Children of a Dead Earth Book One (28 page)

“Maybe they're getting better. It made sense. The last thing I told Korolev to do was put her in protective custody. I figured he'd trust you with it, or you'd find out through Jeanine, and this was the obvious place to hide her.” Benson took Mei's delicate hands in his and led her over to the sumptuous antique chair.

“Mei, honey, I need you to tell me everything. About Kimura's plans, about what he's going to do next, all of it.”

“I… I shouldn't.”

“Mei.” Theresa knelt down and put a hand on the young woman's knee. “It's OK, you can trust us.”

“You were so brave yesterday, Mei,” Benson smiled, warmly and authentically. “You saved thousands of people yesterday, did you know that?”

“But almost everyone died!”

“In Shangri-La, yes, but that was my fault, not yours. I couldn't get there fast enough to stop them. But Mei, Kimura tried to do the same thing here in Avalon. They didn't have the chance to finish, because of you.”

Theresa nodded her head in agreement. “It's true, Mei. Mankind still has a fighting chance, thanks to you.”

Mei sank deeper into the chair, mirroring her attitude. “We were the last chance.”

Benson cocked an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“Agong teach us that Unbound would be the first men.”

“Agong?” Theresa asked.

“It means grandfather. It's what they call Kimura.”

Theresa nodded and urged Mei to continue.

“The Unbound chosen to fill Tao Ceti G. Agong was picked by God to lead us after the rest of man fall.”

For a long moment, everyone was silent as the full weight of Mei's words sunk in.

Korolev was the first to continue. “So, you were taught that your people would rebuild everything? Like
every
everything?”

Mei nodded. “We were chosen, like Noah and his Ark.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Forty-six now.” Mei's hand shot to her gently swelling belly. “Forty-seven,” she corrected.

Theresa exhaled slowly. “Mei, forty-seven people isn't enough to start a colony. It's not even enough to get off the ship.”

“Yes, it is!”

“Can you pilot a shuttle?”

Mei hesitated, but shook her head.

“Can any of you pilot a shuttle?”

“We not stupid! We learn.”

Theresa put up her hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I don't think you're stupid. But piloting a shuttle isn't something you can learn in a day, or a month. It takes years of training and drills and simulations. I couldn't learn it in a year, much less the month we have left.”

Mei crossed her arms. “You are not chosen.”

Benson crossed his arms, mirroring Mei's body language. “Mei, do you think I'm a cheater?”

Mei shook her head, afraid she'd somehow offended her hosts. “No, Benson-san.”

Benson pressed on. “My ancestors were. They lied to get on this ship, lied about who they were. Do you blame me for that?”

Mei tried to hide her discomfort at the question, poorly.

“No one is chosen by birth, Mei. We choose for ourselves what kind of people we grow up to be. I did. You did when you betrayed Kimura and came to me. And so will your baby, if we all live long enough to give it the chance.”

Benson backed off to let his words sink in with her. He motioned for the others to come over by the dinner table.

“Well, that explains the attacks,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Korolev asked.

Theresa jumped in. “We couldn't figure out what the terrorists wanted. They never gave any demands, never took hostages. It didn't make sense because we were looking at the attacks as a political statement. But they're not terrorists, they're a cult.”

“But he almost killed everyone, twice now!”

Benson shrugged. “Kimura wouldn't be the first cult leader to decide doomsday was taking too long and try to give it a nudge. History is littered with charismatic leaders who turned incredibly violent to keep their flock loyal.” Benson thought back through the series of events over the last few days, trying to put together a timeline.

“So, he took down the reactors, but not to destroy the ship. Instead, he bought time while all the security nets were down to hit deep storage and steal enough mining explosives to rig up the habitats. Then he waited until most of our constables were at the game to set them up, but he didn't expect Mei to turn, so he had to improvise.”

“He still got twenty thousand people. That's hardly a failed attack,” Korolev said.

“It is if your goal is to wipe out everyone but yourselves.”

