Dusk (21 page)

When they reached the dome, the light was
almost unbearable, and even the interior of the personnel carrier
was bathed in it. Most could only keep their eyes open for short
periods of time, while others just kept them closed. Cyrus kept his
open for as long as he could, sheltering his eyes with his hand
when they began to hurt, and only closing them when the pain was
unbearable. When he closed his eyes, streaks of orange and red
still danced along the insides of his eyelids.

The gates of the city were large bulkheads
that slid open as the carrier approached without slowing. There was
a long tube with track lighting that was much dimmer than the
exterior. Details were hard to catch as their speed and dilating
pupils lent too much contrast to the bleached, titian hues that
commanded the bleak expanse outside. Then, as his eyes adjusted,
Cyrus could see a fine mist dancing toward the center of the
chamber in the tracking lights, swirling as it filled the tube.
Some sort of mist was also being pumped into the carrier, which was
beginning to slow down.

Bulkheads on the opposite end of the long
tube opened, and as they emerged from the tube, they were all
flabbergasted. The city was large. There were high-rise buildings
as well as smaller structures—all with a strange angular efficiency
of design. Most of the buildings had windows, but a few seemed to
have none at all. The aves were straight and uniform, teeming with
levs of various shapes and sizes, and there was even a second layer
of traffic several meters above the aves following the same
patterns of movement. All of this would have been difficult to take
in by a Fringer or someone who lived in a subsistence community,
but it was only slightly stranger than the lives they all knew on
Earth. The thing that floored their understanding was that inside
this monstrous dome that harbored a seemingly cosmopolitan
existence from the cruel wasteland outside, it was nighttime, and
the stars were shining.

“What the…” Milliken whimpered,
involuntarily, and then immediately hushed.

“The lights of the dome. They must be
phase-canceling the sunlight,” Cyrus explained.

“Not another word, you Earth-born son of a
man-fuck,” 43235 was becoming more decipherable and more
threatening, but Cyrus would not be silenced.

“Probably been mimicking
Earth
day
cycles for decades, maybe hundreds of years.”

Soldier 43235 took a step toward Cyrus, his
gun barrel nigh unto Cyrus’s chest. A harsh blend of anger, fear,
and frustration moved through Cyrus’s body, rushing directly to his
head and filling his limbs with impetus. Cyrus moved his face as
close to the soldier’s visor as he could. He could not see the
man’s face through the tinted plastic, but he didn’t need to.
Cyrus’s words misted the visor as he spoke, “Shoot me, or get the
fuck out of my face.”

Cyrus could hear the soldier’s breathing
escalating behind the visor as he extended his arm and pushed Cyrus
back with the nose of the gun barrel. As soon as the barrel touched
his chest, Cyrus lifted his knee and extended all the impulse in
his body into a kick that hit the man’s solar plexus, sending him
backward against the copilot seat of the carrier, and collapsing
him to the floor on top of his gun. Cyrus stood fast. He was angry,
confused, and rash, but he knew better than to pursue. And then it
came—he knew it was coming, just hadn’t expected it when it did
come. A blow to the back of Cyrus’s head sent him down to the
floor. Cyrus caught himself, but lassitude overtook him even as the
second blow came down between his shoulder blades. As his body
settled on the cold metal of the floor, blackness swirled across
Cyrus’s vision, and as the sound around him became increasingly
more muffled, he heard the electronic hiss of, “Welcome to
Eurydice, beta-hound,” as consciousness faded from his body.

• • • • •

—
Dada, where do uberhounds come from?

—
They are bred in labs in hystapods similar to
the ones used for extra-uterine childbirths.

—
Extra-uterine means outside the mommy, right?
Inside is called freebirth, but is really dangerous.

—
Well, ‘freebirth’ is a term I’d rather you not
use. It isn’t proper or very nice. It’s called in utero
birth.

—
How do they get the uberhounds to be so strong
and scary?

—
They have nanoprocessors injected into their
brains while they are in the pods to enhance their senses and
strength, and so their disposition can be controlled by remote.
Rumor is they may be able enhance the sense of smell so hounds can
even ‘smell’ parts of DNA.

