Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (21 page)

“What’s the matter?” I whispered.

“Something jumped on me. It was creepy.”

“Probably just a big old bullfrog.”

“Yuck. Frogs give me the creeps.”

“You’ll have to get over it. Patrick, there’s absolutely nothing in this pond that can hurt you. I’ve been swimming in it all my life. But those people on the shore,
they
can hurt you.”

“How do you know they aren’t friends, come to help us? Jesus, Polly, you
shot
at them!”

“If they’re friends, we’ll find out soon enough. Right now, we have to assume they arrived when they did because they are allied with Max. Now shut up and get your head down.”

He did, even more reluctantly.

I started a count, imagining them moving slowly along the shore, looking into every patch of brush and out over the lake. After what I hoped was enough time, I slowly eased my head up. The water drained from my ears. I paused for a moment, hearing nothing but the pouring rain. I checked my weather schedule and saw we still had ten minutes of rain to come. I turned over and lifted my whole head out of the water. I couldn’t see a thing over the reeds, which were thick, and up to three feet high.

I reached down and got Patrick by the arm and pulled him slowly to the surface.

“I thought I—”

“Quiet.”

“I thought I was going to die down there,” he whispered.

“I didn’t like it much myself. Now stay low, and I’ll take a look around.”

He nodded. I got my feet and hands under me and took it an inch at a time. When I could see the shore, I kept as still as possible while slowly turning my head from side to side. Sudden movement is the easiest thing for the human eye—any eye, come to that—to see. But if you take it slow, the brain won’t really register it unless you’re looking right at the motion. One of our lessons in Survival 101.

I never got higher than waist deep, just able to see over the tops of the reeds, but in both directions and straight ahead I could see no people.

“We’ve only got a few more minutes of rain, and it’s about twenty minutes to sun-off. I’m trying to figure out what to do next.”

“I don’t see how we’re going to get out of this.”

“I don’t either, but that doesn’t mean we give up without a fight.”

“There’s too many of them, Polly.”

“You don’t know that. I saw a couple dozen.”

“There could be hundreds of them.”

“If there are, they’ll probably get us.” I put that thought out of my head. Mama, Travis, all my family . . . I was their only hope. Well, Cassie, too, if she ever got back from her little pleasure trip out to the ass end of nowhere.

“We need to set a destination. I’m thinking they’ll be looking for us at your place. But you know it better than me. Is there any way to get in your apartment without being seen?”

He looked blank.

“Didn’t you ever sneak out at night?”

“When I was younger, we didn’t live there,” he pointed out, without answering my question.

“We need to go to ground, get organized, make a plan. We need to get out of the open.” I gestured upward where, for only a short time more, the mist and almost clouds would cloak us from observation from the other side. “If we wait until they get night-vision equipment, we’re sunk. They’ll track us like bugs on a plate.”

“Maybe they already have night-vision.”

I was getting tired of his defeatism. I guess he was still in shock. Maybe I was, a little, too, but I think it was more likely that I was putting that part off, the sitting-down-and-crying part.

I sighed and started wading toward the shore. I got on dry land and looked back. He was stepping carefully, scowling down at his feet. Then he slipped, did a banana-peel dance for a moment, and fell flat on his ass.

“Could you possibly make any more noise?” I whispered. “Wash that stuff off as best you can. We may need to look presentable.”

He did that, grumbling. I hurried into a small copse of brush and trees. There was a small clearing more or less in the center. Cassie and I had pitched a tent in there from time to time. I hadn’t been back there in years, and it looked much smaller than I remembered.

I was shivering though it wasn’t really cold. I peeled off my clothes and squeezed each item as hard as I could. When Patrick saw what I was doing, he stripped, too, and wrung out his clothes. We dressed again, and I found I was still shaking. Not only that, I felt weak and faint. I sat down suddenly and wrapped my arms around my knees. Patrick sat beside me and looked me over.

“You want my shirt? I’m not feeling cold.”

“I’m not cold, either.”

“You okay?”

“I will be. Just give me a few moments, okay?”

I knew it was because this was the first moment I felt even a little bit safe since I threw the tray of coffee. The first time I could let anything out. It wouldn’t do to overdo it, though. I fought hard against a crying jag.

“Oh lord, Patrick, what are we going to do?”

