A shell went off somewhere east of the hotel, the closest yet. White powder rained down from the ceiling; one corner of the polymer window popped loose from its frame, and curled up like a dead leaf. I squatted on the floor, covering my head, cursing myself for not leaving with De Groot and Mosala—and cursing Akili for ignoring my messages. Why couldn't I accept the fact that I meant nothing to ver? I'd been of some use in the struggle to protect Mosala from the heretic ACs and I'd brought ver the news which supposedly revealed the truth behind Distress… but now that the great information plague was coming, I was irrelevant.
The door swung open. An elderly Fijian woman stepped into the room; the hotel staff wore no uniforms, but I thought I'd seen her before, working in the building. She announced curtly, "We're evacuating the city. Take what you can carry." The floor had stopped moving, but I rose to my feet unsteadily, unsure if I'd heard her correctly.
I'd already packed my clothes. I grabbed my suitcase, and followed her out into the corridor. My room was just past the stairs, and she was heading for the next door along. I gestured at the other half of the corridor, some twenty rooms. "Have you checked—?"
"No." For a moment, she seemed reluctant to entrust me with the task, but then she relented. She held up her pass key and let my notepad clone its IR signature.
I left my suitcase by the stairs. The first four rooms were empty. More shells were exploding all the time now, most of them mercifully distant. I kept one eye on the screen as I waved my notepad at the locks; someone was collating all the damage reports and posting an annotated map of the city. So far, twenty-one buildings had been demolished—mainly apartment blocks. There was no question that if strategic targets had been chosen, they would have been hit; maybe the most valuable infrastructure was being spared—saved for the use of a puppet government to be installed by a second wave of invaders, who'd "rescue" the island from "anarchy"? Or maybe the aim was simply to level as many residential buildings as possible, in order to drive the greatest number of people out into the desert.
I found Lowell Parker—the Atlantica journalist I'd seen at Mosala's media conference—crouched on the floor, shaking… much as the woman from the hotel had found me. He recovered quickly, and seemed to accept the news of the evacuation gratefully—as if all he'd been waiting for was word of a definite plan, even if it came from someone else who didn't have a clue.
In the next ten or twelve rooms, I came across four more people— journalists or academics, probably, but no one I recognized—most of them already packed, just waiting to be told what to do. No one stopped to question the wisdom of the message I was passing on—and I badly wanted to get away from the bombing, myself—but the prospect of a million people pouring out of the city was beginning to fill me with dread. The greatest disasters of the last fifty years had all been among refugees fleeing war zones. Maybe it would be smarter to take my chances playing Russian roulette with the shells.
I knew the last room was a suite, the mirror image of Mosala and De Groot's; the architectural symmetry of the building demanded it. The cloned pass key signature unlocked the door—but there was a chain keeping it from opening more than a crack.
I called out, loudly. No one answered. I tried using my shoulder—and bruised myself badly, to no effect. Swearing, I kicked the door near the chain—which was twice as painful, almost splitting my stitches, but it worked.
Henry Buzzo was sprawled on the floor beneath the window, flat on his back. I approached, dismayed, doubting that there'd be much chance of getting help amid all the chaos. He was wearing a red velvet bathrobe, and his hair was wet, as if he'd just stepped out of the shower. A bioweapon from the extremists, finally taking hold? Or just a heart attack from the shock of the explosions?
Neither. The bathrobe was soaked with blood. A hole had been blasted in his chest. Not by a sniper; the window was intact. I squatted down and pressed two fingers against his carotid artery. He was dead, but still warm.
I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth, trying not to scream with frustration. After all it had taken to get Mosala off the island, Buzzo could have saved himself so easily. A few words admitting the flaw in his work, and he'd still be alive.
It wasn't pride that had killed him, though—screw that. He'd had a right to his stubbornness, a right to defend his theory, flawed or not. He was dead for precisely one reason: some psychotic AC had sacrificed him to the mirage of transcendence.
