Tears ran down his cheek as he thought of her.
“Are you all right, Master?” Starbot asked. He looked closely at Billy, said, “Your tears are silver.”
The comment did not surprise Billy, as he’d noticed silver moisture in his eyes himself. He wiped the tears away, said, “I was thinking of Reanne.” He waved a hand dismissively. “I’m fine now, fine.”
In the middle of the room he saw a familiar silver-metallic mist flickering in the air, indicating the presence of the space devils. They were keeping their distance this time, not touching him, perhaps wondering in their collective way what he was doing. Tobek had been killed at his laboratory bench while trying to build a device to kill the creatures, so Billy was careful now to tell Starbot what the robot already knew, how the device in front of him would read cells and imprint the data on raw, artificial cellular material so that it could be grown into a Lazarus robot, looking like a human, and acting like one.
He looked at the airborne mass of creatures, said to Starbot, “Do you see them there?”
“Yes, Master. They are curious, aren’t they?”
“They certainly are. You know, the more I see them and understand how they helped me, the more I like them. They really have been critically important to me, preventing my enemies from killing me and taking over Skyship.” He smiled as he looked in their direction. “They’re my saviors.”
“Your saviors, Master? Don’t you want them to leave your body?”
“Certainly not! I like them exactly where they are, and if their brethren outside my body want to join them, that’s fine with me.” Billy didn’t say so, but he sensed strongly that all of the space devils wanted to be together, and did not like being apart from one another, as they were now.
They drew a little closer to him, and even more of them appeared out of thin air directly overhead. Looking around, he saw them behind him, too.
“Master, I must point out, with all due respect to your greatness, that you are not making sense. They invaded your body, and before that they murdered Branson Tobek. I don’t see how you can—”
“Leave me, Starbot, and don’t say anything more against them. They are my friends! I don’t have time to explain what should be perfectly obvious to you. They make me happy, do you hear me, happy! I don’t want to imagine where I would be, or what would have happened to Skyship, if they had not helped. As far as I’m concerned, they are brave and noble creatures.”
All the while, Billy concealed his true motivations from them, and from the loyal Starbot. He had a plan, and it just might work, if he played it right, if he took extreme care. He needed to attract all of the little alien monsters into his body, and then deal with them once and for all. He’d tried to think of ways to destroy them—but so far he’d only come up with one that had any hope of success, and it would cost him his own life.
He thought of Devv and Lainey, and all the systems on Skyship that would need to continue after his death—and the steps he had taken to make certain these two humanlike ‘bots—and everyone else—completed what they needed to do, to keep the huge vessel going. The great ship had many important automatic functions that Tobek had set up, and which Billy never understood. Billy had only added to the original package that Tobek developed, improving on robotic details, creating what Billy considered to be enhancements. That was Billy’s real legacy, and he prided himself on his work.
The robot flashed a pattern of lights that indicated confusion.
“Leave me!” Billy said. He pointed toward the door. As Starbot left, Billy reached into the air, and immersed his hand in a cloud of silver creatures. He felt a pleasant tingling sensation, and thought some of them were entering his body, to join the others inside. But others would not come close, and streaked overhead, this way and that, being more cautious.
Billy smiled, reached out to them....
CHAPTER 37
“It is most interesting to go to a place seen by few others, but it can be very lonely if you cannot ever share it.”
—Billy Jeeling, recorded without his knowledge
Only one living person knew that Skyship had a network of hidden tunnels and chambers under its outer skin. Even the most advanced military scanners could not detect these cavities. One of the chambers in particular had been favored by Branson Tobek, because it stood at the pinnacle of the geoengineering marvel, a high point that was commonly believed to be no more than a visual feature, for the sake of the external appearance of the great vessel. But it was something more, and had once been Tobek’s secret vantage point from which to view the heavens, sometimes accompanied by his loyal assistant, Billy Jeeling.
Billy still went up there on occasion, but it was a challenge because of his disability. Yet it was an obstacle he had overcome years ago, back when his mentor had still been alive. Now Billy was rising inside one of the uppermost tunnels, lying face down, his head forward on a wafer-thin, motorized platform. The platform, of his own design, had a thousand tiny servo-motors on the underside, operating in perfect synchronization to get him where he wanted to go. They made a smooth spinning sound while performing their work efficiently. The platform had a headlight attached to the front, but Billy didn’t need it. His bright eyes shone ahead, filling the tunnel with silver illumination. And, as he had hoped, he saw silver illumination behind him as well, meaning the rest of the space devils were following him.
Billy had only been to this hidden place a dozen or so times in the years he’d been on board Skyship. He didn’t particularly like being inside the hollow skin, because it was cramped in there, and the air, though breathable and warm enough, smelled stale. But at the moment, considering all that had occurred, it suited him perfectly. He could get away from other people and sentient robots in these secret confines, and even from his closest confidantes. Other than Billy and the original robotic construction team, no one had ever known about this place except for Tobek, and now he was dead. Billy had not even told Starbot about it.
