Crashland (25 page)

On Deck 5, she clomped slowly to a halt, looking around for PK Drader. He wasn't there. No one was. Her sense of isolation increased, as did her sense of vulnerability. Had something happened to him? Was this an ambush?

“I see you,” he said over a new chat connecting the two of them.

Something moved to her right, matching a green dot on the seastead map. Another armored figure, carrying a stocky rifle across his chest. She raised her hand in greeting, hoping he couldn't see her slight tremor.

“Sorry,” he said as he came up beside her. “Got held up. You ready to do this?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Follow me.”

I can read a map
, she wanted to say, but she was content to let him take charge for the moment. It was good to have company, and she was still getting used to the armor. Only after she had reached the bottom of the ramp did she realize that the armor was assisting her movements: it wasn't a full-on power suit, but each step was slightly easier than it would have been on her own. It threw her off-balance while at the same time not letting her fall.

They went down two more levels and along Deck 3. Here the corridors were deserted, evacuated due to their proximity to the last of the spheres. Clair kept all her senses alert for any sign that an attack was imminent, and tried to ignore the fact that there were several pitched battles taking place elsewhere already. The floor lurched underfoot on more than one occasion. Sirens broadcast staccato warnings from far away, echoing through the empty spaces around her.

They jogged for ten minutes until PK Drader brought her to a halt.

“This is it,” he said in a hushed voice. “The sphere is right through that bulkhead.”

He pointed with one gloved hand upward and to his left, and Clair followed the gesture with her gaze, seeking but not finding anything in the metal wall to make it stand out from all the others surrounding her.

Clair doubted the transmitter would just be sitting in the corridor, exposed for all to see. It would be hidden, though not so well that it was impossible to find. It had to be powerful enough to punch through the bulkheads and reach the dupes outside. It was also likely to have its own internal power supply, otherwise RADICAL would notice an unexpected drain. It might just be tucked unnoticed in a darkened corner somewhere, ignored by everyone.

There were a few such corners near her, but they were empty.

“Let's look around,” she said. “See if we can find anything suspicious.”

“If we split up, we'll cover more ground.”

“Sure,” she said. That way if she did find anything that looked like it came from Q, she would have a chance to decide what to do about it without someone looking over her shoulder.

“Don't go too far, though,” he said. “Check in regularly.”

“All right. You too.”

He touched the tips of his gloved fingers to his helmet, telling her to close her visor, and kept heading along the corridor, looking through doorways as he went.

Clair turned and retraced their steps, doing the same. She kept her visor up, unwilling to shut herself off completely from the outside.

Each doorway led to stylish but empty apartments, all of them identical in dimensions, all of them unfurnished. If things got really bad, she assumed, there would be somewhere for members of RADICAL to live permanently, far away from the rest of the world. It was a depressing realization on two levels. The first was that people smart enough to have built such a thing might actually think it necessary one day. The second was that, having built themselves a safety net, the members of RADICAL were presumably prepared to use it, and to hell with everyone else.

She added that to the list of things she had to do: stop the RADICAL twins from abandoning the world to whatever fate they deemed too horrible for themselves.

Apartment after apartment, equally sleek and empty. No transmitters, and no explosives, either. Clair didn't know what the latter would look like—probably not a cartoon bomb with a hissing fuse sticking out of it. She kept an eye out for anything out of place.

“Why don't they have fabbers here?” she asked PK Drader over the chat connecting them.

“They do,” he said.

“Where? I don't see them anywhere.”

He slaved his senses to her suit's. “In the main room, left-hand corner opposite the door. There's a panel above the shelf. See it?”

She did.

“Push in and slide the panel back into the bulkhead.”

An exploratory nudge produced a click, and the panel moved under her fingertips. It slid aside, revealing a standard fabber door.

“Why hide them?”

“Don't fit with the aesthetics, I guess.”

She experimentally poked the fabber door. It looked like it opened the same way. “Have you found anything?”

“Nothing.”

“How long until . . .”

She stopped in midsentence. The fabber wasn't empty. But it didn't contain anything that looked like a transmitter, either. It was full of a white, gel-like substance wrapped tightly in plastic.

“Clair? What . . . oh no.” PK Drader's voice took on an anxious edge. “Clair, step away from the fabber. Don't touch a thing. Don't even close the door. Just get out of there now—and lower your damn faceplate.”

“What is it?” she said, backing away with both hands upraised. The suit sealed itself tight at her command, shutting out the room's lifeless air.

“One of the explosives we're looking for. You're lucky it wasn't booby-trapped.”

Adrenaline made her heart race. That was an explosive? How on earth did it get in there?

The answer, when it came to her, was so obvious she was not just angry at herself for not thinking of it earlier, but angry at everyone else on the seastead too.

“They didn't use d-mat to get the explosives onto the seastead,” she said, easing through the door. “They
fabbed
them.”

“We're getting this,” said Devin over the open chat. “Shutting power to all fabbers immediately.”

“But how did the data get in?” she asked. “There still has to be a transmitter somewhere.”

“Clair, heads up,” said Jesse. An image came from outside of a long, tapering snout poking out of the waves and a new kind of missile being fired toward the seastead. It looked like a dart, with a pointed tip and a cylindrical body that flared at the tail. “Coming your way.”

She was out in the hallway now, looking for PK Drader.

“Where are you?”

“Go on ahead,” he said. “I'll catch up.”

“What are you doing?”

“Checking fabbers. I've found three more explosive stashes. We need a disposal crew down here immediately.”

“On their way,” said Sargent. “Clair, you really need to move.”

