Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (24 page)

Cara looked at Hektor as their unusual orders came through, but he merely shrugged and looked back at their two wards.

“It appears,” said Cara aloud, “that you are to benefit very much from this little encounter, Minister.”

The man looked confused and far from convinced as Cara went on, “You are going to be offered the very best medical care available. The very best that we can offer, and believe me when I say that we can offer a great deal.”

“Medical care?” said the minister with a skepticism that was starting to turn manic.

“Yes,” said Cara, “medical care. You know, for your leg.”

“My leg?” said the minister. “But there is …”

Even as he said it he was regretting it. He fell backward in his attempt to get away from the woman suddenly running at him. Cara was precise, even restrained. But her kick, when it came, was low and extremely hard, even for her, even given her machine augmentation.

It did not break the minister’s ankle and foot so much as demolish them, splintering the bones into a thousand pieces. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men would not be able to save them. But Ayala’s could. And with that, a phone started to ring outside in the main reception area. It was deserted now, but Cara looked at the guard and said, “You should get that, Karl. It is for the minister.”

“And you,” she said in a gentle tone to the man clutching his foot and weeping, a hoarsely whispered scream echoing from somewhere deep within him, “now, now, Minister, don’t worry. The pain will pass soon. Well, this round of it. That will never heal, I am afraid. That foot will hurt for the rest of your life, even as it remains completely useless to you.”

She lowered her face to his, even as the guard, prompted by Hektor, answered the phone outside and patched it through to the one on the minister’s desk. “The phone call your guard is answering right now is from my boss. She wants to talk to you. We have to go now before the police get here, but she is going to tell you what you are going to do next. If you ever want to walk again, I strongly suggest you listen to her.”

She stood, her helmet closing over her head as she did so. The minister was crying now, sobbing, but she was right, the agony was subsiding, his body numbing somewhat to the geyser of pain bubbling up from his ankle.

Cara was already turning to leave, to go and meet the Slink even now descending on the roof of the building. It had not been as subtle an operation as they might have liked, but they did not sense any recrimination from Ayala. They guessed that this was probably not far from what she had planned once they had confirmed who the source was anyway.

But Hektor had one more thing to say as the guard gingerly handed the phone to a shell-shocked minister. “Herr Pahr, just so we are clear. We really can offer to heal you, make you actually better than new. But make no mistake, you should listen very carefully when our boss tells you what to do. Very carefully indeed. Or we will be back, and we will not be so gentle next time.”

And with that he closed his helmet and they were gone. The minister took the phone. He was pale. He felt like he might pass out. But he did not. The conversation was short, curt, and one way, but it would not be the last between him and the enigmatic woman on the other end of the line. Ayala did indeed have a proposition for him, and the alternative was not something he ever wanted to live through again.

Chapter 20: Newsworthy

Reporting live …

This is the view from …

If you are just joining us …

The world reacted to the news in waves. A story about a terrorist attack in Vienna three days beforehand, news that would once have filled the airwaves, was being washed away like writing in sand, wiped away by wave after wave of rolling, breaking news.

A billion cameras had photographed and recorded the arrival of Hekaton. Its first full orbit had been the subject of more conjecture and conversation than any previous event in history, but even that new moon was being eclipsed now.

A new story was taking center stage. The real story. One that Jim and his team were trying furiously to get ahead of. They’d had a precious few days’ warning. They had hoped for more, but Ayala’s contact had not been able to promise them more than that. For the minister had been a busy boy.

In the days to come, Ayala and Neal would contemplate very seriously going back on the deal they had offered the traitor. But he was their traitor now, bound to them by a bond even he would not understand at first. When he returned from the ‘clinic’ that had offered to help treat his leg, Rudolf would amaze his Austrian doctors with the abilities of his new prosthesis. But the price of that miraculous device was more than he could yet understand.

“It is coming through now …” said Jim. “… Jesus Christ.” They were looking at the photos coming out of Tehran. The photos that their friend the minister had sold the Iranian government before TASC had gotten to him. He had been told they would be used as leverage by the ayatollah for concessions from the West, but apparently the man did not intend to be so subtle.

