Read Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Online
Authors: Thomas T. Thomas
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #science fiction, #High Tech, #Hard Science Fiction
Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (20 page)
“Yes, please do so.” She took out hers and deactivated it.
When his own hand unit was inert, he felt slightly claustrophobic.
“I’m guessing this meeting will not have taken place,” he said soberly.
“We have a new threat—or perhaps an old threat, I think—against the company,” she explained. “Twice in the past two weeks I’ve had calls from agents of Border Protection in Homeland Security. Their pet AI has noticed irregularities in our shipping schedules—heavy goods making inexplicable stops on the way here from the Far East. The machine has dreamed up some sort of terrorist activity involving nuclear materials. All just conjecture, of course—until they started showing me pictures of probable suspects on the management end of the supply chain. About two dozen faces and names, all told, but guess who pops out of the matrix?”
“I don’t know. Amelia Earhart?” he said, first thing to come into his head.
“Mariene Kunstler,” Aunt Callie replied with a hard gleam in her eyes.
“
She’s
still alive? I always thought somehow she would be dead.”
“New name—Deirdre Falconer, from a video capture in Dublin. New hair color—an awful red, by the way. But same shape to her face, same eyes, same spider tattoo. And yes, she
should
be dead. That’s why I called you in here.”
“We don’t do that anymore, Aunt Callie. We discussed this long ago.”
“I know. But this is a special case. I think she’s using a member of the family, my godson, from Italy, as her inside contact. I gave him a job in Planning and Estimating about six months ago. It was just after that when the shipments started going awry.”
“God, does that family of yours never quit?”
“I think she’s using him for that purpose.”
“But he’s otherwise an innocent lamb?”
“Well, maybe not all
that
innocent.”
“Ah! Do you want him dead, too?”
“No!” his aunt barked. “Or … not yet. I’ll talk to him.”
“But this Falconer woman, or Kunstler, or whoever—she won’t be missed?”
“Yes, and I want to be ‘not missing’ her by the end of the week, if possible.”
“Okay. I’ll talk to Paul. He’s got a better sense of these things.” Brandon paused to consider the overall situation. “Do you want me to put our own tracers on tonnage out of Asia—see if we can detect any of these bogeys?”
“Would your findings be deniable?”
“Ahhh—not under a court order.”
“Then as far as you and I know, it’s not us. Nothing to see here.”
“You’ve got that,” he agreed. “All just a glitch in the machine.”
* * *
Gustavo Reiter was busy with his fingers, plotting the side-trip for a delivery of prefabricated bridge components from Sinosteel in Guangdong, China, to a freeway project in Cleveland, Ohio, to be routed through the Strait of Malacca, then by the Cape of Good Hope and the St. Lawrence Seaway. He didn’t notice the approach of his godmother until he felt a light tap on the shoulder.
“Gustavo,” she said softly.
“Eh, Contessa. Good to see—”
“Take your hands off keyboard, sir.”
“Sorry, but I am at a critical juncture—”
“Now, please!”
He lifted his fingers.
“Slide away from the terminal.”
Only then did he notice another woman behind Callista: a tall woman with very blond hair cut short and held down with
lacca capelli
—hair spray. From her athletic build and unsmiling nature, Gustavo decided this was not a woman who could be charmed. He put his hands in his lap.
“How may I help you, Contessa?”
She bent to peer at his workstation screen, which still showed the map.
“I don’t suppose you feel in the mood for confession,” she said. “It might be good for your soul, you know.”
“I do not understand,” he said, spreading his hands. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the Amazonian woman go tense. “Confess to what?”
“That,” Callista said, pointing at the screen. “The Federated Republic’s Homeland Security people have already contacted me, twice now, about the little detours you’ve been making with our shipments. They have a first-order analysis about what those cargoes might be picking up and dropping off. So your little game is up.”
Gustavo weighed the possibility of further
negazione e offuscamento
—denial and, as the Americans would say, blowing smoke. He decided against it. He still owed his godmother something. “I see,” he said. “
In rosso le mani
—red handed, yes?”
“Very much so,” Callista agreed.
“You will turn me over to the authorities?” He only made it a question at the end.
“At this point, all they have is their suspicions based on robot analytics. The routes you have been scheduling had set off improbabilities and rung some bells with their
intelligenze artificiali.
