Ten Thousand Thunders

by Brian Trent

  His strategy targeted corporations first, pointing to the ready-made workforce from Outland incorporation. Then he hit the public with appeals to their cherished humanistic principles: images of Outland suffering played continuously in the strongest voting districts. In the end, his political opposition scrambled to attach their own names to the Deal, desperate to outdo each other’s philanthropy when they realized that Doros had won the propaganda game. Only the most rigid senators held out, and most of these were gone by the next election. In fact, the ousted senators were replaced by frontierists, which led some to speculate this had been Doros’s grand objective to begin with.

  And then, with such a glorious career in politics cemented, he promptly left.

  He became a paleontologist.

  Doros went deep into the Outlands and funded strange new digs. He published papers and skyrocketed to celebrity status in a new field. When his book, Troodon: The First City-Builders, was published it became the first interplanetary bestseller, the colonies on Luna and Mars having just been settled. Gethin had read it himself, delighted by the premise that the first stirrings of terrestrial civilization hadn’t been in Mesopotamia as once thought, but in the twilight of the Cretaceous Era seventy million years previous. The book became too popular for its own good; fantasy serials were produced, blowing the original findings so far out of proportion that it was tough now to separate the original work from its legend.

  And at the height of this hoopla? He vanished again.

  This time it was to get married and utterly disappear from public view for two centuries, until he reemerged as a University of Athens professor. No fanfare this time, his thirst for fame dulled at last into a low-profile, quiet life in academia.

  Disch chewed his lower lip as he read the file. “The professor doesn’t like to stay in one place for long, that’s for damn sure.”

  Celeste couldn’t stop staring at Doros’s age. Three hundred years of life! King D. was right; the human race was no longer homogenous. The Earth was inhabited by two human species now. Castor and Pollux on a genetic level.

  As for the Outland Charter Deal, she felt a special bitterness in the back of her throat. Even assuming this Peisistratos fellow had meant well – an assumption Celeste was never keen on making about anyone – the legislation had been toothless in practice. The three-step integration process sounded perfectly acceptable to an arky, sure. The problem was that each step could take twenty years, and a single episode of violence in a chartered town was enough to reset the whole process. Wastetowns were being jerked around by a fake carrot, and Celeste felt her blood go hot. The arkies treat us like dogs, she thought savagely.

  StrikeDown!

  StrikeDown!

  Her lips moved to form the words.

  “I want you to look at this,” Gethin told Disch, and he shared his recording of Peisistratos’s peculiar phone conversation. “I need to know who he was speaking with.”

  Disch ran the conversation through a filter. “It’s Doros,” he confirmed. “Can’t say more than that, and I have no clue who the other fellow is. Who is he? Why do you care about this? Are we done here?”

  Gethin hesitated. “One more thing. I’d like your opinion on this.” And he transmitted a copy of Celeste’s memories of the Hudson attack.

  “Holy Zeus!” Disch shouted. “Look at that energy release!” He replayed it several times. “Acceleration is probably from a blurmod, but there’s dissolution of his shape! And there’s no actual dispersal of matter. Could be a codeworm…except no, the pattern of movement along air viscosity is predictable, and it doesn’t match this. It doesn’t match it at all!” He had gone pale again.

  Gethin and Celeste regarded each other.

  “Okay,” Disch said finally, looking so sweaty and exhausted that Gethin thought: heart attack. The guy’s insurance premiums must be staggering. “Okay, listen. First of all, that guy moved with an acceleration that’s not possible. He was actually phasing there into plasma. That’s not possible.”

  “A blurmod,” Gethin protested.

  “No blurmod can move a person that fast. Their organs would be pulped. They’d catch fire.”

  “Okay…”

  “And then there’s the problem with the explosion.”

  “What problem?”

  “It’s not an explosive device. He didn’t erupt from the inside out. He converted to an energy release.”

  “He suicide-bombed,” Celeste insisted.