—
Does it hurt when they inject the
nanoprocessors, Dada?

—
At that stage in life, I’m not sure they would
even understand pain. I would think the unnamable shock of spending
the very first stage of life forcibly detached from your own kind
would be distressing enough.

—
Was I born in a pod, Dada?

—
Most everyone is these days. It makes it much
easier to check for and correct defects.

—
Is that a good thing, Dada?

—
People seem to think it is.

—
What do you think?

—
Well, I tend to think our strengths make us
good, but our shortcomings make us great.

—
I think that when I have kids, I want them to be
born the right way. And no doctors tinkering with defects and all
that.

—
Hopefully, when that time comes, we will have
learned enough to just let nature do her thing and to keep our
grimy little hands to ourselves.

• • • • •

The throbbing in Cyrus’s head and neck stirred him
to consciousness. When he came to, he was propped up in a chair in
a nondescript room. All the other scientists were arranged in three
rows of chairs, while he sat in the center of the frontmost row.
Tanner and Davidson sat on either side of him making sure his body
stayed upright. There was a man in a peculiar outfit—a jacket that
looked like a blue lab coat cut-off at the hips, buttoned with only
the middle two of the four buttons along the front. The legs of the
man’s pants were completely without pleats or seems, which made
them look more like black plastic tubes than fabric. His hair was
relatively short and looked as if it had been attended to, but
still had no particularly discernable design. The man was flanked
by two more men carrying assault rifles who wore khaki jumpsuits
similar to early flight suits but lighter in color. Their insignias
looked like a barcode and they had square medallions hanging above
them.

“Now that all of you have joined us, we can
parlay on the problem at hand,” the man in blue and black said,
pacing the floor, hands clasped behind his back.

“But first, allow me to introduce myself. I
am Torus Balfour Denali,” he paused as if he were awaiting
recognition. Cyrus, head pounding with the beating of his heart,
could not tell what part of his name, if any, was a title until he
noticed the thick-rimmed oval ring clasped to the man’s insignia
badge—Torus was a contrast to the squares worn by the members of
his entourage. When no acknowledgement came, the strange man
continued, “I am commander of the Archons of Asha and I believe you
are espions and that you should be treated as such.” He paused
again as if he expected a response other than confusion. “However,
hospitality has been demanded of me by the Praetoriate. It is their
desire that I show you the utmost courtesy while your sudden
‘appearance’ is investigated. It is their belief that the war was
over too long ago for a reconnaissance operation to be of use, but
I find your appearance so close to The Advent of the Defiance to be
entirely too ironic.”

“There was a war?” someone behind Cyrus
blurted. The outburst was so sudden it rang through his ears and
settled with pounding authority in his temple.

Denali scoffed with an expression that looked
like he was about to hock and spit. He then waved his hand through
the air in an almost unconscious gesture as if he was slapping the
air with the back of his hand. “I will not trifle with your feigned
confusion,” he looked as if he were about to spit again. “Quadrad
Chaldea will regale any queries you port to have.” Denali made
another slapping motion and left as the guard to his right moved
forward.

“I may have orders to gale you out, but you
can all punt off as far as I am haunted,” he mimed the same hand
motion Denali had made, only less theatrically, “So to your first
que-ree, the war started in the first gyre and was finished by the
Defiance of the Knight of Swords on eight DC, Murioplex,
twenty-five gyres from. Some think what the Sword Scourge did was
overstrong, but if you query me, I wage you terrasites were
arreared too long.” He basked for a moment in the light streaming
from the bands in the ceiling, proud either of his words or what
they meant, or perhaps a mixture of both. Whatever conceit was
inherent in his delivery was lost in the quagmire of confusion on
the faces of everyone in his audience.

Tanner leaned over to Cyrus, who was holding
the bruise on his head and mumbling figures to himself. “Whoever
these people are have been here hundreds of years…” Tanner said
softly into his ear.

“Yeah, the technology is much more advanced,”
Cyrus winced.

