Scale, p.26
Scale, page 26
Loretta hung up. The sub was slowly backing away toward the shore, but she doubted that meant they’d had a change of heart and were about to dock and hand over the Mayor.
“What do we do now?” she asked Jake.
“Keep talking.”
She called Poseidon, but no one answered. The sub came to a halt, then began moving forward, diving as it accelerated toward the cordon. Even as it dropped out of sight, Loretta could see a wake shaped like an arrowhead, skimming across the sunlit water. The sub seemed to be aiming for a narrow gap between two ships – surely too narrow for it to pass through. As the cordon was being rearranged she’d lost track of exactly where the lift was, so she wasn’t sure now if Poseidon had taken the bait or chosen a different route.
The ships lurched and swung aside, bobbing and swaying. Loretta glimpsed the sub’s wake in the open water behind them, and instead of rising into the air on a hidden platform like a landed fish, it simply faded from sight, diving too deep and traveling too fast for any hint of its course to remain perceptible.
One of the ships began to list. Scale Three figures moved ponderously across the deck, inflating lifejackets ten times wider than their bodies and deploying their lifeboats with agonizing torpor. They had to be racing frantically to save themselves, but even as Loretta watched the water leaking into the ruptured hull, the outcome was as hard for her to judge as if her own thoughts had slowed to match the pace of the disaster.
Her phone rang. Tyne said, “Offer them the amnesty.”
Loretta saw no point in lecturing him on his timing; she called Poseidon.
The number didn’t even ring; all she heard was a discordant out-of-service tone. She turned to Jake.
“They can only communicate if they raise a buoy with an antenna,” he said. “Maybe they’ll do that, once they’re further away.”
“Why would they bother?” Loretta asked bitterly.
Jake said, “Even if they’re snubbing you, they might raise it to make some other calls. All you can do is keep trying.”
Loretta redialled every second, while the sailors continue their evacuation. After twenty-six attempts, she got through.
“Wendale’s accepted the deal,” she said.
Poseidon laughed. “Now? Tell them where to shove it.”
Loretta tried to build on his triumph, not belittle it. “So now you’re free, why walk into another trap? There’s no future for anyone in the base. If you come back now, you can have everything you had before, even the same work if you want it. Can you name one thing that Beech is offering you, that you can’t get this way? The easy way, where you don’t need to start a war?”
Poseidon said nothing, but Loretta could hear other people arguing around him.
She said, “Even if you can’t turn around right now, if you come back with the captives the deal still holds. No one’s died on the ships you rammed. Bring the captives here unharmed, and there’ll be no charges.”
The connection dropped out.
Chapter 41
Jake did his best to persuade the relatives to go home and get some rest, but they refused to leave the dock, so he stayed with them for as long as he could. He’d answered the same questions about his experiences on the sub and in the base a dozen times, but he knew it gave them a degree of reassurance to hear the same things over and over again from someone who’d been there. No, he did not believe anyone was being tortured. Yes, he’d observed the prisoners being fed. His guesses about the future were no more likely to come true than anyone else’s, but at least he’d seen their brothers and sisters or sons and daughters alive, and being treated well enough.
Eight or nine minutes after the sub disappeared, though, his eyes were starting to glaze over, and he doubted he was still saying anything helpful. Loretta had left for a while and returned, and she promised to remain at the vigil while he slept. He called a taxi, and went home to bed.
When he woke, he turned on the radio. The news was still focused on the referendum result, the end of the blockade, and the deaths of Sandra Krauss and Alfred Kenani. He had wanted the audience angry, for his own purposes. He couldn’t have known exactly what would happen, but he could have anticipated that it might end badly.
He ate breakfast, then set out for the dock on foot, less out of a reluctance to arrive there too swiftly than a need to clear his head.
On the streets, most people he passed seemed, not celebratory, but relieved. Whichever way they’d voted, who wouldn’t welcome an end to empty shelves, and the trains stopping in D7 again? As for the promises of lepton engineering, the talks with Wendale still stretched out into the future, so anything was possible. Maybe there were angry separatists somewhere, convinced that their dreams were sure to be crushed once all the details were finally thrashed out, but Jake saw no one protesting against the result itself.
His phone rang; it was Mandy Sayles.
“What’s happening with the river base?” she asked. “Who’s still down there?”
“I have no idea,” Jake replied.
“You promised me that once things were resolved, you’d tell me the whole story.”
“What makes you think things are resolved?”
She said, “So tell me what’s going on, right now.”
“I can’t.”
“Can you tell me where Shane Beckman and his mother are? They’re not at their home, and they’re not answering their phones.”
Jake wasn’t surprised that she’d learned Shane’s name; there had probably been people at the debate who’d recognized him. “Just give them some privacy,” he said. “Maybe they’ll want to talk to you eventually. But right now, I can’t say anything.”
He hung up. As he approached the dock, he could see that most of the navy’s ships had departed. Maybe they’d gone to circle the water above the base, to log the submarine’s arrivals and departures. But sonar couldn’t show them what was happening inside.
