Authors: Robert Appleton
No,
dreading
was the word. An abyss over which no bridge existed—or at least none that he could see. But Sorcha, God bless her, could see it.
“I’ve shut off all com-links, set security to level six. No one can phone in. Anyone buzzes the front gate, they’ll get static. We wouldn’t even know if the Earth was under attack.” She led him past the fence encircling the black bears’ reserve, snuggled close to him, arm-in-arm as they headed uphill toward the house. The smell of wet peat was very pleasant. “Charlie, it’s just you and me in the universe. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I was thinking about Dad, about how he didn’t know when to quit. You know, maybe if he hadn’t pushed it like that, maybe if he’d gone with a safer design, he wouldn’t have flipped.” Charlie’s metal stud tumbling through the grid and into the racer’s engine clattered through his mind. He held his breath for too long, finally let it out with an audible gasp and a cough.
“This is about you retiring, isn’t it?” She slid an arm around his waist. “Come on, I’ve got something to show you.”
She ushered him onto the porch elevator and they alighted on the roof balcony, where an oval-shaped burgundy bubble tent—an extra-strong shelter favoured by deep-space survivalists—stood with its door flap tied open. Inside, two of the cosiest sofa chairs he’d ever seen waited side by side. She sank onto one and invited him onto the other.
“Now, tell me what you see,” she said.
“A sunset.” One of the most brilliant and majestic tropical sunsets he’d ever seen, but Charlie didn’t feel much like elaborating. “It’s pretty.”
“And the rainforest?”
A swathe of damp mist covered the northern treetops, but the western and southern sections of the forest appeared dark, dewy, mysterious. An enticement for his sense of adventure. Sorcha was canny—she knew this vista would appeal to the explorer inside him—he’d often stated his fondness for setting foot where few had ever trod.
“I see what you’re doing, and it’s sweet.” He leaned over, kissed her. “I could spend the rest of my life visiting amazing places, seeing things no one else has seen.”
“But…?” She sighed.
“But I’ve tried that. It doesn’t make me feel good the way RAM-running does. It’s not…unequivocal.”
“It could be. If we started a family—we could all go together.” She nestled her hand in his, gazed at him with that irresistible doe-eyed sincerity she could switch on or off at will. “They’d be our trips of a lifetime. No one else’s. Surely there’s nothing more unequivocal than that.”
“But I thought you weren’t keen on travelling.”
“Not away from home, no. But wherever we’re together, that’s home.” She blushed. “Happy now? That corny enough for you?”
“Sweetheart, you don’t need to—”
“Just think about it?” She looked away to the setting sun. “Things have to change, Charlie. You can either fight the change and lose, or make the change your own. And I’m just saying…you can do anything, be anything. Anyone would kill to be you right now. The only thing stopping you is that obsession you’ve got—being untouchable. You’ve got to let that go. RAM-running can’t last forever. Sooner or later, you’ve got to let the world in. It’s waiting for you.
I’m
waiting for you.”
“Yeah, but…I don’t think I know how.” He slowly let in a full, stuttery breath of balmy Peruvian air. “How did you—when your twin brother—”
“I was only fourteen when he died, and it changed me so much I didn’t recognize myself. But I realized, after a while, you can never go back to the person you were, not for anything. First you have to let the sun set on yesterday. That’s the hard part. But without that, it’s always dusk. And dusk can be a lonely place.”
* * *
“Here.” Blake handed him a set of goggles. The lenses, prisms of some complexity, were identical to the cybernetic green eyes. “I have adjusted the filter for your visual spectrum. Roll your finger over this to magnify—” he pointed to a small pad above the left lens, then one above the right, “—and this to de-magnify. The clarity will automatically adapt to suit your retinas.”
“And I’m looking where in the trees?” Charlie held the goggles to his eyes. Everything was tinted reddish but nonetheless crystal clear. The forest’s vast, drooping leaves appeared to be respiring. They slowly retracted, curling inward, halfway to a fist, before bloating out again at full stretch. The cycle lasted about a minute.
