“No.” I shake my head.
“No?”
“Respectfully, sir, the asteroid did not make you leave her. The asteroid is not making anyone do anything. It’s just a big piece of rock floating through space. Anything anyone does remains their own decision.”
A smile flits across his lips, down in the thickness of facial hair. “You asked me to provide a message, and now you disapprove of it?” His voice is deep, hushed, rhythmic, like an Old Testament prophet. “You have discharged your obligation, friend. Your work is done, and now I must return to my own.”
“You are a married man,” I say. I’m pressing my luck. He stares back at me in silence, impassive as a mountainside. “Your wife is confused. You’ve left her terrified and alone. You can’t just abandon your promises because the world is over.”
I’m aware, even as I am talking, that these arguments are doomed to be unavailing. It is clear that Brett Cavatone is as rooted in his purpose as the fort’s stone walls, planted for centuries in this craggy soil, and my suggestion that he return to Martha and Rocky’s Rock ’n’ Bowl is not only impossible but ridiculous, juvenile somehow. Oh, why should he do what I say? Why, again? Because he promised?
“I am not coming home.” He looks steadily at me, black eyes under furrowed brows. “Tell her that. Tell her our contract has been abrogated. She will understand.”
I can see her, Martha Milano at her kitchen table, aghast with grief, hand trembling on her teacup, stalking back and forth to the cigarettes she will not allow herself. “No,” I say to Brett. “I don’t think she will understand.”
“You said your name was Henry?”
“Henry Palace. I used to be a policeman. Like you.”
“There are things you don’t understand, Officer Palace. Things you cannot understand.”
He takes a step toward me, compact and powerful as a tank, and my mind flies to the little gun tucked in the inside pocket of my blazer. But I have no doubt that Brett, if he wanted to, could be on top of me before I drew, hammering me with his fists. Condensation drips from the ceiling of the room, sweats down the walls. I have to say one more thing, though. I have to try.
“Martha says your salvation depends on it.”
He repeats the single word, “salvation,” lets it hang in the gloomy air between us for a moment and then says, “I’ll need you to leave the grounds of this fort within ten minutes.”
He turns on the steps, presenting me with his broad back, and takes the first step out of the darkness of the caponier.
“Brett? Officer Cavatone?”
He stops, speaks quietly over his shoulder, without turning around. “Yes, Henry?”
I pause, gut rolling. Seconds pass. Yes, Henry?
My investigation is over. Case closed. But I hear Julia’s voice in my head, tense and taut with anxiety: Danger? I mean, danger doesn’t even…
I find that I cannot leave. I don’t know anything, but I know too much to leave. Brett is still waiting. Yes, Henry?
“I know what you’re doing,” I say. “I met Julia Stone, and she told me. She explained your intentions.”
“Oh,” he says calmly. “Well.” He is incapable of being surprised.
“And I—I’d like to help.”
Brett comes back down off the stairs and toward me, holding up his big hands like he’s warming them over a fire. I get the feeling he’s getting a sense off me, interpreting me like a crystal ball.
“Are you armed?” he says.
“Yes.” I take out the Ruger and hold it up. He takes it, weighs it in his hands, drops it in the mud.
“We can do better than that.”
Together we walk up the slippery and mossed steps of the caponier, and then together, silently, we cross the patched mud and seagrass of the fort to the blockhouse. Using a long stick with a curved hook on the end, Brett releases a rope ladder coiled at the elevated doorway, tumbles it down to where we can reach it to climb up. Brett goes first, swift and sure-footed, and I follow, heaving my ungainly body up the rungs, one at a time, all knees and elbows, like some kind of invading mantis.
I’m not sure what happens now.
“There’s the Portsmouth naval base, there’s a base at Cape Cod, and there’s what used to be the coast guard station at Portland, Maine. That is all. Three stations and by my count eight or nine cutter ships. There was a nuclear submarine called the Virginia assisting them, but no one seems to have seen it in months. AWOL, maybe, or else they’ve run it south to help in Florida.”
I nod mutely, my stomach a tight ball of astonishment and unease, as Brett tells me his plan. Our plan.
“I have renderings from all of these facilities. We can’t know precisely what the state of readiness is, but we can presume it is lower than we might have found pre-Maia, due to desertions and technical limitations related to resource depletion.”
While he talks Brett runs his fingers delicately over the maps and blueprints he has taped all around the walls of the blockhouse. He’s papered over the historical displays and the park-service timelines, but they peek through, the glowering faces of old soldiers from old wars, staring sternly at the portraitist or daguerrotype man. I think that Brett is wrong about our likelihood of success. I think we may find these naval and coast guard bases, like the Concord police department, better defended than in the past, not worse. I would predict multiple checkpoints, added layers offence-line security, skittish base patrolmen operating under strict shoot-first orders.
It is clear though that Brett’s calculation of these dangers is purely abstract. One does not contemplate failure, or even death, when one believes oneself to be on a crusade. Brett’s intention is to commit murder in the name of a greater good.
Danger? I mean, danger doesn’t even…
“This strikes me,” I say quietly, “as more than a two-person job.”
“Well, it was a one-person job until ten minutes ago,” says Brett. “Our obligation is to do what we can with what we have. That is all we can do, and the results are up to God.”
I nod again.
We are going to break into the naval and coast guard stations—shoot guards if necessary—shoot seamen—set fire to the ships. Whatever means necessary to prevent further missions by those vessels. A one-man crusade to stop the interdiction and internment of catastrophe immigrants along the northern Atlantic coast. A two-man crusade, I correct myself. We are going to the Portsmouth naval base first, and if our efforts are successful there, then we will come back here, to Fort Riley, resupply, and make the longer trip to Portland later in the week.
“I believe, Officer Palace, that you were sent for a reason,” says Brett, turning away from his wall of Scotch-taped plans and barracks blueprints. “To ensure the success of this work.”
There’s a rusting piece of artillery in the center of this room, a cannon with its nose thrust out the centermost window toward the sea. Beside it Brett has a heavy trunk, and now he kneels and pops it open and starts to sift through the supplies inside, jugs of water and rolls of gauze and iodine capsules and plastic grocery bags full of jerky and cheese; as he’s sifting through, something catches my eye, a flash of bright color, out of place. Then he shuts the trunk and hands me my gun, exactly the gun I was expecting: the second of the M140s that Julia Stone boosted for him from her stash at UNH. He presses the gun into my hands. I feel my simple missing-person case crumbling under my feet, melting beneath me.