by Lee Bond
Sidra pursed her lips at the word ‘damn’ but didn’t say anything. Herrig said much worse things, so she supposed it was all right.
Herrig took his glasses off and rubbed his poor eyes until he saw sparklers. “You’re right, of course. So they aren’t close to figuring our science out?”
“Not these guys, no.” Candall drank some cold, clean water. The SpecSer techs were running filtration units on all the sources of water they had under their control because they were worried about toxic agents and the Army soldiers had their own supplies, which tasted funny. “I overheard one of them saying other teams out there are getting closer to the problems, though.”
Herrig knew about that already. Huey’s communique from the fifth planet, Sarelsa, said as much, which was why the man was there instead of anywhere else; handling the tech teams close to cracking protean technology required a very delicate hand. If they woke up one morning and all their data was destroyed, they’d know they were under closer surveillance than they’d realized. As far as Herrig understood, his friend was currently undergoing imprisonment and torture on a regular basis, pretending to be a kidnapped teacher from one of the colleges.
Apparently, he was having a lot of fun, which had the Chairman very worried; Huey was close-lipped about what he and Chadsik al-Taryin had gotten up to in Trinityspace, leaving Herrig to suspect a bit of the FrancoBritish assassin’s madness had been transferred to someone who should remain sane.
“Your Army contact …” Herrig started poking on his prote.
“Captain Shane Markson.” Sidra supplied. “Age, 52. Standard Human offshoot.”
Candall applauded briefly. “That’s the one.”
“Is he showing any signs of, er, ‘handling’ the population?” Herrig wondered nervously. Vasily knew Trinity’s playbook fairly well from his stint in Trinityspace: when the Army had significant control over a planet’s population but lacked the resources for long-term engagements, they started looking to reduce that population to manageable levels.
Candall liked Shane on a personal level. The grizzled captain had a lot of wild-eyed stories to tell about the things he’d seen out there in Trinityspace and Candall, who’d pretty much been everywhere and done everything inside Latelyspace, could sit and listen to those tales all day, every day. The man had a cache of something called ‘scotch’ which was perhaps the greatest invention known to mankind. Shane had gifted a bottle to him, and Candall was waiting for this damn invasion to be over so he could hand that amber wonder to a friend of his so they could see about replicating it.
Professionally, though, his … friend Shane was close to losing it; for the time being, he was coercing the population into retrofitting all their heavy industrial plants into factories for various military purposes, but that was only going to last so long. Latelian miners and factory workers were the literal opposites of their genius brothers and sisters. They were wild, wooly, and quick to fight each other and were, if whispers were true, growing terribly close to rebellion.
Captain Markson had himself a meager four thousand soldiers. But he also had full-scale weapons of mass destruction, a ship parked in orbit that could rain kinetic missiles for hours on end, and a willingness to kill every last person should it come down to it. Candall knew through the Captain that he’d prefer to wait until the Latelians under his command completed automating their factories, but if push came to shove, well, he’d shove.
Hard.
Candall explained all this, adding, “If the situation doesn’t get better soon enough, it will get very much worse.”
“I shouldn’t worry about their ship, if I were you, sa. Our own tech teams have conned the systems aboard into thinking everything is working just fine, when in fact, more than half the offensive weapons aren’t functioning.” Herrig wanted desperately to kiss Sidra’s hand, and he could feel her amusement at his desire. He blinked and continued. “In fact, with Huey’s aid, we’ve dismantled their so-called ‘black hole engines’ and have liberated the design for ourselves. Soon enough we’ll have our own ships capable of moving faster than light.”
“That’s all well and good, Sa Chairman, but why risk this meeting if you didn’t have something for me to do? You’ve already shown me that you’re fully up-to-date on everything I’ve told you. This last snatch and grab felt suspicious to me and if it felt that way to me, I guarantee you, Shane is going to feel the same way.” Candall couldn’t keep the irritation out of his voice. He hated wasting time and he and his men were already risking their goddamn lives running counterintelligence on these bloody Trinityfolk.
