Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (33 page)

“Who did this to you, Travis?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. I never saw them, just heard their voices. They had a hood over me, so I couldn’t see it coming when they hit me.”

“Was it Max?” I was so steamed I wanted to go out and kill him, just blow the bastard away.

“I never heard his voice. He might have been there. But I think he found a couple of repressed sadists to do what he didn’t have the stomach for. You can’t find them all, you know. We did psychological testing on all the passengers, but some will get through.”

“Why did they do it, Travis?” Cassie asked. “Why so brutal?”

“Information. They need the codes that exist only in my head to finish their takeover.” He stopped, raised a bloody cloth to his mouth, and tried to be as quiet as possible as he spit bloody stuff into it. He grinned again, but it was horribly lopsided.

“I’ll be all right. I’ve had worse than this outside a bar in Miami, drunk on my ass.” He paused, then shook his head. “That’s a lie. I had broken bones then, but this was worse because I wasn’t drunk, and they took their time. It’s the waiting for the next punch to land that’s the worst.”

I looked at his mangled hand and didn’t say anything.

“I always wondered how I’d stand up to it. Torture, I mean. I understand everybody breaks sooner or later. They only had the one long session with me, then they tossed me back in here to think it over.”

It was still mayhem all around us, with many angry people itching to do something about this outrage that had been done to them and no really good outlet for it. No one else I saw seemed to have been harmed, physically, but I saw several people crying, clinging to each other. In a way, I guess they’d had it harder than Cassie and I had, locked up and unable to do a thing about it, completely in the dark as to what was happening outside that small room. At least we were able to move around. I stopped thinking about that and focused on Travis again as we helped him out into the hallway. He looked at the casualties being treated, at the body of Cheryl, who he hadn’t even known, her face covered with someone’s shirt. He looked away quickly.

“I thought I held up pretty well,” he went on. “I don’t know how much longer I could have. I have to tell you, my darling girls, the thought of you two out there coming to get us helped a lot. Every time they hit me I just pictured you two, coming to the rescue . . . and how the
hell
did you make it all that way?”

“Well,” Cassie began, “we—”

“No, sorry, I’m babbling, no time for that. We’ll sit around the fire with Jubal and your mother one day . . . How is Jubal? Is he safe?”

“He should be. We left him with Patrick. If there was trouble, they were supposed to go to Sheila. We figured she could handle it.”

“Damn right she would. Good thinking.” He paused, and pulled himself as erect as he could. I thought he might have some broken ribs.

“Okay, we’ve got some things to do. We need to get out of here.”

“I’m coming, too.” I looked behind me, and saw that Mama had been following us, listening to everything.

“Sure, Podkayne,” Travis said. “You can help prop me up if these girls get tired of it.”

I was as tired as I’d ever been in my life, I guess, but there was no way I was going to be too tired to hold him up.

—

We hadn’t gotten very far when he stopped, shook his head, and made a rude sound.

“The old bean ain’t working as well as it should, girls. They tell me the security systems have screwed up a lot of things. I thought I heard some explosions, louder than gunshots. Do the doors work? With thumbprints?”

“A lot of them don’t,” I said.

“I guess that’s good news. It has to be making things tough for them, too. Where did you get those guns?”

“Mike and Marlee’s apartment.”

“You went there? I can tell this is going to be one interesting story.”

“And some from your arsenal under the bed in the ship.”

“So you maybe brought along some grenades?”

“Several. We have a few left.”

“We need to get them. We might have to blow some doors.”

“I’ll do it,” Cassie said, and hurried back to our backpacks. Travis was still looking groggy. His eyes fell on my bandaged shoulder. He frowned.

“What happened to you, honey?”

“Aw, they made a shotgun or two. Stuffed them with ball bearings and made some black powder, I guess. I got a little nick.” Aw shucks, t’warn’t nothin’, Cap’n Travis. But what was I going to do, with him looking like that? I guess his emotions were pretty close to the surface because he looked devastated. Tears were leaking from his eyes.