“Well, then why didn't he make any move against the command module?” Theresa asked. “Hundreds of crew are in there.”

“Because he needs it intact. With command knocked out, he has no way to control the ship. Remember, he wants the Unbound to take over when the Ark reaches Tao Ceti G.”

Korolev rubbed his chin. “How many people do you think he lost in Shangri-La?”

Benson shook his head. “I can't be sure, but if it was me, I'd have pulled everyone back as soon as I knew Mei had escaped. Huang either volunteered or was picked to stay behind while the rest of the group escaped, to take out a whole bunch of constables and the module at the same time.”

“So what happens now?”

“He's going to make another play on Avalon, but it's going to be fast and dirty. There's not enough time left for another complex operation.”

Korolev piped up. “And we're watching for him now. Avalon is locked down tight as a drum.”

Benson looked at him quizzically. “Is it now? I'm here, not in my apartment. Still, he's not going to be able to do a repeat on the lake. It's being drained anyway.”

“So he needs to make a hole. What if he has some extra mining explosives lying around?”

“Wouldn't matter. Those explosives aren't powerful enough to cut through six sub-levels. That's why he had to rig them to the lake and let its mass do most of the work. No, he needs a
big
hole, something engineering can't patch in time.”

“Well, where's he going to get explosives big enough before we Flip the ship and the nukes start…”

Everyone froze in place as the same icy thought clawed its way out of their brains and down their spines.

“A nuke,” Benson sighed heavily. “That'd certainly do the trick.”

“Oh, no.” Theresa put a hand over her mouth. “He wouldn't.”

“He most certainly would,” Benson said.

“But that would destroy the entire ship, wouldn't it?” Theresa asked.

“I doubt it. The propellant bombs aren't the city-killers we used to build. They're much lower yield, and the Ark is huge. You don't really understand how huge until you've seen it from the outside.”

“But he can't reach them, we've had a security contingent guarding the only lock to engineering since right after the reactors were sabotaged.”

“We go around it,” Mei said.

Everyone looked at the antique chair where Mei sat, her legs drawn up to her chest and her arms crossed around them.

“What do you mean, Mei?” Theresa asked.

“We not use lock. Go around it with a secret way to break reactors, then come back. No one see.”

The doorbell chimed. Then chimed again. Whoever was outside wasn't exhibiting an abundance of patience.

“Check it,” Theresa said to Korolev.

The young man nodded curtly and jogged over to the small screen by the door.

“It's Hernandez,” he said. “He has three other constables with him, and he looks mighty pissed.”

“Well, that didn't take as long as I'd hoped,” Benson muttered.

“Stall him.” Theresa grabbed Benson under the chin to ensure she had his full attention. “You're not thinking about digging in your heels for some testosterone-filled last stand, are you?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Good. I hate that macho bullshit.”

“Sure you do.” Benson grabbed the back of her head and pulled her in for a deep, penetrating kiss. Korolev looked away out of respect. For just a moment, they both forgot about all the tragedy and uncertainty that had plagued their lives since the call about Laraby's disappearance came in a week ago. The world shrank down until it was just big enough to fit two lovers sharing a passionate embrace before the winds blew them apart again.

In the blink of an eye, the moment passed and Benson was on the move again.

“Wait, I want to come with you,” Theresa said, pleading in her moist eyes, but Benson could only shake his head.

“They're only guessing that I'm in here. But if your plant suddenly goes dark, they'll know for sure.”

She gave a small, resigned nod. “Go.”

Benson steeled himself. He'd been nervously anticipating this moment for months, putting it off for selfish, silly reasons. But circumstances forced his hand now. This was the last chance he was going to get. He took a deep breath, then said the words.

“I love you.”

Theresa stepped in and punched him in the gut.

“Jesus, Esa.” Benson bent over and tried to catch his breath.

“No, you selfish shit,” she said. “You don't get to say that. Not here, not like this. Not until you come back to me.”

“Right, sorry.” Benson jogged over to Mei's chair, holding his stomach. “Mei, I need you to show me the secret way into engineering.”

