Charles Sheffield - Aftermath

“Then I say it again. You don’t go in. That murdering sod’s the last person to risk your life for.”

“He was tied up and helpless.”

“Good. He deserved to die like that. And good riddance.” Joe walked away.

Art went across to Dana and took her hand. In silence, the group moved slowly along the path. The rain fell steadily. By the time they reached Ed’s house they were soaked, and the fire behind them was beginning to burn lower. Art took a last look back. The cabin was settling in the downpour, in gouts of blue flame and dying spurts of red-hot ash.

They went inside. Without being asked, Ed poured drinks of moonshine for everyone. Seth set the test kit boxes carefully on a table at the entrance. Dana brushed mud from the batch of wet papers and took a casual look at the top sheet. After a moment she frowned and read more carefully. Finally she went across to where Seth was sitting.

“I thought you said Guest didn’t tell you how to use the test kits.”

“He didn’t.” Seth was drinking fast, and too much. “Unless we can figure it out for ourselves — pretty long shot — we’re nowhere.”

Dana held out a sheet. “But this is the description of how to use the test kit. You can see, the first test is described here, how to do it and how to interpret it. The other pages give the same thing for the other tests.”

“Gimme a look at that.” Seth grabbed the sheets in a filthy hand and bent over them. After a couple of minutes he scowled and shook his head. “Ain’t that the damnedest. You’re right, this is the whole shebang. He never told me he’d written it out.”

“I think he intended to use this when he bargained with us for his own future. Naturally, he wouldn’t say ahead of time that he’d documented everything. But there it is.”

Art had been listening in on the conversation. “Let me take a look.”

He skimmed the first couple of pages, not reading as carefully as Dana. Seth waited until he looked up, then said, “Well?”

“It’s the document we need. But this is all too pat.”

“That’s what I thought. Too neat.”

“What do you mean?” Dana asked. “Isn’t this just what we want?”

“It is. And it ties everything up.” Art handed the sheets back to Dana. “Guest is officially dead, so the government doesn’t hunt for him. We have the telomod test kits, and we know how to use them, so we don’t have to look for him. Everybody lives happily ever after.”

“Including old Ollie,” Seth added. “Tell you what, tomorrow morning we go over to your house. No good doin’ it now, everything’s too hot to touch. But I’ll make a bet with you. We won’t find a body in the bedroom. We won’t see a sign of one, there or anywhere else.”

By morning the rain had eased to a thin drizzle. Before breakfast, Art, Seth, and Dana were heading over to the cabin. They had slept in Joe’s house, which had more space. It also had more dogs. Dana had been wakened by three of them soon after dawn, as they wandered in to scratch and sniff at the interesting new female scent. She had thrown them out of the bedroom, but remained up. Art soon joined her. He couldn’t sleep. Seth was up already. For all Art knew, he had been awake all night.

The burnt-out house had been reduced to a chaos of wet ash with an intact chimney protruding at one end. Everything was red-hot beneath the sodden upper layer of gray.

It was easy enough to find the bed. The iron headboard and footboard were intact and upright, sticking up from a cluster of fallen roof slates.

“See,” Seth said. “Nothin’.”

He had a straight sapling that he had cut on the way over. Now he reached in from outside and raked the long stick across the mess next to the headboard.

“Nothin’,” he repeated. “Hey, wait a minute.”

The sapling had run across an uneven hump. He moved it a couple of feet, and poked again.

“Son of a bitch. What’s that?”

Something irregular in shape lay between headboard and footboard. It was impossible to tell what it was without direct examination. The three walked gingerly forward, hearing the sizzle as their shoes went through the crust of ash to the still-smoldering layers beneath.

“My feet are starting to burn,” Dana said. “Can we pull the whole thing out? Unless it’s too hot to hold.”

Working together, they dragged the remains of the bed onto bare ground. The iron end parts fell away as they went, creating showers of black ash and hot sparks. Slate fragments and patches of ash dropped off the object that lay on the bed. Once they were clear of the ruins of the house, Seth and Art carefully removed the rest of the debris.

What came into sight was unmistakable. A human body lay faceup on the charred bed, most of its flesh burned away to reveal blackened bones.

“Well, how about that,” Seth said softly. He stood looking down at the skeleton. “I said I’d take bets, an’ I was wrong. Dr. G., I guess I owe you an apology.”

“Or maybe you don’t. Oliver Guest was a genius, but even a genius can’t think of everything.” Art squatted onto his haunches, staring at the scorched head with its naked cranium and empty eye sockets. He reached down and carefully removed something from the corpse’s grinning mouth. “When Guest was sentenced to judicial sleep, he was stored away naked. We know, because we found him that way.”

He held up what he had taken out of the mouth, showing Dana and Seth a partially melted object made of plastic and metal. “They put him into judicial sleep for six centuries. What do you think the chances are that they’d have stuck him into the syncope facility wearing dentures?”

They stared at what Art was holding, then at the burned body. Finally Dana said, “Who?”

“I doubt we’ll ever know.” Art tossed the melted dental bridge back into the ashes. “I’d like to believe that Guest found a corpse somewhere. There are plenty around, we saw signs all the way here.”

“Or maybe he dug one up,” Seth said cheerfully. “But knowin’ old Ollie, it’s more likely that’s number nineteen on his little list. Look on the bright side, though — it could easily have been one of us.”

Each of them straightened, turned, and scanned the trees and bushes.

“Come on.” Art took Dana’s hand. “Let’s get back to Ed and Joe. For once in my life I’ll feel safer with a few more guns around.”

As the full moon slid behind clouds and darkness became absolute, Celine gave it one last try.

“I know the layout of the corridors and the feel of the place. You don’t. It could make all the difference.”

“I realize that, ma’am.” The captain, no more than five years younger than Celine, treated her with the deference appropriate to some great and venerable head of state. “Your help in bringing us here and your description of what we are likely to find underground were really important. But you don’t know how to use any of this.”

He gestured around them. He, Celine, and nine black-clad strike team members were sitting in a vehicle that from the outside might be taken as a standard and old-fashioned electric van. Inside, gas masks, gas bombs, rifle mortars, and suits of body armor lined the walls. Four small screens showed black-and-white images. Two displayed the terrain using thermal infrared and active microwave sensors. The third observed in visible wavelengths, and was at the moment dark. The fourth was a general purpose television. Once it would have picked up any of ten thousand channels. Now there was one channel only, and that was dedicated to official government broadcasts and announcements.

“I wouldn’t have to know how to use everything,” Celine said. “You would do all that. I would just help you to find your way in the underground tunnels.”