The Veil

by Bowden, William

  Blake comes to his senses, looking up to find an MBI in its cradle.

  “Hello again, Senator Blake,” Lucy says.

  The VTOL’s hatch slides shut.

  DEATH BY NUMBERS

  VTOLs are not the best for long distance, but it means Toor is able to keep low and off the radar, aviation law not being top of her priority list given their cargo and destination.

  The cargo warily eyes Landelle, who warily eyes him back.

  It’s been hours. No amount of protest had yielded any insight into his predicament—and a predicament it indeed was, given that the Secret Service agents who had bundled him into the van were very definitely the real deal. Most likely they had flown from Andrews air force base, judging by the time spent getting there. A good few hours’ flying time and they had set down in the middle of a desert, his captors allowing him to stretch his legs unguarded—it wasn’t like he was going to make a run for it, and he suspected that they wouldn’t give a damn if he did. The two of them had spent their rest time talking quietly with the machine, which had otherwise remained silent throughout.

  “Can you at least tell me how much longer we will be flying for?”

  Blake’s spirit has been compliant for a while now, so no harm in yielding a little something.

  “Nearly there, actually” Landelle replies.

  “At last it speaks,” Blake quips. A little stretch before fishing for more information. “You’re both British,” Blake says. “The pilot’s military, but you… you’re something else. And I’m guessing not even MI5 or 6. What did you say your name was?”

  Landelle hadn’t said, because it was clear Blake didn’t recognize her. And why should he? They had never crossed paths. He would have noted her presence at the Afrika Hearings, but her appearance was more youthful now, and her hairstyle markedly different, one being the product of an unadulterated horror, the other the decade that had passed by since.

  “We look after our next passenger. That’s where we are headed.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Coming up on three miles,” Toor calls out.

  Landelle applauds the timing, returning a thin smile to Blake, “See for yourself,” she says, grabbing a handhold to pull herself up, so as to clamber forward onto the flight deck.

  With some trepidation, Blake follows suit, with alarmed bewilderment at what greets him.

  Ahead, the rocky cliff edge of a canyon races by, thrown into sharp relief by the shadows of a breaking dawn.

  “Are we on track?” Landelle asks Toor.

  “Just about to enter the window,” she replies.

  “Where the hell are we?” he asks.

  The cliff edge drops away as the VTOL rises out of the canyon to skim the plain below, heading toward the gentle curve of a vast perimeter barrier. An increasingly worried Blake has an inkling about this place.

  “No, no, no. This can’t be.”

  A flash of reflected sunlight in the distance has Blake whirling to Landelle, eyes agog.

  “We can’t go there!” he wails. “Do you understand me? We-can-not-go-there!”

  Landelle looks back into the main cabin, “Ready, Lucy?”

  “Ready, Special Agent Landelle.”

  “Landelle?” queries Blake.

  * * *

  The means of it are two metal pillars set more than an arm span apart, an electronic key slot set into each, with three equally spaced buttons below. The pillars frame a flat video display of a desert scene, a domed facility nestled within.

  The witnesses gather, taking their assigned seats before the pillars, the arrangement not unlike a private movie theatre. But this is not entertainment—it is a grim necessity, and it shows on their faces.

  As the last of the witnesses sit, the sheriff spots Justice Murphy enter, taking him aside.

  “We can’t locate Chief Justice Garr or Senator Blake.”

  “Well, we’re not waiting,” says Justice Murphy. “Proceed as scheduled.”

  Murphy takes his own seat, the sheriff stepping between the pillars to address all that have gathered.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen. Justices. May I have your attention, please.”

  What little murmur there is, quietens.

  “This will be brief,” the sheriff says. “We are here to carry out an order of the Supreme Court before witnesses. That order is the destruction of the Trinity facility and all that it contains, including what remains of one Robert Cantor. Does anyone present have any cause, reason, or other matter to voice?”

  All remain silent.