They showed the flare in all its glory, the flare from a thousand engines, the engines of the coming Armada.

It was not conclusive evidence, but nor was it alone.

“We can’t stop this,” said Ayala.

“No, I know,” said Neal. “Even if we could discredit it, we would still be left with telling the truth later, at the expense of what little credibility we would have left.”

He shook his head at the sight. It was a picture he was familiar with; indeed he had seen better photographs and infrared images than these. And they were out of date. Not only by the ten years it had taken the light from these images to get here, but also by the months since these particular shots had been taken.

“They’re nearly ready for you,” said one of Jim’s assistants. She was not speaking to Neal, she was speaking to their appointed spokesperson. Wislawa was of Polish birth, but she was as international a citizen as one could find. Fluent in five languages, notably including Mandarin and Arabic, she had forgone a promising career as a politician and diplomat for her pursuit of a passion for poetry.

Now she had come back, called to the cause by an old friend in the Polish government who had joined Jim’s team in the first flush of TASC’s emergence as an independent state. Her command of language was peerless. Her demeanor during debate and argument was gentle and comforting, but she was quite capable of being scathing if crossed, and no one doubted that such a capacity would be vital as the truth finally came to light.

She would be as good a spokesperson as they could hope for in the coming weeks, even if Neal himself was a little afraid of her. She reminded him of Laurie West; an intellect not to be trifled with. His confidence in his team was bolstered when she was around, even as his own personal cool was more than a little ruffled by her piercing stare.

But even she was unnerved by the coming interview. She knew her mind and knew her topic. But to say that this interview would be replayed and analyzed like no other had been before was a gross understatement.

A man powdered her nose once more and a producer indicated for her to follow him. She breathed deep.

“You’ll do fine,” said Neal.

“You’ll do
great
!” said Jim.

She smiled and nodded. “Certainly. Great. Yes, that’s how I’ll do,” and she was gone, walking out into a studio bristling with cameras. They would start here. They would tell their story now. Depending on how well it went, they would adjust and tweak, and move on to the next. Jim had lined up other representatives in many nations to give similar interviews.

This first would be in English and would be for the BBC World Service. Al Jazeera would be next, also in English, but French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Italian interviewers were standing by for either a moment with Wislawa or another representative from Jim’s team, along with Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi-Urdu, Russian, Japanese, and Javanese language TV stations.

It was a plan they had been formulating for months. They had been training the team of ambassadors for all that time. Wislawa and her counterparts had already been put in place as TASC’s representatives to the world’s many governments for that time, and as such had explained this story to presidents, ministers, kings and queens, chancellors, chairmen, sultans, even an emperor, an emir, a taoiseach, two captains regent, and a pope.

Notably absent from the list, though not by choice, had been a grand ayatollah of Iran. Iran represented a massive state, and one whose scientists and scholars were among the best and brightest on Earth. But their place in TASC’s historic effort was far from representative of that prowess, not least of which because their leader had refused to meet with a representative of a Western nation since 1989.

“She
will
do great, you know,” said Jim, almost as an aside, their shared attention now on the screen in front of them.

The interview would be conducted in District One, and would be supplemented by a tour of the facility. They would look to overwhelm the viewer with evidence of their work to prepare for the coming Armada even as those viewers came to terms with the very news of the Armada itself.

But in the coming days they knew they would not be the only voice.

- - -

Sure enough, the ayatollah was quick to proclaim a very different story. He talked not of unification or collaboration, but instead of an effort by the organization known as TASC and its Western allies to collaborate with the coming alien force. He began to describe the Milton SpacePort and its siblings around the world not as defense outposts, but as receiving halls built by a Vichy United Nations.

And he would start to call for those halls to be torn down. It would not be out of malice that he would do this, nor out of ignorance. It would be out of a mistrust born of decades of abuses by mostly well-intentioned Western powers. And it would be a misinterpretation of very real intelligence he had come into, intelligence that described the participation of elusive alien contacts within TASC’s ranks.