“OK,” she said. “But you not like it.”

M
ei was right
. Benson did not like it.

“What is this, duct-tape?” Benson poked a finger at the gray strip covering one of the elbow joints of the ancient spacesuit.

“Yes. Duck tape work like lucky charms.”

Benson decided it was a language barrier issue and moved on. “Where the hell did you dig these things up from?”

“People throw them out, we fix them up.” Mei turned around and pointed at a zipper at the bottom of her suit's back flap. Benson obliged her.

“Are you sure about this? You're pregnant, after all. Can't you just tell me where to go?”

Mei shook her head. “You get lost. Turn around.” She tugged at his zipper, but couldn't get it to close. “You too fat.”

“I'm not fat,” Benson said defensively. “I'm just a little bigger than average.”

“Breathe out.”

“But we wear these things
to
breathe.”

Unimpressed by the line of logic, Mei slapped him in the stomach. Begrudgingly, Benson exhaled and she managed to finish zipping him up. The suit was indeed a bit snug. He wiggled around in it trying to find any extra room. But instead he found that the left shoulder joint was sticky and didn't want to go higher than forty-five degrees.

“Hey, my arm can't move all the way.”

“It just need oil.”

“Great, do you have some?”

“No.”

“Of course not. It was a silly question.”

Mei slung on her backpack life-support unit and cinched down the straps before hooking up the trio of hoses that connected to the front of the suit. Benson followed suit, and immediately felt cool air circulating inside the tight confines.

“How many times have you gone outside?” Benson asked.

Mei shrugged. “Many. Whenever we need to move between the modules. Sometimes we go outside just to watch the stars.”

It explained how they'd gotten around security. Only a smattering of external cameras studded the hull for maintenance inspections. They were equipped with floodlights, which would make them easy to avoid for anyone walking around in the dark.

Benson had realized his gun wouldn't do much good zipped up inside his suit, so he fashioned a lanyard and tied one end to the trigger guard and the other to the suit's belt. Not that he could actually fit a gloved finger inside the trigger guard to fire the gun, but if push came to shove, he could jam a stylus inside the guard to pull the trigger.

The helmet was the last piece of Benson's suit to put in place. The top of his scalp pushed up against the inside of the helmet, matting his hair flat against his skull.

“This was built for somebody ten centimeters shorter than me.”

“You complain too much.”

She turned away and ambled towards the small maintenance lock, her usual feline grace lost inside the cumbersome suit. Benson followed in his bouncy, halting way. Someone had long ago spliced through the lock's control panel to avoid tripping any alarms. Mei spun open the inner door, and before Benson had the chance to talk himself out of it, pumps had pulled out all of the air. His suit popped and crinkled like an inflating balloon as it swelled in the vacuum, sending little waves of fear through him. But the suit's integrity held, even the duct-taped elbow, although Benson intended to flex the joint as little as humanly possible.

The outer door opened and Mei signaled for him to step out. The suit had short-range radio coms built in, but using them could give away their presence, so Mei had given him a short run down of hand signals the Unbound used during their jaunts.

With a deep breath, Benson stepped out onto the small platform and back into infinity. It had enough space for one person, barely. Mei was already climbing towards the hub.

Benson, meanwhile, was busy beating back panic. From his perspective standing on a tiny metal grate bolted to the outside of Avalon's rear bulkhead, the entire universe was busy spinning along at three hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. The effects this had on his sense of balance and stomach were all too predictable.

With sweat already forming on his forehead, Benson shut his eyes and took deep, calming breaths. The sensation of spinning wildly through open space brought the memory of the EVA pod accident bubbling right back up to the surface. He turned around to face the outer hull, suddenly very interested in reading the serial numbers of each honeycomb composite tile.

Something tapped the top of his head. It was Mei's foot. Her face looked more impatient than concerned, but he couldn't blame her for that. The spacewalk to the secret entrance would already push the safety margins on their suit's endurance without time wasting freak outs.

