Trident's Forge (41 page)

“From me? What secrets is he talking about, Max?” Barbara turned and stared the accusation into the side of my face, but I didn't dare take my eyes off the muzzle of Reggie's gun.

“Can we maybe table this conversation for now, dear?”

Reggie didn't have time for our domestic squabble. “I'd threaten Mrs. Benson, but for that to work, you'd have to be capable of loving someone more than yourself, and I just don't think you have that in you, Maximillian. I'll count down from five. Five.”

“I can give them to you, but they're coded for me and Barbara. They won't work for anyone else.”

“Four.”

“Use your head, Reggie.” I struggled to keep my voice even and under control, not to let the desperation I felt creep in. So long as he believed I was in control, it didn't matter who was holding the gun. “You won't get past the first checkpoint.”

“I know they're faked. So change them. Three.”

“Faked? What does he mean, faked?” Barbara broke in.

“Not now,” I said coldly before returning to Reggie. “The disks aren't fakes, Reggie. Our genome profiles were altered to get us through the screening process, but the disks are genuine. They have quantum guillotine encryption. If I so much as try to open the case without the right equipment, the entanglement breaks and they wipe themselves automatically. That's the point of the disks in the first place. They're physically impossible to tamper with.”

“Three…” Reggie's voice wavered as his eyes started to mist over.

“Besides, the cut-off for the project was forty-five. You and Mrs. Palmer couldn't possibly pass for that age. Not that you don't look lovely, Mrs. Palmer,” I hurried to add.

“Two.” Tears flowed freely down Reggie's checks now as his last, desperate plan fell apart before his eyes.

“C'mon, Reggie. You and Barbara are all the family I have left. If there had been any way, any way at all to save you and your wife, I would have. But I couldn't. If you do this, you're only going to be killing all four of us. There won't be anyone left to carry the legacy.”

He finally broke down. The gun sagged in his hand as Reggie threw his arm around his wife and started sobbing. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know what else to do.”

“It's okay, Reg.” I forced soothing tones into my voice, as if I was talking to a child. “I understand. You're scared, but it's going to be alright. Just, give me the gun and everything will be alright.”

Reggie looked down at the black pistol in his hand as though he'd already forgotten it was there. Still clutching his wife, he turned it around and held it out to me butt first.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Benson.”

I reached for the gun and slipped my hand into the grips. The plastic was still warm and slick with sweat. “I forgive you.”

I pulled the trigger.

The world exploded with noise as the overpressure echoed through the confines of the car's interior, deafening me instantly. Reggie's head snapped back from the bullet impact, then slumped against Mrs. Palmer's arm. Before she had time to scream, I put one in her head too. It was all over in less than a second.

It wasn't something I thought about, it just had to be done. I would have to drive the rest of the way. I turned around to get Barbara to help with the bodies, but she'd gone white as a sheet. Her eyes fixated on the gun, hypnotized by it.

“Barbara.” I reached out to touch her shoulder to try and snap her out of it, but she started screaming like a banshee and tried to crawl backwards up the seat. When that didn't work, she ripped at the door handle trying to get out, breaking two of her nails in the process. But the doors were locked.

“Get away from me!” she shouted loud enough that I could hear it over the ringing in my ears.

I put the gun down on the floor and held up my hands. “Barbara, stop. I'm not going to hurt you.”

“He gave up! He said he was sorry and you shot him!”

“I had to, honey. He didn't give me a choice. Now, we have to focus. We're running late already and we have to get to—”

“I'm not going anywhere with you. You're a killer!”

“Barbara!” I'd had enough, so I grabbed her shoulders and tried to shake some sense into the panicked little ingrate. “I didn't kill anyone. You see these two?” I pointed at the corpses hunched over in the front seats. “They're ghosts. They were already dead. Everyone who doesn't have a ticket is already dead. Like zombies, okay? Reggie figured it out, I don't know how, but he did. If I'd let him go, he might have told someone and we'd be caught and they wouldn't let us on. And in a couple of months, we'd be just as dead as the rest of the zombies.”