They think they know what you’re trafficking, but they don’t have proof yet.” She seemed to consider. “If I turn you in, then I give them that proof and, at the same time, offer our admission of guilt. I’m not sure I want to do this.”
He saw a ray of hope. “You will let me go?” And in the same breath, he saw his danger: his as-yet unfulfilled promises to the red-headed woman who had arranged for his services and paid him in advance. She did not seem like one who would accept an apology and a refund. “Then will you protect me?”
“From what? The law? You’re on your own,
Figlioccio.
”
“No, from the people who will not get their
munizioni
—their nuclear materials. I don’t know all their names, but she who represents them is
un feroce donna.
”
“You’ll have to make your own way with them—and with her.”
“I will need resources in order to travel far enough, fast enough.”
Callista appeared to think about that. She drew from an inside pocket
la carta di credito.
“Take this,” she said. “It has a limit of fifty kay in F.R. dollars. Draw cash on the way to the airport. Buy your ticket. Drop the card in the nearest trash. I’ll report it stolen in about three hours’ time.”
“And what about my friend? That is not enough to take care of her.”
“She’s not your friend, Gustavo. And besides, by the time you land somewhere, she will probably be dead.”
* * *
Deirdre Falconer, such as she was called, waited at a table along the wall of the main bar at Doheny & Nesbitt’s public house on Baggot Street. It was a famous old establishment, easy enough for the tourists to find, and just right for meeting an American she didn’t know—which meant the pub was busy, noisy, and safe.
The man who had called her that afternoon, by the name of Paul Gallagher, said he was looking to move some real weight in contraband into the Federated Republic from Iran, and that he’d gotten her name from Gustavo Reiter in San Francisco. Reiter wanted to move it for him, start to finish, Gallagher said, but the boy wasn’t sure he had authority to make the deal, because he was contracted to a business agent in Dublin. And that, Falconer thought, was just the sort of infantile lip music the little nimwit was likely to make. Gustavo was simply not smart enough to take the opportunity and run with it.
But then the warning flags went up in Falconer’s head. If the Feds were onto Reiter, they would feed him just such bait as that: unspecified product to be moved illegally. Entrapment was the oldest dodge in the police handbook, as she knew from experience on both sides of the law. But the police were reliable, too. Whatever the result of the meeting this evening, they would be polite and professional, not rough her up in a public place nor want make a scene. So she could listen to this Gallagher’s spiel, nod and agree to nothing, and then walk away. Far away. No harm would come to her.
She felt confident enough that the meeting would be either a legitimate business deal or a clumsy trap, and not a setup by an angry ex-customer or jilted lover—neither of which she had in great supply at the moment—that she left her main armament at the apartment. The Beretta 92FS was bulky and difficult to conceal, and she didn’t want it on her person in the event any entrapment maneuvers became aggressive or tenacious.
That evening Falconer scanned the faces as they entered the bar, considering and rejecting each one. She didn’t actually have to identify Gallagher, because she had told him where she would be sitting and that she would be the redhead with the spider tattoo—and she had worn an open-neck blouse just for that purpose. Sometimes identifying marks came in handy.
Strange men had already come twice to her table and offered to sit down. When they didn’t give their names right away, she had shooed them off.
“Miss Falconer?” asked a man wearing a yellow windbreaker and chino slacks.
She eyed him: a fatherly type, late fifties, going a bald across the top, and moving with a slight hesitation—from a bad knee or hip, probably.
“Yes? Are you Mr. Gallagher?” she asked. She kicked a chair loose on the other side of the table. “If so, take a seat.”
He settled into it slowly. “You got my phone call?” he asked.
“Yes, of course. And we agreed to meet here, didn’t we?”
“Oh, yes. Certainly we did.” He seemed fuddled, not nervous. So, probably not the police—but as a client, maybe not any smarter than Gustavo Reiter, either.
She leaned back against the wall, where she could keep her eyes both on Gallagher and on anyone else who might be watching their encounter and making ready to move on her.
“You said you had a business proposition?” she began. “Not that I understand exactly what you—”
She felt a prick in her biceps, like a needle going into the flesh. She glanced down, wondering how Gallagher could have gotten a hypodermic into her, under the table, from across the width of it, a good three feet, and him not having moved an inch.