Both Sidra and Herrig quirked their eyebrows at the familiarity, but neither said anything. The Chairman cleared his throat. “Is Captain Markson aware of your previous life? As a reclamation specialist?”
Candall nodded. “He is.”
“And what are his thoughts on the matter?”
Candall squinted his eyes. “He let it be known that if I could acquire things for him that he would be grateful.”
“And,” Herrig tilted his head sideways, boring holes into Candall’s head –a trick he’d learned from watching footage of previous Chairs, one that worked remarkably well-, “does he trust you?”
In all his life, there were only two men that had left Candall afraid for his life. One, naturally, had been his own father. That cocksucking bastard had been a devil straight out of myth, one who liked to beat his own family unconscious on a regular basis.
The other was Herrig DuPont. Candall wasn’t ashamed to admit it, and neither were any of his crew. There was something terrifically unsettling about the Trinityman, the way he seemed all soft edges until something rubbed him the wrong way. Then he was duronium through and through.
Herrig repeated the question.
Candall thought about the booze-fueled nights, two old men telling outrageous stories about the things they’d done and the things they’d seen. Most of those tales had been true. Candall shrugged. “He’s never given me reason to worry, no. Why?”
Herrig consulted his proteus. “In thirty minutes, this facility is going to erupt in, er, what I am told is going to be ‘one fucking tremendous burst of light and shit’.” The Chairman smiled apologetically. “The demolition team apparently spends every waking moment when they’re not on the job rewatching every scrap of Garth’s televised antics.”
Sidra handed Herrig a battered and barely functional Sheet.
Herrig handed that Sheet to Candall, saying, “You will have luckily escaped with this.”
Candall wiggled the Sheet in his hand before tucking it into his jacket. “What’s on it?”
“Data concerning a convoy of vessels passing through this sector of space. Only lightly guarded. Aboard these vessels, you will find food and drink. Additionally, there will be weapons.”
“Ah.” Candall nodded. “Poisoned food and damaged weapons. If they eat, they die. If they test the weapons, they blow up.”
“Good heavens, no!” Herrig threw his hands up in the air. It was exasperating, dealing with Latelians. They were so bloody-minded! “We need these men. Every single man, woman and alien in the Army and working for Special Services, Sa Candall, every single one of them. We need to keep the death toll of our invading forces down the absolute minimum! Are you mad?”
“Well, no, but … but what is this all about, then?” Candall looked around the room, mightily confused. The soldiers and tech crews were packing up most of their stuff.
“Aboard one of the ships, in one of the containers, there will be a Harmony soldier. He or she will be utterly undetectable. You will ensure that when you raid these vessels, this container is taken. I will flash you the details.” Herrig waited for a gleam of understanding to wash over Candall. It came, though the man made a sour face.
The Chairman understood. Some didn’t like the fact that many God soldiers had taken to calling themselves Harmony soldiers. To many, it sounded suspiciously like faith. “You don’t have to like it, sa. This is what�
�s happening. The soldier will subdue these invaders. Non-lethally where possible, in absolute bloody mess where necessary.”
“You’re bloody right I don’t …” Something dawned on Candall. “Hey. Wait a minute. If this facility is going to blow up, and I’m supposed to convince Shane I escaped … that means you’re going to blow me up, too. Isn’t that right?”
Herrig smiled wanly. “We must all make sacrifices for the Latelian Commonwealth, sa Candall. Yours is this. Or we can try you for the crime of selling weapons and information on troop movements to the enemy, which is what initially brought you to us in the first place.”
Candall plucked his lip thoughtfully. Rock and a hard place. Always. He nodded. “Fine. But I don’t want to lose any body parts. Or my hair.”
Sidra moved from Herrig, smiling. “We will see what we can do about that pretty head of hair of yours, Sa Candall, but there are no promises in life. We will be lucky if you don’t die in the explosion. We have plans for that, too, though, so rest assured, no matter what happens to you specifically, Sa Herrig’s plans will move forward. It’ll just make things more difficult, short term.”
