The Destructives (39 page)

No.

Is that why she chose Theodore Drown to be the father? Because it would be easier to abort the child of a man like him?

No.

Theodore’s interrogation. She was the last to arrive at the gloomy storeroom. The toxic smell of men in an enclosed space. Theodore was the one in the chair, two fishers holding him down by his shoulders. He seemed… not in control but dignified. Ballurian stood at the other end of the cell. There was a long rectangular window with a greenlit view of the dusty grey lakebed. The light was low, and red in parts, green sometimes; the faces of the men passed through these tinted shadows, and then out the other side. Theodore noted her arrival with a glance of weary disappointment.

She would not stand for that look.

“What?” she asked.

“My honey trap,” he replied.

She almost told him, there and then, that it wasn’t like that. But perhaps it was.

She wondered where to stand among the tense arrangement of men. Ballurian did not acknowledge her: his dark filtered gaze, his high Asiatic cheekbones and broad Malaysian nose with nostrils like haunches – the solid effigy of his head – loomed over Theodore as a threat. She stood to the side. Whether she was to act as witness for the prosecution or defence, Reckon was not yet sure. Ballurian’s fingertips tapped softly together, as if counting out beats before a crescendo.

“You remember now, don’t you?” He placed his palms against one another in careful, weary supplication. “Please tell us why you came all this way.”

“Because of a brain in a jar,” said Theodore.

This was not the answer Ballurian expected.

Theodore offered clarification. “Your cephalopolis. Your Doxa. We came to destroy Doxa,” said Theodore.

“Why?” gasped Reckon.

“Doxa breaks a Cantor Accord. It is emergent.”

“But Doxa has nothing to do with emergence. It’s a jellyfish.”

“I was in the asylum mall,” he said. “Matthias used human experimentation to construct the mental architecture of Doxa, an experiment that I was part of. The emergences learnt of it and saw that Matthias was trying to create a group mind. They cleared up his mess on Earth, massacring hundreds of people to prevent the experiment being repeated.”

“I thought they were helping us,” said Ballurian.

“They might have been, at an early stage. But they will not risk another emergence.”

Green shadows in the hollows of Ballurian’s face. Anger could be exhausting.

He said, “You told me that Matthias was shot.”

“Yes.”

“And that was a lie.” A statement not a question.

Theodore nodded. “Matthias was connected to Doxa when an emergence killed him. He maintained a link between the mall and here, concealed within the University of the Sun’s system of laser relays. His death experience must be drifting around in your Doxa. I was there. It was deeply unpleasant.”

Ballurian moved over to the dark window, peering out into the lake.

“So we finally have the attention of the emergences.”

Hamman was shocked. “You wanted this?”

“Sooner or later. It’s the nature of things,” said Ballurian. “Our two species are bound together.” His spoke without conviction.

Hamman stepped forward, blade in hand, testing the point against Theodore’s scarred face. The boy’s fear made him dangerous.

“Nobody is coming to save you,” said Hamman.

“You’re right,” said Theodore. “They are not coming to save me. But they are coming.”

Fear flowed around the room. She tried to control her heartbeat. A mother’s fear conditions the foetus, trains it for a hostile world. Her womb, the core of her, felt insecure. It was a horrible sensation.

Ballurian contemplated the waters beyond the glass, and Theodore’s reflection within them. “Why did Magnusson send you?” he asked slowly.

“To buy everyone some time. The emergences are curious about you.” Theodore shrugged out of the grip of the fisher guards. “Their curiosity means that all is not lost. There is a sliver of a chance.”

Hamman withdrew his blade from Theodore’s face to consider the range of options in terms of other wounds, other scars.

“You’re a bureaucrat with the face of psychopath,” said Hamman.

Theodore’s expression showed only a kind of regret. “This is big boy stuff,” he said to Hamman. “You should step back.”

Theodore had space to move now. Methodically, he had got them to take their hands off him, and secured a yard or two of freedom. He caught sight of his own reflection in the black lake.

“I’ve sent a signal,” he said. “So that negotiations can advance.”

Ballurian continued to study the waters, pressing his hands against the cold glass.

He asked, “What’s in it for you?”

Theodore said, “There is still a chance to rescue your colony and Doxa.”

