Children of a Dead Earth Book One (29 page)

Mei unhooked from her rail and pushed off in a new direction. Benson's fingertips tingled from the diminishing oxygen, making it hard to unhook. Hopefully, they didn't have far to go.

Just off the main street of rails sat an odd, lumpy-looking structure about three meters tall and as many across, a sun-faded yellow that clashed against the uniform white of the hull. It looked out of place, almost parasitic sitting against the hull. It wasn't until Mei climbed on top of it and disappeared inside that Benson realized what it was: a lock, but not like any of the standard locks he'd ever seen. It looked like an afterthought, and maybe that's exactly what it was. A temporary lock set up by the builders to make their work easier, then forgotten as they moved on or ran out of time. That would explain why it wasn't on the security grid or any blueprints. The Ark was the most complex object mankind had ever built by a wide margin. Alterations and oversights along the way from paper to reality were inevitable.

Little shooting stars flew across Benson's field of vision, sending a fresh jolt of dread through him. For a fleeting, paranoid moment, he realized that if Mei had been playing some elaborate double cross, now would be a perfect time to just lock the door and leave him out in the cold, gasping like a freshly-landed fish.

Benson scrambled up the side of the temporary lock to get at the hatch. With a sigh of relief, he pulled the loose hatch open and slipped inside head first. It had enough room inside for himself, Mei, and maybe half a sandwich, so cramped that she had trouble spinning the hatch shut behind him.

His suit finally sent out a warning bell when his reserves had been completely depleted, but by then, Mei was already cycling the lock. Even as grey crept into the edges of his vision, Benson could feel the air rushing into the tiny compartment, deflating the shell of his suit as the pressure equalized. Benson wasted no time getting his helmet off and sucking down a big lungful of air the moment the light turned green. It was dry, stale, and tasted like an unsealed tomb, but he didn't care one bit. Mei tapped him with her foot and pointed at the inner hatch.

Benson spun it open and floated into the darkened space beyond. Weapon in hand, ready to face down a monster.

B
enson didn't even know
where to start. He'd never studied the schematics of the Bomb Shelter in any detail and had no idea where he was or where he should go.

He pulled off his suit's gloves and tossed them back in the lock with his helmet. Normally, he'd just pull up a map with his plant, but connecting to the network would give away his position to the floaters before he was ready.

“Mei, can you show me where they are?”

She shook her head. “I not go so far before.”

Benson sighed.
Figures
,
no map and a blind guide
. “OK, you stay by the lock. If anyone comes by, hide. Agong probably isn't going to be happy to see you, and I don't want you to get hurt.”

She didn't offer up a fight. He'd hoped she wouldn't. Benson reached out for her wrist and brought the young woman into a bulky hug, like two people wearing sumo suits.

“Thank you, Mei. You've been so brave already. I'll take it from here, OK?”

He let her go and pushed off down the small corridor nestled between the double-hulls.

“Benson-san!” Mei called out. He flinched and put a finger to his lips, pleading with her to lower her voice.

She held a hand over her belly and gently rubbed at the tiny life growing inside her, completely unaware of the drama playing out that would decide its fate.

“Stop him,” she whispered. “Please.”

Benson pulled the FN free of its lanyard and slipped the handle into his palm.

“Count on it.”

He decided that without a map any old hatch was as good as another. Benson had a basic understanding of the Bomb Shelter's layout. Very basic. Essentially, the vault was nothing more than a giant magazine designed to feed bombs through barrels at the center of each of the Ark's three dozen shock absorbers, themselves each fifteen hundred meters long, and out the back of the pusher plate.

Magnetic conveyor belts cycled the nukes into electromagnetic railguns at the top of each shock absorber, which then fired the bomb through a small aperture in the plate itself. Only three bombs detonated with each cycle, giving each railgun a full twelve cycles to cool down, recharge, and reload before firing again. This way, ablative wear on the pusher plate remained evenly distributed.

But as far as the actual internal layout of the mechanisms went, Benson was in the dark. Quite literally, since none of the lights were on. Here and there, a small display or status light cast a red or amber glow across the thin corridors, reminding Benson of every low-budget sci-fi horror movie he'd ever seen, leaving his lizard-brain to fill every dark corner with scaly alien monsters and decomposing zombies. It wasn't helping his heart rate.

Neither was the heat. Despite the bone dry air, the temperature was stifling. Heat bleeding through from both the reactor compartment and the radiator fins outside kept the bomb shelter cooking, but since few people ever came here, little point existed to spend energy cooling the air down.

