Steal Across the Sky (34 page)

“I’m fine.”

“Oh, yes, of course you are.
Cara
, who are you shooting at?”

She didn’t answer.

“Because I am not going to let you have the gun when we find James. I want you to know this now.”

She swung around to face him, so fast the barrel of the Beretta pointed right at his chest. Lucca paled, reached out, and turned it away. He said, “And that is why.”

“What is why? You know I wouldn’t shoot you!”

“No, not intentionally. But in your present state of training and your present state of mind—”

“You don’t know anything about my state of mind.”

“Ah, Soledad, you are not that stupid.”

It stopped her, if only because he seldom used her name, merely the meaningless
cara
.

He went on, “You must remember, I lost my Gianna, as you have lost James.”

Fury rose in her. She pushed it down, because if one emotion broke through, they all might. Her voice stayed low as she said, “It’s not the same. Don’t pretend it is. Gianna didn’t choose to leave you, didn’t . . . Lucca, if you’re not going to let me carry the gun, then why are you teaching me to use it?”

“You wanted to learn. And here we are with little to do . . . 
Cara
, I ask you again, who are you shooting at? Not those helpless tins.”

She said evenly, “I’m shooting at Atoners.”

An unseen bird began to sing, an operatic outpouring of loud song, joyous and insistent. Lucca said, “The bird is in that bush to your right . . . no, closer to the cabin . . . yes, there. Kill it.”

Soledad stared at him.

“You heard me. Fire at the bird.”

“No.”

“Then what makes you think you could shoot an Atoner? Assuming, of course, we ever meet up with one, which I doubt will happen.” He watched her intently.

“That bird never fucked over the human race. Never promised something and failed to deliver. Never used people, never worked underhandedly to—”

“To do what,
cara
? We still don’t know what the Atoners are doing with James. It may be an action for good.”

“You don’t believe that, Lucca. Don’t try to goad me. You’re the one who’s distrusted them since we got back from Kular . . . and you were right. Is that what you want me to say—to admit that you were right? Okay, you were. We don’t understand those alien minds, we don’t know if the Atoner message is true or not, we can’t trust them.” She heard her own voice: dead calm on the surface, and only on the surface. “Why did they give James a personal shield? Why did they use him to spy on you and me? God knows I’d have talked to them directly. We all would have, except maybe you, and so would the governments of every country on Earth.”

She opened the pistol and slid out the bullet clip. He opened his mouth to say something, but Soledad wasn’t finished.

“And when I said that I was ‘shooting at Atoners,’ it was metaphorical. There’s a difference between desire and action, you know.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Stop it, Lucca. I only wanted the gun to make sure nobody stops me from getting to James. The gun is just a threat.”

“Which you will wave about like some third-rate robber in the mall branch of a bank, thinking that it will make the manager open the vault? You must know that when we find James—if we find James—your government will already be there.”

The bird stopped singing. A chipmunk ran across the clearing, something
in its mouth. Soledad saw Diane Lovett saying,
Lucca’s good, but we’re the United States government, for God’s sake!
“So?”

“So they may or may not stop you from approaching James. Yes, if they wish him to stay undisturbed. No, if they don’t want to blow their own cover, or if they wish to hear what you two say to each other. But they certainly will not let you shoot him. And I will not let you carry the gun. You were right—Italians do not approve of personal firearms.”

“Are you going to carry it?”

“Yes.”

“Hypocrite.”

“Innocent.”

“Lucca, don’t think you can try to—” The handheld shrilled.

It lay at their feet on the new grass, a splotch of dark metal against the raw green. Soledad’s head jerked to look down at the screen. She didn’t recognize the number. Carl Lewis, calling from a pay phone somewhere?

No. Lucca answered and conducted a long conversation in Italian. When it finished, he said, “My people found James.”

Her throat closed. She managed, “But Carl—”

“I never believed that your cut-rate journalist could find him.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

Lucca gazed at her. His eyes, a paler blue than James’s, seemed to reflect all light back at her. “There are many things unsaid here, Soledad.”

What could she answer to that? But it didn’t matter; only one thing mattered. “Where is James?”

“In Brooklyn.”

At first it staggered her, and then it made sense. James had disappeared after clubbing a federal agent with a fist hardened by an Atoner shield, and the Agency would have instantly watched planes, trains, and buses out of New York. And Brooklyn had changed radically in the last decade. The blacks had moved, or been moved, out of the disastrous projects. Gentrification had taken hold and then, abruptly, had failed. In the ever-changing lottery of New York boroughs, Brooklyn had reverted to what it had been a hundred years ago: the first stop for hordes of immigrants, this time most of them illegal. Brooklyn was a warren of shifting streets, alleys, lanes made of temporary structures among the crumbling permanent buildings. Some areas were nothing more than
rubble; some flourished in a dozen languages; some reflected a desperate attempt to re-create the old country in the inhospitable new. There were no reliable maps of this new Brooklyn. Landlords had given up on at least half the buildings. Police did not like to go there, and so local vigilante groups flourished. Anyone could disappear into Brooklyn.

