The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (22 page)

“For playing football?”

“No, because he’s a proponent of men’s rights. He thinks the Lattice has neutered men.”

“
Neutered
?”

“Men can’t be men. The Lattice means men get judged and shunned for thoughts that are biological and out of their control. Tranq’s lost a bunch of jobs because of his aggression. You should ask him about it.”

“Do you agree with him?”

“We’re each here for our own reasons. He has his, and I have mine.”

“And what are your reasons exactly?”

“It’s a long story,” Taveena said.

“I don’t have anywhere to be.”

“Yes, you do,” she answered. “You need to meet everyone. Annalise especially. Some of the crew are going to bed soon and you can’t afford to lose any more time.”

“I wish you’d woken me up. Two days is a lot to lose.”

“You have no idea what kind of strain your body was under,” Wulf said. “The pain of the shock, all the time your body was dead, the recovery. Trust me, you needed to sleep. You’d be useless right now if you hadn’t gotten it.” He nodded his head across the room. “But now it’s time to get started.”

Shaw followed his glance to three people in quiet conversation with each other.
No time like the present, Byron. Which of you wants to save my life?

As Taveena led him to the group, the conversation stopped, and two of them stepped back. They were the most mismatched pair Shaw had seen. The towering woman looked like an Amazon—all muscle and brawn and bulk. She wrapped her hand around the man’s neck. He was nearly as short as Kuhn, his round bald head at her breast. It was so free of hair that it had to be genetically modified not to grow, Shaw thought. The man’s eyes flashed daggers, and Shaw guessed this was Jpeg. The woman kissed the top of Jpeg’s head and pulled on his shoulder, getting the two away from Shaw.

A couple?
Shaw wondered.

“Hey, wait up!” Erling called. They paused by the door, and Erling leapt after them. Jpeg reached out and caught him. Jpeg grabbed the younger man and rubbed his knuckles over his head, laughing. Together they left the room.

No, maybe more than a couple. A nuclear family.

Shaw turned back to the woman, who smiled politely—nothing more—her white teeth beautiful against her dark black skin. “You’ve really stirred things up around here, did you know that?” Her English had an accent. French? Dutch? He wasn’t sure.

“I was beginning to get that sense, yes.”

“Annalise,” she said, and Shaw shook her hand. That meant the tall warrior woman who had just left was Helix. “No one’s quite sure what to do with you.”

“Really? I had the impression that some people knew exactly what they wanted to do to me.”

Annalise laughed. “Ok, you have me there. A few are pretty sure.”

“A few?” Taveena asked. “That many?”

“Ah, maybe just a couple,” Annalise answered. “You still have a fighting chance,” she said to Shaw, smiling again.

“Show him around the
Walden
. He needs to get a sense of where he is,” Taveena said.

“Of course. You haven’t seen much of the
Walden
yet, have you, Byron?”

“No, just a couple rooms.”

“Why don’t I show you around my baby and we can get to know each other?”

“Your baby?”

“Show some respect to the
Walden
, and Annalise will love you forever,” Taveena said. She raised her hand in a short gesture and was off. Shaw watched her push off from the floor and glide across the room toward the door he’d entered. When she left, they were alone in the room.

Shaw smiled awkwardly. The only thing he wanted to ask about was the vote. But he knew better than to bring it up. “I thought Wulf said Jpeg was the ship’s engineer,” he said.

“It takes more than an engineer to build a spaceship,” Annalise said. “It takes a designer. Jpeg can fix things when they go wrong, no question. But an engineer would not build this room.” She held her arms out, encompassing the curve of glass, the gray walls and floor, even the glow of the Earth. “It’s a meeting room, an exercise room, a meditation room, it’s our window to the outside world. It’s where we gather before and after our work. Would an engineer ever envision something so beautiful?” She shook her head firmly. “Never. She’d build a separate room for each purpose. An engineer would be so focused on the technical specs, she’d forget the community that needs to form for us to do our job.”

“A community? Is that what you call yourselves?”

“That’s my word for it. Taveena and Wulf would probably say we’re a team. Tranq or Helix might call us a squad,” she said, a smile again on her lips.

