Charles Ingrid - marked man 02 The Last Recall Page 11

  This part of the Vaults had been constructed to survive even the self-destruct. It was to have been the hope against all defeat. Now it sat on its foundation, tilted, cracked like an egg. The stench from the chambers was appalling. The dean put a sleeve to his face, as if he could filter it away. The dead . . . thing . . . within had been his incarnation. Now he had but one life to live, and that was the life he possessed at this moment.

  The man put his head back and let out a howl. It was muffled by the fallen concrete and plasticomb and tons of mountain. No one heard his anguish but himself. He fell to his knees, his face dampened with tears. He put a hand out to embrace himself. The plasticomb was as chill as he imagined the cadaverous flesh before him.

  It was himself inside that cracked, treacherous womb, and he mourned all his possibilities with this death. He had survived it all—the meteorites, the limited nuclear exchange, the dust which had covered Earth like a shroud for decades, the famine, the plagues, the earthquakes which seemed little enough after all else—cloned and re-cloned, it had been planned for there to be a Dean of the College as long as the College Vaults existed.

  He tried to pull himself together. A glimmer from Ms flashlight picked out the imprinter. It seemed intact, though its lines to the utero chamber were now useless. He crawled forward across the rabble, one arm over his face to mask the stench which grew stronger as he approached the chamber. The unit's panels flared into life as he touched them,

  The dean ripped the imprinter/recorder out of its sockets. The wiring was intact as well, leads and probes falling away from the failed clone's decaying flesh. He stood up, and held the unit in his trembling hands.

  He would go on. It would even be through flesh of his flesh, though his skin crawled at the concept of mating with a nester woman. No. There would be someone more suitable. When the time came, he would know it. And the machinery and the scheme would not fail him. The dean would continue to be immortal as he had been meant to be.

  He wrapped the leads around the small box and stowed it carefully in his pack. As he left the lab, the debris stirred up by his movement began a small avalanche, shelves tumbling down, and another unit bounced to the floor by his foot. It was heavy and squat.

  The dean bent over to retrieve it. His fingers shook again as he brushed the dirt from its face. It was the recall beacon unit for the long-term space probes sent out at about the time the College Vaults had first been sunk into the mountain. His fingernail scraped across the plastic face. A window pulsed at him, a steady red light. He frowned, eyeing the instrument. This had been part of his life work, to watch and monitor and hope that the longships might return as had been intended.

  With the edge of his sleeve, he quickly wiped down the unit. It, too, was self-contained and self-powered. He was not lost—not himself and not his mission. Tears brimmed in his eyes. Their heat spilled over and down his face. The unit was functional. Its reading told him that a signal had been intercepted. He held it close to be sure he was reading it properly.

  Something had set the unit off. Had it been blinking when he entered the lab and had he been so struck by the utero chamber that he'd failed to note it? He wiped his face. Panic swept him. Had he failed in his mission after all these years? When had he last checked the sender/receiver? He could not remember . . . years, perhaps. He had been occupied with dealing with the discovery of the Vaults by Charles Warden, a brilliant if not quite human man, and all the implications of that discovery—the dean rubbed his face harder in hopes of damming his tears.

  The return of longships meant the return of humanity to the Earth. No more adapted mutants, no plague-virused-DNA freaks . . . humans! His chance for a genuine renewal. The Earth's second chance.

  The dean flipped open a window on the unit. He paused but a second before activating the recall beacon switch. Its range was limited, not beyond the asteroid belt at best, but in order for the unit to be receiving the inquiry as it was now, the longships had to be within that range. If they had called, he had answered. He was confirming their mission done, their need to be home. Somewhere on Mount Baldy—or perhaps it was Palomar, he could no longer remember such fine details—a silo was opening and antenna and dish should be responding, and equipment beaming that recall into the depths of space.

  He snapped the window shut. Now two lights danced on the unit's face. The dean smiled grimly. If the long-ships were returning, he had perhaps two years, maybe a little less to prepare for them. They would be the scourge of the Earth.

