Final Days

TWENTY-THREE

Sophia Array, Newton Colony, 7 February 2235

It took Saul nearly sixteen hours to make his way back through the gate to Copernicus. Measured in light-years, the distance he had to cross was impossible for a human mind to contemplate, but measured through the wormhole it was a little under three and a half kilometres – three kilometres to the Sophia Array in the company of a squad of ASI troopers, then three hundred and fifty metres from the outer security perimeter to the transfer stan, and a final stretch of one hundred and fifty metres, including that short, anticlimactic trip through the wormhole itself. And yet every step involved hours of interminable waiting, as he passed through security cordons that hadn’t even been in place when he’d been heading the other way.

If anything, Narendra had underestimated the scale of the military operation taking place. Sophia’s public UP networks had remained out of action, while the remaining communications bandwidth had been commandeered by military networks to which Saul soon found he was not permitted access. He felt overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of equipment and personnel pouring through from Florida: even once he had passed through the final checkpoint within the Sophia Array, he was then obliged to wait for another three hours while battlefield-equipped Black Dogs and their human operators were shipped through to Newton. Saul sat on a bench in a warehouse area, eating from a ration pack, as he watched dozens of the four-legged machines being unpacked from crates by engineers who then ran them through software checks, before sending them out on to the streets of Sophia.

He passed time by playing back the decrypted video fragments or else browsing through a selection of the hundreds of classified documents that accompanied them, hoping they might help make some sense of what he had witnessed so far, but the more he read, the more an almost physical dread overwhelmed him. Some of the documents focused solely on the growths, including speculations on their origin, while the majority detailed the exploration of something called the Founder Network. Saul read on, numbed by what he now learned. No wonder Donohue had worked so hard to suppress it all.

One report detailed an incident on a world so far in the future that – assuming he interpreted what he read correctly, although he was far from sure he did – the last remaining stars had long since burned to cinders. The main part of the report explicitly referenced Mitchell, appearing to suggest that he had somehow died and then come back to life – a claim no less extraordinary than any other Saul had so far encountered.

He closed his eyes and leaned forward to rest his head on his folded arms, inhaling deeply just to counteract a sudden rush of nausea. He couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Jeff Cairns to know so much and never be able to talk about it. If it had been Saul himself, he’d have cracked up long ago. And, if some of the personnel psych-eval reports he’d glanced through were anything to go by, a lot of people had done precisely that.

No wonder Narendra had been so eager to show him this footage. That hadn’t just been because he wanted Saul to explain it; he’d been unable to sustain the horror of knowing everything – on Earth, at any rate – was shortly coming to an end.

Saul stretched out on the bench and dozed for a few hours amidst the roar and whirr of machinery being assembled. He woke up to find that the last of the Dogs had departed, his UP flashing a message to inform him that he could now board a shuttle-car.

As he disembarked in the Lunar Array, twenty minutes later, he saw several hundred troopers in chameleon armour preparing to head the other way, their outlines blurring as they jostled like some nightmare assemblage of ghosts. Saul made his way directly to the Copernicus–Florida gly till trying to process all the information he had absorbed, not least the destruction of everything he had ever known.

He boarded an elevator and slumped back against cool steel, closing his eyes as it whisked him twenty floors up to the Florida ASI’s command centre. The air was full of a distant rumble, like static; the massed voices of however many millions of refugees that had by now arrived at the perimeter. He thought of the crowds he’d already passed through, and wondered with a chill how many of them had since died.

Stepping out into a wide corridor, he made his way straight over to a window and stared out, with appalled fascination, at a sea of human flesh pressing up against a security cordon that had clearly undergone heavy reinforcement since he’d last seen it. A blaze of red on the horizon heralded the coming dawn, and he could make out hundreds of bodies, scattered across a no man’s land separating the mob from a nearly unbroken phalanx of sonar tanks and illuminated by powerful arc lights. Black Dogs roamed this no man’s land, while armoured drones buzzed through the air like a swarm of mechanical locusts.

There must be at least two million . . . no, he decided, more like three million people gathered all around the Array. Maybe even more. The land itself had disappeared beneath their swarming mass.

He managed to pull himself away from this appalling sight and headed for his locker, pulling out a duffel bag already containing a change of clothes. He then headed for the gym and emptied the bag on to a bench. Something fell out and clattered on the tiles.

It was an inhaler, he realized. He picked it up and stared at it for a moment, then opened it up to find it was loaded with half a dozen cellophane-wrapped balls of loup-garou. He stared at the device with a peculiar hunger and licked his lips. He should throw it away – indeed, he wanted to – but some instinct made him shove it back in the bag, instead.