“I was hoping you had some ideas.”

“I do, but nothing I have a lot of confidence in.”

He put his arm around me, and I leaned my head on his shoulder for a moment. It felt good. And then my phone pinged.

I almost jumped out of my skin. Who could be calling me? I had set the phone to accept only emergency calls while I was swimming away from the house. The ID said it was Uncle Travis.

“Hello?”

“Have I reached Cassie?” Max said. What the hell.

“Yes.” What must have happened, he went through Travis’s phone list, came to Cassie first, alphabetically, and dialed. Cassie was not available at the moment, away having fun, so the call was forwarded to me.

Why did I agree to be Cassie? An important rule of survival is that any misinformation your opponent has is usually a good thing for you.

“I’ve had the devil of a time figuring out this antique,” he went on. I could see him holding the old-fashioned phone with its tiny screen. “You’d think that with a doctorate in physics a man could deal with something children used to deal with.” He chuckled.

“Say what you have to say.”

He sighed. “First, everyone you saw is okay. It was knockout gas, not lethal at all. We are not killers. We don’t plan to hurt anyone. In fact, we plan to release most of the people in this room in a day or two.”

“Not killers,” I said. “Mutineers.”

“That’s a very ugly word.”

“For a very ugly thing, you pathetic sack of shit.”

“Do we have to—”

“Yes we do. I see no reason to be cordial. I’ll wait for that until I’m on the witness stand at your trial. Mutiny is a capital crime in this ship. Did you ever see that in the regs?”

“You persist in calling it mutiny. We are a committee of safety. When the captain of a ship is putting the lives of his passengers in jeopardy through his ill-considered actions, it is incumbent on ship’s officers—in this case, the elected civil government—to lawfully detain him and take temporary command. That’s in the regs, too.”

“Tell it to the judge.”

“I won’t have to. Young lady, it will be you telling your tale to the judge, and very soon.”

“We’ll see about that. It’s a big ship.”

“Not that big. And we are in control of it now.”

“You took over the ship violently,” I tried. “That’s not going to go well for you when you’re arrested. But if you give up this insanity now, I would testify that you don’t deserve to be put to death.”

He laughed. Well, it probably deserved a laugh.

“Funny, I was about to suggest the same to you. We won’t even charge you with attempted murder for firing through that door, and for attacking the people approaching the house.”

“I was . . .” I stopped myself. I was so angry I was about to explode, and anger in a situation like this is an enemy.

“You had invaded my home, and those people were trespassing. I made sure I didn’t hit anyone. Believe me, I could have, including parking a few rounds in your fat gut. If you’ll read the regs again, you will find that in defense of her home, a citizen is entitled to do anything—anything!—to someone trespassing, invading. Up to and including killing them. I’m beginning to wish I had.”

I stopped again, as I was in danger of boiling over.

“Well, I can see there is no reasoning with you. We will have you soon, and you know it. Meanwhile, I have many things to do, including moving the people we’ve arrested to a secure location. I may call you later and let you speak to them. For now, I must say good-bye.”

And he hung up.

“What did he say?”

“Give up,” I said.

I had stopped shivering. Maybe talking to Max was just what I had needed to get over my panic attack. He had managed to bring my mind back to a hard, laser-sharp focus with him at the center. I was going to get these bastards and, if it came to it, watch them hang.

“Maybe we should think about that.”

“Shut up, Patrick.”

He looked shocked, but he shut up. I got to my feet, checked the time. Only a few minutes until dark.

“We have to get moving. We need a place to hole up for a while and sort out our options. We need some things other than these pistols.”

“I don’t see how they’re going to do us any good.”

“Frankly, I don’t think they’ll be all that useful myself. We’re not going to be able to shoot our way out of this. But one rule is, in a bad situation it’s better to have a gun than to be unarmed.”

“You said ‘rule.’ Where did you get this rulebook?”

“It’s issued in the school of survival, where I was valedictorian. Compiled by Uncle Travis during a hard, scary life.”

“Travis, huh?”

Did I detect a hint of disdain? I wasn’t sure.

“Okay, here’s what I figure our options are. Back behind us we know there are a lot of people. If we go spinwise or antispinwise, we’re just going in a circle that takes us back here. So unless you know of a place to hide in Grover’s Mill or Lake Wobegon, that leaves sternward, which is toward where you live. I think we need to go there.”