  “No! Didn’t I just tell you it wasn’t an explosion? Damnitall! Listen, okay? His body converted to energy!” Disch pulled the image into a 3D holo and set it floating above them; the rainbow wash of colors sparkling in their eyes as they gazed up at it. It was from Celeste’s viewpoint of the Stillness High Priest being shot to pieces, his flesh disintegrating under multigun fire while his searchlight eyes burned like hellish portals. “I’m telling you, this is matter-energy conversion done on the fly.”

  Gethin felt the stirring of ancient, primal dread. He remembered the video of the shuttle’s explosion. Remembered Kenneth Cavor charred to a crisp in Tycho Hospital.

  “So,” Gethin started. “You’re saying that someone out there has developed the technology to switch matter into energy in a way that maintains a stable pattern of sentience?”

  “I’m not saying that at all.” The man looked at Celeste in unabashed terror. “That guy who attacked you? He wasn’t a human being. No way, no how. That thing is something else entirely.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Deliberations

  They were quiet as they left Disch’s apartment.

  “How do you know he won’t tell other people about this?” Celeste asked.

  “I made him sign a federal NDA. If he breaks that, the IPC will intervene in Michael Disch’s life.”

  “Doesn’t sound so scary.”

  “They’ll erase him.”

  “Oh.”

  Walking the corridor, Gethin realized he couldn’t stop shivering. His limbs felt steeped in ice and his body seemed to be jumping, quietly, in a hundred different places.

  As they entered the Triton wing, Celeste finally said, “Your friend is wrong. That guy must have been a Stillness High Priest. They’re the only rank in that goddamn cult that willingly utilizes biomodifications.”

  Gethin said nothing. At the end of the corridor hung a painting of the Garden of the Hesperides: gods and goddesses frolicking among the heath, drinking wine and just beginning to take notice of a golden apple in the grass. As Gethin came within range of it, his own face was swiftly incorporated into the divine mix; Celeste, too, had her countenance captured and mirrored.

  The Wastelander stuck her tongue out at the painting; her onscreen image followed suit.

  “How well do you know this Doros guy?” she asked.

  “We used to work together.”

  “Do you think he’s working with terrorists?”

  “Not a chance in hell.”

  Celeste grimaced. “So far I’m not bowled over by the sanity of Athens University faculty, Gethin.”

  “Peisistratos is no anarchist. He would never support their ideology.”

  But Celeste was unconvinced. “How can you truly grasp the depths of a three-hundred-year-old guy?”

  He chewed this over. “Fair point. But those three hundred years also establish a pattern of rationality, and Disch confirmed there doesn’t seem to be anything unusual about his habits, travels, or the company he keeps.”

  “People are good at hiding things.” She looked searchingly at him. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m tired.”

  But he wasn’t. At all. Gethin felt hyperactive, and he secretly tapped his virtuboard to order a sleep inducer from the local pharmacy.

  “So what happens now?” Celeste asked.

  “I’m going to see Peisistratos tomorro
w.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Find out how he’s involved,” Gethin said. “That phone call suggests conspiracy of a sort. He…um—”

  His chest exploded in sudden pain before he could utter his next words. He choked on his own spit, sucking in a panicked breath. The goblin appeared in his memory, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern.

  Celeste was suddenly at his side, bracing him by the arms. “Bryce!”

  She held him upright, used his own hand to palm open his hotel room. Then she steered him over to the bed and peered concernedly into his face.

  “Should I call a doctor?”

  “I just need rest,” he managed.

  “Did Disch poison you?”

  Gethin laughed. “Not possible. When you see the others tomorrow, tell them I had to stop at the University. Let them know that I’ll share all my information with them when I return.”

  “Yamanaka will be pissed.”

  He tried to shrug. “No different…than any other…day.”

  With evident reluctance, Celeste left him there. The sleep-inducer arrived twenty minutes later by deliverybot. Gethin’s hands were shaking so much he could barely lift the hyposonic syringe to his neck and squeeze the release button. He dropped it to the carpet.