“When this is over, Polly, this ship belongs to you and your sister. You’ve saved it. We owe you
everything
.” Mama was crying, too, and took my hand and squeezed it.

“It ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” I told them. I don’t know what that means, but Travis used to say it sometimes.

“She’s taking a deep breath, baby. Don’t you worry. Your uncle Travis still has a few tricks up his sleeve.”

Cassie returned with the backpacks. She gave Mama and Travis a handgun each, and we counted the grenades. Six left.

We continued around the circumferential corridor. We passed dozens of other doors, and Travis tried a few with his thumb, and so did I, but none of them opened. He stopped a couple of times, thinking hard.

“I’ve got a pretty good map in my head,” he explained. “Trouble is, I don’t have a very good head at the moment.” There were numbers over the doors, with no explanation of what might be inside. After a while, he stopped in front of a door and patted it with his free hand.

“This is the one . . . I’m pretty sure. But in case it isn’t, let’s see if we can blow it off with just one grenade.”

Cassie took one from her pack and stuck it to the lock mechanism. We all moved back about a hundred yards. I was wishing for something to crouch behind, but the corridor was completely bare.

“Fifteen seconds,” Cassie shouted, then, “Fire in the hole!”

She raced back to us and we all crouched, facing away from the explosive, and covered our ears.

When the smoke cleared, we could see the door hanging open. It was a garage for electric maintenance vehicles. There were a dozen in there, and a door on the far end of the garage that I assumed led eventually to the surface. Some had mower attachments and showed a lot of use. Some had stake beds in back, for carrying gardening supplies.

“We have a ways to go, and I’m not up to walking it,” Travis said. “And I don’t think any of you lovely broads are up to carrying me.”

I didn’t know what a broad was, but if it was lovely, I’d accept it.

He picked out one of the smaller vehicles, and we dumped the stuff in the back and all piled in. It was just narrow enough to make it through the door we’d blown open, make a turn, and go racing quietly down the corridor.

I estimate that we went about a third of the way around the ship. Then another corridor branched off, to the left. It was wide, and descending, and we raced along that for a while. Cassie was driving, and I was sitting beside her. We both had our weapons handy, as did Mama and Travis. But we encountered no one. Not surprising. No one but maintenance workers usually came down there, and I presumed most of them were busy dealing with the crisis above, protecting their families, keeping their heads down. Maybe joining in the riots, fighting, protests, whatever was happening.

All my life I had been used to instant news, to being able to find out what was going on, anywhere, with the blink of an eye. One of the most frightening things about this whole situation was to be so in the dark. To have no idea at all what was going on a hundred feet over my head. No idea what was happening to my friends, my home. At least I knew most of my family was safe. For now.

We soon came into one of the huge warehouses where everything was stored in black time-stasis bubbles. Racks of cantaloupe-sized ones, all the way up to some as big as three-story houses. We weaved around, left, right, left, right again, following some arcane notations on the floor that only Travis could read. He directed Cassie down long rows in almost total silence except for the quiet whirring of our motor. It was very spooky down there. Some of those bubbles held people. Some of them held cornflakes. Some of them held water or kerosene or boxes of crayons or salamanders lying in mud or huge tents or . . . you name it. Literally. No way at all to tell what was what by looking at them. Each was a black, featureless, reflectionless hole in space, and hole in time. Not really a part of our reality at all until they were turned off and revealed their contents.

We came to a massive door in a far wall. I had no idea where we were; my positioning system had stopped working sometime during the trip. I’m sure that wasn’t an accident. This place was on no map.

Travis got out and limped over to the door. We started to follow, but he stopped and turned to us.

“I’m sorry, my darlings, but I’ll have to ask y’all to stay back, out of earshot, and where you can’t see this screen. This is the most secure place in the ship. No one knows the codes here except me. A thumbprint won’t work. I have to answer a series of questions that only I would know the answers to, plus a lot of other stuff to be sure I’m not under duress. The only way anyone else could get in here would be if I was dead, in which case the codes would be delivered to Podkayne. I won’t get into that.”