He took a shower, standing under a blast of hot water for a good twenty minutes until the heat had permeated through his skin and into his bones. He then put on a change of clothes, grabbed a coffee and sandwich and found a random workstation in the main operations room that registered his clearance as he approached, projecting custom pre-sets on to the dark panels on either side. He first checked his latest messages, all of them internal memos detailing personnel’s duties under the current crisis. Saul deleted them all in disgust.

Not for the first time, it occurred to him that there were very likely people working in the offices all around him who would not hesitate to have him killed simply because of what he now knew. And, if what Narendra had told him about his being trailed by an ASI team was true, it was conceivable that such an order had already been given.

He slunk lower in his chair, brooding, but looked up in time to see Donohue pass by.

A glass partition separated him from the corridor along which Donohue was striding, in an obvious hurry. If he’d so much as glanced to one side, he’d have noticed Saul staring back at him. But the Public Standards agent continued with brisk purpose, his gaze focused directly ahead.

Saul slipped out of his seat, intending to follow him, then paused as he remembered the inhaler still in his duffel-bag. He retrieved it before hurrying out into the corridor.

Trailing Donohue at a discreet distance, he watched as the man proceeded into an executive suite, leaving the door fractionally ajar.

Saul quietly stepped up to the door, with a quick glance back the way he’d come. The command centre was very nearly deserted, much more so than he had ever seen it. Only a very few individuals were either still working at their desks or conferring quietly behind semi-transparent partitions. Luckily none of them paid him any attention, as he peeked through the open door to see Donohue leaning over a desk, with his back to him, staring at information on a screen that only he could see.

Saul ducked away from the door, and made his way to another vacant workstation nearby. He waited there, one hand up to conceal the side of his head, leaning forward as if to concentrate on some piece of scrolling information. He was watching discreetly when Donohue emerged from the executive suite a few minutes later, hurrying back towards the elevators.

Saul followed him, rigid with tension, aware that stumbling across Donohue like this was sheer luck. He kept a discreet distance, hovering around a corner while Donohue boarded an elevator. As soon as its doors closed, Saul quickly boarded the one adjoining, punching the button for the basement car park. He couldn’t be sure that was where Donohue was heading, but the chances were pretty good.

Adrenalin chased away all the aches and pains that still plagued him as the elevator dropped, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the fatigue. I need this, he thought, fumbling for the inhaler. Just one more shot to give him a little bit of killer instinct. Maybe things had gone badly that time on Kepler, but the real mistake had been taking too much, too fast.

Just enough, and no more. That was all he needed.

He pressed the device against his lips, hitting the activator and inhaling deeply. He gasped as the loup-garou exploded into his lungs, reeling back against the wall of the elevator as the drug punched its way into his bloodstream and began racing towards his brain’s chemoreceptors. His fingers twitched slightly as he pushed the inhaler back into his pocket.

After the doors slid open, Saul stepped out into an enormous, dimly lit space that normally would be filled with maintenance trucks and Agency vehicles. Instead, more than a dozen battle-scarred Dogs, surrounded by yelling repair crews, dominated most of the available space, while nearly as many sonar tanks stood waiting next to an impromptu repair station. Half a dozen engineers were crowded around the display panel of an industrial robot that whirred and vibrated while applying the bright flame of a plasma torch to the treads of one tank.

Saul stared around wildly, desperate at the thought that he’d managed to lose Donohue.

There! Saul recognized Donohue’s ID tag bobbing along past a cluster of troopers, almost unnoticeable amongst their varicoloured UP icons. He hurried past a pair of Black Dogs carrying sonar cannons on their backs, their batteries blaring noisily as the ear-muffled operators ran test checks across the ceiling.

He noticed Donohue was making his way towards a row of cars parked along one wall and hurried after him, closing the distance while casting a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure no one was looking their way.

Saul slammed into Donohue from behind, just as he was pulling the door of a car open. The man grunted under the force of the impact, which sent him flying forward across the driver’s seat. He recovered quickly, however, ramming his left elbow back into Saul’s ribs, while struggling to pull his gun from its shoulder holster.

Saul brought a knee up hard between the man’s thighs, and Donohue slumped forward, wheezing noisily. Saul leaned further inside the car and locked an arm around Donohue’s neck, while groping with his other hand until he found the holster, and pressed Donohue’s standard-issue Agnessa up against the back of the man’s head.

‘Slide over, and keep your hands visible,’ Saul commanded.

Donohue nodded wordlessly, and moved himself over to the passenger seat. His eyes widened in shock as he turned to face his assailant.

‘You son of a bitch,’ Donohue hissed. ‘If you ever had a chance of getting out of this alive, you just lost it.’

A tide of white-hot anger obscuring his thinking, Saul flicked the gun around to grasp it by the muzzle, then whipped the handle viciously across Donohue’s head.

Donohue reeled back in shock, then reached up one trembling hand to feel the blood seeping from his forehead. ‘What the fuck do you want?’ he screeched.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Saul snapped, pressing the Agnessa between Donohue’s eyes. He groped at the dashboard, opaquing the windows as far as they would go, so as to hide them both from outside scrutiny.

