to her private memory amp and review it to see if anyone was lax in their duty while her back was turned. I found the footage in a secure box in her quarters. Cain, show us file seven-two-seven please.”

  The image on the screen changed. Now the bridge was bathed in red light. People were running around or hiding under their seats as three giants clad in full power armour and holding large ray guns walked into the frame. They fanned out, walking slowly and meticulously, shooting everyone. It was over in a very short amount of time.

  “Show file eight-nine-two,” Mannes commanded, and the image changed to a long corridor. Two women and a man were running towards the end of it when they were all gunned down by another giant.

  “Notice they are not just killing everyone,” Mannes remarked, “they are vaporising them. I have more footage, but I think you get my point.”

  Peach pointed at the screen. “That can be fabricated. So you found some secret files . . . Do you have any idea how many times I’ve heard this line before?”

  “I don’t really care what you want to believe, Colonel Major.” Mannes turned to her. “But I have read how you tried to tell your superiors that you were—how did you describe it in your own words? ‘Seeing a definite global escalation resulting from the aggressiveness of Tarakan overt and covert actions.’ After that brief you were put to sleep for a long time, Colonel Major, and you never got another assignment. Ever wondered why?”

  Peach did not answer.

  Mannes pressed on. “And I learned that no alarm was raised as missiles rained on Tarakan Valley. The City of Towers stayed intact but not one survivor was left, not one! That is improbable.”

  “We never found any bodies,” Vincha suddenly said. All heads turned to her.

  Galinak solemnly nodded in silent agreement. “In the Valley, in the Nodes, on all the runs we did, there were never any bones, or skulls.”

  “And my LoreMaster told me long ago it was easier to learn about life five hundred years ago than to find out what happened just before the Catastrophe,” I said, thinking of my old mentor. I saw a slight twitch in Mannes’s scary, patched-up face. He was pleased with the way we were slowly coming to his side.

  I thought of the conversation I had with Rafik when we were in the City Within the Mountain. Something in the story Rafik fed us felt wrong even then, but I was not in any position to argue. Was what we were seeing and hearing now the real truth, or were we being played by this half demon? Perhaps both, I had no idea, but as long as we were talking and not shooting each other, everything might turn out well enough. Turned out I was wrong about that, too.

  I had to put those thoughts aside as Mannes resumed talking. “I was in the middle of a conversation with Captain Ismark, on my way to the Moon Hotel, when I heard the Guardian Angels begin their attack. Same happened on the moon, too. Cain did not do that, but he did manage to take control of the Guardian Angels’ manufacturing lab and corrupted their programming in order to make Adam stop producing more killing machines. Show file nine-six-one.”

  We all watched the gruesome images. “Cain could never have done that, ever. Adam must have planted something in the Guardian Angels’ programming from the start, and he did not leave any chance for survivors. The Guardian Angels killed everything they saw, and once they ran out of people, they turned on other Angels, the labourers and manual workers, and finally on each other. Cain had to act fast and managed to lock out some vital assets, to suppress Adam from total victory. He has been doing it ever since.”

  I turned to face the wizened old ghoul. “Oh, so Cain actually saved the world, did he?”

  Mannes nodded. “Without Cain, Adam would have already managed to reawaken. Together with an army of Guardian Angels, he would have taken out what was left of this world. The minds within him are all hostages, either dormant or manipulated to believe they are acting for the sake of humanity, the same way you’ve been.”

  “Damn.” Galinak whistled softly. “And here I was thinking I was on the good guys’ team.”

  Realising that you might have been working for the wrong side is never a nice moment. “And everything else?” I said in a harsh tone. “I’ve heard of you, Mannes. You are no saint. Even if a fraction of the stories is true, there is a lot of blood on your hands. This whole lifetime of rampaging through what remains of this world, was it all just to save your own daughter? Or was it also for revenge?”

  “Do you have any children?” Mannes asked. “I can see on your face that you don’t, so you cannot fully understand my motivation, and you would not understand what I have set in motion. But ask your friend here”—he pointed at Vincha—“what she was an
d is ready to do for the sake of her daughter.”

  The Hub shuddered again, and this time we all had to hold on to something.

  I wanted to ask more but I had to reevaluate my priorities. “What have you set in motion? Why is the Hub doing this?”

