Crashland (19 page)

“What is the point of this place?” she said. “They didn't build it just for today, did they?”

“It think it's a contingency,” he said. “That's what Hassannah called Valkyrie Station, remember? Maybe this is another one of those. There's enough space here for thousands and thousands of people. I get the impression it's kept ready for times like this.”

Preparations for global disaster would explain the energy levels of everyone she saw, Clair thought. Not just focused industry, but a bit of panic as well, hidden behind bluff and bluster in Trevin's case.

RADICAL was taking this
very
seriously, she realized then. Seriously enough to risk friction with the PKs. RADICAL wasn't a terrorist organization like WHOLE, but clearly it shared a similar disregard of the law when the law got in the way of what RADICAL thought was right.

Clair glanced over her shoulder and saw a large, armored figure trailing behind them. PK-blue armor, not RADICAL gray. It was Sargent, keeping an eye on them. Perhaps she was afraid Clair might run off with RADICAL given the chance.

“Devin said something about new clothes,” she said. “And I'm dying for a drink of water.”

“I'll take you there, if I can find the way. They gave us a double berth. I know that's a bit presumptuous, but I don't think we'll be here that long, and if we are we can always ask for something else. There's a fabber. One of the guys here showed me how to use it.”

Clair hid a smile at his awkwardness about the bed arrangement. It was sweet. “You won't eat the food but you'll wear the clothes?”

“As long as it's not going
in
me, I can live with it.”

She supposed that was progress.

“Uh . . . this way,” he said, peering across a metal antechamber that could have accommodated a small circus. “I read once how they sent the first permanent moonbase in one piece seven times, recycling it over and over until they got all the leaks out. But this is way bigger than that. Look.”

They had reached a railed landing where she could lean out and see forward and back along the side of the seastead. The massive vessel was lit with strings of navigation lights and bulged around the middle. She guessed it was a mile or two from end to end and maybe a quarter of a mile across. She had never seen anything so huge, and she could hardly believe it floated on water: no doubt Jesse could tell her how, if she asked. The dedicated powersat beam that kept the lights and mighty engines going was visible as a faint yellow stream, flickering through the atmosphere in a perfectly straight line from the south, touching down somewhere on the giant vessel's stern.

From far below she imagined she could hear the whisper of waves, but underfoot she felt not the slightest hint of motion, either forward or side to side. Perhaps she would be safe from the dupes here, for a while.

“Does it have a name?” she asked.

“Athene,” Jesse said. “Doesn't seem big enough, does it?”

She agreed. Small dogs had bigger names, which perhaps said more about the people who named such things than the things themselves.

“I used to call my bike Trigger,” Jesse said. “I wonder if it's still where I left it. . . .”

Clair had to think for a second to remember what he was talking about. Jesse had chained his bike up at school the day his father had confronted Gordon the Gorgon. It felt like that had happened a thousand years ago to an entirely different Clair. In several senses the latter was probably quite true. What Clair was she up to now—4.0?

The memory of school was equally distant. What would be happening if none of this had taken place? She would be hanging out with her friends, agonizing over Zep and other romantic entanglements, dodging homework and the Mean Girls a year above them—the same girls Libby had defended Clair from in the earliest days of their friendship.

Clair wondered if Q thought of
her
as the equivalent of a Mean Girl, for what she had done. That was a depressing thought. Equally depressing was the thought of where her other friends were now, thanks to her. Libby was almost certainly gone forever, unless Clair could find a way to bring her back. Ronnie and Tash didn't seem to notice her, perhaps because of some kind of filtering the seastead put on her access to the Air. Ronnie was pacing from one end of her house to another like a caged lion: she could have left anytime, but what was out there for her? Without d-mat she was cut off from everything she knew and cared about. Tash, meanwhile, was climbing up a steep massif, glimpsed only in snatches by the lenses of her fellow climbers. She wasn't talking or posting. She was just moving forward the only way possible for her.

Clair had to do the same.