‘Why were you following me when I arrived in Sophia?’ Saul demanded. ‘Were you intending to kill me, like you did Farad Maalouf?’

‘You have no idea what you’re involved in,’ Donohue snarled. ‘I told you to get the fuck off Earth, and you ignored me. You got yourself caught up in something you shouldn’t have had any part in.’

‘Tell me, about Mitchell Stone,’ Saul demanded through clenched teeth. ‘You told me he was dead, but that’s not what I’ve been hearing. Why bother lying to me?’

‘So it’s true what I heard,’ Donohue snapped back. ‘You did get your hands on the Tau Ceti files. We’d never have figured that out if you hadn’t sent them to your girlfriend over a public network.’

‘How the hell can you know about that?’

‘You don’t have high enough clearance even to ask me that fucking question,’ Donohue replied angrily.

‘Before you sent me after Hanover, you told me I had a chance of finding out who blew the Galileo link – and that whoever did it was linked to Hsiu-Chuan. Or was all of that just so much bullshit?’

A Black Dog clumped past them, followed by two sonar tanks, only blurrily visible through the opaqued glass. The car trembled under the impact of their passing.

Donohue pulled himself more upright, one corner of his mouth twitching up into the same sneer Saul remembered from Hong Kong. ‘I don’t have to tell you,’ he said, enunciating the words carefully, ‘One. Fucking. Thing.’

Saul shot him in the thigh, taking a chance that the din of surrounding machinery would drown out the sound of the gun firing. Donohue screamed and jerked back against the door, his face turning alabaster white as he grabbed at his wounded leg. He seemed to grow suddenly smaller, his breath hissing in and out in small, tight gasps between his clenched teeth.

Saul leaned in closer, his gun now angled towards Donohue’s crotch. ‘I just want you to understand exactly how I’m feeling,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ve been waiting ten long, miserable fucking years just so I can find out if my wife and daughter are even alive. I want to know who did this thing – what person is responsible for putting my life on hold for all this time. So I want you, Agent Donohue, to tell me every last fucking thing you know. I’ve been arrested, held prisoner, tortured, had guns pointed at me, you name it – and if there’s one person around here who seems to have a better grasp of whatever the fuck is really going on, it’s you.’

‘Or what?’ Donohue gasped. ‘Or you’ll kill me?’

Saul shook his head. ‘No, I’m a lot more imaginative than that. First I’ll blow your right arm off.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Then the left. Then I’ll drill a hole through your balls. Then—’

‘All right,’ said Donohue. ‘All right. Jesus, I’ll tell you.’

Saul leaned back and waited, the loup-garou making him feel superhuman, invulnerable.

‘It was never really about Galileo,’ said Donohue. ‘When we sent you after Hanover, I mean. It was just about the shipment.’

‘The artefacts from the far future? What exactly were they carrying in that shipment?’

Donohue laughed weakly and rolled his eyes. ‘What the hell do you think was in that shipment? It was something that triggered the growths, left behind by whatever it was that built the Founder Network. But we got careless.’ He winced in pain and shifted slightly. ‘Turns out that shipment went to the bottom of the Pacific before it even managed to reach Taiwan.’

‘And that’s the cause of all this?’

‘Looks like it,’ said Donohue. His skin had by now taken on a pale and waxen appearance.

‘And Galileo?’

‘We figured you needed an added incentive to find that shipment.’

Saul fought the urge to place the gun between Donohue’s eyes and pull the trigger. ‘And Hsiu-Chuan? Where does he come into it?’

‘No.’ Donohue shook his head, and looked back at Saul with wide, frightened eyes.

Saul pushed the gun barrel against Donohue’s uninjured leg. ‘Five seconds.’

Panicked, Donohue put out a hand. ‘Wait! Okay, all right.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Hsiu-Chuan was just one link in a very long chain of Sphere politicos that wanted the shipment hijacked.’

‘Why did they want it so badly? Because of whatever triggered the growths?’

‘No, we didn’t have any idea what the artefacts were or what they could do. The Sphere couldn’t have known either.’

‘But there has to be some reason they wanted that particular shipment. They wouldn’t have planned things that carefully just for the hell of it.’

‘They got wind of the fact that we had discovered wormhole generators the size of your fist.’ Donohue coughed. ‘They were right, but they didn’t realize it was an alien technology. Maybe they suspected it . . . all I know is, they wound up grabbing the wrong shipment.’ Donohue groaned, clutching at his injured leg. ‘For Christ’s sake, let me go. I need to see a doctor.’

Saul shook his head in astonishment. ‘I can’t believe this. Billions of people are going to die, all because you people fucked up. Did you ever think it might have been better just to let the Sphere have their own damn wormholes?’

