Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  “You did.”

  “I’m smarter than they are.” He pushed her toward the cartons. “Go on,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”

  She was already on top of the pile. Ahead of her, between the last row of cartons and the wall, she could see a space, not even as big as the cage she had just escaped. She did not want to descend into it. She swivelled to look at Esteban, but he was now beside the door, his hand on the light switch.

  “But …”

  “Go on,” he said. “Get in. If anyone finds the lights on, they’ll get suspicious. And I will be back.”

  A carton moved beneath her weight, and she slid into the hole. As soon as she could no longer see her friend—and he could not see her—the lights went out. The door opened and quietly closed. She fell the last half-meter into her new cell.

  The darkness was complete. Her brain manufactured sparkles and lines and fragmentary mottled patterns from the random firings of the neurons in her retinas. There were faint sounds too, and though she wondered at first if they too were hallucinations borne of sensory deprivation, she soon accepted them as… The mutter of distant voices? The muted clash of metals? Steps in the corridor outside the door?

  She resisted the trembling that threatened to overwhelm her by flattening one hand against the side of a carton. Plastic. They could be folded flat, stored fifty at a time inside one of their number, and unfolded again whenever they were needed. She wondered how old these cartons were, what they had held, and even where they had been. The Gypsies and the Orbitals both used the same design. It dated, she thought, to a time before the gengineers had fled Earth.

  What was in the cartons now? She could detect no smell of food or machine oil. They were light, light enough that Esteban might easily have lifted and moved and rearranged the stacks to make this space for her to hide in, but they were not empty. She felt for the top of a carton, found overlapping flaps, and slid a hand inside. Soft. Cloth. Clothing, then. Or bedding.

  She was painfully aware that Esteban had told her nothing at all of what he planned. He had said he would return. But he had given no hint of where he was going now, or of where they would go when he came back.

  He had said he wanted to free the others when they were talking with Aunt Lois, hadn’t he? Then perhaps that was what he was doing now. Shooting guards, putting them to sleep just as he had done to hers. Releasing Esteban and Cherilee and the other dissidents who had wished and tried and failed to protect Pearl Angelica, the living blasphemy so far from her home and kin.

  “How long have we been in here?” she asked the artificial intelligence in the cuff Esteban had given her. She was sure it was not the hours she felt within her. “Since he left. Since the lights went out.”

  “Ten minutes,” said the machine quietly. “Time flies when you’re having fun.” And much, much later, maddeningly later: “Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty-two.”

  Footsteps in the corridor. A moving door. Light once more, at last. And a voice she recognized, a voice she had feared she would never hear again: “Angie?”

  “Anatol!”

  Esteban was there as well, looking sour as she clambered over the stack of cartons and rushed to embrace her older friend.

  “I thought …,” she said, and she set her fingers gently beside Anatol’s left eye. It was swollen shut by a massive bruise. Then she looked at the others and could not help a dismayed gasp.

  “Yeah,” said Anatol. His arms were tight around the bot. “They were pretty rough.”

  “They won’t get another chance,” said Esteban.

  Besides Anatol and Esteban, there was one other man, his skin swarthy, his bald crown a mass of scabs rimmed by crusted, dirty curls. He looked both lost and determined. Pearl Angelica barely recalled seeing him at the party that seemed so long ago. “The worst of it doesn’t show,” he said.

  But it did. Four women accompanied the men, and their eyes were wide and dark and wary. One carried an arm in a sling. Another was bent half double, her arms cradling her sides as if she were in agony from broken ribs. Pearl Angelica recognized them both from their visit to the greenhouse and wished she knew their names.

  “I’ll make them kill me first,” said the woman who clutched her ribs. Her voice was rough with pain and fluid.

  “We’ll carry you if we have to,” said Anatol.

  “You won’t,” she rasped. “It hurt, but I ran this far. I can keep going. As long as … You said you can do it, Esteban. Just get us out of here.”

  “I thought there would be more,” said Pearl Angelica.

  “The rest can’t walk. Or I couldn’t find them.”

  “Some are already dead,” said the man she didn’t know.

  “Did they get us all?” asked someone.

  “All but Esteban.”

  “Then who’s the informer?”

  “Do you think we’d be here now if he was the one?”

  “Where’s Cherilee?” asked Pearl Angelica. “Wasn’t she … ?”

  “She was with us,” said the woman with the broken arm.

  “I bet it was Notting,” said the man. “He didn’t seem worried enough when they took us in.”

  “It doesn’t matter, as long as he’s not with us now.”

  “Or she.”

  “She said she had to get something,” said Anatol. “At the greenhouse.”

  “I told her where to find us.” Esteban looked uncertain.

  “Here?” asked the bot. She refused to share the suspicion that had obviously crossed more than one of the others’ minds.

  “No. We can’t wait for her. If they catch her …” He eased the door open the merest crack, peered into the corridor, and retreated. He leaned against the door and whispered, “Guards. But they’re not going our way.” Footsteps became audible, and voices.

  A moment later, he peeked again. “They’re gone. Let’s go.”

  Anatol and Pearl Angelica let go of each other only long enough to slip through the doorway. Then they seized each other’s hands and ran, following Esteban.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” the bot managed to ask.

