Final Days

SEVEN

Flathead Lake, Montana, 25 January 2235

It took Jeff Cairns nearly six hours to navigate the hire car to his cabin in the Rockies. Early spring rains, bringing the last of the meltwater down from the peaks, had flooded out a bridge and also wiped out a section of road, meaning long detours and one eye kept constantly on the weather feed, throughout his long drive north from Missoula.

As soon as he had left the city limits and the hopper port behind, Jeff took manual control, ignoring the dashboard’s warning that his insurance was void if he didn’t stick to automatic so long as the weather bureau warned of adverse conditions. He took pleasure in the feel of the steering wheel under his hands, despite the periodic squalls of rain that lashed at his windscreen, but after a while the rain faded to a light drizzle and the car altered its configuration, becoming lower and more aerodynamic, and even changing colour according to some pre-programmed algorithm. After a couple of hours, a break in the clouds suddenly appeared, and Jeff soon found himself driving through sunlight of such glorious intensity that it seemed to bore through his eyes to touch against the back of his skull.

He took the off-ramp when the car instructed him to, the roads thereafter becoming gradually steeper, higher and narrower, until finally he followed a series of switchbacks, up the side of a hill above Flathead Lake, to a gravelled driveway fronting a gable-roofed log house.

Jeff climbed out and walked around, stretching his legs after such a long drive, while his car sidled over to the grassy slope, there sucking up leaves and twigs and any other available biomass. He tucked his hands into the pockets of his down jacket, and gazed down the slope of the wooded hill to where the waters of the lake shimmered gold and silver. The evening was drawing in as the sun dipped down towards the peaks on the far side of the lake, the last of the rain clouds evaporating even as their fading shadows drifted across hills dense with larch and aspen.

When he felt ready, he walked around to the rear of the cabin and checked the mini-tokamak that supplied it with power. He next headed over to a tool shed standing below some trees that grew up the slope behind the cabin, where he stepped inside and cleared away a tarpaulin laid across the floor. Beneath was a metal doorspe a combination lock. He rotated it in different directions a couple of times until the lid clicked open, then withdrew a foil blister-pack from inside his jacket and placed it inside the safe, before locking it once more.

As he returned to the car to collect his luggage, Jeff accessed his UP and saw there were new messages waiting for him, all left by Olivia. He left them unopened, afraid that, if he did read them, he might make the mistake of calling her back and telling her all the things he’d struggled to keep hidden from her.

He woke with a start not long after dawn. He had been dreaming of Site 17, of walking through the abyssal dark with lights strung along on either side. Farad had been standing in front of him, his face full of alarm, shouting at him silently through his visor.

Jeff got up, his body stiff and sore, and ate a sparse breakfast before driving the rental downhill to where a trail met the road close by the lake. He still retained vivid memories of hiking along this same trail in what now felt like another lifetime. He’d been working on his graduate thesis the first time he’d come here and, although he’d hiked across other parks and trails in the years since, Flathead Lake still held a special place in his heart. The girl he’d brought with him all those years ago was long gone, but he’d come back almost every year since. The bonuses he and Olivia had received for their work on the Jupiter platform had gone towards the down-payment on the cabin, and they had spent several summers there together, before things had soured.

Later hiking trips, whether with other people or on his own, had taught him that particularly intractable problems – whether related to his work in the University of California’s exobiology department or to his intermittent love life – could often be best solved during his traversing of the trails scattered around the lake. On such occasions, the mountains and sky became a great blank canvas for his thoughts, a cosmic whiteboard that left him feeling he understood the way the world worked just a little bit better than before.

But this time was different. This time he didn’t want to think at all. He wanted to become lost in the scent of budding wildflowers, the sight of whitetail deer or the occasional elk picking their way down forest slopes, or amidst the meltwater cascading down those same slopes in the first weeks of spring.

He pushed himself hard for the first half-dozen kilometres, sweating beneath his down jacket, despite the freezing temperatures, his feet chafing painfully inside stiff new hiking boots. And, for a while, it worked; but the first time he stopped to eat a granola bar and take in the view, looking out across a world he could almost imagine was devoid of people, all he could really see was a great pyramidal mass under a starless sky, squatting on an airless plain in a future he would have found unimaginable if he hadn’t already visited it.

