Terminal Point Page 5

  There was no way out of the punishment she could hear in Erik’s voice. Ciari could never admit that she knew the identity of that seemingly unknown target. All Strykers who held the OIC position and those of the company’s highest officer ranks obeyed a hidden law, and it had nothing to do with human legal wrangling. The Silence Law gave and took, but above all, it saved. Some might argue that the cost was too high, but Ciari never had.

  Despite everything that was going on, she wouldn’t betray her people. Her life wasn’t worth theirs. She stayed silent.

  Erik leaned forward slightly and rested both hands flat against the old wooden tabletop. “You are not justifying your case, Ciari. Silence is not an acceptable defense.”

  She could have spoken for days straight and it wouldn’t have mattered. The judgment had been decided prior to her being summoned before the bench. This was merely a formality and a showcase of control.

  “We announced the presence of rogue psions in the city as required by law,” Ciari said. “It served to explain the large numbers of Strykers on the ground and resulted in the deactivation of the electrical grid. We thought the reduction in power would help us flush out and corner the target.”

  Travis Athe raised a single finger. “It didn’t.”

  Ciari shook her head. “No, sir.”

  “How could you think that frightening human citizens was a good idea?”

  “We acted in accordance with the laws in order to save them.”

  “That is debatable.”

  “Is this a debate, sir?”

  “You overstep yourself, Ciari. Much as you overstepped yourself in Buffalo.”

  “We did what we thought was correct in the face of rogue psions and an unknown threat. We only ever had the well-being of humans in our thoughts.”

  It was a lie, they all knew it, but one every Stryker learned to tell.

  “Your actions produced failures that resulted in this mess,” Erik said. “That is unacceptable.”

  Ciari couldn’t argue that statement. “We did what we could with the information we had. It was my decision.”

  “Do you stand behind your decision?”

  Ciari looked him straight in the eye. “Yes.”

  In a world full of deadzones and toxic gene pools, with a population barely at a million and a quarter strong, Erik created order with the strike of a gavel. The World Court’s efforts over the years had resulted in hundreds of secretly built space shuttles waiting to be filled in the Paris Basin, poised to leave the planet for a distant promised land. Earth meant nothing to the elite descendants of those who survived the Border Wars and managed to clean up their DNA by the fifth generation and join the Registry.

  Erik embodied that mind-set, as did everyone else seated in judgment before her. This fact hadn’t changed in all the decades the World Court had been in power.

  “You’ve been such a model psion to those beneath you in the Strykers Syndicate over the past eleven years, Ciari,” Erik said.

  “I train my people as you require me to, sir.”

  “And therein lies the issue. They are not yours. They have never belonged to you. We own them, as we own you.”

  Ciari expected the pain, the flip of that switch. For one crystalline moment, she thought she could feel the hum of the neurotracker implanted in the back of her head as it processed the order for punishment. Perhaps she did, but it was drowned out by the searing agony that burned through her brain, pressing against the interior of her skull and spiking down her nerves.

  She screamed when it became too much, too hot, knowing that to hold it all in would just drag it out longer. The sound of her voice echoed in her ears. It was the only thing she heard, the only thing that made any sense as she writhed on the floor, both hands clutching her head, incapable of making the pain stop. When it became too much, when it seemed as if the agony were too big for her skin to contain, Ciari clung to the self-inflicted pain in her gut to differentiate between the real world and the threat of insanity that began to crawl through her mind.

  I want, Ciari thought through the fiery feeling of having her brain torn apart. I want you—

  She tasted blood on her tongue, smelled metal all along the inside of her nose and mouth. She swallowed air and couldn’t breathe, her nerves following the dictates of a machine and not her own body.

  It went on and on and on.

  FIVE

  AUGUST 2379

  LONGYEARBYEN, NORWAY

  “What the hell is Cinnamomum verum?” Kerr said. He held up a silvery foil packet to the fluorescent lights bolted to the ceiling of the vault, squinting at the faded text printed over the front of the packet.

