The Meek Page 21

  They found the Security Office badly damaged but still standing. Though the main entrance had been bolted shut, the front window was smashed, its bars ripped away, one still dangling from the steel window frame. They climbed through the window. Cody swung his guidelight around the duty clerk’s area, saw a chair lying on its side, broken glass all over the floor, and a vandalized particle-beam battering ram leaning against the wall. A picture hung next to it, a face from the past, now no more than a historical figure, a photographic portrait of Comptroller Leo D. Oliver, his cheeks hanging like the jowls of a basset hound, his blue eyes hooded by drooping and suspicious lids. Ceres’s leader from thirty years ago, the man who had ordered the evacuation, the official who had signed off on Isosceles Boulevard’s decision to bioexterminate. Cody swung his guidelight away. A corridor led to the back. He looked at his oxygen meter. Three minutes left.

  “Let’s check back here,” he said.

  They hurried to the back area and found another corridor running at right angles. Marrow grew here and there. He looked up and down the corridor. Which door to try? He had two minutes of oxygen left, two minutes to live, two minutes to find the right door.

  At the end of the hall he saw a door stenciled with the word STORES.

  “Down here,” he said.

  They ran down the hall.

  They had to break the door down. Cody ran against it three times, launching himself shoulder-first, trying not to panic, struggling to forget how quickly the seconds of his life were dwindling away. The door finally gave and he stumbled into the storeroom. He checked his oxygen meter again—1:23. Some old uniforms hung on a rack. Discarded computer terminals had been stacked one on top of the other against the wall. What else? A pile of evidence collection bags. A stretcher. Three truncheons. Someone’s framed certificate from the Academy. A pack of chewing gum. A music stand. A large metal cabinet, locked, stood against the other wall. That was the only reasonable place to look. He took out his laser drill. Fifty-nine seconds left. He cut around the lock while Ben sliced at the hinges. The metal turned orange, then white. He cut a circle right around the lock and it popped out. He opened the door and jumped back. Thirty-seven seconds left. A dead orphan, mummified and wizened, in shackles and handcuffs, lay in a fetal position on the floor of the cabinet. No oxygen tanks anywhere in sight.

  He turned, looked at Ben, tried to keep his panic in check, but he couldn’t help thinking of snow again, the powdery stuff that came in the evening at the Chillicothe Alpine Habitat, and how, in day’s final light it would glisten with all the colors of a diamond, white, but also blue, violet, and gold, something great, something he was going to miss.

  “This is the shits,” said Ben, and activated his chloropathoxin unit.

  A blue gas steamed up into Ben’s helmet, obscuring his face. Cody reached for Ben but he knew it was pointless. So this was it, he thought. You think about death, it sometimes haunts you when you go to sleep at night, you know it’s out there waiting for you, but you never know where or in what circumstances it will finally catch up with you. Warning pings sounded inside his helmet. Ben slumped to the floor. Cody knelt beside him. He began to gasp for breath a few seconds later. Not strenuously, at least not at first; there was still residual oxygen inside his suit, but it was quickly being replaced with carbon dioxide.

  “Ben?”

  Ben didn’t respond. Through the yellow visor and the blue mist, Ben LeBlanc’s face looked green. His mouth hung open and Cody could see his overbite. Cody struggled for breath but he felt like he had a plastic bag over his head. He thought his exposure to marrow might help him, but he hadn’t kissed Lulu in a while and his stomach was now proving useless as a respiratory organ. He looked around the storeroom. So this was where he was going to die. Every breath he took was more torturous than the last. He gazed at the music stand, at first thinking it was an odd object to find in here but then remembering that the Security Department on Vesta had any number of marching bands. He felt suddenly faint. He glanced over at the mummified orphan in the cabinet, thought how cruel it had been to shackle him, to throw him in there, then just forget about him until he died. He felt the lack of oxygen right down to the base of his spine. He breathed faster. He hyperventilated. Felt his hands start to tingle from lack of oxygen. Felt his muscles seize up as he began to panic. He couldn’t breathe. He got up and looked wildly around the room. So this was it … but it didn’t mean he wasn’t going to fight it.

