Glass Sky (36 page)

“MANVINDER! MANVINDER!” MANVINDER jerked upright, blinking at the unexpected light in his bedroom. His grandmother stood in the doorway. All around him he could hear activity: voices in the neighboring apartment blocks; shouts on the street below.

“What’s going on?”

“You must leave Mumbai now.” His grandmother’s eyes were wide, like a cow caught in traffic. “Take your sister. Leave the city.”

Manvinder stumbled out of bed. “Why? What’s happening?” Grandma was getting older. She can be weird sometimes. But she’s never acted like this before. Should I call Mom? His parents were in London for three days, lecturing at some math conference.

Grandmother held out her omni. It showed a video, taken from many kilometers away, of three mushroom fireballs roiling above an unknown night sky. Her ancient hands trembled, and it was difficult to make out details on the small screen, but it looked as if there were skyscrapers silhouetted against the flames. Many skyscrapers.

“Pakistan,” said his grandmother grimly. “Our government hit them with nukes. Those damned idiots.”

A high undulating noise started up in the distance, a sound he’d heard only in movies. An airraid siren. His sister appeared in the doorway. At five, she was ten years younger than him. She clutched the astronaut doll that her uncle had given her on his last visit, before he went to the moon. “Granny? Manvinder? What’s happening?”

Manvinder grabbed his emergency backpack. “We’re leaving the city, Kari.” His parents had drilled it into him all summer, as the tensions with Pakistan had flared and subsided like his grandmother’s arthritis. “If you hear of nuclear strikes, don’t wait. Not for anything. Get as far out of Mumbai as you can. Don’t come home first. Do you understand?” They’d even showed him photos of Pakistan’s mobile missile platforms. “No matter what you hear on the news, a first strike won’t work.”

His sister looked around in confusion. “Are you coming too, Grandma?”

“Of course, dear.” Manvinder could hear the fear in her voice. “I’ll be coming after, so I don’t slow you down. Go with you brother.” She thrust him a handful of crumpled bills. “You’ll need this when the net goes down,” she hissed.

The volume on the streets was rising. Celebratory cries. The sounds of cars coming out of their nocturnal hiding places. Manvinder grabbed his sister’s hand, and with one quick glance back at his grandmother they hurried to the stairs. By the time they reached the ground floor, the stairwell was thronged with people. Manvinder picked up his sister, and together they plunged out into the night. The cheering of the crowds deafened them. All around, people poured out of buildings, waving banners, screaming in celebration. Got to find a car. But the transportation grid was paralyzed, the automated vehicles bogged down in the swamp of bodies filling the streets.

One of the stopped vehicles disgorged a young couple. They looked around, getting their bearings, then set off at a brisk jog, pushing through the crowds. They were also carrying backpacks, so Manvinder fell in behind them, struggling to keep up with the weight of his sister in his arms. Others traveled in the same direction. A father with an infant. A young man in cargo pants. Frightened people, a second current flowing through the first, grim faces pushing through the cheering mobs.

“Victory, victory!” A man emerged from the horde. Tried to shake Manvinder’s hand.

Kari squealed. “I’m scared. I want to go back to Grandma’s.” She squirmed, wriggling until he was forced to drop her. “I want Mom. Where are Mom and Dad?” Another siren started in the distance.

“Mom and Dad will meet us, Kari. At the rendezvous. Remember how we practiced? But we have to hurry.” Walls of apartments stretched to the sky around him, concrete fences trapping him in the city. How long will it take to walk to the edge of Mumbai? Hours? Days? Two military jets flashed low overhead, followed a half second later by a clap of sound. People pointed and cheered.

And then, suddenly, the mood changed. “Delhi’s just been hit,” somebody yelled. “They hit Delhi.” “The bastards nuked Delhi!” “Delhi!” The name bombarded him from all sides, repeating, growing louder. The flows changed, the revelers now a minority. Hands pushed him forward, crushing, lifting him off his feet.

“Manvinder!”

He snatched at his sister’s hand, but the surge of bodies tore them apart. “Kari!” he screamed. “Kari!” A forest of legs closed around her. He tried to fight back to where he’d lost her, but the push of flesh was unstoppable. No! No! “Kariiiii!”

He couldn’t even see the street corner any more. All the buildings looked the same, ominous against the night. “Kariiiii!”

The.

Universe.

Stopped.

White.

Flash.

A great sun lit the night. And then, with the roar of a thousand freight trains, every window shattered in a blast of flame.

Eeeeeeee.

