“You should have told Knave that I don’t choose my alliance representatives because of their age but because of their ability,” said Wall. “You’re twice as intelligent and ten times more reliable than Knave.”
“I don’t think Knave would have reacted well to me saying that,” said Deuce sadly. “Anyway, Knave lost his temper and said things would be far better with Cage as alliance leader. It’s possible that Knave only said that because he wanted to annoy me and knows how much I hate Cage, but the tone of his voice ...”
Donnell nodded. “I’ll take Knave off the guard duty roster. I’m sure it won’t be long before he works out that Cage was lying to him, Deuce, and then you two can rebuild your relationship.”
Deuce’s face twisted. “Knave may be able to rebuild his relationship with me, but I’m not sure that Diana will ever forgive him.”
I frowned. “Do you mean that Knave has made that comment about the baby looking like you to Diana as well?”
Deuce groaned. “Knave said that to her last night.”
I winced.
There was a short silence before Donnell spoke again. “Wall, we need Manhattan to keep providing the same number of guards as the other divisions, so you’ll have to choose a replacement for Knave.”
“I made a mistake choosing Knave to be one of the Manhattan guards,” said Wall. “Rather than risk making another, I’ll act as a guard myself.”
“Very well,” said Donnell.
Wall and Deuce turned and walked off to the Manhattan corner of Reception.
“Cage has been gone for two weeks,” said Donnell grimly, “but he’s still managing to cause trouble in the alliance.”
Chapter Three
Donnell and I walked across to join Tad and Braden at their table in the Resistance area. I hung my coat on the back of a chair to dry, sat down, and looked anxiously at where Tad was slumped in his seat.
“You look tired and cold after working outside for so long.”
Tad hurriedly straightened up. “I got a little chilly but I’m fine now. It’s gloriously warm in here.”
I laughed. “It’s not just gloriously warm, but almost too hot. Now that we’ve got plenty of power, people can’t resist turning up the heating controls.”
Donnell had dumped his coat on a chair too, but was still on his feet, waving at the back of the room. At first, I couldn’t work out who he was waving at, but then I realized the oldest of his six officers was kneeling beside one of the row of electric devices that had been brought into Reception to replace the old cooking fire. A moment later, Machico got to his feet, noticed Donnell beckoning to him, and came to join us.
“What do you want, oh beloved leader? I’m in the middle of an urgent cooker repair.”
Donnell sat down. “I need you for something far more important.”
“You may think that it’s more important, Sean,” said Machico, “but my wife may not agree. She’s in charge of the team cooking this evening’s dinner.”
“Natsumi can cope with one less cooker. While you’ve been indoors working on repairs, there’ve been some serious developments, Mac.”
Machico promptly sat down. “What’s the problem?”
Donnell gave a wary look around to see if anyone was in earshot, but most of the returning people had taken their wet coats into the wings of the building, so the other Resistance tables were almost deserted.
“We’d better cover the more secret issues before Reception gets crowded.” Donnell turned to Tad. “What’s the current state of the New York power grid?”
Tad’s face took on an oddly distant expression. It was over half a century since children had routinely had web technology implanted in their brains to connect their minds directly to the Earth data net. In the mass exodus of people and resources to new worlds, humanity had lost the capability to manufacture new webs or to keep the existing ones tuned, so they’d all failed decades ago. Every web except the specially adapted one that Tad’s grandfather had arranged to have implanted in Tad’s brain.
Like the relationship between Tad and me, the existence of Tad’s web was a secret shared only with the other two off-worlders, Donnell, and Machico. Tad’s distant expression meant that he was using his web now. When I first found out that Tad was the last man in humanity to be webbed, I’d wondered what it was like to see images and hear voices that no one else could.
Now that I had one of the ancient Armed Agent weapons bonded to me, I was experiencing something similar myself. The tendrils of my gun entered my right hand and arm, before running through my body to connect to my brain. I could hear the gun’s voice and see its tracking display when no one else could, but that was still nothing in comparison to the host of sounds, images, and information that Tad could access with a single thought.
“The New York power supply was turned off when the city was officially abandoned in 2389,” said Tad. “For over eighteen years, many of the buildings in New York have been collecting solar power and sending it into the power reservoir storage system, but nobody was using it. The power built up until it exceeded the capacity of the power reservoir, and the power overflow system had to start dealing with the excess.”
Tad paused. “Now sections of that power overflow system are breaking down under the strain. Each section that fails puts the remaining sections under more pressure, so they’re more likely to fail in turn. The power overflow system is now approaching catastrophic failure point.”
Donnell sighed. “I just asked about the current state of the New York power grid, Tad. I didn’t want one of your never-ending lectures.”
“I’m explaining these things for a reason,” said Tad, in a dignified voice. “When I turned on the New York power supply a couple of weeks ago, the lights and heating started operating in a lot of buildings. They’re using power at a rate that eases the strain on the power overflow system, buying us a little more time before the power grid explodes.”