  He ran to the rack of hanging uniforms and pushed them out of the way. Instinct told him to fight, even though the Conrad Wilson might end up launching a strategic strike anyway. He needed oxygen and he needed it now. His knees felt wobbly. His visor warned him that the carbon dioxide in his suit was now reaching dangerous levels … he ran over to the stack of old computer terminals and pushed them out of the way … thinking he might find an old tank behind there … but what he found was a French horn … sitting on its bell … its brass body dented … one of its valve keys stuck in the down position as if the musical instrument were playing a silent but eternal note …

  At last, he decided he didn’t want to die this way.

  He wanted dreams.

  He wanted euphoria.

  Above all, he wanted peace.

  He activated his own chloropathoxin unit.

  A blue mist rose before him. Like the blue of those gemlike seas in the James Cook Coral Reef Habitat. He breathed in deeply. He sank to his knees, thankful that he didn’t feel the panic anymore. He fell to his back and looked up at the ceiling where a colony of marrow grew in neat little rows. He closed his eyes. And he dreamed. Dreamed of those distant days before the collapse in Residential Sector 5 … when he and Christine had been together … when they still had plans … and when anything seemed possible …

  CHAPTER 18

  In his chloropathoxin dream Cody was underwater. The artificial tropical sun sparkled on the surface of the water above him, giving its underside a mirrorlike appearance. Christine swam down to him, her hair floating around her in a dark brown mane, her eyes the color of jade, that smile of hers on her face.

  He reached up, cupped her chin in his hand, and felt all the old pain come back. I understand your pain, Cody, she said. But could anybody ever understand his particular pain, how he had suffered with it for five years, missing her every day, still getting used to the fact that he was alone, that there was now a major demarcation in his life, a discontinuity, and that at times, as with Buster, he felt like an island unto himself? She reached down and pulled off his diving mask and the water seemed to darken, to lose all its blueness, grow shockingly cold. She leaned toward him. To kiss him. He was so happy to see her again after all these years. The chloropathoxin made her so real. Our life together would have been a work of art, he said.

  When Christine kissed him the water instantly warmed up. But it was more than that. She came into focus yet receded at the same time. He started to come to his senses. Christine didn’t have green eyes but violet eyes; and she didn’t have brown hair anymore but white hair; and her skin had turned robin’s-egg blue. He knew this wasn’t Christine at all but Lulu, here to make him breathe with his stomach, to withstand the lower atmospheric pressure, to survive the killer cold, to reactivate all the marrow he had already ingested so his chromosome 3 could repair the toxic damage of the chloropathoxin.

  For a long time his muscles didn’t—or couldn’t—cooperate, felt locked in a chloropathoxin-induced paralysis. He was so tired, so worn out, as if everything he had ever done in his life had finally caught up with him. He didn’t think he would ever move again.

  He lay there staring at the circular glow his guidelight cast on the ceiling of the storeroom. Sometimes Lulu came to kiss him; sometimes she disappeared from sight. He lost sense of time. His lungs weren’t working. His chest was still. He felt unarticulated yet reassuring emanations from Lulu. She didn’t have to say anything, didn’t have to form her thoughts into words because he already knew, could compre
hend that nugget of brightness, recognized the way she felt toward him and found strength in it.

  He turned, saw Agatha kissing Ben, a desperate CPR kiss. He thought Ben was dead. But Ben finally coughed. A small cloud of blue gas escaped from his mouth.

  Ben opened his eyes. He turned his head weakly to one side, dazed and disoriented. Cody tried to speak, to ask Ben if he were all right, but there was no air, nothing to force against his vocal cords, and no medium through which sound could travel. He gave up on his impotent attempt to form words.

  He said: Will he live?

  Lulu stipulated: He will convalesce.

