The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (19 page)

“Here, have some more water.” Erling helped pull him up and put a water bottle up to Shaw’s lips.

“I should warn you, I’m going to have to piss soon,” Shaw said when he’d finished drinking.

“As long as you do it in here and not the tunnel,” Tranq said.

Shaw practiced standing for the next hour, with frequent breaks for him to catch his breath, and one break to empty his bladder. Eventually he was able to stand on his own without falling. He felt victorious, like he’d conquered an army. Then Tranq rushed at him, and Shaw got spooked, collapsing once more.

He was ready to practice walking, but Tranq shook his head. “No time. We need to pack and start up the tunnel.”

Shaw bumped up against Tranq’s heel. He hadn’t noticed that his captor had stopped. He rubbed his forehead, more for the practice of it than for any other reason, and looked up ahead.

Tranq’s wrap was giving off a bluish light. It looked like it was showing him the outdoors. Checking to see if the coast was clear, Shaw assumed. Tranq rolled his arm and Shaw caught a glimpse of a clock. A countdown.

“It’s clear, but we don’t have much time,” Tranq said. “Once I pull out this last barrier, we need absolute silence until we’re inside the
Walden
. You make a noise, Shaw, and you’ll never see your wife and daughter. I’m going to pull you out of the tunnel. No crying that I pulled too hard, got it?”

“What’s the
Walden
?”

“It’s our spaceship,” Erling said from behind him.

“And it’s only going to be here for the next eight minutes. So no fucking around. You ready, Erling?”

“Ready.”

“Ok. I’m breaking the barrier. No talking until we’re safe aboard the
Walden
.”

In front of him, Tranq started sliding forward again. Where before he had moved only a few inches at a time, this time his feet were out of Shaw’s vision before he could even blink. A gaping hole was in front of him, and Tranq’s hand reached in for Shaw.

Shaw scooted upward a few feet more and then grabbed for it. With just one hand, Tranq yanked him out of the tunnel and slid Shaw onto a hard floor. Shaw felt the cold on his face—tile. He hadn’t expected that. He looked back across it as Tranq pulled Erling out of the hole behind him.

Shaw tested his arms and lifted himself up carefully. He was able to get up on to his knees, but he didn’t want to risk going any further without help. In the beam of Tranq’s headlamp, he watched as Erling hurried across the room and wiped his fingers along a section of wall. It was hard to see in the darkness, but to his eyes it was as if a piece of the wall was vanishing to reveal—to reveal what? A checkered tile of some kind. He ran his hand across the floor and felt the small tiles.

It was a piece of floor. Hidden with an invisibility cloak against the wall.

Erling stuffed something into his pocket—the cloak—and then tipped the section of mosaic tile away from the wall. Together he and Tranq carried the slab over to the hole they had just emerged from. They slowly set it into place, with only a couple noisy scrapes that caused Tranq’s eyes to flash angrily at Erling. The section of floor looked identical to that around it. Erling began spreading something over the edges, and Shaw suddenly realized with a silent laugh that he was grouting the tile.

Shaw looked around, trying to understand where he was. He’d never been to Arlington, and couldn’t call to mind what the memorial for the
USS Maine
looked like.

The room was round with a pole in the middle of the room supporting a domed ceiling. He saw narrow slits evenly around the room, reminding him of a castle’s defensive windows.

While Erling worked on blending in the mosaic, Tranq was at the only door to the room. It looked heavy, judging by the strain with which Tranq had to pull on it. It swung silently open, and the room was bathed in moonlight.

Tranq returned to Shaw’s side and pulled him up. He was wobbly, but he stood. They waited as Erling finished wiping his tile work with a wet cloth. It looked darker due to the water, but when it dried, Shaw thought it would look identical to the rest of the floor.

Erling joined them and put his arm under Shaw’s. The three of them slowly made their way to the door, Shaw’s feet tripping and stumbling to keep up.

As they neared the open door, the moonlight was so bright Shaw had to look away. He focused on the gravestones out in the distance and the black silhouettes of the trees.