“You should be able to see them around seven or eight tiers up,” Blake replied. “Through the leaves—tiny pinpoints of light. Occasionally they gather and illuminate large sections of the forest. It is a thriving community inside there, Charlie, with laws and art and history. They are amazing, luminous beings.”
“They look like fairies.”
“Not really.”
“What? You’re telling me what a fairy looks like? These things have wings and they glow—they’re fairies.”
“If you insist.”
“How big are they?”
“About fifteen feet tall.”
“Ah.”
He increased the magnification to its maximum setting. Two of the giant leaves had coronas, and he could almost make out a number of long, slender faces glowing behind them. Their features were flooded with pink light, though he reckoned that was due to the lenses being slightly discoloured. Their bodies were long and segmented like a caterpillar’s, with a set of supple wings attached to each segment. He thought he glimpsed an arm or two, but they were so slender he couldn’t be sure.
Transfixed, he struggled to come up with an earthly comparison. The closest was perhaps the dragonfly. He shook his head. Fairies were still the likeliest. He imagined a gentle thrumming of the wings, and an entire language built from that action, the wing of each segment oscillating at its own unique frequency, a vocabulary of hummingbirds and magic.
“They’re really…what’s the word…ethereal.” He searched the higher leaves. “Why did you say they can’t leave the trees?”
“The overlords would kill them. These are the rightful rulers of Baccarat but they have been exiled to the forest realm. It is the only safe, living place on the planet. A long time ago, most of Baccarat was woodland. When the overlords arrived with their terrible weapon and decided this was to be their new home, they started mining the elements required to build their great city. In the process, they threw the natural equilibrium out of whack. The ecosystem retreated into its final refuge—this giant forest. Here, all the surviving species will remain until the overlords are supplanted. Only then will these creatures be able to return Baccarat to her former beauty.”
“All right, let’s get down to brass tacks.” Charlie kept watching the trees. “What exactly do you want me to do?”
Squeaking metal joints approached from behind. Marley. He turned to greet her. As he did, she held out her cybernetic arm. On the flat of her shiny new palm was a tiny capsule, black, about the length of a fingernail. He took it and inspected it closely. Nothing out of the ordinary, just…black.
“Yeah, and I do what with this?”
“Obviously you swallow it.” Marley demonstrated the action with her mouth.
“I want to know what the hell it is first.”
“It is a prototype explosive that emits an organic signature—completely undetectable by scans once it is inside you, unless you know what to look for.” Blake stepped forward. “We need you to smuggle it into the city, and then, when you have identified a critical power source, we need you to destroy it.”
Charlie imagined a thousand sniper rifles trained on the worry lines on his forehead, waiting for him to state the obvious. He didn’t bother. They knew how dangerous it was and what a huge thing they were asking.
Through a long sigh he felt that weight again, that citrus sky pressing down on his sore shoulders. It hadn’t seemed days since he’d ran in the Tonne. It had all been one long, continuous trudge, with naps and nightmare revelations the only reprieves. A single, endless day. The crash, that first riverside hike and guiding Marley’s siblings across the corborilium mountains seemed eons ago. Had he really done all that? It was kind of amazing, the more he considered it. He’d taken all that in his stride. He’d saved a hundred and thirteen lives, for chrissakes.
“And this is the only way we can put everything right?” He wanted to make treble sure.
“It is the only way.”
He thought of his massive home in Cusco, a five-storey palace several miles outside the fast-developing metropolis. He’d designed the hell out of it for more than a year, and now that it was finished, he couldn’t stand the sight of it. Sorcha might be in there somewhere, doing her yoga exercises or swanning about in the pool. They’d been drifting apart for months, ever since he’d announced his sponsorship deal with Latigo.
He fingered the sickle-shaped scar just below his right elbow, and memories of his dumb antics in the low-g velodrome flooded back. He’d cut too steeply onto the spinning vertical track, trying to impress her—they’d only been on two nervous dates—and he’d crashed sideways off his bike, his arm smashing into the handlebars. Incredible pain.
But even more incredible luck, as she was on a gap year voluntary course giving first aid to lunar refugees. She’d spent the next few hours dressing his every cut, nursing his every bruise. By the time she’d finished, they’d shared every embarrassing secret imaginable, laughed at them all, and were already in love. He knew he’d found the woman he would spend the rest of his life with. And that scar had still not healed. Never would.