“You're a monster.”

“I can live with that, if it means we
live
. Now, we need to get the bodies out of the car so I can drive us the rest of the way. Will you help?”

“No.” She shook her head gravely. “I won't help you.”

“Fine, then just stay in the car.” I grabbed the gun, then unlocked the door and got out into the chill of pre-dawn. With my old college baseball arm, I pitched the gun into Old Tampa Bay. It took me three tries to get Reggie's legs out from the foot well and past the steering wheel, and another three hard jerks to get his body out of the car. He hadn't taken much time in the gym over the last ten years and it showed. His head, already hollowed out from the gunshot, hit the pavement with the sound of a dropped cantaloupe. I could see my breath in the air as I strained to drag the body to the side of the road. His wife's body was much more accommodating by comparison. She'd been that way in life, too.

The driver's compartment was coated in blood and… other unmentionable substances. I selected some cotton shirts from the trunk that had already fallen victim to the sniper's bullet to use as rags. A few minutes later the interior was as clean as it was going to get, so I threw the shirts in the water and rinsed the blood off my hands as best I could, but it left stains on the cuffs of my shirt.

By the time I sat down in the driver's seat, Barbara had already closed the privacy screen, which was fine. It took me a minute to find the “START” button, then another to figure out how to put the car in drive, but we were moving again before long. As I brought the hobbled Bentley up to speed, it occurred to me that I hadn't driven a car for myself in years, not since I wrecked that 458 Italia racing in the classics series. This would be the last time I drove anything.

“So you just left them on the side of the road for the seagulls?”

The question startled me, as if the accusatory voice had come from the sky. Then I realized it was just Barbara talking through the intercom.

“I forgot to pack a shovel.”

“You can joke right now? Don't you have any remorse at all?” With the immediate shock of the ambush, Reggie's betrayal, and my first double-homicide fading, her voice was drifting back towards normal.

“Maybe later I'll make time for it.”

“You didn't have to shoot them. You could have made them promise not to tell.”

“I'm sorry, you want me to trust our lives to a man who'd just pointed a gun at my head?”

“They weren't zombies, Max. They were living people. Your friends.”

“You think I don't know that?”

“Obviously not!”

“What's Mrs. Palmer's first name?”

“I…”

“C'mon, Barb. You don't know? It's Irene. They have two nieces, Jennifer and Iris, and a godson named Chad. They were like grandparents to me, and they just tried to kill both of us. So don't sit there pretending like they were more ‘real' to you, okay?”

“But, you didn't even hesitate. You just… killed them. They weren't even armed.”

“Think, Barbara! Use that poli-sci degree and think this through. Getting on that ship is all that matters. When that's done, then we can afford the privilege, the
luxury
of agonizing over what we had to do to get there.”

The intercom fell silent, the privacy screen an opaque wall between us. Maybe that was a good thing. It was helping Barbara compartmentalize, literally and figuratively.

“It's not like I feel good about it,” I said quietly.

“What
do
you feel?”

“Nothing. Resolve, if that's an emotion.”

“You said our genomes were altered. What did you mean?”

I took a deep breath, bracing myself for the plunge. I'd managed to keep the truth from her through the whole process. It was just easier to keep her in the dark. One fewer mouth to let it slip. But Reggie had screwed that up, damn him.

“I rigged the lottery to get our spots.”

“You
what
?”

“I paid people to purge our genome records of all the knockout disease markers, then bribed some key members of the selection committee. You didn't really think that we both just happened to make it through the selection process, did you? Do you know what the odds against that would have been? They're bottlenecking the human race from ten billion to fifty thousand people. We might be the only married couple to actually board the ship together.”

“Are you saying we didn't earn our spots? That I'm stealing a spot from someone who deserves it?”

