The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (34 page)

I obey. For several minutes, my breath shudders in and out of me, the black static behind my eyelids no less of a revelation than the dark ceiling I see with my eyes open.

I need to ignore all the stimuli I’m feeling, the noise of the fan, the sensation of my own breathing, the pressure of the straps on my body and the feel of the mattress under my back. You help me, and slowly we sink into concentration.

I think of empty green fields, and now I’m standing there, soft grass under my feet. I turn to scan the horizon, and nothing is to be seen, no people, no buildings. I let out a shout and begin to run, free of the world of tormenters. When I stop, you suggest we add some more features to the world. You explain to me how I can adjust the topography, making hills and valleys, and how to make trees and boulders.

As an example, you make as a present for me a clear lake with Koi fish in it and rafts of water lilies in deep, rich colours on the surface. All around the edges of the lake you add spring trees, their dark branches bare of leaves but festooned like candelabra with spear-shaped, soft pastel flowerbuds that glisten with dew, trees you draw from some memory you can’t quite recall.

But I don’t like the trees and the lake.
This is my world, and I’ll make it how I see fit!

The lake explodes, throwing water and dying fish and sodden clumps of water lilies all over the landscape, leaving only a crater in the ground and the serene trees as flaming stumps.

*

The next thing Dana noticed was the light in the room had grown dim. When she turned her head to look at the window, the trees on the horizon stood in gloom. The sun had already set; she must have fallen asleep.

“Tarrow!”

Dana got up from the bed, the insides of her thighs aching as soon as she moved her legs. She winced and hobbled towards the door.

It opened before she reached it, and there stood Tarrow with a tray.

“Why didn’t you wake me? Where are Jananin and Rajesh?”

“They’re fine. Came in not long after you did. They’re coming to see you as soon as you’re rested and you’ve eaten this.” Tarrow set the tray down on a hospital table on castors.

“No! You don’t understand! I need to speak to Jananin
now!
”

Tarrow’s eyes widened. “Dana, last night you collapsed and needed a blood transfusion! Today you went out who knows where and came back injured and drenched, clinging to the back of a horse much too big for you and being attacked by birds. Whatever is going on between you and Blake, your health has to take priority! Now sit down and eat your dinner!”

Behind her the door opened, and Jananin Blake appeared.

“What’s been happening?” Dana demanded.

“Since the recovery vehicle brought us back, I have been in touch with the other Spokesmen discussing the matter and the recent turn of events.”

“And what did they decide?” Dana waited anxiously for the answer.

“That the Emerald Forge must be disabled by Compton bomb, tomorrow.”

“No! You can’t! Cale and Peter are there!”

“Dana, calm down,” said Tarrow. “When people talk about a Compton bomb, it doesn’t mean a
real
sort of bomb that explodes and kills everyone in a big mushroom cloud. It’s just a device that emits a powerful signal that disables things like computers and televisions. It doesn’t hurt people.”

“It will hurt my brother!” Dana shouted at her.

Before Dana could say anything else, Jananin interjected a false explanation. “Dana’s brother was born with a heart condition that resulted in him needing a pacemaker. The Compton radiation will affect the device he needs to live on. It could kill him.”

Tarrow looked from Dana to Jananin, and then to Rajesh, who had entered after Jananin and stood with his back against the door. “But... what... Then
why
are you Compton bombing there? Didn’t you tell the other Spokesmen? Good
grief!
”

Jananin glanced at her. “Don’t you have work to get on with?”

Tarrow muttered something before excusing herself and leaving, Rajesh stepping out of the way and opening the door for her.

Jananin came further into the room and sat on a chair near the end of the bed. “The Meritocracy has a policy of not negotiating with hostage takers. If we try to storm the Emerald Forge and take the hostages back, there will be real risk to the people we send in there. Two hostages do not warrant that risk. There is a very good chance a Compton blast will take out their defences and make it far easier for our forces to seize the Forge.”