  “Will the elected key holders step forward.”

  A man and a woman rise from the front row of seats, each holding an electronic key card, each taking up a rehearsed position before their allotted pillar.

  “I require you to insert your key, and when the green light shows, press each of the three buttons below in sequence, top to bottom.”

  The man and woman do as instructed.

  “The sequence is committed. On the hour the following will occur. The Trinity facility will go into lock down—nothing in or out, including the data feeds. This will take about ten minutes. When complete, the bomb will be armed, and after sixty seconds it will detonate.”

  All look to the clock on the wall—8:59 am, local time.

  * * *

  The perimeter barrier passes underneath them. Landelle looks at her watch—6:01 am.

  “Lucy?”

  “I have gained access to the Trinity facility, Special Agent Landelle. Opening the dome gate now.”

  The Senator is beside himself, “Are you out of your goddamned minds?”

  The VTOL powers through the gate opening to head toward the residence. Toor makes a quick landing, leaving the engines at take-off pitch as she and Landelle leap from the side hatch and bound into the building, watched by a perplexed Blake.

  Toor checks a hand held tracking device as they enter the living area.

  “Wait! He’s not here!”

  “What?”

  “He’s moved. Surface lab three.”

  A corridor takes them there from the residence, through an atmosphere buffer and into a humid biome crammed full of lush growth, a concrete path snaking through it all. Landelle is increasingly desperate.

  “Bob! Where are you?”

  A commotion from within a dense cluster of foliage, rustling and shaking, as a disheveled Robert pushes his way out, batting something bamboo-like from his line of vision.

  “Debs? Debs, what the hell—?” Stumbling out onto the path he sees Toor, stopping dead in his tracks. “What’s going on?”

  Landelle grabs his arm to pull him to the exit, “With us. Now.”

  Robert digs in, “Whoa—I’m not going anywhere. What is this? What are you doing here?”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Toor says, delivering a hard right hook across his face, knocking him into a backward stagger.

  “Sharanjit! No!”

  A left hook swiftly followed by a second right and Robert goes down, Toor grabbing him with a snarl to deliver another hard swipe. Landelle catches her fist.

  “We need him conscious!”

  An angry Toor shoves Landelle’s hand away, her expression signaling that she is done. The two women grapple hold of Robert, hauling him up so as to stagger him out of the lab.

  A deep bass tone sounds twice.

  “Two minute warning,” Landelle says, straining under the weight.

  “But we had three last time.”

  They are in the living area, Landelle shouting into her lapel mike, “Lucy! We need more time!”

  “I can’t slow it down any more than I have already, Special Agent Landelle,” replies Lucy.

  Toor has instructions of her own, “Lucy. Prepare to dust off as soon as we are on board.”

  “Yes, Commander Toor.”

  They are out of the residence and staggering across the lawn toward the VTOL, its engines still at speed. The bass tone sounds once, echoing all around the
Trinity dome.

  Toor and Landelle push a semiconscious Robert onboard, both then hauling themselves in.

  “Lucy! Get us out of here!” Toor shouts.

  The VTOL lifts away, engines screaming, a distraught Blake pinned against the cabin wall, looking on with horror.

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “Thirty seconds, Commander Toor,” Lucy says.

  Robert comes to, Toor slamming down on him, pinning his face to the deck. Grabbing his T-shirt she rips a patch away to expose his shoulder blade. She gropes at the skin.

  “It’s here.”

  Toor keeps Robert pinned down as Landelle points a stun gun at his shoulder.

  “Clear!” Landelle shouts, Toor pulling away.

  A bolt of electrically charged plasma slams into Robert’s shoulder blade and he goes limp.

  Toor checks the hand-held tracker.

  “Got it.”

  She wastes no time in scrambling onto the flight deck, strapping herself in and grabbing the controls. Outside the desert races beneath them, the thin line of the outer perimeter ahead. Toor pushes the thrusters beyond their red line.