Donohue grunted, baring his teeth from the onslaught of the pain. ‘You really think technology like that would have been better in the hands of men like Hsiu-Chuan? Then you’re a fucking idiot.’

‘Tell me what you know about Hanover. Where does he come into it?’

‘We found out that he was taking bribes from organized smuggling gangs on Kepler. We kept him in business on the understanding that he could stay out of jail as long as he funnelled information back to us, but it backfired.’

‘Backfired? How?’

‘Hsiu-Chuan’s people found out he was playing both sides, and threatned to kill his entire family in front of him if he didn’t give them what they wanted. That meant access codes, times and places, delivery dates and security hacks. Everything they needed to send a team into Florida, and walk right back out with the shipment.’

‘Jesus.’ Saul had a mental picture of Donohue running up and down a leaking dam, trying to plug up hundreds of ever-widening cracks. ‘You really made a mess of this, didn’t you?’

‘Listen to me,’ rasped Donohue, his voice growing weaker. ‘About Mitchell Stone.’

‘He’s still alive, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, he is, and whatever you do with me, you need to help us find him. And stop him.’

‘Why? What’s he got to do with this?’

‘We interrogated him. Put him under, and asked him questions. The things he told us, he’s . . . he’s not even goddamn human any more.’

‘What?’

‘That shipment we sent you to look for?’ Donohue coughed. ‘There’s no reason why the Sphere drone carrying it should have gone out of control the way it did. Those things are near as damn fail-proof. Then we found out that the Sphere lost contact with it at exactly the same instant Stone—’

The shot came from nowhere, blowing out the car’s front windscreen. Saul ducked instinctively, slamming the accelerator down, without pause for thought. The car surged forward.

More shots followed, and Saul grabbed hold of the steering wheel as it emerged from the dashboard. Donohue scrabbled at him with claw-like fingers, attempting to wrest the wheel from his grasp.

Somewhere amid the din and fury, Saul realized the terrible mistake he had made in not forcing Donohue to remove his contacts. The whole time they’d been talking, rescue had already been on the way.

Troopers scattered as the car hurtled towards them, their outlines shimmering. Donohue wrenched at the wheel and the car side-swiped a Black Dog, ripping the passenger-side door away. Donohue screamed and held on tight, as Saul managed to accelerate away again. Saul let go of the wheel just long enough to raise one leg and boot Donohue hard enough to send him tumbling out of the car.

He then grabbed hold of the wheel again, glancing in the rear-view mirror to see Donohue rolling to a halt behind him. Saul nailed the accelerator to the floor, gunning the vehicle for a ramp down which daylight filtered from above. He twisted the wheel wildly, skirting another Black Dog making its way down the same ramp, and cursing as troopers darted out of his way with only centimetres to spare.

Suddenly, miraculously, he was outside, the early morning sun pale and wan behind clouds. A cordon of tanks and Dogs surrounded the Array directly ahead of him. He kept his fot on the accelerator, swerving past several vehicles heading towards the ramp from the direction of a hopper, then past the armoured cordon and on into the no man’s land separating it from the crowds. The car ploughed through a dense tangle of barbed wire before jarring to a sudden halt.

He stumbled out of the vehicle and saw that spiked steel balls, scattered all around, had blown the tires. The crowds of refugees were just metres away, hidden behind a cordon of cars that had been pushed over on to their sides, mirroring the ASI’s own defences.

Shots came from there, aimed at the cordon of tanks. Hunching over, Saul ran forward, hoping to lose himself in the mass of people surrounding the Array. The sonar tanks let out an ear-splitting blast and he dropped to his knees, hands clasped to his ears.

Somehow he managed to get up again and keep running, half blinded with pain and unable to hear a damn thing. He squeezed between two torched cars, and seconds later was caught up in a great mob of people desperate to get away from the tanks.

Another sonar blast rolled over him, and he collapsed on to churned black mud and vomited noisily. Barely avoiding getting trampled, he balled himself up, his breath emerging in shuddering gasps as people thronged past him.

It had started to rain, a gentle pattering of it cool against his skin and washing away the blood and sweat. Saul stood up and staggered away, the world so silent in his deafness that it felt as if he were in a dream, yet pushing and stumbling past an endless mass of humanity. Passing a burned-out shopping mall, its windows shattered and its shelves stripped bare, he kept moving until the muted sound of fighting faded with distance.

The rain became torrential, thunder booming out across the Array and its surroundings, so he sought shelter under the corner of a vast tarpaulin that roofed an impromptu chapel, where several hundred worshippers kneeled on the grass to listen to a preacher deliver a sermon from the rear of a flat-bed truck. As he slumped down to the ground, the air was filled with hosannahs, at which point he realized he could hear again.

He waited until he’d recovered his breath, then put in a call to Olivia.