He felt, to his bitter annoyance, lonely. So when an unexpected visitor appeared as if out of nowhere, a few days later, he felt pathetically grateful even while he knew the only reason they could possibly be here was to bring him very bad news.

Jeff squinted into the brilliant morning light, beyond the porch, to see the lean figure of Dan Rush, his long, sallow features and weather-beaten skin somehow more appropriate to an ageing cowboy than a materials analyst.

‘Dan?’ Jeff peered at him groggily, his dressing gown clutched around his shoulders, as he’d slept well past midday. ‘What the fuck are you doing out here?’

Dan rocked from foot to foot on the narrow porch, looking at him expectantly, dressed only in a light sports jacket more suited to visiting a bar than the great outdoors. A second hire car was parked near Jeff’s own, where it shuffled closer to the verge and began tearing up the same patch of grass, sucking the biomass deep into its guts prior to converting it to ethanol.

Jeff glanced down and saw that Dan was wearing dress shoes, even less appropriate to the Rockies, at the tail end of winter.

‘Will you just let me in?’ Dan demanded, shoving his hands into his pockets and shivering. ‘It’s cold as hell out here.’

Jeff pressed the fingers of one hand into the corners of his eyes before stepping to one side, waving for Dan to come in.

Dan headed straight for the fire that Jeff had left smouldering overnight in the hearth. He leaned over it with his collar pulled up, still shivering, rubbing his hands vigorously before the naked heat. He glanced briefly at the dozen beer bottles piled up on a table next to the couch, but elected to say nothing.

‘I’ve got coffee on the go,’ Jeff mumbled, head still throbbing from his night of drinking and channel-surfing. ‘You want some?’

Dan glanced at him and nodded, before returning his attention to the hearth.

Jeff checked the filter had finished dripping the last of the Arabica into a pot, and nuked a packet of frozen waffles while he was at it. Given the long drive to the cabin, he guessed Dan probably hadn’t eaten any breakfast. He then grabbed a couple of mugs and put them on a tray, along with the coffee and waffles. By the time he returned to the living room, Dan had pulled a chair up next to the hearth, and sat there staring contemplatively into the flames.

They ate in silence at first, Jeff watching Dan plough his way through most of the waffles. He seemed twitchy as a bird, tension visible in the set of his jaw and the way he kept massaging his hands in the rare moments they weren’t holding either food or coffee.

‘How did you find me out here?’ Jeff finally asked. ‘I don’t remember telling anyone where I’d be.’

‘We did agree to stay in touch, right?’ said Dan.

‘Yes, but that’s not the same as telling each other where we’d be. Why didn’t you just get in touch the way we agreed, rather than actually hauling your ass all the way out here?’

‘Your ex-wife in Vermont told me where to find you,’ Dan replied. ‘She told me she thought you’d been acting strangely and that, if you’d gone anywhere at all, it was probably here.’

Jeff groaned and leaned back, closing his eyes for a moment. ‘How did you find her?’

‘I met her one time when she came down to Orlando to meet you, remember?’ Dan replied. ‘Right after you got back together with her, and you’d already mentioned she lived in Jacksonville. There’s only one Olivia Jury there. I told her I badly needed to get hold of you.’ He looked around the room. ‘So why did you decide to come all the way out here?’

‘I’ve been hiding in case someone figured out we’d hacked the Tau Ceti databases. I got tired of sleeping in motels and thought I might as well hole up here as anywhere else, at least until I heard from Farad.’

‘And you didn’t bring Olivia with you?’

‘I thought I’d be putting her in danger if I did.’

‘You haven’t told her anything?’

‘No.’ Jeff shook his head. ‘You still haven’t told me why you’re here.’

Dan chewed his food for several long seconds, as he gazed into the flames. ‘I came to tell you Lucy’s dead.’

Jeff stared at him, his hangover suddenly forgotten. He remembered the sight of her crouching by the pit next to Dan, in the moments before they found Mitchell.

