Crashland (38 page)

She had Clair's Bears, she reminded herself, and there was a chance they might already have provided the information she needed. Calling up the file Ronnie had been trying to send her, she opened it up in a window of its own. It asked for a password, so she entered “Elevate,” the name of the song she and her friends had danced to at the crashlander ball. That didn't work, so she tried “Silent P,” the artist who had sung it.

The file opened, revealing that Ronnie and Tash had whittled a mountain of data down to just three personnel profiles and two locations. The three profiles were of men. One of the locations was some kind of scientific installation in the Middle East, the other a borehole on the other side of Russia.

“We need access to the Air,” she said. “Is there any way to get that from in here?”

“If I drop the Faraday shield, we'll be exposed,” said Agnessa. “But I have a landline, of course, to maintain my telepresence outside. You can ask me and I'll find you anything you need to know.”

Clair nodded. That would have to do.

“Here are two places you didn't follow up on the endpoint data.” She sent the information. “I want to know what they are, who uses them, and what they use them for. And here are three names to search for, as well. They're our potential Nobodies. Anything you can pull on them will be good.”

“So the plan is still the same,” said Devin. “Find the source of the dupes and shut it down. With or without Nobody's help.”

“If we take out the dupes, the lawmakers will be toothless,” she said.

“There are still the PKs,” said Jesse.

“Until the law is changed, they can't move against us,” she said.

“Unless we become a threat,” said Agnessa.

“That's right.”

“The definition of ‘threat' is very slippery these days.”

“I know,” said Clair.

“We have to handle this carefully,” said Devin. “If whoever's behind this gets the slightest idea that we know what they're doing, they'll come down on us hard. And we know they have the means. The only thing keeping us alive right now, most likely, is that we keep banging on about Wallace, diverting attention from what's really going on.”

Data flooded from Agnessa into Clair's infield. The pit was in fact the Baikal Superdeep Borehole, the deepest artificial hole in the world, drilled twenty years ago at the bottom of a massive freshwater lake, then flooded and sealed to stop urban spelunkers from killing themselves when they reached the superheated bottom. It now served as a geothermal power supply for the national park responsible for its surrounds. No one had been inside for years, according to park rangers, although lat-jumpers like Tash did regularly drop in to see the lake.

The other location was a high-gain antenna on the tiny island of Mesaieed, just off the coast of Qatar. The island sported enormous sand dunes that drew tourists in droves, plus competitors in a popular endurance contest. Few people visited the antenna itself, but it was a major telemetry hub for the network of VIA satellites responsible for coordinating global d-mat traffic.

“Another connection to satellites,” said Devin. “I think we're on to something here.”

“Can we hack in and see what the uplink is talking to?” Clair asked, telling herself not to get too excited too fast. It was hard, though: this looked very plausible. “I mean, d-mat has crashed, right? If that uplink is talking to anything, it has to be where the dupes come from.”

“I'll ask Trevin to look into it,” Devin said.

“You're linked to him even in here?” Jesse asked.

“I'm linked to him anywhere.” Devin lifted his left eyebrow. “Maybe it
is
telepathy.”

While Clair waited, she called up the personnel profiles of the three VIA employees Ronnie had flagged. Two were in their fifties, technicians who had worked on relay stations like the one in Mesaieed. The other was in his midtwenties, a security guard named Cameron Lee. Born in Manchester, schooled in Boston. In his photo he looked cocky and cheerful, with a shock of blond hair and lively blue eyes.

He was the one.

Cameron Lee was a young man who had his entire life ahead of him. Clair didn't know how or why he had been recruited into the dupe program, but in this optimistic beginning she recognized the devastation of Nobody's fall. A middle-aged man might endure it with more grace. Someone vibrant and full of hope had so much more to be bitter and twisted about.

Agnessa came through with extra information regarding the three candidates. The first of the older men had been gunned down in a bar fight a year ago. The second had died in a fall while hiking in the Rockies. Cameron Lee had contracted a form of motor neuron disease that was treatable but had led to him taking a desk job, five years after he was first employed by VIA. The disease wasn't what had killed him, though. He had been beaten to death by an unknown assailant shortly after the crash of d-mat, beaten so badly, genetic records had been needed to identify his body.

“That's him,” she said. “It has to be.”

“Are you sure?” asked Jesse.

“He was born in England,” said Devin. “That would explain the accent.”

“I'm sure of it,” she said. “Cameron Lee is Nobody. He was copied before he got sick, when Wallace first started experimenting.”

“So, are you going to call him on his promise? He said he'd give up if you told him his real name.”

“I know,” said Clair.

“But he's the crazy dupe who has nothing to do with the others,” said Jesse. “How does that even help us?”

“And how are you going to contact him without letting anyone else know?” asked Devin.

Clair worried at the top of her nose with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. Then she looked up.

“Jesse, you said there are people coming here every day?” He nodded. “I bet he's already here. Agnessa, can you put the word out among your people to ask around?”

“Using the name?”

“No. Just ‘Nobody.' If you can do it without the PKs hearing, all the better. We don't want them freaking out and calling in the cavalry.”

“I will do so. But I'm certain you're wrong. All our members are carefully vetted.”

“I bet they are, but Nobody is crazy enough to try something like this and experienced enough to get away with it. Short of all-out invading, it's the only way he'd get close to me.”

“All right. I've got people asking.”

“That uplink,” interrupted Devin. “It's quiet at the moment, but the traffic has been heavy recently. Freakishly heavy, in both directions. There's some serious hardware in there.”

“Could it be where the dupes patterns are being kept?” Clair asked, not wanting to mention Q just yet. One possibility at a time.

“Unlikely. Somewhere on the ground is too easy to take out: a guy with a grenade could do it. Here's a list of all the satellites it's communicated with in the last week.”

