Colony, p.41
Colony, page 41
Cobb waved at the viewscreens. “Find him yourselves. You’ve as good a chance as I have.”
Snarling, Hamoud yanked his pistol from its holster and smashed it into the old man’s face. Cobb flew out of the chair and landed with a heavy thud on the carpeted floor.
“You fool!” Bahjat screamed. “When will you learn...”
“Silence, woman!” Hamoud roared back, the pistol still in his hand. Blood flecked its barrel. “I will find the traitor. Get the Englishwoman in here—quickly!”
Once in the biochemistry laboratory, David had no intention of hiding from the terrorists. But he had a few chores to accomplish first.
The laboratory filled the entire work pod, a vast fairyland of bubbling glass retorts, plastic piping, stainless-steel vats, tubes and ducts and strange crystal shapes with narrow black metal catwalks snaking through them. The kingdom of Oz, David had dubbed it long ago, but the wizardry that went on here was real, and it could spell the difference between life and death.
Hanging above the chrome-and-crystal forest of the laboratory’s sprawling apparatus was the monitoring office, a gondola stuffed with desks and computer terminals and viewscreens. Windows all around the office slanted outward so that you could look down on the working hardware below. Doors opened onto the catwalks that wove through the glass-and-metal jungle. Just above the gondola were the heavy steel structural beams that held the pod together.
The desk-like consoles inside the office controlled every facet of the laboratory pod, from the temperature of the air to the speed with which the pod spun—thereby creating its artificial gravity. David spent nearly half an hour going through the control programs of the pod’s own internal computer and making certain that he could run the computer with his implanted communicator.
Finally, he sat at the phone screen, pulled Bahjat’s pistol from his waistband and placed it on the desktop, and punched Dr. Cobb’s number.
Hamoud’s tense, frenzied face appeared on the screen.
“You!” the PRU leader snapped. Surprise, anger, relief, fear flashed across his face.
“Where’s Dr. Cobb?” David asked.
“Where are you?”
“Where is Dr. Cobb?” he repeated, suddenly afraid. “What have you done with him?”
The view on the phone’s screen widened and David saw Leo holding Cobb on his feet. A gash ran from the old man’s scalp to his brow; caked blood matted his hair and streaked the side of his face. His lips looked swollen, turning blue.
A flash of white-hot anger burned through David. But to his own surprise it immediately boiled away, replaced by a coldly calculating hatred, calm, clear-sighted, implacable, and as deep and frigid as interstellar space.
“We will kill this old man,” Hamoud said, “unless you give us the cure for the disease you have infected us with.”
“You know that I infected you?”
“Yes. And you will cure us. Or he dies. Painfully.”
“Where is Bahjat?” David asked.
“Unconscious.” The phone camera was set at a wide enough angle for David to see Hamoud’s hands. They were trembling. Leo looked shaky, too. Cobb was barely conscious, hanging limply in the big man’s arms.
Then two more guerrillas pushed Evelyn into the camera’s view. She looked sick, as well.
“She will die, also,” Hamoud said. “Painfully. And everyone else in the colony... one by one, if you don’t give us the cure.”
David shook his head. “You won’t have the time. You’ll all be dead in a few hours, long before you can kill more than a few of the people here. Dr. Cobb is an old man. The Englishwoman...” He forced himself to shrug. “What of her? She is closer to you than to me.”
Hamoud pounded his fists on the keyboard. “Where are you? What is the cure?”
“There is no cure,” David said, “not for you. You’re going to die. Maybe I can cure the others... but not you, Tiger. You are going to die. Painfully.”
Hamoud’s eyes burned like coals from hell. “If I die, she dies. Bahjat—Scheherazade. I will slice her throat open myself.”
David hunched forward in the plastic chair he was sitting on. “You bastard...”
“I’ll kill her,” Hamoud answered in a molten-hot whisper. “You’ll never cure her. You’ll never see her alive again. I’ll destroy her.”
