The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (24 page)

“You can say that, but the genes don’t lie,” Shaw answered.
Was he trying to provoke Tranq into a fight? … Maybe.

Tranq looked like he was happy to oblige. His muscles were taut, fists were clenched, and his eyes wanted blood. Finally he spat—it hit the wall and bounced, the bubbles of spittle beginning a slow movement across the room—and gave out a sharp laugh.

“I don’t hit women, and I don’t hit dead men. And that’s what you are, Shaw. A dead man walking. Pleasant dreams.”

The next morning, Shaw was still half-asleep when he wandered into the mess hall, not sure who or what he’d find. If he’d been looking for friendly faces, he’d discovered the wrong crowd. Helix, Jpeg, and Kuhn were crowded around the table, their food bags floating in front of them.

Their conversation stopped when the door slid open, and if it hadn’t been for Kuhn’s sly smile, Shaw would have let it close.

“Ah … good morning. I was getting hungry …” Shaw said, scanning the room.

“Expects us to feed him while he plans to stab us in the back,” Jpeg said to Helix, who rolled her eyes.

“I’ll show you,” Kuhn said. She leapt up from her seat and sailed toward the lofty ceiling above them.

“He’s a big boy, Kuhn, he would have found it,” Jpeg said, looking up at her.

“And I’m the quartermaster. It’s my job to show him. Besides, I doubt he’s thinking in three dimensions yet. C’mon up, Byron.”

Byron pushed and felt the sticky floor release him as he followed her up above the table. He was going too fast, though, and he tried to use the walls to slow himself down before hitting the ceiling. Kuhn caught his flailing hand and pulled him back to her level. She opened a panel in the wall.

“The main food stores are below decks, but I keep the pantry pretty well stocked—”

“The pantry?”

“It’s what it is, isn’t it?”

Shaw smiled. “Just weird to think of something so normal up here.” Up here … in orbit. Up here … ten feet above the table.

“Lots of fruit and vegetables. But no apples—way too gross when you bite into them and the spray just hangs in the air. So it’s things that won’t make too much of a mess. For protein, we have yogurt, cheese, beans, some meat that’s processed into bite-sized chunks. We have a lot of bagged soups, which you’ve seen already.”

She handed him a yellowish bag and a plain bagel. “Try this. Bagels are less crumbly than toast. And the eggs aren’t as good as a real scrambled egg, but it works. Orange juice, coffee, tea in this pantry,” she said, patting another panel. “Grab what you want and come join us.”

Shaw selected a bag of coffee and a bag of orange juice. He closed the panel and looked down at the table below his dangling feet with a sigh. He wished one of them had left or that Taveena or Wulf would have come in. “Coming down!”

He aimed away from the table, but had overcompensated. Hitting the wall, he had to readjust and bring himself down for an awkward landing. Everyone’s eyes were on him, but apparently no one could think of anything clever to say about his bungled dive.

He slid into a seat next to Helix, and saw the crumbled bags floating around them. “Crush the bags you want warmed up,” Kuhn said. He crushed the yellowed bag, which he guessed was liquid eggs and the coffee bag. They became hot to the touch, and he saw the eggs start to cook.

“I thought people didn’t need to eat bagged food in space anymore,” he said, poking a straw into his coffee bag.

“Only in artificial gravity, like on that hotel over there. We don’t have much choice.”

“What’s the longest you’ve ever been in orbit?” Shaw asked the table.

There was silence, as if they weren’t sure whether they were allowed to say.

But from behind him he heard a voice. “Two hundred days.”

Tranq. He pushed up to the pantry.

Shaw arched his eyebrows at Kuhn. “You have enough food to last that long?”

“We try to keep a year’s supply,” Kuhn said. “But all the same, that time we were glad to get back down to solid ground.”

“Were you in orbit during the raid on the Lattice? Or were you on the ground?” Shaw could practically feel the entire room tense. In for a penny, in for a pound. He looked up from his bagged coffee. Helix was fuming. Tranq landed with a couple bags in tow, staring at Shaw. “Is there a problem?” Shaw asked him.

“No problem.”

“I can’t see why you wouldn’t want to answer a simple question. If you get your way, I’ll be dead in four days, anyway. Dead man walking, isn’t that what you said last night during your surprise inspection of my bunk?” Tranq’s eyes flickered to Kuhn, who was looking at him suspiciously. “Who am I going to tell?”

“We were in orbit,” Helix said.

