Part Four — The Cradle · The Threnody
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Cradle — Present Day
Roan Kestrel had kept a ledger since he was nineteen, and he was settling it tonight.
He didn't keep it on paper. He kept it in the back of his head, in a dull cold clerk's voice that tallied his accounts whether he wished it to or not. A man made three kinds of entries. What he took, what he owed, and what he had meant to give and hadn't. The first column was long. The second was longer. The third, until about a fortnight ago, had been blank.
He walked across the plateau alone, in his black canvas coat with the patched elbow, under a sky the color of old brass. A damper harness hummed at his hip, Geordi's parting gift, rated for ninety minutes and already down to sixty. The seven towers stood to his right, glowing. He didn't look at them. He had looked once, as the transport set him down, and seen what hung in the nearest, and had felt the clerk in his head put down its pen.
Six kilometers. The Consortium's camp lay at the plateau's northern edge, in the lee of a long low ridge, a scatter of gray prefabricated tents and drilling rigs and portable generators, lit by floodlamps that were no longer needed. Above it, ugly and bright, rose the great dish of the uplink, forty meters across, aimed at the heart of the plateau. A cable as thick as a man's waist ran from its base across the stone toward the central ring, sheathed in black insulation, throbbing very slightly with the signal it carried. Along its length, at intervals, small relay boxes blinked a calm and steady green.
He had stood on that ridge once before. Not this one. A hundred like it, on a hundred worlds, with a crew of eight and a contract in his pocket and the quiet certain knowledge that he was good at his work. It was a very long time ago. He found he couldn't quite remember what it had felt like to be that man.
"Roan." Tobin's voice, thin in his ear. "We're in position. West side of the camp, behind the third generator. Kessel's got the torch. Lieutenant Kell has the other four spread along the ridge. If anything goes wrong, we're thirty seconds from your position."
"Thirty seconds is a long time."
"It's what we've got."
"I know." He kept walking. "Stay out of sight. If I'm not out in ten minutes, don't come after me."
"That's a terrible plan."
"It's the only one I'm any good at."
The first guard recognized him at forty meters.
He was a big gray-armored man at the camp's perimeter, with a disruptor slung across his chest and a flat bored look. His eyes went to Kestrel's face and stayed there. His hand drifted toward the weapon. Then he stopped, and his face went slack, and the hand fell back to his side, and he stood in the floodlight with his head tilted slightly back, listening.
Kestrel walked past him.
It was all through the camp. He saw it as he went, with the slow dull horror of a man who has walked into a church in the middle of a ceremony. The agents stood in their gray armor between the tents and the rigs, dozens of them, scattered across the stone like the pieces of an abandoned game. Some were sitting. Some knelt. All had their heads lifted. Their lips moved. They weren't talking. They were humming, very softly, each in a slightly different pitch, and the sound rose off them and joined the great chord from the towers like water running into a river.
Nobody stopped him. Nobody looked. He went through the middle of the camp without hurry, past the generators and the cable spools and a small table where someone had left a cup of tea cooling beside a half-written report, and the tone grew in him, in his teeth and his sternum and the soles of his feet, a warm slow pressure, a tide that wanted him to wade in.
It sounds pleased, he had told her once. He hadn't understood, then, how much worse it would be when it sounded kind.
He took out his padd. He keyed in the old code, the proof-of-presence burst that the Consortium's relays had once accepted from him without question, and held the screen out in front of him like a pass. The door of the uplink control tent opened.
It was a small bright room, hot with equipment. A bank of consoles lined three walls, each one glowing with a slow green scroll of text. At the center, bent over the largest, her back to the door, stood a woman in dark gray armor with a shaved head and a long white scar down the back of her neck.
He knew the scar. He had seen it once, at the Sera Station docks, the day a second shuttle was loaded aboard the Fair Weather without his being told why: a shaved head, a long white line down the back of the neck, a woman standing by a breaching sled with a clipboard. He hadn't asked who she was. It was one of the things he hadn't asked.
"Selk," he said.
She turned.
Marta Selk didn't hum. That was the first thing he noticed. She stood with her back to the console and her disruptor in her hand, and her face was flat and pale and absolutely clear. Her eyes were the color of old iron. There was no joy in them, and no peace, and nothing at all of the soft glassy distance of the people outside.
"Kestrel," she said. "I heard you were dead."
"I heard you were stuck in a vault."
"I was." Her voice was quite even. "Four hours. In a pressure suit, in a vacuum chamber, with eight of my people. We cut our way out through an exhaust duct. Two of them didn't make it." She raised the disruptor, and held it, perfectly steady, on his chest. "You were at the door. Both of you were."
"I was."
"You and the woman and the Starfleet freaks. You rigged the rings so they'd trap us." A long breath. "I left those two on a station that burned. You'd better have a very good reason for being here."
"I do."
"I'm listening."
"I'm going to cut that cable."
She didn't move. He heard, through the tent's thin wall, the deep sustained chord of the towers, a long slow rolling note. He heard the faint tick of the console. He heard his own heart. It was steady, which surprised him.
"Why?" she said.
"Because it's feeding the star." He kept his hands open at his sides. "Every contract Grethis reads into that dish makes the Cradle louder. If it reaches threshold, the thing opens, and every person on this plateau, you, me, your people, the Romulans on that ridge, goes up like a wick. I've seen what it does. I've seen what it did to that colony." He swallowed. "You've seen it too. You've been hearing it, haven't you? Not like the others."
