On the table surface Keats’s other biot rolled farther left, moving at top speed, racing to get around the saltshaker and avoid being slowed by the water.
Had Caligula noticed? That would be the question.
Keats cleared the saltshaker tower. He spotted the wall of water off to his right but was well clear of it. Ahead, far in the distance, was a wall of indeterminate color.
Keats’s first biot, K1—the one inside Plath’s brain—turned awkwardly to Plath’s P2 and made a gesture using two claws meant to convey that he was closing in.
In the macro Plath was dragging the conversation out to give Keats time.
Caligula drained the last of his beer and set the glass down just behind the saltshaker.
Deliberate?
Plath’s P2 looked at Keats’s K1. A body shake that was the equivalent of a headshake. No, that didn’t get me.
But it had been close, very close. The glass—a rainbow-swirling object so big it looked a bit like some rainbow-hued desert mesa—came crashing down out of the sky. It sent vibration and water droplets in all directions. One of them, an Olympic pool of water, crashed behind him as he sped on.
“It is your decision,” Caligula said. “Lear will insist that it be your decision.”
Lear will insist, Plath thought. Never “he” or “she,” always the careful gender-neutral name.
“And I will make that decision,” Plath said. “But first—”
“I’m afraid that as enjoyable as this is, I must go,” Caligula said.
“Is there a way for me to contact you directly?”
Caligula smiled. It was a surprisingly genuine thing, that smile. He was no comic-book villain playing a role and posturing for the camera. He smiled and meant it when he said, “Sadly, no. My orders come from Lear. My loyalty is to Lear. But Lear will respect your decision and convey it to me.”
He pushed back from the table and stood.
He spoke very definitely about Lear’s state of mind, it seemed to Plath. And not for the first time it occurred to her that she might have been speaking to Lear all along. Was Caligula Lear?
Except that there was something in the killer’s eyes when he spoke of his master. There was affection, it seemed to Plath, affection and … not fear. No, Caligula did not fear his master. He liked Lear. He was … he was …
Proud!
It hit her so suddenly she gulped and blushed and ended up awkwardly extending a hand, which Caligula bemusedly refused.
No, Plath thought, Caligula is not Lear. But neither was he a mere employee.
Affection and pride.
Unable to sit still in the safe house, Keats had come halfway and met her on the sidewalk. With neither of them acknowledging the other, they made their way to a Starbucks. Standing in line, speaking the proper Starbucks drink formula, squeezing around a tiny round table too close to the bathroom—it was all reassuringly normal.
“Did you make it?” she asked him.
He smiled. “I grabbed his sleeve as he was standing up. I’m on his arm and heading north. In an hour I’ll be seeing what Caligula sees.”
“And who he sees,” Plath added.
“So what did you two talk about?”
Just a flicker in Plath’s eyes. “I told him what Stern had said about the Tulip being impregnable.”
“And Caligula accepted that?”
Plath shrugged. “What else could he do? He agreed to pass it along to Lear.” She frowned, formed a sentence in her head that went like this: There’s something proprietary in the way Caligula speaks about Lear. There’s a relationship there. Almost father-son, I think.
But she didn’t speak it. Under the table she clenched her hands into fists. She found it difficult to talk about Lear at all. She could feel it. She could guess that it was wiring.
What she could not do was decide to rip up that wire. That felt suicidal. It felt painful, though of course it would not be.
More wiring. She’d been wired to fear ripping up the wire.
Games within games. Ever-deeper circles of hell.
Plath’s phone lit up. She recognized the number. She covered one ear against the noise of steaming milk.
“Mr. Stern?”
To her surprise it was a woman’s voice. “No. He’s dead.”
Plath froze. Then, “What?” It sounded childlike to her, her own voice. She sounded wounded.
“This is Camilla Strange. I’m … I mean, I was … Mr. Stern’s second-in-command. I am now holed up at McLure Labs with reports of four of our people dead.”