  And, if not, if the unit had been set off initially by accident, it was still an amusing piece of work to dazzle the nesters with.

  Dusty struggled to keep her teeth from chattering as she woke. This time it was like swimming to the surface of an unforgiving, iced-over lake, wondering if she could break through.

  She blinked several times, thoughts disoriented, unable to remember for a moment who it was who would greet her . . . shipmates from years past swirling through her inner vision, confusing her as she tried to focus on a face she did not recognize at first.

  Then she realized it was Commander Dakin, Sun, who smiled down at her rather than Willem's dark and friendly face. She put her hand up, still inarticulate.

  "It's all right, Dusty. I'll wait for you."

  She managed to nod. The dialysis shunt in her ankle stung fiercely from the alcohol swab. She clung to his hand, a firm-boned hand with slender strength, his skin oddly dry. She wondered what had happened to Marshall, worried a bit, and then decided Sun would tell her when he was ready. Or, more aptly, when she was ready.

  Sun reached behind him for the warmed blanket and tucked it about her. The blanket helped. Her shivers slowed to a convulsive shudder now and then. Finally, nothing.

  She had been dreaming of her sister. Those dreams were always deep and underlay her waking periods as though she still hoped, in those regions of her mind and heart where she was unsure of her thoughts and motives, that Lisa was somewhere to be reached.

  Sun's almond eyes came into abrupt focus. There were tiny, tiny lines at the corner as if he'd been staring into the sun. He wouldn't know about that, of course, every port on the Challenger was well screened for brightness and radiation. Perhaps he had been standing at the helm like a steersman of old looking across a sea of stars.

  Dusty laughed softly at the idea. The noise seemed to startle the commander.

  "Are you all right?"

  She caught herself and sat up in the creche, holding the warmed blanket to her chin. Her nose still felt icy. "Where's Willem?"

  "At the con. He's fine, Dusty." Sun stepped back as she reached for the latch on the creche and opened the side up. His gaze went to the timer on the dialysis unit. He said, "You're not ready yet."

  "I know. I just wanted to . . . sit up." To clear the cobwebs, to touch you, to understand why you're here and Willem isn't, she wanted to say, but didn't dare.

  The lines about his eyes relaxed a bit. When she saw they had, she said, "Give me the bad news, Commander."

  Sun stepped back another pace and shook his head. "You've been asleep six years but you're still sharp as a tack. I look at you and think, she knew my father."

  "I knew your great-grandfather," Dusty snapped. "What's that got to do with anything? What time is it-how close are we and what's happened?"

  He put his hand out again, this time in warning and supplication. He did not want her standing and falling. "All right," he said quietly. "The good news is . . . we've got a recall beacon homing us in. It's to one of the alternate landing sites, out by Lancaster/Palmdale.''

  "We do?" Her heart missed a beat. It hurt. She put her hand to her chest in reflex, not noticing that Sun observed the motion and worried. She thought of herself in terms of experienced time, not the age she would be if she had lived all those years instead of hibernating. "What's the bad news?"

  "It's the Maggie. Reichert lied to us ... he had the capability to send out a probe and he did." Sun hesitated. "Can you watch the screen,
Dusty? I want to put something up for you."

  She felt cold again, achingly cold inside. She knew the Earth had to be dead, all her family and friends dead, all her memories silent. Reichert had gone and gotten confirmation for her. She wiped her forehead, forcing her curly bangs off her brow. "How bad is it?"

  "It's worse than you could possibly expect," Sun said flatly. He turned the lights down and the screen on.

  "The Maggie launched the probe with a booster, so it made its turnaround time far faster than we could. We picked these pictures up about a year ago."

  Dusty watched, but she understood nothing of what she saw. Nothing that she was seeing was a clear shot at first, so Sun interpreted the visuals for her.

  "The good news is, the rain forests are back," he said almost bitterly. "And that's because, as near as we can tell, mankind has been wiped off the face of the Earth. We've picked up nuclear strike zones and also some rather odd impact zones in the western United States here and here, one in Russia and one in South America—from the craters, we want to say a meteoroid strike of significant impact, but whether those were the crowning blows or what, we can't say."