“No,” said Ballurian. “That’s not why you came all this way.”

“You’re right. I came as part of the Destructives. Being here has made me feel terrified and vulnerable but, in my entire life, Doxa is the only thing I have known that gives me hope.”

He was telling the truth, she was convinced of it. The kindness of Doxa could be overwhelming.

“We will seal Dream 6 tunnel,” said Hamman. “The fishers will defend the colony. Nothing will get through.”

The fishers were strong of arm, and had formed a cult around their fortitude. But she wondered if they were all that tough. Because of Doxa, none of them had so much as punched another man on the nose. Whereas Theodore – while not a violent man – had a hard indifferent sheen to which morality did not adhere. God knows what his friends were capable of.

Ballurian turned to Reckon. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” said Reckon. “I think he will betray us despite his best intentions. It’s in his nature.” This hurt him, she saw that on his face: What are we to each other? How did love bring me to this despair?

She was curious to see if she could break his heart.

“The question is,” she said to the room, “will Theodore still betray us when he finds out that I am pregnant?”

She watched Theodore expression turn inward with calculation. Do those sums, you bastard. His eyes tremored, thinking through all the variables. But then his expression changed. The numbers evaporated.

“Will the child live?” he asked.

Ballurian wanted an answer to this question too.

“It has a chance,” she said. “Presuming we are not wiped out by the emergences first.”

She considered Theodore, shabby in his seat.

“If this child makes it to term, you will not be its father. It will be raised by us all. By Doxa.”

From deep below the base, came the creak and moan of the moon as it was stretched and compressed by competing gravities. Through the deep water came the squeak and whine of thick ice under pressure. A whine that intensified, echoing down the air vents. A variation on the usual geological tensions. The fishers gathered at the window looking out over the seabed and there, in place of the grey dark, there was a new colour. Whorls of red. Jovian light.

“The ice sheet must have cracked,” said Hamman. The base shook and through the window the waters whirled and churned in a fierce upward current. She reached out to steady herself and Theodore caught her.

Ballurian summoned a hologram of the surface of Europa. Together they watched as the ice fissured in the chaos regions, and plumes of lakewater poured forth, boiling out into the vacuum of space. Not a waterfall but a
waterrise
, like a tower rising from out of the moon, an edifice a hundred kilometres long, lethal rainbows of Jovian radiation shimmering within its outpouring. Blocks of surface ice moved around and against one another. Fresh rolls of ice formed on the plains, metre by metre closing up the new vent, diminishing the stream of the waterrise, until the gush was cut off and the tower drifted apart in a cloud of glittering icicles.

The view of the hologram shifted to Lake Tethys. Objects speeding with intent through the drift of thousands of chunks of glacial debris. Pods.

“That’ll be my wife,” said Theodore.

24

THE DESTRUCTIVES

This is what Doxa did to him. It gave him a new perspective on the story of his life, and forced him to accept what a mean tight little story it had been. The kindnesses he blithely accepted as his right, the loving gestures he had forgotten about, if he had ever noticed them; overlooked compassions were more formative than his scant experience with weirdcore. It was his choice to be defined by his damage, by his scars.

On the arrays, no one analysed compassion because it did not lead to purchase. Compassion was omitted from the metrics. Reckon, angry, had told him what a reduction of human potential he represented but it took the integration with Doxa for him to admit that failure in his heart. He was ashamed of all the missed opportunities to do or say something helpful to the people he loved. Yes, he had lost his mother at an early age but how much worse had it been for Alex to lose her daughter. Through Doxa, he was privileged to experience a mother’s loss and then have that loss healed. Now he understood the strength Alex must have mustered to turn her grief into kindness toward her grandson. This was the kind of heroism that deserved monuments. Even Beth Green was trying to be kind to him. On the night he hit rock bottom. Her careless confession to him was because she was fond of Theodore, trusted him, and he had seized on this trust as a moment of weakness. Doxa took the kinks out of memories twisted by bitter recollection, and showed him the kindness he had never noticed. He could have been a better man. The night he sat with Grandma Alex as she died, and ministered to her, and stared into the black sun of her dying; that experience should have set him on a different path.

