Transcendence (54 page)

But her mind drifted back to Triton, to the artifact, and then, as she and Pang stopped walking, to a single segment of a delicately balanced environment surrounded by unthinking forces of nature, hungry to devour the city and its inhabitants.

A small, familiar, shrunken-looking Asian man lay on a thin cot. The room held four such cots, each walled off from the next by a ceiling-high set of shelves; some held clothes, some equipment, some unfamiliar 3VRD-projection units, and others held various sentimental items from Earth. The room’s only light at the moment was provided by the small dome overhead letting in light from a pinpoint Sun. Miru’s head turned as Janus entered, and he smiled. When he sat up on his elbows, Janus saw that he was naked beneath the dull silver sheets.

“
I know you,” he said. “You are Janus. You will want to know how Lonny and Pehr are. I believe Lonny—you call him ‘Eyes’?—is dead. Pehr is fine, I’m sure.”

Eyes dead. She received that information with no emotion. Jack alive, but
. . .
“Where is he?”

“
I do not know, but we both exited the object together. If I had to guess—which is all I seem able to do now that we are not together—I would say he has gone back to Earth.”

Janus stepped back, bumping into someone who had followed her and Pang. She apologized.

“
He has been saying such things,” Pang said, apologetically.

Janus didn’t how to react. She couldn’t, and didn’t.
Later
, she would process this later, when she had more information.

“
Janus,” Miru said, “Pehr loves you, you know.”

This time, she wasn’t quite as shocked. She simply listened.

“
Soon,” Miru continued, “when I am stronger, we must find him. We must spread the word about this new learning tool. I will take Pang and you inside, and you can see Pehr in me. Yes, my dear Pang, I know how all this sounds. I feel crazy myself now, but everything seems so clear, as if I have been walking through my life with shackles on my mind and brain—they are different, I have learned, you see. It’s as if I’ve been asleep all my life, dreaming of being awake, but only able to see minute reflections of what it means to live. You will understand, you will understand soon.”

His eyes sparkled with insight and energy. Janus had no idea how to read him. She couldn’t simply dismiss him as insane, since he had been in the artifact, with Jack, and now he was out. So he must be speaking from experience, at least from subjective experience. But Janus had no capacity to understand any of this. She felt as if she would weep, as if she were the helpless little girl again.

“
Don’t cry, my dear,” Miru said. “In time, you will understand. We will return to the object in just a few more hours and—”

“
No,” Pang, in Japanese, said from beside Janus. He spoke more that Janus couldn’t translate.

“
Yuriko cannot know how strong one must be to enter the object,” Miru said, in English again. “I have been inside, so I will decide. I am still Project Hikosen Director. If you and Janus-san will accompany me, I do not fear.” He turned his attention back to Janus:

“
Will you accompany me to the object? I will need your strength, if you are willing to share.”

And that did it. That was what she needed to hear. Suddenly, she was no longer the most-alien among aliens on an alien world, she was a necessary team member. Miru needed her to find Jack. Though not yet ready to accept that Jack loved her, she could not deny that they had grown close during the show and especially before the crash. She found herself willing to do nearly anything for him. And for Miru—she felt doubly willing to help him; she realized with deadly certainty that she would sacrifice her very life to help him in reparation for what she had allowed to happen. If the missile had been fired only moments earlier, he would be dead now. The citizens of Triton would have killed her as she entered their city. . . .

That’s why Eyes sent me here
, she realized with a bitter sense of irony.
To be punished
.

“
I owe you my life,” she said. “I’ll do whatever is necessary. I would die to see the inside of the artifact.”

“
No need for that,” Miru said, seriously. “I have seen far too much death in the past minutes and decades.”

And he began to tell her his story of being in the artifact.

Hardman Nadir looked up at the purpling sky as sun set over the desert. A trace of smile crossed his face. It seemed to blot out the dull pain from where the Sotoi Guntai lieutenant had struck him on the jaw with an NKK plasma-pulse rifle stock.

“
Touch him again and I’ll kill you,” Paolo said. The boy leaned close to the enemy soldier. Nadir realized it was time to get up. He opened the EarthCo-to-NKK channel as he—carefully—rose.

“
Once again, I request to discuss forming an alliance with someone in command,” he said. He kept his voice as neutral and patient as he could manage. The pain helped. “Can anyone here speak English?”

“
You want to discuss terms?” a voice growled.

Nadir turned and saw a tall, gaunt Sotoi Guntai standing just behind him in pressed royal blue uniform that bore no insignia. He was a Black Chinese with purple-dyed hair and black eyes, dark skin. His narrow, lined face quivered with disgust. The man—presumably the Commander—spat on the sand between them. A hundred other blue uniforms surrounded the remains of Nadir’s unit: 16 men and women in ragged tan, most bleeding and all dazed. The 48 EarthCo Warriors who had marched with the Sotoi Guntai had wandered a few hundred meters out into the desert, where they were holding a private scream-fest between the Boss and his men.

“
We don’t discuss terms with criminals,” the commander said.

“
Did you get that transmission from—”

“
What was the meaning of showing us those orders?”

Nadir inhaled slowly to give himself time to think. “Did you look at them? Did you watch the feed-record?”

“
All absurd!”

Nadir felt hands shove him this way and that. Tensions were mounting.

“
Do you doubt the records? Do you doubt NKK’s involvement in the massacre, even as you march with three EarthCo units?”

