Tridents forge, p.41
Trident's Forge, page 41
“C’mon, Reggie. You and Barbara are all the family I have left. If there had been any way, any way at all to save you and your wife, I would have. But I couldn’t. If you do this, you’re only going to be killing all four of us. There won’t be anyone left to carry the legacy.”
He finally broke down. The gun sagged in his hand as Reggie threw his arm around his wife and started sobbing. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“It’s okay, Reg.” I forced soothing tones into my voice, as if I was talking to a child. “I understand. You’re scared, but it’s going to be alright. Just, give me the gun and everything will be alright.”
Reggie looked down at the black pistol in his hand as though he’d already forgotten it was there. Still clutching his wife, he turned it around and held it out to me butt first.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Benson.”
I reached for the gun and slipped my hand into the grips. The plastic was still warm and slick with sweat. “I forgive you.”
I pulled the trigger.
The world exploded with noise as the overpressure echoed through the confines of the car’s interior, deafening me instantly. Reggie’s head snapped back from the bullet impact, then slumped against Mrs. Palmer’s arm. Before she had time to scream, I put one in her head too. It was all over in less than a second.
It wasn’t something I thought about, it just had to be done. I would have to drive the rest of the way. I turned around to get Barbara to help with the bodies, but she’d gone white as a sheet. Her eyes fixated on the gun, hypnotized by it.
“Barbara.” I reached out to touch her shoulder to try and snap her out of it, but she started screaming like a banshee and tried to crawl backwards up the seat. When that didn’t work, she ripped at the door handle trying to get out, breaking two of her nails in the process. But the doors were locked.
“Get away from me!” she shouted loud enough that I could hear it over the ringing in my ears.
I put the gun down on the floor and held up my hands. “Barbara, stop. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“He gave up! He said he was sorry and you shot him!”
“I had to, honey. He didn’t give me a choice. Now, we have to focus. We’re running late already and we have to get to—”
“I’m not going anywhere with you. You’re a killer!”
“Barbara!” I’d had enough, so I grabbed her shoulders and tried to shake some sense into the panicked little ingrate. “I didn’t kill anyone. You see these two?” I pointed at the corpses hunched over in the front seats. “They’re ghosts. They were already dead. Everyone who doesn’t have a ticket is already dead. Like zombies, okay? Reggie figured it out, I don’t know how, but he did. If I’d let him go, he might have told someone and we’d be caught and they wouldn’t let us on. And in a couple of months, we’d be just as dead as the rest of the zombies.”
“You’re a monster.”
“I can live with that, if it means we live. Now, we need to get the bodies out of the car so I can drive us the rest of the way. Will you help?”
“No.” She shook her head gravely. “I won’t help you.”
“Fine, then just stay in the car.” I grabbed the gun, then unlocked the door and got out into the chill of pre-dawn. With my old college baseball arm, I pitched the gun into Old Tampa Bay. It took me three tries to get Reggie’s legs out from the foot well and past the steering wheel, and another three hard jerks to get his body out of the car. He hadn’t taken much time in the gym over the last ten years and it showed. His head, already hollowed out from the gunshot, hit the pavement with the sound of a dropped cantaloupe. I could see my breath in the air as I strained to drag the body to the side of the road. His wife’s body was much more accommodating by comparison. She’d been that way in life, too.
The driver’s compartment was coated in blood and… other unmentionable substances. I selected some cotton shirts from the trunk that had already fallen victim to the sniper’s bullet to use as rags. A few minutes later the interior was as clean as it was going to get, so I threw the shirts in the water and rinsed the blood off my hands as best I could, but it left stains on the cuffs of my shirt.
By the time I sat down in the driver’s seat, Barbara had already closed the privacy screen, which was fine. It took me a minute to find the “START” button, then another to figure out how to put the car in drive, but we were moving again before long. As I brought the hobbled Bentley up to speed, it occurred to me that I hadn’t driven a car for myself in years, not since I wrecked that 458 Italia racing in the classics series. This would be the last time I drove anything.
“So you just left them on the side of the road for the seagulls?”
The question startled me, as if the accusatory voice had come from the sky. Then I realized it was just Barbara talking through the intercom.
“I forgot to pack a shovel.”
“You can joke right now? Don’t you have any remorse at all?” With the immediate shock of the ambush, Reggie’s betrayal, and my first double-homicide fading, her voice was drifting back towards normal.
“Maybe later I’ll make time for it.”
“You didn’t have to shoot them. You could have made them promise not to tell.”
“I’m sorry, you want me to trust our lives to a man who’d just pointed a gun at my head?”
“They weren’t zombies, Max. They were living people. Your friends.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Obviously not!”
“What’s Mrs. Palmer’s first name?”
“I…”
“C’mon, Barb. You don’t know? It’s Irene. They have two nieces, Jennifer and Iris, and a godson named Chad. They were like grandparents to me, and they just tried to kill both of us. So don’t sit there pretending like they were more ‘real’ to you, okay?”
“But, you didn’t even hesitate. You just… killed them. They weren’t even armed.”
