Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (51 page)

Chapter 50: Dying Another Day

The long days were, in some ways, worse than the long nights, thought the prisoner. During summer, the time passed interminably and was filled only with the blustery wind and long walks through the penguin and seal colonies.

In winter, at least, the nights were punctuated by a brief twilight each day around noon, which, as it faded, revealed once more the great diorama above, vivid and beautiful. Neal stared up at it now, pulling back his visor for as long as he could stand, to take it in, unabashed, pure in all its infinite magnificence.

Then, as his eyes began to water and that tiny amount of moisture threatened to freeze on his lashes, he resealed his faceplate, blinking hard to clear his vision as the warmth enveloped his face once more.

He shook his head, closing his eyes within his suit’s helmet and checking his systems. His view, a view that had once encompassed a world, was reduced now to the base bodily functions his limited monitor allowed him access to. His suit, warm though it was, gave only enough augmentation to discount its own weight as he walked the width and breadth of the island each day.

It was, itself, part of his sentence. He could not take it off outside the confines of the prison block he now called home. Doing so would only bring hypothermia and quick death anyway, but that was the point. He was not allowed even that escape.

This was his punishment. This was his purgatory. Confined forever to a jail of his own construction down under the cold, dark underbelly of the world, far away from the sun’s life-giving gaze.

He decided he would not walk along the south coast today, the cliffs and buttes there held the great, howling seal colonies, predictably hostile as they barked at his lumbering form.

They had fascinated him for a while, during the first months of his incarceration, but now their willful coming and going and vibrant life only served to mock his own incapacitation. His pen, though wide and beautiful, was very clearly demarked. And it was, he knew, to be his prison for the rest of his life.

So he started the long walk back to the low, grey block where he ate, slept, and had what limited conversation was now available to him.

His only company now came from one of two people. One insane and the other, he had to admit, profoundly evil, a sociopath he had, in his hubris, given license to. He hoped, no, he expected to see one of those two people on his walk home, as he passed the Dome, or the nearest point he and his fellow inmates could get to it, anyway.

Sure enough, there she was, crouching across a low plateau as Neal cleared the western ridge and started down the slope. He breathed heavily into his suit, the hot air thick on his face. Its systems worked diligently to cleanse it of vapor and carbon dioxide, but made no attempt to aid his struggle, as it so easily could.

He trundled onward. Yes, he thought, there she was, as she so often was, constant even now, in this, perhaps the final stanza of her difficult life. She just sat there, staring at the lights and activity around the great Dome, as the latest in earth’s growing fleet of Skalms was wheeled from the golden egg that had birthed it into the cold night.

It was a night that the Skalm would soon light up and depart, soaring into the sky with a haste and speed that would rattle the entire island, lifting free a layer of regolith and desert snow from its mountains as its departing roar echoed out across the grey ocean that surrounded this lonely place. The dust would settle in places and be whipped up in others into eddies that would be matched by the distant cheers from an elated Dome crew celebrating yet another successful launch.

For the Skalm did not belong here. Almost the moment they came to life they had no further need for this drab and lifeless place. They could not be contained here, and nor should the woman Neal now stumbled toward, he knew that. Not that she hadn’t earned her place here, he had no doubt about that. At their trial, the litany of crimes she had committed, both in his name and of her own volition, had shocked him to his core.

But still, she was not meant for this. She had survived too much, accomplished too much, to be penned up here. She had been driven to fury by her grief, and now she had been driven to madness by this place, by her punishment, and by her lack of even the freedom to end it. She clearly longed to. That had been made all too plain by her many creative and often gruesome attempts at suicide. But, in the end, they had been futile, and now he came up on her as she sat on her haunches, leaning slightly into the stiff gale blowing across the island.

Her suit was black, like the rock of the plateau. Inside her helmet he could not tell if she was looking at the Dome or elsewhere. He assumed that she was probably mumbling gently, like she did in the night sometimes. She had been the toughest person he had ever met, and he knew it was not this island that had really broken her. It was the loss of Barrett, and her failure to fulfill the mission he had died fighting for.

And he knew it was also the shame, the shame at what that man would have thought of their actions if he had seen them brought to light. Neal had been thankful, at least, that Jennifer had not been at their trial to hear it. He was happy that he would be left with a memory of her still loving him, and still respecting him. He was sure neither was true anymore.

As he stepped up behind his old ally, one of his first friends in this long, lonely war, he placed a mechanical hand on her shoulder. Without the suit to protect him, he would not dare touch her. She had nearly killed him and their other companion at least twice, stopped only by a numbing pulse from her spinal interface, attached there now with a length of nanotube wire around their necks that served both as anchor and choking reminder.

But she did not react to his machine touch. She did not turn or speak to him through their suit comms. She hadn’t said a word to him in months now, well, not a pleasant one, anyway. He missed her, in truth. She had done horrendous things, he did not doubt that, but this … this was … well, he supposed, if he was honest with himself, this was all too appropriate, lex talionis.

He left her, sparing only a passing glance at the still Skalm across the bay, silent now for the last time in its spectacular life as it awaited ignition. How many was that now? Two a month for … two years? Longer? He called up the date. Thirty-two months. Jesus. Thirty-two months in this awful place.