  Dusty frowned at the black and white shots. "Nobody left anywhere?"

  "Not that the probe picked up, which means whatever is left of civilization is either fairly small or gone underground."

  "What triggered the beacon?"

  "We don't know."

  The shots came in tighter. She recognized the world turning slowly in its orbit as the probe swung around. "What about nuclear winter?"

  "That's a good possibility. Equally good is a dust shroud, based on the Nemesis theory, from meteor impact. We don't have a Nemesis here and now, but the basic theory holds. A lot of life would have been affected by a heavy dust cover that could have lasted, oh, decades."

  She looked at the screen. No sunlight, no vegetation. No food chain for existence. Mankind might outlast it a year or two on reserves, but never decades. Not en masse. "Mass starvation."

  "Mmm," Sun said. He looked at her. "That's still not the worst."

  What could be worse? She returned his look. He thumbed the screen to a pause and said, "We've lost the Maggie."

  "What?" The words burst out of a throat gone suddenly numb.

  "Shortly after the probe .pictures were transmitted. Reichert said they'd been losing water. We knew they were having difficulties but—" the commander's voice came to a halt. He took the video off pause. The transmission changed abruptly from that of the probe to a view off the Challenger's port side, where the Maggie cruised alongside, several hundred miles away.

  Suddenly there was a tremendous flare-up. Explosion, implosion, she couldn't tell which—and the longship was gone. This death was silent, too. "Oh," she breathed. "My God."

  "We think it was suicide. We think that Reichert filmed the transmission to be sent on to us while they reviewed the information, sat down with his command, and made the decision. They had nothing to return to. They had little likelihood of making it elsewhere. They decided to—end it. Sun turned the screen off altogether and panned the lights up. "Id like to think it was an accident, but my heart tells me it was not."

  Dusty sat, stunned. "Then it's just us and the Mayflower."

  He nodded.

  She looked at the empty screen. She thought of all the promises, all the interviews, all the intentions. JPL, NASA, the President of the United States and the President of Russia, the long-range plans. She remembered all the meetings, all the hopes, as if it was yesterday. "It better be worth it," she said. "Someone out there owes us."

  "We'll be down in about two more years. Late summer, early fall, give or take a few weeks."

  Dusty disengaged the dialysis shunt and stood up. "Good. I'm staying awake for this one."

  Sun smiled slightly. "I thought you might," he answered.

  Chapter 10

  Late September, 2285

  "Remind me never to ask for your help again," Lady said bitterly. She threw him a pack as he put up an empty hand.

  The noise in the newly rebuilt barn gave them privacy as nearly twenty others saddled up. Leather creaked and horses and mules gave protests over tight cinches and heavy packs.

  He lashed the saddlebag into place without comment. Lady was in one of her moods and he knew better than to interrupt her before shed run her course.

  "You," she said heavily, "were supposed to talk him out of this, not organize it."

  Harley stomped as if to punctuate her words. Puffs of dust rose from his hooves. Thomas pulled a last tie into place and leaned on his forearms across the saddle. "Stefan is right. This needs to be done. I told you that before. Why should I talk him out of something that needs to be done?"

  "He has a wife. None of these other boys—or you— do." She met his gaze evenly, no emotion in her eyes, blue or brown.

  "She's young, he's young. They'll survive. Or would you rather they stay together and beat each other into the dirt over whose fault it is they can't have children?" Thomas took a deep breath. "I can't talk him into staying, Lady. I did try. And I'm not so convinced he's wrong. Alma's hardly more than a child herself. Let her grow up a little more. Let Stefan mature a little. Then we'll see what happens to the hope of the Seven Counties."

  Lady put her hand out and held onto the stirrup as if she could stay the expedition with that one gesture. Her cheeks were flushed and her light brown hair had escaped all attempts to tame it that morning. "All right," she said. "That's his excuse. What's yours?"

