It was now where Allied Command kept their main headquarters.
“We’re heading into Nyingchi first,” replied Zoraster.
Sid waited for him to expand on his plan, but the Grilla just trudged through the snow.
Glancing up at the towering peaks of the Himalayas, the splinter of Sid’s mind hovering in the drone hoped that the Grilla had a plan.
3
“All is lost!” screamed Hezekiah. “And because of what? This boy?” He threw an accusing finger at Bob.
Isaiah placed himself in front of Bob, protecting him. “You are the King of Judah, you cast out the false idols. Yahweh will protect us.”
Bob trembled, the scroll of papyrus balanced on his knees shaking. Night was falling, and the smoke from the cooking fires of the two hundred thousand Assyrian troops camping outside the walls of Jerusalem was drifting in, even into the royal palace.
Hezekiah scowled. “Where is this god you speak of?” He grabbed a smoldering pan of incense and threw it against the wall. The slaves cowered. “The twenty-four cities of Judah have been sacked. It was on this boy’s words that you counseled me not to pay tribute to Sennacherib!”
“He will come,” Bob heard himself saying, leaning forward to look the king directly in the eyes. “Yahweh will lay waste to the legions.”
“Your head will be the first thing I will present to Sennacherib come the first light,” growled Hezekiah, but already there were the screams of life being ripped from thousands of souls beyond the walls. Hezekiah’s head turned to look through the billowing curtains into the screeching night, the expression on his face turning from anger to bewilderment, and then into fear.
The dreams washed from Bob’s mind as he awoke. Australian aboriginals believed that man dreamed the world into existence. What world am I dreaming of?
Bob’s mind flitted into the sensor systems of the transport in which his body was being smuggled. There were no humans aboard except for him and the priest, stowed below decks in a life-support crate. All around was the heaving blue of the oceans, the wind whipping the tips of waves into a froth that skidded across the sea’s surface. He was in an automated oceanic tanker-transport, one of the thousands that mindlessly plowed the watery wilderness.
On Atopia, the ocean was Bob’s friend, his playground. He tried mapping his tactile sense—his water sense—onto the sea’s surface around the tanker, like he used to do at home, but now it felt alien, angry.
Nearly the only things that were alive out here—if that label could be applied—were the machines that roamed the waves, ferrying cargo back and forth to feed the seething mass of humans on the shores. Human biomass now exceeded all wild terrestrial biomass. Overhead in the skies, he could sense the turbofan transport networks, their insides filled with this same human biomass that they ingested and regurgitated at each stop. Dead seas, dead lands, and all creatures enslaved to the human project of pleasuring themselves.
The priest, his body in stasis in the pod next to Bob, was awake as well, and he opened a private communication channel. “Are you feeling ready for the coming fight?” he asked.
Bob mentally shook himself, waking himself up. Such dark thoughts, it wasn’t like him. Then again, his body lay encased in a life-support unit at the bottom of an oceanic transport, an unwilling linchpin in a surreal global conflict. “Not really,” Bob replied. “My mind is filled with such—”
“Fear and doubt is normal in such a situation.”
In such a situation. “You were right.” Right about the end of the world. Bob didn’t entirely trust the Terra Novans, but everything Tyrel said seemed to make sense. Mohesha was the one to suggest that the priest come with him. She contacted the priest to debrief him, and he’d offered to continue on the journey with Bob. The priest was more comfortable with Terra Novan technology than he was, and Mohesha knew Bob trusted him. She knew this would be a rough road.
“The truth comes in many ways to those who seek it,” replied the priest.
Both of them were immobile in the bottom of the transport, speaking through their minds. Bob had renounced Atopian technology—it was too dangerous to connect into it anymore. He was using Terra Novan tech now. Terra Novans didn’t use proxxi, so Bob freed his, creating a set of corporations around the world that Robert could control to establish his identity as a legal person. He missed his old friend, and on this leg of the trip he was in total radio silence.
Once again he was cut off from the world, but now he was on a mission.
“We need you to return to Atopia,” Tyrel had explained to Bob at the end of the Terra Novan Council meeting.
“Return to Atopia?” Where just days before this would have excited him, when Tyrel said it, his stomach had knotted up.
“You are the only one that might be able to get through to Jimmy Scadden. What’s left of him in there still trusts you, even loves you. He spared you. You might be able to drive a wedge of uncertainty into his mind.” Tyrel had paused. “Or obliterate him.”
“Can’t I try talking to him from here?” Bob had complained.
“You need to get inside the Atopian perimeter; it’s the only way we can try to ensure the White Rider won’t intercept you.”
Bob had finally agreed.
But only as it gave him the chance to rescue his family, and to rescue Nancy. But he didn’t know if he’d even be able to convince them to leave. Still, he had to try.
A part of Bob wished he’d managed to speak to Sid more after the meeting, but somehow there hadn’t been time. To be honest, he hadn’t made the time. To be honest, he didn’t really want to talk.
At the meeting, they’d unpacked all the data that Patricia gave to him. It seemed to confirm what the Terra Novans were thinking, but the POND data was unexpected, and nobody had any idea what it meant, or if it was even relevant. Sid was still working on decoding it. The most critical information, though, had been what Willy’s body had been carrying, the information on the identities of the other Horsemen.
It was this that had set the plan in motion.
The Terra Novans had given him nearly unfettered access to all their resources, the ability for him to summon their entire cyber-arsenal if needed. He was the critical node in the fight that had to get through, that might be able to cut the head from the snake.
“How much did Mohesha tell you?” Bob asked the priest. He wasn’t sure what Mohesha had shared.
“Enough. We must decide for ourselves what to believe and what to cast out. The battle between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness began long ago.”
In his mind’s eye, Bob saw a fly crawling on the strip-lighting embedded in the ceiling. The fly crawled around, its only concern finding its next meal, perhaps finding a mate. If he reached up to swat it, it would try to escape, realizing something was trying to kill it. It wouldn’t understand what was trying to kill it. It would only understand that it had to run. Bob had a creeping sensation of the same thing.
Inside his mind, he burned to get back onto Atopia, to take his family and Nancy to safety. He couldn’t fail again.
He was the only one who really knew Jimmy, the only one Jimmy might listen to, and he was the only one who knew the Atopian systems as well as Jimmy did. An image of Jimmy on the beach back at Nancy’s thirteenth birthday party floated into his mind, that young trusting boy looking to Bob for help. Now he needed to use that trust, find the love for Bob that might still exist somewhere inside his old friend.
And use that love against him.