Shaw turned to her. She was giving a look to Tranq that he read as “well, why not?”

“Managing the whole thing by spheres?”

Helix nodded. “Not that there was much to manage. Mostly by that point, we were just waiting on the hovercraft to do its job. Once it had, Pelier was standing by to flood the Geneva Lattice with the acid.”

Shaw nodded. “I guess it would have been rather suspicious if Ono was constantly checking a sphere for instructions.”

“We thought we had everything taken care of.” Helix shrugged it off.

Shaw looked at his fingers. They weren’t black anymore. The nanoshock must have been removed when he’d been revived. “But you can’t plan for everything.”

“We could have just fucking killed you. That would have worked. Instead we were dicking around with these special shocks,” Tranq said. “A higher dose of a lethal shock, you wouldn’t have survived long enough to turn it back on Ono.”

“Your modified shocks go slower?”

“Slightly,” Kuhn said, cutting off Tranq. “They don’t just kill the nerve like a regular shock, they preserve it too. So we can bring you back. It means a couple seconds difference.”

“It would have been enough,” Tranq said.

“A couple seconds …” Shaw thought about those one point eight seconds, and where he’d be if they’d gone differently.

Dead. But he was pretty much dead now, so what was the difference?

A lot, he realized suddenly. He wouldn’t have gone home to Ellie. He wouldn’t have a daughter on the way. Even if he never got to meet her, she wouldn’t have been conceived if their plan had worked. Maybe he was as good as dead now, but he was surprisingly comforted by the thought that those one point eight seconds meant he got to bring a new life into the world.

“We agreed when we started. No one dies if we can possibly help it,” Kuhn said. “A couple of seconds didn’t seem worth killing over.”

“Seems to me there’s a good chance my blood will be on your hands in a few days,” Shaw shot back, not bothering to conceal his sudden anger. “You’re splitting hairs if you think one is different than the other.”

“What I’ve been arguing for years! Thank you, Shaw,” Tranq said. “If we’re willing to vote to kill someone in here, then we know that sometimes people have to die to bring about the change we want.”

“Shaw’s starting to convince me that we should have killed him during the attack,” Jpeg said, a glint in his eye. “Save us the trouble of having to do it now.”

“It’s different when you’re asking someone else to do your dirty work,” Kuhn said, her focus not on Shaw, but on Jpeg and Tranq. Turning to Shaw, she said, “Ono wouldn’t have agreed to do it if he thought he was going to kill someone. A lot of our recruits agreed because we promised no one would die.”

“We would have found someone willing,” Tranq answered.

“I wouldn’t have signed up,” Kuhn said quietly.

Tranq looked like he was about to reply and then thought better of it. Jpeg got up from the table and soared into the air, getting something else from the pantry.

Shaw was about ready to get up and leave when Helix said, “How would you have done it?”

“What?”

“Wulf and Taveena think you have this great strategic mind. That’s why you’re here. You stopped the attack, you realized that we were leaving fingerprints on the spheres. They think you’re some sort of genius or something. So tell me, if you were in our shoes with the same parameters—no unnecessary deaths—what would you have done differently?”

Jpeg drifted back down to his seat. And Shaw felt all eyes on him. Hadn’t he been through this before? Part of his job was to prepare for all sorts of attacks on the Lattice. When there wasn’t a raid, he was probably conducting a drill for one, and Shaw used to throw crazy scenarios at the new officers. A diverted slingshot hurtling toward them. A stolen nuke. But he’d never guessed they’d be attacked with better technology than he possessed. Mostly he thought about ways the existing infrastructure could be turned against them—the classic
modus operandi
of a terrorist.

Transporting spheres, special hovercrafts, an invisible spaceship, modified nanoshocks. What would he have come up with if he’d had those toys to plan it with?

“He’s got nothing,” Tranq scoffed, pulling Shaw out of his thoughts. Helix seemed to agree, and he was getting the sense this interview was over.

“You all keep making it sound like I single-handedly foiled your plan,” Shaw cut in, stopping them. “But you’re forgetting I had help. A whole team of people behind me. But especially the man who
truly
saved the Lattice. Johan Iverson.
I
was lying on the ground in pain. He knocked Ono away from the table, preventing him diverting that last nuke, and then used it to destroy the hovercraft.”

“By that rationale, we should have taken out the entire Installation, so no one was around to stop us.”

“Exactly my point.” That got their attention. “You sent Ono after me—just one guy at the command table. You needed to go after everyone.”

