The Far Dawn (18 page)

I'll be your memory, Owen Parker.

This morning I unsnapped it from her cold, wet wrist. My memories will be mine, and they will haunt me.

But I do have one thing to say.

“I love you, Lilly Ishani.”

Eighth time.

I put my hands on the wood edge, hold my breath, and push.

The first wave we meet is bigger than I anticipated, and it slaps against the wood and water sloshes over Lilly, and I want to scream in pure rage that not even this can I control. I can't even get this last thing right.

Crushing my chest to hold back the tears, I keep pushing, my feet pedaling against the sand, but my casted hand slips off the wood, the bones, recently set by Grayland, burning inside, and I am thrown off balance and slip and stumble and lose my grip. Water soaks me. I stagger back to my feet and reach for the coffin, but my fingers miss, and I swallow a mouthful of salty ocean, coughing violently.

She is out of my reach, bobbing over the swells, out onto the sunlit ocean.

“Lilly!” I scream, and a sob breaks free. Tears finally fall.

I lurch forward, another wave catching me in the chest.

“Lilly!”

“No, Owen, don't.” Mendes grabs me by the arm and drags me back out of the waves and suddenly I know that I did not say enough, did not do enough. There should have been more. . . .

I . . .

“I'll give you a minute,” says Mendes, “but if you go and drown, I'll be very disappointed.”

I sit there, listening as he trudges away, and catch my breath, the surge of crying receding, numbness setting in.

I watch the box ride the waves. Better built, Lilly's will stay afloat longer. Beyond that, Mateu and Evan are faint lines on the swelling sea.

Some time passes, the winter sun sliding sideways.

Finally, I can speak.

“I remember,” I say to the body of Lilly Ishani, “when you said you were letting me go. You said it just in case, just in case we weren't meant to be together until the end. But we were, Lilly, we were. And I am never letting you go, no matter how much longer I live. I am keeping you with me, until the end.”

Waves crash. A gull calls nearby.

My thoughts go dead like static.

When I finally stand, shivering and wet, I find Rana glimmering at the top of the beach. She watches with her dead gaze.

I do not speak to her.

I only nod.

She knows what this means, and she disappears.

It is time to head out with the soldiers.

I join them, and when Mendes asks me how I am holding up, I tell him I am fine. And when he asks me if I know where I want to go next, I tell him that I do.

The request surprises him. It is out of their way.

But he sees the look in my eyes.

The look of someone with plans.

And he agrees.

All along, we have had to guess what Paul has been thinking.

But he is not the only one with unguessable plans now.

He is not the only one with death on his mind.

PART III

“I
USED TO SAY THAT
I
KNEW HOW THE WORLD WILL END, BUT NOW
I
THINK IT
'
S REALLY ENDING.
H
ELLO, WORLD, IF ANY OF YOU CAN HEAR ME,
M
OROS LIVES ON—PROPHET OR FOOL, YOU DECIDE—LIVE FROM THE NIGHTMARE INSIDE
V
ISTA.
B
UT WHO
'
S IN THE NIGHTMARE NOW
? O
UTSIDE, IN YOUR REAL WORLD, SOMETHING HAS CHANGED.
Y
OU FEEL IT, DON
'
T YOU
? I
T
'
S IN EVERY TRANSMISSION
I
HEAR, IN EVERY MESSAGE AND SIGNALCAST
I
INTERCEPT, IN EVERY BELLICOSE POLITICIAN
'
S RANT AND EVERY BEDTIME SONG.
S
OMETHING HAS SHIFTED, OVERNIGHT IT SEEMS.
W
E
'
VE BEEN DYING FOR A LONG TIME, BUT THIS FEELS LIKE DECAY.
A
LL GROWS MELANCHOLY AND VIOLENT.
I
T
'
S AS IF WE HAVE LOST SOME INNER LIGHT, SOME PART OF OUR SOUL.
I
SEE IT EVERYWHERE, AND FOR ONCE,
I
WONDER IF
I
AM BETTER OFF IN HERE.
D
ARKNESS IS FALLING, CHILDREN, AND DAWN FEELS FARTHER AWAY THAN EVER BEFORE.
”

17

THE HOVERCRAFTS BUZZ NORTH IN THE DARK, over the turbulent sea, away from the monochrome coast. They fly smooth, skimming above the water, their hum constant, through the walls, into your bones.

