The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (20 page)

Where was all the noise? It was loud, but not deafening. Shaw imagined that going into space was a noisy affair.
Why had he never jumped inside a space launch?

Were they going faster? It felt like they were accelerating even more. Maybe that made sense with the thinning atmosphere.

He suddenly saw shimmering green just below the stars. He almost panicked. Are those green things afterimages on the inside of his eyelids? Were his eyes closed? Shaw still didn’t trust his body enough to tell what was real.

And then his brain clicked in, and the optical illusion was set right. He was looking down on the top of the atmosphere, and those green lights were the aurora borealis.

Shaw lost the sense of acceleration, but they were still hurtling over the pole at an incredible speed. The curtains of the aurora passed beneath him, and then they were gone. He wanted to linger, wanted to watch them dance, but before he could even miss them, there was another wonder. As they crested over the pole, the sun appeared, rising over Asia, and they were in the brightest light Shaw had ever experienced.

He flinched, all night vision gone. A few seconds later, he felt the light dim against his eyelids.

“It’s all right,” Taveena said. “The glass adjusted.”

Shaw looked up and indeed the window had darkened considerably. The earth was still luminous below him, but the sun was no longer blinding.

There in the clouds was the northern edge of Russia on the Arctic Sea. The forests and lakes of Siberia. Some desert to the south and the west. Were those the Himalayas in the distance?

“It’s beautiful,” he whispered. “I’ve used the Lattice to visit orbit before. But somehow it doesn’t capture the wonder like actually being here.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” a voice said behind him.

Shaw’s chair spun, evidently unlocked after the take-off. A man had his hand on the back of the chair and released it. Shaw registered the beaming smile, the cropped gray hair, the massive belly, the triple chin, and the fact that he had seen this man just a week before.

“I know you,” he blurted.

“You do.”

“You were eating that ice cream cone in St. Louis. You’re the … man on the bench.”

“Fat man on the bench? Is that what you were going to say?” The man laughed. “It’s true. I was the fat man on the bench. After you foiled our attack on the Lattice, I wanted to get a good look at you.”

“You could have just jumped.”

“I’d already done that. I’ve spent a lot of time inside your head listening to you. It’s why you’re here. But as you just said, sometimes you just need to see things with your own two eyes.” He nodded in the direction of the window with a smile. “The name’s Wulfgang, but everyone just calls me Wulf.”

The man put out a chubby hand with chubby fingers, and Shaw tentatively shook it, appreciating the gentle shake. He still wasn’t able to grip anything very well.

Wulf nodded, as if he were reacting to the same thing. “Don’t worry, not too much longer and your body will be back fully under your control. I speak from experience.”

“They brought you back from the dead as well?”

“Of course. Otherwise everyone would know that the world’s most famous scientist was trying to destroy his own creation.”

Shaw stared at the fat man, his eyes wide. His vision shifted and he understood. Through the layers of fat, he saw the younger man he remembered in news feeds and in jumps. “You’re Wulfgang Huxley,” he whispered.

“At your service,” Huxley said. He scratched at his chin, his face a wide smile, and performed a sort of half bow.

“But you invented the Lattice!”

“I did. And now I’m trying to uninvent it. Care to help me?”

Shaw watched the small white dot in space grow larger and larger in the window. Soon he was able to make out distinctive features of the space hotel. It was a slim white half-circle, a new crescent moon around the earth. Protecting the curve of rooms was a massive shield, a reflective gold surface that protected the small hotel without getting in the way of the line of sight for any of the paying guests.

Slowly the
Walden
edged up to the white crescent. Shaw saw the bulbous windows that looked down on the Earth. They looked mirrored from the exterior, giving the impression of little globes jutting out of the white façade of the hotel.

“I thought we had tracked all the old space junk,” Shaw said, not taking his eyes off the looming hotel. He was starting to understand its incredible scale, and how massive its shielding really was.

“Just because we know where it is, doesn’t mean we can always avoid it,” Taveena answered. “If you get into a pocket that’s too dense, the only thing you can do is let the shielding do the work for you and plow through.”

The room suddenly darkened, and Shaw realized that they’d dipped under the protective hood of the Grand Orbitel’s shield. The glass lightened again and the brightness of the Earth’s atmosphere came back.

