Fata Morgana

by Steven R. Boyett

  Broben glanced at the closed main door across the staging area and looked at the throttle. God damn it. “Wen, I can’t drive through that friggin door,” he said. “How do we get out of this shithole?”

  A quick burst of automatic gunfire came from up front, and rounds sparked off the bowl antenna poking out of the milk truck.

  “Screw this,” Broben muttered. He was reaching for the throttle when the bomber rang like a bell and the gunfire cut off. His vision went blurry and his eyes wouldn’t move. His head wouldn’t turn. His mouth felt shot with Novocaine and his ears rang. He couldn’t talk. All his muscles went rigid. His face, his scalp, his toes. The cockpit went liquid and wavy. Lights smeared. The breath locked in his chest. Black fog skirted the edges of his vision. His thoughts were mud. The cockpit darkened and he felt a sense of pressure. Sinking to the bottom. Red flashes now. A white burst of adrenaline. Lungs on fire. Oh please I want to breathe please let this wear off so I can—

  His muscles let go a notch. He pushed air out his throat, the tight hiss of it like a slow leak in a tire.

  “Belly gunner here.” In his headset Martin’s voice came from far away. “I think we’re hit. I’m fine. Maybe because I’m in the ball? That truck just popped open. They’re getting out on both sides. Maybe ten troops. Does anybody have a shot? Anybody? Over.”

  Breathe in. It’s like sucking air through a wet paper straw, but you can do it. You have to do it.

  “Anybody read me?” said Martin’s distant voice. “They’re going for the main hatch. Ten men with zap guns and armor. They’re right in front of me. God damn it. I’d have ’em all if I had a yard of ammo. Can anybody take these guys? Over?”

  Broben moved his fingers. The control panel swam into view. He could hear the props idling. He tried to release the brake.

  “They’re at the main hatch,” Martin said. “I’ve got my sidearm, can someone get me out, over?”

  Dimly Broben heard the hydraulics as the ball turret rotated.

  “Main hatch is open. Main is open.”

  Broben released the parking brake and got a hand on the throttle.

  “They’re coming in. They’re inside, they’re in the bomber. Some still on the ground. They see me. I’ll try to—”

  The voice cut off.

  “God damn you,” Broben tried to yell. And couldn’t.

  Heavy footsteps on the deck behind him now. Accented voices. He tried to reach his pistol and felt hard hands on his shoulders.

  Close. We were so close.

  thirty-three

  The gently curving hub corridor had white walls, white ceiling, white floor. Pale gray rectangles evenly spaced along the right-hand side seemed to float in a universe bleached of detail. Farley thought they had to be doors, but there were no knobs, hinges, keyholes, card slots, hand panels, or anything he associated with the idea of door.

  Then they found one that had not shut flush. Farley hooked his fingers around the exposed edge and pulled.

  “If these were sealed airtight, they might have been built to keep germs out,” Wennda pointed out. “Or to keep germs from getting out.”

  Farley let go the door and stepped back. “Germ warfare?” he asked, scowling at the door.

  “Why not? They built every other weapon they could.”

  Farley indicated the white corridor. “So a hundred doors around this thing and we shouldn’t open any of them?” He banged the off-plumb door. “We have to get out of here somehow.”

  From the wall came a loud ratcheting like a missed gear.

  Farley jumped back, one hand sweeping back to protect Wennda as the door grated open. The three of them stared at the entryway. Then Farley shrugged. “Hell with it,” he said, and went in.

  Wennda wanted to stop him but couldn’t think why. She was having a hard time focusing.

  Yone gave her a helpless shrug and his quick smile. With his scraped-up face, he looked frightening. “After you,” he said, and swept a hand at the doorway.

  “Oh, for crying in the sink,” said Wennda. She brushed by him and stalked into the room.

  Just inside she stopped. She stood in the center aisle of a small auditorium, molded chairs facing a stage with a sleek black lectern. A red-curtained backdrop bore a large design in black and white.

  Farley stood transfixed before the stage. He was staring at the curtains.