  Jason telekinetically added another box of seed packets and clear glass vials to the top of a pile. The entire stack teetered precariously near the entrance to the storage vault they were ransacking. “Hell if I know.”

  “Cinnamon,” Kristen piped up from where she had climbed one of the storage racks and was methodically handing boxes down to a scavenger for loading. When he didn’t move fast enough for her tastes, she dropped the boxes on the floor. “Spice out of Sri Lanka.”

  “Right,” Quinton said as he hefted a box onto a gravlift. “What’s Sri Lanka?”

  “It was an island country in the Indian Ocean. Rising sea levels swallowed half of it. The Border Wars destroyed the rest.”

  “Huh.” Kerr turned the packet in his hands from side to side, wondering what the seeds would look like. “Guess whoever built this place had the right idea. You know, I never did believe those conspiracy theories on the pirate streams about the government hiding supplies. Wonder if anything else they talk about is true.”

  “Most of those people are dissidents repeating false information,” Lucas said. “They don’t know any better.”

  Quinton eyed him. “You said most. What about the rest?”

  Lucas smiled slightly, but his only answer to Quinton’s curiosity was “You don’t need to worry about the rest.”

  “If we can’t trust government history, and pirate streams don’t have the entire truth, how do you know all this stuff?” Jason said, warily eyeing Kristen where she clung to a metal shelf.

  “Government history is fairly accurate,” Lucas said as he entered information into his datapad. “But only if you sit on the World Court or know how to pry it out of the server farm that handles the data traffic for The Hague.”

  “Why didn’t the governments from before the Border Wars use what was up here to save their people? The terraforming machines alone could have saved billions,” Kerr said.

  “Who would have gotten the right to use them first? Third-world countries? First? In the face of declining resources, overpopulation, and environmental change, the ruling classes thought Mars was the better option for them, just not for everyone.”

  Kerr shook his head and put the packet back into the box. He resealed it before handing it to the nearest scavenger. He reached for another one, ignoring the twinge of sore muscles all across his back and down his arms. Everyone was past the point of exhaustion, but they kept going. The only person excused from doing heavy lifting was Threnody. She was back in Alpha shuttle, sleeping off the exhaustion of opening the seed bank. Jason checked up on her once every hour or so. She hadn’t woken up yet and wasn’t getting any better.

  The temperature in the three storage vaults was set at -18 degrees Celsius and needed to remain that cold to keep everything viable. They methodically worked their way through each of the vaults, taking half of everything: seeds, cell lines, DNA samples, frozen embryos, and everything else in the inventory. Aside from the boxes of seeds, the frozen zoo would hopefully repopulate empty continents and oceans one day through cloning. None of them expected they would live to see that miracle.

  Lucas wanted more than what they were stealing, but two days was all they could risk on Spitsbergen; one day of recovery, one day of work. Then it would take hours to fly to Antarctica. The environmental systems on the shuttles had been prepped
at a near-freezing temperature to handle the cargo. Each was equipped with a limited amount of cold-storage units, and they had to factor in space for the disassembled terraforming machines, but not all the stolen goods would fit in cold storage.

  Looking up from his datapad, Lucas nodded to Jason. “This stack is ready. Get it out of here.”

  “Right,” Jason said. He wrapped his telekinesis around the stack of boxes and teleported out. Appearing outside a shuttle in the marked-off arrival zone, Jason waved tiredly at Everett as the other man came down the ramp.

  “How many more?” Everett said as he eyed the pile that Jason had brought out.

  “We’re barely halfway done,” Jason said. “You can expect two more loaded gravlifts in about fifteen minutes.”

  Everett frowned. “We’re full up on three of the shuttles already, and one of the shuttles needs to carry the terraforming machines.”

  “Lucas needs to check if those are still in working order. It’s been a few hundred years since they were taken apart and stored.”