  Thomas had been tightening Harley's cinch as the gelding had a bad habit of blowing out. He strapped the buckle down and dropped the stirrup into place abruptly. "I don't need an excuse," he responded. "Unless you want to face a nester nation in all-out war.''

  "And you think you're the only one who can make a difference."

  Harley caught the tenor of her voice. His ears went back and he shifted in the box stall, his hooves rustling among the straw.

  Thomas caught up the reins. "If I don't go, we'll never know, will we?" The edge in his voice surprised him, he had not meant to get caught up in Lady's bitterness.

  She let go of the stirrup and stepped back so he could lead Harley out of the barn and mount up. They walked through the crowd of high-spirited young men and their families, girlfriends weeping excitedly as if they played a part and were determined to play it well, fathers thumping their sons on their backs solidly, and mothers standing quietly, resignedly, in the shadows of the hayloft. The smell of new buckskins and freshly oiled rifles permeated the hay and dung atmosphere of the barn. Lady's nostrils flared slightly as if grateful for the fresh air as they stepped out into the new morning.

  "Shall I send Alma to beg?" Lady squared off with him. Her blue eye had gone icy. Its glare pierced him.

  He shook his head, speech momentarily surprised out of him. She looked down. She plucked at the worn seam of her riding skirt. "Don't," he said, as she inhaled slightly as if for a long speech.

  Lady stopped. She looked up as if expecting something from him. He wasn't sure what it could be. She said quietly, "All right, then. Got enough vials?"

  He patted down the front of his jacket. "I hope so. I don't intend for us to do any fighting. My main job is to get these boys past the basin, and then they're on their own. They're surveyors, not troopers."

  "See you remember that," Lady responded softly. "Good-bye, Thomas." With no further words or gestures, she left.

  He watched Lady and saw the steel determination in her spine and walk. She would not run after him. She' would not offer him a second good-bye. She was done with him.

  For the moment. Thomas sighed, gathered up the reins and swung aboard. Harley grunted as his rider settled into the saddle. He slid a hand down the horse's neck and wondered, just briefly, what he was doing leaving Lady behind.

  The yard filled with milling horses and mules as the boys came outside, their entourage following them. Harley sidled away from the commotion and Thomas let him go. As they
dipped into the shadows thrown by the corner of the building, a lithe figure darted out and caught at the horse's nosepiece.

  "Sir Thomas," Shankar hissed. "A word with you, please?''

  The Mojavan ambassador looked more than a little rumpled. His shirttails hung out and there were creases as if he'd slept in his clothes. That did not surprise Thomas—Shankar had been extremely busy with Drakkar the past few weeks. Denethan's son was consumed with the desire to learn all he could about the Seven Counties, firsthand if necessary, and seemed to be in motion constantly. "What is it, Shankar?"

  "I beg of you—a last minute addition to your party. The experience will be good for my charge—who, may I remind you, was sent to your fostering care, and who, I may also remind you, curries as much dislike as like—"

  "Shankar," the young man scolded as he rode forward out of the shadows, frowning slightly in the brightness of the daylight, "is that any way to ask for a favor? Sir Thomas, what he and I desire is that I be allowed to accompany your mapping expedition."

  The surveyors had a two-year mission ahead of them.

  Harley snorted at the Mojavan's blue-black horse and dodged aside as Thomas answered. "I doubt your father wants you in peril and out of touch for the next two years."

  Drakkar's dark brow went up. His crest rustled as if stirring. "You misunderstand me. I don't want to join the mappers. I had in mind riding with you."

  "To the Vaults?"

  "And to the nester boundaries."

  Thomas considered. Doubtless, Denethan was as concerned about the recent nester unrest as he was—and the boundaries of the territory. He would send spies regardless. Why not take advantage and keep Denethan's boy in sight where, hopefully, Thomas could also keep him under restraint? Nor could he afford to forget that Denethan had sent him for protection as well.

  As if following Blade's train of thought, Shankar blurted, "And you will need to keep him away from his enemies as well."

  "Old enemies or new ones?" Thomas asked dryly.