Burn (29 page)

“I did,” Harry said. “I’m going to put together Marte’s data for transmission. Can I get you something from the galley?”

“Coffee,” Sonja said, not looking at him. She concentrated on staying away from the pack of boats fanning out from the harbor. “It’s going to be a long night.”

Chapter 43

So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale,
and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly
destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded.

—Joshua

Sonja got the
Kamui
twelve kilometers offshore before an uncontrollable shaking overcame her white-knuckled grip on the helm. Sonja, Harry, Rena Scholz and Father Free had nursed personal grief in silence, busying themselves with the dozen small tasks of navigation and accommodation.

“I can hold a course,” Rena told her. “Why don’t you get some dry clothes and some sleep? There are things in the medical kit I could give you.”

“No!” Sonja snapped. “I mean, no thanks, Rena. I don’t want anybody giving me anything ever again.”

She finished with a shrug.

“I understand,” Scholz said. “Go ahead; I’ll take it for a while. I need to be out here alone, anyway, I think.”

Sonja stumbled through the hatchway and kicked off her wet shoes. Harry and Father Free were engrossed in the onboard Litespeed. She didn’t feel like making small talk, so she hurried past them into the head. She stripped, toweled down, then wrapped herself into a sheet on a lower berth in spite of the heat and humidity. She couldn’t seem to get warm, but inside the sheet, she felt the shakes ease off.

Harry was consolidating Marte’s data with Father Free’s, adding whatever he could from memory. Father Free cabled up the palm-cam and dumped its memory to the Litespeed, too. They had worked without speaking, except to exchange tools, for two precious hours. Father Free broke the silence.

“I don’t think that tonight’s holocaust came from the Sabbath Suicides,” he said.

“Where else?” Harry asked. “Tonight it spread to Catholics, and they didn’t all drink the EdenSprings water.”

Father Free held up the plastic bag, with the items he’d rescued from the
St. Elias.
The data cubes were already dumped to the Litespeed, so the bag contained only the priest’s personal kit: Breviary, stole, holy water and oil, a tin of communion wafers.

“For Easter Mass most of the churches used fresh hosts, just delivered on Friday. It’s the only way I can think of to infect so many Catholics so quickly.”

Harry stopped his editing chore and looked Father Free in the eye.

“You said an Easter Mass, too, didn’t you?”

Father Free nodded solemnly and set the bag down.

“Yes,” he said. “I had some old hosts from the cathedral that I preferred to use up rather than toss, so my mix was about fifty-fifty, old to new. My own kit, here, is old hosts. The one I took myself was old, because it was from a supply I left there last month.”

“You’d better prepare a statement,” Harry said. “We’ll broadcast that with the rest. We’re almost set, here.”

Sonja lay in the starboard bunk beside the electronics and navigation equipment, and drifted in and out of sleep as Harry and Father Free worked their electronic magic.

“The trick,” Harry said, more to himself than to Father Free or Sonja, “is to appear to be where we’re not while we’re sending. Or not to appear where we are.”

“Do you really think they’ll look for us now?” Sonja asked. “Especially after you send whatever you’re sending. There’s no
reason
for them to come after us, is there?”

Harry frowned at his display, and Sonja saw the glimmering codes reflected off his gray eyes. He solved a problem with a grunt, then said, “As long as the U.S. government is intact, they’ll come after us. Governments like things tidy, and we’re the last loose end. Besides, as long as your grandfather’s alive, they won’t give up on you. You’re the only living relative of the Vice-President of the United States.”

She still couldn’t get used to that thought, although her grandfather had been a senator or cabinet member as long as she could remember.

It hasn’t done us much good so far.

“How could they find us aboard a sailboat?” Sonja asked.

“I found a locator beacon inside this Litespeed and tossed it onto another boat leaving the harbor,” he answered. “That should throw off some of the dogs for a while. This boat’s primary mission was entrapment of drug dealers, so I would assume it’s black-wired from top to bottom. We could have half the intelligence agencies in the world listening in. I hope that we’ll have them all listening in when we broadcast, but I don’t want anybody tracking us down.”

“If . . . if there’s anybody left,” Sonja said.

