“Poisoning the children’s minds against us didn’t give you enough leverage?”
“Sadly, no.”
“Then why warp them?”
“I’m molding them,” Li said. “Dana’s job was to find a refuge, a haven, like Dark. Now it’s my turn. To mold the children. To mold a civilization. The rest of you don’t have what that takes.”
“Now that we know how important this is to—”
Li snickered. “Little Miss Sunday dinner? I’m supposed to believe you’ll change your mind? Come back up. I have more to show you.”
The heavy bunker door slipped from Rikki’s grasp when she closed it, too. This time, aware of the explosives, she cringed.
Li gestured up Main Street with her handgun. “Good. They’ve finished.”
Carlos was ushering children—their clothes, faces, and hands inexplicably filthy—away from the gate. One by one, they dropped gardening tools on a pile. Once the last child started down the street, Carlos did something with a gadget from his pocket.
Most of the children gave Rikki a wide berth. Some stared as they passed.
Rikki burst into tears. “I love you children.”
If they heard her, if they cared, none showed it.
Behind Rikki, from one of the playground speakers, Marvin announced, “Discovery’s radar shows Endeavour is inbound. It will be on the ground within ten minutes.”
*
Li motioned Rikki forward. “I’m almost impressed. They got suspicious faster than I expected.”
The barren rock near the fence was…changed. Textured. Dug up, somehow, by the bulldozer? By the children, too, Rikki guessed from all those begrimed faces and hands.
Two paces closer and Rikki saw that something covered that strip of ground. A wavy gravel bed, all tiny hummocks, hollows, and shoeprints, extended about five meters inside the fence. The broad gravel band paralleled the fence until both, curving around buildings, were lost to sight.
“Stop!” Li picked up one of the rocks that little feet had kicked and dragged into the compound. “Do not approach the gate.”
“Why not?”
Li lobbed her pebble toward the middle of the gravel strip, about ten meters to the left of the gate. Nothing happened.
“That was anticlimactic.” Li took a rake from the tool pile. She tossed it after the pebble.
Blam!
Rikki ducked, hands clapped to her ears, as gravel rained down and something stung her cheek. Stones pinged off the fence and concrete chips flew from it. Children screamed. When the smoke and dust had cleared, a meter-wide crater remained. Of the rake itself, only scattered twisted shards could be seen.
“Pressure activated. That’s why you should stay off the gravel.”
Rikki wiped grit and tears from her face. “Why, Li?”
“The fence and gate suffice to keep the children in. The land mines are to keep you and your friends out. Except, of course, when I have need of you inside. The mines are radio controlled. I can turn them on and off.”
“Six minutes,” Marvin called.
“You see,” Li went on, “we on the inside—and our numbers will grow—require food, water, and clothing. Every year or so we’ll want a fresh bottle of deuterium. So rejoice. The four of you can still serve the new order.”
“And if we aren’t able to produce enough? If, say, the weather doesn’t cooperate? You would blow the bunker?”
“You want to know, can you starve us out? You could try. But there is plenty of food and water in the pantry for just Carlos and me.”
“You would take food from the mouths of babies?”
Li shrugged. “If you withhold food, what happens is on your heads. And when you come to your senses and resume deliveries, we can replace any children you starved.”
Rikki just stared, dumbfounded.
“For lesser infractions, if you should be so foolish, I’m sure I can find other ways to get your attention. I might cut off power to your homes for a while. Have any other bright ideas?”
Did she?
Rikki pointed at the fence. “That encloses what, maybe a square klick? You can’t mean to stay inside for long. You can’t fit many more children inside.”
“The secure compound is just about half that area, but you’re correct. We won’t stay forever. A few years will suffice. By then, hundreds of children, the cadre of a new civilization, will have been thoroughly shaped.” Bright, fanatical eyes proclaimed, “They’ll be thoroughly mine.”
