He stalked past the rows of oblivious faces, all lifted to the screen and ignoring the storm gathering above them. Ignoring the world. He hated their mindless indifference, the lure of
Sunrise’s
complaisant hypocrisy—all will be well, all
is
well, do not worry.
It was time to do what he had never dared do before; stand up to Tynan Camus. Stand up to the Elect and speak truth to the people. And if he was banished to the Badlands for his efforts or, worse, to
Acarsaid Dorch
, then so be it. He knew he could live within the Ark no longer. Not without Rhionna—not with the guilt he bore for her exile and death.
Sweeping into the
Sunrise
building, he pushed past the startled guards, torn away from their screens by his arrival. They dared not stop him, and were, he supposed, only too glad to return to their entertainment.
In the elevator, he closed his eyes so that he would not see the strip-screen above the door, but he could not block the players’ voices from his mind. While his daughter was dying outside, these players feigned tears over fictitious sorrows and the people of the Ark looked on in avid delight.
The doors slid open, and as he stepped out into the empty corridor of Floor Ten, his footsteps echoed, empty in an empty world.
It made him want to weep with regret and shame.
* * *
The studio was a large square room, big and scruffy with pieces of set piled up against one wall. Distinctly unglamorous. It was also deserted.
Hands resting on her weapon, Sam entered the room, Sorcha by her side. The old woman was peering around the studio, interested despite herself. “This is all?” she said, gazing up at the cardboard sets. “Even the homes in which they live are not real.”
“It’s called a set,” Sam said, scanning the corridor again. “TV is all fake.”
“Like the Ark,” Sorcha said, and her face creased into a smile for the first time since they’d left the Badlands. “Their whole world is a mere ‘set’.” She seemed to enjoy the new word. “They live isolated from the reality and distract their minds with another fictitious world built within the first.”
“Ironic,” Sam admitted, walking further into the room and stepping over a nest of trailing wires that led from a small glass-sided annex to the cluster of lights and cameras in the center of the floor. “Stay there,” she said, waving Sorcha back to the studio door. “I’m going to check out that annex. If someone comes, call me.”
Sorcha snorted, glancing irritably into the corridor. “If I am to play guardsman while you work, at least give me your weapon so I might defend myself.”
Sam’s fingers tightened around her gun, an involuntary reaction.
“Ah,” Sorcha said with a bitter smile. “You do not trust me.”
“It’s not that.” But it was, and they both knew it. The P90 felt heavy in Sam’s hands, a weight between them now.
Saying no more, Sorcha just looked at her with those hard eyes of hers. Judging.
With a sigh, Sam unclipped her weapon and handed it over. Thera would have disapproved, but she wasn’t Thera. She’d never been Thera. And trust, Daniel had proven again and again, usually paid dividends.
Sorcha took the weapon with a nod and listened intently as Sam explained how to fire. “Give me five minutes,” Sam said when she was done. “And don’t pull that trigger unless you’ve got no choice.”
“I will not,” Sorcha promised, turning back to the doorway and fixing her gaze on the hallway beyond.
Sam watched her for a moment, then headed across the studio and ducked into the annex. As she’d suspected, it was the studio’s equivalent of the SGC’s control room and a brief survey of the equipment was enough to show her that the plan was at least possible.
Sunrise
appeared to be recorded digitally—which made sense, given the Ark’s limited resources. It also meant that patching in Daniel’s camcorder was just a question of finding a way to interface with the Ark’s technology. Kinda like making a Mac talk to a PC—if Macs had been invented on Mars and PCs on Venus.
With a sigh she crouched behind the desk to get a closer look. A small monitor was showing the current episode as it played, simply streaming it from the local mainframe out to the screens in the city. Broadcast was really the wrong word. This was more like a wide area network, with all the terminals connected to a central server that—
“Samantha!”
Sam looked up, startled. Sorcha stood in the doorway to the annex and in her hand was the P90. It was pointed right at Sam.
“You should have listened to your instincts,” Sorcha said. “In the Badlands we learn to trust none but our kin.”
Jack kept
his gun leveled at Tynan Camus’s back while Rhionna led them up a narrow staircase toward the top of the wall that surrounded the Ark. Seeing it up close, he noted the curvature of the smooth gray stone and realized the thing was a built like a giant sea wall. He wasn’t prone to flights of fancy—he didn’t always enjoy the path his imagination chose, so he kept it on a tight leash—but it was impossible not to imagine the last days of this world; seas flooding through cities, and terrified people holing up in this final refuge while outside their civilization drowned.
Desperate times threw up all kinds of leaders—some good, most bad. Telling those last survivors that they were special, saved by divine purpose instead of by blind goddamn luck, must have been an easy sell for the predecessors of Tynan Camus. Desperate people believed anything that made sense out of their misery; they were easy to lead. Easy to deceive.
And the Elect had exploited that to the hilt. They’d lived like kings, while outside their world went to hell.
At the top of the staircase Rhionna stopped and waited. The wall opened out to a path about five meters wide, with the Ark’s dome rising up on the right and sweeping skyward toward the scudding thunderclouds. Rain streamed down its side in writhing torrents, so heavy Jack couldn’t make out where the Badlands had once sprawled. Or maybe, he thought with a sick drop in his gut, they just weren’t there anymore.
“How far’s the gate?” he asked as he herded Tynan up to the top of the wall. The man’s face was pasty, and he glanced out at the storm with unease. Maybe he didn’t like heights.
“There.” Rhionna pointed at a shoulder of steel that stuck up from the wall a couple hundred meters further along. Doubt clouded her face. “That’s the mechanism. It’s not been opened for over a hundred and eighty years, though.”
“Good job I packed some WD40.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending. Into the silence, Camus said, “Are you imbecilic enough to consider opening the gates, Colonel O’Neill?”
