Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (33 page)

Chapter 33: Catcher’s Mitt

The realignment had cost Birgit and Rob nearly forty percent of their home’s mass, but the space-terminal turned spaceship had been designed for a hundred times as many people as it currently held anyway.

It had come to her as she looked for ways to slow themselves as they span outward from Earth into the blackness. Eternity in ever blacker space didn’t sound very pleasant, so Birgit had looked for a gravity net, another of the sun’s planetary sons and daughters to call home while she worked on solving the greatest scientific puzzles that humanity and the Mobiliei had ever known.

Or failing that, a place to wait until the war was over. After that they could either hope for a rescue or wait out the rest of their lives watching a victorious Mobiliei Armada inhabit their home world. Not a pleasant thought, really, so they tended to stay away from that topic.

There was some good news, though. As Birgit had searched for potential planets to slow them, the possibility of an additional benefit had reared its head, and Birgit had quickly become all but obsessed with the plan. But the truth was Birgit and Rob’s future together was like a dying tree, the vast majority of the branches of possibility ending in brittle, leafless twigs. But there were a few avenues that still held life. A few that might bear fruit, and the seeds of new hope.

And it was out onto one of those last branches of prospect they were now starting to shimmy. With several of Terminus’s labs jettisoned in a violent but calculated act of sacrifice, they had thrown themselves to one side, down and across, into a new and profoundly elliptical orbital plane. They could not hope to completely halt their flight from Earth by this method, but they could speed their passage to another island in the darkness.

And her plan had worked, or at least the first part of it had. And now, years after leaving home, they found themselves approaching a new world, or rather, falling across its path as they had hoped to do. They could certainly have hoped for more precision, but they wouldn’t get it. Precision was the product of planning, and no one had planned for them to be hurled out here, with only their wits and a seemingly random set of tools to craft their new destiny. They were interstellar MacGyvers, they often liked to joke.

“My calculations hold, mini-minnie, this will have to do,” said Birgit to the air, and the response came into her head as a voice. She had all but given up on mind-to-mind communication with her amalgam of Minnie, it only reminded her of this version’s limitations. Instead she spoke to it like she did to her friend Rob, with her voice, unenhanced and unembellished.

“Of course, Birgit,” replied mini-minnie, “but I have received back from my self on Earth a revised orbital path that may require less manipulation.”

Birgit stared out of a porthole. Far away, a disc was coming into focus. It was, as she had known it would be, a dusty red, like a plate of ground cinnamon, and it was growing fast now.

In Birgit’s mind a graph appeared showing their approach. It dealt in far greater margins of error than she would like, but they would have to deal with that once they got themselves stabilized.

For while they were set to enter orbit around Mars, that was not Birgit’s true target. Her plans were even more ambitious than just wanting to be the first human to visit another planet. The object she sought was much, much smaller, but, in its way, so much more accessible than the planet itself.

She sighed as mini-minnie questioned her calculations once more, then replied, “I am sure we can do it more efficiently, mini-minnie, and I am sure the real you has a better way to get into stable orbit, but that isn’t the end state here, is it?”

“You talking to yourself again?” came Rob’s voice as he slid in through the bulkhead from what was left of their living quarters.

“I am, it seems,” she said, as he slid up to her. She was, as always, keenly aware of his physical presence, as he was of hers, no doubt. It had been years since she had seen another human, and while there were days when she dreamt of butchering the man, if only so she could cook him in place of another dried protein satchel, she also had ever more vivid dreams of doing ever more elaborate sexual acts with him as well.

She forcibly set them aside as she always did. It was something he’d had to do as well, though he never said anything either, of course. Unwittingly, she had become the sole source of every one of his fantasies. They had a data link to Earth that rivaled many a wifi, barring the whole hour-long request response time, but he doubted whether it would be well received if he requested even the most innocuous of dirty pictures from their Earthbound contacts.

So he lived with and suppressed his desire for her, as she did hers. They would be together for God knows how long, maybe even for the rest of their lives. No place for such silliness as a relationship, especially given the fifteen-year age gap between them.

Damn it, she thought, frustrated, why am I thinking about this again?

And she focused once more: on work, on the calculation, on the calculated risk.

“You arguing over the orbit again?” he said, and she snorted a laugh.

“Yes. We are arguing over the orbit … again.”

The circular argument Birgit had been in over the past few months was a perfect demonstration of the difference between the copy of Minnie and the real thing. On the one hand, mini-minnie was not complex or deep enough to really care about the danger of what they were hoping to do next. But when the real Minnie heard about it, and calculated the precise chances of them pulling it off successfully, the real AM most certainly did.

And then, once the real Minnie convinced this one of the need to dissuade Birgit of the enterprise, mini-minnie was both too dogmatic to back down and too limited to have a real discourse on the topic.

“I know their objections …
her
objections. But …” said Birgit, trailing off.

“… but you don’t give a shit?” said Rob helpfully.

She laughed. “Yes, something like that.”