  “Do you know,” he asked without looking back, “who they sent my bomber after, a couple hundred years ago? Who half the world sent millions of planes and tanks and ships and idiots like me to fight?”

  Wennda eyed the curtain apprehensively. The design showed a stylized bird of prey looking to the left with wings outspread. Its talons clutched a wreath that surrounded a stark symbol made of four bent arms joined together.

  “No, Joe,” she said. “How could I?”

  Farley climbed onto the stage and stood before the curtain. “These bastards here, that’s who.” He pointed at the Reichsadler clutching its swastika.

  She glanced at Yone as he came into the room. He stayed by the door, staring at Farley on the red-curtained stage.

  “We all keep saying that the war will be over in a year,” Farley said. “But it won’t. Not in ten years. Twenty. It’ll grow until everyone has to pick a side. Until the entire planet’s at war.” He made a disgusted sound. “Man-made plagues, right, Yone? Fighting machines that think for themselves. Bombs that wipe out cities. Weapons that tear holes in reality itself. That think for themselves.” He looked at Wennda. “Hammers that decide what to hit.”

  He pulled at the curtain. The gesture oddly like a child tugging at its mother’s clothes. “These evil sons of bitches will hold out till there’s nothing left to hold out for. And when they see they’re going to lose, they’ll take everything with them. The entire goddamn world.”

  He turned toward Wennda. “What do you think this building is?” he asked, unnervingly calm, as if addressing a seated audience.

  “I don’t really know,” Wennda said. “But I think we should go. There’s something wrong with this place.”

  “A facility this size,” Farley pressed on, “underground, hardened against attack, chock full of gear, with an entire division of typhons guarding it. And all of it at the very center of the blast that ended the world.” He brought his fists up to his head and ground them by his temples. “Do you see it?” he asked. The hands lowered. “Do you see it now?”

  “No, I don’t, Joe,” she said. “It was two hundred years ago.”

  “It was last week,” he said.

  He held up a placating hand. He looked like he was fighting for control.

  Yone’s voice came from the back of the auditorium. “This isn’t where the weapon was meant to be used,” he said.

  Farley nodded. “It’s where it was built,” he said. “And something went wrong. Somebody pressed the wrong button, or forgot a decimal point. Or probably they all just bit off more than they could chew. And the rest is history.” He looked at Wennda and laughed bitterly. “Your history,” he said. “My future. They’re the same thing.” He was shaking.

  “But the people who built the device were the only ones who survived it,” Yone said from the back. He seemed reluctant to come farther into the room. “Because they were in the most protected structure in the world. And after the device was activated there was no more war to fight. No more enemies left, or allies either. Only a dying world.”

  “But they still wanted to live,” said Farley.

  “So they built the Dome,” Wennda said numbly. She looked at the fierce black eagle on the red curtain. “Your enemies built the Dome.”

  “The Dome and the Redoubt,” Farley said. “They were the only ones left, and the only place left on earth where they could survive was at the bottom of the crater their own weapon had made.” Farley shook his head. “And I’m fighting like hell to get back so I can help make it happen.”

  Wennda saw that he was struggling not to cry. He isn’t angry, she re
alized. He isn’t crazy. His heart is broken. She tried to think what to do.

  “But now you know what happened,” Yone told him. “So perhaps you can make a difference when you go back.”

  “But it happened,” said Farley. “So I didn’t.” He smirked. “Or maybe the difference I try to make is what causes all of this in the first place.”

  “Or you not going back is what lets it happen,” said Wennda, walking toward the stage.

  “But it doesn’t matter,” Farley said. “Here we are. Cause and effect.”

  “Captain Farley.” Yone’s voice sounded very flat across the room. “If you know the outcome beforehand, then you share responsibility for it if there is even a chance you could have prevented it and you did nothing.”

  “Cause and effect,” Farley said again. “There’s no getting away from it.”

  “Listen to me, Joe,” Wennda said, feeling desperate. “It’s not inevitable. Time’s not an arrow. It’s a shock wave. It spreads out in all directions at once. All possibilities. All outcomes.”

  “If everything happens, then what I do still doesn’t make any difference.”

