“You will talk to Mallory.”
“I promise you, I am considering all my options. You, however, should get some rest.” He walked over to the desk, tapped some controls, and the windows regained their transparency and a weight in the air receded, clearing Parvi’s sinuses.
“Please,” Parvi said, “I don’t know how much time we have.”
Lubikov nodded as a pair of guards came in the room to take her away.
Lubikov watched the guards take Parvi away.
How much time
do
we all have?
From Parvi’s intel, Mr. Antonio’s master, Adam, was limited to the speed of these new Caliphate tach-ships. More or less as fast as a normal tach-comm signal.
Unlike Parvi, Lubikov knew exactly why Adam had not yet made an appearance. Mr. Antonio—the old man who recruited him to Adam’s cause, who Lubikov suspected was no old man—had provided Lubikov with a lot of information. Mr. Antonio gave him Adam’s script of how Bakunin’s future would play out for him, a script that Bakunin had followed up until the transmission from Earth.
According to Adam’s prophet, Mr. Antonio, Bakunin and the space around it was supposed to devolve into a seething cesspit of self-destructive violence. As a military man, Lubikov could easily infer the reason. It made more sense for Adam to concentrate on the capital planets, the command and control centers with an interstellar reach. Bakunin was a mess that could be dealt with at leisure.
He wondered if Mr. Antonio knew that such mundane strategic considerations tarnished his master’s claims of divinity. Not that Lubikov had cast his lot with the AI because he ever believed those claims. Lubikov, as always, simply played the odds in his own favor.
And as the activity around Bakunin began diverging from Adam’s script, Lubikov was sensing a slight shift in those odds.
If he assumed the self-proclaimed deity would intervene as soon as he was aware that things were not going as prophesied, the earliest Adam could show up would be five days after receiving that information. That was the shortest travel time from a neighboring planet ...
Five days.
When did he begin to notice things changing from the script old man Antonio gave him? Ten days ago? Just enough time for a tach-signal to go out, and for Adam to come back.
Just enough time.
Lubikov eased himself into his chair, wondering what his options truly were.
“Dolbrians?” he muttered to himself. Then he started calling up commanders, ordering coverage to the main eastern approaches to the Diderot Range.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Guardian Angel
“It is human nature to ignore the fate of nations when one’s family is at stake.”
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“The destruction of civilization will always begin with the destruction of the family.”
—SYLVIA HARPER
(2008-2081)
Date: 2526.8.9 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Flynn Jorgenson drove a stolen groundcar cross-country along the plains about two hundred klicks northwest of Godwin. Tetsami had helped him disable every electronic component that wasn’t needed to keep the wheels going. Even the running lights had been removed, and he drove through the night using a heads-up display set on passive infrared, giving the night a surreal monochrome appearance.
In the cabin behind him, everyone slept. He found it amazing that anyone could rest while that tiger snored.
“You there, Gram?”
“Yeah.” Her voice was passive, almost resigned. Completely unlike the woman he’d shared his head with all his adult life. He glanced next to him, and saw her sitting in the passenger seat, looking as she always did, black hair diagonally cut, leather jacket, almond eyes . . .
Tears?
“Gram?” He wanted to reach out to her, even though the person he saw existed behind his eyes, not in front of them.
“I think it just hit me. It’s all gone. Everything.”
“I know,” Flynn said, turning back to face the rolling gray landscape. After a few moments he asked, “If the Protean hadn’t shown up, what would you have wanted us to do?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m saying, if the first we heard of all this was Adam plopping out of the sky and saying ‘join me,’ what would we have done?”
“Not a fair question.”
“Isn’t it? Somewhere there’s a recording in the Hall of Minds that made that choice.”
“No.”
“You don’t think Adam went to the Hall—”
“No, I mean what I was, what’s there in the Hall ... don’t you remember how bad it was when you—you know if I was given a choice, then I would have said
hell, no
.”
Flynn paused a long time before he said, “I see.”
“Christ on a unicycle, you know I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Sure.”
“Damn it, however we feel about it now, we both weren’t willing participants.”
Flynn sighed, “I know you didn’t mean it that way, Gram.”
“You’re the most family I’ve ever had.”
“Same here.”
“And for what it’s worth, now I’m glad we weren’t given the choice.”
“So,” he asked, “if Adam shows up now, and gives you that choice—his way or nothing—what would you do now?”
“That’s not my say.”
“Of course it is.”
“This is your body, your life. I’m just a hitchhiker.”
“Gram, after how long we’ve been together, this is as much your body as mine.”
She didn’t answer him immediately, and when he glanced next to him, she had vanished from the passenger seat. He looked at the empty seat and felt prickings of worry even though he knew she had never really sat there.
Gram?
he thought more than said.
He felt his eyes burn, and he reached up and wiped the tears off his own cheek.
“Thank you,” he heard his own voice say.
But she never answered his question.
Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Flynn, check your three o’clock.
He had driven in silence past midnight. The rolling plains and the rocking of the groundcar’s suspension had lulled him into a near trance, and Tetsami’s voice in his head cut through and he let the massive vehicle roll to a stop as he looked to the far right. Some light or other was out there, past the range of the passive thermal imaging.