“You think it will still work, Travis?” Mama asked. “With all the computer problems?”

“It damn well ought to. It’s not networked. It has its own power source, and a lot of ways of defending itself if someone tries to get it. This is my last refuge, the final trick up my sleeve.”

He turned from us and limped over to a wall panel. He opened it, and the door screened us from seeing what was in there. The three of us moved away and stood against the wall.

For a while, he punched buttons.

“We have to wait a little,” he said. “The AI has to solve some pretty complex algorithms. Jubal designed them.” He looked at us, and smiled. “I had a lot of time to plan this trip. It took quite a while to build the ship, and even longer to get it all running.

“So have you ever thought about your neighbors? Not family, they were all invited. Other people. The ones you went to school with, the friends you know from here and there in the townships. Can you tell me anything about them?”

Mama looked puzzled. She shrugged.

“Normal people. Friendly. All in all, I’d say they were a nicer bunch than the people I knew back on Mars. But only a little. They’re not saints.”

“No, I have little interest in saints,” Travis agreed. “Nor fanatics, nor people with huge anger issues, nor wimps. I had a team of the best, most realistic, down-to-earth psychologists I could find make up tests that all potential passengers had to pass. And we selected . . . Hang on a minute.”

He turned back to the security panel and did some more things for a bit. Then he faced us again.

“We selected people with what I’d call . . . an even keel. People who could work with others. People of all races and nationalities, and religions, so long as they weren’t holy-rolling Bible thumpers or jihadists or anything like that. And we selected for skills. If you think about it, a very large number of our citizens are farmers or experts in animal husbandry. We will need that where we’re going. Also people with mechanical skills. Some people who are good at running things, and some people who are good at taking orders. Artistic people here and there, though it’s hard to pick for artistic talent. I never set out to make a utopia because I don’t believe in them, and I want a certain amount of orneriness in the colonists, too. Shrinking violets have no place on a frontier.

“But because I
don’t
believe in utopias, I planned for the worst as well as the best. I knew something could happen on a trip this long. Now it’s happened. I hoped the
real
troubles wouldn’t happen until we got to New Sun. All we know about it is that it has enough water and oxygen to support life . . . and that life is
already there
. But we don’t know what it is. Dinosaurs? Huge sea monsters? No land animals at all, yet, and nothing but jellyfish in the sea? We don’t know. But look at Earth’s history. Four and a half billion years, and land life didn’t appear for the first several billion years. Where is this planet on the evolutionary scale?

“There’s a tiny chance we might encounter intelligent life, already there. We view that possibility as a small one. Humans have only been around for a hundred thousand years or so. ‘Civilization’ is even younger. A blip on the timeline of Earth’s history. How long does a civilization last? A million years? Or only a few thousand, until it destroys itself with ecological disasters and nuclear wars? We don’t know. But the likelihood that two stars as close as Old Sun and New Sun would have intelligent life at the same time is pretty small.

“But if there are . . . people or something like people there, I would hope to bargain with them for some living space. I . . . Wait a sec.”

Once more he communed with the very touchy AI.

“One more step, and we’re in,” he said. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. It’s looking like we
can’t
go to another star. I never wanted to be a colonialist, I don’t want to fight or subjugate or in any way have bad dealings with any inhabitants . . . but what if they don’t want us? We would have no other choice but to fight for some living space.”

“I don’t like the sound of that, Travis,” Mama said.

“You think I do? And as I said, I don’t think it’s likely. We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it, but our bridges to home, or to another star, are
burned
, Poddy my darling. And anyway, the most likely thing I expected we could face is a hostile wilderness. Big, scary animals. How would you like to fight a
T. rex
? Not me.”

The panel made a contented sound, and the big doors began to roll open. Travis was still looking at us.

“So I knew I had to take some people who were up to that sort of thing and up to dealing with any human problem we might have along the way.”