“How about this?” Rikki said desperately. “We construct a second settlement elsewhere. Far down the coast of Darwin Sea. Or on the coast of a different sea, if you prefer. You live there. You build your”—insane, twisted, tragic—“society there.”
“Or you could move. Except no one will be going anywhere, because I need workers here to farm. Or I may find I need resources only Endeavour can fetch. And even if those weren’t possibilities, I would still refuse. Know this: restored humanity will be a single society. One perfect society.”
With Mad Queen Li to rule it.
The children, terrified by the explosion, had crowded around Carlos. Eve, taller than the rest, very blond, was unmistakable—and Carlos’s hand rested on her shoulder.
Amid cosmic disaster: a tragedy of human scale.
Rikki said, “To feed so many, we’ll need Carlos’s help, too.” Whether or not that was true, she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him inside the fence, with the little girls.
“Carlos outside?” Li hesitated. “No, I need him.”
“Three minutes,” Marvin advised.
Li took the controller from her pocket. “You have thirty seconds to cross the gravel.”
“But I—”
“Twenty-five seconds. Twenty-four.”
Rikki dashed, gravel scattering beneath her shoes. She didn’t slow down until she was at least twenty meters outside the gate.
Li called, “Your friends will be on the ground soon. Tell them what you’ve seen. Tell them what I expect.
“And tell them the consequences if any of you fail to cooperate.”
DEFIANCE
(Autumn, Year Ten)
37
With a throaty roar, straining against its massive load, the tractor lurched into motion. It crept from the granary and, with its motor protesting more than ever, negotiated the turn onto Main Street. Dana found herself leaning forward—as though by shifting her weight she could make the poor, overburdened vehicle and its trailer move faster. Maybe, she mocked herself, it will speed up if I make vroom, vroom noises.
On both sides of the street, a few potted trees provided hints of autumn color. Dry leaves skittered down the pavement. The twin greenhouses teemed with unseasonable green. In their respective enclosures, chickens clucked and cows lowed.
Blake walked past the lumbering tractor.
From Dana’s perch on the tractor seat, she could see his shoulders tense as, passing through the open gate, he trod upon the strip of gravel. Nothing happened: the mines were switched off, as promised. As had been the case for countless deliveries.
Tribute, all of them, to Queen Li.
Carlos loitered inside the stockade, well back from the bright red-painted line that marked the inner edge of the minefield. Several of the oldest children were wrestling pipes embedded in concrete bases into position along the line: posts for the inside fence that must delimit the boundary once snow fell. The nip in the air suggested that wouldn’t be long.
When three among the children on snow-fence duty looked Dana’s way, she offered them a grandmotherly smile.
Boys? Girls? She couldn’t tell. All the children had hair down to their shoulders or longer. If haircuts for hundreds weren’t a massive enough undertaking, she still didn’t suppose grooming ranked high on Li’s list of priorities. Maybe unisex hair was part of the new order. Unisex garments definitely were, if only of practicality. Most of the hand-me-down pants, sweaters, and coats were too big or too small for their new owners;
even the clothing that fit tended toward ragged and dirty.
The three watchful kids, whatever their genders, scowled back at Dana.
How many lies, and how vile, had these children been told over the years about the people who lived outside? She felt ill, just wondering.
“Stop!” Carlos shouted. “You know the drill.”
Dana applied the brakes with the tractor still well outside the gate. Four tonnes of cargo took their sweet time responding. To the accompaniment of a squeal, she brought the tractor to a halt atop the inactivated minefield that Li—nowhere in sight, but doubtless watching—could reactivate in an instant. Or if Li did not like something she saw, she might merely take a potshot from hiding.
It was best not to raise suspicions.
Children were everywhere. Milling about. Walking, running, and climbing. Peeking from between, and out the windows of, buildings throughout the compound. Indoors, the choruses clashing, three groups recited their rote lessons. Little Eve (only she was a young woman, not little anymore) supervised toddlers on the playground.