Flynn pulled the vehicle to a full stop.
Immediately, he heard Kugara’s voice from the cabin behind him. “What’s the problem?”
I thought she was asleep,
he thought. Then he realized that Nickolai had stopped snoring as well.
“Something up ahead,” Flynn said as he powered down the heads-up display. Bakunin’s moons had set, leaving the night lit only by a massive spread of stars above them. The mountains, their destination, were only visible as a high, ragged, horizon.
“Can you check it out?” Kugara said, and it took a second before Flynn realized she wasn’t talking to him. Of course, why would she? He was a fifth wheel on this expedition, more useless than the still-sleeping scientists.
Don’t get down on yourself.
Gram, I’m only here because you know the area.
The tiger opened the side doors, letting in the cold night air in a sudden breeze that made Flynn’s arms break out in gooseflesh. Nickolai stepped out and became nothing more than a feline silhouette framed by the open door of the groundcar.
“What do you see out there?” Kugara asked him.
Flynn wondered if the tiger could see anything in the darkness, but then he remembered what the Protean had done to his eyes. He shuddered, and told himself it was the cold.
“PSDC,” Nickolai said. “Airborne early warning and surveillance platforms. One to our southeast, another to our north-northeast. No question that they know we’re here.”
“Shit,” Flynn said, “we got to get away from this thing before they show up.”
“Don’t worry,” Kugara said. “They would have picked us up before we cleared the horizon. The fact they haven’t sent anyone to intercept us means that they haven’t classed us as a threat yet. One of those aircraft has to be tracking hundreds of thousands of civilian vehicles.”
“The problem is they’re between us and the mountains,” Nickolai said. “The closer we get, the more likely they’ll identify us.” He stepped back into the groundcar. “If we spark their interest, we’re already close enough for them to get a visual ID on us.”
“Damn,” Kugara said. “Just seeing you would be enough to set their alarms ringing.”
Let me take over.
Gram?
I have a way past this...
Flynn let his mind drift back as he felt Tetsami turn his head to look at Kugara. He could feel himself smiling at her.
“I think I got good news for you.”
A long time ago, back when Tetsami was living on Bakunin, she had worked for a man calling himself Dominic Magnus. He had been an arms dealer, and ended up being one of the final lines of defense against the last attempt by the PSDC to take over the planet. In the short period that Tetsami worked for him, she got to know his retreat in the Diderot Mountains—and the mountains themselves. The whole range was riddled with ancient lava tubes and natural caverns to the extent that someone could walk from pole to pole without breaking the surface.
It was the perfect place for someone to go to ground against an army. The number of options for retreat was endless, and thanks to Dominic Magnus’ paranoia, some of those options were still firmly planted in Tetsami’s mind.
“I know half a dozen coordinates by heart,” she told the others. “These are the closest.”
“It’s also damn close to Godwin,” Kugara said. “We were trying to avoid that.”
“If they already see us, we’ll be less remarkable going toward a population center than a mountain range,” Tetsami said.
“And it’s still twenty kilometers north of Godwin,” Nickolai said.
“Okay,” Kugara said. “Our goal is to reach the underground anyway. If there’s a way in short of the mountains themselves, I’m all for it.”
Tetsami turned the groundcar, and started going due south.
About ten kilometers north of their destination, the woods grew too dense for the car. Tetsami brought them to a stop and said, “We either cross over to a main road, or we hoof it.”
“How much night do we have left?” Kugara asked.
“About ninety minutes,” Tetsami said. After so long on Salmagundi, the sixteen-hour nights on Bakunin seemed endless. “Do you think you can make it on your injured foot?”
Kugara snorted, as if the question didn’t merit an answer. She turned to the two scientists still asleep in the back. “Okay, everyone out!”
Well, Tetsami had the answer to her question. They were hoofing it. It was probably just as well; any maintained roadways would more than likely have some sort of PSDC checkpoint.
She turned on the console lighting, and bent down into the footwell by the driver’s seat.
“What are you doing?” Kugara asked.
“Just a minute,” Tetsami said, pulling a panel from underneath one of the driver’s displays. She released a couple of spring-loaded latches, and the small display popped off in her hand. “Good—”
“What—”
Tetsami held up the display. “The on-board navigation system. Even when they’re inset like that, they’re generally the same add-on hardware as the after-market stuff.” She yanked a couple of cables from under the dash. “Can I have your carbine?”
“For what?”
“This thing won’t power itself on our good intentions,” Tetsami said. “Don’t worry, it just needs a trickle from the battery. It’d take a good ten years to drain the power cell.”
Kugara unslung the rifle. “This is our only weapon. Are you sure you need to do this?”
“Unless someone here can tell longitude and latitude by looking.”
She handed over the rifle. “Don’t break it.”
They walked through the woods, the sky slowly lightening above them. They followed Kugara’s limping lead, while Kugara followed the jury-rigged navigation display Tetsami had attached to her rifle. Dawn came slowly, and Tetsami’s breath fogged in front of her.
Flynn’s breath.
“You awake?”
she thought at him.
“Yeah, Gram,”
came back Flynn’s voice inside her head.
“You want me to take over?”