Dana couldn’t believe she was hearing this. This wasn’t what happened, this wasn’t the sort of thing that got reported on the news. Cale had been with her through her whole life, and now Jananin was saying they couldn’t get him back, that he had to die in a Compton blast, because of what Gamma had done? “But you can’t kill my brother! Talk to the other Spokesmen again!”

“And tell them what? Unless you have any suggestions of alternative plans for stopping what’s going on at the Emerald Forge, there is little point.”

Dana sat up on the bed and thought. “It’s the birds and things, the constructs and the animals they’ve implanted stuff in that’s the problem, aren’t they?”

“They appear to constitute their main defence, and they seem to be what they intend to do damage with. There was no evidence of any other weapons being used at the hospital. That’s why a Compton bomb is a very effective solution with very little collateral.”

“But there’s other ways of stopping them. They must all be controlled by Gamma. The transceivers Pilgrennon implanted in her — if it’s the same as mine — can’t broadcast over long distances. It’s just short range. I have to connect to a wLAN or some other piece of equipment that can transmit long distances if I want to access the Internet, and Gamma is the same. She would have to use something to carry her signal out there when they send the animals outside of the Forge, like when they attacked us and at the hospital.”

“Or it could be that there is no such transmitter, and the birds communicate through a network relay of sorts, with some birds in range of Gamma and each other acting as a relay chain to carry instructions out to the main flock.”

“I suppose so.” Dana hadn’t thought of that, but if there were enough birds, it would make sense. “But even so, that means Gamma is still controlling them all from the Forge. And that means if we can stop Gamma, we stop them all as well. It’s like a hive of bees, and Gamma’s the queen.”

Rajesh spoke up. “I can quite see where you’re coming from, but that will not be easy when everything she controls is all around the Forge, strategically placed to defend her. It would be like playing a game of chess with the intention of taking the king without damaging any of the other pieces on the way.”

“But there must be some way of making a diversion and sneaking someone close enough to the Emerald Forge so they can break in and try to get at Gamma. I mean, when those birds came, they chased me and didn’t hang around and try to get in the car after you, did they? If we could make a big signal or something to distract them, and I could get in...”

“No, hold on there.” Rajesh held up his hands, palms towards Dana. “You can’t get involved in this. It’s a dangerous situation and you’re just a child.”

An angry spike started up through Dana’s chest. “Nobody told Cale or Peter they couldn’t get involved in it because they’re children! Or Gamma! And now Cale and Peter are stuck there and they can’t do anything to help themselves, anything apart from sit there and die in a Compton bomb.” She turned imploringly to Jananin.

After a few seconds of thought, Jananin interlocked her fingers and leaned back on the chair. “Hear her proposal first, Rajesh.”

Rajesh gave Dana a disbelieving look, but didn’t voice any further protest.

“I know Gamma,” Dana said. “I’ve seen everything about her in my dreams. There’s this connection we share, although she won’t let me in when she’s awake. They did awful things to her at the hospital. She’s just a person like me who has been treated in a way that has made her hate everything. If I can get in there, if I can get her alone, I think I can reason with her.”

Jananin studied Dana for a little while. “Rajesh, I want to put an alternative suggestion to the Spokesmen. We will have the
Stormcaller
on standby ready to deploy the Compton bomb, however, we will send in a small task force first, a group led by you to attack the Forge and cause a diversion, while I will attempt to get Dana close enough to enter and defeat Gamma. If this strategy proves unsuccessful within a reasonable time limit or it looks as though we will incur heavy losses, we will use the Compton bomb.”

Rajesh stared at Jananin in horror. “If you deploy the Compton bomb while Dana is still in the Forge, she’ll be killed as well as the hostages and Gamma!”

“But that risk is worth taking to save Cale!” Dana shouted.

Rajesh shook his head. “You don’t understand what you’re saying! Jananin, I can’t believe you’re prepared to even consider this! She’s a child! She’s not capable of understanding the risk and making an informed decision!”

“Rajesh, this child is rather more capable than you might think. She managed to follow Pilgrennon’s beacon to it source alone.”

“I know that very well, and you should never have allowed it! She couldn’t possibly have understood the risk. You exploited her to further your own agenda.”