David let his shoulders sag. “I’m in the biochemistry lab,” he said in a low, defeated voice. “It’s the work pod next to the hospital. Get the technicians from the spacecraft control station to put you into a commutersphere and send you out here. The serum you need is here.”
Hamoud broke the connection instantly. The screen went blank.
Straightening in his chair, David smiled.
~~~
NEW ENGLAND CENTRAL DISTRIBUTION: The main rectenna farm's completely shut down. We're not getting a watt.
NATIONAL POWER ALLOCATION OFFICE: You're not the only one. The whole northern rim is gone. Canada, too.
NECD: You got to do something, and fast. It's below freezing here.
NPAO: We're working on it.
NECD: What the hell are you working on? They've turned off the satellites.
NPAO: Not all of them. Arizona's still getting full wattage on all their rectenna arrays.
NECD: They are? Well, pipe some of it up here-quick. People are freezing here. We've got snow and...
NPAO: We've got to go through World Government channels before we can...
NECD: What?
NPAO: We need an okay from the World Government office before we can shunt power to you. We'd have to divert what we normally pipe to Mexico and...
NECD: Fuck Mexico and fuck the World Government. We need the goddamned power now!
—Read into the Congressional Record by Representative Alvin R. Watts (D., N. Mex.), 15 December 2028
~~~
FORTY-ONE
Bahjat awoke and found herself reclining on a contoured couch. She felt weak, her head ached, and a dull, rasping pain was sawing away inside her lungs.
Turning her head to one side, she saw that the Englishwoman was lying on the couch next to her, looking just as miserable as she felt.
“What happened... ?”
Evelyn stared blearily at Bahjat. “You fainted. In Dr. Cobb’s observation room. David’s infected us with some horrible disease.”
“I know. Where...”
“We’re going to him. He’s in a biochemistry laboratory or something, out in one of the pods outside the colony’s main structure. We’re in a commutersphere now, heading out toward him.”
Bahjat smiled weakly. “David... he has destroyed us all.”
“No. He said he has the cure for us.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You love him,” Bahjat said.
Evelyn ran a weary hand over her eyes, then said, “But he loves you.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes.”
Bahjat tried to turn a little to make herself more comfortable. But the straps of the safety harness prevented her, and the gnawing pain in her chest groaned on.
“It could have been very beautiful with David,” she said, more to herself than to Evelyn. “But it was not meant to be.”
“He loves you,” Evelyn repeated. “He never loved me.”
“What difference does it make? In another day, another hour, we will all be dead.”
“No, that’s not true. David...”
“My life ended months ago,” Bahjat said. “I died in the explosion of a helicopter. What has happened to me since then has been a dream... not real. I have been dead and dreaming for months.”
“A helicopter explosion?” Evelyn asked.
“My lover was killed in a helicopter explosion. I died then, too.”
“Hamoud said something about a helicopter explosion…”
The pain eased somewhat. Bahjat wondered if she were beginning to die. “We will all die, no matter what. What we have tried to do—the PRU, all this killing—it will catch up with us soon. We will all be killed.”
“He told me about a helicopter explosion…. someone was murdered, an architect or something...”
“Yes.” Bahjat heard her own voice murmuring drowsily. “The architect. My architect.”
“He was killed in the explosion,” Evelyn said.
Bahjat could feel her body drifting, drifting weightlessly into darkness. “He died because of me.”
“Hamoud committed murder.” Evelyn’s voice was dwindling, distant, echoing. “He murdered—for you.”
With a frail shrug, Bahjat replied, “We have all killed. We are all murderers.”
“But Hamoud committed cold-blooded murder. An execution. For you. He told me so.”
“No...” Bahjat said, scarcely hearing her. “Not murder. We are at war. It isn’t really murder. Not really. Sleep now. I must... sleep. I am so tired.”
