Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (60 page)

Chapter 67: Numbers Up

Quavoce, now but a hushed echo of the Agent he had once been, stared at the sky through Minnie’s eyes while they waited. He was still without his real self’s memories even though he had given his, a poor trade, perhaps, but that had been his devil’s contract.

He did not care about that now, anyway. His real self was, he imagined, even now being taken apart, mentally at least. A likely end given that they had seen from the Armada’s fracturing that two sectors had clearly turned after the rejoining.

Good. He had done the right thing. But that would not be much consolation if she was lost. In his desperation to hear what had happened to Banu, he started to turn over scenarios in his mind. What, he asked, if he had betrayed the humans, bargained with his other self for Banu’s life, could he have protected her, could he have saved his daughter?

But he would not have been able to look her in the eye then anyway. She would never have forgiven him. The question now was would he forgive himself if she died.

This interminable light minute took an age to pass. The signal had gone cold. The subspace lanes were silent in the aftermath of the strike. But the image came through again, at last, a picture, a haze of space revealing itself after a million lightning bolts filled the heavens. As the sky’s retina recovered, the stars began to reappear, and among them a number of moving bodies resolved, vastly reduced now, the cataclysmic collision of wills having ripped so many of them to pieces.

Minnie, Mynd, Remy, and seven billion humans watched as the fog of war cleared, and now they started to track the remaining combatants, the last survivors of the battle for all of their lives. As the count came in, the result became clear. They had lost.

They had done much, Earth’s brave warriors, and as Quavoce collapsed inside, crawling into the depths of his mind to mourn, Remy started to disseminate the tally. Madeline, standing in a command suite on Rolas Island, looked away from the information, shunting it into a memory bank as she opened her eyes and looked around the room.

Everyone was silent. Others were, like her, checking out of the system.

“Fifty-seven,” said Jim Hacker, looking at the ground.

“Fifty-seven,” said Madeline, quietly nodding.

“It does not seem like much, does it?” said Peter, without humor.

Someone laughed, less than halfheartedly, and then they were silent a moment before Jim asked, “The fixed armaments on Hekaton and the moon? Will they …?”

But he already knew the answer, and if he had a doubt, the slow shake of Madeline’s head assuaged it, as she said, “We can fire our pop guns at them, but those guns were designed to fire on the fleet ships. Their fixed firing positions will be easily avoidable by a Skalm. We may get a few, if they are damaged, I guess.”

“And then?” said Peter.

She took a breath, then said, “And then, Mr. Secretariat, these fifty-seven Skalms will carve our remaining defenses to mulch as they approach, and then turn their guns on us. I can only speculate on what they will target in the eighteen minutes or so they will be in range of the planet itself, but one of these craft once took down a Chinese skyscraper in about three seconds, so …”

“Yes, Madeline,” said Jim, interrupting her, “I think we get the picture.”

She looked at him without apology, then her eyes drifted to Quavoce. He was unnaturally still.

“Lord Mantil?” she said, her heart aching for him, for all he had sacrificed.

“Lord Mantil?” she said again, walking over to the Agent.

“How long do we have?” said Peter, to anyone who could answer. He could look himself, he supposed, but he did not want to look at the data stream anymore.

As someone answered the Russian, Madeline stepped up to Quavoce and placed her hand on his shoulder. It did not give under her touch.

Leaning in and staring into his unresponsive eyes, she said, concerned now, “Quavoce, are you all right?”

She went to shake him gently and was surprised when he did not give, not even slightly. He was as hard as stone. So this is machine grief, she thought, pulling up a chair and sitting down next to him. She did not speak to him again. If he wanted be alone for the last minutes before the axe came down, then so be it.

One thing was certain. At the top of the incoming enemy ships’ target list would be this place, and ones like it, at the base of the world’s doomed elevators. With no one better to spend her last minutes with, Madeline leaned in close and put her arms around the former terrorist, in case he should wake, in case the man who had given more than she could grasp to their ill-fated enterprise should wish to talk to someone before the end came.

- - -

Rob was in tears. Not the still, icy unresponsiveness of a grieving father, but the wracked anguish of a man watching the woman he loved slowly die.

“Damn it, Birgit, let go!” he screamed, tears smeared across the inside of his faceplate as he clutched her now cold legs. They were crammed in now, but if she would just release her hold and allow him to pull her free he might be able to at least right her, to look into her eyes one more time before the structure finally cracked and caved in around them.

As the gravitational pressure had built, her heart had no longer been able to keep all of her upended body fed, so she had shut off circulation to the parts of her that she no longer needed, letting them start to die so she could finish what she had fought so hard to do.

It was destroying her that Rob was hurting so much, and she so wanted to comfort him, to touch his face and say that this was what she wanted, that if she must go, and if he must, that she would make it worthwhile. But she didn’t have that luxury.

She was doing this as much for him as anyone else. Or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was just out to prove something like she always had been. Maybe this was all just a last-ditch clutch, a mad attempt to control a universe that had slipped through her grasp, imposing its will on her as it sent her tiny, irrelevant form bouncing out into space.

And so she said no.

She was not a pawn in this war. She was not some statistic. She would make the world know her name again. She would leave her mark.

Minnie:
<¿can you feel it?>

Birgit:
‘it … is … close.’