She saw a pale line of red light, a high-powered laser, that had cut through the white cotton of her sleeve with the barest whisper of smoke and hint of char, then through the meat of her arm, and on into her chest cavity. If she threw herself forward now, out of range, that beam would slice through her spine, paralyzing her, leaving her defenseless, and the next thing after that was being dead.
She looked up into Gallagher eyes. He was watching her with sudden intensity.
She glanced down again and saw the red line make a slow half twist, just part of a circle, cutting the letter
C
into the white fabric. The beam severed her arm bone, still without a lot of visible blood loss, and dropped her wrist and limp forearm into her lap, secured to her shoulder by only a slowly tightening thread of muscle. She wasn’t sure exactly what the red line was crossing inside her chest, but her lungs were already filling up with fluid—plenty of blood there—and her breath was coming in short gasps, each one helping the laser do its work. When the laser beam severed her aorta and the top of her heart, she knew she had just seconds to live. She opened her mouth and a bubble of blood came out.
In the fading light, she saw the man named Gallagher reach forward across the table with his free hand, put it against her forehead, and ease her head back against the wall. He stood up, drew a handkerchief from his pants pocket, and wiped the blood from her mouth.
She was dead before he walked away.
6. Up in Smoke
Antigone Wells returned to Rengstrom Fertility Services ten months after her initial visit to adopt her new—well, not “daughter,” never a daughter. The new child would be her “niece,” the same as Angela had been, and would be raised with the same story.
As she waited for her genetic reproduction counselor, Maggie Epperson, to bring out the baby, Wells recalled the anxiety she had felt earlier—at first over Alexander’s conception, then over Angela’s—about the huge number of embryos Parthenotics had been required to start and subsequently cull in order to bring one viable baby to term. She had been reassured by Rengstrom’s advertised One Shot Ovum System™ and its promise of creating the perfect baby from a single embryo. Now she would see the proof of that promise.
“Here we go,” Epperson said, coming through the conference room door with a bassinet in one hand and a folder of documents in the other. She set the bassinet on the table.
“May I see her?” Wells asked.
“Of course. She’s yours.”
Wells pushed back the hood of the carrier and studied the cherubic face peeking out of the blanket. The head was covered with light brown, lion-colored hair. The eyes that stared up at her were dark blue.
“I thought we said blonde hair, like mine?” Wells said.
“Most babies are born with darker hair,” Epperson said. “That usually falls out in a month or so. Within six months you’ll start to see the real color. There’s a clause in the contract that compensates you if it’s not as we agreed.”
“Her eyes are blue, too. And I specified green.”
“Again, all babies are born with blue eyes. That will change by the end of her first year. The final color depends on the amount of melanin the cells in the eye produce in response to light—just as the skin colors with a tan.”
“But they will end up green?”
“Yes, per the contract.”
Wells knew she couldn’t ask for more than that, even from people who claimed to mix genes the way Sherwin-Williams matched paint colors. The main thing, though, was the health of the baby: healthy genetics, healthy placental development, healthy delivery. The rest was up to her, with proper post-natal care, nutrition, and a rich, stimulative environment.
“She’s beautiful,” Antigone Wells said.
She folded back the blanket, exposed one tiny hand, and gave the baby a finger to grab. The tiny fist locked onto her and held tight with surprising strength.
“Hello, Angela,” she cooed.
“Is that going to be the baby’s name?” Epperson asked, opening the folder.
“Yes … Angela Wells.”
“We’ll make out the birth certificate. Do you have a middle name in mind?”
“Hel—” Wells started, thinking of her sister, whose health had recently seemed to decline over nothing the doctors could diagnose and cure. Then she reconsidered, because rushing a namesake might be some kind of bad luck. “Elaine,” she finished, liking the sound of it. “Angela Elaine.”
“Very good, we’ll process all that this afternoon,” Epperson said. “Best of luck—best wishes really, because luck has no place in this—with your new daughter.”
“Is that what you think she is?” Wells asked, surprised. “No, have the documents show me only as her guardian, nothing more.”
* * *
Gillian Barnes was puttering around in her kitchen, having just poured herself the morning’s first cup of coffee and still considering whether she wanted to mix a pot of oatmeal for breakfast or go to the trouble of frying bacon and eggs. Out of the corner of her eye, from a clear, blue sky overhead, and penetrating the leafy, shaded light right outside her kitchen window, she saw a flash of lightning, flaring and fading. She started to count the seconds, so as to know how far away the storm was, and at “four” she heard the crackle and roar of thunder, but really loud and not anything like four miles away through the mountains.