Shaw was silent.

“You’re thinking about the vote?” she asked.

He nodded, glad she had brought it up first.

“What kind of people would put someone’s life to a vote? That’s what you’re thinking. And then they call themselves a community.”

Shaw caught her eye. She’d read him thoroughly.

“I went through the same thing,” she said. “Three years ago. They killed me. A nanoshock in the streets of Rio. It looked like a robbery by an OJ who was looking for money—well, it was that, too, of course. But they’d arranged for it. Afterward, they brought me back, just like you, and told me about the vote. I didn’t like the Lattice, sure, but could I work with people who could so casually condemn me to death? Of course, it’s not casual, as I learned later. It’s agonizing. But that’s hard to swallow when it’s your life on the line.”

“Why did they want to recruit you?”

“They’d been hiding underground—literally—for more than four years. But they’d refined their plan enough that they knew they needed a ship. They needed to be mobile. I was maybe the only spacecraft designer in the world who hated the Lattice enough for them to think they could recruit me. If I’d lost the vote, it might have taken them years longer to get their ship built, but they still put me to a vote regardless. I survived, four to one.”

“Who voted against you?”

“Tranq.” She didn’t say it bitterly, but she also made it clear she hadn’t forgotten his vote either. “He thought all of us should know how to fight. And I’m a bit of a wimp in that area.”

“Has anyone ever lost a vote?” Shaw asked.

“Once. A woman they tried to recruit right before me. It was unanimous. She freaked out when they revived her, and no amount of convincing could make her agree to join them. Right up until they put her back in her coffin, she said that she would betray them if she ever had the chance. For awhile she said she’d come around, but Taveena says it didn’t take more than a three-second jump to see it was a lie.”

“For people trying to destroy the Lattice, you sure use it an awful lot,” Shaw said.

“It’s a tool. A dangerous tool, but we’ll use it until we destroy it. If you survive your vote—sorry.
When
you survive your vote, no one here will jump into your head without permission. We don’t violate each other’s privacy. But before then … people are going to be in your head a lot.”

Shaw took a deep breath. He was left with two impossible options. Try to sabotage the ship, likely dying in the process, but at least taking them with him. It was an option that he almost certainly would never have the chance to execute, if they were listening in to his thoughts. Or he could convert. Convert so fully and convincingly that he would win over even the biggest skeptics in just five days time. Skeptics who had no reason to trust him, and—after all he’d done to lay waste to their plans—plenty of reason to wish him dead.

Five days.

He couldn’t see any way he’d live past then.

Annalise’s tour of the
Walden
was long and full of the tiniest details. Her love for the ship was plain in every remark, and Shaw did his best to ask questions that showed he was an attentive listener.

His earlier guess had been right: the great room took up a full quarter of the space aboard the
Walden
. The floor of the room was a perfect cross-section of the sphere, splitting it into an upper and lower half. Elsewhere on that same level was the small mess hall he’d seen, as well as small bunkrooms.

Outside his own room, Annalise pointed up toward a vertical hallway that went up into the sphere, a ladder built into the side of it for use when the
Walden
wasn’t in orbit. Off of the hallway were more bunkrooms. Everyone had found their own favorite way to sleep in micro-gravity. Taveena and Erling preferred a sleep sack. Helix liked to sleep unencumbered, with only a light fan pushing her against a wall. Tranq and Kuhn … “Well,” Annalise said, her eyebrows arched, “I’ll let your imagination fill that one in. It’s a lot easier with two people.” Everyone else used the belts.

Below decks, as Annalise called everything below the middle floor of the sphere, she showed Shaw the solar engines, the quantum stabilizers, and their storage rooms. Food, gear, and several large printers.

“Kuhn’s the quartermaster. If you need anything, just ask her.”

Great.

“You still haven’t seen the most interesting room,” she said, a glimmer in her eye as she led him down another narrow hall. “It’s gotten kind of cramped,” she said as the door slid open.

To Shaw’s amazement, it was the only room of the
Walden
that he’d imagined perfectly. A small cubbyhole, the room was filled on three sides with shelves, and those shelves were filled with small black spheres.