  Her cool wind cleared the fog from his mind, and all the pieces of his current reality fit themselves together. He sat up, dizzy with the effort, and pulled on his helmet. He checked his visor readings, patched into the biofeedback monitors of the survivors in the pod, and discovered that only four of them remained active: Axworthy, Claire, Deirdre, and Jerry. He accessed the pod life support, had trouble with the connection, had to try a few times, finally got through and saw that the four survivors had 22 minutes of oxygen left.

  He said: Do you know where there’s any oxygen? Any extra tanks anywhere?

  She nodded, beckoned.

  He followed her down the hall on unsteady legs to a door at the end. She pulled her knife from its scabbard, pried off the control unit, did something to the electronics inside, and the door slid open. Stairs led to a basement.

  In the basement, they found fifteen oxygen tanks as well as a rack of different adapters, one of which fit his own suit.

  Oxygen not to breathe—he was breathing with his stomach now—but to speak with, to force his vocal cords to move.

  Axworthy’s holo-image smiled weakly at Cody. “I thought you were dead. When we saw the glitch in the targeting program we thought you’d had it.”

  “What happened to everybody?” he said. “I’ve got only the four of you left.”

  Axworthy looked away. “My security recruits used their units so the rest of us could have more air.” He looked up at Cody, his eyes steady. “They were brave men and women.”

  “We’ve got fifteen tanks of oxygen here. We can be there in 35 minutes. Can you hang on that long?”

  “It means we’re going to be running on empty.” Axworthy’s face settled. “Not that it’s going to make any difference now. They’ve ordered the strike.”

  Cody’s blood quickened. His throat tightened with apprehension. “What strike?” But he already knew the answer to his question.

  “Had you contacted us ten minutes sooner … the Council’s voted for bioextermination. The comptroller’s signed off on it. I’ve sent the order to the Conrad Wilson. I’ve had them abandon the explorer refit. They weren’t going to have it done in time, and they’ll need the fuel from the explorer to make their maneuvers anyway. I’ve locked in the strike command. The ship’s on automatic strategic deployment. The crew can’t stop it. They’re just along for the ride now. Only I can send the abort command.”

  “Then send the abort command,” said Cody. “I’m coming with the oxygen. You can’t kill them all, Kevin. Send the abort command.”

  Axworthy’s face hardened. “It wasn’t my decision, Cody. And don’t think it was an easy decision for the Council to make either. You saw how long it took them. They considered two possible options: a full-scale invasion or another bioextermination. They felt a full-scale invasion would cost too many Vestan lives and might not be effective enough in stopping whatever plans the Meek had for Earth. Plus they wanted to minimize damage, and the blast from neutron bombardment is quite small compared to the firepower they’d need to launch a full-scale invasion. They believe that Ceres might be recoverable at some point in the future and they want to optimize that possibility.”

  “You’ve got to send the abort command, Kevin.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Please,” said Cody, growing even more alarmed.

  Axworthy frowned. “I’ve erased the software. I’m a soldier, Cody. You think I’d actually leave the software intact? I know how orphans work. The minute we run out of oxygen, the minute we’re dead, they’ll be in the pod hacking the bioextermination order. Only they won’t find it. There’ll be nothing there to hack.”

  Cody stared at the holo-image of Axworthy, his mind racing to find a way out of what was quickly becoming a checkmate situation. But he felt as if he were groping in the dark, searching for a solution that simply wasn’t there.

  “You mean the Conrad Wilson‘s going to attack Ceres whether we want it to or not?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  Lulu put her hand on his arm, as alarmed as Cody.

  “I did it for our children, Cody,” said Axworthy, looking annoyed that he should have to explain this to Cody. “I want them to grow up healthy in the one gee, like I did. I want them to grow up free from the fear of orphans coming in the night. And I want them to know that they live in a society that’s willing to stand up for what’s right.”

  “But what about the Meek children?” said Cody. “Have you thought about them?”