“Think, Barbara! Use that poli-sci degree and think this through. Getting on that ship is all that matters. When that’s done, then we can afford the privilege, the luxury of agonizing over what we had to do to get there.”
The intercom fell silent, the privacy screen an opaque wall between us. Maybe that was a good thing. It was helping Barbara compartmentalize, literally and figuratively.
“It’s not like I feel good about it,” I said quietly.
“What do you feel?”
“Nothing. Resolve, if that’s an emotion.”
“You said our genomes were altered. What did you mean?”
I took a deep breath, bracing myself for the plunge. I’d managed to keep the truth from her through the whole process. It was just easier to keep her in the dark. One fewer mouth to let it slip. But Reggie had screwed that up, damn him.
“I rigged the lottery to get our spots.”
“You what?”
“I paid people to purge our genome records of all the knockout disease markers, then bribed some key members of the selection committee. You didn’t really think that we both just happened to make it through the selection process, did you? Do you know what the odds against that would have been? They’re bottlenecking the human race from ten billion to fifty thousand people. We might be the only married couple to actually board the ship together.”
“Are you saying we didn’t earn our spots? That I’m stealing a spot from someone who deserves it?”
I snorted. “Deserves it? Christ, Barbara, people talk about the selection process like it’s the fucking Rapture. But it’s not God bringing the faithful home, it’s a bunch of dweebs in lab coats and tweed jackets picking through mankind like they’re breeding horses. You, my dear, do you know why you don’t deserve to survive?”
“Why?” she asked in a small voice.
“Because you have the genetic markers for Addison’s disease. There’s a less than five percent chance our children might be born with it.”
“Well that won’t be a problem, because there’s no way I’m having children with you.”
“It’s not me, it’s you. The risk will be there no matter who you’re with. But you’ll have that choice, thanks to me.”
“My fucking hero,” she said viciously. “Cheater of the system and killer of the elderly.”
“You can always get out of the car if your conscience can’t take the strain. No really, I’ll pull over right now.”
The intercom fell silent again. That’s what I thought. I managed not to say it aloud.
Poor Barbara. She was a sheltered little girl who fancied herself an activist right up to the moment she might have to make real sacrifices. Maybe I was being too harsh, but since the black hole arrived in the Oort Cloud eighty years ago, the world had become a very harsh place indeed.
Some idiot had named it Nibiru, after a rouge planet some New Age conspiracy twit had predicted would destroy the Earth more than a hundred years ago in the early days of the internet. She’d been wrong about the type of object, the century, basically everything, but they still wanted to treat her like some kind of fucking prophet. Humans would endure any amount of self-delusion if it meant they could continue to believe that somebody was in control or knew what the hell was going on. Too bad the Ark committee hadn’t selectively eliminated that stupid trait.
“It’s not right.” Barbara rejoined the conversation. “What we’re doing. It’s not right.”
I noticed the pronoun usage, but didn’t mention it. “No, what’s not ‘right’ is the way our family was treated since this whole thing started. Ninety-percent income tax to fund construction? ‘Renting’ the lion’s share of our elevator slots at a third of the going market rate, crippling our business. Then when father complained, the government just nationalized the whole company. That damned ship wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for the heavy-lift capacity they stole from us, and they couldn’t cough up waivers for two spots onboard? That isn’t right.”
“Ah, so you’re just restoring some justice to the universe?”
“It’s more than that.”
“Why were you rejected?”
“Hmm?”
“You told me why I was rejected. Why were you? What was your knockout marker?”
I squeezed the soft Napa leather of the steering wheel, the memory of reading the email still fresh. “My psych eval. The shrink said I ‘exhibited evidence of oppositional defiant disorder,’ and ‘lacked empathy.’”
“Ah, so they said you don’t respect authority. So to prove them wrong you went around and broke all their rules.” She actually laughed. “You sure showed them, honey.”
“No.” I clenched a fist and pounded the steering wheel. “That’s not it at all. Don’t you see? They’re not just selecting for diseases, they’re trying to reshape humanity to fit some arbitrary ideal. They think we’re going to live in a crime-free fucking hippie commune in the sky where everyone’s a vegan and holds hands around a damned drum circle. They’re trying to select initiative and individuality right out of us. Like, I don’t know, a herd of cattle.”
“You just executed two people you’ve known your entire life without batting an eye. ‘Lacks empathy’ would seem to be the least of your problems. Can you honestly tell me rejecting you was bad idea?”
“Of course it’s a bad idea! They’re trying to pick the ‘right’ people to build a whole new world. But they’re using the wrong paradigm. They’re picking artists and poets and grief counselors and yoga instructors, but they’re entirely wrong for the job. Artists and poets are a result of civilization, a side-effect of stability and prosperity. They don’t create it. You need explorers and entrepreneurs and leaders and soldiers. They stake out the land, they take the risks, they build the settlements and hunt the game. They make the hard calls that make the rest of it possible.”
“Now I see,” Barbara said, sarcasm dripping from every word. “You’re not doing this to save your own skin. You’re doing this for the betterment of the whole species. Who else can lead us poor little lambs but a big strong wolf? How philanthropic of you.”