I found two umale security guards in the second bedroom—one fully dressed; one had probably been sleeping. Both looked like they'd been shot in the face. I was in shock now—more dazed than sickened—but I finally had enough presence of mind to start filming. Maybe there'd be a trial, eventually, and if the hotel was about to be reduced to rubble, there'd be no other evidence. I surveyed the bodies in close-up, then walked from room to room, sweeping the camera around indiscriminately, hoping to capture enough detail for a complete reconstruction.
The bathroom door was locked. I felt an idiotic surge of hope; maybe a fourth person had witnessed the crime, but had managed to hide here in safety. I rattled the handle, and I was on the verge of yelling out words of reassurance, when the meaning of the chained front door finally penetrated my stupor.
I stood frozen for several seconds, at first not quite believing it—and then afraid to move.
Because I could hear someone breathing. Soft and shallow—but not soft enough. Struggling for control. Centimeters away.
I couldn't let go of the handle; my fingers were clenched tight. I placed my left hand flat against the cool surface of the door, at the height where the killer's face would be—as if hoping to sense the contours, to gauge the distance from skin to skin by the resonant pitch of every screaming nerve end.
Who was it? Who was the extremists' assassin? Who had had the opportunity to infect me with the engineered cholera? Some stranger I'd passed in the Phnom Penh transit lounge, or the crowded bazaar of Dili airport? The Polynesian businessman who'd sat beside me, on the last leg of the flight? Indrani Lee!
I was shaking with horror, certain that a bullet would pierce my skull in a matter of seconds—but part of me still wanted, badly, to break open the door and see.
I could have broadcast the moment live on the net—and gone out in a blaze of revelation.
Another shell exploded nearby, the shock wave resonating through the building so powerfully that the frame almost flexed itself free of the lock.
I turned and fled.
The procession out of the city was an ordeal—but perhaps never more than it had to be. From my snail's-eye view of the crowd, everyone looked as terrified, as claustrophobic, as desperate for momentum as I was—but they remained stubbornly, defiantly patient, inching forward like novice tightrope walkers, calculating every movement, sweating from the tension between fear and restraint. Children wailed in the distance, but the adults around me spoke in guarded whispers between the ground-shaking detonations. I kept waiting for an apartment block to collapse in front of us, burying a hundred people and crushing a hundred more in the panic of retreat—but it failed to happen, again and again, and after twenty excruciating minutes we'd left the shelling behind.
The procession kept moving. For a long time, we remained jammed in a herd, shoulder-to-shoulder, with no choice but to keep step—but once we were out of the built-up suburbs and into the industrial areas, where the factories and warehouses were set in wide expanses of bare rock, there was suddenly space to move freely. As the opaque scrum around me melted into near transparency, I could see half a dozen quad-cycles ahead in the distance, and even an electric truck keeping pace.
By then we'd been walking for almost two hours, but the sun was still low, and as the crowd spread out a welcome cool breeze moved in between us. My spirits were lifting, slightly. Despite the scale of the exodus, I'd witnessed no real violence; the worst I'd seen so far was an enraged couple screaming accusations of infidelity at each other as they trudged along, side by side, each holding up one end of a bundle of possessions wrapped in orange tent fabric.
It was clear that the whole evacuation had been rehearsed—or at least widely discussed, in great detail—long before the invasion. Civil defense plan D: head for the coast. And a planned evacuation, with tents, with blankets, with solar-rechargeable stoves, didn't have to be the disaster, here, that it might have been almost anywhere else. We were moving closer to the reefs and the ocean farms—the source of all the island's food. The freshwater arteries in the rock could be tapped with relative ease, as could the sewage treatment conduits. If exposure, starvation, dehydration and disease were the greatest killers of modern warfare, the people of Stateless seemed to be uniquely equipped to resist them all. The only thing that worried me was the certainty that the mercenaries understood all of this, perfectly. If their aim with the shelling had been to drive us out of the city, they must have known how relatively little misery it would cause. Maybe they believed that selective footage of the exodus would still be enough to confirm the political failure of Stateless in most people's eyes—and with or without scenes of dysentery and starvation, there was no doubt that the position of the anti-boycott nations had already been weakened. I had a queasy suspicion, though, that merely evicting a million people into tent villages wouldn't be enough for EnGeneUity.