Erling was in a thick chair in the middle of the room, reading his wrap.

“Hey Byron!” he said, unbelting from the chair and getting up.

“There are so many,” he said to himself.

“One hundred forty-two, I think, at last count.”

“I had no idea your network was so big.”

“It’s shrunk, actually.” Erling’s eyes flickered to Annalise. “We’ve lost a lot since your conversation with Wulf in that hotel room.”

“Really? I would have thought you’d have gained some.”

“We gained allies, that’s for sure. But we exposed a lot of people, too. People realized that the innocuous sphere their husband or wife had wasn’t just a piece of art. A lot of people got turned in. Most of the people who were turned in hadn’t actually done anything yet.” Erling shrugged. “But enough people had them that Lattice Security, with help from the corporations, is finding patterns in how we operate—how we recruit.”

Shaw felt a tinge of pride that his old teammates were making some headway. He couldn’t quite believe that he was here with the raiders, while they were still groping around in the dark. He looked at the spheres and imagined an Ono, or a pilot, or a plastic surgeon on the other end of each one. “How do you keep track of them all?” he asked.

And then he answered his own question. Below each one was a label with a name. As he read, he started to notice that Asian names were generally with each other, that European names were with each other. He took another look at the entirety of the shelves and said, “They’re organized by geography, right?”

Erling smiled and fluttered his hand. “Eh … Close enough. I did it one time when I got bored. It’s actually pretty helpful. We have dossiers on everyone, but it’s nice to have some hints to jog our memory.”

Shaw was still scanning the names. Now that he had the geography of the spheres roughly in his head, he was looking at North America. So many names … so many people who had one day come home to find a sphere, just like he did. Except, they didn’t fight back? Wouldn’t they have reported the sphere if they weren’t interested? Wouldn’t—Shaw’s attention was caught by a familiar arrangement of letters.

Peter Mayfield.

There had to be thousands of Peter Mayfields, right? But geographically, the sphere was roughly in Mexico. And he had taken the Blue Sky Pledge …

“Is that the Peter Mayfield I think it is?”

Erling flushed, answering Shaw’s question. “We recruited him last year,” Erling said softly. “He’s only done one task for us.”

“What was it?”

“We made sure he went to your party in St. Louis. We thought it would remind you of Elvin and all the terrible things that the Lattice has caused.”

Shaw nodded slowly. “You didn’t know me very well then.”

“We were still learning about you,” Erling agreed. “You don’t like absolutes. Some people really love them—a lot of these people do,” he said, nodding his head at the walls behind him. “But a few are like you.”

“I like absolutes. When they exist. I just think the Blue Skyers are a little preachy for me, that’s all.”

Erling shrugged again, not meeting Shaw’s gaze.

“Do I know any other names up here?” Shaw asked, his voice filled with anger. “Any more sleeper agents that were in my circle?”

“None,” Erling said. It was like he’d personally let down Shaw.

Shaw instantly regretted his tone. Erling was one of the few people in his corner. And really, these people had already replaced Yang with someone who had tried to kill Shaw with a nanoshock. In the scheme of things, an old friend trying to talk him into a silly pledge was probably a minor offense. He put his hand on Erling’s shoulder. “Sorry. It’s all still new to me.”

Erling gave a regretful smile, but nodded.

“Let’s finish the tour,” Shaw said to Annalise.

They stepped out of the room and let the door close. “That was sweet of you. Trying to make Erling feel better. He’s a sensitive kid.”

“How old is he?”

“Nineteen.”

“You killed a nineteen-year-old kid and brought him up here with you?” Shaw was shocked.

“He was seventeen at the time. And yes. He was an orphan. Later his boyfriend—well, his life was a mess, that’s all I guess that’s important … we gave him a chance to start over, and he jumped at it.”

“What happened? Something to do with the Lattice?”

Annalise shook her head. “That’s not my story to tell.” She started leading Shaw up to the main floor again.

“It’s a simple enough question.”

“Maybe. But it’s nice to let each other feel like we can have secrets again. No, not secrets. That we have our own
stories
. That we aren’t open books for anyone who’s interested. If you want to learn more about Erling, you should ask him.”