Jack fixed him with a look. “I’m imbecilic enough to do just about anything.”
“In the middle of this storm and with the seas rising?” Camus snorted. “You would destroy us all!”
“Guess you should have thought of that before you locked half your people out.”
Camus’s lip curled. “If you mean the creatures in the Badlands, then you are mistaken. It is the Lord who has set them Outside, where the light of the Sun might purge their sins. We cannot interfere with His will.”
“Well, as we like to say on Earth”—Jack prodded him into motion with the barrel of his gun—“bullshit.”
Camus stumbled forward a step, feet tangling in his heavy robe. He scowled at Jack, but kept walking and turned his attention to Rhionna instead. “Do you think the soldiers will obey you?” he asked. “Do you think they will open the gates at the command of a Seawolf whore?”
She glanced over her shoulder, jaw tight. “No,” she said. “Because you’re going to give the order.”
He laughed, a grating trill of derision. “And why would I do that?”
“Because,” Jack said, slowing as they reached the massive gate mechanism, “your flock down there are going to demand it.”
Camus stared at him. “This is madness indeed.” He jabbed a finger at the people sitting engrossed before the screen. “Do you honestly believe
they
will demand that I open the gates?”
“You might be surprised.”
Ice crept into Camus’s eyes. “What have you done?”
“Nothing.” Jack smiled. “Yet.”
“I will never open the gates!” shouted Camus. “I would rather die before I gave that order.”
“They are
people
!” Rhionna cried, with a look that reminded
Jack all too much of Daniel. “How can you just stand here and let them die out there?”
“Because the Lord decrees it.”
“Arrant nonsense!” Rhionna shot back. “You know it is. Don’t make the mistake of thinking me as empty-headed as
your followers. I have a mind of my own and I have used it. You
don’t believe the Lord has decreed it any more than I do.”
“Perhaps I don’t,” Camus conceded. “Nevertheless, the Ark was not made for them. It was made for us, and there is not enough room or food to house the Badland beggars.
That
is a fact.”
“Then we must all have less—an equal share.”
“An equal share?” He flung a hand toward the plaza. “Do you think they will agree to your equal share, Rhionna Channon?”
“They will when they see what the people in the Badlands have suffered.”
Camus laughed. “You are a naive fool, like your father. You think they will feel pity for these people? When they see them thronging before the gates, do you think they will feel pity, will wish to share their homes and food?” He glared at Jack. “You know what they will feel, O’Neill. You have seen it, I am sure.”
Saying nothing, Jack kept his face deliberately blank. But he knew, he knew exactly what Camus was talking about.
“Fear,” Tynan said. “They will feel fear and terror, and they will turn to me—to the Elect—to save them from the hordes outside the gates.” He laughed again. “This was your plan? You are a greater fool than I had imagined. Bringing the damned here only strengthens my hand!”
“You’re right, that was our plan,” Jack said with a shrug. “But not all of our plan.” He glanced at his watch and turned to look at the screen in the plaza below. “Watch this. Three, two, one…”
Nothing happened.
Sunrise
continued to play out its Technicolor melodrama uninterrupted.
“Impressive,” Tynan said. “Very impressive.”
Jack ignored him, glancing over at the vast
Sunrise
building with a knot of cold fear in the pit of his stomach.
Carter.
Something had gone wrong.
* * *
Hands raised, Sam stood up. “Sorcha, what are you doing?”
“I cannot allow you to do this.” The old woman took a step closer. “You are wasting our best hope of activating
Sciath Dé
.”
The P90 sat awkward in her hands, but it was lethal all the same. Sam cursed herself, glad the colonel wasn’t around to witness this profound gaffe. How could she have been so stupid? “Look, we don’t have time for this,” she said. “If we don’t get the gates open, they’ll all die out there. Faelan. My friends. They’re depending on us.”
On me.
“You will bring down the soldiers upon us before we can activate the shield,” Sorcha protested, edging further into the room. “And then more than the Badlands will be lost. All of Ierna will die.”
“But if we tell the people the truth,” Sam countered, “if we show them what life is like in the Badlands and beyond, then they’ll help us find the controls for the shield and—”
“Truth!” Sorcha spat. “Why should they care about truth while their bellies are full and their minds empty? The truth is before their eyes yet they remain blind!”
“They won’t be able to ignore this,” Sam said. “They’re not bad people, they’re just ignorant.”
With a derisive grunt, Sorcha advanced further into the room, forcing Sam to take a step back. Claw-like hands jerked the gun up a fraction. “Help me activate the shield, or I shall take the device you stole from
Acarsaid Dorch
and do it myself.”
“What about Faelan?” Sam pressed, looking for a weak spot. “Are you just going to let him die out there?”
“
Sciath Dé
is all that matters. More than his life, more than yours. Faelan would understand that.” The gun jerked again. “Give me the device.”
“No.” Rolling onto the balls of her feet, slow and subtle, Sam judged the distance she’d have to cross to reach Sorcha. A low tackle would do it. Chances were the old woman would never get a shot in. “If you want it, you’ll to have to come get it.”
Sorcha’s face hardened and her finger tensed on the trigger. Sam ducked to the right, diving for the scant shelter of the desk. Bullets spewed, and she felt a bright stripe of pain across her arm. She fell awkwardly, hit her left knee, rolled. From the corner of her eye she caught a flash of movement outside the annex window.
“I do not wish to harm you.” Sorcha’s voice was tight, uninflected. “Give me the device.”
On the floor, still covered by the desk, Sam shifted so her back was to the wall. She was dimly aware of the pain in her arm, and through the thunder of her heartbeat she realized two things; there was no way out, and the gunfire undoubtedly had alerted the Elect Guard. It would only be a matter of minutes before they were discovered.