“Don’t mock me, Barbara. The people they’ve got up there now? How many of them would have had the balls to take the risks I did to get here, or make the tough decisions, not because I enjoyed them, but because they had to be made? No, they have this shit completely backwards. They shouldn’t have been sifting through us. They should have let us all fight it out and grabbed the winners.”
“Sure, an entire starship filled with fifty-thousand testosterone-poisoned narcissists and sociopaths. What could go wrong?”
Another barricade approached as we reached the end of the causeway. But unlike the last one, this one was manned with professional soldiers wearing the light blue helmets of the UN, along with a pair of marines in heavy combat exoskeletons. As soon as they saw our headlights, their recoilless anti-material rifles snapped into the ready position.
“I’d love to keep this conversation going, dear, but the checkpoint is coming up. If you want to leave, I won’t stop you. But now’s the time.”
She didn’t respond.
“Okay, I’m going to take that as you’re staying. But that means we can’t breathe a word of this to anyone. Not ever. In fact, we probably shouldn’t talk about it between ourselves in private. Who knows what kind of surveillance they’ve built into that ship?”
“Feeling a little paranoid, Maximillian?”
“Covering our bases. We’re about to cross the Rubicon, Barb. I’m sorry to drop all this in your lap at the eleventh hour, but I have to know if you’re in, or out?”
She sighed heavily. “In, God forgive me.”
“I don’t think God’s hanging around here anymore, my love.”
The UN soldiers manning the barricade signaled me to stop short of the gate. Glancing over at the enormous cannons the exos mounted, there didn’t seem to be any reason to argue the point.
One of the uniformed soldiers walked purposefully up to my window. His sidearm remained in its holster, but his brothers had him well-covered. I rolled down my window to greet him. Look friendly. Look like I belonged there.
“Good morning, soldier.”
“Will you please power down and exit the vehicle, hands where I can see them.”
“I have a passenger in the back. Should she get out, too?”
He nodded. “Yes, sir.”
I pushed the intercom. “They want us to step out of the car. It’s okay, just follow their orders.” I shut down the Bentley and stepped out, hands at my sides. Act like I’m in charge, but not condescending. Soldiers obey orders. They respect status.
“Nice car,” the soldier said.
“It was,” I said bitterly.
“The lady’s credentials, please,” he said curtly.
“Our disks are in my jacket pocket. I’m going to reach for them, if that’s okay.”
His face tweaked in confusion. “You’re not her driver?”
“No, I’m her husband,” I answered, but the soldier was already looking past me into the driver’s compartment. He signaled for more troops to approach.
“There’s blood in here.”
“Our driver was killed in an ambush. I took over.”
He knocked on the windshield. “Windows are intact, care to explain that?”
“Yes, the old fool rolled down his window and they shot him.” I shrugged my shoulders and let my voice ratchet up a few decibels. “Look, private?”
“Sergeant Lantz, sir.”
“My apologies, Sergeant. We’ve been through absolute hell to get here. I just saw a man I’ve known for thirty years get shot in the face. I don’t want to be out in the open any longer than necessary. The disks in my pocket have everything you need.”
Lantz stepped up as two other soldiers with rifles took up positions behind me.
“Left or right?” he asked.
“Sorry?”
“Left or right pocket?”
“Ah, inside left.”
He grabbed the disks and gave them a cursory inspection. Satisfied for the moment, he handed them back to me and nodded to the two guards behind me. “Okay, Mister?”
“Benson,” I said.
“If you and your wife will follow me, we’ll escort you to the processing station.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. Oh, and we have some luggage in the trunk that—”
He shook his head. “Your personal items have to be searched for contraband before they can be transferred to processing. We’ll handle them from here.”
I handed over my keys and walked away from the car, indeed, away from the last remnants of my old life. Barbara walked beside me, but said nothing. The silence was anything but companionable. I couldn’t tell if the waves of cold I felt came from the bay, or her.
The soldiers led us into a staging area. The launch tower and rocket stack was still more than a mile away, but it already loomed large. Our candle was larger than the NASA Space Launch System that had taken the first humans to Mars. Today, it would take just under two hundred people up to the largest construct in history, and mankind’s home for the next two centuries.
The next few minutes would determine whether or not we were among them. I’d done everything I could to ensure our survival, made huge, mind-boggling sacrifices, done things I didn’t know I was capable of, and learned some things about myself that I wasn’t comfortable knowing. Now, I just had to trust that everything had been done right. There was no one else to bribe. No one else to kill. Nothing more I could do to affect the outcome. All that remained were all the ways it could go wrong.
I’d never felt so helpless in my life.
“Just, be calm. Stay collected,” I whispered to Barbara, pitching my voice low enough that our escorts couldn’t eavesdrop. “There’ll be plenty of time to break down later.”
“Are you telling me, or yourself?” Her voice had taken on a hard edge, a reflection of the wall that had been built between us over the last half hour. I didn’t know if I’d ever see the other side of it. I wasn’t sure I cared.
“Just act like you belong here.”
