[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
blue intensifying to green, to yellow.
To white.
A hole opened in the Pacific. The sun rose in its center. Joel flung his hands in front of his eyes, saw the
bones there silhouetted in orange flesh. The lifter spun like a kicked toy, rammed deep into the sky on a
pillar of steam. Outside, the air screamed. The lifter screamed back, skidding.
But it didn't break.
Somehow, after endless seconds, the keel steadied. The readouts were still online; atmospheric
disturbance, they said, almost eight kilometers away now, bearing one-twenty. Joel looked out the
starboard port. Off in the distance, the glowing ocean was ponderously collapsing upon itself.
Ring-shaped waves expanded past beneath his feet, racing to the horizon.
Back where they had started, cumulus grew into the sky like a soft gray beanstalk. From here, against the
darkness, it looked almost peaceful.
"Clarke," he said, "we made it."
He turned in his chair. The rifter was curled into a fetal position against the bulkhead. She didn't move.
"Clarke?"
But it wasn't Clarke that answered him. The lifter's interface was bleating again.
Unregistered contact, it complained.
? ?
Bearing 125x87 V1440 V5.8m sec-2 range 13000m
Collision imminent 12000m
11000m
10000m
Barely visible through the main viewport, a white cloudy dot caught a high-altitude shaft of morning
sunlight. It looked like a contrail, seen head-on.
"Ah, shit," Joel said.
Jericho
One whole wall was window. The city spread out beyond like a galactic arm. Patricia Rowan locked the
door behind her, sagged against it with sudden fatigue.
Not yet. Not yet. Soon.
She went through her office and turned out all the lights. City glow spilled in through the window, denied
her any refuge in darkness.
Patricia Rowan stared back. A tangled grid of metropolitan nerves stretched to the horizon, every
synapse incandescent. Her eyes wandered southwest, selected a bearing. She stared until her eyes
watered, almost afraid even to blink for fear of missing something.
That was where it would come from.
Oh God. If only there was another way.
It could have worked. The modellers had put even money on pulling this off without so much as a broken
window. All those faults and fractures between here and there would work in their favor, firebreaks to
keep the tremor from getting this far. Just wait for the right moment; a week, a month. Timing. That's all it
would've taken.
Timing, and a calculating slab of meat that followed human rules instead of making up its own.
But she couldn't blame the gel. It simply didn't know any better, according to the systems people; it was
just doing what it thought it was supposed to. And by the time anybody knew differently after
Scanlon's cryptic interview with that fucking thing had looped in her head for the hundredth time, after
she'd taken the recording down to CC, after their faces had gone puzzled and confused and then,
suddenly, pale and panicky by then it had been too late. The window was closed. The machine was
engaged. And a lone GA shuttle, officially docked securely at Astoria, was somehow showing up on
satcams hovering over the Juan de Fuca Rift.
She couldn't blame the gel, so she tried to blame CC. "After all that programming, how could this thing
be working for ßehemoth? Why didn't you catch it? Even Scanlon figured it out, for Christ's sake!" But
they'd been too scared for intimidation. You gave us the job, they'd said. You didn't tell us what was at
stake. You didn't even really tell us what we were doing. Scanlon came at this from a whole different
angle, who knew the head cheese had a thing for simple systems? We never taught it that...
Her watch chimed softly. "You asked to be informed, Ms. Rowan. Your family got off okay."
"Thank you," she said, and killed the connection.
A part of her felt guilty for saving them. It hardly seemed fair that the only ones to escape the holocaust
would be the beloved of one of its architects. But she was only doing what any mother would. Probably
more: she was staying behind.
That wasn't much. It probably wouldn't even kill her. The GA's buildings were built with the Big One in
mind. Most of the buildings in this district would probably still be standing this time tomorrow. Of course,
the same couldn't be said for much of Hongcouver or SeaTac or Victoria.
Tomorrow, she would help pick up the pieces as best she could.
Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe the quake won't be so bad. Who knows, that gel down there might
even have chosen tonight anyway...
Please...
Patricia Rowan had seen earthquakes before. A strike-slip fault off Peru had rebounded the time she'd
been in Lima on the Upwell project; the moment magnitude of that quake had been close to nine. Every
window in the city had exploded.
She actually hadn't had a chance to see much of the damage then. She'd been trapped in her hotel when
forty-six stories of glass collapsed onto the streets outside. It was a good hotel, five stars all the way; the
ground-level windows, at least, had held. Rowan remembered looking out from the lobby into a murky
green glacier of broken glass, seven meters deep, packed tight with blood and wreckage and butchered
body parts jammed between piecemeal panes. One brown arm was embedded right next to the lobby
window, waving, three meters off the ground. It was missing three fingers and a body. She'd spied the
fingers a meter away, pressed floating sausages, but she hadn't been able to tell which of the bodies, if
any, would have connected to that shoulder.
She remembered wondering how that arm had got so high off the ground. She remembered vomiting into
a wastebasket.
It couldn't happen here, of course. This was N'AmPac; there were standards. Every building in the lower
mainland had windows designed to break inwards in the event of a quake. It wasn't an ideal solution
especially to those who happened to be inside at the time but it was the best compromise available.
Glass can't get up nearly as much speed in a single room as it can racing down the side of a skyscraper.
Small blessings.
If only there was some other way to sterilize the necessary volume. If only ßehemoth didn't, by it's very
nature, live in unstable areas. If only N'AmPac corpses weren't authorized to use nukes.
If only the vote hadn't been unanimous.
Priorities. Billions of people. Life as we know it.
It was hard, though. The decisions were obvious and correct, tactically, but it had been hard to keep
Beebe's crew quarantined down there. It had been hard to decide to sacrifice them. And now that they
somehow seemed to be getting out anyway, it was
Hard? Hard to bring at 9.5 moment-magitude quake down on the heads of ten million people?
Just hard?
There was no word for it.
But she had done it, somehow. The only moral alternative. It was still just murder in small doses,
compared to what might be necessary down the
No. This is being done so nothing will be necessary down the road.
Maybe that was why she could bring herself to do it. Or maybe, somehow, reality had finally trickled
down from her brain to her gut, inspired it to take the necessary steps. Certainly, something had hit her
down there.
I wonder what Scanlon would say. It was too late to ask him now. She'd never told him, of course.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]