Dazed, Manvinder pushed a dismembered torso off himself. All around, people staggered to their feet. A man stumbled in front of him, his face torn off, skeleton mouth open in a soundless scream. Silence. Only the buzzing in his ears. Manvinder tried to wipe the blood out of his eyes. Pain! He stared at the shards of glass jutting out of his hands. Two of his fingers were missing. A …woman? …man? stumbled in front of him, mouth moving like a fish.

Get out of the city. Find Kari. Meet my parents.

Thick ash started falling from the sky, burned humanity, falling like snow, filling his lungs. Manvinder lurched forward, trampling bodies.

Get out of the city. Find Kari. Meet my parents.

Get out of the city. Find Kari. Meet my parents.

***

“Jie, wake up!”

A moment of confusion. The clock read 4:15 AM. Sharon pounded the next door. “Sally, wake up! Rajit!”

“Lights.”

Jie yanked on the shirt he’d left folded on his chair and stumbled into the hive, scanning the ceiling and floor for water. The television was on, playing a news broadcast from Earth. Dog testicles. Is that a mushroom cloud?

He sank into the couch. Moments later Sally joined him, wrapping an arm around his shoulder, pulling in tight.

Rajit stood in his doorway, paralyzed. “Have they hit Mumbai?”

“…a surprise attack,” continued the reporter. “Only yesterday, rumors were swirling that UN Secretary General Khan Tengri had finally negotiated a truce around mutual support for Pax Gaia, UNBio Director Tania Black’s ambitious environmental plan.”

Sally got up and led Rajit to the couch. Sharon vanished into the kitchen, as if she could not yet decide on an appropriate response. Gradually, the videos and hastily uploaded photos emerging from Pakistan’s shattered communications links stitched themselves into a fragmented picture. All of Pakistan’s large cities and military bases had been hit by multiple warheads. Islam-abad, the government center and home to the foreign embassies, was flattened. Analysts already put the death toll at over 15 million, based on census totals from areas known to have been destroyed.

“Tea anybody?” asked Sharon. “I have some biscuits too, fresh from Earth, if you want a snack to go with the end of the world.”

Nobody was interested, but she handed out cups anyway, as if on some weird social autopilot. Jie sipped the steaming liquid, wincing at the lifeless brew. Sharon might be the better cook, but he had a thing or two to teach her about making tea. He added two scoops of sugar. Sweeten water enough, and you don’t even need tea bags.

An analyst in a red bowtie predicted that the fallout would remain trapped by the rocky walls of the Himalaya and Karakorum until it lost some of its venom. A second analyst argued with him, predicting that the radiation would travel north, over Kabul, Dushanbe, and Tashkent. A crippling plague on countries already blighted by poverty and bad government.

Radioactive dust clouds? Deaths in the tens of millions? For what? The earth Jie had left didn’t exist anymore. It had vanished forever, replaced by the menacing and dangerous place on the television.

Rajit sat forward as the coverage switched to India, his leg jittering up and down like a sewing machine. A reporter stood on a darkened Mumbai street, surrounded by thousands, tens of thousands of bodies, all in motion. “We’ve just heard a report that Delhi has been hit,” the reporter shouted over the noise. “People are desperate to get out of Mumbai. I’d be leaving too, but the streets are so full of pedestrians that the transportation grid has collapsed. We can only hope that Pakistan’s mobile weapons have…”

The image on the screen vanished. No flash. No burst of static. No camera tumbling down the street. The picture just winked out of existence, the reporter cut off mid word.

Rajit moaned. “No. No! My mother. My sister and her husband… Their kids… Kari is only five.” A view from further away showed a roiling mushroom cloud rising over a darkening city, swathes of lights blinking out in rapid cascades as the electrical systems unraveled.

Only seven of Pakistan’s mobile warheads survived India’s strike. India’s missile defenses shot down two. One failed to detonate and crashed into the crocodile exhibit at the Surat zoo, causing one of the more unlikely casualties of the war. But four warheads did get through. Ah-medabad, and Mumbai were hit once. Delhi twice. Four weapons, out of a total arsenal of nearly a hundred.

It was enough.

MOISTURE FOGGED THE Amsterdam restaurant’s windows; bicycle headlamps cut cones of light through the drizzle. It had been raining when Tania left London. It was still raining today, the Cape Town spring a distant dream, eclipsed by the nuclear catastrophe. Tania picked at her half-eaten curry. Indian food – bad idea. I feel like I’m at a funeral feast.

“You’re sure Tengri’s dead?” asked Ruth.

“You saw the pictures. Islamabad is destroyed.” Tania fought back tears. I talked to him two days ago. “I lost an old friend. And with nobody to handle the politics, Pax Gaia lost its last hope. Even a popular movement still needs governments to implement it.”

