by Larry Niven
“No,” Rachel screamed. She stepped between them, then stopped, frozen, remembering Liren had already shot at her.
“Rachel”—Liren’s voice was incredibly calm—“Rachel, get out of my way. I don’t care if I shoot you.” Liren took a step toward them.
Anger shot through Rachel, and she said, “Back off,” talking to both Liren and Andrew. “Don’t do this.” Andrew reached toward her from behind, and she leaned back, trying to unbalance him. He shoved her aside, looking for a clear shot at Liren.
Rachel felt the unfamiliar weight of the weapon she had taken from Justin. What the hell was it set to?
Andrew’s eyes were focused hard and black and directly on Liren. He was close enough he wouldn’t miss.
Vassal whispered in her ear, “Choose one now.”
Both choices were impossible. She wanted to shoot Liren.
Rachel bent her elbow, raising the weapon. She fired. She saw four brilliant blue-white stars flare behind Andrew’s shirt, too near the heart.
CHAPTER 70
EXODUS
GABRIEL PUSHED PAST two Councilmen rushing a captive Moon Born through the downstairs door, and pounded up the steps, slamming through the open door onto the roof. He jumped at the soft noise—a weapon! Where? He turned in time to see Andrew flying backward. Andrew thrashed, then went limp. Four sparks flared on a distant wall.
Liren and Rachel stood ten feet from each other. Liren’s mouth was open and she looked shocked; her weapon extended toward Rachel.
Justin reached for a weapon from the ground near Dylan, turning, looking wild and lost.
Liren first. Gabriel spun into her, knocking her sideways, peeling her weapon away. He heard Rachel shout and he ducked. A needle slammed into the door above him. Gabriel looked. Justin’s hand shook as he fumbled to bring the weapon back up.
Rachel turned toward Justin, raising her arm, pointing her weapon at Justin. Then she threw the weapon and dropped her head, running at Justin, keeping him off balance, preventing him from firing at Gabriel. She and her half brother collapsed in a heap on the roof.
Ali burst through the door, screaming Gabriel’s name, and stopped, dead still in the door frame, sun glinting off her own weapon. The scream died in her throat. She swept her eyes over Dylan’s still form, and Andrew’s, glanced at Rachel, lying atop Justin, kicking his weapon away.
Rachel looked up at Ali. Anger and shock and adrenaline and fear all mixed together in a mask of madness.
Gabriel stood between Rachel and Liren as Liren scrambled up. Unarmed, she stood and glared at Rachel, at Gabriel, then started toward Rachel. Gabriel grabbed her as she went by and dropped her to the ground. “No.”
Liren sputtered, glaring at Gabriel, and started to pull her feet back under her.
Gabriel had trouble reading Ali’s face: shock, relief, a coiled energy.
Justin, prone, watched them all carefully. His eyes were wild. He didn’t move. He said, “You shot him,” and Rachel blinked in the sun, standing still, absorbing Justin’s words like bullets. “You killed Andrew to save one of them.”
Gabriel shook his head. “You saved Liren?” he asked Rachel.
She nodded.
Two of Liren’s pet Council pounded up onto the roof. Gabriel pointed to Justin. “Take him down, get him out of here.”
Liren was standing now, and she started to make another move toward Rachel when Gabriel grabbed her shoulder roughly. “No, Liren. You are the cause of this. Go down now, quietly.”
Liren looked at him, shaking, her eyes full of hatred and anger and fear.
“Rachel saved you, Liren. She saved you from yourself. Go back to John Glenn. You don’t belong here.”
Liren’s shoulders fell. She suddenly looked young and vulnerable, and Gabriel nodded. “Get to safety.”
Justin struggled, pinned between the two Council, and they pushed him through the door. Liren glared at Gabriel, looking more like her usual imperious self, but she followed the other three down and away.
Ali stepped over to Andrew, feeling along his neck for a pulse. She shook her head.
Gabriel went to Rachel and gathered her in his arms. She quivered, burying her head in his shoulder. “I didn’t know,” she said, her voice muffled against his neck. “I didn’t know it was set to kill.” He knew she was beyond being help; needed help.