I'd transmitted the footage from Buzzo's suite, along with a brief deposition putting it in context, to the FBI and to the security firm's head office in Suva. It had seemed the proper way to let the families of the three men hear of their deaths, and to set in motion as much of an investigation as was possible under the circumstances. I hadn't sent a copy to SeeNet—less out of respect for the bereaved relatives, than out of a reluctance to choose between admitting to Lydia that I'd concealed the facts about Mosala and the ACs… and compounding the crime, by pretending that I had no idea why Buzzo had been assassinated. Whatever I did, I was probably screwed in the long run, but I wanted to delay the inevitable for a few more days, if possible.
Some three hours' slow march from the city, I caught sight of a multi-colored blur in the distance, which soon resolved itself into a vast patchwork of vivid green and orange squares, scattered across the rock a few kilometers ahead. We'd just left the central plateau behind, and the ground now sloped gently down all the way to the coast; whether it was that modest gradient, or the end of the march coming into view, the going seemed suddenly easier. Thirty minutes later, the people around me stopped and began to pitch their own tents.
I sat on my suitcase and rested for a while, then dutifully commenced recording. Whether the evacuation had been rehearsed or not, the island itself collaborated with the refugees so fully as they set up camp that the process looked more like the smooth slotting into place of missing components in an elaborate machine—the logical completion of a function the bare rock had always implied—than any kind of desperate attempt to improvise in an emergency. One tear-sized droplet of signaling peptide was enough to start the cascade which instructed the lithophiles to open a shaft to a buried freshwater artery—and by the time I'd seen the third pump installed, I'd learned to recognize the characteristic swirl of green-and-blue trace minerals which marked the sites where wells could be formed. Sewerage took a little longer—the shafts were wider and deeper, and the access points rarer.
This was the flipside of Ned Landers' mad, tire-eating survivalist nightmare: autonomy-through-biotech, but without the extremism and paranoia. I only hoped that the founders and designers of Stateless— the Californian anarchists who'd worked for EnGeneUity all those decades ago—were still alive to see how well their invention was serving its purpose.
By noon, with royal blue marquees providing shade for the water pumps, bright red tents erected over the latrines, and even a rudimentary first-aid center, I believed I understood what the medic had meant when she'd warned me not to think that I knew better than the locals. I checked the damage map of the city; it was no longer being updated, but at the last recorded count, over two hundred buildings—including the hotel—had been leveled.
Maybe technoliberation could never transform the unforgiving rock of the continents into anything as hospitable as Stateless—but in a world accustomed to images of squalid refugee camps, choking on dust or drowning in mud… maybe the contrasting vision of the renegades' village could still symbolize the benefits of an end to the gene patent laws, more persuasively than the island at peace ever had.
I recorded everything, and dispatched the footage to SeeNet's news room with narration which I hoped would limit the perverse downside: the less dramatic the anarchists' plight, the less chance there was of any grass roots political backlash against the invasion. I didn't want to see Stateless discredited, with commentators tutting wisely that it had always been destined to slide into the abyss—but when it took a thousand corpses a day to raise a flicker of interest from the average viewer, if I painted too sanguine a picture the exodus would be a non-story.
The first truck from the coast which I sighted ran out of food long before it came near us. By three p.m., though, with the sixth delivery, two market tents had been set up near one of the water pumps and an ad hoc "restaurant" was under construction. Forty minutes later, I sat on a folding chair in the shade of a photovoltaic awning, with a bowl of steaming sea urchin stew on my lap. There were a dozen other people eating out, forced to flee without their own cooking equipment; they eyed my camera suspiciously, but admitted that, of course, there'd been plans for leaving the city—first drafted long ago, but discussed and refined every year.
