James Axler - Terminal White

“But,” Lakesh said, “it meant something. If two barons were looking at the same data, it meant they were collaborating.”

Kane shook his head. “Where is all this going, Lakesh? The barons are dead now.”

“They are, but their legacy is still with us,” Lakesh pointed out. “And what Donald here discovered may be a rather big part of that legacy.”

“So pull the trigger already,” Kane said impatiently.

Bry paused for a moment before replying. “Baron Cobalt’s database was locked just like Ragnar’s, so I tried checking through the other baronial databases. In the Snakefishville database—now Luilekkerville of course—I found the same coordinates attached to something called Terminal White.”

“And who or what is Terminal White?” Brigid asked.

“That is a mystery,” Donald admitted, “but a fascinating one. Once we had the Snakefish link I could backtrack into the Ragnarville and Cobalt databases and look for a link. The phrase ‘Terminal White’ appears in all of them, relating to an area to the north of their territories. It would appear to be a shared project involving all three barons—at least—working together toward some undefined goal.”

“Three-way power grab, maybe?” Kane mused.

Brigid nodded warily. “Hmm, perhaps they were collaborating to take over the other baronies, then split them among themselves. And that all fell apart when the snake gods emerged, changing the stakes.”

“Not just the stakes,” Kane reminded her, “but the rules of the whole darn shooting match.”

Kane turned back to Bry and Lakesh, a look of concern on his face. “So, did you find anything else?”

Bry shook his head regretfully. “We’re still running checks, trying to burrow into the data. We’ve scanned the databases of each of the baronies, well, as much as we can access at this stage. We have the name or term, but everything else is encrypted like a ticking time bomb—if we push too hard we’ll wipe the data entirely.”

“And with a lot of that data already lost or ransacked after the fall of the baronies,” Lakesh said, “much of Donald’s information is already coming from old files that would be regarded as ‘lost.’”

“The data is very high-level security,” Bry added. “I suspect a lot of this information was carried person to person, baron to baron, and not stored on any database. What little we have uncovered is purely relating to the site, but the coordinates and the site match up both with each other and with the storm we’ve observed in satellite surveillance.”

“The barons are gone,” Kane said grimly. “Any research project they started should have shut down, too. Shouldn’t it?”

Brigid shook her head. “Kane, you know we’re going to have to look,” she said. “Don’t try to find a way out of it—that’s beneath you.”

Kane ground his teeth in irritation. “I want to protect people—not databases,” he muttered.

“They’ll come,” Grant told him. “They always do.”

Designated Task #011: Cleaning

Each resident of Ioville is expected to exhibit a professional level of cleanliness at all times. The cleanliness of the ville is paramount and is the responsibility of every citizen.

After my manufacturing shift—nine hours with three designated breaks—I am assigned ville cleaning duties with another citizen, named Citizen 058F—a woman like me.

Our duties involve checking the factories and walkways of Epsilon Level, cleaning and sterilizing all walls and floors, checking and sterilizing the stairwells and elevators in the west tower, checking and sterilizing the linking walkways between west and north towers, cleaning and maintaining fire safety equipment, collecting and labeling any debris larger than a fingernail so that it may be retained and analyzed, and assisting in the cleaning of all personnel exiting manufactory 8.

Once our circuit is completed, another team takes our place to begin cleaning again while we are designated as off-shift. At this stage, we are stripped and sent through the personnel cleaning facility at factory 8 to ensure that we have not picked up any rogue dirt or dangerous debris. Once we are clean, we are expected to return to our residences. Citizen 058F resides in a block close to my own, and so we travel together via trolleybus. We do not discuss where she works during the day, preferring to sit in composed silence as the bus makes its circuit of the ville. She gets off one stop before me.

—From the journal of Citizen 619F.

Chapter 6

At dawn the next morning, two sleek bronze-hued aircraft cut across the skies over the former province of Alberta in the western part of Canada. The craft were known as Mantas, aircraft designed in ancient prehistory by an alien race and capable of phenomenal acceleration and other feats, including subspace travel. They had emerged from a hidden hangar in the Cerberus redoubt at a little before dawn, launching one after another and veering northward in perfect formation.

Identical in appearance, the Mantas were constructed from a bronze-hued metal whose liquid sheen glimmered in the early-morning sunlight. Their graceful designs consisted of flattened wedges with swooping wings curving out to either side of the body in mimicry of the seagoing manta, and it was this similarity that had spawned their popularised name of Manta Craft. Each Manta’s wingspan was twenty yards and their body length was almost fifteen, but it was the beauty of their design that was breathtaking, an effortless combination of every principle of aerodynamics wrapped up in a gleaming, burned-gold finish. The entire surface of each craft was decorated with curious geometric designs; elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols. Each vehicle featured an elongated hump in the center of the body which provided the only indication of a cockpit.

Inside those cockpits sat three individuals. Piloting each craft were Kane and Grant, dressed in their shadow suits, their heads hidden behind the almost-spherical, bulb-like helmets that were built into the pilot seats of each vehicle. The interior was small and simple, with very few displays showing other than a few indicator lights. Rather, the dashboards existed in virtual space, projected onto the pilot’s retina using the heads-up technology of the weird-looking helmets.

The third occupant of the Mantas was Brigid Baptiste, sitting in the backseat of Kane’s vehicle, where she was using a portable tablet computer to analyze the local weather patterns and generally familiarize herself with the local climate and terrain. It wasn’t necessary, of course—she had already gone through all of the material the night before and her eidetic memory ensured she would not forget so much as a single detail. And yet, nervousness or perhaps that human instinct that one might have missed something made Brigid check the material again while running through scenarios in her head.

“You okay back there, Baptiste?” Kane asked, raising his voice slightly over the low hum of the Manta’s engine. The Manta utilised two different types of engines, depending on the specific flying that was required of it. One was a ramjet while the other was a solid fuel pulse detonation, which was useful for work outside the planet’s atmosphere. Neither was especially noisy, however, and Kane raised his voice more out of habit and the weird feeling of his skull being encased and muffled by the helmet rather than any real need. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”

“Just thinking,” Brigid said as the Manta cut through the cold air high over Mount Robson in the Canadian Rockies.

“What do you think we’re going to find?” Kane asked, making conversation. “Another baron?”

“I don’t like to speculate,” Brigid said.