‘Police found her in her car in a motel parking lot.’ Dan finally looked back up. ‘She’d been on her way to Miami.’ He took a sip of his coffee and finally met Jeff’s eye. ‘Officially it was a heart attack, but she’d called me the day before and told me she was certain she was being followed. She wanted to know if I’d noticed anything like that myself.’

‘That’s . . . that’s dreadful.’

‘Terrible,’ Dan agreed. ‘And particularly worrying since Lou Winston also appears to have vanished. First thing I did after hearing about Lucy was try to get hold of him. Turns out he has a place on one of those floating platforms just offshore from New Orleans, but his family reported him missing more than a day ago.’

Jeff felt like a cavity had been hollowed out inside his chest. ‘They know about the files, right? And now they’re coming after us.’

Dan shook his head, his expression bleak. ‘Don’t be so certain that’s the reason. I tried to get hold of people from the other sci-eval teams, people who’re supposed to be back home by now, and nobody knows where they are. My guess is Hanover or somebody higher up the food chain – Fowler, maybe, or Borusov – figured the civilian staff were too much of a security risk to be allowed to live.’

Jeff gaped at him. ‘You don’t seriously think they’re all dead?’

Dan shrugged. ‘As far as I’m concerned, we’re all that’s left of the sci-eval teams. If we’re lucky, they don’t even know about the files, but either way they’re still going to come looking for both of us.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

Dan took a sip of his coffee before replying. ‘Where I live in Orlando is right across the street from a hotel. After I heard about Lou, I hired a room there with a good view of the inside of my own apartment. I wasn’t there more than a couple of hours before I saw someone sneaking around inside my place. I grabbed my rucksack and left town as fast as I could.’

‘Maybe we should talk to the police.’

‘What could we tell them? The only thing that connects us to each other is our work on the Founder Network, and officially that doesn’t even exist. They’d have laughed us out of the station as soon as we started saying anything about Founders or ancient alien artefacts.’

Jeff nodded, feeling his heart sink. Everyone on the sci-eval teams based out at Tau Ceti knew that the catastrophe that would wipe out life on Earth was due some time during the next thirty years. They had lodged protests regarding the restriction on their access to the data recovered from the near-future, and it hadn’t helped that the time-stamps had been carefully removed from the few images and scraps of information they were granted access to. Something was being deliberately kept from them and, being scientists, it was only a matter of time before one of them took matters into their own hands.

Stealing a copy of the entire database had been Farad’s idea, and he’d first approached Lucy, since she was the one with the in-depth knowledge of the Tau Ceti station’s security protocols. With her help, and with Jeff and Dan’s more than willing support, they had found a way to hack into the station’s networks and copy the unaltered records recovered from the near future. Unfortunately, the files they had recovered proved to be protected by a particularly impenetrable form of encryption, one that Farad had assured them would take time and considerable skill to break.

The four of them had agreed to return to their respective homes at roughly the same time, Farad volunteering to try and find some way to reverse-engineer the protected files in the meantime. And then, once they had acquired the proof they needed, they would go public.

A sick chill wrapped itself around Jeff’s bones as he poured himself another coffee. He noticed his hands were shaking. ‘Then I guess we’re lucky we managed to stay alive this long.’

Dan shot him an exasperated look and pointed at the cabin’s wall-screen. ‘Don’t count your chickens just yet. Haven’t you seen the news?’

‘I didn’t come here to watch the news. The whole point of a place like this is to avothe outside world.’

‘Right.’ Dan stood and gestured towards the screen. It came to life and he quickly navigated to one of the main news-feeds, in which Jeff saw an aerial view of the ocean. The water was foaming for kilometres around, while a headline caption suggested they might be witnessing an undersea volcano. An inlaid satellite image revealed that the disturbance was taking place a few hundred kilometres north of the Mariana Islands, nearly halfway around the world.

‘It’s already started,’ said Jeff, that sick feeling getting worse.