“It’s incredible,” Shaw murmured.

Shaw looked over at Taveena as she unstrapped herself from her seat. She pushed up and floated up against the window. She pushed herself off of it and back down to Shaw’s seat. “Are you ready to try weightlessness?”

Taveena unlaced Shaw’s belt and flipped it to the side. He pushed off of the armrests and couldn’t believe how little effort it took. Suddenly he was floating weightlessly in the middle of the room.

“Careful with the window. It’s cold,” Wulf said from the floor.

His momentum was carrying him toward it, and when he caught himself with his fingers, he was glad for the warning—the cold of space couldn’t be kept out entirely, and he felt the freezing pinpricks of that chill in his fingertips. But at least he could feel again!

He pushed off the window and aimed himself for the tall wall across the room.

“This should be easier on your body as it recovers,” Wulf said. “Just give us a warning if you’re going to be spacesick. We have some pills you can take, or some bags you can carry around.”

Shaw slowly drifted over him, and reached the wall. Like at the window, he put his fingers out to bounce off of it. Instead of a quick release, the soft and pudgy surface of the wall felt like it had trapped him. He pulled harder, but to little effect. His fingers looked like they were on the surface of the wall, but they felt like they were caught in thick molasses.

“What the hell? The wall’s not letting me go!”

“It’s OK! Let me help,” Erling called. He had floated up to Shaw’s side, and rested his own fingers on the wall. He rolled them off, so that his fingertips were the last to touch. “Just like that,” he said.

Shaw rolled his fingers and he was released.

“Anything that’s this gray color is sticky. Pretty much all the floors, the bunks, and some of the big walls. They’ll hold you, but they can sense the roll and that’s their cue to release. You can walk normally on them. It can feel weird, since everything else is weightless, including your insides,” Erling said, grinning.

“There’s no artificial gravity at all?”

Erling shook his head. “The generators are too loud. You can’t stay invisible very effectively while it’s running. And it would add so much weight we would have had a hard time with the launch just now. So we make do.”

They both descended to the floor of the room, and Shaw practiced standing. Erling was right, it did feel weird to have your feet rooted to the floor when the rest of your body was weightless.

“How are you feeling?” Wulf asked.

“Better, I think.”

“We still need to get some more fluids in you. But, now that we’re nestled inside the shield, let’s talk.”

The mess hall was just that—a narrow hallway. The narrow room was nothing more than a table with benches on three sides, but its height was incredible, soaring above him for reasons he couldn’t understand.

Taveena was at the table, her eyes closed. Asleep? She opened them as Shaw and Wulf sat and stared at Shaw. Wulf passed him two liquid filled bags.

Shaw looked at them carefully.

“Chickpea soup,” he said. “The protein will do you good.” He passed another bag of soup to Taveena, and then distributed three pointed straws. Wulf stabbed his bag and started sipping his soup. Shaw was once again embarrassed. He couldn’t get his hand to work right, and he missed the bag.

Taveena watched him struggle and Wulf finally came to his rescue and punctured it for him.

Shaw mumbled some thanks.

“You’ve really both been through this before?”

Wulf nodded. “All of us have. But none of us for as long as you. The flight back from Geneva, the huge funeral … it added a lot of time. A long time to be dead.”

“Am I going to be OK?”

“You’ll be fine,” Taveena said.

Shaw got the distinct impression he could have just lost both legs and she still would have told him that. He looked to Wulf, who said, “Really. You would have already been showing signs if you weren’t.”

Shaw nodded. “I still don’t understand. You killed me just so you could pull me out of my grave and try to get me to help you destroy the very thing I just stopped you from destroying? The thing that saved my life as a boy and that I’ve sworn to defend? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, I think that after some time, you’ll come to see things our way,” Wulf said, scratching behind his ear. “But the truth of it is, that wasn’t actually why we reactivated the nanoshock. We needed to end your investigation. You were just lucky Taveena and I thought you were worth bringing back.”

“Why did you need to kill me?”

“Because you had almost figured out how to trace us,” Taveena said.

“I did?” Shaw was stunned.
He was close enough they had to kill him to stop him? Why didn’t he know it?

“Think back on it,” Wulf said. “You and Yang were in that bar in Paris. Something was bugging you.”