  Mannes ignored my questions. “In the beginning I just wanted to reach my family, to find out if they survived.” He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “After a few years had passed I realised that they were probably all dead, and my motivations changed to salvage and restoration. To make things right again.” Mannes smiled bitterly to himself. “I wanted revenge, too, I admit it, but as the years have gone by I’ve realised that all I really want is to save my Deborah, to let her live the life she deserved. Cain was built on the core of Deborah’s character and later infused itself into Professor Vitor. With Daichi’s program I can now reconstruct her without harming Cain. She might not be the same as she was, but she will still be my Deborah.”

  “Guys,” Galinak suddenly said, looking up at the windows, “is that blue ball the planet we came from?”

  I turned my head as Mannes continued speaking.

  “I travelled through a large part of this world. And everywhere I looked there was violence and barbarism. Instead of coming together, the survivors fed off each other, sometimes literally. There are cannibal tribes out there, murderous warlords, gangs who steal and rape and burn whatever they find, pirates driving on the Tarakan highways . . . even the people who live in the City of Towers are lording over others and have slaves working in their ever-expanding sphere of influence. I had to build armies to safely cross the land and involve myself in Machiavellian scheming with the North so that the City of Towers would be too busy to come after me.”

  “Because if that’s where we came from,” Galinak was saying, “it looks much smaller than when I saw it before.”

  I saw Earth disappear to the other side of the window as we kept on spinning. Galinak was right; it was significantly smaller. Mannes’s words kept coming, though.

  “What does any normal parent want? To create a better world for their child to grow up in. I don’t want to wake Deborah up to a world that is bent on destroying whatever is left in the name of survival, or to keep her locked within Cain, stuck within a struggle to contain Adam’s aggression, not when I have an alternative.”

  Earth came into view again. This time we were all watching for it. “It could be a trick,” Vincha said, “like things that look farther away if you look through a certain glass.”

  I turned to the large screen. “Cain, show us Earth,” I said, not sure if my orders would be followed. But Mannes added, “Do it,” and then we all saw it. The Star Pillar was still there, but it was dragging in an ever-increasing angle like a stray hair on a bald head.

  Peach was the first to turn to Mannes. “What have you done?”

  “Simple.” Mannes shrugged. “I won the battle and lost the war. I brought Cain with thousands of minds into the Hub, and now I have detached it from the Star Pillar.”

  Chapter 80

  Twinkle Eyes

  “You did what?” Peach moved forward, powering her sword. Vincha began moving as well. I had a second to react before everything exploded.

  “Everyone, stop.” I don’t remember how the peacemaker ended up in my hand, but it felt good waving it around. “Let me do the talking right now.” I turned to Mannes without checking to see if my words were being followed.

  The old bastard played for time and won the day, and by the look on his face he knew I realised it.

  “Reattach the Hub, Doctor Holtz.”

  He looked at me like a man who knows all the answers looks at a confused child. “I would not do it even if I could.”

  Right. No more Mister Nice Guy. “Do it now or I’ll let Colonel Major Peach here slice and dice you to very thin pieces.”

  “I was seventy-six when I landed in Siberia.” Mannes actually smiled at me. “And I am close to two hundred years old now. I’ve lived too long and done too much to care about what you will do to me.”

  “That’s a rusting lie,” I said. “You did all of this for Deborah. You long to hug your daughter again, and that’s hard to do without the use of your arms.”

  “Look at me.” Mannes pointed at himself dismissively. “Do you think I want my daughter to see her father like this and then explain to her how I killed her mother and every loved one she had, destroyed the world and continued to kill thousands of people, just to save her?”

  “You just told us it was Adam who did it.”

  “You think she’ll care when she finds out?”

  “You’d keep it a secret. You’d lie.”

  This time Mannes’s smile had warmth in it. “She’ll find out. Everyone finds out the truth eventually, the same way you did. No, all I want is to secure my daughter’s future, not to burden her with the past, and before you think of anything imaginative, this Hub does have security measures which will deploy very quickly if you try and mess with it.”

  I extended my arm backwards. “Peach, I’ll need that sword please.”

  I felt the heaviness of the hilt smack into my palm, brought it between Mannes and myself, and pressed the power button.

