‘Then where is he?’ asked Olivia.
‘He went ahead.’
Olivia frowned. ‘Ahead to where?’
The corner of Mitchell’s mouth curled again, into an almost apologetic smile. ‘To the very end of time.’
Olivia stared at Jeff, then back at Mitchell. ‘What?’
‘Look,’ said Mitchell, ‘the exploration teams went a long,
long
way into the future, but there are routes through the Founder Network that can take you much farther still – so far ahead in time that I don’t even know how to describe it. Except that it’s long after the universe, as we know it, has effectively ceased to exist.’
‘You believe this?’ she asked, looking at Jeff.
Jeff shrugged helplessly. ‘After what I’ve seen during the past couple of weeks, I think I’ll believe pretty much anything.’
‘The Founder Network zigzags across the whole universe,’ Mitchell went on. ‘Jeff told you about it, surely?’
She nodded, and Mitchell reached up to tap the side of his head. ‘The pools – the learning pools, I call them – they put a road map of the whole thing here inside my head.’
‘What about Erich?’ asked Jeff. ‘How could you have spoken to him? There was no sign of himivia starl when we found you.’
‘I can’t tell you exactly how I know, but some time between losing consciousness and when you found me, I talked to him.’
‘Talked? How?’
‘I just know that, before you found me, Erich and I’d . . .
communicated
in some way. He said he was going up ahead, to find the Founders and the civilization they created close to the end of everything. When I woke up, I was all alone.’
‘Why didn’t you go with him?’ asked Olivia.
Mitchell paused, as if he was being careful to find the right words. ‘There were things I had to do first.’
‘What things?’
‘I had to remember certain things,’ he answered after a pause.
Olivia could feel herself getting angry, again, at what struck her as deliberate obfuscation. ‘
What
things?’
‘Everything . . .’ said Mitchell. ‘Like taking a snapshot of everything living on Earth, and preserving it with all its thoughts intact, and carrying it through to the far future. “Remember” isn’t really the right word . . . but the memories will live and breathe and think, put it that way.’
Olivia stared at him, suddenly frightened. ‘And you can do that?’
‘In a sense,’ he replied eventually, his expression almost reverential as he continued. ‘All this would make more sense if you’d seen what those learning pools showed me. Death has no real meaning to the Founders. It’s not a concept they really understand, because they vanquished it so very long ago.’
Olivia stared at the strange half-smile on his face and shivered.
A fresh tremor caused the table to rattle. The three of them waited, ready to bolt outside if it grew worse, but it faded after a few seconds.
‘Time to get moving,’ said Jeff, heading towards the exit. ‘We’ve probably wasted too much time already.’
Sophia Array, Newton Colony, 7 February 2235
It took Saul nearly sixteen hours to make his way back through the gate to Copernicus. Measured in light-years, the distance he had to cross was impossible for a human mind to contemplate, but measured through the wormhole it was a little under three and a half kilometres – three kilometres to the Sophia Array in the company of a squad of ASI troopers, then three hundred and fifty metres from the outer security perimeter to the transfer stan, and a final stretch of one hundred and fifty metres, including that short, anticlimactic trip through the wormhole itself. And yet every step involved hours of interminable waiting, as he passed through security cordons that hadn’t even been in place when he’d been heading the other way.
If anything, Narendra had underestimated the scale of the military operation taking place. Sophia’s public UP networks had remained out of action, while the remaining communications bandwidth had been commandeered by military networks to which Saul soon found he was not permitted access. He felt overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of equipment and personnel pouring through from Florida: even once he had passed through the final checkpoint within the Sophia Array, he was then obliged to wait for another three hours while battlefield-equipped Black Dogs and their human operators were shipped through to Newton. Saul sat on a bench in a warehouse area, eating from a ration pack, as he watched dozens of the four-legged machines being unpacked from crates by engineers who then ran them through software checks, before sending them out on to the streets of Sophia.
He passed time by playing back the decrypted video fragments or else browsing through a selection of the hundreds of classified documents that accompanied them, hoping they might help make some sense of what he had witnessed so far, but the more he read, the more an almost physical dread overwhelmed him. Some of the documents focused solely on the growths, including speculations on their origin, while the majority detailed the exploration of something called the Founder Network. Saul read on, numbed by what he now learned. No wonder Donohue had worked so hard to suppress it all.
One report detailed an incident on a world so far in the future that – assuming he interpreted what he read correctly, although he was far from sure he did – the last remaining stars had long since burned to cinders. The main part of the report explicitly referenced Mitchell, appearing to suggest that he had somehow died and then come back to life – a claim no less extraordinary than any other Saul had so far encountered.
He closed his eyes and leaned forward to rest his head on his folded arms, inhaling deeply just to counteract a sudden rush of nausea. He couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Jeff Cairns to know so much and never be able to talk about it. If it had been Saul himself, he’d have cracked up long ago. And, if some of the personnel psych-eval reports he’d glanced through were anything to go by, a lot of people had done precisely that.
No wonder Narendra had been so eager to show him this footage. That hadn’t just been because he wanted Saul to explain it; he’d been unable to sustain the horror of knowing everything – on Earth, at any rate – was shortly coming to an end.
Saul stretched out on the bench and dozed for a few hours amidst the roar and whirr of machinery being assembled. He woke up to find that the last of the Dogs had departed, his UP flashing a message to inform him that he could now board a shuttle-car.
As he disembarked in the Lunar Array, twenty minutes later, he saw several hundred troopers in chameleon armour preparing to head the other way, their outlines blurring as they jostled like some nightmare assemblage of ghosts. Saul made his way directly to the Copernicus–Florida g ratetill trying to process all the information he had absorbed, not least the destruction of everything he had ever known.
