Gary Gibson - Final Days

‘You want to know the truth?’ he said, opening his eyes again. ‘The learning pools remade me. They pulled me apart and put me together again, better than before.’

Albright frowned. ‘Learning pools?’

‘The pits me and Vogel got caught in.’

He remembered the sense of stark terror as the black, tar-like liquid had started to fill the pit all around them, and then that sense of floating in a timeless void. ‘When Jeff Cairns found me, I was still trying to understand what had happened to me. But one thing above all had changed: I wasn’t afraid of anything any more, not even death.’ He locked eyes with Albright. ‘Or anything you could possibly threaten me with.’

Albright stared at him for several seconds, then stepped back to his desk and swept his hand across it in a practised gesture. The desk’s surface dulled to an inanimate grey.

‘The next time we meet isn’t going to be nearly as civilized,’ said Albright. ‘Because there’s too much at stake. But I want you to think about one thing that’s been puzzling me, before we meet again tomorrow morning.’

‘What?’

‘You were the only thing still alive anywhere on the Moon or Earth, when we found you,’ said Albright. ‘Why you ? Why would whatever wiped out every last trace of life everywhere else lve you untouched?’

Mitchell looked towards the window, and said nothing.

NINE

South China Sea Airspace, 28 January 2235

‘Tell me, you ever jump out of a plane? Go parachuting, or anything like that?’

Saul glanced at the man opposite: lean and sharp-faced with deep-set eyes, his head jerking slightly from side to side as the sub-orbital slammed through the stratosphere. Saul’s UP floated a tag next to him, identifying the man as Sefu Nazawi.

‘Once,’ Saul replied. His knuckles shone white where they gripped the padded restraints confining his chest and shoulders.

Up until now, the conversation had been distinctly muted, ever since taking off from an airfield in Germany. Saul didn’t need a degree in psychology to know that he was the reason.

He glanced up front towards Hanover, who was leaning over the pilot’s shoulder. The two men were conferring quietly as the craft angled its nose downwards at a terrifyingly steep angle. They were approaching the endpoint of a sharply curving trajectory that had boosted them to the edge of space, before hurtling them back down towards the South China Seas, and nearly ten thousand kilometres to the east.

Sefu looked sceptical. ‘For real?’

‘Why do you ask?’ Saul replied, doing his best to maintain eye contact while the sub-orbital bucked and shuddered with profound violence.

‘Just in case we have to evacuate.’ Sefu barely suppressed a grin. ‘I mean, we’re a long way up and, with all those storms scattered around, we could get ripped to shreds before we reach the ground. It happens.’

‘Shit, yes,’ said the man next to Sefu. Saul registered that his name was Charlie Foster. ‘Did you ever see the UP footage from that guy who fell out of a sub-orbital? The one that came apart just fifteen minutes after take-off?’

‘I did,’ Sefu replied, turning to Foster with a snap of his fingers. ‘His ’chute failed, right? And his contacts kept recording, the whole way down.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Saul.

Foster nodded enthusiastically, gazing at Saul with an innocent expression. ‘No lie. Bastard screamed like a banshee right up until the end.’

Sefu noisily sucked air through his teeth.

‘Hit the ground so hard his skull wound up lodged in his ass,’ Foster added, shaking his head sadly.

Saul considered a variety of responses, most of them anatomically impossible.

The sub-orbital hit a fresh patch of turbulence, lurching like a truck dropping one of its wheels into a deep pothole. Saul drew in a sharp breath and wished he had something to cling on to, as the turbojets grumbled and whined in preparation for the last stage of their descent.

‘And there’s a reason you’re sharing this with me?’ Saul managed to say.

‘Well,’ Sefu replied, ‘I got the impression you weren’t enjoying the flight, for some reason.’

‘Me, I love turbulence,’ said Foster, his eyes wide and happy. ‘It’s like being rocked to sleep by Mother Nature.’

Text, rendered in silver, floated on the lower right of Saul’s vision, telling him that the sub-orbital was now only seven kilometres above the ground, having already dropped nearly fifteen kilometres in the last few minutes. The external temperature was minus seventy, and the air still thin enough to qualify as vacuum.

‘Now Mitchell,’ Sefu continued, twisting around in his restraints to catch the attention of the rest of Hanover’s task force, ‘that son of a bitch was in fucking love with jumping out of things.’

‘Fuck yeah,’ confirmed a woman further down the two rows of seats facing each other on either side the craft’s interior. Her tag read Helena Bryant. ‘I trained with him this one time, when we had to jump from about twelve kilometres up. He got to within maybe a half-klick of the ground before he even started to pull back up. Scared the shit out of me then, but the man was fucking fearless.’

‘Wing-suit, right?’ Saul guessed.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ she replied. ‘You know what I’m talking about?’

‘Sure,’ Saul replied, assuming an air of false bravado. ‘I even went on a jump with him once, years ago. He’d been daring me for months.’

‘You knew him?’ interrupted another voice over to his right.

‘We worked together way back when,’ Saul replied. ‘Somehow he . . . talked me into it.’

‘Why’d he have to talk you into it?’ asked Sefu. He was still grinning, but there was a shade more respect in his tone. ‘Because you were too chickenshit?’

‘Too sane, I think,’ Saul replied. ‘The dive was made from low orbit.’

That shut them up.

‘Real orbit, or sub-orbital?’ asked Helena.

Saul grinned. ‘Sub-orbital. I’m not that crazy.’

‘That’s pretty dangerous shit nonetheless,’ someone else said.

‘Sure.’ Saul made a point of shrugging, as if to say no big deal. ‘Maybe one in a thousand orbital divers wind up dead, but Mitch and me did it together, from more than twenty kilometres up. We used foam and Kevlar heat shields for the first five kilometres down, then wing-suits the rest of the way.’

Saul recalled the wide wings embellishing the one-piece flying suit. Rigid stabilizers built into each suit kept them from going into a deadly spin as they dropped down through the thickening atmosphere. At the time, he’d thought the experience might cure him of what had then been nothing more than a mild fear of flying, but instead it had made it much, much worse. He’d never even have agreed to it if Mitchell hadn’t been having such a hard time back then, coping with the death of his brother Danny.

Sefu waved a hand in mock dismissal, and several of the task force laughed. Saul felt himself grinning back.

‘So why the fuck do you look like you’re about to crap yourself?’ prodded Sefu.

‘When you jump, you’re in control,’ Saul explained. ‘Being on a plane isn’t the same, though, since your life’s in someone else’s hands. And anyway, it’s been a long while since I rode in a sub-orbital.’

‘Told you,’ said Sefu, looking around at the rest of them. ‘Chickenshit.’ They all laughed, but when Sefu gave him a grin, Saul could see it was much more friendly than before.

Confirmation of Saul’s temporary transfer had come through a few days after his interrogation by Donohue and Sanders.

Almost a week after his meeting with Donohue and Sanders, he’d made his way back through the Copernicus–Florida gate, reacquainting himself with the tug of full gravity and working at rebuilding his muscle strength in a government gym close by his apartment in Orlando. He scored himself some Bad Puppy – a milder derivative of loup-garou – and used it to steady his nerves and kill some of the pain still seeping through despite the medication he’d been given for his injuries. After that, he had hitched a ride aboard a military cargo hopper to an ASI facility near Berlin, where he’d then undergone a brief interview with Hanover in his office.