Plath found she was breathing hard. Audibly. “How did you know to call me?”
Was it her imagination or were there an unusual number of police sirens. Too many even for New York?
Was it her imagination, or were unflappable New Yorkers hunched a bit too tight around their lattes? Were their eyes less big-city averted and more alert-scared?
“Mr. Stern left a file to be opened in the event of his suspicious death.”
“And was it suspicious? His death?”
Camilla Strange laughed humorlessly. “He seems to have been … eaten. Consumed. His driver brought him here, dead, with maybe a third or a half of his body gone. Muscles, viscera, organs: all eaten. Like millions of ants had been working on him. That’s how he looks. Like roadkill.”
“Nanobots,” Plath said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Camilla Strange said. “That was our thought, too. A mini gray-goo scenario. They must have been programmed in advance to replicate only so many generations. And then … I’m sorry, someone is … hold on, please.”
The phone muted. Then Camilla was back. “I just sent you a piece of video.”
Plath switched apps, opened the video, and turned so that Keats could see. It showed a sedan screeching to a halt at McLure Labs. A man whose entire head and shoulders seemed to be weeping blood staggered from the car, walked three steps, and fell.
“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God, what is that?” The voice on the video was saying.
The picture zoomed in, and for just two seconds before focus went hazy Plath could see the dead man liquefying before her eyes.
The video ended. Blessedly no advertising had yet been attached.
“Ma’am? Ms. McLure?”
“Yes.”
“You saw?”
“I saw.”
“What do we—”
“Stay hidden. Stay out of it. This is out of your hands now.”
Plath, shaken, hung up the phone. She excused herself to the bathroom. She vomited into the toilet bowl, fished in her bag for a mint, found three loose Tic Tacs.
War was on. If there had been any uncertainty, it was gone now. If she had entertained doubts about whose side she was on, the Armstrong Twins had made it easy.
Stern had been like an uncle. The one living remnant of her father’s company. The only man she knew who’d been Grey McLure’s friend.
Stern, murdered by the Twins. Her brother, murdered by the Twins. Her father …
She saw it again in her mind, the towers falling, and mingling with that imagery was the vivid personal memory of watching her father’s jet arcing crazily out of the sky, plunging toward the stadium, the fear, the panic, the flash and heat and noise of the explosion.
If she was not in this to avenge her father and brother, why was she in it at all?
Was it all wiring now, thrusting these memories to the fore? Maybe, yes. But that didn’t make it wrong, any of it.
Stern must have been in agony.… Grey McLure must have died in terror, not at his own extinction but at the knowledge that his son would die with him, and possibly his daughter as well.
If wire was what it took to give her strength, then okay. Okay.
She wiped her mouth, washed her hands, chewed the Tic Tacs, and thumbed a text.
ARTIFACT
Plath to Lear: Yes.
EIGHTEEN
The Antarctic weather came down like the wrath of God. Sixty-knot winds, subzero tempera
tures. Nothing was flying out of Forward Green.
It was on her third day there that Imelda Suarez decided to take a chance and see what was in the big hangar out to the south. She waited until the base boss—his actual title was Chief Executive Forward Green—had his birthday party.
Suarez had no difficulty starting up a Sno-Cat and driving off toward the south. No one saw her leave, which was not surprising in the whiteout conditions. The problem would come if for some reason she got lost or the Cat broke down. Then she would have to call for help and all hell could break loose.
In her forty-eight hours at the base Suarez had felt that this was a very different sort of place, very different from the usual Antarctic facility—even very different from Cathexis Base. The ice was a lonely and often boring place, so people tended to be friendly. People liked “new meat.”
But not at Forward Green. Here she had been treated politely, properly, but not welcomed. No one had plopped down next to her at table and struck up a conversation. This despite the fact that she was an attractive woman and the gender ratio on the ice was about seven to one.