  “Yeah.” Anatol was panting. Before he could answer, a distant alarm began to wail. “Shit!” he said. Ahead of them Esteban gestured with desperate urgency. Anatol yanked at her wrist, and she plunged ahead until her breath burned in her throat. “They’ve caught Cherilee. Or they’ve found out we’re gone. But we’re almost there. Next corner.”

  “Wrong direction,” said Esteban. “They don’t know about you yet. That one’s near the greenhouse.”

  Pearl Angelica’s heart fell. If Cherilee had truly been recaptured, she would never see that woman, her friend and protector, again. “Where are we going?”

  This time Anatol said nothing. Esteban was already stopping beside a doorway and pointing into a room much like the one they had just left. Instead of stacks of cartons, it held rows of four-wheeled carts loaded with sheets, rods, and bars of metal. Each cart had a hitch for attaching it to a small tractor.

  When they were all inside, Anatol said, “The Teller. We’re going to steal it. Right?”

  Esteban nodded. “If we can.”

  Pearl Angelica almost shouted as she realized that Anatol had to be right. There was no other way to escape the base. A truck might get them onto the Moon’s surface, but the Engineers would know as soon as they attacked an airlock. They would not survive long enough to be picked up by Lois McAlois or the Orbitals. The Q-ship, on the other hand … “Hrecker said it was ready when I got here. It just needed more mass tanks.”

  “But we can’t just barge in,” he said. “There’s a pair of guards on the door. I walked past earlier. And a keypad lock. I don’t know the combination. We have to wait for the next shift.”

  “When’s that?”

/>   His cuff and hers answered simultaneously, “Seven. Hours yet to go before we …” They went silent together, and then her cuff said, “Stan? Is that you?”

  “Donna?”

  “Whip out your tap wire, and we—”

  “Shut up,” said Esteban.

  “I’m not your—!”

  “Hush,” said Pearl Angelica. “He’s right. This isn’t the time.”

  More alarms joined the first, some hooting, some wailing, at least one ringing like the telephone of an absent god. One of the alarms was so close and so loud that the woman with the broken ribs covered her ears. Someone said, “They’re going to get us!”

  “She’s supposed to come here,” said Esteban when the raucous din paused as if to catch its breath. “If she can … Is that her?”

  “How can you tell?”

  He reached for the door. “She limps.” As soon as he put his eye to the crack, he almost shouted. “It is!”

  Cherilee stumbled into the room, almost falling. Someone’s shirt was wrapped around one ankle. In her arms she held a white cylinder, one of the greenhouse’s smaller beehives. The entrance hole at its base was plugged with a wad of crumpled paper.

  “We thought they had you!” cried Anatol.

  “They almost did. They spotted me. But …” She handed the beehive to Pearl Angelica. “I had two of these. I threw the other one.”

  Someone laughed, short and sharp, a bark.

  “I dumped the honey.”

  The bot clutched the hive to her chest—it weighed only a few kilos—and thought: Even when escaping from a death sentence, even injured, even with no time at all for such things, Cherilee had remembered what she needed. She could not give her the Earth she had most truly craved, but her excuse, the bees she had said she wanted, those she had risked her life to bring. She struggled to speak. “I … I …” She shook her head so hard that the tears flew like raindrops, sparkling in the light.

  Cherilee was standing on one foot, massaging her bandaged ankle with both hands. She grinned up at Pearl Angelica. “Don’t even try. It made sense at the time. And it saved my ass. Those guards lost interest in me very quickly.”

  “Your ass wouldn’t have needed saving if you hadn’t—”

  “Shh,” said Esteban. The alarms had quieted for a moment. Now movement and voices were audible in the corridor outside the room. “I wish we could lock this door.”

  “Like this,” whispered the man whose name Pearl Angelica did not know. He took a meter-long steel bar from one of the carts and gently set one end beneath the door’s knob. He set the other end on the floor and braced his foot against it. Then he found another bar and hefted it in his hand as if he would welcome the chance to bloody a skull in repayment for his own wounds.

  “Good idea, Karel,” said Anatol.

  “It’s nothing new,” he added. “On Earth I’ve seen old apartments with sockets in the floor and door for rods like this. They were supposed to keep criminals from breaking in.”

  “There’s nowhere to hide in here.” Pearl Angelica was thinking of the cartons in the other room.

  “It’s too late for that.” Karel smacked his steel bar against one palm. Then he eyed the beehive in Pearl Angelica’s arms. “Just don’t drop that. Please.”

  Esteban whispered, “If we don’t make it—”

  He didn’t finish the sentence because feet pounded in the corridor just outside the door and stopped. A voice rose, and every one of the fugitives leaned toward the door to hear.

  If they didn’t make it, thought Pearl Angelica, they would have no second chance.

  “The locks are covered,” cried a voice outside their hiding place. “Get the maintenance shops. If you find a truck, put someone inside it. That’s how—”

  An alarm sounded just long enough to drown out his voice. Pearl Angelica filled in the missing words: That was how she had hidden before. And escaped, at least for a while.

  “You think we’ll find them all there?”