“Is the rest of the building secure?” Gabriel asked.
Ali nodded. “I think so.”
“Go tell Shane what’s happened,” he said to her. “Tell Shane there’s no danger here now. Andrew’s dead. Leave us alone up here for a few minutes. We’ll come down when Rachel’s ready.”
Then Gabriel and Rachel were alone on the roof.
Rachel clung to him as if for her very life, a limpet, head bent and buried in the crook of his neck. He couldn’t take her down to the chaos at street level yet.
He carried her to the edge of the roof farthest from the bodies, still holding her close, her head buried in his chest. Gabriel catalogued her recent losses in his head; Dylan, her father, her half brother. He added Ursula to the list. Maybe Justin; Justin might hate her now. Regardless of what she thought of Andrew, that too was a relationship. She had taken a side, his side. She didn’t have to save Liren. Or Gabriel!
Gabriel set her on her feet, steadying her with his arm. Rachel had fought him like a wild thing when she discovered Ursula had died. Now, she just let him hold her, shaking, not crying, not talking, not fighting.
She had saved his life. She had saved his life!
He stroked her hair. He turned her face to his, but she kept her eyes closed. He kissed her cheek, gently. After all she’d been through, her skin felt soft. It seemed like a strange thing to notice. He whispered, “Thank you,” into her ear.
She stirred, nodding. “Is . . . is he dead?” she asked.
“Andrew? Yes. I think he planned to die.”
Rachel’s arms, impossibly, tightened around him further, and he rocked her for a moment. He looked up the rise of the crater toward the Sea of Refuge. They didn’t have forever; the flare required a response. “Erika? You there?”
“Thank her for me. Thank her for all of us.” Erika’s voice shook, like his, like Rachel’s. In shock.
A hundred eyes must be on this spot.
“The flare?” he asked.
“It’s real. Get your ass underwater!”
“Thank God.” Gabriel sighed in relief. Better a flare than a lie from Astronaut. A flare represented a real danger, one he could understand. He still didn’t know if the AI had gone rogue, but at least it was still protecting them.
“B-B-Beth, how’s Beth?” Rachel asked. “And Sarah?”
How was he supposed to know? “Erika, can you check on Beth?”
“Th-thank you. That’s good.” He could barely hear Rachel’s voice.
What was good? He hadn’t told Rachel anything. “We have to go soon. The mother of all flares is coming.”
He waited for her to move, searching for his own calm, breathing gently. He matched his breath to Rachel’s faster breathing, then slowed his own down, and hers followed, slowly but surely.
It took almost five minutes for Rachel to disentangle herself and step back. The pain in her eyes made him flinch; he reached for her hand. “We have to go,” he whispered to her.
She followed him to the doorway, letting him shield her from the sights with his body.
The street was a riot of confusion. A stream of people moved toward the freight elevator that ran up the side of the crater. Others donned wings.
The remaining conspirators stood together by the warehouse across the street: Justin, Sam, and four he didn’t recognize. Their hands were secured behind their backs. Shane stood over them, his face angry, his stance controlled. He glanced at Gabriel. “Shall I take her too?”
Gabriel shook his head. “Rachel stays with me.”
Ali stepped up next to them. She gestured toward the ship they had landed in, a question on her f
ace.
Gabriel shook his head. Rachel would need her people, and he needed to learn some things from her. “We’ll go to Refuge.”
Council members carried one of their own, the one who had fallen, toward the landing strip. Others followed with Sheila’s body. Liren went with them, head down, eyes down, shoulders still slumped. One plane had already lifted away toward John Glenn.
Ali reached a hand out for Rachel, who took it without leaving the shelter of Gabriel’s arms. They walked that way, Gabriel’s arm around Rachel, Ali holding Rachel’s other hand, a steady march to the lift.
Council, Earth Born, and Children crowded the lift to Council Aerie, all jumbled together. A wide supply lift, it could carry a hundred people standing close. It swayed and rumbled on its way up the long slope, its cargo of people secured by a waist-high metal wall. Gabriel held Rachel close to him, looking out over Clarke Base. The light was bright enough that Gabriel had to shield his eyes. The first parts of the collider assembly stood out; support struts that ran for hundreds of yards, and two sections of the barrel, not yet joined, resting in the middle of the line of supports. Wispy clouds roamed high in bright blue sky. Insects buzzed in the rocks under the lift.