The cabin floor lifted under her feet, then dropped as the building came down, askew and tilted on its foundations. Accompanying the movement she heard the shriek of boards snapping and the squeal of nails being pulled out of old wood. The glass blew out of the window frame, peppering her face and hands with shards. Then the frame itself twisted sideways, broke loose, knocked her down, and hit the back wall.
Barnes was still shifting mental gears from “freak thunderstorm” to “major earthquake” when the cabin lifted again, like Dorothy’s house in
The Wizard of Oz.
But instead of the dust from a tornado, the blackness beyond the hole in the wall where her window used to be was a boiling cloud of gas and rock, moving at something like four hundred miles an hour and bearing hot death at something more than eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
Gillian Barnes barely had time to whisper the technical term, “pyroclastic flow,” before the physical effects of her life-long career, the study of rocks and movements in the earth, rushed forward and killed her.
* * *
Brandon and Penny Praxis had just finished a two-day stopover in Denver, monitoring security for the University of Colorado’s S3IF project at Hyatt Lake. He was putting their bags into the trunk of the rental car while Penny checked out at the motel office on the other side of the parking lot.
He heard a rumble of thunder, off to the northwest—a long rumble, representing not just a single lightning strike or several together, but a continuous booming and crashing that went on without letup. He looked in that direction and saw a darkness, like a storm coming over the mountains. One cloud in particular rose higher than the rest. It spread out at the top, not a thunderhead but something worse, more like the scintillant cloud from an atomic blast.
Brandon immediately thought of Cheyenne Mountain, the old North American Aerospace Defense Command base, which was hardened against nuclear attack. Had some foreign power finally decided to test its bunkers with an actual launch against the mountain? And then Brandon remembered from his tour of duty with the old U.S. Army that the base was actually
south
of Denver, down toward Colorado Springs, not north and west. So the disturbance had to be somewhere up in Wyoming.
He was just about to shut the trunk of the car—actually had his hands on the lid to do so—when the great winds hit. A massive gust pushed on the trunk lid, raising it vertically and snapping its hinges with a shriek of broken metal. The movement of the lid pulled him, the force of the wind pushed, and Brandon himself fell over and into the trunk’s empty space on top of their suitcases.
The wind was more than a simple gust but a stream of warm air that went on and on with gale force. He rolled back against it and climbed out of the trunk. Once in the clear, however, he could not stand upright but crept along in a half-crouch, around the left rear fender to the driver’s door. When the wind abated fractionally, he flung the door open and dove inside. As the wind picked up again, the trunk lid tore off, clearing his rearview behind the car.
Brandon started the engine and slalomed around the parking lot to the office. Penny was standing at the full-length glass windows with the motel manager, gaping at the flurry of dust and sand that flew down the road and funneled through the lot. Brandon honked twice to attract his wife’s attention. He knew that, to keep her safe, he would have to get out and escort her to the car.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Something bad.”
“Should we be driving now?”
As she asked this, a rock the size of a softball came out of the wind—either picked up from the side of the road or hurled down from the sky—and smashed the office window. In the split second between seeing the rock come out of his peripheral vision and hearing it strike, Brandon grabbed Penny with one hand and hugged her body against his, turning them both away from the point of impact, and used his free hand to press her face into his shoulder and shield her neck. He ducked his head above hers and squeezed his eyes shut. Glass flew all around them. When it had stopped falling, he opened his eyes.
“Are you hurt?” he yelled into the howling noise.
She shook her head and then, out of concern for him, tried to brush the square crystals of tempered glass off his shoulders. Brandon held her wrists to stop her, but already her fingers had been cut by the razor edges and were bleeding.
“We can’t stay here,” he yelled. “We must get to the car.”
They stepped over the office’s jagged windowsill and ran to the passenger door. In that brief span the wind had died down again and was now no more than a confused whisper. Brandon opened Penny’s door, swung her inside, and slammed it. As he ran around to the driver’s side again, he saw that the darkness to the north had grown dramatically and now reached halfway up the sky. The mushroom cloud was obscured by the leading edge of the storm. He climbed in and put the car in gear.
“Where are we going?” Penny asked.
“The airport, I guess,” he replied.
“They won’t fly in this storm.”
“Well, then east, away from
that.
”
He pointed at the line of clouds.