Waiting is the worst part. David sat at the viewscreen in the biochemistry lab’s monitoring office and watched the commutersphere slowly glide across the emptiness between the colony’s main cylinder and the laboratory pod.
Nervously, he swiveled his chair to face the phone and tapped out the number for the satellite control center. The phone’s small screen showed him the situation map: The entire northern tier of American states was without power. All of Canada glowed a sullen, powerless red. Most of Europe was shut down, too. And the red danger area had grown to include a large part of Russia, from the “Workers’ Riviera” on the Black Sea to the ice-locked ports of Archangel and Murmansk.
For the twentieth time, he punched Cobb’s phone number. At last the old man’s battered face appeared on the screen.
“You’re alive,” David said, the tension in his voice almost visible.
Cobb frowned, then winced. “No thanks to the PRU. Soon as that Hamoud guy heard where you were, he took off like a shot.”
“With Bahjat and the others?”
“They’re all gone from here. I presume they’re heading out to you.”
David studied the old man’s face. “You ought to get medical attention. You probably have a concussion.”
Cobb made a negative wag of a bony finger. “Can’t move. They’ve got guards on the doors. Nobody goes in or out except the PRU crazies.”
“But how do you feel?”
“How should I feel? My head hurts. My mouth hurts. I’ve spent a fortune in preventive dentistry all my adult life to keep my teeth, and now that Arab knucklebrain has busted a couple of them.”
“But you’re okay. You’re alive.”
“Unless you’re infected me with the same bugs you’ve given them.”
David nodded. “It’s a respiratory bacterium that takes a few days to incubate. They used to call it the Legionnaire’s Disease, for some reason. The computer didn’t say why. It’s fatal inside of a hundred hours if it’s not treated with the specific antigens.”
Cobb’s swollen lips hung open. “You don’t fool around, do you? They’ll be dropping like flies.”
“That’s right.”
“Kind of cold-blooded, isn’t it?”
“It’s better than shooting up the whole colony, or letting them keep the power off all across Earth.”
Cobb looked dubious. “And what happens when they come at you with machine guns? The bug hasn’t really hit this Hamoud character, the one who calls himself Tiger. You’re not the only immune guy in the world; there are natural immunes, too, you know.”
David could feel the muscles of his jaw tighten. “I’ll deal with Hamoud when he gets here.”
Cobb snorted. “Tough guy.”
“As tough as I have to be,” David answered.
The old man broke into a crooked grin. “By golly, I think maybe you are. I sent a boy out of this tin can and I got a man back.”
“Sent?” David snapped. “I had to break out of here, like escaping from jail.”
“Do you really think you would’ve gotten away if I didn’t want you to go? It was time for you to bust loose, son, to see the world for yourself.”
David stared at him, searching for the truth in his seamed, bruised, sharp-eyed face.
“Then why,” he asked, “didn’t you just tell me to go out and see the world? Why make a game out of it?”
“Because you had to make the decision to clear out of here, not me. If you went out because I ordered you to, you would’ve taken a quick tour of a few big cities, visited their science centers and universities, and come scuttling back here inside of a couple of weeks.”
David started to protest, but Cobb went on: “When a fledgling decides to leave the nest, it’s got to be his own decision, not the boss bird’s. Kids always have to get sore at their guardians before they work up the guts to fly out on their own. You had to push yourself out.”
David grunted. “Myself, huh? Seems to me you called all the shots... as usual.”
“Not really,” Cobb replied. “You did it your own way. All I did was make sure you had the opportunity. And now you’ve come back—an adult. Strong, confident, tough. You’ve boiled off your baby fat, son. You’re a man now.”
“I didn’t have much choice about coming back.”
“Sure you did. But you came back because you realize just how important Island One is to the future of the human race.”
“To its present, you mean.”
“The future, son. The future! What difference does all this nonsense make?” Cobb’s voice rose, his face set into a grim frown. “So these PRU crackpots turn off the Solar Power Satellites for a few days... or a few weeks, even. What difference?”