His voice would not stand alone. It would become one of three rallying cries. The second would be Wislawa’s, her reasoned, articulate perspective, and that of her fellow representatives, winning no small amount of support around the world, especially as it would have the backing of many a government.

The third reaction-faction would be the most fractured and disjointed, but by far the largest. It would be characterized by a murky mixture of denial, defeatism, and disbelief. Many of the world’s religions would clamor that this was a sign from God, even the pope would have trouble giving his wholehearted blessing to TASC’s mission, despite promises to be ‘as reasonable as he could.’

Many among the world’s billions of confused souls would continue to flock to comforts such as religion and conspiracy theory, as they had in ever greater numbers since the world had started to rock with the first fight with the satellites, a phenomenon that was only now, it appeared, being fully explained.

Many more would call it the end of days, joining a growing cry that this was yet another sign of the apocalypse, as deserved as it was inevitable. And if a handle could not be gotten on the situation, Neal thought, their prophecy may well be self-fulfilling.

But despite it all, he thought, as the unprecedented news cycle entered only its second day, work must go on. His teams must be allowed to move forward.

Chapter 21: The Missing Link

“We are approaching attachment now, Susie,” said Captain Harkness, his voice excited, patronizing in all the right ways. “In a few more hours, Daddy will officially be home!”

Susie was as excited as her father was, but at seven years old, she still far from fully understood where her father had been for over a year, or where he was now, for that matter. Not that she couldn’t very clearly see where he was, like everyone from Moscow to New York. His craft, such as it was, was the most visible thing in the sky save only the sun. Her view, in fact, was among the best you could have. For she was almost directly under the great rock now maneuvering into position above Milton SpacePort.

“We are going to link up with the space elevator in just a while, and then I will be coming down to see you!” he said.

“But when will you be
here
?” said Susie, really trying to be positive, but still not getting why everyone was so excited. Mummy seemed very excited that Daddy was home, but then when she asked when he would be here
they all said in a few days. So … he wasn’t home then, was he?

At least now, though, she could speak to him and he could speak back, instead of that strange way she’d had to say long speeches into a camera and then she would get those strained responses back ages later.

Her mother had tried and tried to explain it to her, but the maths just didn’t add up. If Aunty Cis had been able to speak to them on the phone from Australia, then surely Dad could from wherever he was. After all, Australia was literally on the other side of the planet from their home in Malvern, how much farther away could Dad be than that?

He saw something in her give the way he had so many times before. She was resigning herself to the insanity of her parents, and with infinite patience she was just going to go with it. He smiled. He had to admire her patience, he supposed. One day in the future she may understand the importance of what he had been involved in, the stupendous nature of the mission he had been sent on. But not today.

“Well, as of right now, if you look straight up, through the big glass window above you, all the way up the big lines coming out of the top of the building Mummy has taken you to, you will see a very big rock.”

“Yes, Daddy. Hekaton. The ‘New Moon’ everyone is talking about.” She looked up once more. She knew what he was about to say. He was about to say he was on it. That he was
in
it. That he was actually steering it, like some big car.

“Well,” he said, “now look at this …” and suddenly the view on the screen in front of her changed. She could not see the port plugged into the back of his neck. Nor could she imagine yet what it allowed him to do. But now he showed her one of the many views it afforded him, from one of his many synthetic eyes. His eyes closed now that he was not on camera anymore, and he showed her the view of Terminus Station in front of him, and the cables disappearing down to Earth from its base.

“That is the top of those cables you can see. And here,” he said, changing the angle so that the Earth could be seen far below, and then zeroing in on a spec just viewable under the nook of West Africa, distinguishable as the end point of the lines vanishing down toward it, “is what you look like to me …” and then, on the spot of the SpacePort, he overlaid a photo his wife had sent of his daughter from her last birthday, a smear of strawberry icing across her face from a hastily devoured slice of cake.

“Daddy!” she shouted at the sight, laughing in spite of herself.

“So you see, my little strawberry-flavoured monster, I am still a ways off, but compared to how far I have been, you have to trust me when I say that it is just like I am pulling into the driveway.”