  “I’m trying to make you see that actions matter. What you do, or don’t do, makes a difference every bit as much as chance or complexity. The future’s nothing but potential.”

  He shook his head. “Not once you get there, it isn’t.”

  “You are a stubborn man, Joe.”

  He snorted. “Maybe there’s a world where I’m not.”

  “Then I don’t want to go there. I want the world with the Joe Farley who said that no one ever made a flight by giving up. That’s the one I want to be with.” She climbed the steps to the stage and stood in front of him and set a hand on the curtain. “We can go back and try to prevent this. And if we can’t prevent it, then we can live. The way everybody lives, even though they already know the end of everything is waiting somewhere up ahead.” She took the bloodred curtain in both hands and pulled. The centuries-old fabric tore loose from its hooks and crumpled to the stage. A cloud of fine dust rose.

  Wennda dropped the fold of curtain onto the soft red pile and looked at Farley. “We’ll have time for all the things we don’t have time for now,” she said.

  Farley cocked his head and looked at her as if she were a slumming angel. “Time,” he said. Suddenly he felt oddly giddy, drunk with possibility, more capable because she was here with him.

  “Time,” said Wennda.

  Farley gave a slanted grin. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll try to save the world. And if we can’t, then we’ll hold hands on the beach.”

  Her eyes were very bright. She had begun to sweat. “I’d like that,” she said. “What’s a beach?”

  Farley’s pulse quickened. He felt like he was running. “Something God made for people to hold hands on,” he told her. “I’ll show you.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  “Backward,” he corrected. His palms were slick.

  Wennda laughed. “I look backward to it, then.”

  Yone’s voice made them look out at the auditorium, both of them suddenly feeling like actors playing a love scene on a stage. “I think we must be very near the energy source,” he said. “I think it is affecting us in some way. I don’t feel entirely rational.”

  “I feel….” Wennda frowned. “I don’t know. But it’s good.”

  “Invincible,” said Farley.

  “Optimistic,” she countered.

  “What should we do now?” Yone asked.

  Farley looked at Wennda. She smiled and nodded and he grinned. He held his hand to her and she clasped it.

  “We should finish it,” Farley said to Yone. He saw Yone staring at the fallen curtain and he led Wennda off the stage and approached him. Yone looked startled when Farley clapped a hand on his shoulder.

  “The curtain’s down,” Farley told him, “but the show’s not over.”

  thirty-four

  The hand that reached into Broben’s field of vision had an intricate tattoo that looked like a metallic roadmap. It reached past him and pulled the throttle back. The engines quieted and the vibration lessened.

  Broben tried to force his hand to his holster. The roadmapped hand beat him to it and removed the weapon. Thick plastic bands were wrapped around his wrists and cinched painfully tight. His headset drew taut on its cord, then slid from his head as he was pulled from the cockpit and dumped beside the top turret footrest like a sack of concrete. A figure knelt beside him. Stretchy armor, form-fitting black helmet, chunky nerve gun.

  The helmet regarded him blankly. Broben could not make out a visor, just a black glossy surface. Broben saw no rim where it reached the neck, and he realized that it wasn’t a form-fitting helmet at all. It was the thing’s head.

  The soldier moved aside as another helmeted Redoubt soldier emerged from the nose crawlway unconcernedly dragging Plavitz by the collar. Plavitz’s wrists and ankles were bound by thick plastic bands. Through the crawlway he glimpsed Boney in the nose, lying across his wrecked Norden bombsight, another of the anonymous troops standing beside him.

  Broben looked into Plavitz’s eyes as he was pulled along. He sensed the man behind them but all else about Plavitz was a rag doll as he was dragged into the bomb bay and along the narrow catwalk.

  Broben’s captor grabbed the back of his collar and dragged him through the bomb bay and radio room into the main compartment. Wen’s pet bug, Rochester, was still perched on the bright yellow hydraulic rig above the ball turret, two legs wrapped around the post and a leg on each aluminum ammo can, whiplike forelegs poised. The soldier didn’t even glance at the biobot as he stepped off the platform and dropped Broben to the deck beside Plavitz.