Candall looked worriedly over his shoulder, unsure what he was hoping to gain. Herrig twiddled his fingers and bent down to his proteus.
Sa Candall shook his head. They were going to blow him up.
And he’d agreed.
What a world.
3. Tick Tock
Garth craned his head upwards to watch the ship that’d ushered him to Arcade City fly away. The Baskerville was joined by three other ships, the Gooseberry, Marshall’s Hunt and the Knox. All four vessels seemed in a hurry to make port somewhere else.
Garth couldn’t blame them.
He hadn’t set foot on planet Earth in thirty thousand years, and it was in the sorriest state imaginable. It was laughable that it was still considered inhabitable. He almost wished he hadn’t needed to come.
From where he stood, it was easy, easy to make out the towering spires and megalithic structures that formed Zanzibar. Thousands of miles away, the kilometers-high buildings formed an unnatural wall of black metal and endless lights, all of that surrounded by what Captain Eck swore was a never-ending squall of rain, lightning and super storms; old and abused as she was, good old Mother Earth was still trying her damnedest to hammer away at the invading species that’d ruined her for good.
But to no avail. The grids and girders of Zanzibar, a city-state spanning nearly the entire length and width of the North American continent, formed a perfect barrier against all of Nature’s mighty wrath. Everyone inside Zanzibar was safe, and those living in the walls closest to the ‘outside world’ probably spent most of their time peeking out windows or looking through monitors at the fury outside.
And such fury! Lightning storms powerful enough to rival the great storms on Jupiter –if not in size- then in inchoate rage. Arcs of light, bent and twisted and warped into colors Garth had never seen thirty thousand years ago, slamming into the earth around Man’s last, great city in a never-ending apoplexy. Rain –poisonous and grim and deadly to bare skin- and wind –whirling dervishes reaching hundreds of miles an hour and capable of stripping flesh from bone and whittling bone into dust- conspired to wash away that electric anger, turning the ground on all sides into a deadly mud that no man could touch.
Garth couldn’t hear it, but he imagined the sound of Nature’s Fury was a never-ending howl, a bone-jarring, blood-thumping growl. Given half a chance, those storms would destroy the Earth.
Seeing how bad things had gotten, those storms would be justified in doing so, if they got the chance.
Only, they didn’t have a chance. Vast machines floated in the sky and crawled across the land, brute force wind vector engines and other things, all corralling and fighting those storms, pushing and shoving them across the world so that no one place suffered for too long because there were other cities on broken Earth, just none so wondrous or glorious as Zanzibar.
The Eye catalogued and tagged everything it saw on the horizon, a grim cybernetic historian. It dredged a random memory out of Garth’s mind, a fleeting image of this same vantage point from some time or other when he’d come to London through Cardiff and threw that against the sky to display just what had happened with perfect clarity.
“Suck it, Eye.” Garth flicked a hand and the shot pulled from his mind vanished. He knew what his great plan had cost. Would cost. Was costing.
God forbid he failed.
There were times he wished he hadn’t had the foresight or the ability to plan something that would take thirty thousand years to complete, that he’d just kicked the Heshii’s ass some other way, back then, back with his friends, back before everything had gone as bad as Metallica’s comeback album.
“Oy!”
Garth ignored the cry. The pressure of the King’s Dome behind him was a looming, excruciating thing. In truth, he was more comfortable staring at the poison and sickness that thirty thousand years of ‘progress’ and civilization had done to his wonderful planet than to turn and bear witness to one of the largest structures ever built by Man.
“Second thoughts?” Garth asked himself, shaking his head. “More like fifth or even sixth.”
After that penultimate encounter with Edmund Meech and the conversation with Captain Eck concerning the state of some wardogs once they were free from Arcade City, the more Garth’s thoughts had turned to what he’d seen, what Meechy had said while in the grip of what one of his new jailors had called ‘Dark Iron Madness’.