I sit in my tiny room. Sit on my lower bunk.

The coffins have probably sunk by now.

I eat dinner silently in the galley, at the end of a table of soldiers who are laughing and joking, blowing off steam. They grow quiet when one talks low, then erupt in raucous peals of laughter. Most of them are thinking about the leave they get after this mission. The girls they will see.

I just eat. Try not to listen.

After, there is a mission debriefing, but I am not allowed into that. I hang out up on the bridge deck, face in the cold and spray, wrapped in a wool blanket, engulfed by the deafening roar of the hover engines from this ship and the two that flank it.

I watch the forward lights highlight the wave caps. As we move north, there is more trash in the water. At one point, we pass most of a wood building with a window still intact, reflecting brilliantly in our lights.

I stand there and my fingers play with my necklace, rolling Victoria's finger bone between the pads of my index finger and thumb.

Unlike everything else lost, the dead stay with me. Or maybe that's wrong: the dead don't live on in my mission. The dead are just dead.

The stars are out, the moon gone. The wind is cold, and feels more lonely than usual. Even beyond my emotions, there is something desperate and afraid about the dark tonight. It feels like it could go on forever, like dawn is far away, too far beyond the horizon and we will not find it again. I try to ignore the feeling by tracing constellations and counting shooting stars.

Alien or trash?

I have seen seven by the time Mendes comes and finds me. I'm only counting to know how many she's missing.

“How you holding up?” he asks.

I press down on what is a new feeling in my gut, a part of me as dark and angry as this night, that wants to answer, but I won't let it. “Fine,” I say instead.

“Sorry you couldn't come to the debrief.”

“I understand.”

Mendes lights a cigarette. I like the sweet smell of it. “Want one?” he asks.

“Nah,” I say, but it feels like habit, old me. Why not have one?

But I don't.

“I came to tell you the latest,” says Mendes.

“Thanks.”

“Ship's doctor ran over all the bodies we pulled from the ice, and confirmed that the bullets that killed Eden's men, and the hostages, came from the same three guns: those of the two soldiers who we saw Paul shoot and what we assume was his gun.”

“He only took what he needed,” I say, remembering Paul's words.

“Yeah. He murdered his team and took off with that Heart of the Terra thing. We're categorizing it as an energy source, at least for briefing our commanders. . . . Is that close enough?”

“Close enough.”

“And you said his goal had been to acquire the entire Paintbrush of the Gods.”

“That's what he
said
his goal was, but he always lies,” I say. “And what about his escape?”

“That,” says Mendes, “was a space elevator. Light insertion variety. They were used experimentally maybe fifty years ago—I think the Japanese had one that linked to their space station—but not since the Rise. Paul probably got the technology from the People's Corporation, or maybe someone on the Eden board had ties to a defense contractor.

“Either way: it means that EdenCorp has a space station, or a craft—hell, I don't know. We figure they probably built it back during the war, or maybe bit by bit covertly in one of those domes of theirs. Since the Rise, N-Fed satellites only cover a portion of the sky at any one time. If they had the right intel, they could avoid detection.”

“The Ascending Stars,” I say.

“Yes, that gamma link legend of the Ascending Stars seems to refer to this space elevator, or maybe Eden has a few of them. We reviewed seismic data from as many observatories as we could find. Linking that elevator to the ground causes a significant magnetic discharge. Turns out, there have been countless anomalous readings from southern Oceana over the last couple decades, but they were spread out just enough that they hadn't been noticed. Well, also, no one was really looking.”

“A space station,” I repeat.

“Looks like it. We got intelligence from the Russian kingdom, and it turns out they've spotted a large craft in orbit, bigger than any of the old space stations. They thought it was ours. At any rate, that's likely where Paul is.”

I gaze up at the stars.

If he takes me, all will perish
, the Terra said to me.
Life will go dark
.