He boarded an elevator and slumped back against cool steel, closing his eyes as it whisked him twenty floors up to the Florida ASI’s command centre. The air was full of a distant rumble, like static; the massed voices of however many millions of refugees that had by now arrived at the perimeter. He thought of the crowds he’d already passed through, and wondered with a chill how many of them had since died.
Stepping out into a wide corridor, he made his way straight over to a window and stared out, with appalled fascination, at a sea of human flesh pressing up against a security cordon that had clearly undergone heavy reinforcement since he’d last seen it. A blaze of red on the horizon heralded the coming dawn, and he could make out hundreds of bodies, scattered across a no man’s land separating the mob from a nearly unbroken phalanx of sonar tanks and illuminated by powerful arc lights. Black Dogs roamed this no man’s land, while armoured drones buzzed through the air like a swarm of mechanical locusts.
There must be at least two million . . . no, he decided, more like three million people gathered all around the Array. Maybe even more. The land itself had disappeared beneath their swarming mass.
He managed to pull himself away from this appalling sight and headed for his locker, pulling out a duffel bag already containing a change of clothes. He then headed for the gym and emptied the bag on to a bench. Something fell out and clattered on the tiles.
It was an inhaler, he realized. He picked it up and stared at it for a moment, then opened it up to find it was loaded with half a dozen cellophane-wrapped balls of loup-garou. He stared at the device with a peculiar hunger and licked his lips. He should throw it away – indeed, he wanted to – but some instinct made him shove it back in the bag, instead.
He took a shower, standing under a blast of hot water for a good twenty minutes until the heat had permeated through his skin and into his bones. He then put on a change of clothes, grabbed a coffee and sandwich and found a random workstation in the main operations room that registered his clearance as he approached, projecting custom pre-sets on to the dark panels on either side. He first checked his latest messages, all of them internal memos detailing personnel’s duties under the current crisis. Saul deleted them all in disgust.
Not for the first time, it occurred to him that there were very likely people working in the offices all around him who would not hesitate to have him killed simply because of what he now knew. And, if what Narendra had told him about his being trailed by an ASI team was true, it was conceivable that such an order had already been given.
He slunk lower in his chair, brooding, but looked up in time to see Donohue pass by.
A glass partition separated him from the corridor along which Donohue was striding, in an obvious hurry. If he’d so much as glanced to one side, he’d have noticed Saul staring back at him. But the Public Standards agent continued with brisk purpose, his gaze focused directly ahead.
Saul slipped out of his seat, intending to follow him, then paused as he remembered the inhaler still in his duffel-bag. He retrieved it before hurrying out into the corridor.
Trailing Donohue at a discreet distance, he watched as the man proceeded into an executive suite, leaving the door fractionally ajar.
Saul quietly stepped up to the door, with a quick glance back the way he’d come. The command centre was very nearly deserted, much more so than he had ever seen it. Only a very few individuals were either still working at their desks or conferring quietly behind semi-transparent partitions. Luckily none of them paid him any attention, as he peeked through the open door to see Donohue leaning over a desk, with his back to him, staring at information on a screen that only he could see.
Saul ducked away from the door, and made his way to another vacant workstation nearby. He waited there, one hand up to conceal the side of his head, leaning forward as if to concentrate on some piece of scrolling information. He was watching discreetly when Donohue emerged from the executive suite a few minutes later, hurrying back towards the elevators.
Saul followed him, rigid with tension, aware that stumbling across Donohue like this was sheer luck. He kept a discreet distance, hovering around a corner while Donohue boarded an elevator. As soon as its doors closed, Saul quickly boarded the one adjoining, punching the button for the basement car park. He couldn’t be sure that was where Donohue was heading, but the chances were pretty good.
Adrenalin chased away all the aches and pains that still plagued him as the elevator dropped, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the fatigue.
I need this
, he thought, fumbling for the inhaler. Just one more shot to give him a little bit of killer instinct. Maybe things had gone badly that time on Kepler, but the real mistake had been taking too much, too fast.
Just enough, and no more. That was all he needed.
He pressed the device against his lips, hitting the activator and inhaling deeply. He gasped as the loup-garou exploded into his lungs, reeling back against the wall of the elevator as the drug punched its way into his bloodstream and began racing towards his brain’s chemoreceptors. His fingers twitched slightly as he pushed the inhaler back into his pocket.
After the doors slid open, Saul stepped out into an enormous, dimly lit space that normally would be filled with maintenance trucks and Agency vehicles. Instead, more than a dozen battle-scarred Dogs, surrounded by yelling repair crews, dominated most of the available space, while nearly as many sonar tanks stood waiting next to an impromptu repair station. Half a dozen engineers were crowded around the display panel of an industrial robot that whirred and vibrated while applying the bright flame of a plasma torch to the treads of one tank.
Saul stared around wildly, desperate at the thought that he’d managed to lose Donohue.
There
! Saul recognized Donohue’s ID tag bobbing along past a cluster of troopers, almost unnoticeable amongst their varicoloured UP icons. He hurried past a pair of Black Dogs carrying sonar cannons on their backs, their batteries blaring noisily as the ear-muffled operators ran test checks across the ceiling.
He noticed Donohue was making his way towards a row of cars parked along one wall and hurried after him, closing the distance while casting a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure no one was looking their way.
Saul slammed into Donohue from behind, just as he was pulling the door of a car open. The man grunted under the force of the impact, which sent him flying forward across the driver’s seat. He recovered quickly, however, ramming his left elbow back into Saul’s ribs, while struggling to pull his gun from its shoulder holster.