Ruth leaned in to Tania. Put an arm around her. “This was never going to be easy.”

“Easy? It’s less than two weeks to the UN Climate Summit. We don’t have a single government willing to publicly support us. At this rate, we won’t even have a sponsor to bring Pax Gaia to the General Assembly floor.” Tania’s eyes darted to the exit. I want to get out of here. Away from all this.

The longhaired man behind the counter was cutting squares off an LSD blotter for two giggling tourists. The outlines of pedestrians passed back and forth outside the window. Tens of millions dead, yet life goes on. Tania felt the world blurring beyond her eyes. “We’ve lost, Ruth. How are we going to get the attention of 8 billion people when the television’s showing bodies with their faces burned off? How do we compete against such horror?”

“This underscores the need for Pax Gaia,” said Ruth. “There are other nukes: Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Congo, Brazil, North Korea.” She squeezed Tania’s hand. “It’s not all bad news. I had two thousand environmental groups on my conference call yesterday. Two thousand. I’ve never seen the movement this united.”

“But it’s not enough,” said Tania. “These people were on our side before. We aren’t getting outside of our demographic, and I don’t know how to change that. I should never have agreed to be the face of Pax Gaia.”

“You inspire people.”

“Bullshit. I’m a liability. The politicians hate me. Witty doesn’t even think it’s worth putting me on his show. And the UN budget office just fired me.”

“You got fired?” asked Ruth. “When?”

“An hour ago. They did it by email. Didn’t even have the decency to call me.”

Ruth put down her fork midbite. “I thought you worked for Tengri.”

“Worked. Past tense. Tengri snuck me in on a technicality. And now I’ve been kicked out on one. Without a Secretary General, I report to the budget office. And somebody provided them with evidence of the kickback scheme I used to bootstrap Pax Gaia.”

“It had to be Juarez!” snarled Ruth. Her expression turned hopeful. “But that means she’s still worried.”

“She’s dancing on our graves, Ruth. I can’t even access the simulation data now.”

Ruth lowered her voice to a whisper and leaned over the butter chicken. “Witty’s investigators have made progress on the Ethiopian land deals. Maybe it’s time we struck back at her.”

Tania shivered, as if the rainy night had reached an invisible hand through the glass. “Do you have any idea what our life expectancy would be?” The red lights of a pleasure-doll store blinked across the street. Tania felt exposed, an easy target in the lit window, like an atheist in a lightning storm.

“We have to see this through to the end,” said Ruth. “We may not win, but millions of people believe in what we are doing. They’re standing on street corners. Knocking on doors. We owe them a fight at least. Isn’t that what you told Witty?”

Tania stirred her half-eaten curry. “Well, convincing them one auditorium at a time isn’t enough,” she said. “It’s time to go home. Talk to Witty. Plan a new strategy.”

Ruth nodded. “Wanna split a hash brownie first, and walk in the rain? See Amsterdam one last time before the dikes overflow?”

***

The armored knight wore his visor up, his face sweat-stained from battle.

“My shield,” he said. “It’s my most important defensive tool. Some days it’s all that stands between me and disaster.” The shield teetered in the bottom half of the frame. “I thought I knew how to use it. But Tania Black says it works better if somebody else holds it for me.” The camera panned back, and the knight wasn’t holding his shield at all. Two bearded dwarves held it, one on each side. They stumbled comically ahead of him, as he strutted up the hill, brandishing his sword.

Then a dragon dropped out of the sky and tore all four of his limbs off. The dwarves ran for cover.

“The shield. America helped build it. America should control it. This message is paid for by Mothers for American Sovereignty.”

“Is it just me?” asked Tania. “Or are in-flight ads getting worse?”

***

Witty’s mansion stood alone on an LA hilltop, a juxtaposition of concrete and glass cubes that mocked houses with mere million dollar views. The car dropped Tania and Ruth outside a high stone wall topped with security lasers. Ruth tapped her omni to open the gate, and they hurried through before the two government minders who’d tailed them from the airport had a chance to catch up.

“Sorry,” said Tania. “Private meeting.” Hope the sun roasts you out there.

A cobble-stone path wound past a tasteful mix of native cactuses and grasses to an enormous steel doorway. It opened as they approached, and a man in an old-fashioned butler suit appeared as if by magic. “Tania Black.” He handed a silver tray with a legal scroll laid out on it. “Thumbprint here.”

“What is this?”

“A standard sexual disclaimer for all female guests at the mansion,” said the butler. “A man in Mr. Witty’s position must be careful.”