“Any news?” he asked Loretta.
“No.”
“You should go home,” he urged her.
“I’m not tired,” she said. “And the relatives are keeping me ... more than well fed.” Three large picnic tables had been set up at the center of the vigil, and as Jake watched, a car arrived with people bearing fresh supplies.
He sat down at the edge of the road, his feet resting daringly on the marshy ground, and Loretta joined him.
“Could we have stopped all this?” she wondered. “Once Sam found the base, if we’d gone all out to make people listen?”
Jake said, “I doubt it. That would have just panicked Beech into doing all the same things a little earlier.”
“I keep wondering what she would have done if she’d had all the extra time she asked for. Tested a fusion bomb in the desert? Sent a rocket to the moon?”
“Maybe both.” Jake laughed. “Can you imagine, if they’d sprung the moon on everyone? I don’t know if people would have been angry for being kept in the dark, or just so astonished that they all lined up behind her and told Wendale to keep their hands off our glorious lunar cities.”
Loretta smiled, but the present crossroads Beech was facing offered less appealing choices. “If she tries to build a fusion bomb down there, and it goes off by mistake ... ”
Jake said, “The people who built the generators managed not to blow anything up along the way.”
“Yes, but there’s a difference between something you never want to explode, and something you do want to explode once you press the right button.”
Jake covered his face with his hands and put his head on his knees. “The way to get through this is to picture our children reading about it in their history books, laughing at how absurd it was we ever thought that kind of insanity was possible.”
“Our children?”
“You know what I mean.”
Jake heard a car approaching. He looked up; Mandy Sayles was getting out of a taxi.
“Who tipped her off?” Loretta asked.
“Don’t look at me.”
Sayles walked past Jake, pointedly ignoring him, and went to talk with the relatives.
Loretta’s phone rang. She stood up abruptly and took a few steps away from him, back along the road.
“Yes, it still applies,” she said. “Yes. To everyone.”
Jake couldn’t hear what the caller was saying, but he watched Loretta, trying to read her face.
“Of course,” she said. “No. Absolutely. You have my word.”
When she hung up the call, Jake asked, “Who was that?”
“Don’t say anything,” Loretta implored him. “Don’t get people’s hopes up. If it happens, it happens, but nothing’s certain yet.”
Jake stood up, brushing his trousers. “All right. I’ll keep my mouth shut.” He glanced over at Elaine Beckman, who was talking to Sayles. He was sure she despised her brother-in-law, but she still hadn’t been prepared to let him languish at the bottom of the river.
The three remaining ships began moving closer to the shore; whatever news Loretta had received, the navy would have heard it too. A motorboat was lowered from one vessel, and a Scale Three sailor drove it toward the riverbank. When it arrived, the driver stayed on board, but two Scale Seven passengers Jake hadn’t noticed before disembarked, deftly climbing over the side carrying spread-shoes.
He turned away from them and looked out across the water, trying to imagine the scene inside the base when the submarine arrived, with Beech calling for fresh resolve and a battle to reclaim their advantage, while some of the crew quietly spread the word behind her back that there was another way out. How many of them would stay locked in the hermetic vision of a future they commanded for themselves, and how many would grasp what had happened up on the surface? They had friends, they had families. It was one thing to imagine liberating D7 from Wendale’s tyranny with Friendship’s launch and a resounding win in the referendum, followed by parades in the street to welcome all the heroes back to dry land. But now that reality had parted ways from their script, how many of them would understand that the ordinary people they claimed to be championing had made other decisions?
Sayles approached him. “I’ve got most of Shane’s story now,” she said. “But maybe there are a few details you want to add?”
Jake shook his head. “I’ll save it for my memoir.”
“Are you sure we’ll live that long?”
Jake said, “If Beech blows up Mauburg, I don’t think it will bother me that the Tribune’s last edition had a snotty teenager complaining that I tried to stop him fulfilling his destiny as a hero of the D7 counter-coup.”
Sayles laughed. “He’s much kinder than that, but I still want to hear about the things you saw down there that he couldn’t.”
“Later,” Jake pleaded. It was not her fault that she’d done his bidding and given him the incendiary weapon he’d asked for, but he couldn’t think about anything else in her presence.
She let him be, and went to talk with the other relatives. Jake paced the road, wishing he could just walk away, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave.
He saw Loretta in the distance, speaking on her phone again. He looked to the riverbank, but he couldn’t see where the naval commandoes had gone.
Something glinted, out on the water. Jake watched the metal structure rising. The relatives called out to each other, turning together toward the approaching submarine.
The bridge that would have been retracted if the dock had been returned to camouflage mode had been left extended. The sub performed a series of maneuvers and corrections until the tower was in alignment with it, then the door to the loading bay opened.