“I told you, no unnecessary deaths,” Helix repeated.

“How easy it is to be an armchair quarterback when you don’t have to make the hard calls,” Tranq said.

“Who said anything about killing anyone? From what I can see, you’ve barely scratched the surface of what you can do with your teleporting technology. It’s not a failure of technology, it’s a failure of imagination.”

“We can only send a molecular machine that builds a sphere or a disc out of nitrogen atoms in the air,” Helix said. “We don’t get anything more than that.”

“Spheres!” Shaw exclaimed. “I’m so tired of hearing about fucking spheres and discs and pipes. You tunnel and you built this ship, but mostly you just use them as a … as a walkie-talkie! That’s it? That’s all you can think of?”

“There’s only so many geometric shapes that—”

“How about non-geometric shapes? How about having your little molecular machine, or whatever it is, build something more useful after it’s teleported? Like your specialized nanoshock? How about that? I mean, a shock is just some organic material with special instructions, right? Your molecular machine could pick up carbon and oxygen atoms just as well as it could nitrogen, right? Why not?”

Tranq was looking at Helix thoughtfully. “There’s less of it in the air, so it might take a little longer, but …”

“So that’s what I would have done. I’d teleport the instructions for a nanoshock and get the building blocks on the wrist of everyone at the Lattice Installation. When everyone had the start of a shock on their wrist, I’d send the hovercraft in and activate the shocks. No one would be able to defend the Installation, they’d all be blacked out from the pain. After the raid, turn off the shocks and let everyone wake up. No unnecessary deaths, and the Lattice is destroyed.”

The room was quiet. Helix and Tranq were staring at each other, and it was like they were having a full conversation about it without saying a word.

“You’re not seriously telling me that could work, are you?” Jpeg asked, looking back and forth between them.

Helix rocked her head from side to side. “It … might. I don’t know enough to say for sure, but it might. We’d have to get Taveena in here and talk through all of the mechanics.” She looked at Shaw. “Taveena’s the expert on nanotechnology here. She built the shocks ages ago … I know just enough. But … It might have worked.”

“
Might
,” Tranq stressed, not meeting Shaw’s eyes. “But might isn’t always enough.” He jumped over the table and left the room. Helix looked at Shaw for a few seconds and then followed.

“Keep coming up with ideas like that,” Kuhn said, “And you might just convince some more people to let you stay.”

“Ideas are a dime a dozen,” Jpeg said. “In the end, it’s loyalty that counts. And he’d still betray us in a second if given half a chance.”

After eating his breakfast in silence, Shaw left the room and started to head back to his bunk when he heard “Hi, Byron!” from below him. Shaw looked down and saw Erling coming up the vertical hallway from below decks.

Erling bounced off the ceiling and then landed gently on the sticky floor.

“I just made a report of your strategy session to Wulf. You were really thinking of ways to destroy the Lattice! I think he’ll be impressed!”

“You were listening in to my thoughts?”

“I’m supposed to, Byron,” Erling said, rubbing his elbow self-consciously. “I don’t want to, but …”

Shaw grimaced. “You’ve heard all the other stuff I’ve been thinking too, I’m sure. About wanting to fight Tranq again. About turning you all in and getting back to see my wife. About blowing an airlock open and killing us all. Does that impress Wulf too?”

“We … we know you’re in conflict, Byron. It’s not easy. I’ve been there, too. But I believe in you. I trust you—”

Shaw felt a sudden fury rising. “And where the hell did that trust come from? I don’t feel like I ever earned it. I woke from the dead and you were right there on my side. Do you just like arguing with Tranq? Because otherwise, I don’t understand it!”

Erling had shrunk back a couple steps.

“No! It’s … it’s not that.”

“Then what?!”

Erling sighed and closed his eyes. “All of us here are loners, Byron. All of us. I’ve been alone for as long as I can remember. When I was eight, I won a scholarship to visit the Salt Lake Temple and study. I stayed with my grandparents for the week, but right before I was supposed to go home to Las Vegas … well, you know what happened. My whole family died in the blast … all my friends, my whole school. Gone in less than a second. I was just a kid. My grandparents tried to take care of me, but they were old enough, they needed help themselves. After they died, I didn’t have anyone. I stayed in Salt Lake City, and the church took care of me, and sent me to school. But I was still alone. When I got here, I realized … everyone here has a story like that. If we all had families we loved back at home—like you do—we wouldn’t be here.”