Across the Spectrum (27 page)

“On whose authority?” John backed away from her weapon with
hands raised.

“By the authority of UNOMA Security. This artifact belongs
to all the earth, not a single government or agency. Now roll it out of that
hole and into the lab. I estimate we have seven minutes. Tops.”

No one moved.

Mom pulled the trigger. The explosion nearly deafened me.
The bullet made a big puff of dirt an inch from John’s toes. He jumped straight
up and landed halfway down the crater wall. He fetched up inches from me.

“Might as well help, now that you’re down here.” I shrugged
and leaned a shoulder into the tiles. Two more classmates joined us. As we
pushed and wiggled the artichoke, it levitated, the base hovering at my ankles
and the tip a foot above my head.

“Big sucker,” Mom said, peering over the edge of the crater.
“Biggest one yet.”

“What aren’t you telling me, Mom?” I asked for the second
time that night.

“A lot. I’m trying to keep you from getting killed. I was too
late with the last three pods.”

The displaced air from the approaching helicopter ground
against my ears. They’d covered the distance more quickly than I thought
possible.

Mom looked up at the blinding searchlights approaching from
north, south, and west. “Damn, three minutes out. Get moving. Quickly. We can
argue and question later. Just get that thing under cover. Now!”

I laid a hand on the artichoke’s side and hastened upward.
The thing followed obediently, matching my speed.

We crossed the threshold to the lab side of the quad seconds
before lights began sweeping the ground from a quarter mile up and two miles
away.

Mom hissed and stood guard on the top step. “Quickly, Hope.
The thing should be keyed to a scientist’s DNA. Maybe yours since it levitated
and followed you, or John’s. It will open to one of you or your classmates.”

“How?” I studied the artichoke where it waited in the foyer.

“I don’t know. Each one is different. Each one is sent to
one person and remains impermeable to everyone else.”

“Mom . . . You aren’t just a site analyst,
are you?”

“No, I’m not. I’ve tracked these things for nearly fifteen
years. Now stop asking questions. The FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, the Chinese,
the Russians, and probably the Israelis will be here within minutes. The
African Consortium and the Saudis won’t be far behind. You’ve got to get the
crystal from inside the pod. Add it to the others and get away from here fast.
You’ve got to download the data on it before they catch up to you and steal it
back.”

Gone was the vague and forgetful mother who pinched ration
coupons and gently guided my homework. Here was an entirely different woman.
Authoritative, powerful, and dangerous. Someone out of a spy movie. Jane Bond.

“Move, Hope. Now!”

Gulping back my fears and my questions, I caressed a tile.
The humming resumed. My data crystals joined the orchestra again.

My finger tingled as I traced the edge of one of the
green-tipped leaves. John traced a different one and shook his head. “I got
nothing.”

When I moved my hand one tile to the right, the vibrations
intensified, faded to the right of that, grew stronger one down. Textures
blossomed beneath my palm when I flattened it. The cool alloy grew warm, hot,
burned until it melded with my skin.

John gasped, and clamped his fingers around my wrist. I
stopped him from yanking my hand away with a gesture. My hand sank into the
surface as if it were foam.

Something whirred and spat.

I gritted my teeth and kept my hand in place.

The helicopter’s whop-whop descended to the crater.

A door the size of six tiles popped open below my hand. I
jumped back, staring at the gaping hole. Soft, green light spilled forth.

“Grab the goods and go!” Mom yelled. “All of you. Take it
and disappear.”

“But . . . ”

“Do it. I can misdirect and bluff for a few moments, but my
UNOMA badge only holds so much respect with the big guns.”

I grabbed a fistful of green light and came out with a
glowing data crystal. It matched the others in shape, but was half again as
big. “What are they?”

“A gift from someone out in the galaxy who wants to help us
clean up our messes. St. Rudi got the first one and mucked it up.”

That explained shutting down SETI. Or maybe just public
access to what they found with SETI.