In twenty-five minutes they stood together on the landing above the dock, riding high on the full tide. Safe Harbor approached, returning empty from a run to Refuge. The day looked so normal—so Earthly, despite Harlequin glaring high in the sky, all red and orange and white. Gabriel shook his head as they walked down the ramp and boarded the boat. What had gone wrong? What were the next steps? What could be salvaged?
They passed John and Treesa herding the steady stream of people down the ramp onto the boat. John held Gabriel briefly, putting one arm around Rachel, including her in the embrace. “Glad you’re okay. I’ve got to go . . . wait for me in the Council galley? It will take a while. I don’t know yet if I’ll need one or two more runs to get everyone.”
“We’ll be there,” Gabriel replied, immensely glad to see his friend.
Treesa leaned in and kissed Rachel’s cheek, smiling sadly, whispering, “You did what you had to do. The right thing.” She and John both faded back through the crowd, back to the work they had to do.
Seeing Treesa reminded Gabriel: there was a second AI on Selene. He couldn’t do anything now. Later. He herded Rachel and Ali toward the rail of the boat and kept an arm around them both.
It took a long time for the boat to fill. They had two hours left when they pulled away.
The deck rode low in the water as they motored across the Sea of Refuge toward Refuge itself. Apollo’s reflection blinked and shuddered along the wave tops making bright points of light like diamonds. Harlequin hung above and below them, real and reflection. Multicolored wings flashed overhead as people spiraled down onto the landing pads on the dock, heading for Refuge.
Going down into Refuge for the first time since its completion (or near-completion, he corrected himself) should have been a triumph. He was its designer; he had retrieved a naked rock from the empty black of space and made this to keep these thousands safe. Instead he came to Refuge in a rush, a crowded hurrying of people off the ship, shaping them into queues to tackle the escalator, down, down, a crush of bodies and sweat, finally stepping into the enclosed openness of the big rooms inside the former asteroid.
People stank of fear and anger. The walls buzzed with echoes of conversation. Couples and parents and children held hands, clinging together. A few searched for family, calling names.
Gabriel and Ali pushed through the crowd, shielding Rachel from people calling out for her. She kept her head ducked down under Gabriel’s arm. By the time they were nearly through the common rooms, she was standing taller and looking around. Most of the voices calling for her were friendly, although one or two were taunting. A young Moon Born boy materialized from between two stocky Earth Born, skidding to a halt beside her. “I did it, Rachel. Everyone’s here.” The look on his face was part pride, part anxiety.
Rachel smiled, reaching out a shaky hand to ruffle the boy’s hair. “Thank you, Peter.”
Peter’s face relaxed into a big smile, and he turned away, fading back into the crowd.
Gabriel hurried her along, following Ali to the Council galley.
In the corridors and the common rooms, Refuge’s origins as a rock could hardly be seen. Floors and shelves gleamed smoothly, furniture and rooms and bedding all utilitarian.
They entered Council quarters. Here, wall murals of Earth’s seas had been hung, rugs laid, and Sol system and Ymir were inlaid in one wall. All of it was new; work done during Gabriel’s time cold. Treesa’s work? Ali’s?
Gabriel led Ali and Rachel into the tiny galley. For the moment it was blessedly empty. All regular members of the Refuge team were undoubtedly herding and settling and feeding the frightened, making order from the chaos of a hasty retreat from Apollo’s wrath.
Rachel’s face was still frozen in shock and grief. She was implicated in all this somehow, even if she had saved his life. He wanted to be angry with her, to keep all the Moon Born separate from Council, to keep the lines clear inside, maintain his internal order. But when he looked at her, or touched her, he felt soft and protective.
He tucked Rachel carefully into a comfortable position on a bench, covering her with blankets. He paced, frustrated, then made them all tea, and set his and Ali’s on the table closest to Rachel. Her hand came out to take the tea from him. “Thanks,” she said, her voice a quiet uneven thread.