The one-time hijackers were standing at the front of the crowded bay, with no guards or shackles. They walked out onto the bridge, dazed in the sunshine. Thaddeus was there, and the tall man. As far as Jake could see, none of the captives were missing.
He stayed back as the reunions with the relatives began, and the G8 and Spotlight workers eased their way past the celebrations, looking around warily as if they still feared they might have walked into an ambush. Jake kept recognizing people he’d met on the base: Khalid, Sandrine, Axel, and at least two of the other guards who’d come with him to the surface. He hunted for Madeleine, but he couldn’t spot her.
Loretta joined him.
“You did it!” he said. “You just pulled off your first peace deal!” Jake felt like executing a courtly bow, but he was afraid it would only annoy her.
“It’s not everyone,” she replied, refusing to be triumphant. “Beech is still down there, and about thirty other people.”
“With no submarine. No supplies coming in. Whatever they were planning, it’s over. All they can do now is surrender.”
The two commandoes Jake had spotted, and eight others he hadn’t, emerged from the scrubland and entered the sub unchallenged. One of them was Mollinson; at least he’d had experience driving the thing.
Loretta said, “Surrender, or drown.”
She started sobbing. Jake walked up and embraced her. “Come on, let’s go back to the city and celebrate.”
“But now there’s all the rest of it,” she replied morosely. “Power plant inspections and building codes and railway lines. How am I going to face all that?”
“No one’s in any rush,” Jake said. “And all the best lepton engineers are back on dry land and looking for something useful to do. You’ll have plenty of time to find all the experts you need before Wendale have finished drafting their first memo.”
“Yeah. That’s true.” She parted from him and stood in silence for a while, meeting his gaze. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go celebrate.”
Chapter 42
Sam was eating breakfast when the news came on the TV.
“Former diplomat Loretta Anselm has died in Mauburg’s District Seven, at the age of five hundred and fifty-six days. Anselm was known for her role negotiating the widespread adoption of lepton engineering, after a failed attempt by the D7 Council to found their own nation with the help of the technology. She is survived by three children, eight grandchildren and seventeen great-grandchildren.”
Noor turned to Sam, dismayed. “I suppose that’s a good age for Scale Seven, but it doesn’t seem that long since you were working with her.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Sam didn’t know what kind of grief he should be feeling; beyond his gratitude and admiration for the woman who’d brought Stedland back from the brink of a civil war, his recollections were a jumble of all the things they’d had in common, and those that were utterly incommensurate. And however much experience Loretta had packed into each second, that she would not see the era she’d done so much to shape unfold as far as he would felt crushingly unfair.
“You should send a message to her family,” Noor suggested.
“Of course.” And there could be no excuse for putting it off. Sam carried the dishes to the sink, then went to his study.
It took him a few drafts to find the right words to describe how he’d come to know Loretta, without disclosing things he had no right to discuss, and a few more to make what was heartfelt sound less clumsy. Her family would surely forgive all the remaining imperfections, understanding the pressures of time. He’d never been in touch with Loretta’s children, but Palimpsest was still thriving and had contact details online, so he sent the message there in the hope that someone would pass it on.
It was getting late. He went to Idris’s door and asked, “Are you up?”
“Yes!” Idris yelled back irritably.
“Okay.” Sam restrained himself from spelling out the narrowing window for an indigestion-free breakfast if he wanted to get to his first class on time.
Idris emerged from his room, fully dressed, carrying his notepad. “I got in,” he said.
He made it sound as if he was mentioning something inconsequential, in passing, but he held up the notepad, and Sam took it; it showed a message from the Astronaut Training College in Wendale. Noor joined them, and Sam passed the notepad to her.
“Congratulations!” She embraced Idris.
Sam smiled, and said the same, but he felt numb. The college only took twenty-four people from each scale, from across the whole country. Idris’s grades had been exceptional for a while, but Sam had been hoping he wouldn’t quite squeeze in, forcing him to get serious about other options.
“I have to go,” Idris said, taking back the notepad and heading for the front door.
“You didn’t eat,” Noor called after him.
“I’m not hungry!” he yelled back.
When the door slammed shut, Sam stood in the corridor, at a loss for the right response.
“Not everyone gets to fly,” Noor said.
“It will be worse if he doesn’t,” Sam replied. “I don’t like the risks of him going up, but it will be worse if he stays on the ground, growing bitter.”
“It’s a collective effort,” Noor argued. “Everyone plays a role, wherever they end up.”
“And who’s ended up on Mars so far, in this ‘collective effort’?” The whole mission had been tailored from the start around accelerations that only Scale Seven could tolerate.
Noor said, “That didn’t stop him applying, did it? He understands all the physics and biomechanics behind these choices better than we do. He’s going into this with his eyes open.”
“Maybe.” Sam’s phone chimed; there was a video message from Loretta’s grandson Daniel, who now ran Palimpsest. “My grandmother talked about you,” he said, “and she told me a little about the case you both worked on. It’s kind of you to send your condolences, and I’ve passed them on to the rest of the family.”