Benson soon felt like a plump carrot trapped in a vegetable steamer. He wished he'd just taken the entire suit off and left it back at the lock with Mei. Fortunately, one of the suit's few positives was an LED spotlight built into the chest piece. Turning it on risked giving away his position to Kimura and his men, but short of evolving night vision in the next handful of minutes, he didn't see an alternative.

Still unsure of exactly what he was looking for, Benson switched on the light and illuminated the hallway. At the far end, just before the curve cut of his line of sight, he saw the body floating limply in the corridor dressed in the gray and blue uniform of the maintenance crew. A bright slash of blood clung to the dead man's chest due to the surface tension.

“Well,” Benson said to himself. “This is the place.” Quietly, he floated up to the hatch adjacent to where the body floated. He span the hatch unlocked and, very gently, pushed it open, trying not to let a squeaky hinge announce his presence in the deathly silence. Peering into the compartment beyond, he had to muffle a gasp.

Hundreds, no, thousands of perfectly spherical nuclear bombs, each little bigger than a beach ball, sat in a stacked queue waiting for their turn. It was like looking inside the gumball machine of the apocalypse, and this section was only one of thirty-six identical compartments.

However, it was the first one down the hall from the temporary lock he'd arrived through, and as it happened, was also the first one Kimura and his two henchmen had found. They hovered around a single nuke, dislodged from the queue and wired up to a tablet. Alerted by the noise of the hatch spinning open, the same three people stared up at Benson with looks that were, in order of appearance, surprise, admiration, and rage.

Quickly, Benson flicked on his plant's video capture feature to start recording, set it to stream onto an open, unencrypted public channel, then pulled off the aluminum foil hat from his head.

“Detective!” Kimura called out with genuine enthusiasm. “Welcome.”

“It's just Bryan, now,
David
.”

The voice exploded through his mind as if one of the nukes had suddenly gone off. Benson actually winced as Commander Feng continued to shout through his plant.

be
anything, period.>

Benson cut the link.

“Trouble, Bryan?”

“Just a little headache. You're not going to be so happy when you hear what I have to say.”

“Oh, I expect I know already. You're here to stop the madman from stealing a nuke and bringing his evil plan to fruition.”

Benson shrugged. “Something like that. I had a talk with Mei, I know the lies you've been telling these people.”

Kimura, still wearing a full suit complete with custom helmet, waved his hand dismissively. “There's nothing more subjective than the Truth, my son. My people have done very well following their own.”

“
Your
own, Kimura. You've been filling them with hot air about their destiny as the chosen, or whatever. Maybe you've kept them isolated and naïve enough for them to believe it, but you know damned well that a few dozen people don't stand a chance of starting a new colony. You don't have the labor force, or the genetic diversity to make it work. You're only leading them to extinction.”

Kimura glared at him for a long moment, then shook the tablet in his hand at him. “Good show, my lad, trying to turn these two against me at the eleventh hour. But the trouble is, they already know.”

“What?” Benson was genuinely shocked. He looked at the faces of the others and saw only determination. In a flicker of recognition, he realized they were the same two men he'd played cribbage with before his first meeting with Kimura. They knew they were going to die, but were helping him anyway?

Kimura evidently decided the conversation had gone on long enough and barked something at his goons in Japanese. Each man drew a knife from their waistbands and pointed the tips at the intruder. On command, they turned on Benson like a pair of angry pitbulls and pushed off hard.

Working off instincts honed on the Zero field, Benson sized up their speed and trajectories in an instant and pushed off at an oblique angle to their flight path that would leave him just out of arm's reach. But then they surprised him. The closer man rotated ninety degrees until he was perpendicular to his partner, then pushed off him and straight into Benson's new flight path.

Without access to the stadium, Benson had assumed that the Unbound would wallow around in micro like children learning to swim, but the clever move proved he had severely underestimated them. These men flew well, they knew how to work as a team, and both of them were free of their bulky suits.

Caught off guard and with almost no time to react, Benson pointed the muzzle of his gun at the man barreling at him with an outstretched knife and a face twisted with adrenaline and hate.

With a jerky pull of the trigger and a flash, Benson fired the shot heard around the Ark. The sharp
snap
of the gun's report was instantly replaced by a ringing in his ears, while the recoil sent him spinning as though someone had punched him in the chest.

Benson's arms and legs flailed as he tried to halt the unexpected spin until he struck the far wall like a sack of potatoes. The suit's layers absorbed most of the shock of impact, but the ringing in his ears remained. A metallic, almost sweet smell filled his nostrils as he scanned the compartment for the different threats.