“That bike's the last thing you have left,” she said, feeling a tug of sympathy for Jesse. “It had better still be there or . . .”

He laughed. “You can't fix
everything
, Clair. That way lies insanity.”

She blushed. “Sorry.”

“Besides, I'm not completely penniless. I own the patterns Dad created. It's not like I'm going to starve or anything.”

“No one starves anymore,” she said. “Except for you, when you're sticking to your principles. Or are you being metaphorical?”

“Abstainers do sometimes starve, if the weather turns bad, if crops fail, if there's no one nearby to help out. . . . It probably sounds utterly barbaric to you, but it does happen.”

“Please tell me you don't want to live like that,” she said.

“No . . . but I really don't want to put that fake stuff inside me either,” he said, looking at her in a way that made it very clear that his feelings about Devin's injuries hadn't been erased. “If I had to choose . . . I mean, if what Devin just did is . . . ah, hell. Just don't make me choose. That's all I ask.”

“Are you having second thoughts again?” she asked. It took more courage than expected. She didn't want this to be something they kept coming back to, even though they always seemed to.

“Hell no.”

His face came out from under his bangs, and she took the opportunity to kiss it, enjoying the increasingly familiar taste of his lips and the feel of his long body against hers. They were on a giant metal ship in the middle of an icy ocean, vast forces were gathering around them, but there was still time for this. For
them
. If she didn't have Jesse, she wondered how she would cope.

“Clair,” said a voice.

They pulled apart. It was Sargent, hurrying across the landing toward them. “Something's come up, Clair. Something important.”

It must have been important to make Sargent abandon the pretense of following her unnoticed.

“What is it?” Clair asked, feeling more than a twinge of alarm. “What's going on?”

“It's your mother,” said the PK, coming to a grim-faced halt in front of her. “She's been kidnapped.”

FIVE MINUTES LATER,
in a glass bubble Devin called the crow's nest at the top of the giant vessel, Clair barely managed to sit through the official debrief. It was hard to listen without interrupting constantly. She was angry at the PKs for letting it happen. She was angry at her mother, too, for putting herself in danger. She was most angry at herself, although it was hard to see what she could have done. Maybe if she hadn't given the dupes a chance to act, if she hadn't relaxed . . .

“Your mother was contacted by this person at five p.m. yesterday,” said Forest, sending her an image of a woman Clair had never seen before. The woman was dressed in a PK uniform. “She was advised that you would meet her outside the safe house at six p.m. and accompany her to a more secure location. At five forty-five p.m. your mother's escort was relieved and replaced by these people.” Two more images, also unfamiliar. “At five fifty p.m. your mother was removed from protective custody and taken to the rendezvous two blocks away.” Clair saw an image of an ordinary house. There was PK tape across the door, which chilled her. “By the time reinforcements arrived on the scene, she was gone. The people she went with have disappeared. All attempts to trace them have failed.”

Clair imagined PKs running from the other side of town, unable to d-mat like they normally would, and the image was almost comical—except it wasn't funny at all. Her mother was gone.

Jesse was watching her with white lips. At least he understood how she must be feeling.

“They must have been dupes,” she said in a voice that sounded horribly even and sensible—nothing like how she felt inside. Just when she thought she had escaped the dupes for a little while, back they came with something even more horrible. “Mom had no reason to think they weren't real, so she did everything they said.”

“She must have realized in the house, when they forced her into the booth, right?” Jesse looked worse than she felt, no doubt thinking of what had happened to his father. “Why didn't she call for help?”

“It's likely no one forced her to do anything,” said Sargent. “If her daughter was there . . . or someone who looked exactly like her daughter, at least . . . why
wouldn't
she go with them?”

Clair wanted to fold forward across the table and wrap her head in her hands. Only the thought of how it would look stopped her. Devin and Trevin were there, leaning against the glass wall on either side of the door like protective statues. She didn't want them to think her weak. But she
was
weak, wasn't she, if she had let her mother down this badly?

