straightened the ship. The silence was replaced with howling noise and brutally high gees, although not so bad as it would have been if we’d ridden the reentry all the way down. The sky was all thick gray blankets of water vapor for a while, then we broke through into a view that trapped your breath and didn’t give it back. Warm blue waters sidled up with ivory beaches that were busy fighting off the advances of verdant jungle. Mountains and hills rolled underneath it all, revealing teasing glimpses of luscious valleys filled with mysterious ruins of concrete and steel. It was a quarantine zone, but not any old QZ—the Amazon.
I landed, excuse me, Medusa landed the Aegis on a strip of beach, and I wandered back into my private quarters to change into something a little more suitable for hiking through jungle.
When I returned, Campbell was bent over one of the chairs facing away from me, looking at one of Medusa’s head’s up displays. Campbell turned his head slightly; enough to let me know he’d heard the door open.
“Have you ever seen a view like that?” he asked, still looking at the holographic image.
I slapped the back of one of my hands lightly with the other as a reminder not to take advantage of poor admin Urban boys who had no idea what a girl like me could do with a straight line like that. “Yeah, it’s something, isn’t it? Come on, let’s go for a walk.”
Outside, the beach air hit us hard, hot and thick and sweet, like trying to swim though honey. Seagulls played touch-tag on the breeze, dipping down occasionally to filch tidbits from the wet sand or stand there watching the waves churn up creamy white streams of foam. The sky was blue, startlingly blue. The heat haze broke up the beach in the distance into pale yellow ribbons.
Campbell stood there watching it all with an expression of longing and wonder on his face. The light breeze blew his braided hair back. He seemed as surprised and amazed by the wind as by the scenery.
“You’ve never been outside.” I wasn’t asking a question.
He swallowed, and shook his head. “No.” His eyes were bright and moist. He looked out at the ocean, stared at it as if he could memorize it, as if it would vanish the moment he looked away. Campbell’s yearning was so naked and raw that I felt uncomfortable. He unwittingly answered one of my own questions: he could never have been one of the MOJ officers assigned to QZ slash-and-burn, a ‘Ghost,’ if he had never been outside.
We stayed like that for maybe a half an hour, without a word spoken. I sat down on the beach and carved runes in the sand and waited for him to finish with his communion.
“It’s all about control.”
He turned and looked back at me. “How’s that again?”
“Control. Look around us. It’s all beautiful and wild and nobody controls it. I’ve been to two dozen worlds in the Sarcodinay Empire, and they always put up those damned megacity domes, even on worlds so lovely you think they must have slipped hallucinogens into the water. They even have the stupid things on their own world, and I’ve heard the wilds of Sarcos are the very definition of magic.” I let sand spill out between my fingers. “They can’t control wilderness or atmosphere. They can’t control oceans. So they hide inside their megacities with recycled air and artificial parks, where everything is safe and pleasant. It’s never dangerous. Of course, that’s dull, so they spice up their lives with gladiator fights and holo games and get a vicarious thrill out of the military conquering other worlds, secure in the knowledge that theirs is the most powerful race in the galaxy, which is under their control.”
“You forgot the part where we were destroying Terra’s ecosystems with pollution and overpopulation and our race would have been extinct from the Plague if the Sarcodinay hadn’t come along.”
“That doesn’t excuse what they did. Go ahead and save the kid from putting her finger in the light socket if it makes you feel better, but that’s no reason to lock her in a closet for the rest of her life because you’re not sure if she learned her lesson.”
“You really hate them, don’t you? Your parents—”
I snapped my teeth together and stood up quickly. He stepped back with the suddenness of a man expecting violence, hands half-raised to intercept a blow. I looked up into his eyes and found them clouded and wary, which was the look that came into every man’s eyes that looked at me, sooner or later. Except Paul. And... No. Business.
“I’ll show you why I hate them,” I said. I turned around and walked up the beach, to the green mists of jungle. Campbell followed me.
ggg
We walked until beach became strand and turned to jungle, escorted by sharp chirps and calls that snapped and crackled from the trees and through the underbrush. Sometimes we walked on dirt, but as often it was concrete or asphalt, long since cracked and broken by the elements. You could walk for miles and not realize this had once been a home to millions. The wilderness reclaims its own so quickly.