The second goon had been pushed to the far side of the compartment by the midair maneuver, while the man Benson had shot had drifted into the ceiling. He floated near a corner, whimpering softly, curled up in a ball with his hands pressed tightly to his shoulder while droplets of crimson hovered around him. His knife hung in the air, out of reach.

Just above the threshold of the ringing in his ears, Benson heard a
tink
as the spent brass cartridge reached a wall and bounced off.

For a moment, nobody said or did anything, as if the gunshot had cast a sort of spell. Kimura was the first to break free of it.

“Where did you get that?”

“From a friend.” Benson decided the other man was too far away to pose a legitimate threat and trained the gun on Kimura. “It's a loaner.”

Kimura only chuckled and held up his tablet. “I'm afraid you've brought a gun to a nuclear bomb fight.”

Feng's voice broke through again.

Benson returned his attention to the crisis in front of him. “I wouldn't underestimate this gun. The last time some idiot fired this thing, sixteen million people died,” he said, echoing Devorah's words again. They had a nice ring to them. Weighty. “David Kimura, you are under arrest for sabotage, the terrorist attack on Shangri-La, the death of Chief Constable Vikram Bahadur, the murder of Edmond Laraby, and a shit-ton of other things. Let go of the tablet and push away from the bomb, or I'll be forced to shoot.”

Kimura glanced at the tablet, then folded his hands behind his back. “Do your duty, constable.”

This time, Benson was ready for the shot. With his off hand, he grabbed a frame member to steady himself from the recoil and took extra time to line up the simple sights. He aimed for Kimura's center mass, and pulled the trigger.

The tiny copper and lead slug tore through the air at hundreds of kilometers an hour, covering the handful of meters between the two men in the blink of an eye. It struck Kimura in the abdomen, lower than Benson had aimed for, but he crumpled around the hit regardless.

But then, to Benson's horror, Kimura straightened out, pulled the flattened bullet out of the fabric of his suit… and smiled.

“An excellent shot, Bryan, but you forget that these suits are rated for micrometeorites up to a millimeter.” He let the squashed bullet float in front of him, then pulled out the tablet and let his finger hover over the button. “Your pebbles aren't going to cut it.”

“David, just stop. You're going to end everything.”

“Everything?” Kimura shook his head. “What an egocentric statement. Everything will be just fine. A single, insignificant mote of dust will be destroyed, and the universe won't even notice.”

“I'll notice! Everyone I know will notice. Everyone I love will notice. And the memories of everyone you've already killed will notice. Not to mention the half million people we've lost along the way, and the souls of the ten billion we left behind.” Benson pointed at his head. “We're
all
watching you right now.”

Kimura smirked. “Streaming this, are you? You're more clever than I gave you credit for.”

“You're not the first.”

“No, but I'll be the last. Here you are, vilified and derided by your betters, yet still you do their bidding. It's sad, really.”

“I'm doing no one's bidding. I'm doing my job.”

“Yes? Did you know your job is to maintain a lie? Maybe you deserve to know, maybe everyone does.”

An error message appeared in Benson's vision. His plant's live stream had just been cut. Benson's heart sank. Someone knew what Kimura was about to say, and despite the impending Armageddon, still wanted to keep the cattle in the dark.

“I'm not killing anyone, Officer Benson, because we're all ghosts. This grand project, this final rage against the dying of the light, was the last gasp of human folly. We were destined to die with our home.”

Benson adjusted the grip on his gun. “Start making sense or I'll shoot you just for the satisfaction of it.”

Kimura gave a curt bow. “Nibiru, the black hole that swallowed our home, wasn't some cosmic accident. It was sent by God.”

If anyone had still been watching his live stream, they would have seen Benson's eyes roll like stones trying to shrug off a moss infestation. “That's all you have? Really? The same crackpot nonsense spouted by every pseudo-messiah for the last three centuries?”

“They didn't know what I do, they merely guessed. Nibiru changed course to hit Earth. Twice.”

Despite the heat, Benson's veins filled with ice as the full implications of what Kimura said set in. A black hole couldn't alter course, unless something was acting on it. Controlling it? But that meant Earth died, billions died, as part of someone's plan. A deliberate act of genocide.

“That's impossible,” Benson said.

“For mere mortals, yes. But God?” Kimura turned up his palms and shrugged. “It's been known that Nibiru couldn't have occurred naturally for centuries. It was created artificially, to be a weapon.”