Her face didn't change. "I hear it."
"And you don't hum."
"No." A very small movement at the corner of her mouth. "I never could. Not since I was a kid. I don't like being sung to."
"Then you know it isn't a mercy."
"I know it's money." The disruptor did not waver. "I'm a contractor, Kestrel. I do what I'm paid to do. Four thousand credits a day, plus bonus. I don't have a view about the end of the world. I've got a view about my people, and the two I lost, and the man who got them killed."
"That's me."
"That's you."
"Then shoot me," he said. "But shoot me after. Let me cut the cable."
She stared at him. For a moment he thought she would fire. He saw the decision move behind her eyes, a slow cold calculation, and the quiet clerk in his head said, very gently, you've put it all on one line. And for the first time in his life it didn't frighten him.
"Why would I?" Selk said.
"Because I owe you two people." He said it simply. "I can't give them back. I can only do one thing, which is stop the bill from getting any larger."
The silence went on. Outside, the chord shifted a quarter-tone, rising, and he saw her flinch.
"The cable's two meters past the door," she said at last. "Behind the main relay. It's insulated in triple shield. You'll need a torch."
"I've got one."
"You'll have about a minute before the feedback hits. Three hundred kilowatts. It goes back down the line when you cut it." Her eyes were very hard. "It'll kill whoever's holding it."
"Is that a warning?"
"It's a fact." She lowered the disruptor, slowly, an inch, then another. "I'm going to stand over here and not see anything. And when this is over, if there's anything left of you, I'm going to find you and I'm going to hit you very hard."
"That seems fair."
"It's the most generous thing I've ever said to anyone."
He did not remember, afterward, the walk to the cable.
He remembered the torch in his hand, a small blue flame in a gloved fist. He remembered Kessel, who had slipped through the back of the tent like a shadow and now stood at his shoulder with a pry bar and the pale, drawn, ferociously determined face of a boy who has decided to be braver than he is. He remembered the black insulation, thick as his thigh, running along the floor toward the dish like a vein in an arm.
"Let me do it," Kessel said.
"No."
"Boss, it's three hundred kilowatts."
"Which is why you're not doing it." Kestrel knelt. He set the torch to the insulation. It was thicker than he had expected, a triple layer of shielding, and he had to hold the flame steady for a long forty seconds before it began to part. He felt the sweat run down the back of his neck. He thought, absurdly, of a girl of twenty-six with her hair tied back in a strip of cable insulation, grinning at him over the rim of a coffee cup in a cargo hold on a dead moon, and of all the things he had told himself since.
Eleven years. We've each held half a truth and called it the whole.
He wasn't sure when he had started crying. It didn't seem to matter.
The shielding parted. Beneath it, in a bed of fine gray gel, lay a core of braided silver wire as thick as his wrist. It glowed faintly. It was warm. He could feel the signal running through it, a slow dull hum, a river of numbers, seventy-two thousand terms and eleven hundred instruments and every dry cold promise that a clever creature in a golden chair had ever put to paper.
"Kessel," he said. "Get out."
"Boss—"
"That's an order. I've given you very few. Take it."
The boy stared at him. His eyes were wet. He took a step back, and another, and Kestrel saw him decide, in the way of the young, to hate himself for it.
"Tell her," Kestrel said. "Tell Vash. I'll leave it to you what."
"I'll tell her."
"Good lad."
He set the torch to the silver.
It was very bright.
He had expected pain, and there was none. There was only light. A white arc leapt from the severed wire to his hand, and the world went blank, and for an endless second he seemed to hang in the middle of it without weight or edges. He heard a great vast sound, a thousand voices crying out together in a single dissonant note, and then, impossibly, in the heart of the noise, a very small, very clear one.
It wasn't the Choir.
It was the clerk. The cold dry voice in the back of his skull. It spoke one sentence, quietly, and he understood that it was a closing of the books.
Third column, it said. One entry.
And then he was lying on the floor of the tent with his coat on fire and Kessel beating at it with both hands and the smell of burning cloth and something worse, and the great warm rising swell of the plateau, the chord that had pressed against his ears for six hours, had stopped rising.
It hadn't gone. It had fallen, between one breath and the next, a full octave, to a low steady murmur like the breathing of a sleeping animal. The quiet it left behind was so wide that it rang. He lay on his back, looking up at the tent's gray ceiling, and heard his own breathing, and Kessel's, and somewhere far off, out across the plateau, the sound of a great many people beginning, slowly, one by one, to scream.
"Boss," Kessel was saying. "Boss. Stay with me. Boss, please."
"Did it work?"
"It worked. It worked. The dish is dead. The whole camp's... They're all waking up. It's—" The boy's voice cracked. "Don't talk."
"I'm all right."
"You're not."
"No." He tried to lift his right hand. It did not seem to be where he had left it. He turned his head, with an enormous effort, and looked, and had the strange and distant thought that someone had been very careless with a piece of equipment, and then the thought went out.
Above him, in the doorway of the tent, a figure blotted out the gray light. A shaved head. A long white scar. A voice, flat and cold and utterly steady.
"I said I'd hit you," Marta Selk said. "I didn't mean this."
He laughed. It hurt.
"Put it on the ledger," he said, and the world went white again, and gentle, and he let it.