At the moment he wanted a quiet, totally secluded place where he could complete what he needed to do with the creatures of light, the space devils, as Tobek had so aptly called them. He certainly could not go around in public, looking the way he did—the alien cast to his eyes would terrify everyone. It terrified him, too, as did the prospect of even more of them entering his body. Yet he tried to remain calm so that he could come up with the best way to deal with the creatures effectively, before they could cause any more destruction. Billy knew that many of the tiny intruders were still inside him, not only because of his shining metallic eyes, but because of certain peculiar, continuing sensations in his body, an ever-so-slight, cool tickling sensation whenever they moved around. At the moment the collective entity was relatively calm, and he was comfortable—not shivering cold as he had been earlier when they were in their hyperactive, murderous attack mode.
Yet he felt great unease, even though they were protective of him. They had destroyed half of the Imperial fleet that had been sent to attack him, and had sent a silver beam of light down to the planet to find and kill two of the conspirators against him, General Moore and Jonathan Racker. Then the collective alien entity went after others, apparently for their association with the other two—but withdrew before harming them.
Billy recalled struggling mightily to pull the death ray back from Prime Minister Yhatt, to prevent it from doing what it had seemed intent on doing. Had he exerted some influence to save the Prime Minister, or had the space devils pulled back of their own volition?
Before going after Yhatt they had also visited another conspirator, Maureen Stuart, and frightened her, and had gone to Sonya Orr as well, a woman Billy now suspected of being in the cabal—but had not attacked either of them. Billy had not had any influence in saving their lives—or he didn’t recall having any. And yet, the creatures were inside his body, and linked perhaps to his own motivations and desires. Maybe they’d known he didn’t want lower-level people like Stuart or Orr killed, but had not kno
wn this about Yhatt, until Billy exerted himself, trying to save the leader of the AmEarth Empire.
He had questions without solid answers, but it did seem to him that the creatures, in their shared personality, knew that Stuart, Orr and Yhatt had not been prime movers in any attempt to kill Billy or damage Skyship.
Then there was the dream, the horrific nightmare, of a swath of silver death passing over the surface of AmEarth, slaying his enemies and saving his supporters. That suggested discernment on the part of the space devils, that they were able to identify degrees of danger to him, and only deal with the worst. The nightmare had been a warning, telling him they had something dreadful in mind, something very large in scale.
Even though three people had been spared in real life, the nightmare had shown them dying. Billy sensed that the creatures were going to do something horrendous, on a massive scale, if he didn’t destroy them. Their earlier demonstrations were nothing, in comparison with what they would do in the future. They had already shown a pattern of going after his enemies, and because of the campaign of lies against him, there were hundreds of millions of people who hated him and wanted to see him fail, or die.
The creatures could annihilate all of those people in a matter of minutes, to prevent them from harming Billy Jeeling. He knew that could happen, without any doubt, and the zealous action the space devils took on his behalf frightened him far more than anything his enemies might do. Maybe that’s why they actually pulled back from the three they didn’t kill, because they had something much bigger in mind, and didn’t want Billy to interfere with them. This line of reasoning suggested that he had some power over them, that they needed him. But it was all conjecture, based on a series of events that pointed, circumstantially, in a certain direction.
One frightening thought, among many: they could be evolving mentally, adapting to situations, coming up with new ideas. And wherever they were going, they were taking him with them.
The platform surged higher in the hollow hull, and finally stopped inside a chamber that his eyes lit up in silver illumination when he arrived, and even more when the trailing devils entered, and flitted around in a metallic mist. The pinnacle enclosure was larger than others inside the skin, and formed a circular room at the uppermost point of Skyship, above the surrounding rooftop domes. Billy touched a control on his belt and the platform re-shaped itself, into a hard chair.
An array of instruments lay in front of him, twinkling with colors and ready to be activated, much the same as the controls he had in his office, though these were not camouflaged. He pressed a button and a small compartment opened, with a cup of water inside. He removed the cup and sipped; the water still tasted fresh, from having been sealed and preserved perfectly for all of the years since Tobek set this chamber up secretly. Billy drank half, then placed the cup into a holder on the chair. Food packets were available to him as well, but he wasn’t hungry. The chamber also had a toilet that he could crawl over to, and use. He wasn’t sure how it emptied, a detail he’d never asked about.
Now Billy touched a pressure pad, causing a wide VR-panel to appear on his right—displaying multiple surveillance screens, each showing a different section of the great vessel, which was now on the upper edge of the ionosphere, at the fringe of orbital space. He customized the settings, so that one of the images showed the place in the corridor where he’d left his maglev chair, and other places where searchers might try to get into the hollow hull, looking for him.
He touched another control and a high-tech window opened over his head, providing him with an enhanced vista of glimmering stars and constellations, and even spectacular color-streaked nebulas. Moment by moment the view broadened, so that the entire peaked roof of the pinnacle had viewing windows. Outside he could see the domes of Skyship arranged in the shape of the immense Christian cross—all dark now. He narrowed the extent of the view, so that the side windows were covered, and only a small section was open directly over his head—to prevent anyone on the ship from seeing it.