  “Tell him to hurry it up then. We need to know in order to calculate volume and weight.”

  Jason shrugged and teleported away, carrying Everett’s concerns with him. Lucas didn’t even look up from the datapad in his hands as Jason finished reporting. “Everything will fit. If we need to make space for the weight, we’ll leave people behind.”

  Jason stared at him. “You said we couldn’t risk leaving any evidence of our passage.”

  “No one will think to look for bodies in the water. Get back to transporting these things to the shuttles. Matron has a stack ready for you in the second vault.”

  Jason left. He knew better than to argue with the man who still had an iron grip on their lives.

  It took hours of nonstop cataloguing, transferring, and pure grunt work to get the job done. Seeds were infinitesimal in weight, but with the amount they were transporting, it quickly added up. Toward the end, they ripped open boxes, taking just one or two packets of the remaining seeds, or just one vial of DNA, one stored embryo. For the more important items—such as algae and countless tree seeds and grains—the amounts were never reduced.

  Only when the last cargo door closed and everyone was settled in for the flight did Lucas strap himself into the navigator’s seat in Alpha shuttle. Matron was piloting again, and Threnody was laid out between them, unconscious and liable to remain that way for hours. The flight deck was set at a higher temperature to accommodate her.

  Matron yawned through the preflight procedure. After the fifth yawn, she picked up a hypospray nearby and pressed it against her throat, dosing herself with a shot of adrenaline. A minute or so later, Lucas could feel the engines start up through the soles of his boots.

  “Didn’t think we’d make it this far,” Matron said as she settled her hands on the stick and activated the vertical takeoff and landing.

  “Get us in the air,” Lucas said.

  Matron did as she was told in silence, launching the shuttle and feeling the weight of the cargo in the jerk of the stick. They had a heavy load in the shuttle’s belly, one more precious than anything her scavengers had ever discovered in the broken, abandoned cities of America. For all the credit that the government issued, for all the elite perks that one could have by gaining entrance into the Registry, clean DNA wasn’t worth anything compared to what nine shuttles ferried out of Spitsbergen one late-August morning.

  Behind them, its doors shut but not locked, the Svalbard Global Seed and Gene Bank was just as silent, just as cold as it had been for centuries.

  They flew north, climbing over the Arctic Ocean, heading for the Pacific. The midnight sun guided their way, a constant bright circle beyond the clouds.

  PART TWO

  Cognizance

  SESSION DATE: 2128.03.18

  LOCATION: Institute of Psionics Research

  CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett

  SUBJECT: 2581

  FILE NUMBER: 251

  The doctor watches Aisling play with a deck of cards. The child’s small hands spread the plain, white rectangles across the table in a shapeless mess. She picks cards at random and lays them before her in a line.

  “You never ask how I do it,” Aisling says as she pushes the cards together. “Why?”

  “Would you tell us if we did?” the doctor replies.

  The girl tucks a piece of dark hair behind one small ear, studying the cards. “No.”

  “That’s why, Aisling.”

  “But you’re a doctor. Doctors should ask questions.”

  “We do.”

  “Not the right ones.” Aisling smiles as she flips over a card, revealing a crimson red square on its face and nothing else. “Pick a card, any card. I can tell you the future.”

  “Would it be the right one?” The doctor leans forward to catch the child’s gaze with her own. “Would you help us survive?”

  Aisling flips more cards over, one at a time, until a line of shapes and symbols lie before her. She picks a card seemingly at random, holding it up beside her bleached-out violet eyes, the color of the shape a deep, dark blue. “My brother has eyes like this.”

  “Where is Matthew, Aisling?”

  Aisling scoots the card as far across the table as her small arm will stretch. “You can’t have him.”

  SIX

  AUGUST 2379

  THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS

  Beneath the Peace Palace lay a city of underground tunnels and bunkers. Its protective warrens once housed thousands of people during the Border Wars and still held their descendants today. The most well-guarded bunkers were reserved for those who served on the World Court. The business of ruling, however, was always conducted aboveground.