Her mind swam downward, into the connection with the machine, wrestling with its hardcoded imperatives to quash its resistance to her will. As it kicked and writhed, trying to buck her, she grabbed at its encoded flesh, digging her nails in, and forced herself down on it, willing it into submission.

But this was not a battle of desire, it was a battle of belief. The machine was not resisting her because it sensed that it was being co-opted by the enemy. It knew no such distinction in this dark cavern. The machine was fighting her because she was trying to get it to do something it simply did not believe it could do.

And maybe it couldn’t, thought Birgit, but still she tried to drive the steed toward the edge, to make it jump into the abyss against its engineered instinct, to make it try and fly.

I don’t care what you do or do not think you can do, she screamed at the machine, you are … damn … well … going … to … try.

She felt Minnie’s presence at her side like a fellow wrangler, a shouted vote of support as she leapt into the saddle with her mother, injecting a part of herself into the machine and leaning her weight into the struggle.

Birgit:
‘just go, you bastard!’

Minnie:

Birgit/Minnie:
<‘NOW!’>

And with that they drove their heels into the IST’s flanks and willed it forward, up, and out with all their might, and their minds were suddenly in the swimming mist of a netherworld.

Were they falling?

Were they dead?

No, we are not.

Where are we?

I have seen this place before.

Yes, we have.

Where?

This is subspace.

Where?

Under. Wait. What is that? There, a beacon.

An ever-increasing circle washed over them, expanding as it vanished outward, but also never growing, never weakening. As they analyzed its paradoxical form, thinking of it brought them, instantly, to its source.

What is it?

As they studied the beating heart of the beacon, stepping into it, then through and around it, they recognized it.

It is the moon. That is the Lunar base subspace tweeter.

But we are with it.

We are. A smile. A shared happiness. They were out.

Can you speak to Earth?

We cannot. I am not whole, I am an echo, in your mind/in the machine.

So am I, I guess. Maybe this is all that is left of me.

I guess it is up to us then. It is. Let’s find them. Yes, let’s find them.

- - -

The fifty-seven saw the cosmic flak coming up at them from Earth and stepped aside with simple grace, dancing around it as it came. The beams, though powerful, were anchored, and with cold detachment the remaining pilots of the strike force added the source of this fire to the list of targets they were each compiling.

They had not heard from the carrier ship since the glancing. It was still there. They could see its big, ungainly form rolling lazily behind them. But it was silent. Something had upset its onboard systems just before the fight had finally closed, and it had stayed too long in reality.

A squadron of the enemy Skalm had seen their opportunity and taken it with a speed the remaining Mobiliei Skalm pilots were still reeling from. They had been good. Some had been truly awesome. But they had been too few to turn the key of critical mass and, once the final count had been tallied, the glancing had been the Mobiliei’s.

Now all that was left to them was the quick butchery they had come for. Their orders no longer spoke of saving the planet’s environment; environment be damned. They had paid a terrible price for worrying about the precious planet’s ecosystem. They would clean up what they had to clean up. Their mission now was to make sure there was nothing left to resist the colony ships when they came in to begin the cleansing proper.

As the minutes closed, all looked to be plain sailing now. The moons, each clearly housing a significant body of military and industrial might, would make a nice opener, and so the two sitting ducks were the first to feel the searing napalm of the strike force’s arrival as the fifty-seven lazed them.

For the moon it was an exercise in acne control as the bulk of the incoming force popped anything that even vaguely resembled a structure. For Hekaton, their attack was more straightforward. Five assigned Skalms directed all of their focused, aligned beams straight down the captured asteroid’s pole, releasing a long, concerted pulse before turning their guns on the closest elevator base. The light-speed beam lasted less time than it would take for it to reach its target and so pulsed outward.

From Earth, Guowei, still subsumed with Mynd, watched the nanosecond before impact as the beam lanced through Earth’s closest limb. The shaft struck straight at, and then through, the heart of the asteroid, expending a great deal of its energy in the process, but still leaving a little contingency to burst out the other side as the rock broke open. The split was not clean, though. This was a blow of shattering force, and while the kill would be glacially slow to fall to ground, its back was most certainly broken.

Emergency procedures were being enacted all over the planet. Bunkers were flooding with important personages and whatever duty officers had been lucky enough to be offered spots in the deep, hidden places.

Under mountains and oceans, shielded dugouts were lit and quickly populated. Their new inhabitants could not know if this claustrophobic home was to be theirs for weeks, years, or the rest of their lives. They only knew it was likely going to be better to be down here than up there as the strike force completed their drive-by assault.

With fresh craters now pocking the moon’s surface, the entire remaining Mobiliei fleet turned their eyes earthward and began checking off lists of targets based on various compared and contrasted criteria. Power signatures were a good clue. They may have once feared releasing fission fuels into the atmosphere, and certainly that was still far from desirable, but humanity’s many fusion cores, far more powerful and obvious to spectroscopic eyes, were like beacons. Their very natures were like great, emblazoned red targets on the planet’s surface, and once ruptured, their released energies only magnified the destruction suddenly blossoming across the planet.

It was not a fair fight, not anymore, but it was the only fight left these fifty-seven pilots before they were gone once more. If they did not put a stop to us now, blasting us back into the Stone Age, or just to the early stages of the information age they had found us in, then they would have no safe place to return to once they finally stopped their mad progress and came back here, a little over four years from now.

A so they fired at the fish in the barrel, and Earth’s great achievements began to crumble.