Authors: Gary Gibson
“There’s something about Draeger actually saving our lives that makes me feel ill,” muttered Veliz. “He doesn’t even try to deny he’s manipulating us to get
his own way.”
“We don’t have long now before we go up,” Buddy reminded them. “This late in the game, I don’t know if we have any choice but to accept his terms.” Sabak
nodded his agreement at this.
Kendrick felt a cold horror creeping into his belly. This was wrong, all wrong. “Don’t ever make the mistake of taking him at his word. Once we’re up there, that’ll be
another matter entirely. If he tries anything, it’ll be him against us. But we’re Labrats – We’ll still have
that
advantage.”
Kendrick found his way to the deck, unable to remain in the comms room while Sabak contacted Draeger to agree to his terms. He wondered if Draeger intended to return to Earth
with whatever information he gained. Or was it possible that he believed he could travel through the wormhole to the Omega along with the rest of the Labrats?
Once Kendrick was out in the open the sea air made him feel light-headed. The waters, as expected, were calm: if it had been otherwise the launch would have been disastrously delayed. The sky
was cloud-free, the ocean in front of him disappearing into limpid blue depths as clear and smooth as crystal.
He looked over to the tanker, which had now stopped moving. Its upper decks looked as though they had been modelled after an aircraft carrier, and a dozen sleek-looking military-style jump jets
stood alongside more missile-carrying armoured helicopters. Dozens of figures, insect-like at that distance, moved across its acres of steel. Kendrick thought again of Angkor Wat and wondered if
the huge vessel was some kind of mobile secondary base of operations for Draeger.
He gazed up at the early-evening sky, the first stars revealing themselves as the light began to fade. The
Archimedes
was orbiting somewhere far above his head, and the reality of his
decision to go there was only just beginning to sink in. He turned his attention to the shuttle, sleek and powerful-looking, resting on its launch platform. As he watched, Draeger’s
helicopters moved away from the platform, returning to the tanker. Clearly, Sabak had come to an agreement with Draeger.
Buddy came for him a while later, clapping him on the shoulder.
“This is it,” he said. “You ready to go?”
Kendrick turned and looked at his old friend. “Are we really going to do this?”
“Sure we are. Still full of misgivings, aren’t you?”
Kendrick looked back over the sea. “Can you really leave all this behind?”
“I probably wouldn’t survive more than another few years here before my augments killed me,” Buddy said calmly. “You seem different – care to share?”
“I experienced something like a vision, Buddy. I think it was what you saw. As though I was taken on a carnival ride through the history of the universe.”
“All the way?”
Kendrick nodded. “All the way.”
Buddy cocked his head at him. “But you still don’t really believe it, do you?”
Kendrick sighed and turned away from looking at the launch platform. He remembered his conversation with McCowan. “Not like you do: no revelation, no firm sense that this is absolutely the
right thing to do.”
“Kendrick, for most of the people going with us there is no other way. Even if they felt they were just taking a chance they’d still take it. It’s either that or stay here on
Earth, hated and despised, and wait for a long and lingering death. It’s not much of a choice. Remember, I hate Draeger just as much as you do. I want you to find the proof you’re
looking for. I just don’t like the thought of staying here and dying slowly, maybe locked up in a secure ward somewhere.”
Kendrick shook his head. “Look, the one thing I know about Draeger is that he doesn’t lie. He could stab you in the back, but he’s too proud of his achievements to ever make
claims that are unsupportable.”
“You’re talking about that cure he offered you, right?”
“I met someone out at Angkor Wat who assured me that his rogue augments had been stabilized by Draeger’s treatments. The same treatments that I was receiving from
Hardenbrooke.”
Buddy regarded him sceptically. “So you’re saying that you’ll return from the
Archimedes
with evidence to incriminate Draeger, but then you’ll still take his
cure?”
“If Draeger’s really found a way to control the Labrat augments, then other people can develop the same techniques. But even if there were no cure
yet
, I’d still want to
come back. There’s always hope.”