“This is a dead city, isn’t it? We’re in one of the Quarantine Zones?”
“On the very edges of it. The real city was that way.” I gestured vaguely ahead of us.
“The pattern of the trees is strange.” He stopped and bent over a lichen-covered tree trunk, dead and gradually being transformed into recycled compost, but for now still recognizable as something that once stretched up into the canopy. “All these fallen trees... is that normal?”
“Oh not at all. The blast wave knocked them over.”
“The what now?” His voice hitched a little, no doubt because he was used to phrases like ‘blast wave’ traveling in the company of other collections of words like ‘minimum safe distance,’ ‘electromagnetic flash,’ and ‘hard radiation.’
I moved aside the foliage of a giant bush and held out my arm in case Campbell decided to charge forward recklessly. We stood on the edge of a precipice. Literally, as well as figuratively.
The crater was so large it was almost unidentifiable—a sharp, slick slope of hard rock that was shiny and smooth as the surface of glacial ice. The edge of it, skirted with the jungle that spilled over but could find no purchase to grow down the sides, faded into the misty distance. The crater bottom was filled with water, spilling over from the side that faced the ocean or collected from the rains, its walls thinned by the slope towards the beach so that the melted rock thrown up by the original blast was breaking up into dots of island rocks and archipelago formations. In few hundred years, erosion and surface weathering would turn the crater rim into something only decipherable by geologists, but for the moment even the most ill-informed amateur could tell that this was result of violent cataclysm.
“What...what happened? A nuclear blast-?”
“Impact crater,” I corrected. “The Sarcodinay used a mass driver to hurl an ice comet harvested from the edges of our solar system. Ultimately just as destructive as a nuclear device, but with no inconvenient radioactive fallout. The blast was the equivalent of the detonation of a 100 megaton device; it destroyed everything in 200 kilometers, and the shockwave leveled all of the jungle in this region. The tsunami that hit the coast of Africa was over 40 feet high, and a floating megacity, ELEVEN.two, was ripped off its moorings, killing over half the residents. The cloud of dirt and debris kicked up into the atmosphere by the initial impact and the fires that followed took over a month to clear, and if they had used a ball of rock instead of ice, would have caused an extinction event.”
“I don’t understand. This was done deliberately?”
“You wanted to know where I was between the ages of eight and fourteen?” I pointed towards the large open wound. “I was right over there, at a place called the Kaimer School. It was a Sarcodinay top-secret research and training facility, run by Vana-Nus Lorvan, home to over a thousand staff, teachers and children. They put it here, because this place was as far off the grid as it’s possible to be: not even Wilders come here.”
“Why not?” He looked around. “A city here would have access to fish, to the ocean...”
“This is Rio de Janeiro. Rather, it was.”
“Keepers.??
? He closed his mouth, swallowed, and looked around him as if he expected an ambush to spring out of the jungle at any moment. “I would have thought they’d have razed this place decades ago.”
“What would be the point? It wasn’t the city that carried the Plague, it was the people who lived in it, and that damage was long done by the time Sarcodinay arrived to offer their help.” I stared at my hands, clenched them into fists, forced myself to uncoil the fingers one by one. “All this happened because nine striketeams, coordinating with two inside agents who turned off the automated systems and disabled security, attacked the school. They killed most of the staff and promised to rescue as many of the children as would agree to go with them. Not everyone would—some were too brainwashed, too loyal, and went down fighting.”
“You?”
I smiled. “Paul and I were the inside agents. I also told them that I had very valuable information on multi-dimensional theoretical mathematics and quantum modeling they did not want to have slip through their fingers.”
“What?”
“I told them I knew how to build a hyperdrive,” I explained. “So when most of the others were separated up and put with striketeams to be escorted back out through the jungle, Paul and I were placed on a shuttle heading straight up into outer space, guarded by a striketeam known for being able to