“We have heard nothing, no demands or threats,” said Forest, and for once she was grateful for his blank face. He wasn't patronizing her with something fake, something intended to be sympathetic or soothing. “I feel confident assuming that their demands haven't changed. If you tell them where Q is, your mother will be returned. Meanwhile, your mother's biometric data has been added to the list of known or suspected dupes. We have no recorded sightings yet.”

Clair nodded, not wanting to think too hard about
that
. Her mother the dupe. What if the next time Clair saw Allison Hill she was really an assassin?

Part of her was momentarily glad Q was still missing. She didn't like to wonder which way she would have chosen, had she been asked to choose between her mother and her friend. . . .

“Facial recognition,” Trevin said to Forest with a sneer. “Surely you can come up with something better than that to find the dupes.”

“What else do you suggest?” said Sargent. “It's very difficult to trace the dupes back to their source because they come and go at random. Drones are therefore our first line of defense. Once dupes are visually identified, deputies deal with them on the ground.”

“
Posses
, you mean,” said Devin. “How many innocent lives have been lost due to mistakes or vendettas?”

“Casualties are unavoidable,” said Forest. “While the vast majority of our forces remain immobilized—”

“As they seem likely to be forever.” Trevin's sneer was unwavering. Clair wished he would stop picking at the PKs and concentrate on finding a way to get her mother back, or at least finding Q so they would have more options. She was sure Q could find Allison in a second. “Are you ever going to get d-mat working again?”

“We've isolated the reason why the system won't reboot,” said Sargent. “The AI called Quiddity isn't alive after all. It's not functioning, not viable—
dead
, in other words. We're vetting former VIA technicians to jerry-rig a new overseer algorithm. We're also looking at ways to keep unauthorized users permanently out of the system—dupes and the general public alike.” She glared back at Trevin. “Be warned: this includes RADICAL. If we have to pull the power on you, we will.”

That surprised both twins.

“Shut off the powersats?” said Devin. “Are you serious? You know what that will do.”

“Yes,” she said in a tone that shocked Clair with its ferocity. “Everything will
really
stop then. No fabbers, no Air—all of it grinding to a dead halt. Next time you feel like complaining that life is tough, think about that first.”

Three meals
, Clair thought, staring at Sargent in disbelief. Turning off the powersats would be the end—not just of her mother but of everyone. That possibility jolted her out of her anxious self-recriminations. The dupes were striking at the very heart of her, yes, and it was time she struck back. But not like this. There had to be another way to destroy the dupes that didn't mean destroying the world with them. . . .

Forest's face
flicked
from one expression to another, as though trying out several to see which fit best. When it settled, it was one Clair had seen before, in New York: stern, with a hint of warning.

“Our imaginations are running away with us,” he said. “Let us instead ask what the dupes hope to achieve by kidnapping Clair's mother. What is it they want?”

“They might be trying to flush Clair back out into the open,” said Sargent. “The videos they sent obviously didn't coerce her and their approach on the island didn't convince her, so maybe now they're trying to force her.”

“Because of Q?” asked Jesse. “Do we really think she's still out there?”

“We've searched every byte of the Air,” said Devin, “every server, every line of code in existence. There's no sign of her.”

“We have searched too,” said Forest. “If she still lives, she is well hidden.”

“
Very
well hidden,” said Sargent.

“That doesn't mean she's dead, though,” said Clair.

“That's true,” said Devin, “in which case you're our only hope. And the dupes' only hope too.”

“I'm amazed,” said Trevin, “that anyone's still laboring under the illusion that Clair knows anything about anything.”

“I know
this
,” said Clair, stung by the sharpness of his dismissal. “I know we don't know where Mom is, or Wallace, or what the dupes really want. Maybe it is all about Q, but what will they do with her if they get her? Put Wallace back in power by making more and more of them until they take over the world? We have to find a way to stop them. If you want to sit here and argue about who knows what, that's just fine, but don't single me out, all right? You're just as much in the dark as I am.”