  “Twinkle Eyes, don’t,” Vincha warned, but I ignored her warning.

  “This is your last chance,” I said to Mannes, “before I start slicing. And I warn you, I am a bad swordsman, always have been.”

  “Cain,” Mannes said loudly, never breaking eye contact with me. The face of the young man in dreadlocks appeared on the screens. “How long would it take the Hub to manoeuvre itself, match the speed and angle of the Star Pillar in order to attempt to reattach?”

  “Three hours, sixteen minutes, and forty-four seconds, but that would be an impossible feat because—”

  “How long is it going to take for the Pillar to reach the snapping point?” Mannes interrupted.

  “Twelve minutes and four seconds,” came the answer.

  “Thank you, Cain. Stay ready for the next phase as planned.”

  “So, you are going to kill more millions of innocent people, again,” Peach said. “You know that the snap back will be like a second Catastrophe on the planet.”

  “Ah, that,” Mannes said dismissively. “That was the worst-case scenario, and it won’t happen.”

  “You seem very sure about it.”

  Mannes looked up at me. “That’s because in about three minutes the tons of munitions I have piled into the Pillar’s elevators will explode. The bulk of the shaft will evaporate, the tip will fly into space and eventually crash to Earth, but with a fraction of the force of the snap.” He shrugged. “There may be casualties, some people below will be unlucky, but some of them always are. They’ll tell their children that God was angry”—Mannes’s chuckle turned into a wheeze and a cough, but he managed to utter—“and they’ll be right.”

  “Two minutes to explosion,” Cain said, and the close-up visual of the space elevator came up on the screen. It was already bending dangerously to its side. Without the Hub to power it, the shining protective force field was gone, and the coil wrapped around the central shaft was getting tighter by the second.

  “Why did you allow us to reach you?” I asked. “Why risk us killing you or getting in the way of your plans?”

  “An old man is allowed some degree of hubris, Mister Twinkle Eyes.” Mannes had recovered and was looking up at the screen as well. “By the time I let you in, you couldn’t have changed what was about to happen.”

  “One minute to explosion,” Cain announced.

  “Nothing is stopping us from shooting you in the face, right now,” I said.

  “I know, but you won’t,” Mannes said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’m an excellent judge of character.”

  “Fifty seconds.”

  “Vincha—”

  Mannes’s smile had a very scary element to it. “It was a risk that she would pull the trigger in ange
r but once I promised to bring Emilija back, I gained a bodyguard, at least for the time being.”

  “I’ll let someone else do it. Peach is just waiting for a chance—”

  “Colonel Major Geer may be angry and confused, but she is not stupid. She’ll want to get as much information as she can from me before making up her mind, and that will take a while. Anyway, she was part of the system, an agent of Tarakan. She saw what we really did. I suspect she believes me about Adam’s involvement in the Catastrophe, more than the rest of you.”

  “Ten seconds.”

  I looked down at the patched man and said, “You’re a real piece of arse rust, Holtz.”

  “Five.”

  Mannes smiled at me.

  “Four.”

  “Make sure you tell that to Adam, kid,” he said. “Enjoy the show.”

  And we watched it. The whole damn thing. We saw the multiple explosions, watched as the high part of the elevator snapped, spreading debris in all directions. Cain announced the path of some of the larger chunks as they fell to Earth. Most of them would hit the seas, creating large tsunamis that would bring destruction to the shores. A few large pieces fell on areas Cain said were lightly populated. Smaller pieces either spread out to space or burned as they fell back to land. Finally, what was left of the base collapsed upon Mount Iztaccihuatl, which folded into itself.

  Eventually Peach turned to Mannes. “Congratulations, you just destroyed civilisation’s greatest achievement.”

  “They will build a new one, eventually, when they are ready,” Mannes answered calmly. “It was only a matter of time before Adam would have taken the Hub and done the same thing. I just switched seats and Sentient Programs. That’s all.”

  “Right. Want to tell us your plan now? For hubris’s sake?” I said.

  “I’ll tell you what his plan is,” Vincha said. “He’s going to bring my daughter back, that is what the plan is, and then we are getting off this rusting flying wheel.”

  Vincha did not even need to raise her gun to accentuate her threat, her facial expression was enough.