Trident's Forge (40 page)

“I really don't like the sacrifices.”

“This one will be different.”

“Good,” Benson said. “I'm sick of smelling like fish guts.” There had been several sacrifice ceremonies over the last few days. The Atlantians had brought along mostly small, larval animals for the occasions, while the human delegation had opted for catfish, chickens still being quite expensive. The chicken Benson had called down to the surface, meanwhile, having survived its assassination attempt, had since found a comfortable niche in Kexx's village being venerated alongside the rover as a minor deity.

They left the dome behind, flew through the Can, and settled into a lift car that would take them down to the bottom floor of Avalon. During the drop, Benson noticed that here and there, light bulbs needed replacing on the axle running through the module. Not quite as many people around to swap them out, he supposed.

Stepping out onto the vast, slightly curved inner hull of the module, held in place by centrifugal force equal to one G, Benson actually found himself feeling the tiniest bit sick. He still didn't care all that much for the skies on Gaia, but now that his body had experienced real gravity, nothing else would feel quite right again. They walked down one of the old footpaths. The apple trees lining their way had grown a bit wild in the last few years, their leaves and blossoms left to clutter up the cobblestones just a bit longer than before. Not as many gardeners and arborists around to sweep up after them, he guessed.

Soon, they reached the small park his plant had designated as the staging point for the ceremony. It was an open-air affair with benches on three sides, while the fourth was a sandy beach overlooking Avalon's large retaining lake. Benson had visited the spot many times, using it as a water stop on his morning runs around the module. Tuko was there, along with Kuul and old Chak, against zer better judgement, from the look on zer face.

Standing next to them was Miraculously-Still-Acting-Captain Feng, Ambassador Mei, and Theresa.

But most curious was who was absent. None of the other village reps were present, nor anyone from the Dweller camp. Benson sidled up alongside his wife and leaned in to whisper in her ear. “What's going on?”

“Don't ask me. I just go where I'm told.”

A small pedestal with a familiar bowl was set up in the middle of the park. Tuko and Chak handled the spoken parts of the ceremony, and despite the fact his translation matrix was still shoddy, Benson managed to kneel down at the right parts this time. Then, it was time for the sacrifice. Tuko reached down to a wicker basket at the foot of the pedestal and returned with a blanket, something squirming inside.

A deep, cold dread clenched at Benson's chest. This wasn't the normal sacrificial ceremony. It was close, but subtly different. He'd seen it once before. He took to his feet and made two bounding strides for the bundle even as Tuko set it down in the bowl. Benson snatched it up and dug through the folds of cloth, dreading what he might find.

And then he found it. A small, wriggling baby Atlantian, its skin pulsing without pattern or rhythm, its tiny, tentacle fingers reaching up from the blanket, grasping for Benson's hand.

“No,” he said firmly. “Absolutely not. I've already been through this with you people.” Benson pointed a quaking finger at Chak. “With you in particular.”

“Benson,” Kexx interrupted. “Calm yourself.”

“No, Kexx!” Benson snapped. “We are
not
sacrificing this baby.”

“You're right,” Kexx said.

“I am?” Benson said, his budding tirade cut short.

Kexx put a hand on Benson's wrist. “No. We are giving it to you.”

“I'm sorry?”

Theresa stepped in. “You're what now?”

“This is the same infant that you saved from culling a month ago when you stayed Chak's hand. We know that you and your mate have not been able to have your own children. So, after much discussion, we have decided that since humans have sent Mei and her people to become part of our village, we will do the same. We give one of our own to join the family of humans in the home of the ones we trust the most. Ze will walk among you, learn from you, and one day become a bridge between our people. If you will honor us.”

“I'm sorry?” Benson repeated dumbly, but Theresa had already snatched the baby up and started coddling it.

“Oh, Kexx, we say yes!” she said between coos.

“We do?” Benson asked.

“Yes. We do.” There was no room for negotiation in her tone. “Ah, honey, look, she has her daddy's eyes.”

Benson looked at the baby's large, yellow irises encircling pupils shaped like the number eight filled in. A glint of light reflected off the backs of them. “Does ze?”

“Good, it's settled then,” Kexx said, then translated the news to the other assembled Atlantians, who greeted it with cheers.

“It is?” Benson was starting to feel lightheaded. Was there a hull breach? His new baby, er, something, turned zer head and smiled at him, then squirted a stream of water out of zer right ear.

“Is ze supposed to do that? Hello? What the hell are we supposed to feed zer?”