“Maybe for you, Kendrick, if you want to take that chance.” Buddy shook his head. “But I already told you, I’ve got more faith in the Bright than I have in any number of
spurious claims about curing something that I don’t believe
can
be cured.”
The funeral service never happened, because Doctor Numark had felt constrained to incinerate Caroline’s remains immediately as a precautionary measure. Kendrick felt his
temper rise when she told him that he couldn’t even keep the ashes for a ceremony later as she wanted to keep them isolated. To Kendrick, the need to mark Caroline’s passing in some way
felt vital, necessary.
It was in case, Doctor Numark argued, there was even a slight chance of a containment breach. Kendrick almost laughed in her face, insisting that since he himself constituted a walking
containment breach it wasn’t likely to make much difference to him. She replied stonily that unfortunately there wasn’t much she could do about
him
.
In the end, he dragged Buddy back out onto the deck, since he was the only other Labrat still alive who had really known Caroline. They took sips from a bottle of whisky that Buddy had acquired
from a crewman and stared silently out to sea. There really wasn’t much either of them could bring themselves to say.
Within the hour they were ferried by boat to the launch platform and each of them was given a lightweight spacesuit to wear, marked with the colourful logo of Sabak’s
private launch company. A hundred or so Labrats trooped onto the platform, looking not so different from the kind of rich tourists who’d spend an afternoon orbiting the Earth as an
alternative to skiing in the Alps.
Kendrick soon found himself inside a steel-walled hut set high up in the gantry, from where he and the rest could look down the length of the shuttle, to its engines far below.
27 October 2096
Cocha Canyon
offshore launch platform
The evening skies above them were still clear, the sea still calm. Ancillary launch technicians wearing jumpsuits and hard hats carefully inspected each of the space-suits
three times. Kendrick could hear continuous, incessant systems checks crackling over a nearby intercom.
Just as the checking procedures were completed, the attack finally came.
First, there were dark spots on the horizon. Then, just as Kendrick and the rest were being guided through the gantry and along an elevated platform towards a door set in the side of the
shuttle, three sleek silver shapes rocketed past the platform, moving over Draeger’s ship in a flash and continuing onwards in a long, curving trajectory.
At the same time, Kendrick noticed a helicopter lifting from the deck of Draeger’s ship. It landed on the launch platform’s landing pad barely a minute later and he watched as
several small figures stepped out and looked around, half bent over under the whirring blades, before stepping quickly to one side. He could see Draeger among them, and the others, he was sure,
were the men he’d seen waiting in the shadows of the ruined buildings of LA. They all wore spacesuits modified with black Kevlar body armour.
A moment later another figure stepped out of the helicopter just before it lifted to return to the tanker. This time it was Smeby.
“Jesus Christ,” he heard someone mutter. Kendrick turned to see Sabak standing nearby. “Will you look at that?”
They all turned to look as one, as three simultaneous explosions of light shot upwards from the main deck of the tanker. Something flared, arrowing in towards the three jets which were now
twisting round in their trajectory to take another pass over the launch platform. This time, Kendrick was sure, they would fire on it.
He glanced around, seeing how utterly exposed they all were on the gantry. There would never be enough time to get them all inside the shuttle, and even that was far from the safest place to
be.
Then he saw the jets veer in a curve that would bring the shuttle directly into their line of fire. A moment later two of the aircraft twisted away in a high-speed manoeuvre as the missiles
launched from Draeger’s ship rapidly closed in. Kendrick felt his heart crawl into his throat as two of the pursuing missiles sped into the ocean in an explosion of salt spray.
The third missile, however, zeroed in on the third jet, whose pilot had veered too close to the waves, and as he pulled up and away from the ocean the missile gained on him. The two met in a
blossoming ball of fire a few hundred metres away from the launch platform. People yelled and screamed around Kendrick as shredded pieces of the jet’s fuselage shot overhead. A deep shudder
ran through the platform’s structure.
He gazed, dry-mouthed, at the shuttle. That had been far too close.
“We’ve got to launch now,” Kendrick yelled at Sabak who was standing just a few feet away. “For Christ’s sake, get everybody on board!”