“If we can get in.”

“We’ll see when we get there. Meanwhile . . .” Right on time the bright mist that had been surrounding us began to dim. Within a minute, it was very dark.

“Crap,” Patrick said. “I can hardly see.”

“That’s the good news, because it means they will have trouble seeing us. More good news is that I know the land between here and Mayberry very well. I’ve played here all my life.”

“So what’s the bad news?”

“That you are being so negative and still don’t seem to be thinking constructively,” I almost said, but held my tongue.

“That most of the people I love are being held hostage by people who don’t mean them well,” I said. “But there’s more good news. We are going to outsmart those people, and we are going to get the ship back.”

It was too dark for me to see his expression very well, but his posture told me that he still wasn’t completely with me on that one.

He sighed. “Okay, let’s go.”

And we set off sternward, toward the lights of Fantasyland that were just now looming through the thinning mist.

Cassie:

I had dozed off in the captain’s chair when Sheila woke me with a gentle alarm. I sat up, bleary for a moment.

“We back at the ship?” I asked

“Not yet. There’s been a development.”

“The gizmo . . .”

“Isn’t functioning, as it hasn’t since you stopped looking at it. It seems your father was right. It won’t—”

“Papa is always right, so far as I know. About physics, anyway.”

“If you say so. I’ve never heard of a device that needs to be observed to function, but if it is based on quantum principles, it might be possible. But as of now, the screen is blank.”

“Okay. So what’s the deal?”

“There has been an anomaly back at the ship. Specifically, the monitoring equipment at your house is no longer working.”

“The monitoring . . .”

“The cameras I told you about, various other detectors. It’s down, all of it. There is no information coming out of your house into the computer network.”

I must have still been groggy, but I wasn’t liking what I heard.

“What could have caused that?”

“There are routine glitches, most of them highly unlikely. But I doubt that is what happened. That is because there are other peculiar things happening, and they started at the same time.”

“Tell me about it.”

“There is a cyber attack of some sort being waged on the network. Files that are supposed to be accessible to only a few people have been opened, programs initiated.”

“Just spit it out, will you?”

“I infer that an attempt is being made to take over the ship.”

Take over the ship. You don’t take over a ship. It’s just not done. That would be . . .

Mutiny.

The nastiest word you can use on a ship of the seas of water or the seas of stars.

“Ohmigod, Sheila, my house . . . the meeting, my family . . .”

“Yes. I thought you should be notified.”

“Can you . . . can you tell me anything else?”

“Very little at the moment. I myself am not involved in the cyber war that’s taking place. I’m . . . off to one side, observing and noting. The techniques involved are quite sophisticated. Someone is in possession of information they should not have. At this point, I would not want to predict the outcome.”

“Can I call anyone? Mama? Polly?”

“I can’t tell you the whereabouts of anyone who was in that house. It’s all being blocked. Phone service is down in the township of Freedonia.”

“What can I do?” I didn’t like the quaver I heard in my voice.

“Very little at the moment. I will continue to monitor the situation. And I am awaiting your orders concerning our return to the ship.”

Right. Awaiting orders. Okay, time to get it together, spacegirl.

“For now, keep on course to the hangar. In the meantime, show me what sort of armaments Travis installed here.”

It never occurred to me to ask
if
Travis had armed Sheila. The only question was how much was available and how lethal was it.

“External weapons consist of six small high-velocity squeezer-powered missiles, each with a half-megaton squeezer warhead. These missiles can accelerate at two hundred gees, and continue at that rate for a very long time.

“There is a three-megajoule laser, also powered by squeezer energy.

“The most lethal weapon, however, is a silver bubble generator capable of engulfing almost anything, from a small spaceship to a planet, and squeezing it down almost infinitely.”

Great. All I had to do to quell the mutiny was blow up the ship, slice it up with a laser, then squeeze it to oblivion. All that should be quite helpful.

This was how Travis equipped his personal yacht. There was little point in asking how he had armed
Rolling Thunder
itself.

“Okay. Now show me to the weapons locker.”

“Right this way.”

Lights on the floor blinked in sequence, leading me to the back of the cabin. I passed by the head, where Papa was still sitting on the floor, snoozing, whacked out from all the exertion of throwing up for hours.