She was aware that she was gambling not only with her life, but with his as well. She had allowed him access to the data, both her interpretations and Minnie’s, and said he should vote on this, speak up if he wanted her to stop. But he could not understand Minnie’s objections any more than he could understand Birgit’s counter-arguments.

It was like a child trying to vote on which house his parents should buy, or which route they should take to school. Sure, it affected him too, it affected him very much. But that did not make him any less ignorant of the nature of this disagreement of geniuses, and so it didn’t make his vote anything more than honorary.

“Well, how about this?” said Rob, looking very serious all of a sudden. Birgit’s expression became one of skeptical curiosity, “How about mini-minnie stays here with me and you go on ahead. If the water is warm give us a shout and we’ll come and join you.”

She laughed.

“Sure,” she said, chuckling, “and if I find work I’ll send for you.”

He smiled broadly and with genuine affection. Their eyes stayed locked a moment too long. She turned away, but the nature of the systems she worked in did not give her a computer screen to stare at or a binder to read, so she closed her eyes instead, looking inward to her link to the station’s systems … to her calculations … to her plan to crash land the entire station into the moon called Phobos.

Chapter 34: The Ball Rolling

Madeline was waiting for Amadeu when he finished his class. Before accepting her meeting request, he validated that the request had come via standard channels, ready to initiate a certain protocol should it be required. But, he saw, it had come via the main system. He would not need his protocol today.

Amadeu:
‘good morning/afternoon/evening, whatever it is where you are.’

She laughed through the system.

Madeline:
‘hello, amadeu.’

Amadeu:
‘hello. yes, that’s so easy for you english-speakers. we don’t have that in portuguese. i tried using ciao for a while, but too many people think i am saying good-bye by mistake.’

Madeline:
‘so let’s come up with a new word. ¿how about ‘neal?’ we could say, ‘neal be with you.’ or ‘good-neal to you.’

Amadeu did not laugh. She took the hint and got on with the real reason for their conversation.

Madeline:
‘i just met with moira, like we discussed.’

Amadeu was curious. Her and Birgit’s work was bordering on madness, he felt sure of that, but then when he dipped his toes into any of the theoretical pools behind subspace technologies it all felt very cold and uninviting. This was not the stuff of science, as he understood it. This was too esoteric. It did not feel … safe. And this from a man whose life’s work was messing with people’s spines, dicking around with people’s brains.

But this, this was different, this was more unsettling even than Amadeu’s burgeoning science of the mind. This was messing with the fabric of space, of reality, and it specked of hubris that we should hope to circumvent the rules of the very universe and not risk breaking the game itself.

But it was, he feared, too great a prize to pass up. And in the end, they may well need success there in order to survive, if only because of his own ongoing failures to break the ‘limit’ by any appreciable margin.

But Madeline did not have the news he had hoped for.

Madeline:
‘moira is … skeptical.’

Amadeu:
‘¿skeptical?’

He did not stop his disappointment from bleeding through to her, and in turn saw that she shared it.

Madeline:
‘she does not say it is without hope, she just says … well, she says it is not something she sees a conclusion to. she insists that this does not mean birgit cannot do it. ¿but in the end, if moira cannot see a light at the end of the tunnel, even moira, can birgit be that much further along that tunnel than her?’

Amadeu:
‘don’t ask me, madeline. ask … neal. he’s the physicist.’

But Neal was not a physicist, not in the sense that Moira or Birgit were, not even close. And neither was he someone that they really wanted to invite into this conversation.

They said nothing for a moment, and then Amadeu did two things. He spoke and initiated the very protocol he had not thought he would need in this meeting. Madeline felt both happen at the same time.

Amadeu:
‘well, madeline, i appreciate the update anyway. thanks for coming by. i guess i should get back to the school.’

Madeline:
‘of course, amadeu. sorry for disturbing you. i wish i had better news, but there it is.’

Amadeu sent a mental nod and then the signal was cut.

The space around him went suddenly black as the system began unloading subsets and running looped mind-maps. He waited. It was working without him now. A little part of Minnie that she had sectioned off just for this purpose. Sectioned off and then abandoned, wiping the memory of her own actions from her very own mind.

The connection came back online now, muted and simplified. The most minimal version of a link possible. So thin and slight that it could be hidden in static, piggybacked on the trillions of other bytes of data swarming around in Minnie’s world-spanning network. Hidden even from Minnie herself, as she had designed it to be.

Madeline’s voice came back to him now as a whisper in the darkness.

“Are we clear?”

“We are, Madeline. Sorry, but I needed to hear it properly. I know we said we should talk as much as possible in the open, but …”

“No need to explain, Amadeu. I know what you mean. Trust me, I know what you mean.”

She did. It was not the first time she had felt spied upon in her life, and she did not relish living through it again. That she now had the help of friends as capable in this new world as Amadeu made it infinitely easier, no doubt about that. But that she was now hiding from her own, from the one who had been with her from the start, in India, all those years ago, that also made it so much harder, as well.

For now it was not the Mobiliei satellites, but Neal himself that they feared. Neal and Ayala. Always listening. Always watching. In their very heads, or so it felt.