Past Harry, out the porthole, she saw the flare of another small boat burning in the dark. They had seen dozens of boats catch fire in the past couple of hours as the Deathbug relentlessly kept its gruesome appointments.

“There’ll be people left, all right,” Harry said. “Marte said that Mishwe made two mistakes—first, this is a multistage AVA, therefore fragile, so it can’t last long outside the body; second, it works too fast. It kills people before they have a chance to get far.”

“Harry, could you love me?” she asked.

He looked up in open-mouthed surprise, and Father Free cleared his throat.

“I’ll go topside,” he said. “See if Rena needs a hand.”

“What was that again?” Harry asked.

“Do you think you could love me, after what we’ve been through? I mean, I’ve lost everybody I’ve loved. Everybody that I’ve lived with. I don’t know if I can stand it happening again.”

He closed his mouth and it slowly tilted into a smile.

“I’ve had a crush on you since we were six,” he said. “Does that count?”

She was not too exhausted to blush.

“It’s not the same.”

“Then I’ll have to confess, if I didn’t know I loved you before, I knew it when you talked me up that elevator shaft at ViraVax. Maybe even before that, when they had us naked in that decontamination room and you were pacing around, looking . . .”

“Looking what?”

Sonja was up on one elbow now, watching him chew his lip and squirm.

“Looking sexy,” he blurted. “I mean, even then, in all that trouble, I wanted to, you know . . . except we knew they were watching us all the time.”

“That’s different, too,” she said. “That’s combat bonding; I’ve read about it before. Foxhole buddies, that’s what we are.”

“I’ve never had a buddy that looked like
that,”
he said.

Harry pressed a few keys, frowned at the display in front of him and shuffled his gloveware until the machine beeped at him.

“Chill,” he said. He slipped out of his gloveware, rubbed his eyes, and when he returned his hands to the machine he spoke to the ceiling, not to Sonja.

“If those things aren’t love, then why don’t you tell me what is? Do you think love’s only for people who don’t die?”

Sonja took a deep breath, then asked the thing she was afraid would alienate him for good.

“Did you love Marte Chang?”

Harry didn’t even take his hands out of the gloveware. He laid his forehead on the table in front of the Litespeed, and his body began to jerk with silent sobs. Sonja let him be. After a few moments he took a couple of deep breaths, but he didn’t lift his head from the table.

“I . . . I didn’t have the chance,” he said, his voice almost too tight and squeaky for her to hear.

Another couple of deep breaths. Harry set the machine on standby and wiped his face with a napkin. He cleared his throat to get his voice under control.

“I really liked her, I know that,” he said. “She was the smartest person I ever met. I kept having this dream. . . .”

Harry shook his head, still not looking at her. Sonja bit her lip, but kept quiet.

For the first time since she’d known him, Harry was absolutely still. She didn’t realize until then how busy his body always was—not fidgeting, but busy. She wasn’t even sure he was breathing until he spoke.

“What we did . . . it wasn’t something that she should
die
for,” he said. “But you heard Hodge. I killed her, as sure as if I’d put a gun to her head.”

Sonja’s shaking finally stopped. She sat up, gathered the sheet around her and sat beside Harry. She took Harry’s hand, squeezed it.

“You didn’t kill her,” she said. “ViraVax killed her. Hodge and Mishwe killed her. Your father and mine, keeping their secrets, they killed her. You helped her to feel something good one time before she died; you should be happy for that.”

Harry’s Litespeed beeped twice. He took another deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Okay,” he said, “at least I’d better not blow my opportunity to make something out of all of her work. It’s show time.”

Then Sonja kissed him. She was as surprised about that as Harry was. They lingered at each other’s lips until the machine double-beeped again, and Sonja pulled away.

“Okay, wizard,” she whispered, “show your stuff.”

The machine was set to Hodge’s voice commands, so Harry slipped his hands back into the gloves and made the “go” motion. The telltale green light blinked off and on as the Litespeed uploaded to the satlinks.

“How did you fix it so they can’t find us?”

“It’s the same trick I showed your dad,” Harry said. “The same one that Marte used to get information out of ViraVax. We’re seeking and using channels that are already in use. We’re doing this at random, using three hundred and sixty satellites, firing bursts of data into the worldwide system. Any traces will lead back to the original carriers, hundreds of them.”