He knew from having been here before that the overhead window was a magnaviewer, with similar capabilities to the magnascope in his office, except with more distant focal points. He found the controls for the device and made adjustments, bringing distant constellations and nebulas into clearer view.
But after several moments of looking straight up and trying to identify star systems, he realized he was seeing much farther into space than should be possible, even with this magnaviewer, which he knew how to use. It seemed to him that he was actually peering into another galaxy, and perhaps even farther than that, all the way to the other side of the universe.
This was difficult to imagine possible, but with everything that had happened to him so far, he thought it might be possible. Somehow his new shining eyes were far more powerful than the scope in his office or the viewing capabilities of the skylight. He’d never seen this far into space before.
The fantastic new vista was hypnotic to Billy. So many millions and billions of years that were represented by what he was seeing. And from his scientific studies he knew he was actually peering into the far-distant past, the ancient history of the cosmos, and not into the present. He thought of a conundrum and marveled at it, the possibility that the universe had already been destroyed, and parts of it just didn’t know it yet.
In this very quiet and serene place, Billy Jeeling finally felt a sense of supreme calm. He raised his hands in the air, and felt the fingers tingle as creatures surrounded them and merged into his skin, a strong current of them now. Billy felt them flowing inward, flowing, flowing, flowing, until it was complete. And when he looked at his hands, arms and the rest of his body, he was entirely silver, and he felt a little cold, but pleasantly so.
Now, at last, he was ready for the next step, the ultimate act he needed to take. He had an idea, a way to render the space devils harmless forever.
He thought of eternity, and of his brief but significant place in it....
CHAPTER 38
“Death has always been a question—one of the great questions of philosophers and thinkers over the ages. But it can also be an answer, depending upon how you look at it.”
—Billy Jeeling, disturbing comment made to his son on the high walkway
Lainey thought these were very strange aircraft, though not nearly as strange as the function and scale of Skyship itself. She rode in a small module beside Devv, who rode in another. Connected by an electronic interlock system, it was a morph-baby. He had the controls now, although her module was the same as his, and she could take command if she wanted to. But she preferred to let him run the linked assembly. He had more experience operating police aircraft, and she didn’t want to make an operational mistake.
While the most common humbabies looked like fat bumblebees with rotors on top, these units were cubes, flat on all sides so that they could connect to other units in different configurations—side by side, front to back, or one on top of the other—and they had no rotors. Each module, propelled and controlled by tiny jets, had the blue-sky emblem of Skyship on its surfaces. The morph-babies were high-priced, but Billy Jeeling had never spared any expense when it came to Skyship.
Lainey and Devv had been looking for Billy for two days now, without any success. This morning they had flown past the high walkway that Billy favored, and had run scanners to see if he was concealed somewhere up there. Nothing had turned up. There had been no clues.
They’d been discussing the possibilities, whether Billy might have gone somewhere by himself on Skyship, to be alone for some reason, or whether he might have been captured by the enemy and taken to AmEarth. Devv hoped it was not the latter, but if it was, there had been no publicity about him being taken prisoner, and no ransom demand if criminals were responsible. Or, maybe he had been taken by someone, and his kidnapper couldn’t get him off Skyship yet. It was difficult not knowing.
“Skyship is huge,” Devv said over the speaker system between the modules, “but with all the surve
illance systems it would be difficult for a person to just disappear. That’s especially true of Billy Jeeling, who is ultra conscious of security and protecting himself. No, I’m starting to think that he’s gone voluntarily to a hidey-hole, some private place he hasn’t told anyone about, one that cannot be detected by scanners.”
The morph-baby hovered over the broad green expanse of the airborne city’s central park. Below, people walked their dogs, and small children played on the lawn.
“Why would Billy hide? Why not come out?”
“Billy ordered me not to tell you about a troubling event, but I’m worried about him, so I’m going to go against his instructions. Lainey, when I was with him in his office Tuesday, a strange silvery substance appeared suddenly and pooled around his feet. Shockingly, it crawled up his body and merged into it. For several moments his entire body glowed silver. Then Billy reverted to his normal appearance, except his eyes remained silver. It was really weird, and terrifying when he looked at me.”
“My God! What could have caused such a drastic change in him?”
“I don’t know, but right after it happened to Billy, the attacking fleet was destroyed by blasts of silver light.”
“Are you saying he had something to do with it?”
“I didn’t see him do it, but it sounds possible to me. Circumstantial evidence points that way, though I can’t imagine his part in it. And right after the attackers were defeated, Billy disappeared. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”
“Very strange,” Lainey said.
“I’ve been thinking about it, racking my brain, trying to dredge up whatever I can. My father said something to me once, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. He said—”
The Assassination of Billy Jeeling Page 26
