The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (35 page)

“Frankly, I don’t trust the network anymore. I can’t speak for them, but I think we need to recognize that after the hotel exploded, a significant number of them probably got cold feet. They’re going to be wondering ‘what exactly am I being asked to do?’ They’ll worry that their actions might cause people to die. And when they understand what’s going on in the dome, they might get cold feet then too, right when we need to know what’s happening the most. I don’t want to put my trust in them if I don’t have to.”

“Funny, we didn’t have issues with our allies on the ground before you showed up and gave them unclear orders to shine lasers on a hotel. Seems like we’re having to clean up after you a lot,” Tranq said.

Shaw stood silently, chin forward, waiting.

Wulf spun in his chair slightly and looked at Tranq. “Do you agree with Byron’s assessment? That our network is unreliable?”

Tranq was quiet and nodded. “With enough time we could figure out if anyone was on the fence or having second thoughts. But we don’t have the time.”

“Then we’ll do it without them. Let’s not dwell on the why right now.”

Tranq looked like he was going to argue, but relented. He turned back to Shaw. “All right. Without the network, that leaves only the eight of us in this room. You want two in Nevada. That leaves six to take down the whole Geneva Lattice? Is that enough?”

“Yes.”

Tranq sat back, still defiant but definitely intrigued. “I think I’d like to hear that plan.”

“Me too,” Wulf said.

Shaw nodded. “This is where things get interesting. Annalise, has the
Walden
ever been submerged in water?”

She shook her head. “No, but it can handle getting a little wet.”

“How about a lot wet?”

“Exactly how deep do you want to take it?”

“I’d like to be able to do fifty fathoms, at least.”

Annalise grimaced. “That’s an incredible amount of pressure. Ten times the atmospheric pressure at sea level, if I remember my diving chart. And the pressure’s all reversed from space. Up here we’re trying to hold in the pressure—down there, we’re trying to hold it out. We’d need rigorous testing.”

“For those of us who don’t know a fathom from a furlong, how deep is that?” Taveena asked.

“Three hundred feet,” Shaw said.

“And what body of water do you want to sink my ship hundreds of feet into exactly?” Annalise asked.

“Lake Geneva, of course. The Lattice is in the old tunnels under Geneva from the Large Hadron Collider they built decades ago. It’s incredibly well protected simply by having a city on top of it. The method you had planned before—to use an old ventilation duct to chemically destroy the Lattice with sulfuric acid—was ingenious. But now that it’s been revealed, it won’t work anymore, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

“Another fact we have you to thank for,” Tranq said.

“Enough,” Wulf corrected.

Tranq looked defiantly at Wulf, but was quiet.

“The whole tube system around the Lattice has been encased with a second coating of lead, so we can’t transport any starting molecules inside it,” Shaw said. “Any action against it has to take place on site, likely an explosive placed directly there by either one of us or a drone. So how do we get to it then? We can’t tunnel from above ground. We’d attract too much attention. We can’t set a surface-based explosive. It wouldn’t penetrate far enough below ground, and there would be massive casualties. This one stumped me for a long time, but then I realized there would be one way to get underground that wouldn’t be guarded and wouldn’t cause any loss of life: the lake itself. We can submerge the
Walden
, maneuver to the correct elevation entirely undetected, and then create one of Taveena’s pipes directly from the lakebed to the tunnel holding the Lattice.”

Tranq was leaning forward, waiting to jump in. “It’s impossible.”

“It’s not.”

“Your general idea might work, but have you thought about how you actually plan to submerge the
Walden
? It might be invisible but it will still cause a splash. Even at night, even while invisible, even while going incredibly slowly, there are just too many people who live around the lake. Someone will see something. It only takes one of them to expose us.”

“I agree. And it’s actually worse than you think. Because the Walden would still be detected by sonar from the surface. We might be invisible, but sound waves would still find us.”

“Who uses sonar anymore?” Erling asked.

“Fishermen,” Annalise and Shaw said together. Shaw added, “It takes away the sport if you use the Lattice.”

“So anyone who happens to see us enter the lake, or any passing fisherman who sees a big fucking sphere on his boat’s sonar could give us away,” Tranq continued. “And six of us would be on board, just waiting to be handcuffed and tried. Or scuttled. That’s not a plan, Shaw.”