In the back, a bed was rising from its position on the deck, folding up against the wall. Under it was Travis’s arsenal. If someone from a hundred, two hundred years ago looked at it she might not be at all sure these were actually real weapons, and deadlier than whatever they were using. They would probably look like toys.

The main structural difference was that there was not much metal in them. The barrels and firing chambers were made of composite materials, carbon fibers, layered buckytubes, and other high-tech materials. The barrels were tubes about as thin as a tin toy but much stronger than steel. The muzzles wouldn’t look intimidating to a twentieth-century shooter, as they were all .25 caliber. But the rounds they shot were much higher velocity than old guns.

The propellant was not gunpowder but a small charge of high explosive called C-7. All the guns were automatics, and all the ammo was caseless; there was no “brass” to eject. The bullet magazines were not in the handle, as in most old automatics, but mounted in a small round cassette that snapped quickly onto the side of the weapon. It was made of clear Lexan, or something like that, so you could see exactly how many rounds you had left. The ammo belt coiled up inside was consumed each time you fired, so you didn’t have a belt hanging off to one side. The handguns were very light, and the rifles not a lot heavier. The rifles had longer barrels and took larger magazines, but otherwise they were very similar. They were battle-tested for over fifty years and hardly ever jammed. If they did, the jam could be cleared in one motion of the other hand.

They were smart guns. They would only fire when being held by a person authorized to use them. That way, if it came to it, you could toss them and not worry about someone else’s picking them up and shooting you.

“Can I use these? Do you need my fingerprints, or something?”

“As captain, you are automatically an authorized user. But you were already, along with your mother and sister.”

“Good enough.”

I picked up a pistol, opened it, looked down the barrel. Keeping these weapons clean was not a problem, even stored for a long time, but it was my training always to examine my weapons. This one looked good. I could feel the grip adjusting to my hand until it fit like a glove.

There were four rifles and four pistols, and plenty of ammo. There was also a box of grenades and a bulky, clumsy-looking gun that fired rockets the size of beer cans with high-explosive warheads. They scared me just to look at them. My training hadn’t included actually using stuff like that. Even the simulations were scary.

I put a pistol aside in a drawer and told Sheila to close the arsenal. I didn’t want Papa to see it.

“How long to get back to the ship?”

“An hour to turnover, as the flight plan stands. I can get you back faster if I boost at, say, two gees, and decelerate at the same rate.”

“Do you think that saving that much time is essential?”

“Not that I can see. I’m still awaiting developments, and I haven’t learned much new yet. I can’t tell you what might await us when we arrive.”

“Okay. I’ll keep thinking about it.”

So there wasn’t much I could do at the moment but hope Sheila could get some new information. And there was one more chore I couldn’t put off.

I sighed, and went toward the head.

Papa was still asleep, in an awkward position that was not quite embracing the toilet. I watched him for a moment and felt a lump forming in my throat. God, how I loved this man. Nobody could have asked for a better father, even though he was gone a lot. We all knew why that had to be, and we treasured him all the more when he was with us.

And now I was going to have to do something a bit underhanded. No way could Papa cope with the notion that his whole family was out of communication, whereabouts and condition unknown. Hell, I was having trouble with it, myself.

I tried once more to raise Polly on the phone. Out of service. Same with Mama and Travis. Same with Mike and Marlee.

I leaned over and shook Papa’s shoulder gently. He snorted. I shook him a little harder. He came awake slowly, blinking, then groaning.

“Oh,
cher
, my tummy sure do hurt.”

“You did a lot of throwing up.”

“Yes’um, and my throat hurt, too. But it my belly muscles feel like somebody used it for a punchin’ bag.”

“Papa, I’ve got an idea.”

“I could use an idea ’bout now. Hope it don’t have to do with food, though. I think I’m gonna give up food forever, me. It so nasty when you see it for the second time.”

“You got that right. Papa, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. What I figure is, your work is done here, and we’ve still got a fair amount of weightlessness we can’t avoid to get docked with the ship again.”

He looked a little green just thinking about that. He got up, and I got out of his way as he walked back into the main cabin.

“Did you know there is an escape capsule on this ship?”

“Escape . . .”

“You know. It’s a black bubble that can be generated inside a small capsule that’s equipped with emergency beacons.”