  And once again, he had no dreams.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Thunderheads

  Keiko Yamanaka liked to run in the dim hours of morning.

  She pushed herself down the Athenian jogging routes with her hair clinging to her sweaty face and neck, a bio-readout displaying itself in small yellow print on her optics. Every morning in Babylon she went running. In space, regular exercise was required to maintain muscles and bone density, unless you wanted to spend a fortune on nanite infusions. You got used to pacing yourself in rotational gravity. It changed your perspective, retrained your mind. You started thinking like a spacer, a Belter, maybe even an Ashoka.

  The hour of 0500 was dark; Poseidon Luxury guests were asleep, and she had seen only two other joggers on the path. Grudgingly, she admitted these Athenian trails were the most beautiful she had ever seen. Marble statues stood in little groves. The arcology ceiling displayed overcast clouds, reflecting the real-time weather outside.

  With each step, she imagined she was pounding the face of Gethin Bryce.

  He played me, she thought acidly. It hadn’t struck her until late last night, when she realized Gethin wasn’t following them to the hotel. He and the Wastelander went missing for more than two hours. In Babylon, she’d have been able to track and trace him, but this was out of her jurisdiction and there was nothing to do but wait for him to return. Keiko promised herself to never let him one-up her in this investigation again. She’d stick to him like a shadow.

  She still couldn’t believe he was here. Gethin Bryce! And working for the IPC again? Of all goddamn factions?

  She had met him in Arcadia before meeting in person. He had been young, sharp, and ambitious; she sensed in him a kindred spirit, a person who wanted to make a difference in the human universe, who could reshape that universe through sheer force of personality. And when Gethin began stitching together a core group of collaborators – uniting the best and brightest in the global web – he really did change the face of Arcadia.

  Keiko figured he was bound for a political career. Maybe even the next IPC president. She proposed to him. He accepted.

  And then, together, they became addicts.

  Arcadia had a way of doing that, especially for the naturally competitive. Plug into VR rigs or wetports, and vanish into seductive fictions. Pause only when your alarm chimes for meals.

  One night (or day, she couldn’t remember now and those years seemed to melt time away like in a Dali painting) Keiko had disengaged from a game, needing to use the bathroom. You didn’t have to disengage; Arcadia could wrap itself onto the contours of your own environment, with chaperone boundaries so you didn’t collide with walls or walk off your balcony.

  But Keiko had actually unplugged.

  She still remembered what she saw, as if with newborn eyes. The bedroom like a junkyard…clothes, boxes, fucking garbage everywhere she looked (the cleanbot was damaged and she and Gethin had been so occupied with Arcadian events that they hadn’t so much as sent an email for the thing to be repaired. Not even an email.) The place smelled bad too.

  Gethin was plugged into the wetport beside her. His eyes were open, glazed, blank…his optic nerves being fed straight from the web. He looked cadaverous, oddly sallow, like old papyrus. Skinny to the point of being famished; technically they were eating enough to keep alive, but his body appeared skeletal. Drool hung from the corner of his mouth. And his unseeing eyes horrified her…as if she’d been sharing a bed with a corpse.

  Keiko had fled to the bathroom. Hands shaking, she bathed, dressed, and went outside. Just to see the real gardens of Athens again. Real places with real people. She walked for hours until her feet were aching; she required a PDT to get back home.

  And Gethin was still there. Hadn’t moved an inch. Like a human-shaped tumor growing against the bed.

  Keiko had killed the room’s power then. She remembered her husband blinking languidly, looking around in confusion. His lost, dreamy expression was somehow the most terrifying thing of all, as if he was thinking, Is this still part of the game? Am I still playing?

  Keiko shuddered.

  After that, they both began to distance themselves from Arcadia. Pursued real-world jobs – him with the local university, and her with Prometheus Industries. She hadn’t really expected anything to come of her application, and was stunned when they invited her to an interview…in person, at the regional headquarters. Stunned more when they hired her.