A rifle butt slammed the back of Nadir’s neck and knocked him down once again. He rose to his elbows as Paolo punched the perpetrator in the face. Several scuffles broke out almost instantly, sand flying with curses, fists, and more deadly instruments. Nadir heard the muffled crunch as a bone broke; the injured man didn’t cry out.

“
Knock it off, boys!” he 3-verded as soon as he regained his senses. “Am I in command of raptheads or soldiers?”

“
Sorry, Boss,” one said. They quieted down, but not before several lay face-down in the sand with Niks on their backs. The Canadian boy was unconscious, a tiny line of blood flowing from his hairline to a spiny patch of brush beneath him.

“
I’m trying to have a discussion here, in case you boys didn’t notice!”

“
It won’t happen again,” someone commed him, audio-only. Paolo squatted, red-faced and silent, beside Nadir. His fists pressed white-knuckled against his abdomen.

“
You will give me access to your files,” the Sotoi Guntai with no insignia said. He started walking toward the fort-turned village without waiting for a response.

Nadir leaped to his feet and followed. Paolo stayed with his Boss.

“
Your people burned our server,” Nadir said. The other stopped and spoke without turning:

“
Yes, it seems so. And yours burned ours, all of them. That does not matter. I will access it manually.” He resumed walking, steady, head tilted slightly down.

Jhishra’s two guards stood to each side of the command truck. They seemed limp and distant. The number two looked as if he were about to go into shock. The Sotoi Guntai approached the vehicle and inspected the dead Boss.

“
I did that,” Paolo said. His voice was shaky.

That earned him a long, narrow-eyed stare from the Black Chinese. Paolo hurried on:

“
He threatened my subbs. He was crazy.”

“
I was sub-Boss just before,” Nadir explained. “Our unit Boss was implicated in the massacre. Paolo
. . .
had to. He did the right thing.”

Nadir felt his aiming-eye begin to twitch. In the hustling dark, two hundred marks—no, two hundred murdered civilians—seemed to rise up at the corners of his vision and dance a silent sway. Nadir realized his head was silent for the first time in months, perhaps years. It terrified and exhilarated him.

The enemy soldier ducked and entered the truck. Nadir shook his head when the guards seemed about to move. A few minutes passed. Behind Nadir, Paolo’s boots rasped against the sandy ground impatiently. Night insects began to sing as if this were any other desert night and atrocity had not occurred here today.

The Sotoi Guntai exited and stood on the packed earth a few steps from Nadir. He rubbed the back of his neck, staring out of the ruined and smoldering village at the ring of armored Mabalasik cars, at his deadly Tora tanks with their 50-kilometer-range accelerator guns, at his now-silent flock of whirlyjets painted a deep blue that seemed camouflaged in the early night. Two hundred men muttered and coughed, but Nadir didn’t pick up a single 3VRD though he was tuned to NKK and EarthCo BWs. Good discipline.

“
It seems an appropriate time to tell you that we perceived your
. . .
platoon as a force equal to ours while we attacked. Until the server went down.” The Sotoi Guntai seemed to prefer intheflesh speech but never looked at the person to whom he was speaking except just before or after.

Now he stared at Nadir for a moment, only his eyes visible in the dark, like sparks in a lump of ash. He looked away at the embers of what had been a hut.

“
You have not had time to counterfeit the battle records so thoroughly,” he said. “Tell me everything you know or suspect.”

Nadir drew a deep breath. As he did, he felt as if a fractured wad of rage rose from his chest into his throat.

“
I don’t know anything for sure,” he said, “except that our Boss has been lying to us for the four months of this operation. I suspect someone above him gave the orders and programmed our server to feed us virtuality
. . .
bullshit.” He cleared his throat to relieve the tightness building there.

“
I suspect the world has gone to hell, sir, and I plan to make things right, even if that only means stopping the lies now by uniting our forces. That’s why I came here in the first place, to do what I thought was right, and in doing so, to feel alive.”

The enemy soldier stared long at Nadir, his eyes sparkling red with the reflection of a fire behind Nadir. He looked at the stars visible overhead through smoke.

“
If you could do more to
. . .” the Commander paused, “to
make things right
. . .
what would you do?”

Nadir felt the muscles of his arms begin to flex and tremble.
A chance! Damn the world to hell, he’s giving us a chance to save our crashed souls
.

“
I’d fuck both EarthCo and NKK up the ass with a stick, sir, that’s what I’d do. And I’d ask you to help.”

Nadir squinted his eyes shut tight to block out the heaps of bodies around him—they had been invisible during twilight, but in the dull illumination of the fires their glossy skins shone like damp coal. Closing his eyes didn’t work; he could still see them. He relived the almost-realizations he had had so many times before: A child’s face flickering beneath the virtual mask of a man, naked skins almost visible beneath NKK soldier’s uniforms. . . .
How had I been so blind?

With his eyes closed, he suddenly saw, truly saw, the dead surrounding him—their eyes were open, huge and vacant, staring. Silent, staring, accusing. They were patient but demanding. He could not deny their demand for justice.

Nadir couldn’t help but shout:

“
Betrayal from above, man! Betrayal, from both sides!”

In the close desert night, his voice didn’t echo. The soldiers’ muttering ceased. The crackling of fire was the only sound, and insects, stupid naïve insects that didn’t realize something fundamental had just shifted in the human world.

The Sotoi Guntai commander cracked the silence:

“
Come. We will find other units. We need information. We will find the betrayers and deal with them as criminals.