Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

Rikki asked, “How did you know our lights were out?”

  Blake grimaced. “It’s not just this house. Li cut off all the power for the night.”

  *

  “I’m bad,” Todd moaned. “We’re all bad.”

  Though the boy shied away from Rikki as they fled together up Main Street, he clutched Beth’s hand as though for dear life. Rikki didn’t mind having one hand free to hold a flashlight, but Todd’s rejection cut her like a knife.

  “None of us is bad,” she told the boy. It didn’t interrupt his litany.

  The latest forecast showed the overnight temperature dropping below freezing. They could not stay in their home. Nor in Antonio and Dana’s home, also without power. This side of the fence, lights shone only from the cow barn, the chicken coop, and the greenhouses. Lights indicated power, and power meant heat.

  Within the fence, as though to mock them, bright light streamed from every building.

  From behind Rikki, Antonio said, “It’s just one night. We’ll be fine.”

  One night if Li doesn’t change her mind, Rikki thought. The woman has gone insane. More insane.

  “I vote for a greenhouse,” Blake said. “Any building that still has heat will reek of manure, but at least a greenhouse should be quiet.”

  “What about the caves?” Rikki asked.

  “My opinion?” Blake said. “That’s too far to hike in the dark with kids.” They had come to an end of Main Street and stopped. “Maybe in the morning, if the power still hasn’t come back.”

  “Endeavour is closer than the caves,” Dana said, “offering all the power you could want. With all the comforts of home.”

  Because, for so long, it had been home. Rikki felt a rush of nostalgia—and an inconsolable sense of loss. They had built so much on this world. What if they had just lost it?

  She said, “Lead on.”

  Todd kept moaning as, by moonlight and flashlight, the six of them crept up the shadowy, rubble-strewn slope to the landing field. Picking up on the boy’s fear, Beth began whimpering, too. As they approached the landing field, Dana signaled the ship from her datasheet and its running lights came on.

  “The ark!” Todd sobbed. “The stolen ark. This is bad.” But when they reached the ship, the cold had bested his fear and with little urging he followed Beth up a cargo-hold ramp.

  “I’ll get the children settled in the crew quarters,” Rikki said.

  “Cargo hold one is empty,” Dana said. “We’ll talk there.”

  The little ones were exhausted, from the trek and emotionally. Rikki got both children settled in hammocks. After dimming the galley ceiling lamp to night-light levels, she headed for the cargo hold. The last thing she heard from crew quarters came from Todd, something about having been cast out.

  As she entered the hold, Antonio was saying, “But we have to know more about the moons.”

  “No one’s arguing,” Dana said. “The question is how. Look where hacking got us.”

  Standing in the hatchway, Rikki cleared her throat. “If I could interrupt.”

  “All ideas cheerfully accepted,” Blake said. “We’ve got nothing.”

  “Not this idea,” Rikki said. “And I’ll start by admitting I’m no Biblical scholar.”

  She knew a few of the old stories—didn’t everyone?—but she had grown up knowing God as just Someone invoked to add zest to cursing. Learning that the Church made Galileo recant what he had seen with his own eyes hadn’t given her religion, either. But Dana sometimes seemed to respect the old tradition, and Rikki would not offend her friend for anything.

  Rikki continued, “Still, listening to Todd scares the crap out of me. Li has that poor child—and so, I assume, all the children—believing she is God’s messenger. Li has made herself into Noah and Lot and Moses and I-don’t-know-who-else all rolled into one. Casting us out of the settlement, commanding us to feed everyone else by the sweat of our brow, she’s like God banishing Adam and Eve for original sin. To contradict Li is more than wrong, it’s heresy.”

  Antonio nodded. “To the children we’re the bad people.”

  “It’s horrible, I know,” Dana said. “But the flooding, the moons—”

  “Are parts of a bigger problem,” Rikki interrupted. “We have to be one colony again. The problem is bigger than getting at the lab instruments, bigger than access to Marvin.”

  “Bigger than…drowning like rats?”