Clair forced herself to do as she was told. She had achieved one of her goals and found the source of the explosions; there was no shame in beating a retreat now. It was PK Drader's choice to stay behind, surrounded by explosives and facing this new kind of attack—and typical of him to do so, she thought with grudging admiration. Presumably the dart had something to do with the discovery they had made. Could it pierce the hull even if the bombs had been defused? Were the dupes already changing their tactics?

As she ran, part of her wondered why the bombs hadn't gone off. That was what she would do in the dupes' shoes. The explosives had been found. Why waste them? And if killing Clair was one of their objectives . . .

“Missile changing course to follow you,” said Devin. “Clair, turn left —
now
.”

She did so, heading deeper into the seastead and exercising all the power of her armor to put as much distance between her and the outside as possible.

Red patches flared in her vision as all the explosives hidden in the seastead went off at once. The floor bucked beneath her, and she stumbled.

Walls and ceiling collapsed with the sound of metal screaming as the missile forced its way into the seastead, sending her flying. Clair felt a moment of terrifying weightlessness, heard Jesse calling her name, and then, for a long time, nothing.

SOMEONE WAS COUGHING.
It was Clair. Her lungs were full of smoke, making it impossible for her to hold a breath longer than a split second.

“Clair? Clair, you're back. Good. Can you hear me?”

A small face peered at her through the helmet's smashed visor. Her lenses were scrambled. She blinked and the face came into focus.

Cashile
.

Her head spun. Was she imagining this, or was it real?

“Clair, listen to me,” the Cashile said. “We don't have long.”

“What . . .” Her voice was too loud, made her pulse thud thickly in her ears. “Can't . . .”

“We need you to call him off.”

Her first thought was of the drones. “Who? Jesse?”

“I'm talking about Nobody. You know—the dupe we talked about on Ons Island?”

She wanted to touch her face. It felt like blood was running down her temple, into her eyebrows. But she couldn't move her hands. Her suit was immobile, like a statue.

“Let me go,” she croaked. “Please.”

“We will. Soon. We don't mean you any harm.”

“Is that why you kidnapped my mom?”

“We didn't do that.”

She laughed with a bitterness that surprised her. “Pull the other leg.”

“I'm serious,” the Cashile said. “We don't know who did that, just like we don't know who blew the barrage in Washington and fired on Valkyrie Station.”

“Wallace said . . .” She paused to swallow, tasting blood. “He said he would destroy my family.”

“We know. That was Wallace. Forget about him. He's not your problem now. It's Nobody. He's threatening to ruin everything. He won't listen to us anymore.”

She squinted up into the face of the child the dupes had killed in California. Did the dupes think she would believe them just because their lies came dressed as Cashile?

“Good cop, bad cop,” she said.

“This isn't a game, Clair. Don't misunderstand me. Nobody is
both
our problems now. Once he's killed you, we think he'll turn on us and then all bets are off. You think this skirmish is big? He's only warming up. In a week's time, he could be everywhere.”

“The Linwoods . . .”

“On the seastead? All him. And all for you. Does that make you feel special?”

It made her feel faintly ill. Every gruesome copy of Jesse's father contained the same disturbed mind, duplicated hundreds of times over. Could it really just be to intimidate her?

Did the Cashiles choose their form to have the exact opposite effect? If so, it wasn't working. The whole dupe thing was too weird, almost surreal, the way it began to strip all sense of recognition from faces she had come to know well. They became masks that hid unknowable things.

“How did you get in here?”

“There's always a back door. We don't need anything as crude as missiles and rockets. If we wanted to kill you, we would've done it already.”

The Cashile retreated and her suit came alive. She could move again.

“We're not the threat here, Clair. We're the messengers. If you don't believe me, watch what happens next. I told you we didn't have long, remember?”

Clair sat up suddenly, banging her helmet on a crumpled bulkhead that might once have been the ceiling. She was in a twisted space barely larger than a booth. The air was full of smoke. She could hear gunfire in the distance, coming closer.

The Cashile stood with four others by her feet, all dressed in sleek child-sized flak suits. They offered their hands and she let them pull her out of the tangle, into an area where she could stand. Her suit's plates ground against each other with a horrible sound. Her interfaces were still down.

Factions
, she thought. Dupes fighting dupes. Some trying to kill her, some not. Some loyal to Wallace, some pursuing their own agenda. Or were they all loyal to their creator, ultimately?

“We're supposed to tell you that this is your last chance,” said one of the Cashiles. “But let's be realistic. Come to us at any time, and we won't turn you away. A new age is coming no matter what. We're not the threat you think we are. In fact, we're your allies, if you'll let us be. Take a long, hard look at Nobody, and you'll see that compared to him we're actually on the same side.”

“How are we on the same side?”

“We both think the Consensus Court is wrong, for starters.”

He was talking about Zep and Libby. He had to be. Could she learn to live with dupes if it meant her friends could come back? She didn't even need to think about the answer.

“I'll never be on the same side as Ant Wallace—”

“Forget Wallace,” said another Cashile. “This isn't about him.”

“Of course it's about him. He's making this happen!”

“Don't give the man more credit than he deserves, Clair. He's a pawn—just like you were until you broke out of the box he tried to put you in.”

“So who does Wallace work for?” asked Clair. “You're just trying to confuse me.”

“If you're confused, Clair, it's only because you don't realize what a unique position you're in now,” said a third Cashile with a wide-eyed look that might have been admiration. “If you could only know what you know . . .”

The gunfire intensified, and all the Cashiles looked around with an eerily similar motion.

“This ends badly for us,” said the first one, “as it seems to every time we meet. But it's only a temporary setback. We'll see you again.”

“I strongly advise you to go that way,” said one of the others, pointing along a narrow seam that might once have been a corridor. “We'll hold him off as long as we can.”

Dozens of childlike figures crowded the seam in the opposite direction. Torchlight rippled along the walls, such as they were. Wild shadows danced.