Dusk (29 page)

They had been only a few meters away from the
edge of the overhead dais when it started. There had been a clamor
above, and then almost simultaneously, the soldier with the remote
received a message in his earwig radio, and the cuffs on their
restraints began to pull together. There was yelling, a grunting,
and a sound of metal clattering against concrete. It sounded as if
someone had released an uberhound set to ‘angry’ in a conference
room.

The guards turned and raised their guns. The
remote guard looked over them, training the gun barrel on the whole
group, but Milliken’s guard smiled and kept his barrel trained on
him. Davidson didn’t know if this was the signal he was supposed to
be looking for, but there definitely was not much he could do to
further anything resembling escape at the moment. So he
instinctively raised his hands above his head and hoped there was a
better signal coming.

Torus Denali’s back arched over the rail of the dais
as his neck, caught by the chain between the cuffs of Cyrus’s
restraints, stopped Cyrus’s descent to the lobby floor. Cyrus’s
right arm felt as if was being ripped from its socket. He leaned to
his left, hoping to relieve some of the pressure as he looked at
the ground beneath him. As he looked down, his heart, which was now
beating as though it were bouncing around inside his rib cage,
dropped into the pit of his stomach. He had expected the floor to
be three meters above the lower level but it was more like four.
There were agitated soldiers barking orders below him, and there
was the din of general chaos above him as Denali clawed at Cyrus’s
hands and cuffs to no avail. Out of the corner of his eye, before
he had vaulted over the edge, Cyrus had seen Tanner and Uzziah
scuffling as well, but he had no idea where Toutopolus, Torvald,
Davidson, or Milliken were. No one had moved toward the dais
beneath him. Cyrus could feel the muscles in Denali’s neck
straining as a cough and then a gasp moved through it. Cyrus felt
the flesh beneath his hands shudder and shift, and then he heard a
hacking sound. Droplets of what must have been spittle or vomit
cascaded across Cyrus’s forehead. There was another set of hands
scraping at Cyrus’s now, and he heard someone yell, “Punt it, just
do ’em all!” There was a short pause and another voice
indecipherable in the calamity. Cyrus looked at the ground again in
hopes that he had bought enough time before he had jumped, and then
he heard, “All of them! Now!” and he knew it was too late.

Toutopolus threw open the door from the stairwell
and rushed through into a mire of confusion. The state of affairs
in this hall was very different from upstairs. Scientists stood
confused, guns trained on them from all sides as Toutopolus
barreled out the stairwell into one of the guards. The guard
stumbled, tripped over someone’s foot, and hit the ground hard as
all the other guards trained their guns on Toutopolus. Perhaps
Cyrus’s plan included him being bait—he was fine with that—but that
wasn’t what it had sounded like. It had sounded like Toutopolus
needed to get Cyrus help before something bad happened. But now, as
Toutopolus raised his chained hands above his head, it looked like
all he was going to get was orchestra seats at an execution.
What the hell were we thinking?
ran through his mind so
clearly he was sure he had actually spoken the words aloud. Five
years of kung fu training and they thought they could escape from a
military base with a harebrained plan organized in showers and
through walls. Then his bladder released and cemented the whole
notion creeping up from the base of his brain; this was not going
to end well.

Cyrus lifted his eyes from the ground, and as
his knee scraped the edge of the dais, he heard voices approaching
from somewhere near the façade of the building behind him. Sound
seemed to not travel as well here as it did on Earth, or at least
as it had on the Paracelsus. It was hard for Cyrus to remember
anything about Earth in detail, especially hanging here from a
man’s neck, four meters from the floor, with guns most likely
trained on his back. And then he remembered the one Earth detail
most important to him at that moment.

Gravity.

Earth’s gravity was about one and one-sixth
the gravity of Asha. A healthy grown man could drop from about
three meters, or a little more, on Earth and catch himself, but
here…

…and his restrains released before he could complete
the thought.