  Rikki slammed the bulkhead with a fist. “Yes, damn it. Bigger than that. Li was right, years back, about one thing. Our survival was never about us. It’s about who and what comes after us. Despite every warning, despite Li’s evident fascination with every manner of authoritarian and utopian society, we allowed her to take charge. We continue to do her bidding. We’ve stood by as she brainwashed more and more children. Is that the legacy we plan to leave behind?”

  Stony silence—and then the other three began speaking at once.

  “She’s got us over a barrel,” Antonio said. “Without endangering the children we…we can’t…”

  “There’s no way past the land mines,” Dana said. “If I could get over the mines, silently, then maybe…”

  “There has to be a way to disable them,” Blake said. “I keep racking my brains for something new. I admit Marvin or Carlos can be as good with software as us, or Antonio and my hack wouldn’t have gotten caught. But maybe if I can…”

  “Just stop it!” Deep inside Rikki, something had snapped. “All of you. I’ve heard it too many times. Pilot our way in. Invent our way in. And tonight’s failure, hacking our way in, the transgression for which Li would freeze us back into submission. I am so sick of the delusions!

  “To rescue those children and redeem ourselves, we need to start working together.”

  42

  Bulging, rippling—and threatening, with each errant draft, to tear itself apart against the rough stone walls of the sinkhole—the hot-air balloon strained against its tethers. Its ethanol-burning heater roared.

  “Eighteenth-century tech,” Dana said, shaking her head. “Your wife.”

  “You asked to pilot your way in,” Blake said. In the night-dark sinkhole shaft, he was a shadow: face smeared with grease; flight suit, gloves, and boots all matte black. She was made up the same. “Be careful what you wish for.”

  Was it piloting when you couldn’t steer the damned thing? Well, they wouldn’t be in the balloon long. One way or another.

  “Uh-huh.” She glanced at her wrist. “Time to go.”

  With little time to spare. They would have a bare forty minutes tonight without a single moon in the sky. In duration of darkness, several other nights would have been better, but the prevailing wind had not cooperated. Tomorrow offered a longer window—and the forecast of snow. Snow and reduced visibility were complications they didn’t need. The later into the season it got, damned near every night might bring snow, even a howling blizzard.

  “Saddle up,” he agreed.

  She pretended not to have heard the quaver in his voice.

  Dana clipped them together, chest pressed against his back. She wore a bulky black backpack; he a black satchel strapped over his stomach. Pockets in their flight suits bulged with tools and supplies. More gadgets—holstered or bagged lest they clink together or reflect any light—dangled from their tool belts. Stealthy, they might hope to be. Agile, they were not. Groping behind her, she backed them onto the seat, little more than a child’s swing, that dangled from the balloon. They slipped on smart specs. He grabbed hold of the seat’s ropes.

  She throttled down the burner to its pilot-light setting and switched off the dimmed flashlight that hung from her belt. The seconds she gave her eyes to adjust to the dark—while, within the balloon, the air would already be cooling—seemed interminable. The only sounds were a slow, echoing drip from deep within the cave, the faint hiss of the burner’s blue flame, and the creak of tether ropes. She wondered how much more tension stalactites could take before they snapped.

 
The better question might be how much more tension she could take. Search and Rescue was a young person’s game.

  “Godspeed,” she wished them both, then armed and triggered the tether release.

  They fell up through the sinkhole into a starry sky.

  *

  She could only guess at where the ground was. A hundred meters beneath her toes, at the least, the distance growing by the second as the balloon wafted upward and the slope tipped down toward Darwin Sea. A portable radar unit would have been nice—and its pulses might have given them away.

  “Are we having fun yet?” Blake asked.

  “Ask me in a few minutes.”

  With so much gear to gather and, more often, to cobble together—without doing anything to arouse the suspicions of those inside the compound—they had managed only a single test run. A hemisphere away, where it was late spring. In full daylight. With winter almost upon them here, determined to act now, there had not been time for a second rehearsal under more realistic conditions. Mostly Dana had practiced in a flight simulator, also improvised. How good could that be?