“I’ve considered all of that. But we can still enter the lake undetected, and I can guarantee that no fisherman will be out on the water using sonar on the day of the attack.”

“How?”

Shaw smiled. “Let’s just say there are other ways to avoid being seen that don’t involve invisibility.”

Shaw was in the command chair. The command room he’d been locked from only days before now operated at his beck and call. The days and nights he’d spent here on tactical planning had been mostly spent with Tranq and Wulf, jumping in and out of the Lattice to check details of their plans against the facts on the ground.

For a while, it was easy to feel like it was just the three of them against the world as the rest of the crew prepared for the plan.

Annalise prepared the
Walden
to become a submersible, with help from Helix. Kuhn prepared the supplies of the ship for its return to gravity. Taveena and Erling worked on the molecular machines that would grow into spheres. Five thousand solid spheres had already been seeded evenly around the interior of the lead dome, programmed to grow until everything inside it was crushed between them. And another forty thousand machines had been programmed to build hollow spheres for the assault on Geneva. Some of those would grow to the size of snowballs and stop, most could fit Shaw comfortably inside, and some were even bigger than the
Walden
itself. The mix would be essential.

Shaw’s understanding of the tasks of the rest of the crew was limited to the parts that affected the joint attacks. Anything beyond that, he couldn’t make time for. There were just too many details, too many counter-plans to consider, and—it turned out—too many fights.

The first big fight was over dividing the team; in particular, choosing who would be on the ground in Nevada. Shaw was pushing for Tranq and Helix—at this point he didn’t trust either of them, especially after his conversation in the hallway with Helix. Tranq argued that Shaw should be in Nevada, on the grounds that Shaw couldn’t do much of anything about the Nevada attack once it had started, but he could easily sabotage the Geneva assault.

“I’ll be recognized in Nevada,” Shaw argued. “I worked with them for years.”

“You’ll be recognized
anywhere
,” Tranq said. “Most everyone with a Lattice reader watched you die. Putting you out in the field in Geneva is just asking for trouble.”

“If security in Geneva finds a stranger, they’ll act immediately. If they find me, they’ll hesitate long enough we can disarm them,” Shaw countered.

“Guns melt in the face of your incredible celebrity, is that it?”

“Enough,” Wulf said. He was quiet, but they both stopped. “Byron, don’t play favorites. You’re a superb strategist—don’t make an ass out of yourself like you’re picking teams in middle school. Tranq, you and Kuhn will be in Nevada. Kuhn doesn’t have enough training to be much help in Geneva. If all this goes well, our work will be done. I expect the destruction of the Lattice will lead to a … global hiccup in transportation and other systems, and while that gets worked out, you two shouldn’t be on two different continents. Agreed?”

Shaw and Tranq nodded and went back to their corners. At least until the next bout.

The most bitter fight resulted from a surprise announcement only a day before the dome would be complete: the five CEOs of the companies that produced Lattice readers—including Grace Williams—were meeting at the Nevada Lattice to celebrate the completion of the lead dome.

To Tranq, it was an opportunity to “cut the head off the serpent” all at once. “It’ll send a message to anyone who wants to reconstruct the Lattice,” he finished.

“We’re destroying their companies, we don’t have to be assassins at the same time,” Shaw countered.

“Those companies need to be in chaos for as long as possible.”

“They will be! Their CEOs will all be in Nevada and no one will be able to reach them using the Lattice. We don’t need to create another five martyrs for this cause.”

“Says the first martyr for it. Maybe you’re just trying to protect your buddies.”

“If you just wanted to accuse me of betraying you all the time, why did you bother voting for me?”

“You gave us a plan. A pretty good one. I happen to think it will work. But I also agree with Taveena: I think you’re going to get cold feet and turn on us. Better to pull you out of the equation now and not give you the chance.”

“What exactly are you proposing, Tranq?” Wulf interrupted.

“We kill them. And only them.”

“How, I mean?”

Shaw sucked in his breath and held it.

“We speed up our timeline. They’re having a press conference and ribbon cutting thing in thirty-six hours—a day before our planned attack. We strike then.”

“Wouldn’t they evacuate?”