“How much extra time?” asked Donnell urgently. “When will the firestorm hit New York?”
“I’ve run several projections over the last two weeks,” said Tad, “but I can’t come up with a definitive answer. Power overflow sections are failing at a lower rate now, but the power reservoir storage system is still dangerously overloaded, and the weather this spring will make a crucial difference to when the firestorm hits.”
He shook his head. “We’re barely into February, so the days are still short, with snow often covering the solar power absorbing areas of buildings. The days will gradually get longer as we approach the summer, increasing both the amount of solar power going into the power reservoir storage system and the rate of power overflow sections failing. A late spring, with lots of cloud and snow, would slow the speed of that increase. An early spring, with sunshine and no snow, would accelerate it.”
Donnell ran his fingers through his thick, wavy hair, and I noticed the number of silver strands among the brown was growing. “I appreciate the weather is an unpredictable factor, Tad, but you have to give me some idea of when the firestorm will happen. I need to get the alliance out of New York before it hits.”
“Let me check the Earth data net for information on weather patterns for this part of the Americas,” said Tad. “If I find out the potential range of spring weather, then I can use it to run more accurate projections.”
As we waited in silence, my gun warned me of another returning hunting party. I turned to watch the door open, and saw Rebecca take an eager few steps towards it, but she was disappointed again. This was Luther’s hunting party coming back. He dumped a brace of geese on the floor, pulled his hat from his dark head, and shouted loudly enough to be heard everywhere in Reception.
“The rain has eased and is changing to snow.”
Donnell normally divided the alliance men into six hunting groups, taking charge of one group himself while the others were led by either his deputy or one of his other six officers. The threat presented by Cage had changed the standard arrangement th
ough. With Donnell, myself, and a number of archers busy on guard duty each day, only five hunting groups were going out, and those groups were always being led by the same five officers. We were just waiting for Vijay, Aaron, and Julien’s groups to come back now.
Tad’s voice attracted my attention back to him. “I’ve just researched the historical weather patterns for the New York area. There seems to have been a radical global climate change during the decades when people were leaving Earth for new worlds. Winters got colder, possibly because of reduced energy usage.”
Tad paused. “I decided to ignore all the older information and focus on the weather patterns for the last two decades. The citizens in the big swathe of settlements over to the south-west have been keeping some rudimentary weather records on the Earth data net. Those show the best spring weather was back in 2391. Does that sound right to you?”
“That was two years after the last of the citizens left New York,” said Machico. “I remember we had a glorious spring that year followed by a miserably wet summer.”
“The records show the worst spring weather was in 2400,” said Tad.
“Yes,” said Donnell. “That was a painfully long winter. We thought it would never stop snowing, and then we had a hot, sunny summer.”
I thought back to the summer of 2400, and bit my lip. I hadn’t been in New York but London then. It had been unusually hot there too, and everyone assumed that was the reason for there being a lot of small fires in the city. If we’d realized they were a warning sign that the London power grid was on the edge of exploding, then ...
I grimaced and brushed the back of my hand across my eyes. There’d been plenty of working portals in London back then. A security block meant that only respectable citizens could use them, but members of the London branch of the Resistance knew how to break into the control box on one of the inter-continental portals and hardwire it to bypass the DNA security checks.
You didn’t hardwire a portal lightly, because any accidental interference with the portal transmission process could have hideous consequences for the person travelling. If we’d known what the warning signs meant in 2400 though, the London Resistance would have got a portal working and taken everyone from London to join the New York scavenger alliance.
If things had happened that way, if we’d evacuated London before the firestorm hit, then my life would have been so different. My mother would have lived. My brother wouldn’t have turned traitor. Donnell and I wouldn’t have wasted six years barely daring to speak to each other.
“Are you all right, Blaze?” asked Tad.
“I’m fine,” I lied hastily. “So, you’ve got information about two different extremes of spring weather, and you’re going to use that in your projection thingy.”
“Yes. It will just take me another few minutes to adjust the parameters and ...”
There was another long wait. I’d no real idea what Tad was doing on the Earth data net. The boy was a mass of contradictions, incredibly knowledgeable and powerful in some ways while completely ignorant and defenceless in others. The web implanted in Tad’s brain let him use the old Wallam-Crane family security codes to do seemingly miraculous things, such as turning on the power to the whole of New York. At the same time, he could misjudge the simplest situations, making basic mistakes like leaving his aircraft next to a disintegrating skyscraper so it was smashed by falling debris.
My mind drifted back into pointlessly reliving the events leading up to the London firestorm. We hadn’t realized the small fires were a danger signal. We’d carried on with the usual routine of our lives until a clear, sunny day the next summer. There’d been a sound like thunder, and flames had come from nowhere, ripping through the Europe Parliament House that was our home.
As always when I thought about the London firestorm, my memory conjured up the choking smell of smoke, and the sound of my mother’s dying screams. I’d tried to open the door between us, tried to save her, but the door handle had been red hot.
