The noise of the pumps increased in frequency. The air pressure in the chamber was dropping. “Stop it.” Jimmy’s projection stood up and walked next to Bob. “Don’t make me do this.”
Bob wheezed. “I’m not making you do anything.” He felt Jimmy’s networks trying to stem the flow of information gushing from him into the core.
“Stop it,” insisted Jimmy again, banging one hand against the wall of the airlock.
Bob was trying to contain it, but his cellular membranes began shredding in the sudden and massive decompression. He doubled over, coughing, keeping one hand on the transducer while the other came up to his mouth. He brought it away. It was covered in blood.
“Bob!” Jimmy yelled, his eyes growing wide. “Stop!”
Bob’s internal organs began rupturing, and blood ran out of his nose and ears. It was nearing vacuum in the chamber. Still he kept his finger on the photonic array. His body sagged against the wall.
“STOP IT!” Jimmy screamed, but he was now screaming at himself. Nobody else was left in the chamber.
Trailing a streak of red against the wall, Bob’s body slid down to slump into a pool of its own blood.
21
Sid pulled the restraints of his seat, his knuckles white on balled fists. The image of Bob’s inert body lingered in the shared display of the passenger pod. Tears streaked down Sid’s face. The only sound was the low hum of the pod’s life support system recycling the air.
Sibeal reached into the display with a phantom and clicked it off, then reached with her real hands to hold Sid’s. She encouraged him to release the webbing tabs.
Shaking his head, Sid muttered, “Why did he do that?”
“I don’t know,” whispered Sibeal.
“Jimmy didn’t need to kill him.” Sid clenched his teeth and looked at Sibeal. “He could have just left him unconscious. Why did he have to kill him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“And why didn’t Bob try to stop him?” Sid mumbled. “He could have hacked the controls. He didn’t even try…”
“Ah, sorry,” said a quiet voice from the back of the pod. It was Shaky. “But how do we even know that just really happened? Maybe it was a fake.”
Sid began breathing again in shallow breaths. “It seemed real enough to me. None of the connection streams ever switched, it was continuous”—he analyzed the data they received—“and the encryption tags were intact.”
Shaky shrugged. “Even so, you Atopians…”
“I don’t know, is the answer.” It wasn’t something Sid could analyze, wasn’t something he could crunch the numbers on.
Shaky shrank back into his seat. “Sorry.”
The pod cut through space in silence while Sid ran through the connection mechanics again and again, searching for any evidence of tampering.
“Hey.”
Sid glanced over his shoulder while the bulk of his mind focused on the analyzing and replaying the scene of Bob’s death over and over again. Bunky was reaching forward in his seat to reach out and touch Sid’s arm.
“Look, I know this is a shock,” continued Bunky, “but there was no good reason why Jimmy wouldn’t have killed Bob.”
Sibeal turned around. “Bunky this isn’t—”
“Let me finish.” Bunky held up a hand. “We might have to accept this at face value.”
“You don’t understand.” Sid’s voice was ragged.
“No, I don’t. So tell me.”
“Bob was the only one that ever stood up for Jimmy, protected him. We grew up together.”
“So you were mates as sprogs, then?”
It took Sid a second to decode what he meant. Sprog—cockney for child. “Yeah.”
“Sometimes mates kill mates in war, mate.” Bunky gripped Sid’s shoulder. “I know. I was in the British Army when the Troubles rose up again in Ireland. It was why I left.”
Shaky frowned. “I didn’t know that.”
Bunky nodded. “Yeah, and if you want to make whatever he sacrificed himself for to be worth it, you need to get a grip, right now.”
Sid said nothing. The muscles in his jaw flexed.
“Or do I need to remind you,” continued Bunky, “that we’re in a thirty-foot long capsule,”—he checked the altimeter reading—“forty miles in space above enemy territory, in the middle of a war, traveling at six thousand miles an hour straight into an enemy blockade.”
The Commune wasn’t just a Luddite ashram. Its founding fathers, some of the richest people in America, had foreseen a day like this. It had been built with a final battle in mind. There was a fortress under those farms. While it might be safe on the inside, the problem was that Allied forces had encircled it—the Commune’s perimeter was now an enforced no-fly zone.
Nancy knew this, and must have had a plan, but since comms were cut off for twenty seconds in the plasma burst of launch, they hadn’t been able to contact her. They were heading straight into this mess at nearly two miles a second. The heat shield of the capsule was already heating above a thousand degrees as they reentered the thicker layers of the atmosphere. Their chairs swiveled around to take the g-forces in the opposite direction.
“This Nancy girl that Bob spoke of, to take care of—that’s the same one that bundled us into this thing?” Bunky asked.
Sid nodded. “Yes.”
“Try her again—seems the first order of business would be making sure she’s all right.”
Sid tried again. “I have been.” Jimmy was steadily regaining control of the Atopian ecosystem, driving out the Terra Novan tunnel Bob wedged into its perimeter. Sid’s connections were shutting down.
“I think the first order of business,” Sibeal interrupted, “would be making sure we’re not blown to bits by the Allies or the Commune.”
“We should be okay. Did you check the flight plan?” Sid summoned the details Nancy gave them. They had to assume Nancy had a plan. He noticed that Commander Strong had authorized Allied tags for their capsule. He pointed this out to Sibeal. “That should let us straight through, at least until it’s too late to stop us reaching the perimeter. And I assume she contacted the Commune to tell them we’re coming.”
From here, they had no way to communicate with the Commune directly.
Sibeal shook her head as the g-forces of re-entry squeezed her back into her seat. “Assume she contacted them?” The acceleration was piling up, much more than at launch. Their trajectory was taking a steep dive into the Commune.
“And we better hope that those Allied tags are still good.”
The pod ripped down through the atmosphere, blazing a bright tail behind it as the comet rose over the curved horizon. Holding their breath, they breached the Allied no-fly zone. Sid spun a viewpoint out into the surrounding area. The Allied attack on the Commune had stopped. Everything in the Allied networks indicated a stand-down status. What happened? Why’d they stop? The auto-rotating blades of the pod popped out, shifting their capsule from a ballistic into an aerodynamic flight path. It began decelerating hard again, squeezing them into their aerogel seats. They neared the Commune’s shield.
Sid detached from his body to watch from the outside. Like a helicopter, the pod hovered just at the edge of the aerial plankton dome a mile and a half in the air. Then, like magic, an opening appeared underneath them. The plankton parted to allow them through.
“We’re in!” Sid exclaimed inside the capsule.