And then suddenly they all went black. Where before there had been a vista of trees and gravestones, now there was nothing but blackness. Shaw wanted to push back, but Erling and Tranq didn’t break their stride. Out of the darkness came a woman’s arm, and suddenly Shaw was spun. Her arms—large arms, he couldn’t help but notice—were wrapped under his and clasped around his chest, pulling him into the darkness.

He was being pulled away as Erling and Tranq pulled the heavy door closed. Directly above the door, he saw that chiseled into the stone were the words:

Erected in memory of the officers and men

Who lost their lives in the destruction

Of the USS Maine

That was the last Shaw saw of the memorial. They had rounded a corner, and he couldn’t see anything more save for some blinking lights.

“Where am I?” he whispered.

“The
Walden
,” a woman said, pulling him farther into the darkness.

“Are we going into orbit?”

“Shh.” She laid him down on a low bed. Shaw looked at the lip of the bunk above him as she strapped a belt around his waist. Despite the fact that this woman was a raider, he couldn’t stand the idea of being left in this bunkroom during lift-off.

“No!” He said in a stage whisper, struggling against the belt. “If we’re going into orbit, I want to see.”

What he really wanted to do was fight. Or run. But he wasn’t going to get a chance to do either of those alone in a bunk room.

“It’s only a low Earth orbit,” she answered. “We’re not even going to get a thousand miles up.”

“I’ve never been into space in real life—only in a jump,” Shaw said. “I want to watch.”

He couldn’t see her face very well in the darkness, but she didn’t make any move to keep buckling him in. “All right. You can have my seat if it comes to that.” She unbuckled him and helped pull him out of the bunk.

“I can hobble along, I think, if you help me,” he said. She supported the majority of his weight, but Shaw was able to hop along and keep pace.

The woman guided him back down the passageway they’d come from. It ended in a door, and she pressed her hand against it. It slid to the side, and they stepped through.

Shaw gaped at the massive window in front of him. A curved wall—was the whole ship a sphere?—showed the sloping hills and orderly gravestones of Arlington National Cemetery. Even as Shaw hobbled in, straining to see out the window, he noticed that the landscape was falling away. The
Walden
was already rising, beginning its ascent.

“Taveena, he’s supposed to be belted into his bunk,” someone said.

“He wanted to watch,” Taveena said.

Shaw refocused on the actual room itself. There were no lights so far as he could see—but why have them? Even in the dark, the massive window let in enough light to find his way reasonably well. In the day, this room would be awash in sunlight.

His eyes adjusted to the dimness, and he saw that the room was a hemisphere, maybe fifty feet long along the back wall, and twenty-five feet at the widest point of the curved window. If the entire ship was a sphere, then this room represented a full quarter of its space, Shaw realized. Why would a spaceship devote this much space to a single room? There wasn’t much in it so far as he could see. It was mostly open, with eight swivel chairs pointed toward the great window. All but two of them had swiveled around at his entrance. He saw Erling, Tranq, and four more people who were looking at him curiously.

Shaw’s left leg suddenly spasmed, and he wobbled against the woman’s support. Six or seven crew members, and he could barely stand. His plan to fight or run was starting to seem a little impractical.

Erling was instantly on his feet, helping Taveena guide him to a chair. “He can have mine,” Erling said.

Erling set Shaw down in the chair he’d just vacated. Taveena belted him in, and sat in the empty seat next to him. Erling went back to the door and let himself out of the room.

Shaw kicked at the floor and swiveled the chair around to face the window. Outside, he caught a glimpse of what looked like a row of streetlights maybe a hundred feet below him, and then nothing. There were stars, but he couldn’t see anything below. He strained to see anything, and then saw another row of lights up ahead that were reflected out over water.

“Chesapeake Bay?” Shaw asked. It was the only thing he could think of.

“That’s right. We’ll keep moving south and east, slowly gaining altitude, until we’re over the open ocean, that’s when we’ll make our ascent.”

They were over land again, but at maybe twice the height they were before. Shaw looked at the twinkling lights of the land below.

“An invisible spaceship …”

“Not the first,” Taveena said. “They were popular with the spy agencies before the Lattice.”

“But after the Lattice they were all discovered. Being invisible wasn’t enough.”