  “Come on! Come on!”

  A blinding flash of white light, what was the Trinity facility now an expanding dome of super-hot gas.

  Toor turns the VTOL sharply to run parallel with a wall of destruction closing in at six hundred miles per hour. In an instant it is upon them—

  The cliff face slices across it, protecting them as she dives the VTOL, the blast debris racing across the canyon divide above.

  BOOK OF REVELATION

  The Cantor Satori skunkworks had been the engineering home of the Afrika Project—a grand tour of the solar system to prospect new resources for an overstretched Earth, now mothballed in the wake of the scandal that had engulfed it and its billionaire architect, Robert Cantor.

  The facility itself had been kept operational as a commercial spaceport, its linear accelerator used to slingshot payloads into orbit, ferry visitors to and from the International Space Station and run the occasional service mission to the Afrika parked at Lagrange Two. Outside of scheduled launches the facility required few on-site personnel, which suited the purposes of those now seeking to use it for an undertaking far grander than originally intended.

  Even so it meant more people who needed to know. Not all had been given the full picture—it was deemed too unsettling—but a few had to be told everything so that the plan could be executed. They included Dr. David Bebbington, the Afrika’s chief engineer, and Dr. Zoe Panchen, the chief scientist behind its fusion drive. Both were part of the Afrika Project from its inception, and both had employed Lucy on the spaceship’s design.

  * * *

  The VTOL sits in a landing area close to the main facility. A small medical team already has a dazed Robert on a gurney, wheeling him off to the medical center. Toor and Landelle help Bebbington with Lucy’s MBI unit—her electric cart has been unloaded, and it is just a matter of hoisting her onto it.

  All Senator Blake can manage is to mill about in a personal bubble of confusion and horror, no one paying him any particular attention, until he spies a familiar figure emerging from the facility and marching straight for him.

  “I imagine you have quite a number of questions, Julian,” says Chief Justice Garr.

  * * *

  Convincing Senator Blake was never going to be easy, his kidnapping being the least of the hurdles to overcome. But his collusion was essential and Chief Justice Garr considered the price she had likely paid worth it, even if just to get him here. It is an uneasy Blake who now sits across a meeting room table from her, having been told the first of two truths—that the one thing that he had built his political career around this past decade was based on a deception worthy of the most outlandish of conspiracy theories.

  “It can’t be,” Blake says, warily eyeing the other two individuals in the room. One he takes to be Cardinal Joseph Ansoni, and he recognizes the young woman as the pilot from the VTOL.

  “It just can’t be,” he reiterates. “I’ve seen the reports.”

  “Falsified to demonize the Messiah virus,” Garr says.

  “Why?”

  “Because it worked. Sort of. Though in its current form it is unstable and if it got out would most likely wipe out half the population—”

  “And if it were improved?”

  “Well, indeed. But if its existence became public we would no longer be able to control access to it. The demand to tame and exploit it would win out.”

  “You would deny the world that?”

  It’s an old argument for Garr, yet for her the debate feels as relevant now as it did then.

  “Because within a generation we would be facing greatly extended lifespans in an already overpopulated world short on resources. It would all add up to socioeconomic chaos in a time frame we could not possibly cope with.”

  “Robert Cantor didn’t seem to think so.”

  “Another deception, I’m afraid Julian. It was Monica Satori and Jerome Ellis who tried to take us down that road, not Robert—except that their intended method of control was to create an elite class of citizen. It was Robert who stopped them—and it was he that we took from Trinity today.”

  “No. No, I don’t believe it.” Blake protests. “Dr. Felton’s official report laid the blame squarely with Cantor. He was the ring leader. And I saw what the virus did to him. There was nothing left but a monstrosity barely alive. You approved that report.”

  “The world needed somebody to hate, Julian. Monica and Jerome were too far into the shadows to matter to anyone, but Robert was front and center. Somebody the world could really get its teeth into. We were certain that he would not survive, so we made him the scapegoat.”

