Final Days

NINETEEN

Florida Array, 4 February 2235

Saul continued through stark concrete corridors until he came to a service elevator that carried him back upwards, and into the main Array building. To his shock, it was very nearly deserted, emptier than he had ever known it to be; so the only conclusion he could come to was that gate-travel had been suspended altogether.

Before long, he encountered a small unit of ASI personnel. The three men carrying Cobras were dressed in matte-black armour, and accompanied by a Black Dog whose four thick legs whirred and clanked rhythmically as it trailed after them, its armour-plated torso laden with sonar cannons. The squad was led by a lieutenant named David Murakami, who insisted on checking Saul’s credentials.

‘Sorry,’ Murakami apologized, ‘got to check everyone’s clearance. And I mean everyone’s.’

‘I was forced to walk here from the highway after the traffic snarled up, and it looks like half of Florida is heading for this place. Any idea what the hell is going on out there?’

Murakami let out a heavy sigh. ‘Sir, I’ve been trying to find someone who can give me a straight explanation. You’re from Investigations, so I was kind of hoping you’d be the one to set me straight.’

Saul shook his head ruefully. ‘Sorry.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ Murakami replied, clearly far from happy at that reply. ‘Between you and me, though, I’d swear on my mother’s tits it’s all to do with those things out in the ocean.’

‘Yeah,’ said one of his squad, with a UP tag bearing the name Hall. ‘Tere’s people out there on the other side of the barricades who think it’s the End Times, except far as I can see they’d all rather run for the colonies than wait around for Jesus to come haul their asses to the big fire.’

Some of the others chuckled. ‘Guess they had second thoughts about Jesus being in a forgiving mood,’ said one.

Saul turned to Murakami. ‘Have they shut off access to Copernicus?’

‘Nope.’ Murakami shook his head. ‘I know it looks empty around here, but there’s still a hell of a lot of traffic heading for Luna. Hopper-loads of people have been flying in here twenty-four hours a day for the past couple of days and being sent straight through with no delay.’

Saul frowned. ‘Who?’

Murakami shrugged. ‘Again, sir, I was hoping you could tell me. Civilians mostly, from what I’ve seen.’

‘It’s the government,’ said Hall, with an expression of disgust on his face, ‘They’re getting their own people out and leaving the rest of us here to rot.’

Saul looked over at him. ‘You know that for a fact?’

‘All I can tell you is there are whole families arriving here, and they’re all being escorted by Special Ops types using heavy gear like Fido here.’ He nodded towards the Black Dog. ‘It’s like the lieutenant says. They’ve been bringing them in to the Florida Array day and night and shipping them through the gates to Copernicus as fast as they can.’

‘Special Ops, you said?’

‘Hundreds of them,’ said the soldier. ‘Look to me like they’re armed heavily enough to start a war somewhere. And here’s the other thing,’ he stabbed the air with one finger. ‘Nobody, but nobody, is coming back through, the other way. What the hell’s that about?’

After he left them, Saul signed into the main security database, downloading anything he could on Farad Maalouf that he hadn’t discovered already. At the same time, he continued making his way across one of the huge concourses.

The concourse was eerily silent. Enormous animated advertisements hung in the air, while an electronic display above the immigration checkpoints indicated a variety of off-world destinations. None of the usual civilian staff was visible, and so Saul passed unchallenged through a security gate and entered a transfer station that on any normal day would be processing a couple of hundred passengers at a time on to the shuttle-cars. During peak hours, each transfer station could handle close on three hundred people every seven minutes, both coming and going.

There were further squads of troopers guarding the transfer station, their Black Dogs pounding up and down across the concourse on sturdy steel legs. One swivelled its head towards Saul as he moved towards a shuttle-car, turning away again as soon as its onboard AI registered the newcomer’s clearance.

‘Hey!’

Saul turned to see a man wearing the uniform of a security commander hurrying towards him. ‘Your clearance doesn’t allow you through here,’ the man told him.

‘If it doesn’t,’ Saul replied, ‘that’s a first.’

The commander studied Saul’s UP clearance for a moment, then rolled his eyes in evident irritation. ‘Great, more screw-ups,’ he muttered. ‘Where exactly are you headed?’

‘Newton.’

‘Why?’

Saul forced a laugh, deciding the commander didn’t really need to know. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he replied. ‘I’m really not at liberty to discuss that.’

He watched the other man consider this for a moment, before shaking his head slowly. ‘That’s not good enough. So long as we’re under a state of emergency, you’re going to need to get fresh authorization. Maybe—’

‘Sir!’ A trooper came running up to them just then. ‘We’ve got sixty or more people just broke through a cordon near the secure runway, where we’re expecting another hopper to arrive in the next ten minutes. Johnson wants to know what his orders are.’

‘Shit,’ the commander swore under his breath. ‘All right,’ he instructed the trooper, ‘tell him to use any force necessary to clear the intruders away from the runway. Any force, is that understood?’

‘Sir.’ The trooper nodded, before jogging back the way he’d come.

‘As for you,’ the commander turned back to Saul, ‘I don’t have the time for this. Get into a shuttle-car right now before I change my mind.’

Saul stared after the retreating trooper. ‘Did I really hear you give that order? You’re firing on civilians now?’

The commander’s face reddened. ‘I already told you I don’t have time for this.’