“True. The U.S. had all three of its invisible spy ships uncovered by people using the Lattice—ironic that one of their own spy tools uncovered another one. But those ships were uncovered because someone jumped into a secret CIA meeting and heard someone mention an invisible ship. After that, he found the plans, the contractor, the shipyard, and from there he just tagged the ship while it was still being built. From then on, it didn’t matter that the ship was invisible, it had been tagged at a moment in time. It could always be found just by speeding up time and finding where it had gone.”

Shaw kept looking out the window, thoughtful. “And this ship is different?”

“It’s not the ship that’s different. It’s us. No one can jump into a secret meeting if they don’t know it exists. No one can find the shipyard. We’re still a secret, because we’ve kept
everything
a secret. The smallest mistake from any of the eight of us, and we all die.”

The scenery below was changing again. In the distance, Shaw could see a black divide that marked the end of the land and the beginning of open water. The lights of land were smaller now.

“Don’t they hear the ship? And how are you going to break into orbit? That takes a lot of energy and a lot of noise. Won’t someone detect it?”

“We’re going slow enough we’re not making any noise on the ground. And the noise is the main reason we’re entering orbit over the Atlantic, far away from anybody.”

“Tranq said that we were trying to squeeze into a narrow window …”

“Very narrow,” Taveena said. “We needed two things to align: it needed to be the middle of the night in D.C. so we could get you out of Arlington. And we needed the Grand Orbitel to be in a particular window of its orbit. She’s the newest of the orbiting hotels and she’s got the best shielding to protect us from space junk. We’re going to nestle in under her wing, so to speak—otherwise we run too much of a risk of some piece of shrapnel from a hundred-year-old satellite ripping through our hull at fifteen thousand miles per hour.”

“Or of being microwaved under a nice dose of solar radiation. If I wanted a tan, I’d go to the beach.” Shaw winced as soon as he said it.
Why was he trying to make her laugh? To make himself seem docile before an attack? Did he truly think he could escape?

“Unlikely. It’s only in the event of a solar flare that we’d have to worry about that. But the Orbitel’s shield will come in handy if there is one.”

Below Shaw was the open ocean. Black water, black sky.
What was he going to do, crash the ship?

“Won’t a ship report hearing a take-off?”

“Sounds like you want us to get caught, Shaw,” Tranq said.

“The computer has plotted all the ships,” Taveena said, as if Tranq hadn’t spoken.

“Now shut up and watch the launch,” Tranq said.

Shaw decided to take the advice. He wasn’t going to get anywhere right now.

As they moved over open water, the ship seemed to pick up speed. Although it also felt like they were rising higher and higher as well. Ripples on the ocean looked smaller and there were more of them. Shaw thought he might be a few thousand feet up.

A few more minutes passed in silence. He stared. At the glory of the eastern night sky. And the hardness of the water below it. Suddenly Shaw felt his belt pressing into his waist, his body pushed up against it. They were slowing down, quite quickly. And just like that they had stopped. Hovering in the atmosphere. Thousands of miles from anything.

He waited for something to happen, but nothing did.

Shaw angled his chair to look at Taveena. She had pulled back her right sleeve and was inspecting the screen on her wrap. In the dim starlight, he caught his first good look at her. Was she pregnant? He had such a hard time telling pregnant women from fat women. But he so rarely saw fat women, he thought that was understandable. There was that young professor in Germany. He couldn’t remember another in the last few months. Taveena had rolls where he’d never seen rolls before. But they looked symmetrical and soft and round. Could you have toned fat? That didn’t seem possible.

“We arrived with a minute to spare,” she said, when she noticed him looking at her.

“And then?”

“And then three-two-one blast off,” Tranq said.

Shaw didn’t have a chance to respond. All at once, his body was thrown back into the seat. The swivel chair had automatically spun him back into position so he was facing forward and he could feel the belt automatically tightening again around his waist.

He missed whatever had happened to the horizon, because all he could see were stars. His stomach lurched as it seemed like the sphere dropped a thousand feet in a second. Then gained it all back again in two. The sphere was bouncing around in the atmosphere—was it wind? Was the computer self-correcting to stay on the right course?