  “Trust me,” Antonio had said of his improvised trainer. “It’s only physics.”

  Quit griping, Dana chided herself. Had the harvest not been complete, she’d have had to prepare with nothing but simulation. And scolded herself again: stay focused on the here and now.

  On her specs, a red disk represented her target, the settlement’s puddle of illumination digitally replaced to protect her night vision. Even by starlight she could sense where the sea must meet the sky. If she saw horizon, so did her specs. As camera and processor identified individual buildings and interpreted their foreshortened appearance, the specs overlaid in dim red: contour lines, distance and bearing, altitude and ground speed.

  Antonio had called retrofitting nav mode into the specs simple physics, too.

  Borne along by the wind, the air seemed still. But this was late autumn, and the ground had long since surrendered the day’s scant warmth to a cloudless sky and back into space. Dana, shivering, cranked up the current to the heating elements of her flight suit.

  “Um, Dana?” Blake said.

  “I know.” The higher they rose, the farther the wind pushed them off course. But she needed altitude. “Trust the pilot.”

  “With my life. Every time we launch.”

  They had yet to reach the altitude she wanted, but the range to the target kept changing and not for the better. She muttered, “Close enough for government work.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s time,” she translated. She armed and smacked the seat release. Freed of their weight, the balloon bounded away.

  Plummeting to the ground, Dana declared, “Now we’re having fun.”

  *

  Sooner than her specs advised, trusting her instincts, Dana yanked the ripcord.

  Nylon fabric whipped from her backpack, grabbed by the air stream, heard and felt more than seen. The paraglider, like the balloon they had just jettisoned, like their flight suits, was all black.

  Air rammed into the glider’s cells. With a brutal yank the inflated wing braked their fall—and knocked the breath right out of her. Her specs went flying into the darkness. Grabbing the risers, she flattened their angle of attack. Shifting her weight, she started them on a slow, banking curve toward the island of light below.

  “I need your specs,” she told Blake.

  “I lost mine, too,” he said. “Damned inferior straps. You should fire your engineer.”

  “Not a problem,” she assured him.

  That we don’t know what we’ll find once we’re down? That this is my first night jump, ever? That apart from the one practice run, I haven’t paraglided since college? More than fifty standard years ago! In a sane universe, I’d be taking up knitting.

  Those were problems.

  *

  No one’s looking, Blake kept reminding himself. If someone were, this is the dark of night. We’re all in black. They’d never expect us to arrive this way. And anyway, we’ll be on the ground soon.

  As buildings loomed out of the darkness—as he and Dana fell out of the freaking sky!—that became too soon.

  “Get ready,” Dana whispered into his ear. “Legs together. Knees bent.”

  Turning into the wind, their boots all but grazing the top of the stockade, they swooped toward the open end of the playground. He felt a jerk as Dana flared the wing. They were coming in fast! Maybe a meter off the ground, she hit the brakes again. Hard.

  She hissed, “Hit the deck running.”

  He did, and somehow their feet tangled. They tumbled to the ground, Blake on the bottom with the wind knocked out of him. He heard the paraglider flapping.

  Dana unclipped them. Faster than he could climb to his feet, she had off her backpack. He helped her squeeze air from the paraglider cells, wincing at every wheeze and faint whistle. Together, they crammed the flapping, deflated wing into her pack. She shrugged the pack back on.

  “My turn,” he mouthed.

  “Li? Is that you?”

  Carlos’s voice! He wasn’t in sight—yet.

  They sprinted across the playground, Dana hanging onto his arm and limping. She had injured herself, doubtless his fault from his clumsy landing. They flattened themselves against the childcare center, between windows.

  She took out her air gun. Blake, lacking her training, not trusting himself with a lethal weapon, left his air gun in its holster. He went for his improvised shock device, of use only up close.

  Carlos emerged from behind the childcare center, cigar in hand, its tip aglow, to peer into the playground. “Li? Is that you?”

  Blake tased him.

  Carlos folded, spasming.