Saul raised both hands in mock surrender, before quickly boarding the nearest shuttle-car. It shuddered as the hydraulic clamps released it and it began to move forward, gradually picking up speed. Saul took a window-seat and watched as the concourse slid out of sight and the shuttle-car was carried into one of several tunnels running parallel to each other, the walls crammed with coolant pipes, radiation feedback buffers and shielding.

Before long he was being transported across the dozen metres of the wormhole itself, as four-fifths of his weight dropped away.

<"Times New Roman">The Lunar Array proved to be just as eerily quiet as its earthbound counterpart, which struck Saul as remarkable, given it was several times larger. Where the Florida Array existed primarily to shuttle people backwards and forwards between Earth and the Moon, its lunar equivalent also provided access to a dozen interstellar destinations. The entire facility sprawled over nearly fifteen square kilometres, challenging even the nearby city in terms of sheer scale.

Saul made it through a series of impromptu checkpoints, with the help of some constructive lying, and soon learned that he was right in guessing that all incoming traffic from the colonies had been suspended, for the duration of an as yet unspecified emergency. But while he waited at one checkpoint in particular, a group of tired and harried-looking travellers were guided past by a phalanx of the Special Ops soldiers Murakami had mentioned earlier. Those they were escorting were clearly civilians, yet no one at the checkpoint attempted to confirm their credentials, or even find out by what authority they were being allowed to pass into areas that even Saul struggled to reach. As they passed close enough, he could see from their tags that every one of them had all-areas clearance. Even the troopers questioning him didn’t possess that level of clearance.

Somehow, he got through. Saul jumped on a robot bus empty of passengers, which carried him all the rest of the way to the Copernicus–Newton gate. There he once again found himself forced to do some fast talking in order to continue on his way. His weight increased again, once he had passed through the wormhole, but not to Earth-normal, for Newton was slightly smaller, and less dense. Finally, after yet more clearance checks and terse questioning upon his arrival, Saul looked around to find himself riding on a train passing through the shrouded city of Sophia, beneath an alien sky.

Dense, greenish-black vegetation smothered the valley walls that rose above the tented fabric containing the city’s human-breathable atmosphere. As Saul disembarked at the central rail terminus, the air was alive with the scents of sweet tea and roasting chestnuts, and Al-Khiba floated far above, with bands of dark orange and brown girdling its equator. One of the gas giant’s other moons was moving with stately grace across the sky, appearing tiny through distance, yet so clear and sharp that Saul almost imagined he could reach up and pluck it out of the air like some fulvous jewel.

It rapidly became clear that many of Newton’s public information services had either been reduced in operation or shut down altogether. Saul jumped on to an open-topped maglev bus that smelled of apples and rotting fish, closer to the centre of town, and gazed around as it carried him through the narrow, winding streets. Most of the people he saw wore business suits, or else the same casual clothing people tended to wear almost everywhere throughout the colonies. But the farther out he travelled, the more frequently he saw men wearing keffiyahs or taqiyah caps, some of them accompanied by women in chadors.

According to the scant information he’d been able to scrape out of the ASI’s databases, Farad’s brother lived in the north-eastern section of Sophia, not too far from where the city’s all-covering roof met the upper slopes of the valley. Saul had a distinct feeling, however, that actually finding Farad was going to prove to be a bitch.

It was already getting late Alcal businesses were starting to wind down for the night. Saul yawned involuntarily, and realized just how much this long and terrible day had taken out of him. He let his eyelids droop for a moment, but all he saw behind them were scared and hungry people struggling along under a noonday sun, or those echoing concourses populated by nervous troopers following orders they didn’t understand.

Disembarking eventually in a part of town where he knew he could find a family-run hotel that he’d used before, he headed past a variety of small coffee shops clustered around one of the massive pillars that supported the city’s roof. Choosing a café, he ordered coffee and sweet pastries, and when the coffee arrived it proved so thick and bitter as to be almost undrinkable. But he persevered, and before long the caffeine began to work its magic, filling him with a temporary but nonetheless welcome sense of well-being. By the time he moved on, brushing through softly glowing adverts for baklava or Turkish tea, he was feeling a little more alert.

It didn’t take long for Saul to realize he was being followed, even though the streets were still busy with both pedestrians and road traffic. He stopped from time to time, as if to watch the sun slipping behind the gas-giant, and when he glanced back the way he’d come he spotted a couple of faces familiar from the café, but now mingling in with the crowds. He kept his eyes fixed on them, until it became clear they were trying just a bit too hard not to look his way.

Saul started to walk more quickly, while trying to figure out his next move. But before he reached a decision, someone approaching him lunged sideways, propelling him through a dark shop doorway.

He felt hands reach out for him, noticed faces barely distinguishable in the gloom. As he lashed out with his fist, he felt it make satisfying contact with yielding flesh. Someone groaned, but more bodies piled on top of him before he could take another swing.

They were yelling in what might have been Turkish, his contacts struggling to run a translation, but there were too many talking all at once for the software to come up with anything meaningful.

He kicked and struggled, but they had him down, with his face against the floor. One yanked his head back while another thrust a wad of cloth between his jaws, before pulling a bag over his head and securing it tight around his face.

Hands grabbed the back of his coat and dragged him further into the interior of the shop. A boot struck him hard in the ribs and Saul groaned in pain, just before he felt the prick of a needle in his neck. Immediately, dark tendrils of fatigue spread all the way through him, utterly irresistible, dragging him down into a warm and comforting darkness devoid of dreams.