“So,” said Amadeu, whispering in the blackness, “is it really a lost cause?”

“No,” replied Madeline. “Moira definitely didn’t say that. She just doesn’t see how it can be done. She still has the highest possible faith in Birgit, but, well, that is what worries me.”

“It does?”

“Yes, it does. Because if even Moira, with all her knowledge, with all her ability, and the breadth of her experience in the field, and more than that, with the amount she respects, even idolizes, Birgit, if even
she
doesn’t see how it can be done …”

Madeline let it hang out there for a second.

“Did you tell Neal this yet?” said Amadeu.

“Do I even have to tell him?”

They both laughed now, but without humor. They had seen too many examples of Neal knowing too much about their work, more than they’d had the chance to share with him yet. And besides that, Amadeu’s other contacts had given him more conclusive evidence of surveillance. They were being watched, Amadeu knew that. Maybe everyone was being watched, who knew, but he did know for certain that he and his direct contacts were.

Most notably the nexus of the group. The man who had started it all. The man whose tirades on the subject had become so vitriolic it had prompted Amadeu to create this very communications program, if only so he could have a place to tell the man to stop ranting, to save him from himself and stop drawing attention to something he was not alone in suspecting.

Madeline spoke again after a brief pause. “No, I haven’t told Neal yet. Though, interestingly, he does not seem nearly as married to this line of research as we all are.”

“You know, I sensed that too,” replied Amadeu. “You’d think, given the wall I have hit, that he would be more worried, that he would be pushing harder, both on Birgit and on me.”

“Still no more progress on your end either, then,” said Madeline, as conciliatorily as she could.

Amadeu did not flinch at the comment, so much as brace for the flinch he felt should come. It was a failure on his part, he knew that, but whether it was a failure to achieve his goal, or to accept the truth behind that failure, to accept the real cause of their inability to meaningfully exceed the Mobiliei pilot’s capabilities, that was something else.

“I am afraid we continue to see diminishing returns, yes. We broke though one wall only to find a taller one beyond, one that I cannot seem to find a way over. We will, I feel confident, be faster than the Mobiliei. But unless something changes, it will be by such a minuscule margin as to make it almost imperceptible.”

“And Neal knows this?”

“He does,” said Amadeu.

“And how did he take that?”

Amadeu thought about it.

“You know, it’s weird,” he said. “At the last Meeting of Representatives which I presented at, I am telling them my numbers, I am telling them the facts. I am trying to be positive, to be sure, but I am not sugarcoating it. Not by a long shot. We know the numbers of Skalms coming for us. We know the probabilities of damage from the coming missile-mine strike. We know what we will likely be facing once the real fighting begins. Given that, and the speed difference between our fleet and theirs at the point of closing, we knew what needed to be done on reaction times to give us a fighting chance.”

“Of course, Amadeu. To say that message has gotten through would be an understatement. So how did Neal react to news of your … ongoing struggles?”

Amadeu snorted. Ongoing struggles. But his discomfort with the greater topic at hand sobered him once more, and he replied, “Well, Neal nodded. He looked somber and he let the group throw some questions my way, I think it was that Uncovsky from Russia, and the Qatar representative, about me getting enough resources. Then … he just left it.”

Now that Madeline thought about it, she had seen the feed. All Representative Meetings were broadcast internationally, and even got a shockingly large viewership, for political meetings, anyway. But then they typically moved with an impressive speed and purpose compared to the lolling indecisiveness of ordinary governing body debates.

It was an unnatural speed, Madeline feared. A fear that had been the root of a brief conversation with Amadeu a year beforehand. A conversation that had seen her being brought to this black meeting place for the first time.

“So why isn’t Neal reacting more strongly?” said Madeline.

Amadeu did not know. Neal was not known for coyness. Neal was a reasonable enough man, sure, well, he had been back when they had started out, at least, but no one had ever accused him of being restrained, and certainly never gun-shy.

“I’ll reach out to him,” Madeline said. “He asked me to update him on this anyway. For now, stay focused on the school. No matter what happens with Birgit
or
Neal, your work is still at the center of everything. Your progress, as hard as I know it is, is the fulcrum on which this turns. Anything you need …”

He had heard it many times before. But he feared what he needed was a better raw material to work with. What he needed, he knew, was a cleaner subject.

Madeline knew there were others in the little conspiracy of theirs. She knew that Jim Hacker had recruited more once Amadeu had showed him how to communicate without Neal or Ayala being able to track it, once Amadeu had given Neal’s chief of staff the means he needed to start a candid discussion on safe terms.

But who they were and what they were doing, that Madeline was not fully privy to. She could not be. That was the nature of their conspiracy. A limited string of people, layer on layer of security.

Amadeu was, for the most part, just an enabler. And Madeline was right, he did have another, vital role to play, a day-job to return to.

“You’ll pass on to Jim what I’ve found out, and what I am going to do next?” said Madeline before leaving.

“I will,” Amadeu replied, and she was gone.