Sweet Sorcha.
If only there was some way they could go back to how they used to be, before he’d taken to vacationing off-world for weeks at a time. Strangely, it had felt more peaceful out there—roving across the moon, bivouacking on a Martian safari, just cruising the system with his masseuse. But sooner or later he’d felt that sting of regret, remembering his father had died “out there,” and nothing could ever assuage his private agony. No, there was no escaping it any more than the man was escaping the boy. His guilt was sacrosanct, as much a part of the cosmos as the constellation Cassiopeia. All he could do was keep moving, press onward, until the time came that he could look back without crumbling to hateful shards. The quickest way to move, to press onward, was to run.
Was Sorcha right? Was that why he’d become the fastest runner on Earth?
“When should I swallow it?”
“Shortly before you enter the city. You will need to regurgitate or excrete it once you are inside.”
“Sick.”
“To detonate it, you must leave it exposed under bright light. The brighter the light, the quicker it will explode. In this current level of sunlight, it would take about thirty minutes.”
Charlie gazed all around him at the barren alien landscape. “Gotcha. When should I go?”
“As soon as we can prepare enough food and water for your trip. The quicker you plant the explosive, the quicker you get to go home.”
“Okay. And which is the best route to take…approaching the city, I mean.”
“We think the best chance you have of getting close to the city is by one of the water channels. They are mostly tributaries to the city’s water source. We have made you a crude canoe of the lightest metal. It will not be very stable, but it will float, and it also folds into a portable size.”
“You’ve thought of everything.”
“We have had a long time to plan.”
“So what are my chances, Blake?”
A short but telling pause. “Chance alone can answer that, Charlie.”
* * *
He said goodbye to Marley and Christina, and waved to the others when he left. As easily as that, he was on his own again. A bitter twang inside told him he’d grown close to the children, or as close as any misanthrope could grow to homogenized metal tykes. Things had at least been simple around them—no bullshit, no greedy ambitions, no agenda beyond their will to survive. They were admirable little do-gooders—better than ninety-nine percent of Earth’s grubby populous.
He found a low dip in the bank and set the boat down in a flattish yellow pocket of dried mud. In its portable state, the thing seemed nothing more than a light metal tube, about two feet long, with seams running through it. When he rotated the lock, however, it slowly unfurled itself to a flat, ten-by-four sheet. Then by some clever magnetic means, its edges curled upward to form the sides of a canoe-shaped boat.
Charlie felt sure the thing would depress like tinfoil at his touch, but not only did it hold firm, it seemed as solid as cast iron.
“Damned clever.”
There was no sign of the electromagnetic field he’d seen in the water on the other side of the mountains. He soon settled into an easy glide down the narrow purple channel. One slender oar proved sufficient to swish him along. He was in no hurry. Hell, no. It all seemed so…obligatory.
What the hell have you got yourself into?
Hours passed. The serpentine river course grew wider until no current remained. Shallow banks afforded him vista views of the vast desert. He glimpsed the occasional crashed alien vessel miles away, its occupants either long gone or in hiding like Marley’s family. He wondered if he’d get to see any of the strange species whose ships he’d watched in orbit. If they’d taken the plunge, managed to reach the surface, might they have visited the forest dwellers first and learned of the overlords’ trap? Or maybe someone could help him inside the city? The more he thought about going it alone, the more he wanted to beach the boat and just run for it. Probably to the forest. He had no idea what to expect at the end of the river. It was all a blind bet—Baccarat—that he’d been manipulated into from day one.
“Those little—”
The boat now glided much faster through the water. His heart began to thump. He hadn’t noticed the electromagnetic pattern—the M-field—looming ahead.
“All right, what now, genius?”
His instinct told him to make for the nearest bank and walk the rest of the way. But if the M-field was dangerous, surely Blake, Hippolyta or Marley would have warned him. Yes, he had nothing to worry about and it would take forever to reach the city on foot. Indeed, if he were to achieve anything in this espionage racket, he would have to start taking risks. Now might be as good a time as any. A trial run?