E
very author
, every creative really, builds their house upon a foundation laid down by everyone who came before them. As an avid reader of sci-fi over the last twenty odd years, one of the most engaging and rewarding experiences I had was discovering new alien societies. Taken far beyond “Monsters of the Week”, the best of them blended not only plausible, yet unique biology, but language, morality, technology, and culture, all perfectly blended into their environment.

As some astute readers and reviewers have already guessed,
The Ark
was not written initially as the beginning of a series. It was conceived as a standalone novel, and remained so until the third rewrite, at which point my agent wanted synopses for two more books so he could pitch it as a trilogy. A furious rewrite of the last couple chapters set the stage for
Trident's Forge
and anything that follows. As such, I was starting with a clean slate. I knew I wanted to write something very different from the locked-room mystery of
The Ark
. This novel would be more about adventure and exploration. With
Trident's Forge
, I had the unexpected opportunity to sit down and create my own alien race to add to the sci-fi canon. An opportunity I was eager to take.

For inspiration, I drew upon those aliens who had stirred my imagination in the past. The safety-obsessed Pierson's Puppeteers of Larry Niven's
Ringworld
. The enigmatic Pequeinios of Orson Scott Card's
Speaker for the Dead
. The telepathic pack-minds of the Tines from Vernor Vinge's
A Fire Upon the Deep
and
Children of the Sky
. And most recently, but perhaps most convincingly, the waterborne Ilmataran and consensus-building Sholen of James L Cambias's
A Darkling Sea
.

It is because of these captivating examples of race-building that I decided to make
Trident's Forge
a story of first contact. I set out to craft the Atlantians as much as a tribute to these authors, and countless others, as a challenge to myself. And while I'm far from convinced that they measure up to the above examples, I hope they are enjoyed, and that readers will tag along for the ride in future novels as I continue to explore their evolving culture and uneasy partnership with these strange, powerful, dangerous, yet wondrous creatures they call deadskins.

O
ur last day
on Earth was the grey overcast of an approaching storm, which was appropriate.

“Don't make eye contact with them, Barbara.” I put my hand on my wife's knee. “Don't do anything to provoke them.”

Her head didn't turn away from the ruins of Clearwater, or the retched sea of humanity frothing just centimeters away from her face. A beer bottle filled with… an unmentionable substance, shattered against the window with a
Crack!
Barbara flinched and pulled away in shock.

“Can they get through?” she asked breathlessly.

“Don't worry, dear.” I rapped a knuckle against the Class III ballistic window. “It'll take a lot more than a shit-filled Bud Light bottle to get into this car.”

A resigned little sigh escaped from Barbara's lips. “I almost wish they could.”

“Don't be a fatalist. We need to focus on getting through the next hour alive.”

“Whatever you say, Maximillian.”

I cringed. She only used my full name when she was cross, but there wasn't time for the little games that had been a hallmark of our marriage. Instead, I pressed the intercom button for the driver's compartment.

“Reggie?”

“Yes, Mr. Benson?” came the answer from the car's speakers. The fidelity was almost too good. Reggie sounded like he was sitting right next to me. I was really going to miss the car.

“Can we move any faster?”

“I'm trying, sir, but these refugees keep blocking the car.”

“Persuade them.”

Silence drew out on the intercom.

“Reggie?”

“Yes, sir. Of course.”

Reggie gave the rabble in his path a blast from the pair of LRAD sound cannons built into the bumper. That had been a seventy-thousand dollar upgrade, but it proved to be a good investment as the crowd parted like the Red Sea. The Bentley surged forward on its four electric motors. As soon as they were clear of the deafening zone ahead of the car, the crowd turned ugly and lunged at the doors. But the Bentley had answers for them, too.

A huge, shirtless, heavily tattooed slab of beef in the rough outline of a man wrapped his fingers around the handle, and immediately regretted the decision. For his trouble, a hundred-thousand volts of rapidly-alternating current surged through his arm and down the rest of his body. He crumpled to the ground like a marionette with its strings cut.

I couldn't help but chuckle.

“That's funny to you?” Barbara barked.

“Not exactly. But you've got to admit it was impressive.”

“These are people, Max. But it's like you don't even see them. They're desperate and terrified.”

“We're all desperate and terrified, Barbara. The only thing separating us from them is I had the resources to do something about it.”

She crossed her arms. “Resources you were born into. It's not like you earned them.”

My patience for her faux-righteousness wore thin. “And that's somehow less noble than marrying into them?” Her mouth hung open in shocked fury, and for a moment I thought I'd regret the outburst, but she stayed silent.

“What do you want me to do, Barb? Take the time to look at all ten billion doomed people on this rock until I break? I'm sorry. But there's only fifty-thousand seats on that ship. That wasn't my call, okay? These people outside? I can't do anything for them. It's taken literally everything I have to keep us on this side of the glass. That's all the control I have left, so that's what I see.”