Conversations in the dining hall tended to become quieter when she was seen. Everyone was trying hard not to seem secretive, but the end result was that they just seemed more so.
Maybe it was just that Tanner had warned her to expect that something strange was going on. Maybe she was seeing what she expected to see. But that said, it was weird. It was a very weird vibe, as her hippie mother would have said.
The Sno-Cat is a small, tracked vehicle, like a tiny two-person tank with big windows and no cannon. The heater was blowing noisily, rattling from something stuck in the vent, and the windshield wipers were ratcheting back and forth even more noisily, but visibility was still poor. It would be all too easy to drive right past the hangar and just keep going until the gas was used up. And then she’d quite likely freeze to death. The ice was unforgiving of recklessness.
But after an anxious half hour she saw the outlines of the building in between swipes of the wipers. She kept going—no point in being coy, she had to look like she had every reason to be here.
Before stepping out of the Sno-Cat she zipped her parka all the way up, flipped her fur-lined hood forward, and tugged at the drawstrings before pulling on her huge gloves. Her dark goggles were already in place.
Suarez climbed out of the warm cab and was almost knocked over by the wind. But she was a sailor, after all, and not unaccustomed to pitching decks and bad weather, so she avoided disgracing herself. She twisted the door handle, and, sure enough, it was unlocked.
The wind—which was a battering physical force outside—became just a howling noise.
The hangar was lit only minimally, but it was still bright enough to see. And what she saw were four vehicles like the ones in the video Tanner had shown her. Three were partially dismantled, with parts strewn across wheeled steel tables.
The fourth vehicle appeared to be intact. She walked to it, torn between fascination and caution.
It was about thirty-five feet long from tip to tail, and almost as wide. It was a sort of elongated oval, a hovercraft judging by the skirts, but otherwise like no hovercraft she’d ever seen outside of a Hollywood movie.
It had a tail, almost like something you’d see on a fighter jet, but there was no horizontal plane, just a shark’s fin bearing missile pods on each side. A quick count indicated six missiles total, three in each pod. She had no familiarity with the type of ordnance, but it was undoubtedly real and undoubtedly missiles and undoubtedly military in its purpose—and that fact shocked her.
Antarctica was the last place on Earth without nationalities or armies.
Before and beneath the tail was a hard plastic canopy—again like something from a fighter jet. There appeared to be two jet turbines mounted on either side, flush with the top, squat beside the canopy. The pilot would be able to see ahead and to either side by looking over the engine casings.
It was painted a marshmallow white with only a few blue accent notes here and there, plus the obligatory safety notices near the intakes and exhausts from the two jet turbine engines.
Suarez walked boldly to the hovercraft and peeked inside the canopy. The controls were more modern versions of those on her own LCAC.
“What do you think?”
The voice made her jump. It was male, high-pitched, curious not hostile. But when she turned to see its source, she was face-to-face with an assault rifle. Behind the rifle was a middle-aged man in white overalls. He was balding, had a red face and glasses. And he was not, she judged, used to pointing weapons at people.
“It looks fast,” she said, trying for a nonchalant tone.
“It is,” the man said with evident pride. “She’ll do one sixty knots with no wind and on smooth ice.”
“One sixty? And if it hits a bump?”
“Do I need to point this at you?”
She shrugged. “I’m unarmed. And I’m not up to anything. I came out here because I can’t find a three-sixteenth socket wrench to save my life. I’m Imelda Suarez. I drive an LCAC. They brought me in to work on … well, to be honest, I think they brought me in on a bullshit excuse.”
The man smiled expectantly. “And why would they bring you here on a pretext?”
“So that I would see this.” She indicated the hovercraft. “So that they could see how I reacted. Because they need hovercraft pilots and we aren’t exactly thick on the ground. There aren’t a hundred left on the planet, let alone on the ice since the navy’s LCACs were decommissioned.”