The corners of Milliken’s eyes twitched as
his frustration fumed out of them toward the soldier smiling in
front of him. It was not the first time this man had put his hands
on Milliken in a way he could not abide by. Euston was what they
had called him, at least that was what it sounded like the day
Milliken had buried his foot into the man’s crotch. And now, with
Euston’s gun trained on him, a haughty grin across the soldier’s
face as he tightened his grip around his weapon, he silently dared
Milliken to make a move. Then something had come crashing through
the door next to them.

Something or someone slid across the ground
behind Milliken, but the steam seething from his eyes had filled
his whole world now. Nothing existed but Euston, Euston’s rifle,
and the odium that swirled around them. Milliken, weeks earlier,
had wondered what had run through Cyrus’s mind the moment he had
attacked the armed, trained soldier on their conveyance to this
city. Now Milliken had trouble understanding how any
self-respecting man could have done or felt anything else.

And then a sensation shot through the spite. The
cold around Milliken’s wrists became just as hot as the fury
swelling in his temples and behind his eyes. Relief came to the
strain in his shoulders, the anchor at his wrists loosed, and as
Euston’s eyes averted to the clatter on the floor behind Milliken’s
feet, Milliken felt his hands, now without restraints, launch in
front of him toward Euston’s weapon and throat.

The ground moved up toward Cyrus with alarming speed
and yet the fall seemed impossibly long. His muscles loosened, and
as his feet touched floor, Cyrus allowed his body to compress,
absorbing the shock in his legs and glutes as he breathed out in a
grunt and braced himself with his left hand. Then, even as the
tremor passed painfully through his shoulder, he gripped his right
wrist with his left hand, restraints still dangling around his left
wrist, and rolled forward toward the first khaki body he saw

It took a moment for Davidson to recognize
the thing that dropped from the sky and rolled toward them. It
wasn’t until his own cuffs slid from his wrists and bounced off his
head that he realized somehow, impossibly, Cyrus had done it.

As the soldier in front of him began turning toward
the strange splat and grunt that had resounded at the edge of the
lobby, Davidson knew what help Cyrus needed—but his knees locked,
his body became numb from the waist up, and he just stood there,
hands above his head, anxiety vibrating his right cheek in pulse
with his erratic heart.As the warmth spread across the front of his
pants and down his thighs, Toutopolus took in the chaos. With the
guns trained on him and the alarm on the faces of the guards, he
had expected to reel backward as gunfire tore into his chest. What
he had not expected was a flailing blob that he barely recognized
as Cyrus to drop down like a spider at the end of the hall as his
own restraints released.

Then, as the guard he had apparently tackled with
the door began to rise to his feet, Toutopolus thought of his three
daughters whom he would never again hear giggle until they shook
and lost balance. He thought of his wife who would never again
smile and kiss him to shush his rambling ad infinitum about some
new nanotechnology. It was not the first time this lament had
arrested his thoughts in this place, but it was the first time he
realized his captors, these fucking guards—especially the podwaste
motherfucker crawling to his feet in front of him—were to blame. He
caught one loop of his cuffs in his right hand before they dropped
and with force enough to reverse the fabric of time itself, he
tried to kick through the motherfucker’s head.

Something had dropped behind Euston, but
Milliken had paid little attention to it. He had wrapped the
fingers of his right hand around Euston’s neck and pressed his
thumb hard just beneath the jawbone as Sifu Tanner had taught him.
Something or someone smashed into the soldier to his left as
Milliken twisted his right hand outward, pulling Euston’s rifle
barrel in the opposite direction with his left. Euston started to
move his feet, but Milliken had already raised his knee upward with
force, driving it up, dropping it, and then driving back up again
into the Euston’s groin. Euston’s hand had released the rifle,
which fell to the floor as Milliken brought his hand back in a fist
into Euston’s ribs.