  She and Gethin mutually agreed to terminate their marriage contract. And she had never looked back. Eight years of marriage by the final reckoning. Good and bad times, and all of it, happily, in the past.

  Keiko jogged to a water fountain and bent to sate her thirst. An alabaster statue of Zeus stood nearby, smiling lasciviously at her, gripping a crooked lightning bolt.

  A thought entered her head:

  What if Prometheus selected me for this mission because of Gethin?

  It had been Lenny, after all, who tipped her off to the Base 59 footage. The shuttle explosion was old news when he found it. Lenny was a good friend; they’d served together on Ceres. He also knew her reputation as a corporate rising star. Tipping her off made good political sense. An investment in his own career.

  Still…

  Lenny must surely know other well-connected people. Company loyalty came with a cutthroat edge. Unless he was planning far ahead, Lenny could almost certainly get a faster reward by sending that footage to others.

  The Higher Ups must have stepped in.

  Keiko jogged in place, mulling that over. Prometheus must have known Gethin Bryce was going to be assigned. They would have seen his name on the passenger manifest. A quick data mine would link him with her. Analysts would crunch the profiles. Maybe Lenny sent the base footage to others, and corporate brass stepped in, told him to pull her into the loop. Another hound in the hunt, designed to counter the IPC’s dog.

  Good.

  I am a sister in the great family, Keiko thought. I am to investigate the Lunar incident and counter Gethin Bryce. Because this isn’t Arcadia anymore. In the real world, he is working for the great oppressor. The overprotective parent of Homo Sapiens. Someone had to challenge them eventually, to break up their hegemony and send humanity to the stars.

  War was inevitable.

  Keiko smiled up at Zeus. She retied a shoe, stretched, and continued her run.

  The call from Fincher arrived a few minutes later.

  “Keiko, are you awake?”

  “Of course,” she snapped, pulling a strand of hair from her face and tucking it behind her ear.
“What is it?”

  “One of our Pacific bases has been hit.”

  Keiko listened first with horror, then with escalating rage, as Fincher related the destruction of a Promethean offshore facility. There was no way to keep the incident secret; a flurry of deceased employee purchase signals were already being received by local regen centers.

  “That’s not all,” Fincher said. He was on audio only, but she could hear the strain in his voice and pictured him making rapid paces in his office like a worker bee stressing its figure-eight pantomime. “The Sol has run a front-page editorial on us.”

  Keiko was still running. At this news, she entered another grove and propped one foot on a bench.

  “Before or after the Pacific attack?”

  “The dateline is two hours before. Shall I upload the file?”

  “Go ahead.”

  The Sol

  Lunar Accident Stemmed From Illegal Promethean Experiment?

  By Nathaniel L. Moore

  The ‘accident’ on Luna resulted from experiments with unstable and exotic energy, according to an anonymous memo leaked from a Prometheus Industries network Earthside.

  The memo purports to be a classified briefing on lunar experiments with a state of matter known as ‘negative-mass.’ Such unstable material has been theoretical; however, sources confirm that Prometheus Industries has been researching its feasibility for use in the Trans-Neptunian Outpost. Base 59, the research lab which exploded under mysterious circumstances two days ago, is specifically mentioned in the memo as the major testing site.

  Eleven other “testing sites” are also referenced, though not by name or location.

  The Base 59 explosion has been confirmed as the cause of Flight 3107’s destruction. The incident claimed 216 lives, including the permadeath of superstar actor Salvor Bear.

  The TNO contract, already a hot political subject, is known to involve exotic matter and antimatter.

  “The potential risks of this technology currently outweigh any theoretical gains,” said Dr. Jethro Wells, a researcher with the independent think-tank Crawlspace. While declining to comment on the Base 59 explosion, Wells added, “Energy experiments that the TNO requires are by their very nature volatile and unpredictable. You don’t want to be sensationalist when you talk about these things, but in this case I think people don’t understand what’s at risk here. If it’s confirmed these experiments have been taking place in Earth’s vicinity, the IPC has to shut it down.”