Oblivion (6 page)

A burger actually sounded good.

It sounded normal.

An Army officer sat inside the truck with the door open. He was eating, too. The burgers were wrapped in aluminum with a fast-food logo on the side. He took a bacon cheeseburger, still warm, from the bag, and some soggy French fries. They tasted like a bit of salted heaven.

The officer, a blond man in his early twenties, handed Cross a Coke.

Cross took it and drank. The lemony sweetness tasted good, too. He had to take better care of himself.

He was halfway through the cheeseburger when the officer spoke.

“Dr. Cross?”

“Mmm?”
Cross hated answering when his mouth was full.

“That’s him,” Jamison said, reaching around him for another burger. “Damn, this is fine food.”

Cross swallowed. “Is this what football players consider gourmet?”

“Only if it has catsup,” Jamison said, unwrapping the burger and taking a huge bite.

Cross wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Did you need me for something?” he asked the officer.

The officer nodded. He looked even younger than twenty, with his blond crew cut and his flaming red sunburn. His eyes had shadows beneath them, though, just like everyone else who worked on this project. It was their version of the thousand-yard stare.

“I wish I could say I was only here to bring you lunch, but you’re wanted in Washington, sir, and I’m not allowed to leave until I take you with me.”

Jamison shot him a look. Cross took a final bite of his burger, then set the rest of it down. It no longer tasted as good.

“I’ve already told them I’m staying here,” Cross said.

“I’m not supposed to take no for an answer. General Maddox’s orders, sir.”

The officer said General Maddox’s name as if she were God. And maybe to him she was. She was one of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and also a representative on the panel that formed the Tenth Planet Project. She had, during the Project’s existence, kept it on track and given it validity throughout the military structure. She had also come up with the only game plan that had allowed them to destroy enemy ships.

She was justifiably famous.

She was also an absolute hard-ass whom Cross had tangled with more than once.

“Did she say why?” Cross asked.

“Something about you being the vision of the Tenth Planet Project.”

He blinked. The burger he had eaten sat like a lump in his stomach. He had been the vision behind the Tenth Planet Project. He had been the push to get the world governments to do something, anything, before the tenth planet arrived. It had been his foresight that had enabled them to find the planet in the first place.

The tenth planet had an elliptical 2006-year orbit that took it into the very depths of space. Unlike other recurring events in the solar system, from Hailey’s comet on down, the tenth planet’s orbit was so long that only archaeological records held its secret. There was no one alive who remembered it, and there were few written records about it—and certainly no written records from anyone who understood it.

Cross had seen the archaeological record, and had managed to tie it, through astroarchaeology, to something that happened in the sky. He had used his friend Doug Mickelson, the secretary of state, to open doors that would otherwise have remained closed.

That was why Clarissa Maddox called Cross the vision of the Tenth Planet Project.

“I think I’m more useful here,” he said.

“You can argue with the kid all you want,” Jamison said, “but he’s not going to stand up to Maddox for you. You’ll have to fly back to D.C. to do it on your own.”

Cross shook his head. “I’m not beyond my usefulness here.”

“We can do this. I can train someone else to use the wand,” Jamison said.

“Yes, but I am the one familiar with the fossils. I’m the one—•”

“We’ll know it when we see it,” Jamison said. “If we have any questions, I can always e-mail or call you. Chances are, they need you for some bogus meeting, and you’ll be back here when it’s done. Trust me, going is easier than fighting a member of the Joint Chiefs.”

Cross sighed. He was just getting tired of meetings in which everyone rehashed all the facts that they didn’t know. He found it even more discouraging than digging through this dust and finding fillings that had, until a few weeks ago, been a part of someone’s mouth.

“You’re not going to let me off the hook either, are you?” Cross asked.

Jamison finished his second burger and tossed the wrapper in the bag. “If I’d known this was why you were avoiding your link, I’d’ve been on your butt in an instant. This is a needle-in-a-haystack project no matter how you spin it, Leo. And you don’t know what they’re going to discuss in Washington. They might need you more there than we do here.”

“I think I know,” Cross said. “It’s just another meeting.” “If it were just another meeting, don’t you think your colleagues would let you stay out here?”

Cross looked at him. Jamison was probably right.

This was a meeting of the Tenth Planet Project, and even though Cross had been to a dozen meetings since the aliens left, none of them had been of the original Tenth Planet group. The meetings had been for other things, crisis things, with some or none of the members of the Tenth Planet Project.

That alone made this coming meeting different.

He knew it. He was just avoiding it. And he couldn’t any longer. That was what he had been telling his colleagues: no one had time to shut their eyes anymore. And yet he was trying to do it, too.

It was hard to look clearly at something that could destroy life as he knew it.

“All right,” he said to Jamison. “But you call me the instant you find something.”

Jamison mock saluted, a goofy grin on his face. “I’ll call you in a nanosecond, sir.”

“You know,” Cross said, smiling for the first time in a while, “I believe you will ”

April 27, 2018
18:05 Universal Time

170 Days Until Second Harvest

Commander Cicoi had only been in Elders Circle once before, several Passes ago, as he got a tour of Command Central. He had just been made general, and it was customary to let all generals know what they were defending.

He had thought it odd that the Commanders believed the generals were defending buildings. Cicoi had always thought he was defending Malmuria.

