“I can walk,’ Fiona mumbled. Pierce ignored her, but then she whispered one more word. “Emet.”
“Damn it, Fi!”
He felt a rumble rising up through his boot soles as the rubble pile behind them coalesced into another golem, and he had to slow almost to a stop as the construct lumbered past on an intercept course with the shekinahs. Pierce caught only a glimpse of the golem — not a dinosaur this time, but a crude humanoid form — before he heard Fiona’s voice again. “Met.”
The golem crumbled into a heap right in front of the shekinah creatures, blocking their approach, and buying the three of them a few extra seconds to maneuver.
All Pierce could think to say was: “Good thinking.”
“I can walk,” Fiona said again, and this time, Pierce took her word for it.
THIRTY
With Fiona using the golems to block the creatures instead of destroying them, they reached the monastery walls without triggering any further radiant bursts. The gunmen were also absent, but Pierce remained wary as they made their way around the monastery. The garden area on the opposite side of the complex had been transformed into a triage site, with emergency workers and monks ministering to the wounded.
“I hope Father Justin made it,” Fiona said.
Pierce nodded. “Right now, the best thing we can do for him and all the survivors is to get as far away from here as we can.”
“How far is that?” Gallo asked.
“We’ll just keep moving,” Pierce said.
They slipped past the casualty collection point and made their way down the road to the tourist village, also named for Saint Catherine. The hotels were full of visitors who, following both the earthquakes and the rumors of a terrorist attack at the nearby monastery, were waiting to be evacuated by bus to Sharm el-Sheikh. After a few inquiries, Pierce found a local taxi driver willing to make the road trip, for quadruple the normal fare — a very competitive rate given the circumstances, he was assured — and they were soon underway again.
As the hired car raced down the desert roads, Pierce called Dourado and learned of the debacle in Geneva, and the worldwide consequences.
There had indeed been another spate of earthquakes in the western hemisphere. In an ironic reversal, earthquake-prone California had experienced only mild shocks, nothing above magnitude 5.0. But further to the north, the pent-up energy of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, had been released in a massive six-minute-long quake measuring 8.4 on the Richter scale. The entire northwest coast of Oregon and Washington had gone silent. The predictions emerging from scientists and news agencies were ominous. Portland, Seattle, and everything west of Interstate 5 had been devastated by the temblor and the subsequent tsunami. Alaska had been hit with the most destructive temblor since the 1964 Good Friday earthquake that had leveled Anchorage. Hawaii and Japan were bracing for tsunamis that would, in all likelihood, dwarf the disastrous effects of the 2011 Fukushima quake.
That the seismic disturbances had been a long time coming — historically, a ‘Big One’ hit the region every 300–600 years, and the last one had occurred in 1700—didn’t make the news any easier to swallow. Carter was a Seattle native, and Fiona’s ancestral home was just a few miles inland on the Oregon Coast. It would be hours, possibly even days, before the true extent of the damage was known. But even the most optimistic predictions were dire.
Yet as terrible as the news was, Pierce knew it was only a shadow of the danger that still loomed on the horizon.
Following the showdown with the renegade robots, the team had regrouped and set up an ad hoc command center at Tomorrowland. Despite his frustration, Pierce knew that the misguided attempt to ‘fix’ the Black Knight had been the right decision, given the circumstances. At least now they knew who was responsible for the global threat.
Ishiro Tanaka.
Pierce put the phone on speaker mode, as Dourado began relating what she had discovered about the Japanese physicist.
The grandson of a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bombing, Tanaka had, from an early age, shown a macabre fascination with the destructive forces at work in the universe. Later in life, as a university student, he had become an active and vocal proponent of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement — VHEMT, pronounced ‘Vehement’. They were a group that espoused the belief that humans were a virulent disease and would destroy all life on Earth if they were not themselves made extinct. It was a goal they believed could be accomplished peacefully through anti-natalism — the end of human procreation.
“Vehement wasn’t radical enough for him,” Dourado explained, “But he became friends with an Indian student named Bandar Pradesh—”
“Bandar Pradesh?” Gallo broke in. “That’s not a real Indian name.”
“I know, right? Bandar literally means ‘port’ and Pradesh means ‘province.’ It’s probably an alias or some kind of inside joke. He preferred to go by his hacker name: Shiva. Pradesh or Shiva or whatever you want to call him, took the whole humans-are-a-disease thing one step further. He believed that all life — from microbes to redwood trees to blue whales — was a great big cosmic mistake.”
“Huh?”
Carter broke in. “It’s the philosophy of pessimism.”
“Like Rust, in True Detective,” Dourado supplied.
“I was thinking more along the lines of Schopenhauer,” Carter said. “Death gets us all in the end. Everything we do only leads to suffering, either for ourselves or someone else. Entropy will eventually destroy the universe no matter what we do, and since life is pretty much miserable for most creatures, eradicating life from the universe is a merciful act, sparing future generations from pain and suffering.”
“That’s dark,” Pierce said.
“Geniuses are a little more susceptible to philosophies like that, because they want to understand the big picture and think everything should make sense like a balanced equation. They end up getting scared by what they see.”
“Tanaka and Shiva stayed friends,” Dourado continued. “And continued to be pessi-bros or whatever. Tanaka worked at HAARP for a while, and then joined Pradesh at a place called Jovian Technologies, but then Shiva disappeared during the Blackout incident in Paris a few years ago.”
“I remember that,” Fiona said with a groan.
“Tanaka was pretty quiet after that,” Dourado continued, “Stopped posting on the Vehement forums and focused on his work.”
“Unfortunately,” said a new, unfamiliar male voice, “his work was helping me figure out how to turn the Black Knight satellite into a planetary-scale solar reflector.”
Marcus Fallon, Pierce thought. The boy who couldn’t resist playing with fire.
“So that’s all he wants? Global annihilation? No negotiation?”
“Seems that way,” Dourado answered.
“Do we know where he’s going?”
“Not a clue. He could be anywhere. All he needs is an antenna array with a 10 gigahertz transmitter, and he can stop the sun.”
“What about the men who attacked the monastery? Were they working with him?”
“Given the timing of the attack, I think that’s a safe assumption. Tanaka has been building his doomsday network for a long time, and thanks to the Internet and his Vehement connections, it’s worldwide.”
Gallo shook her head. “Who knew there were so many people out there rooting for the end of the world?”