I snorted. “Deserves it? Christ, Barbara, people talk about the selection process like it's the fucking Rapture. But it's not God bringing the faithful home, it's a bunch of dweebs in lab coats and tweed jackets picking through mankind like they're breeding horses. You, my dear, do you know why you don't
deserve
to survive?”

“Why?” she asked in a small voice.

“Because you have the genetic markers for Addison's disease. There's a less than five percent chance our children might be born with it.”

“Well that won't be a problem, because there's no way I'm having children with you.”

“It's not me, it's you. The risk will be there no matter who you're with. But you'll have that choice, thanks to me.”

“My fucking hero,” she said viciously. “Cheater of the system and killer of the elderly.”

“You can always get out of the car if your conscience can't take the strain. No really, I'll pull over right now.”

The intercom fell silent again.
That's what I thought
. I managed not to say it aloud.

Poor Barbara. She was a sheltered little girl who fancied herself an activist right up to the moment she might have to make real sacrifices. Maybe I was being too harsh, but since the black hole arrived in the Oort Cloud eighty years ago, the world had become a very harsh place indeed.

Some idiot had named it Nibiru, after a rouge planet some New Age conspiracy twit had predicted would destroy the Earth more than a hundred years ago in the early days of the internet. She'd been wrong about the type of object, the century, basically everything, but they still wanted to treat her like some kind of fucking prophet. Humans would endure any amount of self-delusion if it meant they could continue to believe that somebody was in control or knew what the hell was going on. Too bad the Ark committee hadn't selectively eliminated
that
stupid trait.

“It's not right.” Barbara rejoined the conversation. “What we're doing. It's not right.”

I noticed the pronoun usage, but didn't mention it. “No, what's not ‘right' is the way our family was treated since this whole thing started. Ninety-percent income tax to fund construction? ‘Renting' the lion's share of our elevator slots at a third of the going market rate, crippling our business. Then when father complained, the government just nationalized the whole company. That damned ship wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for the heavy-lift capacity they stole from us, and they couldn't cough up waivers for two spots onboard? That isn't right.”

“Ah, so you're just restoring some justice to the universe?”

“It's more than that.”

“Why were you rejected?”

“Hmm?”

“You told me why I was rejected. Why were you? What was your knockout marker?”

I squeezed the soft Napa leather of the steering wheel, the memory of reading the email still fresh. “My psych eval. The shrink said I ‘exhibited evidence of oppositional defiant disorder,' and ‘lacked empathy.'”

“Ah, so they said you don't respect authority. So to prove them wrong you went around and broke all their rules.” She actually laughed. “You sure showed them, honey.”

“No.” I clenched a fist and pounded the steering wheel. “That's not it at all. Don't you see? They're not just selecting for diseases, they're trying to reshape humanity to fit some arbitrary ideal. They think we're going to live in a crime-free fucking hippie commune in the sky where everyone's a vegan and holds hands around a damned drum circle. They're trying to select initiative and individuality right out of us. Like, I don't know, a herd of cattle.”

“You just executed two people you've known your entire life without batting an eye. ‘Lacks empathy' would seem to be the least of your problems. Can you honestly tell me rejecting you was bad idea?”

“Of course it's a bad idea! They're trying to pick the ‘right' people to build a whole new world. But they're using the wrong paradigm. They're picking artists and poets and grief counselors and yoga instructors, but they're entirely wrong for the job. Artists and poets are a
result
of civilization, a side-effect of stability and prosperity. They don't create it. You need explorers and entrepreneurs and leaders and soldiers. They stake out the land, they take the risks, they build the settlements and hunt the game. They make the hard calls that make the rest of it possible.”

“Now I see,” Barbara said, sarcasm dripping from every word. “You're not doing this to save your own skin. You're doing this for the betterment of the whole species. Who else can lead us poor little lambs but a big strong wolf? How philanthropic of you.”