“But we don’t need rescuin’.”

“Your tummy does. What I’m saying is, you can pop into the bubble for a few hours, until we get settled on the ship. Then you come out, and no space sickness.”

He thought it over.

“I dunno,
cher
 . . .”

“Come on, Papa. You know it’s the right thing to do.”

“I just don’t like leavin’ you alone out here.”

“I got Sheila, Papa.”

He thought some more, then nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get her done.”

I followed him through the bunk room. At the very back, there was a round hatch that opened as we approached it. It was about four feet in diameter. Papa stepped over the edge with one foot, then ducked in and pulled his other leg after him. I bent and looked into the room, which was perfectly spherical. If you stuffed people in like sardines, you could probably get six people inside. Seven or eight if you got really ruthless, which you probably would if the ship was about to explode in a few minutes. It didn’t matter, since you would either be coming out of it in zero time, or you’d never be coming out at all, to the heat death of the universe, amen.

The inside was lined with struts in a latitude-and-longitude pattern. When the panic button was hit, the black bubble would form just outside that framework.

I was figuring I should shut the door, when Papa stuck his head out and looked into my eyes.

“There’s somethin’ going on, ain’t there, Cassie.”

I hesitated just a second too long. But I probably couldn’t have lied to Papa anyway. I could shade the truth, though.

“There’s been some sort of dustup back at the ship,” I said.

“How bad . . . I probly shouldn’t ask, I guess.”

“You don’t need to worry about it.”

“Is . . . is your mama okay?”

Turns out I could lie after all.

“She’s fine, Papa.”

“Polly? Travis?”

“She’s got the situation under control,
cher
. Now get your head back inside and in just a jiffy everything will be all right. Half a jiffy, even.”

He sighed, and held out his hand. I took it, and leaned down to kiss him on his cheek, and turned my cheek so he could kiss me.

“See you in a quarter of a jiffy,
cher
,” he said, and pulled his head in. I could hear him muttering. “Hail Mary, full of grace . . .”

I closed the door and turned the airlock wheel. I could see part of one of his legs through the little clear window. Then it went black, an infinite flat blackness deeper than space and time itself.

—

Then there was little to do until we got back. Sheila kept me updated, as much as she could, but there was not much news coming in. Things seemed to be chaotic on the cyber level. And yet, apparently, most citizens weren’t even aware that anything dire was going on. The sun was working, the weather was working, and the ship rolled placidly on. Meals were served, work went on.

“Some people closest to the computers and other machinery have noticed a glitch here and there,” Sheila told me, “and there must be a few hundred who are very worried, both on the crew side and the side of the mutineers, but so far the news has not been broadcast.”

“What about my family?”

“I’ve been able to observe a great many people entering your house, and they are taking people out on stretchers.”

“What about inside?” I was getting the creepiest feeling. These bastards, whoever they were, invading my home. In my very room, probably, free to go through my things. I felt violated.

“Still nothing from inside. All cameras are dark.”

Then nothing happened for a while. Nothing happened a bit more, then a bit more, and soon there was a string of nothing happening that stretched for over an hour. That’s the worst kind of waiting. Helpless, no information coming in, good or bad.

For something to do, I kept trying to call Mama, Travis, Polly, but the calls never went through. I knew it was futile, but I kept dialing, anyway.

“I have something,” Sheila said. And at the same time, I got a ring.

“Cassie?” It was a very quiet voice, a whisper.

“
Polly!
Polly, it’s me! What’s happening?”

She said something, and I couldn’t make it out.

“You’ll have to speak up. I can’t hear you.”

“Turn your volume up all the way,” she whispered. I did that, and it improved the sound a little bit.

“I don’t know how long I can talk,” she said. “I’m worried they might be able to trace this call, so you need to just listen. Max and Governor Wang released some sort of knockout gas. I only got—”

“Max? Uncle Max Karpinski?”

“He’s not our uncle now, never really was. Yes, that Max, and shut up, Cassie, I don’t have much time. I . . . How is Papa? Is he okay?”

“He’s fine. When I learned about this, I decided to put him in the escape bubble.”

“In the . . . Okay, I guess that’s a good idea.”

“And Mama, Travis, Mike . . . Patrick?”

“All I know is it looked like they were breathing, and Max called me later and told me they were alive.”