She didn't argue. Instead, she gazed out the window at the blurred faces streaming by and sank deeper into her own budding survivor's guilt.

The risky car ride wouldn't have been necessary at all if it weren't for the No Fly Zone. The military had pulled back from the cities, but their drones still ruled the skies. After those Salafist idiots took out the Kuala Lumpur tether with a hijacked cargo plane, the U.N. shut down air traffic within a hundred miles of any of the tethers and launch sites in a hurry.

For not the first time, my hand absent-mindedly reached into my jacket pocket to rub the data disks tucked inside. I pulled them out, a pair of iridescent holographic memory disks little bigger than half-dollar coins encased in clear protective sleeves. They held our genomes, medical histories, and heredity going back ten generations. They were our Golden Tickets off the dying Earth.

I'd traded every last red cent of our vast family fortune on the contents of those two small disks, and I hadn't even blinked. Money was meaningless now. Tickets aboard the Ark were the only currency that had any real meaning anymore. More valuable than any coin, or piece of art, or bar of precious metal. The Ark represented the clearest line of delineation between the haves and the have-nots in the history of wealth. Yet the majority of humanity, even with mere months left to live, still fought over money like some instinctual cultural reflex they couldn't break free of.

The fools.

Maybe it had always been that way. Generals had always fought the last war. The same was true in business. Companies failed by chasing the last fad, instead of recognizing the next one. Or better yet, creating it. I'd seen the truth about money since I was a child. It was an illusion. A sleight of hand. With it, you could fool people into giving you what you really wanted. The only difference between the poor and the rich was the rich recognized real value. Still, I pitied them, but sentimentality wouldn't stop me from doing what must be done.

“Trouble coming up, Mr. Benson.”

I couldn't see the windshield through the privacy screen, so instead I put the forward camera feed on the display. Some enterprising souls had set up a makeshift barricade of burned-out cars across the entrance to the Cortney Campbell Causeway. The swarms of refugees were thinner here, owing in no small measure to the motley crew of rednecks patrolling the barricade with automatic weapons.

Barbara grabbed my thigh and squeezed. “Max, they have machine guns.”

“They've got squat. This car's rated up to Three Thirty-Eight Lapua.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It's a type of bullet, dear. A big one. These hillbillies don't have anything bigger than a five point five—”

WHAM!

The car jumped three inches to the left with the force of the impact. At first, I was sure we'd hit an IED. The display automatically switched over to damage and threat assessment screens. The front passenger side drive motor was disabled, cutting the car's acceleration by a quarter, and braking by almost a third.

“Reggie, back up!” I shouted into the intercom as I hit the icon to deploy smoke canisters. The threat assessment software matched the acoustic signature of the attack not to a bomb, but to a Barrett fifty caliber BMG sniper rifle. Somebody's grandfather had passed down some heavy firepower. God bless America.

“What happened?” Barbara shrieked as Reggie floored it into reverse, pressing us into our seatbelts.

“We were shot.”

“I thought you said this car was safe against big bullets!”

“This one was bigger than that.”

Outside, bullets danced across the hood, windshield, and roof like hail as the militia opened up with their assault rifles. The car slid back to rest behind the cover of a fallen billboard. The shot to the wheel had been intentionally placed to disable us. Any normal car, it would have carried straight through both front wheels, drive motors, and their battery packs without so much as slowing down. The reinforcements had been money well spent.

“Reggie, do you think you've got enough road to bust through that barricade?”

“I'm not sure, sir. Not with this wheel knocked out.”

“Do your best.”

“Wait,” Barbara gripped my arm tight with fear. “We're not going back out there?”

“We don't have a choice. This is the only open route since the National Guard pulled out.”

She stabbed a finger at the wrecked cars blocking the road. “But it's not open, Max. We'll crash.”

“Reggie can handle it.”

“But they're shooting at us!”

“Shut. Up. Barbara.” I didn't mean to yell. I'd never shouted at her like that before, and I could see the words hit her like fists. She shrank back into her seat. I'd smooth it over later, when we were safe.

“Reggie, floor it.”

The Bentley, all sixty-seven hundred pounds of it, took off like a scalded cat. Even wounded, it had acceleration that would be a match for many gas-powered sports cars of only a few decades ago. The lead hail continued to
tink
off the car's armored paneling as the hicks manning the barricade tried ineffectually to stop it. Soon, the expanding cloud of smoke churning out of the canisters I'd dropped enveloped them.