  They had rehearsed takedowns. In the instant after Blake cut the circuit, Dana had her knee in Carlos’s back and his arm twisted behind his back. Blake slapped tape over Carlos’s mouth, then offered Dana one of their improvised plasticuffs. She bound Carlos’s wrists together behind him.

  Blake pocketed his weapon’s spent cartridge and reloaded before he and Dana hauled Carlos to his feet. With current no longer flowing, Carlos was already recovering. His eyes round, his gaze darting from one captor to the other, Carlos followed meekly where they led.

  Toward the bunker.

  Now it was Blake’s turn.

  *

  The bunker door sensor flashed green at Carlos’s handprint, lifted weeks earlier from a datasheet. Who could have guessed they would end up in possession of Carlos’s actual hand?

  “I thought that would come in handy,” Blake whispered. His own handprint might still have been in the system. And it might have triggered an alarm.

  Dana did a slit-her-own-throat gesture. As in: shut up.

  He had never doubted he could bypass the lock—security on the bunker was to keep out children, not bank robbers—but happily matters hadn’t come to that. The handprint was quicker.

  Blake doused the door hinges with lubricant spray. A test tug gave off a faint squeak, so he lowered the door and sprayed more. On his second try, the door opened silently.

  Apart from the wind, the compound was deathly still.

  In the bunker, only the glimmer of scattered LEDs broke inky darkness.

  Dana crept down the stairs, clutching the handrail. Still not putting much weight on her left leg, he noticed, before she disappeared into shadow. Again, Blake cursed his big, dumb feet.

  At Blake’s shove, Carlos followed her down.

  When Blake lowered the massive door from inside, Dana was ready with her flashlight. Not trusting an old gasket to be light-tight, he taped over the gap between the two doors. Only then did he pat the top-of-the-stairs wall sensor and activate the bunker’s ceiling lamps.

  Two blinking packages, just as Rikki had described, were bound to support beams high overhead. The timers showed almost twenty hours remaining till a reset would be needed.

  One way or another, matters would be resolved before then.
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br />   “Safe to talk?” he whispered.

  “Should be,” Dana said. “You know, having Carlos here changes things. Li didn’t build these bombs.”

  Doubtless Carlos had built the devices. Under other circumstances, he might have been the right person to disarm them. Not at gunpoint, shaking as he was. Not with his nostrils flared wide, his eyes round, and a tic. No way would Blake risk that man messing with detonators.

  “If I have questions, he’s here,” Blake said. “But Carlos is no more an explosives expert than I am. The controls he devised will be simple, like in the land mine I took apart. We agreed upfront to that.”

  But had that agreement reflected sound logic, or only shared wishful thinking? Believing anything else, they could never have dared this raid.

  “It’s your call,” Dana said. “Let’s get him out of the way.”

  “I’ll handle it. And I’m sorry about your foot.”

  “Sprained ankle, I think. I’ll live.”

  Blake pushed Carlos toward a mound of seed sacks. “Sit. Do not make a sound.”

  Carlos nodded. Hands still bound behind him, he dropped to his knees. From there he swiveled, toppled awkwardly, and squirmed into a sitting position, his back against a couple of sacks.

  The day of Li’s coup, Rikki had seen a folded stepladder leaning against a bunker wall. Too bad the ladder wasn’t still here. Blake found the chain hoist’s remote control and lowered the steel hook. Too small to accommodate his foot, alas. Catching the hook in a link of the sturdy chain, he fashioned a simple loop. When the bunker was new, he had moved cargo far heavier than himself using this hoist.

  With the loop positioned in the notch between the heel and sole of a boot, the chain snug in the crook of an arm, Blake told Dana, “I’m ready. Raise me up.”

  43

  I’m going to die.

  It scared Carlos, just a bit, how little that prospect scared him.

  Death could come in many ways. Blake might blow up the three of them, together with the future of mankind. Or Li could happen upon them and—by accident or in a rage—do the same. Or someone might slit his throat while he sat trussed up, helpless.