Nancy cut straight to the point. “Jimmy is the one who stole your wife’s mind.”
Commander Strong stared at her. Of course she would do anything, say anything right now. Desperate people did desperate things. “That’s a very serious accusation.”
He felt sorry for her, but lies wouldn’t help.
And yet.
Nancy forwarded the data beacon Bob sent her, details that Patricia Killiam had left: evidence implicating Jimmy in the deaths of his own parents, dozens of disappearances, even the death of Patricia herself. The most damning, though, was evidence that Jimmy stole his wife Cindy’s mind, taken her away to gain control over him.
He assimilated the data. “I’ve seen most of this before.” Jimmy had presented the data recovered from Patricia Killiam at the last Council meeting when they received approval to attack Terra Nova.
“Not all of it.”
She was right. Jimmy had hidden the parts incriminating him. The Commander recognized the digital authentication of Patricia. He verified it with his old keys. It was from Patricia. “What do you want, Nancy? If you knew about this, why did you wait?”
“I had to be sure.” Nancy tried raising Kesselring, opening a channel together with Rick, but Kesselring didn’t answer the ping. “Kesselring is together with me.” She shared her rendering of the meeting Kesselring had with Jimmy, when he’d confronted him.
Veins popped out in Rick’s neck. “If you and Kesselring were discussing this, you should have come to me…”
“I needed to wait.”
Until now, she didn’t have to add. They were about to crack the Terra Novan defenses.
“I can’t prove it more than this,” she added breathlessly, “but have I ever lied to you?”
Rick stared at the data. He’d always been a gut thinker, and the things that happened with Patricia Killiam hadn’t made any sense to him on a gut level.
In the splinter of his mind that was always with his wife, he looked down into her face.
Hell, he thought, is not a place where you burn, but a place where you are frozen—frozen in time, alive and never dying, immobile with your thoughts and regrets. The more you struggle to get out, the more the thoughts dig into you, pulling you deeper. Rick had been living in a frozen hell for the past six months. None of it had made sense.
Until now.
19
“The girl from Ipanema”—Sid was sure that was the muzak being played in the passenger cannon waiting area. This waiting room would normally be packed with businesspeople and tourists, but it was empty. Something was going on in the city, but Sid was disconnected from the networks. Holographic ads played across the wall of palm trees and people winning money in casinos, promises of the womb of warmth and security. He was sitting next to Sibeal, facing Bunky and Shaky seated across from them, surrounded by psombie guards in their black body armor.
“Where are we going?” Sid asked, looking at the guard nearest to him. It seemed like he was the squad leader, but it was hard to tell. They didn’t talk, didn’t make any noise at all except the whisper of the metallic fabric of their uniforms as they merged around each other in a fluid, non-human gait.
Of course there was no response.
The psombie guards’ faces were covered in a reflective black shell, and Sid doubted they even used their own eyes to see. They were just nodes in a network. Tiny ornithopter bots hovered everywhere they moved, coordinating the activity, bees hovering around their mobile hive.
Sid wondered what the owners of these bodies were doing right now. They were still thinking, using the brains inside of these heads, but they were off in virtual gameworlds, or perhaps living in another version of New York, living out a fantasy life with a girlfriend that jilted them or some other situation they weren’t able to come to grips with. Whatever it was, it was enticing enough to lease their bodies to Cognix Corporation. He wanted to get up and shake them awake, ask them if they knew what they were doing, but even if he did, it wouldn’t make any difference.
The public didn’t care anymore. Everyone was too wrapped up in pleasing themselves, which was exactly what the plan had been all along.
Sid could guess where they were going. Atopia was well within the launch energy of the passenger cannon. Everything was resting on Bob being able to get inside, and get inside of Jimmy’s head. If he did, ironically, it might even be a good thing they were being shipped there right now.
A low vibration hummed through their seats, and a two-tone chime sounded. Their passenger pod was here.
“First time I’m getting on one of these,” Shaky said as they all stood. “Will it make me sick? I’m not good with zero gravity.”
“We got more serious things right now,” said Bunky, his face grim.
Shaky looked at him. “You’re the one sitting beside me, mate. Have you ever seen someone vomit in low gravity?”
The waiting area doors slid open, revealing the passenger cannon pod interior of nondescript gray walls with thick g-seats in creamy fake leather. Sid waited for instructions to be fed into his displays, but instead their psombie minders stood back and away from them.
And then something amazing happened: one of them spoke.
“You are free to go,” said the one Sid had imagined as the leader.
Turning on their heels, the psombies marched off, trailing their beebot entourage.
Sid was speechless. He glanced at Bunky and Shaky and Sibeal while “The Girl from Ipanema” played on in the background.
“Did you… what did you do?” stuttered Bunky. He took a step toward the exit, but then reconsidered.
Sid shook his head. “It wasn’t—”
“Come on!” commanded a voice from inside the pod.
Sid turned to look inside the passenger cannon pod. He nearly fell over backwards.
It was Nancy, or at least, a synthetic space projection of her. “Hurry up,” she insisted, motioning for them to get inside.
He checked the encrypted metatags of the projection inside the pod. It was Nancy in front of them, or someone that had stolen all of Nancy’s authentication. She sent him details of a flight plan. “It’s okay, she’s a friend,” Sid said, making a decision. He pulled Sibeal through the doors. Bunky and Shaky followed.
Sid was busy reconnecting his network feeds. His meta-cognition systems flooded with images of battles raging outside. A lot had happened since they were captured. The world had erupted around them.
“Hurry,” Nancy urged as they seated themselves and clipped in their webbing restraints. “Commander Strong and Kesselring are with us now.”
“Did Bob make it through?” asked Sid.
Nancy’s projection shook its head. “He’s here, but it’s not that easy.” She opened a connection.
A splinter opened in Sid’s mind, and he saw an ocean. It was a view from just offshore of Atopia. Someone was in the water. “He’s swimming?” Sid said incredulously. It was Bob, churning through the surf, cutting under a wave as he pulled away from the beach.
The passenger pod jolted and began accelerating, pinning the passengers back into their seats.
“Uh, guys, don’t mean to spoil your reunion,” Bunky said from the seats behind Sid. “But where exactly are we going?”
Sid networked them into the display that was tracking Bob, and then uploaded the flight plan. “We’re going to the only place that’s still safe,” he replied.
“At least for now,” added Nancy.
“And where’s that?” grunted Bunky.