Elders Circle was deep within the bowels of Command Central, ten layers below the tenth public layer. The Waiting Chamber was icy cold, even for Malmur, and the lighting was thin, activated when the first tentacle crossed the threshold. The Waiting Chamber was done in black; the Waiting Circles, dark spots on an already dark floor.

The Commander of the North was already in the room, on the Waiting Circle that designated his position. The Commander of the North was the oldest of the Commanders, the only one of the main Commanders who did not lose his life after the disaster. He was large, as most elder Malmuria were, but his tentacles were graying at the tips. Someday, his upper tentacles would be gray and useless, his lower nearly solid stumps, and he would lose his position through sheer immobility.

It was a fate that awaited them all, a fate that Cicoi was not looking forward to.

The Commander of the North raised a single eyestalk, turned it, and peered at Cicoi. “We await only the Commander of the Center, then.”

Cicoi nodded. The Commander of the Center was in a tenuous position. He had risen through the ranks, as the rest of them had, but had done so over the objections of the Brood Nest females. The females, though a younger group, had made it known that they did not accept the results of the last harvest. They were clamoring for one of theirs to become a Commander, even though they had no military experience.

The clamor was coming from the Center, from a group of females who believed that all decisions should consider the impact on the nestlings and the families, and the future of the race. Some of the youngest females, barely out of the nest, their tentacles newly sprouted, believed they should get military training just like the males.

Fortunately this rebelliousness had not spread to the other segments. In fact, the Commanders had tried to keep news of this uprising quiet, so that the other females would not learn of it. The females would be busy enough tending the broods and making the food harvested by the Sulas last long enough to compensate for the shortages.

The final set of chimes were ringing as the Commander of the Center entered the Waiting Chamber. He seemed diminished somehow, as if command had shortened him and damaged his tentacles.

He slid onto his circle, his head bowed, all but two of his eyestalks pocketed. More problems in the Center then. Cicoi did not want to know about them.

Cicoi stood on his own circle, head bowed. His tentacles were at his side in proper respectful position. He stood on the tips of his lower tentacles. He had pocketed nine of his eyestalks. When facing the Elders, the ancient instructions said that no more than two eyestalks should be showing. That, of course, was different from the circle of respect for their betters that the Malmuria formed around their faces with all ten eyestalks. It felt awkward and uncomfortable. Cicoi had to work to keep the single eyestalk from floating freely and looking too closely at things it should not see.

The room darkened for a moment, and then ten bells rang. Cicoi felt a sheen of nervous moisture form on his outliner. A waste of energy, but he could not stop it.

Then the floor whitened and dropped away. The standing circles were the only support. If Cicoi stepped off his, he would fall into white nothingness.

Slowly his circle lowered and, he noted with his uncontrollable eyestalk, so did the other two. The Commanders of the Center and North were holding their positions as if a single movement would hurt them.

In exasperation at his own lack of control, Cicoi pocketed his last eyestalk and let the circle take him down in darkness. Only when he felt the circle bounce to a stop did he release an eyestalk—a different eyestalk.

He had sight just in time to watch the room above, where they had been standing only a moment before, disappear. The ceiling closed, leaving them in this expansive luminescence.

It was so bright to his single eye that Cicoi could not make out the details in the room. Except that this vast chamber had a slight breeze and was hotter than any other place he had ever been on Malmur.

Was the energy expended here some of the energy brought to the planet through the solar panels? Or was there something else going on?

He raised a second eyestalk, keeping it in rigid control. He noted that the Commanders of the North and Center had their eyestalks pointed in two different directions. He did the same.

Then, from the depths below, creatures rose. They were shaped like Malmuria, but they were just black shadows, almost outlines of the shape of Malmuria. All of their eyestalks were floating around their heads in an uncontrolled fashion, and their tentacles waved like a child’s before the child learned discipline.

One of the creatures assumed the front position. Cicoi saw that the rest, at least twenty, formed a row behind. He turned one of his eyestalks. There were others behind him. Perhaps fifty Elders in all.

It was the force of their presence that kept this chamber warm. Cicoi wanted to hunch forward like the Commander of the Center, but he did not allow himself to do so. To express fear or even awe was to insult the Elders.

Then there was a whisper inside Cicoi’s mind. A faint hum, like the touch of a tentacle before a male-female bonding. He tilted his head involuntarily and saw the others doing so as well.

Good,
a wispy voice said. Cicoi realized it belonged to the lead Elder.
You can hear us now.

Cicoi waved his front tentacle in acknowledgment as the other Commanders did the same. The Commander of the Center had raised a single eyestalk in surprise.

We have been content for all this time to watch and let our people make their own way through the problems our new sun has brought. And for thousands of Passes near this new sun, all has gone well. Until this Pass.

The thought felt alien, unlike his thoughts. It was like a voice, but not like a voice. Cicoi tamped down a feeling of fear. These were the Elders, the ones who had made Malmur survive. He had to listen to them.

He tried to control his own thoughts, in case they could hear what he was thinking in return.

The ability of our people to supply our basic needs has been put in extreme danger by the quick and surprising development of the race on the third planet. You must not underestimate these creatures as you have done before.

That was the argument Cicoi had just made to his own Second. But to say that, and to do it, were two different things. The creatures on the third planet had changed so much between this Pass and the last that they seemed to be almost different creatures.

There was no time to study them. There was no time at all.

We feel that for the safety of our entire race, we, as Elders, must again step forward to guide our people past this crisis. It was the way of the past. It is the way of the present.