“Rudi was more interested in accolades and glory than a solution.
When he realized that his shortcuts and incomplete reading were killing him and
a lot of others, including your father, he tried to smash his crystal.” Mom
turned a feral grin on my necklace. “I stole it before he succeeded.”

That explained sealing his lab and the strange
investigations I did for the FBI instead of the CDC. They fed me bits and
pieces of Rudi’s data for me to analyze properly. They farmed out the work to
bright students, bound us with fear and money, because they couldn’t trust their
own scientists and agents.

Mom continued. “There have been four other gifts from space,
but the governments of the world don’t want anyone else to have the knowledge
in those crystals, so they’ve gone to great lengths to confiscate them or
destroy them. I and my agents stole them. You’re wearing them.”

I stared at the glowing crystal. I could almost see formulae
and diagrams swirling beneath the facets, spiraling inward and outward, sending
laser streaks to each of my crystals in turn, then
speaking to my brain synapses directly.

Mom thrust something heavy and jangling into my labcoat
pocket. Car keys.

“I know an abandoned high school that might still have some
equipment,” John offered. “I—uh—work there sometimes for the CIA.”

“I’ve got my netpad and it’s still networked with the
mainframe in the school lab.” Mary held up her mini-computer. “I’m with
Homeland Security.” She flashed a smile and a mini badge.

“Will the crystals fit this data port?” Sean added, showing
an external that plugged into a netpad. “The National Security Agency gave me
some extra adapters.” He too produced a badge.

We looked to each other, four medical students with a hoard
of knowledge and bits of equipment and . . . and hope in our
hearts. We had each worked separately for a different official agency. Now it
was time to work together.

“Work as a team, share every scrap of knowledge you glean so
that no one will hide or hoard it again,” Mom whispered. She turned and marched
down the steps, gun held out to the side, a symbol of co-operation, but ready
to defend and protect if necessary.

“Good luck, Hope,” Mom called from the doorway. Then she
turned and faced the enemies of hope.

As one we turned and ran through the corridors, out the back
door, across a lawn to the faculty parking lot.

Mom’s little car, with nearly a full tank of fuel and
battery charge, sat in the last spot, next to the gate, parked nose out for a
quick getaway.

We crammed ourselves into the seats, likes clowns in the
circus.

“Goodbye, Mom.” Tears spilled from my eyes. I’d never see
her again. I knew it. And so did she.

I peeled out of the lot, spraying gravel, facing an unknown
future with all I had left, my friends, a few wishes, and . . .
hope. Hope that this time we’d find a way to save our oceans, and ourselves
before the government shut us down.

Though it’s an early story of mine, it’s still one of my
favorites because I just fell in love with the character of the narrator, a
crotchety old English writer, Elizabeth Barnett; and I loved the situation (a
post-apocalyptic world, where half the survivors believed that humanity was
regathering in Grants Pass, Oregon, and half rejected the notion). And then, I
moved to Oregon a year or so after I sold the story, and now I drive past
Grants Pass all the time, and it still makes
me smile.

∞ ∞ ∞

Elizabeth Barnett stood on the veranda, lifting a wiry
hand to shade her eyes as she watched Christos sail away. The sun gleaming off
the Mediterranean assaulted her, but the light was beautiful all the same. Sometimes
the loveliness here made it hard to remember how thoroughly everything had gone
wrong.

Or maybe she was just being an old fool. Sunlight,
kilometers of pale beaches thrust against bright blue water, hills covered with
scrubby brush, khaki-colored rocks, and the occasional dark green cypress
tree—it was not enough to hide the fact that she was very likely the last
person left on the island. The last living person, anyway.

She snorted and turned away from the sea before Christos, in
his little white sailboat, had moved out of sight. No point in watching him go.
He wouldn’t be back. She’d seen to that—they’d fought for weeks like rabid
dogs. Or plague-infested weasels, more like. In the end, she’d set her teeth
and scratched his lovely face with her long fingernails until the blood touched
his chin. And still he stood, pleading.

“Beth, come to Grants Pass, I know it’s real.”

“It’s a lie, and you’re never going to get there on that
damn fool thing anyway.”

“This is our only chance.”