He brought the view back to his face and smiled. It was a smile she had missed. It was one of the two most important smiles in the world to her, and it filled her with a sense of peace and warmth. They continued chatting for a while longer but preparations were continuing apace, and while Captain Harkness could do a great deal via his link while talking to his daughter, he must focus all his attention on the coming linkage.

They were dealing with masses and momentums that stretched the capacity of reason, and while the entire process would be done in something close to slow motion, the ramifications of a miscalculation did not bear thinking about.

- - -

As one child’s eyes stared into a sky full of wonders, a whole group of others looked out on a simpler view, but one into which they, themselves, were getting ready to fly. Wednesday God looked at the cliff.

“This can’t be right,” he said to Friday God. “Surely this won’t work.”

“But … we
saw
Mother do it,” said Friday, as much to convince himself as to convince his friend. “And besides, she says it is safe.”

He glanced back at the woman standing behind them.

She had asked them to call her simply Mother. She said she was there to look after them, and indeed the weeks since they had come to live with her had been the best of their short lives. More food, more space, more freedom than they had ever known back at the orphanage. More than they had dared dream of. They had quickly come to trust her, trust her more, perhaps, than they had ever trusted anyone.

She had introduced the concept of games early on. First they were computer games on a small screen. They would have appeared antiquated to any child from the West, but to them it was the most powerful computer they had ever seen. The games had been of a theme. Descent, TIE Fighter, Wing Commander, lots of flying and lots of fighting. They had taken to them as any child would.

Now the games went to another level. Now the games became more real. They stood on a cliff side. Ahead of them the cliff face dropped off to the sea, not to a rocky base, but straight into a broad ocean. They had come here from the house. Mother had driven a group of them in a van. When they had arrived, they had each been assigned one of ten broad wings set up on the grass that ran along the cliff’s top. Mother had helped each strap in.

Mother had given each of them some brief instruction, and then Mother had demonstrated, stepping into the air like it was nothing, swooping away as they stared at her and then, a minute or two later, gliding back in to land in front of them, smiling as she always did.

Now she waited patiently, watching. Wednesday God glanced at his friend. Friday was staring intently at the cliff’s edge, breathing in long, slow rises. Wednesday didn’t feel right about all this, and he glanced at some of the others all lined up, facing the drop off.

“I’m not su …” said Wednesday, turning back to Friday, but as he spoke his friend was already running, driving his legs forward as the fragile-seeming wing frame lifted above him, already starting pulling upward.

“Wait! Friday!” Wednesday inadvertently glanced back at Mother as if to say ‘help him,’ but Mother only smiled proudly and nodded, her eyes flicking back to Friday as he came up to the edge and …

“Waahooooo!” screamed Friday as he leapt over and the updraft caught him. He was still falling, his glider angled downward as he began to accelerate away, but somehow he was also rising, the very air coming up to meet him.

And he was gone. He was flying.

Wednesday stared at his friend. He wasn’t sure what compelled him to do what he did next, but suddenly he was setting off as well. Suddenly he was building up speed and the glider seemed to be coming to life in his hands. Now, somehow, he was approaching the edge. He shouted more out of surprise than fear. What was he doing? Dear God, this wasn’t right, this wasn’t natural, but … but …

…!…

He was flying. The sensation was nothing short of heaven. An adrenal bliss that possessed him utterly, but bliss nonetheless. The wind was a vivid thing under and around him, a channel and a friend, an elusive hand brushing and lifting him while always keeping its presence felt on his face as he accelerated after his friend.

The wing was a tool, an extension. It was fragile and yet reliable, it could be predicted, as could the wind it harnessed. The updraft lifted them, and a part of Wednesday’s mind wondered at how easy it would be to land again. But it was only a small part of him. The last of his friends were still waiting and watching, but most of them were getting airborne, now, beginning to dart this way and that.

Could they collide? That seemed possible, likely even, and Wednesday doubted that would be a good thing. But now he saw Mother was taking to the skies once more, as well. Her wing was larger, her command of the wind more complete. She seemed to be able control her passage in ways Wednesday could not comprehend.