His Cloud had gone wrong, been corrupted by the presence of men and women and machines and Trinity’s own, incessant prying into the bizarre nature of the signal the vast nanotech shadow had cast over the solar system. He’d designed it to convert inert and inorganic matter into building blocks, had gone out of his way to find a system that would never ever generate life on its own and had even fucking programmed Trinity to ignore anything It might find. Never once had Garth imagined that Trinity –just a program, a smart one, a very smart one- would find a way around those restrictions.
And when things had gone wrong, when the whole of the system had been infected and the men and women were –without their knowledge- being turned into shambling, matter-starved monstrosities, well, Trinity had begun to manipulate and shift things with Tynedale/Fujihara’s Debt Acquisition firm until an encounter in that system had been inevitable.
Garth shivered again. Empty eyes and impossibly wide mouths sometimes found him still when he slept, and since that time, since effectively ‘dealing with’ the problem in Goreene and Tynedale/Fujihara, he’d seen things that were worse. Worse by far and away, but there was something special about The Cloud.
Maybe it was because it was the first hint that his plans could –and had- gone off the rails. It was undeniable that trillions of people had lost their lives in the service of ‘something greater’, and it made Garth sick to his stomach. A trillion more people who would never get a chance at life in Reality 2.0.
But that was his Cloud. It’d been cut loose and left on its own for thousands upon thousands of years, intelligent enough in its own right and guided –more or less- by the HIM hidden there, but again, semi-intelligent machines or not, they’d required a human touch to adapt properly. That was something he’d failed to consider.
But here, on Earth, under The Dome, in Arcade City … what if someone had found the old designs and schematics somewhere, on some drive, or his original handwritten notes? What if … what if someone had perfected the design? Back in the day, it’d been a fact that no one alive other than another Kith’kin or Kin’kith could figure out how to work hytech machinery, but thirty thousand years was a long time.
Long enough for anyone to figure out how to make such impossible machines and science work to their benefit.
Someone shouted, but Garth ignored the cry. He could be wrong. The Unreal Universe was home to things that consistently defied rationality. There could be some other explanation
about how Dark Iron worked. It didn’t have to be a modified Cloud variant.
A rifle butt slammed into the back of Garth’s head with cruel precision. The ex-Specter scratched the side of his head and waited for the inevitable second blow; the Eye, still feeling guilty over it’s failures with Meechy, was letting him be the immovable object by way of compensation.
“In three, two … one.” Garth stepped out of the way when experience told him the attack was going to collide with the back of his wonderful skull. The guard who’d taken it upon himself to corral an obviously morose prisoner fell to the ground in a clatter of arms, legs and rifle. Raucous cheers and jeers filled the air; the other FrancoBritish prisoners awaiting certain death once they crossed the threshold into Arcade City started stamping their feet and shouting ‘fight fight fight’.
Four more guards sprouted like magic mushrooms and more were pushing their way through the hundred or so strong crowd of thieves and madmen. Garth put his foot down on the rifle recently used by a man intent on crushing his skull and raised a hand to the oncoming guards.
“Did you know,” Garth shook his head pleasantly at the men, all of whom were displaying a severe interest in murdering him there on the spot, “did you know that this area was once called Cardiff, and was once home to people who spoke the weirdest fucking language on the planet? And I mean, weird. Like, take blaidd drwg for instance.”
“What’s that then?” One of the guards asked. They were all taken aback by the prisoner’s utter nonchalance. And, of course, that he’d been cracked across the back of the skull and was still standing upright. “Blud durg?”
“No, it’s blard druug.”
“Is Orris all right?”
Garth assumed Orris was the guard down by his feet. The poor kid was making noises like he’d bit his own tongue off. “He’ll be fine. Now blaidd drwg means bad wolf and it doesn’t have anything to do with anything except that Welsh cracks me up, and you’re standing in the capital city of Wales and none of you have a fucking idea what I’m talking about because it’s thirty thousand years into the future and there’s only one person in the Universe who even knows what Welsh is, and I blew a fucking hole through his chest with my finger, so … that’s, uh. Yeah. That’s that.”