“If it’s random, how do they make sense of what you’re sending?”

Harry smiled, and this time it was his turn to take Sonja’s hand.

“I wrote a find-and-collate program. It links all of the data fragments into the proper order and announces itself as a single file. Anyone looking at it would know it would take at least a half-hour to dump it into the system, so they’ll be backtracking transactions that took at least a half-hour. But none of ours is taking more than a half-second, and it’s riding on somebody else’s, anyway.”

“Where’s it going?” Sonja asked. “I mean, besides just
out there?”

“First, it’s going out to twenty researchers that Marte recommended. Then to every newsgroup that I could get an address on. Then to all the boards on the web for anybody who wants it.”

“Hey, crew,” Rena Scholz called down, “did you save any of that coffee for me?”

Harry stood up and stretched.

“Coming, Skipper,” he said. “We got busy here and forgot all about it.”

By the time the coffee finished gurgling into its carafe, Sonja was dressed and the palm-cam was transmitting the last of its data into the void. Tired as they were, Sonja and Harry joined Scholz on deck for a sunrise toast to their success.

The weather had roughened considerably, and the spray bursting over the rails brought an uncharacteristic chill for these waters.

“Here’s to success,” Harry said, holding his cup out to the others.

They clinked cups, and each of them balanced on the rolling deck and sipped their hot coffee in the privacy of their thoughts, memories, sorrows, dreams.

“Another one,” Rena said, pointing off the stern.

Then Sonja saw it, a blossom of flame thrown into the black throat of the oncoming wind.

That one must be close,
she thought,
if we can see it through this weather.

Father Free muttered a prayer to the wind.

When Sonja turned back to Rena, she saw the unguarded fear in the older woman’s eyes. The glow from the gauges turned Rena’s face a sickly green, and aged her far beyond her years.

“What is it, Rena?” Sonja asked. “Are you still afraid it’ll get you, too?”

Rena sighed, and faked a smile.

“I thought I had enough luck for Rico and for me,” she said. “He was a changed man, and he did the changing on his own. It was the real thing, and I let myself look forward to . . . well, I let myself look forward.” She nodded towards the fireball, dying in the relentless mouth of the sea. “If I’m afraid of anything, it’s that I’ll burn up the boat and kill the two of you when I go.”

Sonja couldn’t think of anything to say, since the thought had occurred to her, too. And with his silence, Harry acknowledged his own thoughts on the matter. After a few moments, he was the one to speak.

“Let’s get you and Father Free to Maude Island,” Harry told Scholz. “You’ll be safe there, and maybe you can get that kit analyzed, just in case it’s the real thing.”

“You don’t sound like you’re planning on staying at Maude Island,” Rena said.

“This lab rat is through running mazes,” Harry said. “What I’d like to do, if Sonja’s willing, is to sail off with her into the sunset, and find someplace where we can be invisible, take our chances on a real life.”

“I can understand why you’d feel that way,” Rena said. “How about you, Sonja?”

The chill she felt now had nothing to do with the weather. Sonja knew that in all of this dying, it was time to be born. They had few resources, and could very well starve at sea, but she agreed with Harry—she never wanted to be a specimen in a jar again. At least, not a live specimen.

“I love Harry,” she said. “Where he goes, I go.”

They tried on silence again for a while, and wore it well. Rena broke it with a sigh and a toss of her cold coffee overboard.

“Okay,” she said, “if that’s your plan, then I have a present for you. Call it a wedding present. Harry, if I give you some numbers, can you connect to them without giving away our position?”

“It might take me some time to access,” he said, “and we might have to do some switching while you’re on-line. Why?”

“If they’re looking, they’re after the sailing vessel
Kamui
carrying Harry Toledo and Sonja Bartlett. With a little fancy footwork and some help from you, I can get both of you protected identities with full documentation, and a new registration for the boat. That way, you can sell it when you get to a safe port. If there is a safe port.”

“How about a pilot’s license?” Sonja asked.

“We can do that,” Rena said, “as well as transcripts, passports, the works. We can make you Australian, Canadian, Mexican. . . .”

“Chill,” Harry said. “How about ‘World Citizen’?”

Rena laughed.

“Well, Harry, we’re trying not to call attention to you. How about American? Then you don’t have to worry about your story or your accent.”