“We have no chance.”

He’d simply stood there, looking at her.

“I have no chance,” she’d finally added, her voice bitter
and dry. “I’m seventy-eight years old, and you know my health. I’ll die out on
the water.”

“You’ll die here.” He’d leaned forward, almost touching her,
but holding back.

That was when she’d scratched him, digging in with every
last shred of strength she had. It was either that or touch him in a different
way, and she’d held on to at least that much dignity, through it all.

Now she would not watch him go. The world had died; what
difference would one more person make?

∞

“Kayley’s journal,” Beth said out loud as she heated a
slab of halloumi over a wood fire she’d built in the stove. Bitter as it still
was, at least her voice had lost its edge of testy near-panic, she thought.
Three days Christos had been gone, and although she was growing accustomed to
the terrible silence, she still felt the need to speak to the air from time to
time.

She’d made this batch of the cheese herself, and she was
proud of it, even if it didn’t have the tenacity of the stuff she’d been able
to find at the market when she’d first bought this property, fifteen years ago.
Or even the weaker but still salty-sweet cheese that Christos had come up with,
using the thin milk they’d managed to glean from the last goat.

“Bunch of adolescent fantasies.”

She might as well talk aloud. There was no one to hear, no
one to judge. No one to answer.

. . . No one to brush her thinning grey hair,
to stroke her hard and ropy shoulder muscles, to clear the weeds from her front
walk. No one to argue back to her. To bring her a drink when the sun went down.
To glance up from his work in what passed for her garden, his dark eyes
smoldering at her as he . . .

“Stop it, you stroppy old cow,” she muttered to herself. She
finished toasting the cheese and then stood over the stove, eating it with
callused fingers that hardly felt the heat of it.

Then she stood, staring unseeing out the window as she
remembered.

∞

Elizabeth Barnett, international best-selling author of
The
Caged Sword
series of dark and twisted romantic fantasy novels. Elizabeth
Barnett, the toast of London, New York, and Prague literary circles—at least,
those circles civilized enough to consider the genre of romantic fantasy.
Elizabeth Barnett, who shocked the world by retiring at the height of her fame
and purchasing a three-million-pound estate in the hills outside Larnaka,
Cyprus, with her third husband, James—seventeen years her junior and famous in
his own right as the developer of those ridiculous computer games that children
played, instead of reading decent fantasy novels.

“The writing was on the wall,” she said to the window. The
sea shimmered far below her, and Christos was not coming back.

∞

James had been one of the first to die. Maybe he had even
brought the plague back with him, on his last trip to France . . .
but if he hadn’t, someone else would have. The plane had been full of people,
and there had been ten more flights after that, before all air traffic had
stopped. Beth had sat with him in the Apollonion Hospital on the Greek side of
Nicosia—even then, with the wall down, the city was still deeply divided
between Turk and Greek—holding his hand as he coughed blood, sobbed, and
finally choked out his last breath. The sad-eyed doctors had searched their
stub of what remained of the Internet, pumped him full of expired antibiotics,
anti-inflammatories, and steroids, and mopped up the effluent that had poured
from her beautiful husband. He had died all the same.

“You filthy bastards! You swine, you cowards, you
Mediterranean cretins!” she had shrieked at them, wailing and beating at the
chest of the infuriatingly calm chief resident. He’d stood and listened to her,
blinking his large dark eyes, waiting for her to wind down.

It was those Greek eyes that had prompted her to move here
in the first place, when she could finally afford it. Not this doctor’s eyes
per se, of course; but dark Greek eyes in general, remembered from some
long-ago junket she’d taken with her editor and her agent. Three middle-aged
British women on holiday, slumming in a sea of sweet Greek manflesh. Beth had
always remembered that trip, long after she’d married reedy blond James. She’d
always intended to end her life here.

Just not like this.

Beth shook her head, still standing at the window, the fire
gone cold in the stove, the uneaten bits of halloumi sticking to her fingers,
cloying. She felt sick to her stomach, and wondered for the thousandth time if
the plague had finally found her as well.