Only sixteen months left till d-day. A day when he would watch, from here, as the world fought without him. Maybe even died without him. If they lost, at least he would be spared this interminable boredom. He banished that thought. He was angry, but not angry enough to wish for that end. Well, not today, anyway.

As he left the unresponsive Ayala, he marched onward, back to the cellblock, and thought of his last weeks in civilization. The hearing had been held in secret, and open to representatives and senior officials only, for obvious reasons. Afterward, after they had found him, Ayala, Saul, and seventy-three others guilty of war crimes, he had agreed to make a lengthy and public statement of resignation to allay public questions about his whereabouts in return for some measure of leniency.

Not for leniency for himself, and certainly not for Ayala, not after what the prosecution had brought to light, but for some of their subordinates who had been less culpable. As he stomped through the snow to the airlock, the thick metal door clunking open automatically as he approached, a part of him now regretted getting so many of them sentenced internment closer to family and friends, if only because of who that had left him with here at Deception Island.

There was the ever-friendly Ayala, homicidal and suicidal, and then there was Doctor-fucking-Moreau, thought Neal bitterly as he stepped through the inner-door to the small bunker’s lobby, and saw the doctor sitting there. The man smiled, and in that smile Neal saw the worst part of himself. For while the doctor was disturbingly without remorse when it came to the vivisection of hundreds of orphaned North Korean children, Neal knew it was he who had given the man the scalpel, he who had shipped the poor children to this dreadful place.

“Good evening, Neal,” said the doctor, smiling incongruously.

Neal paused, wanting to hit the man like he often dreamed of, but knowing he could not even do that, not here. Instead he replied, inanely, “Is it even evening, Doctor? I cannot tell anymore.”

They laughed without mirth as Neal stepped to a wall and let the suit unwrap itself from around his frail, pasty form. He did not say anything further to Dr. Ramamorthy as he stepped out of it, but simply turned and walked away to his cell.

As he closed the heavy door behind him, he felt a tiny ping within himself. It was a familiar sensation, yet one he had almost forgotten.

A message. He waited a moment, confused. He quite literally never received messages. It was part of his punishment. No communication from the outside. In truth, there were those that were allowed to contact him, including many of his old inner-circle, but those that were important enough to have the ability accordingly lacked the desire.

Now, though, in the grey coldness of his sparse cell, he sat back, and with a curiosity he had not felt in years, he opened the message.

The message contained only a set of images. The same thing captured at intervals over a period of weeks, no, months. Why had they sent him this? Who had sent him this?

He knew what it was immediately, that was painfully clear. He had stared at it a thousand times, watched it for ten years, first through the Hubble’s wide lens and then ever more acutely through others as it grew nearer.

Even now, he would often pick it out in his own sky, visible as it was now with the naked eye, brightening to rival the full moon. But here were more vivid images, close enough to almost discern detail in the cluster.

He stared at them, plastered across his inner-mind, filling his view, and took them in. Instantly he was back there, in his office in the heart of Milton SpacePort, watching and planning. These images were powerful, but they were still vague, still blinded by their own subject, whited out at the center by the power of the Armada’s engines.

But it was not so vague that Neal didn’t see something strange in the changes between them, an irregularity. He flicked back and forth, back and forth through the series. What was that? He started making notes and pulling up what limited resources he had been allowed to bring with him as his mind started to churn once more.

Chapter 51: Tight Space

Squeeze through. Damn it, woman, squeeeeeeze.

She held her breath, grunting and trying to pull herself through one last time. Shit, she thought a moment later, what if I get stuck here? She shuddered.

“Rob, it’s no good. Pull me back, I need out.”

It was his turn to heave and grunt as he wrapped his hands around her legs and pulled. She came loose with a resounding thud, popping backward in the minute gravity, and instantly they were both scrabbling for purchase to catch themselves before they span out across the main space.

“Grab that … shit … Birgit … get a grip …” Rob was already too far out, and so he resorted to barking self-evident orders at Birgit as she thrashed about trying to grasp something. Her hand closed around a length of piping, the third she had tried to grab hold of, but the first two had been too thick to wrap her fist around.

She did connect now, though, her fingers and thumb closing over each other as the strain came on. Rob was not so lucky, so as she brought herself back to the wall of piping she had been trying to squeeze through, she turned and watched as Rob tumbled away, trying to reorient himself so his feet would connect with the far wall of the big, black space rather than his head.

She laughed as he flogged around, without purchase, and said mockingly, “Grab it … shit … Rob … get a grip …”

He was almost there now. He would land on an exposed part of the outer shell, the thick, armor-plated carapace of the beast they had infested with their presence. He connected with the smooth surface with a thud that echoed across the space they had managed to lightly pressurize, and careened away again.

“Oh, for God’s sake …” he said as he was sent spinning off again, slower now, ridiculously slow, lazily turning over and over as he fell across a spotlight beam in the IST’s cavernous core.

They had managed to remove a significant amount of the IST’s guts, not disconnecting them, but disemboweling the big machine where possible and laying its innards outside the shell to leave room for them to explore further. They dared not disconnect anything fully, even when they were certain that the piece in question was vestigial, part only of the drive system, now defunct as the IST lay in the last home it would ever know.