Right before Paul took her off the planet. The Terra meant take her from earth. If the spark of life is taken, the earth will die out. Did she mean at first or slowly? Doesn't matter. Without the Terra, life will end. Paul, the selfish bastard, has taken it for himself.

This could really be the last night of humanity, of life on this planet. Paul has stolen its heart, has taken it trapped in an ancient cage, taken it to the stars. How many days, or hours, can a heartless body survive?

“The other thing is that lead you gave us,” says Mendes. “Elysium Planitia. It turns out your coordinates were a match after all. We were just looking in the wrong place. Elysium Planitia is the name of a place, but it's not here.”

“Where is it?”

Mendes blew smoke into the wind. “Mars.”

“Mars,” I repeat. “The planet.”

“Yeah,” says Mendes. “Telescope imagery confirms a base there, a dome, not the size of an Eden here on earth, but . . . Can you believe that? Eden's board of directors aren't even on earth.”

“Actually,” I say, “I can.” Because what kills me is I've already seen EdenHome. I remember, what seems like so long ago, in the lab at Camp Eden, six screens that showed the Eden domes. And the one that said EdenHome . . . had a view of a rusty orange landscape with an amber sky. We thought it was a desert. We were right, but just not about where. Project Elysium. The location is right in the name. I tell myself we could never have conceived of it.

But then I remember even more. When the board of directors appeared on the screen in the skull chamber, back when Paul tried to hook me up to Lük's skull, they'd seemed to almost be floating, with stars behind them. They'd been at EdenHome, in lower gravity, far from here.

“The ship is called
Egress
,” I say.

“Telescopes are also picking up evidence of heavy mining on Mars,” says Mendes, “for water and uranium, we think.”

I hope the mining dust isn't interfering with visibility on the driving range
, Paul had said in his report to the board, the one we'd watched while flying to the Rockies.

You're so funny
, Lilly had said to the screen.

She might be alive if I'd put these clues together, somehow. . . .

Don't think about that.

I wonder if Paul had ever really planned to save earth, or if all along he'd intended to leave it behind, a dying planet left to die, to take the spark of life, the Heart of the Terra with him, the key to:

The one true quest. The oldest quest there is.
Paul's words in the Andes.

It's so obvious now what he meant.

The quest for eternal life. The most selfish wish, to never die, Paul had put it above all else. He and his board of directors and his precious selectees, they'll be sipping off the Terra's blood like vampires, living forever in EdenHome.

And now that Paul has the Terra, the exodus could be anytime.

“So,” Mendes finishes. “That's all we know at the moment.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask him.

Mendes shrugs. “There's not much we can do. My mission authorization doesn't exactly extend to Mars. Plus, the ACF hasn't had a space program since the last century. The Northern Federation security council is meeting this week, and they will be voting on a resolution whether to authorize a military operation against the Edens. But, while Paul's forces did attack Cheyenne Depot and steal the uranium, it was a lot easier to make a case against them when we thought that was for weapons.”

“What's it for?” I ask.

“Fuel,” says Mendes. “Their spaceship is giving off a massive radiation signal. We figure it runs on fusion drive rockets, using uranium as the fuel source. It will definitely shorten their trip to Mars. Thing is, they no longer pose an existential threat to the planet. They're just a bunch of rich people leaving. It's going to be hard to justify shooting that ship down.”

I could give him a reason, explain that taking the Terra is indeed an existential threat of the highest order, but I don't. A security council of bureaucrats would never believe such a thing anyway. And I don't want them to.

Because then they might get in my way.

“I understand,” I say, and I try to sound upset.

“Look, Owen, I'm sorry. Just know that I want the bastard brought to justice as much as you do, and the minute he comes back down to earth, the minute any of them do, for a coffee or a new crate of synth eggs, we'll be there.”

“Okay.”

Mendes shivers. “I'm heading in. This has been a long day. Longer for you.”

“I'm going to stay out a bit,” I say.

“Suit yourself. And you're still sure about where you want us to drop you off tomorrow? I'm damn close to overruling you on this one.”