“Fine by me,” she said. “Go, go, go!”
Brandon made two turns out of the parking lot to get onto West 58th Avenue heading east. He rethreaded the route by which they had originally driven in from Interstate 70 and the airport. While he was still on city streets, another rock came—definitely out of the sky this time—and hit the pavement in front of their car. That one was the size of a football and exploded like a hand grenade. Soon rocks, boulders, and bits of gravel were raining down, denting metal and breaking glass where they struck the car. Driving became more difficult as they bounced over this debris.
When they headed up the freeway on-ramp, the black cloud passed completely over them. It was as if night had come down without twilight. Brandon had the eerie sensation that it was snowing. He turned on the headlights and saw large, puffy flakes drifting along their path like a blizzard in June. But it was nowhere near cold enough to support a snowfall.
In the darkness and at the speed he was driving, he soon struck a rock in the roadway that was big enough to break the suspension. Penny screamed. The car slewed to a stop.
“Now what?” she asked, catching her breath.
The snow was falling fast. It was already two inches deep on the hood in front of them, and where it collected above the hot engine it was not melting. Brandon turned on the wipers. They flailed across the cracked windshield but, rather than clearing away the snow, they only smeared it into a thick paste.
He realized it wasn’t snow but ash. And the disturbance was not an atomic blast somewhere behind them but a volcano in full eruption. In the moment of his hesitation, the ash layer had gained another inch.
“If we stay here, we get buried,” he said. “Trapped inside the car.”
“We go out there, we’ll be buried, too,” she replied.
“Yes, but we might find shelter first.”
They opened their doors simultaneously, pushing against the weight of ash and stones rising above the rocker panels. He ran around to her side of the car, the ash clinging to his feet and sucking at them like soft mud. Penny’s side was closer to the edge of the ramp and the buildings just off the freeway.
He covered his mouth and nose with his linen handkerchief, and Penny used her sleeve and the collar of her blouse. He helped her climb over the guardrail, and they headed down the slope holding hands, her right in his left. The fine ash clung to their eyelashes, making it even harder for them to see in the darkness.
Toward the bottom of the slope, on the edge of some kind of drainage ditch, Penny slipped and fell. Her hand pull out of his. He turned to find his wife half buried in the ash, struggling to get up. He took her hand and pulled to free her.
The ash was at the level of his knees and around her shoulders now. He struggled to pull her up but, for all its fine and feathery lightness, the ash weighed them down like a heavy layer of dirt.
Stones still fell out of the sky like shrapnel, making powdery craters in the ashy surface all around them.
Penny tried to speak, inhaled hot ash, and went into a coughing fit.
Brandon had a sudden memory flash: the burials at Pompeii, those plaster castings of people struggling in their bed of ash. He had always wondered why the bodies remained faceless and formless when they had been so carefully preserved. He suddenly understood that people buried in hot sand and rocks did not die gracefully, with composed faces and clean limbs. Instead, they struggled, they thrashed, they gasped, and they screamed.
Penny’s head was already covered. Her hand moved in his with frightened, frantic force and then went still.
Brandon would not go on without her. He held her dead hand and screamed against the flood of ash.
* * *
The middle third of the country, from North Dakota to the Texas Panhandle, and stretching as far east as the Mississippi River, was just … gone. Two weeks after the event, John Praxis was still trying to wrap his mind around that reality. The immediate blast effects of the Yellowstone Eruption appeared to have been limited to relatively uninhabited parts of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, but the rest of the area had received a blanket of ash and hot rocks, thicker toward the east than in the west because of the prevailing winds, including the jet stream in the upper atmosphere.
Over much of the country, nobody knew anything for sure. No reports, no official warnings, no lingering calls for help … nothing came out of southern Montana as far north as Boseman and Billings, or from northern Utah as far south as Provo, eastern Idaho as far west as Twin Falls, or western Wyoming as far east as Casper. Just sudden, dead silence.
Denver, Colorado—more than four hundred miles away from the caldera—sounded early reports of ash fall and gas clouds and then went quiet. Brandon and Penny were supposed to be in Denver, supposed to have flown out that morning. But the flight they were to have taken never landed on its inbound leg—or if it did, it never boarded, never left. Denver International Airport was rumored to be under eight feet of ash and cinders, under a sky of perpetual night filled with lightnings from the eruption’s leftover kinetic energy.