Instead they had slowly and carefully, after painstaking analysis from outside the IST’s broad exoskeleton, removed systems through one of the three openings they had managed to find. The partial disembowelment had not, at times, been pretty, and indeed, the IST had been left looking a little like a punctured pumpkin, its innards spilled over the plain it had anchored itself into, but it had been essential to gain access to its inner-workings.

“I don’t suppose you are going to help me out here, huh?” Rob said, as he rotated indolently across the voided stomach of the IST.

“No, I don’t suppose I am going to, either,” laughed Birgit.

He withheld a series of creative epithets. He would get his revenge … eventually, once he stopped rolling. For now he suppressed a minor wave of nausea and settled in for the minute or so it would take him to cross the room.

“If we can’t get through there,” Rob said after a moment, getting back to business, “then I don’t see how we can get at the actuator core.”

She was brought back to the task at hand, and replied, “That is simply not an option, Rob. We
have
to get at it. Even if that means …” she trailed off.

“Another cut?”

“A cut, yes. I know we have done more damage than we had intended anyway, but if we reconstruct some of the outer supports we were forced to bisect earlier, then maybe we can support the central mass enough.”

It was a question rather than a statement. One that no one would answer for them, not even Minnie, the real one now, able to listen now in glorious real-time since they had hacked an ancillary comms system. It would be a gamble. Not as dangerous as the ones they had taken to get here, perhaps, but a bet whose downside could include the collapse of the internal orb, and the loss of access they had spent years getting.

They all thought about it a while longer, Minnie and Birgit bouncing comments back and forth inside Birgit’s head about how close they were, and what they now felt almost certain they could do if they could fully plug their systems, and Minnie’s long gestated algorithms, into the interstellar grade subspace tweeter at the heart of this beast.

Birgit was brought back to the moment by the ever-eloquent Rob, as his frustration at his slow, unaided passage across the space built, and he added helpfully, “You know, Birgit, my sweet, maybe you would be able to fit through there … you know, if your hips were a little less gargantuan …”

He had his back to her now, as he approached the other side, and was more surprised than he should have been when she careened into him. Over the last years they had slowly removed what they dared from the core, and had then sealed it up once more and attached the crew module to one of the larger openings. It had allowed them to pump a small amount of air into the space, just enough to delay suffocation should they damage their aging exo-suits while in the tighter spaces.

It was not much, to be sure, but it was more air than Rob had in his lungs after she bowled into him, laughing. He span, trying to grab hold of her as they now bounced around the space, scrapping as they went. While he focused on overpowering her, she focused on sabotage, and as he got his arms around her, she was pulling his hood and faceplate over his head, leaving him exposed to the cold and sparse air in the space.

He stopped fighting as the air departed him, but held on to her as they spun in place, between the walls once more, still moving, but without a great deal of specific momentum. Suddenly, demasked, he was so vulnerable, so pliant in her arms. He could beat her, of course he could. He was a trained astronaut with many years of military service before that. But he was hers now, in her grasp, and seeing him give in as he dragged in a long, unsatisfying breath, her hold changed as well. Still strong, still vital, but fueled by affection now instead of competition.

She took a long, deep drag inside her own mask and then pulled it aside and connected with him in a kiss, interlocking and pressing herself to him as she pushed a flow of thicker, lusher air into him. As they parted, she helped him replace his mask. Intertwined as they were, she could now feel the press of his desire for her, irrepressible even in his skinsuit. They had made love in here before, with urgency, like lovers in the snow, but they both knew that much more fun was to be had if they were back in the module proper.

Whether they were the first people to have sex in zero gravity they could not be certain. Birgit certainly hoped that someone over the years of shuttle missions and international space stations had taken the opportunity, and kudos to them if they had. But Birgit felt confident that over the last years she and Rob had elevated the art to something greater than any secretive hump in a corner of a spacelab.

“Watch out!” she called out, suddenly, as they came to ground once more, quickly writhing against, no, with each other, to protect their heads and other vulnerable parts.

Clasping a length of piping each, they wrangled their combined mass to a halt, and then he said, breathlessly, inches from her, “I don’t suppose you are going to agree to taking a quick break?”

She smiled wickedly and replied, “I have no need for a
quick
break,” and there was real mischief in her eyes. She opened her connection, routed now through the jury-rigged adjunct they had managed to port onto the peripheral systems of the IST. An adjunct that had satiated a long felt desire, and reopened Birgit’s link to Earth, and to her daughter.

Birgit:
‘minnie, you have the latest data. ¿can you take a look at further cuts for us and model them for probable failure rates? we are going to take a little break.’

Minnie:

Birgit:
‘no, no, minnie, you take your time.’

They smiled big, smug grins at each other. Birgit pressed her faceplate against Rob’s and pulled him to her, saying, “There, now you can have my undivided attention.”

“Undivided?” said Rob, as she pushed away from him toward the makeshift corridor back to their tiny living quarters.

She laughed through their comms, “Yes, Rob, every last inch of it.”

He leapt after her.