She shook her head. “You’re stealing an MI. That’s going to hurt a lot more people than me.”
“If you cooperate you can have it back in a little while,” the man told her. “Bring it online.”
She keyed the genepad. The dashboard lit up.
He studied the display. “So I take it you’re some sort of itinerant health-care worker.”
“Some sort,” Taka said carefully.
“Where are you out of?” he asked.
“Out of?”
“Who sets your route? Who resupplies you?”
“Bangor, usually.”
“They airlift supplies to you in the field?”
“When they can spare them.”
He grunted. “Your inventory beacon’s disabled.”
He spoke as if it were a surprise.
“I just radio in when my stocks get too low,” Taka told him. “Why would—what are you doing!”
He paused, fingers poised over the GPS menu he’d just brought up. “I’m fixing some locations,” he said mildly. “Is there a problem?”
“Are you crazy? It’s still practically line-of-sight! Do you want it to come back?”
“Want what to come back?” the woman asked.
“What do you think did all this?”
They eyed her expressionlessly. “CSIRA, I expect,” the man said after a moment. “This was a containment burn, wasn’t it?”
“It was a Lenie!” Taka shouted. Oh Jesus what if he brings it back, what if he—
Something pulled her around from behind. Glacial eyes bored directly into hers. She could feel the woman’s breath against her cheek.
“What did you just say?”
Taka swallowed and held herself in check. The panic receded slightly.
“Listen to me,” she said. “It got in through my GPS last time. I don’t know how, but if you go online you could bring it back. Right now I wouldn’t even risk radio.”
“This thing—” the man began.
“How can you not know about them?” Taka cried, exasperated
The two exchanged some indecipherable glance across her.
“We know,” the man said. Taka noted gratefully that he’d shut down GPS. “Are you saying it was responsible for yesterday’s missile attack?”
“No, of course n—” Taka stopped. She’d never considered that before.
“I never thought so,” she said after a moment. “Anything’s possible, I guess. Some people say the M&M’s recruited them somehow.”
“Who else would have done it?” the woman wondered.
“Eurasia. Africa. Anyone, really.” A sudden thought struck her: “You aren’t from—?”
The man shook his head. “No.”
She couldn’t really blame the missile-throwers, whoever they were. According to the dispatches ßehemoth still hadn’t conquered the lands beyond Atlantic; those people probably still thought they could contain it if they just sterilized the hot zone. A phrase tickled the back of Taka’s mind, some worn-out slogan once used to justify astronomical death tolls. That was it: The Greater Good. “Anyway,” she went on, “the missiles never made it through. That’s not what all this is.”
The woman stared out the window, where all this was lightening to smoky, pre-dawn gray. “What stopped them?”
Taka shrugged. “N’Am defense shield.”
“How could you tell?” asked the man.
“You can see the re-entry trails when the antis come down from orbit. You can see them dim down before they blow up. Smokey starbursts, like fireworks almost.”
The woman glanced around. “So all this, this was your—your Lenie?”
A snippet from a very old song floated through Taka’s mind. There are no accidents ’round here...
“You said starbursts?” the man said.
Taka nodded.
“And the contrails dimmed down before detonation.”
“So?”
“Which contrails? The incoming missiles or the N’Am antis?”
“How should I know?”
“You saw this last night?”
Taka nodded.
“What time?”
“I don’t know. Listen, I had other things on my mind, I—”
I’d just watched a few dozen people sliced into cold cuts because I might have left a circuit open somewhere...
The man was watching her with a sudden unwavering intensity. His eyes were blank but far from empty.
She tried to remember. “It was dusk, the sun had been down for—I don’t know, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes?”
“Is that typical of these attacks? Sunset?”
“I never thought about it before,” Taka admitted. “I guess so. Or nighttime, at least.”
“Was there ever an attack that occurred during broad daylight?”
She thought hard. “I...I can’t remember any.”
“How long after the contrails dimmed did the starbursts appear?”
“Look, I didn’t—”
“How long?”
“I don’t know, okay? Maybe around five seconds or so.”
“How many degrees of arc did the contrails—”
“Mister, I don’t even know what that means.”
The white-eyed man said nothing for what seemed like a very long time. He did not move. Taka got the sense of wheels in motion.
Finally: “That tunnel you hid in.”
“How did—you followed me? All the way from there? On foot?”
“It wasn’t far,” the woman told her. “Less than a kilometer.”
Taka shook her head, amazed. At the time, inching through gusts of scorched earth, it seemed as if she’d been in motion for days.
“You stopped at the gate. To cut the chain.”
Taka nodded. In hindsight it seemed absurd—the MI could have crashed that barrier in an instant, and the sky was falling.
“You looked up at the sky,” he surmised.
“Yes.”
“What did you see?”
“I told you. Contrails. Starbursts.”
“Where was the closest starburst?”
“I don’t—”
“Get out of the cab.”
She stared at him.
“Go on,” he said.
She climbed out into gray dawn. There were no more spirits inhabiting the shattered building before her: the rising light stripped away the Rorschach shadows, leaving nothing but a haphazard pile of cinderblocks and I-beams. The few scorched trees still standing nearby, burned past black to ash white, flanked the road like upthrust skeletal hands.
He was at her side. “Close your eyes.”
She did. If he was going to kill her, there wasn’t much she could do about it even with her eyes open.
“You’re at the gate.” His voice was steady, soothing. “You’re facing the gate. You turn around and look back up the road. You look up at the sky. Go on.”
She turned, eyes still closed, memory filling the gaps. She craned her neck.
“You see starbursts,” the voice continued. “I want you to point at the one that’s most directly overhead. The one that’s closest to the gate. Remember where it was in the sky, and point.”
She raised her arm and held it steady.
“What’s the deal, Ken?” the woman asked in the void. “Shouldn’t we be—”
“You can open your eyes now,” said the m—said Ken. So she did.