“Then we use more spheres and fill the dome up faster. Maybe we don’t give them time to get out.”

“You’re talking about a lot more than five martyrs, then,” Wulf murmured, stealing the words out of Shaw’s mouth.

“Then I’ll go inside. After the spheres have started to grow. I’ll take them out myself. One at a time.”

Wulf stared at Tranq for a long time, evaluating him. Eventually he shook his head.

“It’s not worth it, Tranq. The CEOs are … figureheads. If we went after everyone who had a hand in the Lattice the list would just keep growing and growing. Ada Dillon. Me,” Wulf smiled sadly. “The Lattice itself is enough.”

Tranq coughed and turned away. “Since you bring up Dillon …”

“No.”

“She’s working on a
new
Lattice, Wulf! Why destroy one if she can build another?”

“It’s years away from completion. With any luck the world won’t want it by the time she’s done.”

“There’s too much money there for people to walk away.”

“There was too much money in slavery once, too. But it’s illegal now. And everyone agrees it’s immoral,” Shaw said, eliciting a raised eyebrow from Wulf, and surprising even himself.

“That’s different. People fought a war over slavery,” Tranq countered.

“What do you call this? It sure feels like a war to me,” Wulf said.

Shaw felt a sudden loss with the conversation turning to the Civil War—two days from now he’d never be able to jump back to his favorite time in history. Should he jump back and visit Gettysburg before their raid? No, there wasn’t time—he still had so much left to do. But he could barely fathom his life without jumps to the battlefields and encampments of the 1860s.

He pushed it as far from his mind as he could. Ellie would want him to.

Ellie.

He would be stuck in Geneva for a time after this was all over. But he should be able to get to her in St. Louis in eventually—hopefully months before his daughter was born. That was all he needed to get through this.

Shaw looked up and Tranq and Wulf were still arguing back and forth.

“We need a break,” he announced, cutting them both off with a commanding voice. “Let’s come back together in fifteen.”

There was no more talk of assassinations or changing the timeline when they came back together. Clearer heads had prevailed, and from then on, Shaw found himself moderating more and more frequently between Wulf and Tranq. Wulf had—consciously or not—become an advocate for many of the principles Shaw had embraced. Wulf’s statesman-like demeanor ebbed, and Shaw felt himself picking up those reins.

This was in his blood. He remembered playing peacemaker during arguments between Peter and Elvin years ago, getting one or the other of them to back down. Making them laugh to pass over a troublesome spot, smoothing out a fight with an invitation to box and letting them hit it out in the ring when both were too proud to apologize. He was used to being the man balancing both sides, pointing out a nuance here or simply calling someone’s bullshit there. And here he was doing it again.

The remaining hours flew by. Shaw insisted everyone sleep before they began their descent out of orbit. They were going to spend their remaining time with churning stomachs and fast-beating hearts with no chance for sleep.

Eventually even that was behind them.

Shaw watched Erling and Wulf guide the
Walden
out of orbit, gently bringing her down into the night sky over the Pacific. As the glowing Earth filled the window in the command room, he remembered watching the
Walden’s
ascent not even two weeks before, half-paralyzed and kidnapped out of his own grave. It felt like a lifetime ago.

Once the ship was back into the atmosphere, and Shaw’s internal organs had settled back into their normal places, the invisible
Walden
began moving through the high atmosphere until they were stationary over the Nevada desert.

There they waited.

They had beat their timeline by an hour, thanks to clear skies over the Pacific—dropping the
Walden
through a bank of clouds would have caused a very obvious and suspicious hole to form and they had allowed time to maneuver around them if need be.

The crew gathered in the great room and used this last lull for hugs and goodbyes.

“Tranq and Kuhn will be leaving us in less than forty-five minutes,” Wulf said. “If all goes as we expect, within twenty-four hours the common purpose of this team—this
community
—will have been fulfilled. I think it’s natural that we feel a certain loss. We’ve shared close quarters, which meant some bitter fights from time to time … but mostly we were united. We face an unknown future. We don’t know how the world will react. But after tomorrow we won’t have to try to change it from the shadows. We will be free to go where we like. To fight for what we want in public and without shame. Thank you all for everything you’ve done.”