“And the language is almost a creole. Even
British English and original American English weren’t this
different up until just before the Uni.”

“Well, they weren’t six hundred light years
apart either, but…”

“You que me or you finish the jatter,
dexter!” the guard interrupted, folding his arms as he stood. He
moved closer to Cyrus. “You are the punty breed-hound that put the
gork to Colfax. He moved within arm’s reach. “If they dint order me
to coddle, I would strong-arm you rightforth.”

Cyrus took his hand from his head, rolled his
shoulders back, and flared his nostrils as he met the eyes of the
soldier Denali had called Chaldea. Tanner could almost feel the
fury building in Cyrus again, as if tendrils of some invisible
electromagnetic current were stretching out of Cyrus’s eyes toward
the strange man before him. Cyrus was almost lifting himself from
the seat with his anger when Chaldea retracted.

“Scrabbling like a feist-monkey only vinces
you more the spions. But I gale you this; I won gork out like that
sunfried Colfax. You tuss with me you get finished, complete. If I
were you, I would process that rightforth, dexter.” Chaldea
gestured and the door opened. Six armed men with triangles on their
badges entered the room and ushered the scientists out in two
groups. Cyrus, Tanner, Villichez, Toutopolus, Jang, Winberg,
Torvald, Cohn, Uzziah, and Murphy were corralled and shuffled in
one direction, while Milliken, Davidson, Qin, Fordham, Eisenhertz,
Tsuchiya, Murphy, Koresh, bin Hassan, and Thompson were marshaled
in the other.

Cyrus’s group was set up in a room that
looked like a barracks. It was a long, somewhat narrow room with
five bunk beds lining the wall on one side and a long window with a
view of the city on the other. There were two footlockers at the
foot of each bunk and a rather large, and completely out of place,
holostation in the corner of the room furthest away from the door.
Opposite the sliding entrance door was an antiquated swinging door
that led to what must have been the showers and the lav. After they
all shambled into the room, the door was closed behind them and
they were left to their own devices without any instructions or
explanation. After their level of exhaustion began to overtake
their level of confusion, they began to settle into various bunks.
Cyrus made an attempt to do a few push-ups to quell his
frustration, but they only made his head pound more fiercely.
Finally, he settled on the bottom bunk closest to the lav and
holostation.

Jang settled next to the window, watching
traffic speed by below. They were about seven stories up as far as
Jang could tell. The elevator they had been packed into had the
numbers covered and the soldiers had sheltered the buttons when
they pressed them. The elevator was a large one designed to move
freight, but it had been too cramped to get a good idea what button
had been pressed. Now, Jang could see that they were about
twenty-five meters above ave level. Upon closer inspection, Jang
realized the floors must have been slightly higher than those on
Earth because on all the buildings he could see, what his eyes told
him should have been seven stories appeared to be only slightly
larger than five.

After his head had convinced him it would
explode if he did another push-up, Cyrus went over to the
holostation and turned it on to pick up the broadcast stream.
Remarkably, even though it was considerably larger, had a higher
resolution, and projected directly onto the floor, the hand
gestures to operate the holostation were very similar to those on
Earth. A few of the scientists sat together on the bunks, but no
one really said much of anything. After about an hour of lumbering
around, the door opened, and three soldiers brought clear plastic
container of food for each of the scientists. There was cubed
steak, rice, and tomatoes on a bed of lettuce, as well as a cup of
water glued in the corner of each. The soldiers handed each
scientist a container, and then grabbed Toutopolus rudely,
shuffling him out the door with his dinner.

Cyrus watched as they took Toutopolus in the
middle of shoveling a forkful of tomato and lettuce into his mouth.
A few of the others had noticed Toutopolus’s abduction, but most
were too exhausted to protest as they turned their attention back
to the first food they had seen in uncountable hours. Cyrus noticed
Tanner bowing his head over his own container of food for much
longer than normal. Cyrus picked up his own food, dragged his feet
over to the bunk Tanner had chosen, and opened his dinner as he sat
down.