  Broben could turn his head a little and move his eyes a bit. Wen, Garrett, Everett, and Sten had been dumped like cordwood alongside the upfolded seat boards. Redoubt soldiers in skintight armor combed through the aircraft. They were small and thin, but they had no trouble dragging a side of beef like Garrett. They moved silently and efficiently in the cramped space as if choreographed, and Broben wondered whether they had some kind of communication system. Headset radios, maybe. For all he knew they used a Ouija board.

  The soldiers all went ramrod straight a moment before a figure entered the opened main hatch. At first Broben thought it was a man walking behind one of the spider things. Then he realized that both were one creature: A man from the waist up, a spider-like conveyance from the waist down. The steady taps of the articulated legs were heavy in the fuselage. It paused and surveyed the compartment. This man—or whatever the hell you’d call it—was larger than the soldiers, dressed in an angular, bulky, military-looking outfit that looked to be covering up a lot of tubing and machinery. His head was large and bald, and on one side of his scalp was a square of metal that looked like an access panel. A coiled cord emerged from under his stiff ring collar and plugged into a jack beneath the metal plate. He resumed his unnervingly smooth and alien walk toward the laid-out crew, and even as he neared them Broben could not have said whether he were looking at a man or some kind of robot.

  The figure took in the aircraft, the bug above the ball turret, the twitching bodies of the crew. He pointed at Wen. Two soldiers picked him up and held him before the man. Wen fought to keep his head upright but it kept sagging forward like a man fighting to stay awake.

  The man set a hand on Wen’s chin and held his head up. A network of metallic tattoos disappeared into the man’s sleeve. He turned Wen’s head left and right, then let go. Wen’s head drooped.

  The man looked down at the inert crewmen. “Ten men,” he said. His accent was harsh and difficult to understand. “And five more inbound.” He looked again at Wen. “The organ tank won’t need you now.”

  Broben heard a sudden meaty smack, and Wen’s head snapped back. His nose was bleeding. It looked broken. Had the man punched him? Broben hadn’t even seen his hand move.

  “You thought I would not know that you had repaired your warp
lane.”

  This time Broben saw the blur before he heard the blow. Wen doubled over and the soldiers held him up. Blood dripped from his nose. His mouth worked as if he were trying to say something.

  “You thought I would not know,” the man said, as if reciting, “that all the accidents and delays were your little sabotages.”

  Wen’s head snapped to the side. Broben heard teeth patter the hull. It had been a haymaker and it had come from very low and no human being could swing that fast. The lower half of Wen’s face was covered in blood and his jaw was out of line.

  “You thought that I would just let them come here and fly away with the means of our resumption.”

  A gut shot buckled Wen’s knees. The thud of it like an axe biting into a tree.

  “That there has been a moment,” the man continued, “when you have not been watched.”

  Wen tried to duck the next blow and it caught him on the forehead. His head rocked backward and his eyes glazed as they looked up. Again he tried to say something.

  A soldier grabbed his hair and made him look at the man. The man held his bloody fist in front of Wen and Broben knew that there would only be one more punch.

  “You thought we were that stupid,” the man said. “That I am that stupid.”

  Wen looked past the lethal fist and directly at the man. He coughed and spit blood. “Muh,” he said. “Monkey wrench.”

  The man cocked his head. Broben got the impression he was processing the phrase, waiting for something to tell him what it meant. Then he smiled and drew back the fist.

  Two snakelike tentacles wrapped around his waist where it joined the multilegged life support, and tore him in two. The spider legs splayed. Blood and viscera splashed onto the deck, and Broben heard faint sputtering and saw bluewhite flashes from the severed spinal column. A wisp of pale gray smoke rose. The man’s head turned. Perhaps he saw what had grabbed him. Perhaps some awareness remained in him as Wen’s pet biobot dropped his sputtering torso into the warm red porridge on the deck beside his four convulsing multijointed legs.

  Wen’s biobot spider flowed down from the turret rig and swarmed the nearest soldier holding Wen. It reared up and reached toward the helmet and turned. The soldier’s body toppled to the deck. The head hit next.