A stream of meaningless names bumped into Clair's infield, an apparently random combination of letters and numbers. As she scrolled down them, one stood out.

“V468,” she said. “That one comes up a lot. What's it for?”

“Unspecified,” said Devin. “Same as Wallace's little hideaway, except this one isn't equipped with life support.”

“Who owns it?”

“It's a OneEarth asset, loaned to VIA for reasons unspecified.”

Clair felt goose bumps rising on her arms.

“That has to be it, doesn't it?” she said.

A knock resounded up the hallway from the external door of the L-shaped building, followed immediately by the sound of Nelly talking to someone. Clair thought she heard Sargent's voice. The door closed. Footsteps came up the hall, two sets.

“Maria Gaudio to see you,” said Nelly. “Signed up with the contingent from Brussels this morning. Said you asked for her.”

She led a tiny brunette into the room. The woman was in her midthirties, dressed in drab khakis and high leather boots. There was a pink-dotted bandage under her right ear. Her eyes were so deep a brown they were almost black. Her gaze swept the room and locked on to Clair.

“Hello,” the woman said.

“Hello, Cameron Lee,” Clair said.

The woman smiled. There was no humor in that smile, just a thousand lives' worth of self-loathing and pain.

Nobody
.

“SO YOU FOUND
him,” said the woman who was no longer herself. “You found
me
.”

“Not before you did,” said Jesse. “Why did you kill him—your original, the real Cameron Lee?”

“Because he condemned me to this life. It was his decision, and he deserved to suffer as I have suffered. I regret that he had just one life to give.”

“But he was sick,” said Clair, “and you're still him. Why not stop punishing yourself?”

“Perhaps I would, if I could find an alternative,” said Nobody. It was hard to think of him as
him
in the body of a woman. It was even harder to think of him as someone with a name. “Nobody” fit much better, so Clair decided to run with it, even if he wanted her to think of him the way he was.

“Death stops everything,” he said, “in the end.”

Just as it had stopped Maria Gaudio, Clair thought.

“You said you'd give up if I found out who you were,” she said. “Do you remember that?”

“I know that I intended to tell you that,” he said, “and that you took one of me captive on the seastead. I have acted on the assumption that you and he reached that arrangement. I speak for all of me.”

“Will you do what you said you'd do?” asked Devin.

Nobody nodded. “If that's what you want.”

“Of course it's what we want,” said Jesse. “I want you out of my father's body—out of everyone's bodies—”

“Not yet,” said Clair. “We've been trying to find the source of the dupes, and we think we finally have. If you really want to die, you'll tell us if we're right, because Cameron Lee's pattern must be in there too. If we don't erase him, he—you—will be brought back all over again.”

“This is true.” Nobody inclined the woman's head, as though acknowledging a point well made—or perhaps a test successfully passed. “Tell me what you've found.”

Clair outlined what they knew about the satellite, V468, and the uplink in Qatar.

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “That would fit, wouldn't it?”

“You're not sure?” said Devin, still looking skeptical.

“I wasn't privy to every detail of Wallace's operation,” Nobody said. “I was just a hired thug, infinitely expendable.”

“So what
do
you know?” asked Agnessa. “What can you tell us that we haven't already figured out?”

“Wallace's repository is vaster than anyone realizes,” he said. “Not just the hollow men, but the Improved, too, and anyone connected to the Improved, and anyone connected to
them
in turn. The patterns number in the millions, perhaps tens of millions. Anyone who used d-mat could in theory be copied by Wallace and put in cold storage.”

“Just in case he needed them?” asked Jesse, a look of bitterness on his face.

“Like your father, yes. Wallace's definition of ‘need' constantly changed. He became a collector of frozen souls, the curator of his own private mausoleum. I heard him talk about it that way once. He called it the Yard. Graveyard or prison yard—I don't know which. Perhaps a bit of both.”

“And that's where your original pattern is stored,” asked Devin. “Destroy the Yard and we destroy you.”

“Yes,” said Nobody as though Devin had asked a child's question. “Of course.”

Clair felt a sudden surge of hope, on two fronts. This was how they would destroy the dupes. When they did that, the world would be out of danger, and so would her mother. But Libby would be in the Yard, and Zep, and maybe Q, too, for better or for worse. How long had she dreamed of a breakthrough like this? “Tell us how to get in there.”

“I don't know.”

“We have the map of his other station,” Clair said. “They must have been linked.”

“Undoubtedly. Sadly, that other station no longer exists.”

“We could hack the uplink,” said Devin.

“Too obvious. It will be protected.”

“So . . . what?” asked Jesse. “We go up there in person and throw a grenade at it?”

“That
would
solve the problem rather neatly,” said Nobody.

“And it's not as crazy as it sounds,” Devin said. “The satellite's in L4—one of the stable Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system. It's crowded up there, but there are very few people. V468 itself is completely empty. We could get very close without ringing any alarm bells.”

“Are you volunteering?” asked Agnessa.

“Yes.”

Devin caught Clair's eye. She could tell just by looking at him that he was thinking the same thing as her. If they could get close enough without raising an alarm, they might be able to access the Yard and the data it contained before destroying the satellite.

But would Nobody agree to anything that didn't mean the immediate destruction of his pattern?

Should
she
?

Of course
, she decided without hesitation. Libby and Zep were where it had all started. If she had the chance to bring them back and didn't take it, could she live with herself? Giving up d-mat would be infinitely easier after that. And so would deciding what to do about Q, once she knew either way. . . .

“I'll go too,” she said, and when Agnessa immediately started to object, she said, “I know, I know—I'm supposed to be an Abstainer. But another jump or two isn't going to change anything, and I want to be sure it's done properly.”

“Then I'm going too,” said Jesse.