Milliken’s punch collided with some hard
piece of metal in a pocket in the soldier’s vest and sent a shock
through his knuckles up his arm, but Euston’s body had buckled
anyway, weak from the attack to the groin. Euston grasped feebly at
Milliken’s wrist as he fell, scraping skin from beneath the cuff of
Milliken’s jumpsuit with his nails. Out of the corner of his eye,
Milliken noticed Cyrus was now on the same floor as them, lying on
top of another soldier. Milliken locked the fingers of his right
hand into a claw and dug his own unkempt nails into Euston’s neck.
Euston tightened his grip and Milliken checked Euston’s elbow with
his free hand, turned to his left, and snatched his hand away from
Euston’s neck in a forceful rake. Milliken ducked under Euston’s
arm, stepped his right leg behind him, and then reached over his
shoulder, grabbed Euston’s neck and chin with both hands, and
stepping hard down and backward, flipped the soldier over his own
shoulder.

Euston’s legs flopped awkwardly as he went over and
he landed face and chest-first on the ground, sliding a half-meter
or so before his knees plopped to the floor. Milliken was already
moving toward him to finish him when he looked up and noticed two
guards across the lobby, about ten meters away, guns trained on
him.

Dr. Winberg could barely believe his eyes
when Cyrus leapt over the edge of the balcony using the Ashan
commander’s neck as an anchor. The guards had scrambled around as
anarchy was loosed upon the hallway. Arms, legs, elbows, and knees
swung wildly as bodies dropped and scientists and guards alike
moved about like roaches from an overturned refuse bin.

So this is how Dr. Chamberlain is going to
get us killed
. There had been a scuffle at the door of what
looked like the staircase, and there was a commotion at the edge of
the balcony as guards had wrestled with Dr. Chamberlain’s chains to
free their commander from his grip. One of them had fumbled with a
small device and they had argued until finally Dr. Chamberlain’s,
along with everyone else’s, chains released.

The fire was now spreading toward the hall at
an alarming rate. Water began cascading over them as four guards
rushed up from behind with extinguishing units. As the men
approached, and as the two original guards who were still conscious
moved to follow whoever had escaped in the stairwell, Dr. Winberg
saw his chance.

“I can help you!” he yelled above the cataract and
chaos. “I know his plan!”

Torvald knew something was coming but he had
no idea it was coming like this. He had spent two dome cycles alone
in a darkened room with only a table and a chair. He had spent most
of the time curled up beneath the table, locked in a repeating
memory of life in Bonn. He had expected to remember his fiancée,
Siobhan. He had even tried to keep revisiting images in his mind of
her thick locks of red hair she could never keep from tangling, her
skin so pale it would freckle the moment sunlight graced her body,
her laugh that, despite being a very masculine laugh, turned him on
to her more than any other of her outward traits. But every time he
tried to think of what Dr. Villichez referred to as ‘enchanted
thoughts,’ he had always been returned to the same vision—riding on
the Bonn sub-lev, from end to end, the day before his fifteenth
birthday. It had been the week of Karneval and the doorman at the
bar where his surprise party was supposed to be refused to let him
in because he was eight hours too young. His best friend Jörg had
to tell him about the surprise that was never sprung. For what must
have been a full day, he rode that same sub-lev again and again,
complaining to Jörg, who stayed with him the whole time. Jörg joked
about their Novitiateship together, trying to get him to forget his
anger at the doorman. That image continued to run through his mind
even after they removed him from the dark room and placed him in
with the other room of scientists. Davidson and Milliken had tried
to tell him something, Davidson had even spoken to him in German,
but all he managed to understand of what Davidson had said was a
paraphrase of what Cyrus had told him before he was gaffled,
‘Something is coming.’

That image of that sub-lev ride was still in
his head now as the orderly line in front of disintegrated into
bedlam. It felt as if his insides had been tangled up in a rigging
line and now two mag-levs were tugging at either side trying to
free it. Only moments earlier, his wristlocks had tightened, but
that had seemed like only part of the routine. The confusion at the
front of the line may have been a sign of the ‘something’ that was
supposed to be coming, but it seemed like everything in this place
was accompanied by some form of bushwah or another.

Before he had been snatched by the imaginary
rigging line from his reverie, he had been lucid long enough to see
something fall from the ceiling in front of the line. That was when
he felt his wrists were no longer restrained. That was when the
tour de farce that had formed around him could no longer sit
outside of his acknowledgement.