  “And the world obliged—” Blake observes.

  “With considerable zeal, thanks to you. But by then Robert was already recovering…” Garr can see Blake turning, requiring only the gentlest of shoves, “…as had Agent Landelle…”

  “Landelle?” That name again. The penny drops in Blake’s mind. Cantor’s secret service body guard.

  “…and Commander Toor,” Garr says, gesturing at the young woman.

  “Toor? Sharanjit Toor? Cantor’s PA—? This is ridiculous! Who do you take me for? She died with the others! The British government confirmed it.”

  “Commander. How old are you?” Garr casually asks.

  Toor shifts her cold gaze to Blake.

  “Forty-nine.”

  Blake takes a moment to process all that Garr has hit him with.

  “But she looks no older than…than—”

  “Specialist medical care enabled them to beat the virus, but not before it did its work. So we covered up what happened to them.” With Blake under her spell, and with her gaze detached, Garr can’t resist a little tease. “Unfortunately, Robert Cantor remains infected.”

  Blake’s eyes widen as a horrible realization grips him, leaping up to check himself over, inspecting his hands and patting his face.

  Garr chuckles with delight. “He is no longer contagious, Julian.”

  “How can you be sure?!”

  “Years of tests. Years of trying to cure him. But the Messiah virus has integrated itself completely into his entire body.”

  Blake calms a little, “You still should have told the world.”

  “You have your monster and we have ours.”

  A chime sounds. Toor attends to her PDA, throwing Garr a glance.

  Garr rises to leave, “I am needed elsewhere. Meanwhile Joseph has something else to brief you on.”

  As Garr leaves with Toor, Blake looks worriedly to Joseph.

  “There is great truth the world is ignorant of,” Joseph says. “The Greeks have a word for the revelation of such a truth. A lifting of the veil, as it were. That word is Apocalypse.”

  * * *

  A groggy Robert sits slumped in a surgical chair, looking even more ragged and disheveled than before. Coming round, he finds
Landelle standing before him, arms folded.

  “So this the manner of it,” he says to her, weakly. “You mean to keep the virus and have the world think it destroyed. God damn you all.”

  Toor bursts in, striding directly toward Robert. Landelle reaches to grab her—

  “This is not the time or place, Sharanjit—”

  Chief Justice Garr, close behind, arrests Landelle with a gentle touch of her own.

  “Yes, it is, Deborah.”

  A seething Toor circles Robert, her fists balled up, her breathing heavy, until she can contain herself no more.

  “You took everything from me!!” she screams at him.

  “You gave everything!” Robert manages to shout back. “And there’s not a day gone by when I don’t think about that.”

  “Ten years!! Kept away from everyone I loved. You made me into a monster!! A freak like you!!”

  “You can’t blame me for what Monica and Jerome did—”

  Toor’s balled fist smashes across Robert’s face, the first of a series punctuating her words—

  “You—should—have—seen! You’re as much to blame as them!”

  Garr holds a distraught Landelle back, but Toor is spent, collapsing to her knees, the virus shimmering under Robert’s skin as it sets about repairing the damage.

  “You were supposed to die,” sobs Toor bitterly. “And now this. It’s not fair!”

  “And now this?” Robert says to Garr. “And what exactly is that?”

  LEVIATHAN

  Though not given to placing himself in the public spotlight, Robert Cantor had understood the power of spectacle, and the Pegasus space plane was no exception. Designed specifically to wow a skeptical world, the Pegasus was far more form than the function required, with smooth lines, graceful curves and a presence that drew in all who laid eyes upon her.

  The space plane’s original purpose was to transit engineers and crew to the Afrika construction site in Earth orbit, but with the project now suspended, and the Afrika parked at Lagrange Two, the Pegasus had been reduced to being little more than a bus taking passengers to and from the ISS. It has taken Bebbington and his small team of technicians three days to prep it for its next trip.