‘I figure we’ve got no more than a couple of weeks before it’s all over,’ said Dan. ‘You’ve seen the way the ASI and military have been building up reinforcements all around the Florida Array. Training exercise, my ass. They’re trying to tell us the increased security is because of some hijack, but I figure our glorious leaders are going to evacuate themselves to the colonies before things turn really nasty. The last thing they need is us finding proof that they were the ones responsible for all this before they have a chance to make their getaway.’

Jeff swallowed. ‘I guess it’s too late to talk to the press.’

Dan nodded. ‘Even if we did, we’d only be making ourselves easy targets. And we’d have no way of proving what we know – not unless we can find some way inside those encrypted files. You still have your copy of them, right?’

Jeff gave an involuntary glance towards the rear of the cabin. ‘It’s somewhere safe.’

‘Uh-huh. I hope so.’

Jeff rotated his coffee mug between both hands. ‘You really think they’re going to try and take over the colonies by force?’

‘What else are they going to do? Ask them for refugee status?’ Dan barked. ‘Fat chance of that. They’re going to want to run things themselves, and their job’ll be that much easier if they can find a way to convince the people out there they had nothing to do with the end of life on Earth.’ Dan stabbed at his chest with a finger. ‘But we’re the ones who can tell them all what really happened. We’re witnesses to the greatest crime in history. So we’ll make our own escape, and stop these bastards in their tracks.’

‘Escape where?’

‘To the colonies.’

Jeff sighed and put his mug down. ‘You’re not thinking logically. How could you possibly get inside the Array, and past the ASI’s own cops if they’re out looking for us?’

‘I know people in the Florida Array, and up at Copernicus,’ said Dan, his expression fervent. ‘People I trust. They can help us get through safely.’ His hands tightened into fists, his expression intent. Jeff was reminded of a deer standing poised in the long savannah grass, ready to take flight at the first sign of danger.

‘You didn’t say whether anything’s happened to Farad. The files are useless unless he managed to find some way to crack them.’

Dan shook his head. ‘I tried getting hold of him, but he seems to be completely offline. Even if he’s okay, I couldn’t begin to tell you for sure where he is.’

Jeff wondered if that didn’t make him the most sensible out of all of them. ‘He’s on Newton, visiting family – or that’s his cover story, anyway. What if we can’t warn him before the ASI locate him?’

Dan regarded him bleakly. ‘Then we’re screwed, unless we can find a way to hack the database files ourselves. That’s not to mention the risk we’d be taking if we actively went looking for him. We could wind up making it easier for them to catch us, as well as him.’

‘There must be someone else we could send the files to, who could help us?’

Dan sighed and shook his head. ‘Remember, the files are stored in an intelligent format.’

‘Lucy mentioned something about that, but I didn’t quite follow it all.’

‘It’s a compression technology that automatically transmits an alert back to its point of origin whenever it’s sent through any kind of network. And if it doesn’t have explicit permission to be transferred on that network, it tells the ASI exactly where it’s been and where it’s headed, making it even easier to track us down. And assuming we just went ahead and forwarded the information to a news agency or anyone else, there’s a chance the whole package might erase itself if they didn’t use the correct decryption method. That’s why we’re keeping our copies strictly offline.’

Jeff nodded, embarrassed now that he hadn’t paid more attention at the time.

Dan’s expression grew more contemplative. ‘But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t maybe still find a way to break that encryption, if there was someone we know much closer to hand, someone we could trust. I was thinking about Olivia, as a matter of fact. She’s a network-security consultant, isn’t she? Would she be able to do it?’

Jeff felt himself stiffen. ‘I don’t want Olivia involved in any of this.’

‘We’re all involved in this,’ said Dan. ‘Everyone on the whole goddamn planet is involved. Or would you rather just wait a couple of days and let her figure out what’s going on along with the rest of the human race?’

Jeff felt a sudden, desperate need to be with her. ‘It’s not that simple. We were supposed to spend time together after I got home. Instead I barely stopped by long enough to tell her I was going to disappear for a while, but I couldn’t tell her the reason why. I mean, the less she s, the better, right?’ He had tried to assure Olivia that he would explain everything once the time was right, but even as he’d spoken the words, the look on her face had told him how very inadequate they were. ‘Maybe we could just wait and see if Farad tries to get in touch before—’

‘No.’ Dan shook his head firmly. ‘The longer we wait, the more chance that whoever caught up with Lucy and Lou will find us as well.’ He gazed pointedly at Jeff. ‘I had an easy enough time finding you, so how hard do you think the ASI would find it?’