Sabak shot him an angry look. “What the hell do you think we’re already
doing
?”
Kendrick looked around to see the remaining two jets swoop off into the far distance, half a dozen of Draeger’s choppers in pursuit of them.
There was a sudden altercation at the head of the line. Kendrick watched silently as an elderly couple, their faces distorted and ugly from runaway augmentation growth, refused to get on board.
He could easily understand, since he had his own doubts about boarding a flying bomb while it was coming under attack. He watched as they hurried back past him: the old woman weeping, her partner
stony-faced but clearly frightened. Kendrick turned and watched one or two people at the rear of the line break away and go towards them, presumably to attempt to persuade them not to turn
back.
“Is this going to be safe? Are those planes going to come back?” asked the woman standing in front of Kendrick. She was wide-eyed with fear. Like the rest, she carried her helmet in
a knapsack over her shoulder, but she wore an incongruous brightly coloured scarf that covered most of her neck where it was exposed under the heavy rim of the spacesuit’s neck ring.
“I think we’ll be just fine,” Kendrick lied, his voice tight. “We’ll get on board, and then . . .”
She nodded. Kendrick could see how badly she was trembling. He looked up and down the line, shocked by how many of those around him were obviously in the later stages of rogue augment growth.
These, then, were the ones who had nothing to lose, who possessed only the belief that, in some far-future place, they might have everything to gain.
Kendrick looked again towards the horizon but could see nothing from where he was standing. If the choppers were still in pursuit, they were far away on the other side of the platform.
Kendrick duly arrived at the front of the queue where a technician guided him speedily on board through an airlock inserted into what had originally been a pair of cargo-bay doors. He turned
around just before he entered to see that the high-capacity elevator that had lifted them into the gantry was rising again. Draeger stepped out, dressed in a grey-blue spacesuit with racing stripes
on the arms, a lightweight helmet tucked into the crook of his arm. Marlin Smeby appeared by his side, followed by the rest of Draeger’s entourage.
Kendrick spoke for a moment to the technician who was processing everyone on board, then waited until Draeger and his men, queuing dutifully, reached the shuttle. Sabak was talking quietly to
Draeger, and he glanced over at Kendrick with a wary expression when he noticed him waiting. Everyone else was already on board.
Draeger studied them both in turn with dark, hard eyes before smiling tightly. “I appreciate your help in this matter,” he said to them both. “There are wonderful things
happening just a few thousand miles above our heads. We may soon be witnessing things that very few people are ever likely to, at least in this life.”
Kendrick glanced over at Smeby who gazed back levelly. Smeby, he knew, was the one he really had to worry about. Smeby was Draeger’s right hand.
Draeger smiled disingenuously. Kendrick turned away from him to enter the shuttle.
Three more technicians guided them into a tall vertical bay filled with seats, all facing upwards. Kendrick tried to ignore the feeling of vertigo but with minimal success. He was led to his
seat via a complicated array of ladders and strapped carefully into place. Buddy was positioned nearby. They nodded to each other.
“I’m sure there were more people than this,” Kendrick called to Buddy over the tumult of voices. Some others nearby were weeping, not without reason. One or two were even
praying, although Kendrick couldn’t help but wonder to what or to whom their prayers were directed.
Buddy looked pointedly over his shoulder at Draeger and his men who were being helped into seats at the very rear of the passenger bay. It occurred to Kendrick that the only reason there were
any seats for them was because of the Labrats who had turned back or who had died before they could make it here. He thought of Erik, dying by a frozen northern shore, and of Audrey, back in LA.
And Caroline. He stared over again at Draeger and nursed the hate that burned deep within him.
Then, finally, even the technicians were gone and the passengers were alone. The air was filled with nervous muttering and the incessant litanies of the few people who were praying.
The same image played over and over in Kendrick’s mind: the third Los Muertos shuttle barely getting off the ground before exploding, its sides rupturing and splitting, liquid fire spewing
out, anything alive inside it obliterated instantly . . . he gripped the armrests of his seat so hard that sharp spikes of pain radiated through his hands.