  Axworthy sighed. “The order’s been sent, Cody, and it can’t be canceled. The ship’s maneuvering for the best strategic spread, and should be ready to fire in less than four hours.”

  He ran like fury down Isosceles Boulevard, an oxygen tank under each arm. He loped past the big government buildings on Isosceles Boulevard, their tall pillars lit by the fitful glow of the new lights Axworthy had strung up. Lulu ran beside him with two oxygen tanks of her own.

  According to his visor the oxygen pod’s air had run out two minutes ago. He couldn’t let Deirdre die. He couldn’t let Claire die. Agatha was still back in Actinium with Ben. He couldn’t let Jerry or Axworthy die. Most of all, he had to find a way to stop the Conrad Wilson.

  In the main auditorium of the emergency shelter, a red light flashed on the outside of the oxygen pod—an indicator light. No oxygen left. Cody put his oxygen tanks down, exhausted by the long run from Actinium, staggered forward, gripped the pod for support, and looked through the porthole window beside the door. He saw the survivors lying on the floor, gasping, eyes half-closed, like fish washed up on a shore. The corpses of the sacrificed recruits lay to one side. The carbon dioxide meter on the wall inside showed levels close to the saturation point. The survivors wore pressure suits, had helmets ready. On their belts they wore chloropathoxin units. All they had to do was snap on their helmets, activate their units, and dream their way to eternity.

  He cycled the airlock, stepped into the pressurization chamber, dragged the oxygen tanks in after him, and beckoned Lulu. Lulu got in. He shut the outside lock, cycled the pressure again, smelled the stale carbon dioxide air, and opened the inside airlock. Claire looked up at him. He sucked back a chestful of the stagnant air and spoke.

  “Claire,” he said, “we’ve got to get your targeting program back on-line.”

  He had finally come up with a solution.

  Meek converged around the pod, summoned by the biochemical telegraph poles of the marrow, Cody’s own weak call amplified through Lulu, replicated in the microscopic particles of marrow that floated in the vacuum, jumping from colony to colony, all the way to the City of Resolved Differences, to the Forest of Peace and Understanding. They converged around the pod and they accepted him. Buster was there and Buster accepted him too. In siding with the Meek, Cody had crossed a line, he knew that, and he knew he had to act accordingly. He had four of the Meek guard Axworthy. He was going to save them if he could, and, as much as he had grown to respect Axworthy, he had to prevent the man’s interference.

  With that settled, Cody went back into the pod to see how Claire was making out.

  She sat at her console going through the 15,000 lines of code in her targeting program. Cody leaned over and watched the screen. He recognized only some of the machine language she was using. She scanned line after line, thousands of electronic hieroglyphs, and every so often s
he would shake her head and her brow would pinch.

  “Any luck?” he asked.

  “I can’t find it,” she said. “I’ve been through it twice. I’ve opened all the crunched bits and I’ve had a good look through. I can’t spot any corruption. And there’s no sign of a virus either. You’re sure it couldn’t be in the hardware? The interface to the microwave converter? Look how old it is.”

  “Our monitor indicated bad code in your software.”

  “I’ll keep working,” she said.

  * * *

  Cody and Claire stood on the transmission tower platform double-checking the interface between her microwave converter targeting program and the rest of the equipment. In the 270 square kilometers of solar panels below them, swarms of Meek, all wrapped in the orange reflective pressure tape, swept the astral debris and dust off the photovoltaic cells. Cody sensed their single-minded determination. More important, he sensed their unity; even though they still had their clans, they came together like this for the common good, thousands upon thousands of them. The white glare of the sun beat down on them from directly overhead. The orange tape was as bright as flecks of fire against the dark solar panels.

  “I’ve had to modify the targeting software with the introduction of a joystick option,” said Claire. “I don’t know what they’re going to throw at us, but I anticipate a multiple launch with multiple warheads. Forward and backwards are up and down. Right and left are right and left. The subsidiary thumbstick brings you back and forth through the grid. This trackball here changes the angle of view.”