“Sir, we completed the dig,” Bonaparte said.
“Never mind the dig,” Mort(e) said. In fact, he had already forgotten about it. When Bonaparte tried to interrupt him, Mort(e) cut him off by naming several items that he needed immediately: an old phone book from the area, medical records on the former owner of Olive the dog, and a book on Morse code. He did not really need the first two, but requesting only the codebook could arouse suspicion. Bonaparte immediately left his half-eaten meal to fetch the items. Mort(e) took pleasure in the pig’s newfound obedience. Word had reached the colonel about Bonaparte calling Mort(e) a choker when they first met, an egregious sign of disrespect. Culdesac had probably made the pig run seven miles with his sash tied to his head.
Thirty minutes later, Bonaparte arrived at Mort(e)’s temporary office with the codebook, apologizing for finding only one of the three things, and for the awful stench coming from the book. Almost all the texts at the barracks had been salvaged from the nearby library. The titles had been waterlogged by rain coming through the shattered roof and broken windows. The scent of this book was so putrid that Mort(e) almost reconsidered using it.
“Can I tell you about the dig now, sir?” Bonaparte asked.
“Yes. What did you find?”
Bonaparte looked around before he answered. “A bomb.”
BONAPARTE LED MORT(E) to a secure room at the far end of the barracks. On the way, he described digging up the dog’s yard. With Olive watching, the pig and two cats sniffed around the numerous mud hills in the lawn. At first it was tedious work. They found the items one would expect from a dog who fantasized about his days as a pet: a bone, a stick, a rubber chew toy shaped like a little green alien—“with three eyes,” Bonaparte added. The pig turned it into a game, placing bets with the cats about who had the best sense of smell. This was an ongoing banter among the species. Bonaparte correctly predicted the contents of the burial sites every single time. Even through a foot of dirt, he could detect a baseball cap, a catcher’s mitt, and a beer bottle (that last one did not surprise Mort(e)). At one point, Olive even clapped, cheering him on against the increasingly frustrated cats.
“Get to the bomb, Bonaparte,” Mort(e) said.
There were grooves carved into the driveway, Bonaparte said. The indentations created a straight line from the dog’s SUV, along the asphalt, and through the grass, terminating at a large mud hill at the edge of the property. Even Bonaparte could not figure out the scent, although both he and the cats could detect metal and plastic. So they began digging. When they found the device, Bonaparte called the barracks and requested more soldiers. He wanted the house surrounded. Olive was probably not involved in this, but it wouldn’t matter now. While Bonaparte spoke, Mort(e) imagined an overhead view of poor Olive’s home, with a red dot marking her house. The dot expanded into a lake of blood engulfing the entire sector.
Mort(e) and Bonaparte arrived at the room. Two Red Sphinx soldiers stood guard. They stepped aside when Mort(e) showed them his identification.
Inside, a single table furnished the windowless room. The bomb sat on top, still caked in dirt. Bonaparte assured Mort(e) that it had been disarmed. It was a black box infested with red and blue wires, like a clown’s wig. The cords connected an electronic timer with a block of plastic explosive. Mort(e) was relieved — though only slightly — to see that the device carried no biological agent. In other words, it was not a weapon intended to spread the EMSAH virus. Averroes himself had tested negative for the disease. Moreover, the device did not have bits of shaved metal or nails in the casing. It was meant to destroy a building rather than kill or maim a group of soldiers.
“The neighbor must have seen this,” Bonaparte said.
Mort(e) nodded. “Averroes had to kill him to keep him quiet,” he said. “Had no choice.”
If Thor had not spotted Averroes with this device, then the bomb almost surely would have been used at the sanitation plant. An explosion there would have been the kind of warning that Briggs had mentioned. A population ruled by its sense of smell would have to pay attention to a destroyed sanitation facility.
Where did Averroes get the material for this? He was no soldier. But if there was a network of saboteurs out there, it made sense that they would recruit someone like him. Maybe another member of the resistance planned to dig up the bomb and finish the job.
“There’s one more thing,” Bonaparte said. He lifted the bomb and turned it on its side. There was a message carved into the plastic. When Mort(e) read it, he heard the words in the voice of Briggs:
THE QUEEN IS BLIND.
It was a direct response to the mantra — the threat — under which the animals lived every day since the war started. The Queen sees everything, they were told. Presumably she saw this. And now what? This was how a quarantine started, Mort(e) realized. If EMSAH could make a person kill his own family, then who could blame the Queen for trying to wipe it out?
“I’ll report this to the lieutenant,” Mort(e) said. “Good work, Specialist.”
“You’ve seen this before, right?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“But you told Culdesac all this was inevitable,” Bonaparte said. “So you must know something about how EMSAH works.”
“I’m starting to think that no one does.”
“I’ve been thinking that for a while myself.”
“Then keep it to yourself,” Mort(e) said.
Discouraged, Bonaparte saluted and went on his way, his hooves clicking down the hallway. Mort(e) ran his finger over the carved message again. He mouthed the words. Then he whispered them.
MORT(E) RETURNED HOME, entered his garage, and opened the codebook. It was not even noon yet. He had over twelve hours to refresh his memory and write a fake report on the investigations he had conducted that day.
This EMSAH outbreak was somehow coupled with a conspiracy to bring down the sector, to bait it into quarantine. He had never heard of the disease spreading in this way, but Culdesac had always warned the Red Sphinx that every case was different. There was no limit to the depravity of humans. But they had promised him Sheba, and so he went ahead with setting up his telescope despite everything that Culdesac had taught him. The quarantine could begin tomorrow, for all he knew, so he might as well see what Briggs was talking about while he still had the chance.
Mort(e) waited. The sky grew dark, a wasteland pocked with stars. For so long, he had viewed the world horizontally. Had it not been for the Queen and her grand design, he never would have gazed up into the sky and wondered. He would have died having learned nothing, like so many wasted generations before him.
To position the telescope, Mort(e) used an old tripod that had originally been intended for a mounted machine gun. He pointed the scope at Orion. Rigel was the brightest, and he used it to focus the lens. After some fiddling, the star went from a blurry ball of light to a crisp white sphere. He moved the sight line up Orion’s leg to the belt. Something floated underneath the star Alnitak, the easternmost one. He saw it moving and could tell right away that it was much closer than the star, suspended in sub-orbit. It was shiny, with three bulbous objects — balloons stacked with two on the bottom and one on top. They were mounted over several smaller rectangular shapes. And then it turned before puttering toward the center of the constellation. Several propellers spun at the rear of the object. At least six of them. It was some kind of zeppelin. Briggs must have come from there, along with many other humans. The ship was probably too high for the Colonial bird patrols. Or maybe the ship had a means of repelling them, with a sonic device similar to the one Briggs carried.