The man lowered the gun, then set it on one of the tool carts. “I suspect you’re right, Ms. Suarez. Or is it Lieutenant Suarez?”
“Not lieutenant,” she said forcefully. “Semper fi and all that, but I’m no longer getting paid by Uncle Sam. Do I get to learn your name?”
“Babbington. Joseph Babbington. Doctor, if that matters to you. We expected you yesterday; that was the thinking, anyway. We were ready yesterday. I’m just an engineer. I did some of the design on the sleigh.”
“The sleigh?”
He shrugged. “It’s a nickname, but it stuck. ‘Santa’s badass sleigh,’ some wit said once, and now that’s what we call it.” He fished a remote control from his pocket, pressed a button, and the sleigh’s canopy rose. “Take a closer look.”
Cautiously, very aware that the assault rifle was still near at hand, she leaned into the cockpit. She took it in with an expert eye, whistled, and said, “About twenty years ahead of my cockpit. Very nice. That’s a forward-looking radar?”
“Oh, much better than that. What we have there, Lieuten … Ms. Suarez … is a computerized obstacle avoidance system technology. COAST, because, well, you know how engineers love acronyms. It senses changes in elevation—obstacles, anything over six inches above grade level—and either diverts power to the cushion to lift the sleigh clear, steers clear, or in extreme cases slows to allow the pilot to choose the course of action.”
“Useful if you’re shooting along at one hundred and sixty knots.”
“Vital if you’re shooting along at one hundred and sixty knots.… We have two qualified pilots,” Babbington said, with the air of someone who was tired of playing games. “We need six total. Four primaries and two backups. You could be the third primary, if you qualify. And if you’re interested.”
“Since I left the military my interests have had a lot to do with what I’m paid.”
Babbington searched her face for a long time. He didn’t believe her. Or at least he didn’t believe her yet. “The pay is three hundred thousand USD per annum.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s a tough job. It may even be a dangerous job. And it’s a job that has something in common with your military service: it demands unquestioning loyalty and obedience.”
She reached in and put her hand on the yoke. They’d gone to the trouble of padding it with leather. It was like something out of a sports car.
On impulse she hopped inside,
a move that required a twisting half jump, like a stunt rider mounting a running horse. She made it work.
The cockpit was snug, but there was room to the left and right, flat surfaces that even included a cup holder. The pedals felt familiar. If her LCAC was a twenty-year-old Buick, this was a brand-new Porsche. It even had a new-car smell.
It was seductive.
“Very nice,” she said. “But what’s it for?”
“For?”
“Dr. Babbington, I couldn’t help but notice the missiles.”
“Indeed.”
“Why would the sleigh require missiles?”
“We’re testing it for the military.”
She wondered if she should let the lie go unchallenged. If she called him out, would he shoot her? No, she judged: if she failed to call bullshit, he’d know she was lying.
“That’s very funny,” she said. “What’s the real reason?”
Babbington smiled, a nice, genuine smile. “The owner of the company is a bit … let’s say, she’s a bit unusual. She has a notion that civilization will soon collapse, and she intends to sit it out right here. But should that civilization lash out at her in its last throes, she wants to be able to defend herself.”
“You work for a nut?”
“I used to work for the Pentagon, as did you. Weren’t we working for nuts then? And those nuts paid rather ungenerous government salaries.”
Despite herself, Suarez laughed. “Well, you got me there. What kind of range does this thing have?”
“The sleigh has a three-hundred-fifty-mile operational range. Six surface-to-surface missiles, four surface-to-air missiles just inside the engine cowling, twin thirty-caliber machine guns.”
With a show of reluctance Suarez climbed out of the cockpit.
“I have to tell you, Dr. Babbington: three hundred large would be very nice. Very, very nice. But there’s something else. The U.S. Navy taught me to drive hovercraft, but that was incidental to my core training.”
“Which was?”
“Marines, first, as you already know. Then Sea Air Land, Doctor. Navy SEAL.”