Ramez Naam - Apex

Miller took a deep breath, and then another. A while later he spoke again. “At night, you hunt deer with infrared, son. You can see ’em clear as day, a thousand yards out. Unless you got thick fog.” He glanced at Rangan and nodded. “Or a heavy rainstorm.” He turned his eyes back to the road. “And a truck runnin’ on battery, with the heaters turned off.”

Rangan shivered, and huddled even deeper in the blankets.

Rangan lost track of the twists and turns Earl took. He was so cold. So tired. Everything hurt so much. His shirt was definitely wet above the bandage where the bullet wound was.

Earl forded a flooded low point in a road, deep enough that water started to come in through his door, through some leak from where the tree limb had struck them. Then they were out the other side. They drove over tiny roads that were just mud now, mud raked up by wind to splash into their windshields. They drove across a field that had been flattened by Zoe, the tires just barely getting enough traction to pull them back onto the road at the other side. Earl pulled them up onto an overpass, then slowed and took them down an embankment instead of continuing on the road they’d been on.

Lights appeared ahead, moving lights, and Earl pulled them off the side of the road again, and behind a row of trees, until a different pickup passed their hiding spot, heading away from town, out towards where they’d come from.

Finally, more than an hour after they’d left the farm, they crawled slowly, carefully, into Madison, taking the smallest roads possible, until finally Earl pulled them into an alley a block from St Mark’s.

The wind was still fierce in town, but weaker. It had grown weaker even out in the countryside in the hour it had taken them to drive this circuitous loop around the town. Zoe was dying, bit by bit.

Earl Miller pulled out his phone, dialed, said a few words into it, listened, and hung up.

“They’re gonna open up the side door for us.”

“Won’t the cops trace your call?” Rangan asked.

“If they want you bad enough,” Earl said, nodding. “They’ll pull all the calls from all the houses.”

“What then?”

Miller shrugged. “My grandson, Jamie,” he said. “That stuff you made. The Nexus. It changed him. He and his daddy took it. He got so much better… Lookin’ you in the eye, listenin’, talkin’, huggin’ .”

Rangan looked over at the farmer.

“Sons of bitches took him away. Got him locked up somewhere.”

Miller turned his head, returned Rangan’s gaze.

“Levi told me that you had a chance to get outa lockup. But you wouldn’t leave without the kids. That true?”

Rangan choked. He nodded. “Mr Miller… Your grandson, Jamie…”

“I know he’s not one of the boys you got out, son,” Miller said. “But he coulda been.”

Miller’s phone buzzed. He looked down. Tapped it. Then took control of the car.

“Seems to me,” the farmer went on, “you took a bigger risk than I am.”

Rangan leaned back, not at all sure what to say. Earl drove them out of the alley, back into the wind, made the corner, and there was the back of the church. Then they were pulling up to a side door, and it was opening.

“Stay safe, son. Stay free. There’s more the Lord wants you to do.”

Rangan leaned over, despite the pain, and hugged Earl Miller. “You stay free too, Mr Miller. There’s more left for you to do too.”

And then the truck door opened, and Levi was there, and another man he didn’t recognize. The belt came off, and they helped him down from the truck. The first motion hurt. The second hurt worse. Then agony shoved itself through him as his body contorted in new ways. He collapsed onto the two men as they dragged him in through the door of the church.

Rangan was suddenly so deeply cold. His vision was growing so very dim.

Then the world receded into nothing at all.

9

Transit and Debriefing

Saturday 2040.11.03

Kade verified his last upload, then streamed the last of the files down from Shiva’s satellite constellation, through the plane’s directional link, and into the NexusOS in his mind. That was it. There was no more time. Either this was going to work or it wasn’t.

It has to work, he told himself. It will work.

Sam’s voice came through the plane’s cabin, amplified over the plane’s speakers, in Thai, for the kids. He could only parse some of what she said, but he understood enough. They were landing.

The plan they’d agreed on was going to be put to the test.

He felt the children react, twenty-five of them crammed into this private jet meant to transport a dozen adults in luxury. They tightened seat belts and huddled together and curled up in the crash position taken from Feng’s mind. The nerves were back. Fear. Uncertainty. They were amazing beyond anything Kade had ever known, but they were still children.

Kade reached out with his thoughts and open arms and the one called Kit – seven years old? – came to him. He wrapped his arms around the boy, braced them both as well as he could on the floor of the plane, and then, with little more than a bump, Sam brought them down.

Sam shut down the engines again, killed the fuel pumps, and then unclipped from her harness. Her chest was pounding. Her face was hot. She turned and Sarai was there, standing in the cockpit doorway.

Sam held her arms open and the girl ran into them, into the hug.

“I knew you’d come for us,” Sarai told her in Thai.

Sam kissed the girl’s brow, mussed her hair. She could hear Feng behind her, tapping on controls, going through the rest of the post-flight shutdown.

“Aroon misses you,” Sarai said. “He can’t feel you. I miss you, Sam. When you have Nexus again…”

Sam’s chest pounded louder. Kevin Nakamura’s face swam in her mind. Her finger pulling the trigger. Kevin’s form, just a green outline in her goggles, toppling back into empty space as her bullets punched into his face, his chest… Kade and Shiva tearing at each other in her mind, wrestling for control as she dropped to her knees in agony…

“Sarai, I–”

“Sam.” It was Kade, standing behind Sarai, by the door of the plane. A door that was opening. “Time to go.”

Kade in her mind, clawing at Shiva, the two of them ripping her to pieces as they fought one another, Kevin already dead at her hands.

Sam’s stomach churned. Something like rage was threatening to rip itself loose from within.

She pushed it down. She needed Kade. Needed him to do his part. Needed him to play a role she couldn’t.

She took a deep breath, swallowed hard, squeezed Sarai with all the love she had in her, and then went out to meet their Indian hosts.

An officer in uniform met them on the tarmac, a Colonel Sanghita Atwal: tall, muscular, short haired, dark eyed, utterly professional and rather deadly looking. With her were uniformed medics. Beyond them Sam could see soldiers, armed, their rifles at the ready but not quite pointed at the plane. With them were emergency vehicles, the sort that responded to aircraft crashes, their amber lights slowly flashing in the pre-dawn gloom, ready, but this time unneeded.

Medics saw to their wounds with cold professionalism. Soldiers watched carefully. Any time Sam looked around, there were at least a dozen ringing her, another dozen around Feng, far enough back to take several strides to reach, their rifles in both hands, safeties off.

Further out, she saw sets of powered combat armor, occupied or being piloted remotely, in a loose perimeter around them.

The Indians were certainly taking this seriously.

She tried to ignore it, to focus on the kids.