He opened a small data window, setting it on a scrap of white wall between pictures of the Sea of Refuge and Crater Lake, left behind on Earth. Definitely Treesa’s work. He set the window to increase the luminosity of its data as surface radiation levels increased.
They had beaten the flare’s forward edge by more than an hour. Gabriel intended to use the moment of calm to understand what had almost gotten him killed, almost killed Liren.
“Ali, I suppose Rachel knows what you told me—about the AI?”
Ali nodded miserably. “We . . . we needed to be able to communicate so High Council couldn’t hear us.”
“What could possibly have been bad enough to risk an AI—an AI—loose on Selene? What could you possibly need to communicate about that badly?”
Anger chased the misery from her face and he flushed at her glare. “You haven’t been down here much. Even the last few years that you were on Selene, your attention was on Refuge, and on building Council Aerie. It wasn’t on Clarke Base or the Moon Born.” Her voice strengthened, not quite accusing. “The Moon Born have been disenfranchised from the beginning—and things have gotten worse, not better. Remember when we were here early on, after the First Trees were planted, and we dreamed of civilization here? We never talked about slaves! But that’s how we’ve treated the Moon Born, and the Earth Born too! Wake them up and put them to work, and they don’t revolt because they’ve got the Moon Born to give orders to.
“Rachel and her people deserve something better. Treesa saw that early on, and she . . . she worked with Rachel to help her learn history and politics, to give her tools to convince Council that Moon Born could be part of our decisions. But no one listened. High Council’s direction got worse and worse.” She stopped, feet planted widely, watching him.
Gabriel looked at Rachel, huddled down in her blankets, not moving. Ali was accusing him of not caring. Finally, he spoke. “I worked to teach Moon Born. I pleaded before the High Council, telling them that we should develop the Children of Selene so they could help us. I got a twenty-year sleep for my troubles.” He thought about it “I’ve always suspected that’s the real reason Rachel and I were left on ice for so long. But you’re talking about rebellion. Rebelling against High Council is wrong. It just got three people killed, almost got Liren killed. What did we get for all that? An opening for a conversation we could have had anyway?”
Ali’s high cheekbones reddened, though her dark eyes remained veiled below lowered lids. “It’s something,�
� she said. “We’re talking.”
“No one had to die for this conversation to happen,” he snapped. “I almost died!”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” she whispered, stepping close to him and taking his hand briefly. “I’m sorry anyone died.” She drained her cup, stared at the bottom for a moment, then stood to make more tea, as if the simple action calmed her. “If we make our antimatter and fly away—then everyone left on Selene will die. Maybe not right away, maybe not for generations, but if we stayed we could keep the environment going longer. We haven’t given them the technology to live on an unstable moon. You know that, I know you do.”
Gabriel frowned. “None of our choices were good. We can’t fight our own rules and laws, we can’t kill our own people, or use interdicted technology—without risking the death of us all! We cannot fight among ourselves. It would be the perfect joke for the only humans in quintillions of klicks to kill each other.”
He didn’t want to stay on this path with Rachel in the room. There were more immediate worries. “An AI was a stupid risk. You saw what it did? It actually sent doctored data streams to John Glenn. I couldn’t even find Rachel at first when this started.” He paced, confined in the small galley, five long steps one way, five the other. “Did it hide data from you too? Break our security some other way? Do you even know?”
Now Ali looked defensive. “Treesa is a good communications tech. Vassal’s parameters and freedoms have been monitored carefully. It has not sold us out—it’s helped!”
“Vassal? You named it Vassal?”
“It named itself Vassal.”
The AI thought of itself as a slave? Or it wanted the people it interacted with to think of it that way? AIs weren’t good at deception, which was a human trait . . . as far as he knew. They were just damned powerful. Another thought struck him. “Vassal is a copy of Astronaut?”
Ali nodded again.
The implications sank into Gabriel slowly. He had always thought of Astronaut as . . . a what? A computer? He knew it was more. As an equal work partner, a good engineer, a careful navigator. He’d talked to it like a friend, sometimes. Or had he?