“I understand the risk!” Dana interrupted. “Really what it is, it’s the choice of just the hostages dying, or the hostages and me. Because you can give the command to use the Compton bomb as soon as things start to get too dangerous, if it looks like someone could get hurt or killed.”

A deep unease had come over Rajesh. He looked again to Jananin, who again did not respond. “In theory, yes.”

Dana couldn’t imagine going back home to Pauline and Graeme’s house, without Cale. She had come into this world with him, and he wasn’t leaving it without her. “Then that’s what you must do. Because I can’t and I won’t stay here and rest because Tarrow says I’m ill, while you go out and kill my brother and Peter. Even if it means I end up dead as well, at least I will have tried.”

Nobody spoke for what seemed a long time, and then Rajesh said, “I am an air commodore in the Sky Forces, and it’s my job to act on the Meritocracy’s orders. If the Meritocracy orders me to do this, then I must do it, no matter what I think.”

Jananin said to Rajesh, “I will speak with you in a moment. I want to speak to Dana in private first.”

He looked away from her and his mouth groped for words. “Pilgrennon did you a severe wrong, and I still believe you were right in your actions to stop him, although I often thought at times vengeance played too great a part in it than I was comfortable with. I made an oath to support you in this to the best of my ability and I have always upheld it, even when it put my career and my own life at risk. I owe you a debt which I will never repay, not in one lifetime. However, if we do this, and it fails, and she is killed... I will consider that debt void.” Rajesh saluted loosely and left the room.

Jananin stared at the door where he had gone for a moment, stony faced, her posture rigid. “Before you accuse me of it, I shall say that I will stand by your decision, and I am not tempted in the remotest by the prospect of destroying the evidence of Pilgrennon’s illegal research. My objection to this plan is based not only on the concern for the safety of all involved, but also on the likelihood that you will throw away your own life in your attempt to realise an unrealistic ideal. Ironically, you are the only one of Pilgrennon’s experiments that was a success. Peter is potentially a liability and a danger to society, and Cale from the reports I have read barely functions in society at all.”

Dana glared at her. “Peter is still a living person. And Cale is
my brother
. He is your
son
. Just because he doesn’t care about the economy or being social or other stuff like that, and he’d rather think about beetles, that doesn’t make him any less than other people.”

“No. But you have a future ahead of you. These people do not. You are not sacrificing your own life for theirs. You are not making any kind of exchange. What you are doing is risking throwing away your own life in the pursuit of something unlikely and not worthy on the bigger scale of things.”

“I don’t understand it. The Meritocracy says all people are equal, but they’re not. Not really, are they? If all people are born equal, why do some people have votes that are worth more than others? Why isn’t everyone’s vote worth the same?”

“That was the original premise behind the political party that later was elected into government and put in place the Meritocracy. Originally its name was the Free Democracy Party, and they wanted an end to politics and politicians, and for the electorate to decide all policies by public referendum. They trialled it and it didn’t work; the practicalities of it were total anarchy. The electorate nominated hundreds of petty, inconsequential topics for referendum. A lot of the party’s members became disillusioned and left at that point, not prepared to accept that their ideals didn’t translate into reality. What remained of it was left to swallow its own ideals and reform based on a compromise.

“What you’re talking about, and what the Free Democracy Party wanted was genuine democracy — one vote for everyone on every single issue with the majority declared the winner — it’s unworkable on societies so large and disparate. The Meritocracy is not perfect, but so far no system has been invented that is. At least everyone now has some sort of a say without important issues being drowned out by a cacophony of trivia. At least it is better than the system we had before, where politicians only cared about being charismatic and popular so as to appeal to the lowest common denominator and ensure re-election while the economy stagnated around them because they just could not address controversial topics. Today we have an infrastructure that meets the power demands of the population; at the end of the last government, we had power outages because the governments would not build new powerstations because it made them unpopular. We have scientific research going on around this very building that will ensure this country becomes agriculturally fully self-sufficient. We have adequate funding for our military and research into weapons and defence that make any other country considering invading here think twice. That would never have happened without the Meritocracy.”