So many kids, and yet, to Dana’s knowledge, none had ever tried to escape. It would seem simple. Just run out when the gateway was opened for food. She thought of the children as hostages and prisoners. They must see themselves as besieged.
The kids were too active to make an accurate count, but she guessed a couple hundred and maybe a few dozen voices in the classrooms. The littlest kids would be in the childcare center. More of them all the time….
Three hundred in total, perhaps? That would be consistent with the quantities of food that Li so imperiously commanded to appear. In the few, low buildings, children would be sleeping cheek by jowl.
Carlos examined the underside of the tractor using a mirror mounted to a long carbon-fiber pole. “All right. Come forward two tractor lengths.” That would bring the tractor inside the fence and put the grain-laden trailer onto the gravel.
“Must we go through this nonsense every time?” Blake burst out.
“Yes, as it happens,” Carlos said. He eyeballed the bulging bags of wheat, then with his mirror began to inspect beneath the trailer.
Fooled you once, Dana thought, because even trivial successes came too seldom not to savor.
Not long after Li’s coup, Blake had rigged a gadget beneath a trailer, hidden within a spare tire. His jury-rig scooped up a bunch of stones—together with what they had been going for: one of the land mines—and refilled the hole with fresh gravel. The mine itself went into a metal box, shielded against the rearm signal.
Far from the compound, inside a copper-screen-sheeted workspace, they had unsealed the box. Sneering at Carlos, Blake had opened the mine, traced its firing circuits, and defused it.
And failed ever after to find a way to remotely disable the remote-control circuits. The mines inside the stockade remained out of reach. Carlos, though he did not know it, had had the last laugh.
Soon thereafter, whether by coincidence or having noticed a suspicious pattern in the gravel, under-vehicle inspections had begun.
What if, instead of trawling that day for a sample land mine to dissect, Blake had been under the trailer? If he had hidden within the compound till dark, sneaked into the bunker, disarmed the bombs….
Uh-huh. Suppose he had somehow evaded notice for hours and not gotten shot by Li. Then he would have had to disarm bombs he’d never before seen, using only the tools he’d been able to carry, while teetering atop a very tall stepladder. If anything had gone wrong, he’d have blown up himself and the last hopes of humanity.
Sending Blake in blind would have been a stupid, foolhardy stunt. It would have violated everything Dana had ever been taught about mission planning.
And through more sleepless nights than she would admit even to Antonio, she feared that by waiting to gather intel she had doomed them all.
“And that doesn’t excuse treating us like…”
While Blake distracted Carlos, Dana surveilled. The concrete stockade pickets looked as untouched by weather on the inside as from without. The gravel bed remained pocked with countless dimples and bumps, masking unknown numbers of buried mines. Cameras atop tall poles continuously scanned the perimeter. All as always.
Nonetheless, she looked.
Even in darkest night, with the children asleep indoors, she couldn’t bring Endeavour within the fence. It didn’t matter that the DED made the ship silent; it was too big. In one or two spots a shuttle might fit—if she were insane enough to land on fusion drive within meters of the children. If the fusion drive’s roar wouldn’t be a dead giveaway from klicks away. If by magic she somehow swept away all those impediments, Marvin through his many cameras could hardly fail to see a spaceship on approach.
In short: there could be no swooping in for a rescue.
The answer never changed, because the compound never changed. Blake called her mindset the pilot’s version of when all you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails.
Despite Blake’s interruptions, Carlos finished his inspection. “All right, Marvin.”
The AI’s voice rang out from speakers across the compound, and children scattered.
“Pantry three,” Carlos said.
“Thanks,” Dana said. She put the tractor in gear. Once again, it crawled forward.
Blake was no less obstinate than she, in his case trying to engineer a solution. Since the day of Li’s coup, he had tried to build autonomous robots. One model was to be small enough to squeeze between the pickets, light-weight enough not to set off any mines, and deft enough to disarm them. Another type was to be hidden in a grain bag, to sneak out of a pantry, somehow make its way into the locked bunker, and there defuse the bombs that gave Li her power.