Shaw remembered. He’d been staring at the wood grain on the table through the smudged bowl of his wine glass. And it had triggered something. Something that his brain had not understood at the time. There was the distortion effect of the glass … and the fogginess of the smudges … the smudges … he’d been holding the bowl of the glass instead of the stem, and he’d left his fingerprints on it.

There.

“The fingerprints,” Shaw said, shaking his head. He started to piece it together, and realized they were right. He
had
almost figured out how to trace them. He spoke slowly as he began to understand. “Somewhere in the back of my mind, I registered that Ono hadn’t worn gloves when he’d written on his sphere. So it was possible that the mastermind—you, I guess—hadn’t used gloves as well, that there was an excellent chance we could read your fingerprint through the spheres.”

“And, unfortunately for all of us, you would have been right,” Taveena said. “We never considered it.”

Wulf snorted. “And I can’t believe that you did.
Fingerprints
. I bet no one’s solved a crime with fingerprints in twenty-five years. Why bother, when you can use the Lattice?”

“But I didn’t think of it. The thought was interrupted by …”

“By Georges Pelier, our man in Geneva. He was our only hope to interrupt you.”

Shaw stared, dumbfounded. “Are you telling me that the reason that man confessed was
solely
to distract me? You sent Pelier to jail and sacrificed the whole plan to destroy the Geneva Lattice, just because of something in the back of my mind?”

Taveena met Shaw’s stare with ice. “If it got us an inch closer to destroying the Lattice, I’d sacrifice everyone we’ve ever sent a sphere to, and all the plans. Nothing is more important.”

Wulf laughed, an attempt at lightening the mood, Shaw thought. “We had the Geneva Lattice at our mercy, and we gave it all up to prevent you from having a single thought. Crazy, no?” Wulf laughed again. “It was a split-second decision, but it was the right one. As you proved right here, ten more seconds and you would have pieced it together. And if you would have realized the truth,
everyone
would have realized, because everyone was listening to your thoughts. Zella Galway had it right. The Lattice might be able to read any thought, but it can’t read a thought that hasn’t formed.”

“But
you
knew it had formed.”

“I knew what to look for—to see the potential in your mind before the thought itself had formed. Watching through your eyes, I realized it myself. As soon as you felt that twinge in the back of your mind. They were
my
fingerprints after all. But also, I’ve become somewhat of an expert at reading the subconscious. All the tutorials on jumping into someone else are about how to pick out the conscious thoughts from the unconscious ones. But you can learn a lot more about a person if you try to listen to their subconscious instead of just blocking it. Like you …”

Shaw set his jaw. “Like me?”

“You hate the Lattice. Despite your past, despite your job, you’re scared of it. You’re scared you’re a slave to it. That’s why you’re going to help us destroy it.”

“I think you’ve misread me.”

“I hope not, otherwise we wouldn’t have bothered saving you. Keep that in mind,” Taveena said.

“There’s no reason for talk like that, Taveena,” Wulf said. “With our help, he’ll come to realize he’s more like us than he would care to admit.”

“He needs to know about the vote. He’s only got a week.”

“A week for what?” Shaw asked.

Wulf shot an irritated glance at Taveena. “I was going to wait until he was better rested before springing that on him.”

“Spring
what
?” Shaw insisted.

Wulf sighed and sipped on his soup straw. “As Taveena already told you, it would only take the smallest mistake for all of us to die. The fingerprints on the spheres … we’ve gotten lucky that no one has noticed that so far. But if only
one
person on Earth realizes, we’re all dead, every one of us. We have no margin for error. And while I might be the leader of this motley bunch, in this one area, we all get an equal say.”

Shaw was starting to get a very good idea of where this was headed.

“In seven days, the crew will take a vote,” Taveena said, picking up the narrative from Wulf, her voice terrifying in her matter-of-fact delivery. “If a majority of the crew feels that you can be trusted, you will be invited to join us. And you can help us destroy the Lattice once and for all. If, on the other hand, we think you pose a risk to us—either that you will make a mistake, or that you will betray us—then we have no choice … ” Taveena held Shaw’s gaze, and Shaw had no doubt that she was deadly serious. “It won’t matter how much trouble it was to pull your body out of that grave. If you lose that vote, we’ll toss you out the nearest airlock and won’t look back.”