Jeff stared at him, mute with shock.

‘Exactly.’ Dan nodded, half to himself. ‘Your UP can be traced with a court order. Every time you buy something, or rent a car or anything else, your contacts know where you are and when you were there. Same goes for me. All the ASI have to do is prove sufficient cause.’

Jeff swallowed. ‘We could get ourselves new contacts.’

Dan shook his head, ‘Purchasing them legally leaves us right back where we started. No, we need black-market contacts preloaded with fake UPs, the whole works.’

‘I have no idea where to get hold of something like that.’

‘I do, though,’ Dan replied, picking up his rucksack and dropping it on a table standing near the couch. He dug out a slim black rod and then a smaller, metal oblong the size and shape of a credit chip, dumping them next to each other on the table.

He picked up the black rod. ‘I used this to fry every locator node in my hire car and clothing. You’ll need to swipe it down over all your own clothes, as well.’ He put the rod down and picked up the metal oblong. ‘This is what car-jacking crews use to override a vehicle’s locking system.’

‘Where did you get hold of this stuff?’

‘I didn’t,’ Dan said simply. ‘I built it myself. There’s hardly an electronic lock or locator in the world that can stand up to even crude hacks like this one.’

Jeff glanced towards the door. ‘So your car . . . ?’

‘Is stolen,’ Dan confirmed. ‘I also made some enquiries on the way here and found out about a guy in Missoula who can get us untraceable UPs. Nobody will know who we are.’

‘Why not just use unregistered UPs? They’re good enough in an emergency.’

‘But they won’t help us get through Array security, will they? We need complete false identities for that.’

‘Okay.’ Jeff nodded. ‘Do you want me to come to Missoula with you?’

Dan squinted at him. ‘Do people around here know you?’

‘Some of them, yes.’

‘Did you go into town on your way here?’

‘Nope.’

Dan thought for a moment. ‘I need to head down to Lakeside just now, and try and find another car. I can ditch the one I brought while I’m at it, but I think it’s best I do that on my own.’

‘Why?’

‘Nobody there knows who I am, whereas you need to stay out of sight in case someone’s been making enquiries about you. It shouldn’t take me more than a half day, at the most, to track this guy down. If it takes longer, I can sleep in the back of the car and be back here by tomorrow morning. What supplies do you have?’

‘You mean like food, that kind of thing?’ Jeff glanced at the beer bottles piled on the table. ‘That was pretty much it. I meant to pick more supplies up today.’

Dan sighed. ‘Okay, if I’ve got enough time, I’ll grab us something for the trip, but I’d rather not use any rest stops on the way if I can avoid it. You get yourself ready and I’ll be back as soon as I can. Sound like a plan?’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ Jeff agreed. ‘Assuming I still believe we even had this conversation after I have some more coffee.’

Dan nodded towards the wand-like device. ‘Remember to use that on all your clothes as well as your car,’ he advised. ‘Just hold down the button, swipe it over your stuff, and the readout’ll warn you if you missed anything.’

‘And the car-jacker?’

‘Just press it against any car’s ID panel, and you’ll be in after a couple of seconds.’

‘That’s it?’

Dan grinned. ‘I know. Scandalous, isn’t it?’

He walked over to the door, hesitating as he put his hand on the handle. ‘We’re not to blame for all of this, Jeff. We even warned the ones who are. I really don’t know how much more we could have done.’

‘I wish I could feel that sure.’

Dan pulled the door open, letting in a blast of freezing mountain air. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

‘Okay.’ Jeff pulled his crumpled bathrobe closer around him. ‘If anything happens, should I call you?’

‘If anything happens, it’ll probably be too late.’

‘Right.’ Jeff felt far from reassured. ‘Okay. I’ll be waiting for you.’