Suddenly she was up with him, smiling and even letting go with one hand to wave quickly. Her voice came to him now, over the rush of the wind, “Well done, Wednesday God! Well done! Try to follow me.” And she dipped her wing, angling downward and speeding away as she did so.

Wednesday dipped as she did, perhaps even a little too much, and the effect was breathtaking. He pulled back a little and the wing reacted. Such response. He had to be careful. He surged onward.

He did not notice one of his other friends, Sunday, lose control and veer too close to the cliff face. He did not notice as the boy’s wing bounced and cracked on the rock edifice and the boy began falling toward the water below. The scream did not reach Wednesday.

He was focused on Mother, and she was moving off to catch Friday, still pulling away, and still whooping with joy at the sheer madness and wonder of it all.

She moved with grace despite her greater size and weight, and Wednesday longed to emulate it, to follow her lead. He longed to match her ability and he watched her intently as they flew off. She was not flying directly for Friday, she was seeking and finding eddies, looking for lift, reading the way the air moved and playing the wind like an instrument.

He followed her, but soon found he had to go not where she had
been
, but where the air she had ridden was
now
. Sometimes he could go faster than her, but sometimes the whirl had passed when he got there. Friday was below them now. Wednesday was vaguely aware of that. Somehow they were both moving up on him and rising above him at the same time.

It was beautiful but it was hard, and she was getting farther and farther ahead. He was loosing the thread of her movement. Soon her passage was already gone when he got there. But no sooner had he lost her trail than suddenly she was dropping. He used that, pushing himself down with greater emphasis to gain speed. Closing on her as she circled down on Friday.

He had seen them at last and was trying to maintain his speed, but his altitude was all but gone now. He was almost at the tops of the waves. Wednesday became aware of the ocean now, and of the distance they had raced from the shore. He saw Mother come up on Friday. Saw her shouting to him, saw her try to help him regain his altitude. Wednesday was coming up on them now too.

But he had also sacrificed his height to catch them, and as he approached he realized he was too low. He would not reach them. There was the occasional lift as he passed over a large wave, but here, at the border of air and water, the air changed, became something wilder as it was pushed and pulled by its thicker, more viscous cousin below.

The crash came without warning. One moment he was above the crest, the next he was in the trough and then the wall of water was on him. His wing seemed to collapse under the weight of the water and for a moment he panicked that it would drag him under. But it came away with surprising ease and soon his head was above the swell again.

He had not swum much before coming to live with Mother, but enough that he could tread water. He could not see Mother or Friday. He could not even see the cliff. He could only see ocean and soon he became worried. The boat was not long coming though. It breached a crest a short distance from him and powered down toward him with skill. It came close but did not overwhelm him. His friend Sunday, who had hit the cliff earlier, was already onboard, as were two others.

He was helped aboard by a smiling but silent helmsman who then powered off once more. Wednesday looked for and found Mother still flying, but she was alone now, returning to the shore and the remaining children still flying there. They found Friday bobbing not far off, frustrated that he had failed, but still elated at the flight itself.

As the boat returned the boys to the shore, Mother flew back alone and spoke to the wind. She was closing on the last of the gliders.

“They are doing well, Commander. Some better than others, but they are taking to the air with as much confidence as we could have hoped.”

“Yes,” came a voice into her head. “Yes, Supervisor, they are. I think you were right to approach it this way. My way would have been … too aggressive.”

“Thank you, Commander,” she said. Her emotion was a strange one, she was proud of her choice, but she also knew it had been born of an exhaustive study of the data. Mother had looked at the training of the pilot named Banu. She had taken from that what she could emulate and removed what she could not.

These children were not Banu. In many ways their upbringing had been similar. In many ways it had been worse. Even their names had fallen victim to the regime, their forenames but days of the week or months of the year, or sometimes even just numbers, such was the affection the state had felt for them. But they were still expected to have love for a state that had relegated them to ignominy, and, as such, their surnames were but prostrations to a cruel leader, the one they knew as the Great One, or just as God.