Five years later, he still tinkered.
To be fair, it was not as though feeding the colony left any of them spare time. Or they had been left with synth vats in which to fabricate tiny, delicate parts. Or any of them had experience in robotics. Or access to Marvin’s technical archives.
After five exhausting, futile years, Dana struggled to find the energy to be fair.
At the slowest creep the tractor could manage, lest any child dart out in front of her, she pulled the trailer into the compound. She did a three-point turn and backed up the trailer to the pantry. Then, panting with effort, shirt drenched with sweat despite the crisp autumn temperature, she helped Blake unload and stack twenty-kilo bags of wheat.
Leaning against a wall, sipping from a flask, wearing a coat, Carlos observed.
“Why don’t you sit?” Blake suggested to Dana after they had offloaded about half a tonne. He brushed dust and grain off his work gloves. “Carlos and I have some business to transact.”
Dana perched on the tailgate of the trailer, more than ready to catch her breath.
“You brought it?” Carlos said.
“I said I would,” Blake said. “And you?”
“You first.”
Blake took a folded datasheet from his pocket and tossed it to Carlos. “Load us up.”
“How dumb do you think I am? Or how drunk?” Carlos drawled, then tossed back the datasheet.
So much, yet again, for an engineered solution. Because if Carlos had accepted the datasheet, and not spotted its hidden Trojan, and been so careless as to net the comp, Blake would have obtained remote access to Marvin.
With a shrug, Blake repocketed the comp. He lobbed over the bulging bag that had been stowed in the trailer’s toolbox.
Opening the bag, at his first whiff of fresh tobacco, Carlos smiled beatifically. “Smells delightful.” He handed Blake a different folded datasheet. “A hundred vids. And because I’m a good guy, bunches of old books, too.”
And then it was back to work.
“I need another break,” Dana wheezed after a while. Maybe they had offloaded half the grain sacks. Even this task was getting to be too much for her. She’d been chosen to save humanity? If the stakes hadn’t been so high, it would have been laughable.
<
br /> “Take your time,” Blake said. He went to sit on the tailgate of the trailer and she joined him.
She told herself not to give up. She told herself, this is what Li did: made them all feel helpless. Li was very good at what she did.
And mad as a hatter.
About the first thing Li had ever said to Dana aboard Endeavour—not even Endeavour yet—was, “Psychiatrists are nuttier than most people you’ll meet.”
“I should have listened,” Dana muttered.
Blake leaned closer. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“It’s getting late,” Carlos prompted.
With a groan, Dana stood to resume the unloading. Champion of mankind, pilot extraordinaire, and third-rate pack mule.
*
“Bad p-people,” George stuttered.
“It’s all right,” Eve told the little boy cowering behind her, clutching her leg.
“Why?”
Why were they here? Why were they bad? Why was their presence all right? An answer to any of those questions was complex. She tousled his hair. “They’ll go away soon.”
That seemed to satisfy him. He scampered off to line up for the slide.
Unlike most of the children, she remembered a time when the bad people had moved at will throughout the settlement. Before they became “the bad people,” but were only Mr. Blake and Ms. Rikki, Mr. Antonio and Ms. Dana.
They were bad, though. Even then. Eve knew that. They frightened her, although she had never understood why.
And, blaspheming in her thoughts, she knew that not everyone bad lived outside.
“Eve?” Reese called, legs pumping as she worked a swing.
“I’m fine,” Eve said. Except she wasn’t: she had allowed her attention to wander. If Ms. Li or Mr. Carlos had noticed—
Eve shivered.
She separated Rhonda and Denise, who had begun squabbling. She helped Samir off the ground, shushed his sniffling, and inspected the scrape on his palm. It was nothing. She commanded Allan to stand in a corner and think about shoving.
“Why do the bad people come here?” Tanya whispered. And she was not one to accept, “Don’t worry,” or “They’ll be gone soon,” as an answer.
Dark Secret (2016) Page 23