Get it together, Bryan
, he admonished himself. The ladder had no cage around it, but it did have a saw-tooth arresting rail running up the right hand side for a tether to hook to. Still, he'd prefer the claustrophobic maintenance tube on the inside to this.

Benson hooked one of his tethers to the safety rail, then followed Mei, keeping his eyes straight ahead. Every twenty meters, he had to stop to swap over his tether to the next length of rail. He very quickly came to look forward to these little breaks. Making the climb had been hard enough without almost forty extra kilos of equipment to lift up each rung. All the while, the aluminum foil still wrapped around his head shifted and chafed.

Mei scampered up the ladder with little apparent effort, pausing with annoyance to wait for Benson to catch up. Youth alone couldn't account for the difference. Maybe he really was getting fat.

It wasn't long before he fell into a rhythm as the distance shed the kilos. He reached the top without throwing an aneurism. Of course, the “top” was actually the middle, which is where things got complicated. The hub sat directly above their heads, spinning away at just over one revolution per minute.

Mei made a “V” with her fingers and pointed at her eyes, signaling him to watch her carefully. She'd explained the procedure earlier as best she could, but some things only made sense when you saw them.

Like Avalon's hull, every panel on the outside of the Ark's spine was studded with at least one loop. They'd been welded in place to serve as anchor points for the men and drones building the Ark back in Earth orbit.

With one tether still attached to the safety rail, Mei reached out ahead and snagged one of the approaching loops, then deftly unhooked her other tether from the safety rail an instant before the rotation took out the slack.

Benson swallowed hard as his turn came up. Even though the hub wasn't moving by at the breakneck pace of the outer hull, it still
seemed
plenty fast, and although his effective weight up here was only a kilo or two, it still wasn't zero. If he missed his mark, he could fall off into empty space, albeit very slowly. By the time the Ark's gravity pulled him back in again, he'd have been out of air for quite a while. Mei had made sure to reinforce this point in her little safety briefing. She'd watched a man killed exactly that way less than a year ago.

Soon, Mei rotated out of sight, leaving Benson alone with his fear. He picked a loop to shoot for and reached out a tentative arm, but his sticky left shoulder kept him from stretching to his full arm span.

“Figures.” He forced the hobbled joint into position. He spotted another loop and tried again, and failed again. By now, Mei was cresting on the horizon, holding a finger to her wrist in the sign for, “Hurry up, you incompetent jerk.”

Assuming third time lucky, Benson lunged at a loop, willing his arms longer to cover the last few centimeters. To his surprise, the carabiner hooked in as if he'd just caught the universe's largest fish.

“Yes!” he shouted in a moment of triumph, while completely forgetting to unhook the other tether from the safety rail. Benson could only watch in muted horror as the tethers snapped taut, until one of them inevitably failed with a tear he could hear through his suit.

Still connected to the module, he watched as the tether attached to the hub sped out of reach. The look on Mei's face as she passed was… clinically unimpressed.

“Of course the wrong one broke,” Benson said to himself. “At least my luck remains consistent.” Heart pounding, Benson unhooked his remaining tether from the safety rail and switched it to his good hand.

Before he had the chance to change his mind, Benson leapt clear of the ladder and crashed into the hub. His teeth snapped together from the jolt, and as soon as he hit the deck, he bounced and fell away again. His arms pinwheeling wildly, Benson screamed as if trying to propel himself back on sound waves alone before floating off into total silence forever.

With a last desperate flail, the carabiner clinked against a loop and hit home. Already at its full reach, the tether yanked Benson hard, stopping him dead.

“Fuck,” was all he could think to say. Yet it felt perfectly appropriate. Benson pulled himself back down along the tether and grabbed one of the anchors, then slowly worked his way hand over hand back around to Mei. Reunited, she led him further down the Ark's spine, methodically swapping tethers from one anchor point to the next.

Mei still had the two she'd started with, but Benson was down to one. Every time he unhooked his carabiner, a small electric shock of panic went through his body until it was firmly connected to the next loop.