A second sniper bullet the size of my thumb slammed into the car. Fortunately, he'd misjudged our speed. Instead of hitting the rear right drive motor, the bullet passed harmlessly through the trunk. Although the damage it did to our luggage on its way through didn't bear thinking about at the moment.

One of the amateur-hour ambushers lost in the smoke met the Bentley's grill at seventy miles an hour. His broken body snapped off the hood ornament as it rolled over the top of the car before crashing back to the pavement behind us like a garbage-bag full of ground chuck.

“Brace yourselves.” Reggie said calmly as the burned car shells filled the screen. On instinct, I threw my arms around Barbara and squeezed her tight just as the car smashed headlong into the barrier. With mighty
Thump
and a cascade of sparks, the gutted cars spun out of the way like dreidels. The Bentley shook like it had been struck by a wrecking ball, but coasted onward regardless.

“Yeah!” I pumped a triumphant fist in the air, almost punching the roof liner in the process. “Good work, Reggie.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Think it'll buff out?”

“I doubt it, sir.”

I leaned back in my chair and let the hot rush of adrenaline suffuse through my body. The causeway on the other side of the barricade was empty. Two lanes and ten miles of vacant road. With the worst behind us, the rest of the drive to Tampa International would be peaceful.

Everything was coming apart. Frost clung to the fronds of the palm trees lining the road. In July. In Florida. The black hole coming to destroy mankind was already making its presence felt by stretching Earth's orbit into an egg shape, wreaking havoc with everything from weather patterns to the tides and tripping off earthquakes and volcanism throughout the globe.

Between the unnaturally high tides and the damage we'd already done to the ice caps, Miami and the Kennedy Space Center were already underwater most of the time. Tampa fared a little better, which was why her commercial spaceport had been commandeered for the Ark project. The Earth's network of space elevators had been working overtime for decades to move the millions of tons of material needed to build the grand ship, leaving traditional, and more dangerous, chemical rockets to act as passenger ferries.

From the crest of the Cortney Campbell's first bridge, I could just make out the gleaming white nose cone of our salvation. I nudged Barb, who hugged her knees to her chest and gently swayed in her seat. She'd never been in a gunfight before. Then again, neither had I, but we all dealt with stress differently.

“Barb, honey. Look south.” I pointed towards the rocket standing on its pad, taller than all but the biggest buildings in Tampa's skyline. “That's our cab. We've made it, baby.”

She followed my finger and locked eyes with the rocket, burning like a beacon in the pre-dawn darkness.

“It's over?” She relaxed a bit and unfolded her legs. “We're safe?”

“Yes, the U.N. controls the other side of the bridge, and as soon as we reach the checkpoint, we… will…”

Something was wrong. The car was slowing down. I pulled up the diagnostic screen, afraid the damage was more serious than I first thought, but it still showed only the front right motor down.

I keyed the intercom. “Reggie, why are we stopping?”

Nothing.

“Reggie? Can you hear me?”

The Bentley came to a stop at the side of the road. With growing alarm, I reached for the button to roll down the privacy screen, but it came down before I touched it. A chill ran through my body as I saw an older woman sitting in the front passenger seat beside Reggie.

“Reggie,” I said gently. “Why is your wife in the car?”

As an answer, Reggie turned around, rested a handgun on the dividing wall, and pointed the barrel at my left eye. My bullet-resistant suit wouldn't do much good against a point-blank headshot.

“I'm sorry about this, Mr. Benson, but we'll have your tickets now.” The safety clicked off for emphasis. “Please.”

It took my mind a few moments to accept what I was seeing. Reggie had been my driver for going on twenty years. He was my most trusted employee, and he was pointing a gun at me. I'd once heard a saying, ‘Every dog is two missed meals away from being a wolf.' I never knew what it meant until that moment.

I eyed the button to raise the privacy screen, but it would take far too long to roll up. Funny, I'd spent a small fortune on armor to protect us from bad people with guns. It never once occurred to me that one of them would be inside the car.

“I can't give them to you.”

“Then I'll have to take them off your body, sir.”

“Reggie!” Barbara gasped. “What on earth are you doing?”

“Retiring,” he said flatly. “Consider this my letter of resignation.”

I put up my hands in a sign of submission. “They won't work for you, Reggie. I'm sorry.”

“Oh don't give me that bullshit, Maximillian. I've worked for your family for thirty years. I know you better than your own parents did, God rest their souls. I strapped you into a car seat. I dropped you off your first day at Princeton, the day you took over your father's company. And I've been keeping your secrets the whole time, from your father, the police, your girlfriends.” He waved the gun in Barbara's direction. “Even her.”