“Millions of lives.”
“Chicken turds. Listen to me. You were wondering what the missing element is—remember? In your forecasting. You could see that Island One is important to the corporations today, but you hadn’t grasped what its importance is for the future.”
“You mean to provide more and more energy for all the peoples of the Earth, not just...”
“Kid stuff!” Cobb snapped. “That’s not it at all. Listen to me. Island One is the beginning, the take-off point. We’re Independence, Missouri, where the American pioneers started off on the Oregon Trail in their covered wagons. We’re the port of Palos, where Columbus left for the New World. We’re Cape Canaveral, where the first astronauts blasted off for the Moon!”
“Easy,” David said. “Calm down.”
“My backside, calm down! Don’t you understand? Island One is the first real step outward from planet Earth. We can see to it that the human race spreads through the whole Solar System. We’ll be safe then! No matter what happens to the Earth, no matter how stupid and shortsighted they are down there with the homeworld, we’ll still survive. Human beings will live here at L4 and L5, on the Moon, in space colonies out beyond Mars, among the asteroids—we’ll populate the whole Solar System! That’s the key to human survival—dispersal. Throughout all of space, throughout this whole enormous universe we’re in. We’ve got a whole solar system full of natural resources and energy just waiting for us. Who needs the Earth?”
The old man was panting heavily, excited by his own vision.
“Survival by dispersal,” David muttered.
“Yes!” Cobb gasped. Raggedly, he went on: “What do you think I’ve been doing here—with the early factory modules, all the construction equipment, and the first living barracks we put up for the construction crews? Garrison doesn’t realize it; none of them has even guessed. I’ve held onto them. I’m putting them together... for the first expedition out to the asteroid belt. Gold mines out here, boy. And iron, nickel, water, carbon, nitrogen—everything people need to live. We’re going to put together a mobile colony and go sailing out there to explore the asteroids—like Marco Polo, like Henry Hudson, or Magellan, or Drake. They’ll be gone for years, they’ll have to be self-sufficient and big enough to be a community, a set of families...”
“I understand,” David said. And he did, at last. Totally. He understood Cobb’s whole scheme, the way it all meshed together. He's planned the human race's next thousand years! And David also saw the flaw in that plan, the hollow core of it that would bring the whole edifice down in a crashing heap... unless he could cure that flaw.
Then he felt the jarring thump of a commutersphere docking against the pod’s main airlock.
“They’re here,” he said to Cobb’s image in the phone-screen. “I’ve got to handle them first, before we can build any future for the human race at all.”
Hunter Garrison awoke when the outside mirrors swung automatically to cast the first rays of a new day’s sunshine inside Cylinder B. His aged body ached in every muscle, every joint. The ground beneath him felt hard, damp, cold.
Groaning, he slowly pulled himself to a sitting position.
For a long moment he sat there, blinking watery eyes at the heavy, dark green foliage all around him. It seemed to swallow him up in ominous shadow. He couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction; even overhead his view was blocked by thick clusters of leaves and tendrils of hanging vines.
Slowly he realized that Arlene was nowhere in sight. His hands began to shake.
“Arlene!” he called, but his voice was only a harsh, croaking whisper. “Arlene!”
He was frightened. He couldn’t admit it to anyone but himself, but he was frightened of the thugs who had invaded his home. Alone and frightened.
“Arlene! Where are you? What did they do to...”
A noise in the brush startled him, but then he saw Arlene push her way through the leafy branches, strong, tall, healthy. She had changed to a skimpy pair of shorts and a clinging white T-shirt. Her hair was rumpled, but she was smiling at him.
“It’s okay,” she said. “They’re gone. We can go back to the house.”
She helped him to his feet.
“You’re sure they’re gone?” Garrison asked.
Nodding, “I checked with Morgenstern and the others. All the terrorists are over in the main cylinder. Everything’s quiet here... for now. St. George is coming over with a few of his men to help us guard the house.”