Their progress was slow, to put it mildly, but eventually they reached the part of the engineering module commonly referred to as the Aviary. Surrounding them, a flock of enormous atmospheric shuttles, each a hundred meters long, laid belly-up to the stars where their ablative ceramic composite tiles had protected them from centuries of micro-meteor impacts and would soon protect them from the hellish heat of reentry through the atmosphere of Tao Ceti G.
Well, just entry
, Benson corrected himself.

The shuttles gave him something to focus on instead of just the deck. He could look at them without getting lost in the sea of stars beyond. They totaled a dozen, two of which hadn't weathered the long journey very well and would be used for spare parts. Enough redundancy had been built into the plan that the loss of two shuttles wasn't going to be catastrophic; indeed the twin habitats themselves had been a form of redundancy. If some disaster crippled one, humanity didn't have all of its eggs in one basket. A contingency plan existed to start the colony in the event half the population was lost to a meteor, plague, or mechanical failure.

That plan had been officially activated yesterday. No one, not the Ark's builders, or the eleven generations that followed, ever thought the calamity would come from one of their own.

“When did we become so naïve?” Benson asked. No one else could hear him. He didn't expect an answer.

Their pace quickened. The individual anchor points had been replaced by long, straight rails that they could hook their tethers to and slide from one to the next. Apparently, the people building the Ark had gotten just as fed up with the stupid loops as he had and came up with something more practical. They left the Aviary behind, crossed the maintenance hangars and the handful of EVA pods, and soon reached the bulbous compartment that housed the ship's twin fusion reactors and massive Helium-3 tanks.

The reactors were, thankfully, still there, but of the forty-eight tanks the journey had started with, only six remained. The rest had been jettisoned as they ran empty along the way with enough force to send them off on new headings. Every kilogram of unnecessary mass the ship shed along the way was a kilogram that didn't have to be decelerated at the other end, which meant more velocity could be built up back at the beginning of the trip. The enormous ablative cone that had protected the bow of the ship for so long would meet the same fate during the Flip.

Provided Benson could stop a lunatic from nuking what was left of humanity. No pressure.

By then, he was starting to feel the heat, literally. They were passing through an alley between two of the reactor's titanic radiator fins. Pressurized steam passed through thousands of meters of tubing, slowly radiating excess heat from the fusion process back out into space before condensing back into liquid to cycle through the system all over again. It was funny to think, but save for the donut-shaped stars at the heart of the reactors, the actual mechanics of the system would be familiar to any nineteenth-century train conductor.

Benson checked a small data monitor on his wrist and realized his cooling unit was working overtime to try to keep up. But even more worryingly, the monitor very casually mentioned that he had ten minutes of oxygen reserves left.

“A fucking alarm would have been nice!” he shouted into his helmet hard enough to hurt his ears. Benson took a deep breath to calm himself, then realized that was probably even worse. With a hard tug on the rail, he closed the gap between himself and Mei and grabbed her foot to get her attention, then pointed at his wrist screen.

She shook her head and pointed at her own wrist, then made an “OK” sign with her fingers. She raised her hand, then flipped the palm over and lowered it again, repeating this gesture slowly several times. It took Benson a moment to realize she was telling him to slow his breathing. Apparently, she thought they were close enough for his supply to last, if he was cautious.

Breathing shallow, Benson followed Mei as they left the reactor compartment behind. Ahead of them, the immense disk of the ship's pusher plate eclipsed all of the stars behind it. Benson felt like he was running out of superlatives, but nothing about any component of the Ark was small. Ahead of them, and much deeper than Benson had ever ventured into the ship's bowels, was their destination.

Behind the reactor module, deep storage loomed, but no one called it that. The few techs who ever had cause to come back here had dubbed it the Bomb Shelter. The space served as a repository for most of the hardware and construction materials being carried to seed the new colony, but its most important cargo was a repository of tens of thousands of nuclear bombs.