I felt more optimistic than ever—and more out of synch with the mood of the locals. They seemed to be taking the success of the exodus (a small miracle, in my eyes) for granted—but now that they'd come through it unscathed, as they'd always expected, and were waiting for the mercenaries to make the next move, everything had become less certain.
"What do you think will happen in the next twenty-four hours?" I asked one woman with a small boy on her lap. She wrapped her arms around the child protectively, and said nothing.
Outside, someone roared with pain. The restaurant emptied in seconds. I managed to penetrate the crowd which had formed in the narrow square between the markets and the restaurant—and then found myself forced back as they drew away in panic.
A young Fijian man had been lofted meters above the ground by invisible machinery; he was wide-eyed with terror, crying out for help. He was struggling pitifully—but his arms hung at his sides, bloody and ruined, white bone protruding through the flesh of one elbow. The thing which had taken him was too strong to be fought.
People were wailing and shouting—and trying to force their way out of the crowd. I resisted too long, transfixed with horror, and I was shoved to my knees. I covered my head and crouched down, but I was still an obstacle to the stampede. Someone heavy tripped on me, jabbing me with knees and elbows, then leaning on me to regain his balance, almost crushing my spine. I cowered on the ground as the buffeting continued, wishing I could rise to my feet, but certain that any attempt would only see me knocked flat on my back and trampled in the face. The man's desperate pleading was like a second rain of blows; I tucked my head deeper into my arms, trying to blot out the sound. Somewhere nearby, a tent wall collapsed gently to the ground.
Long seconds passed, and no one else collided with me. I raised my head; the square was deserted. The man was still alive, but his eyes were rolling up into his skull intermittently, his jaw working feebly. Both his legs had been shattered now. Blood trickled down onto his invisible torturer—each droplet halting in mid fall and spreading out for a moment, hinting at a tangible surface before vanishing into the hidden carapace. I searched the ground for my camera, emitting soft angry choking noises. My throat was knotted, my chest constricted; every breath, every movement felt like a punishment. I found the camera and attached it, then rose shakily to my feet and began recording.
The man stared at me in disbelief. He looked me in the eye and said, "Help me."
I stretched a hand in his direction, impotently. The insect ignored me—and I knew I was in no danger, it wanted this to be seen—but I was giddy with rage and frustration, sweating cold stinking rivulets down my face and chest.
A delicate sheen of interference fringes raced over the robot's form as it raised the man higher. The camera followed my gaze upward, until I knew it was framing only the broken body and the uncaring sky.
I heard myself bellowing, "Where's the fucking militia now? Where are your weapons? Where are your bombs? Do something!"
The man's head lolled; I hoped he'd lost consciousness. Invisible pincers snapped his spine, then flung him aside. I heard the corpse thud against the marquee above the water pumps, then slide to the ground.
The whole camp of ten thousand seemed to be wailing in my skull, and I was screaming incoherently, but I kept my eyes locked on the place where the robot had to be.
There was a loud scrabbling sound from the space in front of me. A sickening hush descended in the alleys around the square. The insect played with the light, sketching its own outline for us, in reef-rock gray against the heavens, in sky blue against the rock. The body hanging from its six upturned-V legs was long and segmented; a blunt restless head at each end swiveled curiously, sniffing the air. Four lithe tentacles slithered in and out of sheaths in the carapace, tipped with sharp claws.
I stood swaying in the silence, waiting for something to happen—for someone with a jacket full of plastic explosives to burst out of an alley and run straight at the machine in the hope of a kamikaze embrace… though ve would not have come within ten meters before being blasted back into the crowd to incinerate a dozen friends, instead.