  Sharra Gervais was blond-haired, blue-eyed, and gorgeous, human down to her very registered DNA. She was Erik’s wife, his perfect piece of femininity; a woman who spent the majority of her time raising a daughter that he rarely saw or interacted with unless for a public event. The world press adored those family moments; Sharra hated the lie she was living. But she knew her role and played it well, portraying the good wife the world expected her to be. She sat in the area reserved for the families of those serving on the World Court, hands clasped in her lap, looking at her husband as he stood before the cameras of the world press.

  He still wore his robes of office, the black synthfabric soaking up the glare from the cameras. Beneath the robe, Sharra knew he wore a perfectly tailored business suit in charcoal gray and pinstripes, the crisp whiteness of his hidden shirt a match for her dress. She smoothed her hands over the synthfabric resting against her thighs. White was such an expensive color to keep clean.

  “I admire your husband’s resolve when it comes to the safety of society,” Fatima Omar said softly. The much younger woman sitting to Sharra’s left wore a far less fashionable outfit, one that covered nearly every centimeter of her body. The long skirt and blouse were modestly cut, her hijab a demure black with little adornment save for a tiny amount of embroidery along the edges. Her husband, Mohammad, was a justice who stood in solid support of Erik.

  “Yes,” Sharra said absently, her attention focused on the spectacle before her. The reporters took up much of the area inside the renovated pressroom, with its small stage and guarded section for families and dignitaries who didn’t merit a place before the microphones of the world press.

  “—cannot condone what happened in Buffalo,” Erik said. “The families of those who lost their lives during the cowardly attacks by rogue psions will be compensated, as is the law. The Strykers Syndicate is reviewing how they organize and initiate their missions. This will not happen again. Punishment has been administered to those responsible for the break in the chain of command.”

  Killing dogs makes people happy, Sharra thought, feeling the corner of her mouth tick minutely upward. But it doesn’t solve the problem, Erik.

  Politics wasn’t her place, so she kept her opinion to herself as she always did. Sharra understood society’s fea
r of psions better than most, but she also knew that psions were a cog that couldn’t easily be replaced. The Strykers Syndicate kept rogue psions in check, but they also kept Sharra in couture fashion, clean food and water. Selling soldiers to the highest bidder under strict contractual terms had made those who sat on the World Court very, very wealthy over the years. Slavery was profitable, even if certain people considered it immoral. Sharra wasn’t religious in the least, though she made a good show of bowing her head in prayer every Sunday.

  “The Strykers Syndicate is well under our control. There is no need to fear government psions when science has produced ways to keep them in check,” Erik said, gesturing faintly toward his head and the bioware net everyone knew was wrapped around his brain. “Society has nothing to fear from them.”

  Of course not. Sharra had to bite down on her bottom lip to keep from grimacing. Oh, Erik, you are such a fool.

  She loved him, or thought she did. More and more as the years passed, she began to believe it was the idea of love that she adored, not the man she had married when she was young and incapable of seeing the loneliness that came with marrying a man of his social standing. They both kept secrets, and the one true thing they shared now was their daughter. Dinner needed to be scheduled in advance. Sleep was preferable to sex.

  She regretted. It was an odd feeling.

  Before her, the reporters were beginning to ask questions, and Sharra realized she had missed much of Erik’s calculated apology in favor of her own thoughts. She already knew the gist of it. Being the wife of the most powerful human in the world had its perks.

  Sharra gave a good show for the news when it was all over, standing beside her husband and smiling proudly at him. Only when they were in the back hallways of the Peace Palace, where the judges separated into their fractious little groups and went their separate ways, did Sharra speak.

  “How is killing the OIC of the Strykers Syndicate conducive to everything we’ve worked for?” Sharra said, her voice a low hiss as they walked back to Erik’s office. Behind them trailed a quad for security, the four soldiers keeping an eye on their charges.