He stood on the edge of the moon pool, waiting for his wife to arrive. A holographic display showed pods descending through a field of ice fragments, and seven silver capsules streaking ahead. The colony defences had been set up around the narrow cavern exit of the tunnel. So Patricia had created a new tunnel, cutting through two kilometres of ice just to surprise everyone. He was scared of his wife. Perhaps he had been scared of her all along, and due to his emotional incapacity, had numbly mistaken that fear for love.

Waiting beside the moon pools, he shivered with adrenaline and the chill rising from the Europan waters. He wanted everyone to be safe. Doxa was too important, Reckon and his unborn child were worth more than his heart could contain. Like all converts, he felt an urgent shame at coming to the truth too late in life.

The memory blocks were degrading. Security had promised him that they would. He flexed his fingertips, shaking out the numbness. He now remembered everything from the moment he shot Meggan in the doorway of her asylum mall apartment to the beating Security administered to him before bundling him into a pod and firing him at Europa. And what a series of raw deals, betrayals and bad behaviour the last two years had been, punctuated with acts of destruction. Justifications for these acts were Patricia’s forte, and he had let her talk him around. He was culpable.

The base was in lockdown. On the way to the dock, he had walked through crowds of agitated colonists. Reckon ran to her lab to secure her work. She had used him to impregnate her and test her theories on gestation. His first child. No, not a child yet. It was barely an embryo. If did get a chance to speak to Reckon, before the end, then he would tell her that he was sorry: I am sorry I allowed myself to become this man.

It was wrong to put all the blame onto Patricia. He wanted status, and had inherited his ambition from Grandma Alex, who had worked her way up from the terraced streets of Belfast to Cambridge and beyond. Her mother, his great-grandmother, had been an alcoholic, and he’d inherited that too. Without parents, he had no fixed position in society, experimented with low life and then swung to the other end of the axis, for an elite life with Patricia and Magnusson. Wanting social status in a Post-Seizure world was like scrabbling for loose change flung across the deck of the
Titanic
.

Patricia, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I have achieved our client’s primary goal. I found the brain in a jar. The bad news is that. The bad news. The bad.

He belonged in the asylum mall for what he had done.

The surface of the moon pool plopped and whitened with bubbles of carbon dioxide, and then his black box surfaced. He reached out for it and the black box leapt into his hand. He had removed it before coming to Europa to conceal his connection with emergence. He fastened the necklace and tucked the black box under his shirt. When he was a boy, Dr Easy told him that his whole life would be recorded on that box, and that it would follow him wherever he went. Only with the breaking of the surface ice had it been able to locate him. His revelation with Doxa, his relationship with Reckon, all of that went unrecorded, and the creation of this gap in the data felt like a victory.

The doors to the dock slid open and there was Hamman Kiki, holding a harpoon and, in his belt, a curved gutting knife. Hamman knelt to measure the vibrations of the approaching pods then, at his instruction, fishers took up positions around the moon pool, their angling equipment directed at the seething, rising waters.

The colony was in a state of emergency but there was no klaxon. That was a shame. The arrival of his wife warranted a klaxon.

“My wife has come to negotiate,” said Theodore, calling out over the churning waters. “But if you give her an excuse to hurt you, she will take it.”

The first pod erupted out of the moon pool, stopped in midair, drawing the fire of the fishers. The pod opened slowly. It was empty. Then his wife leapt out from under the pod, her executive armour deployed, limbs and torso encased in hard cylinders, her small fierce fists powering outsize weaponised gauntlets. Her helmet was massive and shielded for combat and radiation. How long could the fishers last in a room with his wife, when she was in this kind of mood? She adhered to the ceiling, took a microsecond to work the room, then her gauntlets deployed rolling banks of suppressor foam. The fishers were doused in its hardening gum. Her armour was designed to contain angry shareholders and break-up employee uprisings; the fishers had knives, but Patricia had riot control. Hamman leapt across the dock and landed beside her, thrusting his harpoon downward against the armour, not penetrating it, but enough to knock her across the bay. She skidded to a halt against the wrought iron walkway. Hamman was adept at moving in low gravity, knew how to focus his strength. He covered the distance in a single leap, raked the harpoon point down the front of her armour, ripping through the outer layer, then bringing up the blade for a second swipe.