Tania thumbprinted the bottom. “No problem. I have no intention of being a perk of his fame.”

The butler smirked. “Of course you don’t.” He ushered them to a gymnasium-sized living room and then vanished. Witty, in shorts and a T-shirt, sat at the enormous banquet table, going over some notes. Behind him a single, seamless sheet of glass looked onto a swimming pool, and then the city below.

“Tania, welcome to my not-so-humble house.” He rose, all gleaming smile. “Beer? Wine? Drugs? There’s a collection of bathing suits if you’d like to use the pool.” He winked. “Optional of course. Discouraged even.”

“I’d love an orange juice,” said Tania. “But as much as I’d like to hang out in your den of sin, I have to continue to Boulder this afternoon. They cancelled the lease on my UN-provided house and gave me a week before they toss out all my stuff. How petty is that?”

“Sounds like you were naughty, Tania.” Witty waggled a finger at her. “Kickbacks? Really? No wonder they fired you.”

“We had to start working on Pax Gaia,” said Tania. “I had no other source of funding. Nobody profited except that greedy bastard accountant.”

“And he profited twice,” said Witty. “He’s the main witness.” Witty shook his head. “This isn’t looking good. I’d hoped we might take advantage of the nuclear panic. All that fallout spilling into Central Asia. But now your integrity is an issue.”

“That’s what I told Ruth,” sighed Tania. “I’ve become a liability.”

The butler appeared with an orange juice and two beers, although Witty had given no visible order.

“What about the Ethiopia documents?” asked Ruth, taking a beer. “You said you found something. Can we use it?”

Witty waved, and two large men in suits stepped into the living room. How does he do that? Do they just stand in a corner and wait for him? The men moved with cat-like alertness, as if any moment might present an unexpected danger. Their eyes were invisible behind EyeSistants. They must shop at the same store as the supposed bodyguards Juarez has spying on us outside.

“Frank, Bruno. Meet Tania. Frank and Bruno are my investigators. Ex some government agency that doesn’t exist.”

“Dangerous little investigation you gave us,” said Frank. “Our first probe was from an internet access point in a coffee shop. Took only two hours for somebody to show up.”

“One hour, fifty-three minutes,” said Bruno.

“Poor Meaghan,” said Ruth. “She didn’t have a chance.”

“How do you investigate something this sensitive?” asked Tania.

“The same way you investigate a proximity mine,” grunted Bruno. “Very carefully.”

“We only use public terminals,” said Frank. “And we hire intermediaries so that the cameras don’t pick up our own faces. A homeless guy can drop a relay in a coffee shop. We also keep our omnis turned off so nobody can cross-reference location records with the relay drops.” He gave a respectful nod towards Ruth. “She gets it. But most people aren’t aware just how much information they leak.”

Bruno gestured, and the glass grew opaque behind them, darkening the room. A large screen on the far wall – which Tania had mistaken for a painting – transformed into a spreadsheet listing names and numbers. The President’s name was first on the list, followed by the Vice President and a number of prominent senators and congressmen. The second column showed numbers. Large numbers.

“Those are payments into the Terillium Holdings land fund,” said Bruno.

“That’s a lot of money,” said Tania. “And a lot of people. How did they keep something this big a secret?”

“Clearly they didn’t,” said Bruno. “We got this anonymously from someone who developed a conscience. There’s a profound difference between profiting by anticipating a disaster, and profiting by creating one. Whatever Juarez’s intentions once were, she’s crossed that line. Not everyone is comfortable joining her.”

“I don’t see any Chinese names,” said Ruth.

“Nobody ever knows what the Chinese are up to,” said Frank. “They’re so fucking mysterious. Used to drive all of us crazy.”

“China makes no difference,” said Witty. “We now have evidence that top officials in the US government have bet money on Tamed Earth. Pax Gaia will bankrupt them if it goes through. You’re lucky you’re still alive, Tania.”

“Can we put this on your show?” asked Tania, already knowing the answer.

“Absolutely not,” said Witty. “There’s too much noise from the war. Juarez will claim the document is forged, and the story will sink.”

“Then we’re still fucked,” said Ruth.

“I’m sorry, Ruth. As I’ve said, I’m not going to throw my fame away for nothing. If you had something more – something to get back the world’s attention – then maybe I could help.”

“But we don’t,” said Tania. “And if we did find something – those guards outside…”

Frank pointed a finger at her. “Yes. Bang.”

Ruth feigned a look of indignation. “One bang, Frank? Really? Surely I’ve earned a bullet, too.”