My right hand clenched with remembered pain, and my mind jumped to the final memory in the horrific sequence. I was with my brother in a room crammed with people. The air was foul with acrid smoke, and men were clustered by the bulky ring of an interstellar portal, desperately working to hardwire the controls. I was dizzy from lack of oxygen, and the walls were smouldering around us, by the time the portal flared into life.
Then came the moment when my brother picked me up, and the comforting feel of his arms holding me crushingly tightly against his chest, as he carried me through the portal to the safety of New York.
I was hit by a strange feeling that something was wrong with that memory sequence. Some detail in it was missing or confused, and there was a mystery I didn’t understand. A ridiculous idea, because I knew exactly what that mystery was and the answer to it. For over six years, I’d struggled to make sense of what had happened in London, why that firestorm had suddenly exploded across the city, but couldn’t until Tad had explained about the power grid.
The five cities with United Earth Regional Parliament complexes had a special type of energy saving power grid. London, New Tokyo, Lagos, and Sydney had all burned when their power grids exploded. New York was the last of the cities to be abandoned, so it hadn’t burned yet, but it was rapidly running out of time. We were rapidly running out of time. Back in London, the problem had been that we hadn’t known what was coming. In New York, we knew precisely what was going to happen, but there were no working portals left to offer us an easy escape.
I inevitably started picturing flames ripping through this building, the walls of Reception smouldering, and its glass front wall shattering from heat. Fortunately, the tracking display of my gun distracted me by showing two sets of white dots converging on the door of Reception.
Two of the remaining hunting parties were obviously returning at once. I turned to look at the door, and saw this would be a double disappointment for Rebecca. The figures jostling their way inside included stocky blond-haired Julien and the third of Donnell’s senior officers, Vijay. Julien stayed near the door to talk to some of the other men, but Vijay headed towards the Resistance tables.
Weston hurried over to meet his husband, hugged him, and then stepped back and frowned in bewilderment. “You’re startlingly dry compared to Julien.”
Vijay pointedly rubbed the damp patches Weston had left on his coat. “I’m startlingly dry compared to you too. That’s because I had the sense to keep my hunting party sheltering in the turrets of the Unity Bridge until the torrential rain changed to nice, gentle snow.”
Weston laughed. “Some of us didn’t have anywhere convenient to shelter.”
Vijay and Weston turned to walk towards us. They clearly intended to join us at our table, but Donnell lifted a warning finger to stop them.
“I’m busy consulting with Blaze and Machico about guarding the off-worlders, but I’ll be free to chat later.”
Vijay and Weston pulled wounded faces at each other, but turned away. Tad waited until they were out of earshot before speaking.
“My projection has finished.”
“What does it tell us?” I asked.
“If we have an early, sunny spring then the firestorm could hit as soon as the end of May. If we have a very late spring, then the firestorm may not happen until early August.”
“There’s no chance that the power grid can hold together until next year?” asked Donnell.
“Absolutely no chance,” said Tad.
Donnell grimaced. “You said that we’d have to go as far as Philadelphia to reach working portals. That means we’ll need to take supplies for the journey as well as the essentials for founding our new home. Originally, I planned that we would leave New York at the beginning of April. Now it sounds as if it might be safe for us to delay leaving until the end of April, but I’m no longer sure we’ll have completed our preparations by then.”
“What’s the problem?” asked Tad.
“It’s not one problem but severa
l,” said Donnell. “Firstly, there’s Cage. We need so many people on guard duty to prevent him attacking us, that almost everyone else has to focus on hunting for food. That means we haven’t made much progress on the preparations to leave New York, and we haven’t done anything at all about the key issue of transport. We need to scavenge some new, bigger carts, which will be more suitable for transporting supplies and small children across country.”
He sighed. “In fact, the only task on my list that we’ve completed so far is preparing a stock of seeds and wintereat roots to take with us.”
“This is my fault for letting Cage escape,” I said miserably. “When he came to Sanctuary to try to kill me and the off-worlders, I should have shot him on sight rather than delaying.”
Braden had been listening to the conversation in silence, but now made one of his rare comments. “Blaze, you should never blame yourself for having the respect for human life that Cage lacks.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t really delay shooting Cage out of respect for human life. It was more that I was confused by Wall’s arrival.”
“You were perfectly right to delay shooting until you were sure which side Wall was on,” said Donnell. “If you’d assumed he was there to help Cage, and shot both of them, then Queens Island could have convinced Brooklyn and London that the whole of Manhattan should be expelled from the alliance. We’d have been left in a nightmare situation where Manhattan was fighting the rest of us for possession of Parliament House.”
“I suppose that shooting on sight could have been an even bigger mistake,” I muttered doubtfully, “but there should have been a way for me to make sure what side Wall was on and still stop Cage from getting away.”
“There’s no point in brooding on past decisions,” said Tad. “If it was possible, I’d build a time machine, travel back a century, and warn my ancestors that trying to found too many colony worlds at once would lead to a disastrous collapse of civilization.”
Scavenger Blood Page 3