Including an Atoner?

Soledad said, “Call your chopper and let’s go.”

AS THE HELICOPTER LIFTED
, Aldo shouted something over his shoulder to Lucca. Lucca turned to Soledad. “Cam and Frank Olenik are on the moon.”

She nodded. A sudden memory took her: Cam at the start of the voyage to Kular, looking impossibly beautiful and very young, although in fact she was only two years younger than Soledad. Cam had glowed with anticipation:
This is going to be so wonderful! We’re going to the stars!
Soledad had watched Lucca raise his head to stare at her, his personal gloom reluctantly dispelled by her excited joy.

What did Cam feel now about the Atoners? Why had she returned to the moon?

The chopper approached New York. Soledad could just make out the blue of water on the horizon, blending with the blue sky. Lucca had said that of course his chopper would be tracked the second it lifted off in Toronto and that the Agency would guess where he and Soledad were headed.
They may or may not stop you from approaching James
.

Now she could see Manhattan below her: the levees holding out the ocean at the south part of the island, the skyscrapers in midtown, the half-constructed dome over Central Park. Other choppers, mostly one-person copterettes, flew low below them, an orchestrated ballet that nonetheless scared her far more than the flight in an alien ship through interstellar space, and what kind of sense did that make? But the Atoner ship to the stars seemed a long time ago.

On her lap lay James’s sweater, neatly folded now, stained and smelling of too many wearings.

Aldo shouted something to Lucca, who shouted at Soledad, “We’re cleared to land at the helioport in Park Slope. That’s a good sign. And
something else—Cam struck a woman in Selene City. Some sort of argument, and apparently Cam just went crazy.”

“But I will not,” Soledad said, reassuring him, reminding herself.

The chopper began its descent.

If you didn’t know these answers, don’t come out from your melting cave at Point Barrow and rejoin the world—you’re too ignorant to survive out here.

THE ROVER LEFT SELENE CITY
at 9:00
A.M.
EST the day after Cam attacked Dr. Frantz. Frank watched Cam, but this morning she seemed calm enough. He was surprised to find that he was the one feeling twitchy. Well, maybe not so surprised. It wasn’t every day you got to set human history back on the right course.

The instant he thought this, he rejected it. He wasn’t affecting history here; God was merely using him to carry out His work. Once Frank had that firmly in mind, he felt better and went back to surreptitiously checking Cam for any signs of blowing the whole scene. Although in one way, he didn’t blame her for wildcatting Dr. Frantz. The woman was a clueless snob. Weren’t scientists supposed to need evidence to come to conclusions? Dr. Frantz had called seeing the dead “a pack of wish-fulfillment lies,” but she had no eyewitness evidence. She hadn’t been on Susban. Frank had.

And there was another reason he didn’t blame Cam as much as he once would have. Seeing her launch herself at that awful woman, watching her sob afterward, Frank had come to a realization: She was a child. That’s how Darla might have behaved, if their parents hadn’t raised her with better manners. Cam O’Kane, rich and “successful” and famous, was basically just a scared and scarred child. It didn’t make him like her any better, but it did give him some perspective.
Suffer the little children to come unto me
, Christ had said, and so Frank felt bound to accept Cam in all her childish unpredictability, like it or not.

“How you feeling?” he said to her as they took their seats inside the rover.

“Great,” she said shortly, “just great.”

Terry Siekert, the Farrington Tours group leader who was also their driver, grimaced and started the engine.

The rover looked like a round-cornered rectangular box on tractor treads with a smaller box, the air lock, protruding out one side. Windows of clear, tough triple plastic allowed direct views out the front and side, augmented with a small display screen of images from the cameras mounted on the roof. The back half of the cramped space was all storage, life-support systems, and a chemical toilet in a closet small as a coffin. Terry sat in a seat up front, and two padded benches lined the sides, a short one beside the air-lock door and a longer one opposite. A table could be lowered between them from the ceiling. Frank sat on the short bench, opposite Cam and Jane.

“Here we go,” said Jane, with cheerful pointlessness. Cam and Frank exchanged glances.

High contrasts of light and shadow meant they drove in and out of sunlight. Earth hung in the black sky and the stars shone high and cold. Frank twisted to see out the window behind him. Rocks, dust, the arid landscape of lifelessness. An appropriate setting for the Atoners; Christ’s holy covenant was not here.

Terry said, “Shackleton Crater, which we’re driving by right now, lies entirely within the South Pole–Aitken Basin, which is the largest known impact crater not only on the moon, but in the whole solar system. The Basin was named for the things that lie on either side of it: the lunar South Pole and the Aitken crater. The Basin is unique because—”

Terry rambled on about crustal thickness maps and geochemical signatures. He sounded much more cheerful now that they were away from Selene City. Out here, nobody except Farrington Tours could record anything Cam O’Kane might explode into. Jane, that sweet-natured soul, wouldn’t set Cam off. Frank was presumably her friend. Terry would be rid of all of them by tomorrow, and what could happen before then?