  “Who knows? Check their rooms. Their friends. If anyone objects …” The voice faded as the guard moved away.

  Arrest them. Execute them in the prisoners’ stead. Or save the trouble and shoot them on the spot. None of the fugitives had any doubt what the rest of the speaker’s words had to be.

  Someone else moved into range. “They’ve got to be in the base somewhere.”

  “One was in the greenhouse.”

  “That bitch put half a squad on the way to the infirmary.” This voice was just outside the door.

  Several of the fugitives smiled, but no one dared to laugh or speak aloud.

  “We’ll get her. And the rest. There’s no way out.”

  At that, Esteban’s smile became a grin, fierce and predatory, wolfish, showing teeth. His lips moved as he mouthed the words, “There is!”

  Pearl Angelica was sure he was right. He had freed them all from their cells. He had led them here. He had agreed when Anatol had suggested the Teller. There was a way, if only they remained free to seize it.

  Every time a guard’s footsteps sounded in the corridor, she held her breath. So did the other fugitives.

  When one guard laid a hand on the door’s handle and rattled the mechanism, the woman with the broken ribs turned white and her legs began to fold. Esteban’s arm around her chest made her leap with pain and bite her lip, and then she was once more standing on her own.

  Happily, the rattling stopped. The hand and its owner left, and no other guard thought to try the door behind which the fugitives waited for their moment.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Pearl Angelica held the beehive Cherilee had brought her tightly in her arms, afraid to let it go. She was not sure that she would ever get it to First-Stop, but she had it now. It smelled sweet and warm, and an irregular hum vibrated against her skin.

  It was one of the things she had thought she wanted when she came to Earth. Was it enough? She could not have root-home. She could have … She looked toward Anatol and met his eyes. Then she looked at Esteban. Had she found more than she had bargained for?

  How much of it would she keep?

  How long would she keep it?

  She felt like she waited forever for the sounds of the Security guards to move down the corridor, away from their hiding place, and fade into the distance. Later Donna told her that the fugitives hovered by the door, their anxiety palpable even to an artificial intelligence, for only minutes before they could hear no more words or footsteps.

  “Stan?”

  “It’s time,” said Esteban’s cuff. “They’ll think you’re the new shift just long enough.”

  Esteban held his dart gun ready as he cracked the door and peered down the corridor, first in one direction and then, easing through the opening just enough to see around the jamb, in the other. He made a muffled “Tcha!” sound and the gun went “Pft!”

  The man Anatol had called Karel said, “What!” and lifted his steel bar above one shoulder. Pearl Angelica fought down the surge of adrenaline that threatened to force her heart into fibrillation. She bit her tongue to make saliva flow. She swallowed and held her beehive tighter.

  “He was just coming around the corner,” said Esteban. “There’s no one else. Let’s go.”

  He remained in the lead as they left the storeroom, passed the body on the floor, and marched around the corner, where coveralled workers were filing out the already open door to the construction bay. A pair of guards waved at the fugitives, not recognizing them for what they were until Esteban’s dart gun was already firing.

  Someone inside the construction bay knew what to do. The door began to slam shut, but two workers had fallen in its way and their bodies kept it from closing. An alarm began to hoot, closer and louder and more strident than anything Pearl An
gelica had already heard.

  The refugees flowed forward and through the doorway. When a worker tried to attack Esteban with a wrench, Karel’s steel bar blocked the blow and broke the attacker’s arm with an audible snap. The dart gun felled several more workers. The rest drew back until Esteban told them to pull the bodies from the doorway and close the door.

  He pointed the gun at one of the few workers who wore the usual Engineers’ shirt and trousers. The shirt had been lovingly embroidered with spidery mechanisms on a checked background that only slowly defined itself as a panel of photovoltaic cells; the mechanisms were antique satellites. “How do you disable the keypad outside?”

  The man stared back defiantly, glanced at his fallen colleagues, and finally indicated a small metal box on the wall beside the door. “The circuitry’s in that.” When Karel raised his steel bar as if to smash the box, he cried, “No! There’s a switch.”

  No switch was visible, but Esteban ran his fingers around the box, stopped in the middle of its lower edge, grinned, and pressed. Pearl Angelica thought that if there had been no alarm to drown out quiet sounds, she might have heard a click and a grunt of satisfaction.

  The Engineers’ Q-ship, the Teller, towered above them all. Its pointed prow nearly touched the ceiling. Its flanks gleamed, untouched so far by the radiation and dust of space. The two tanks of reaction mass Pearl Angelica had seen so many weeks before were now four. One more lay in a rack to one side. Another was held in the arms of a massive robot, ready for installation.

  The ship’s hatch stood open at the end of a catwalk high above their heads. When Pearl Angelica scanned the room to find the stairway or elevator that must lead to that level, she saw a worker clambering onto the catwalk.

  “Esteban!” Anatol’s cry was almost totally drowned out by the din of the alarm. But he was pointing too. The worker was running now, heading for the hatch. Did he intend to close it? To bar them from seizing the ship he had devoted his energies to building? Or did he have some thought of firing the engines and destroying them—and everyone else in the construction bay—with the incandescent exhaust?