Contingency 3) Social collapse: Being that a healthy communal environment is critical to the expansion of that environment into a civilization, should the social environment onboard become irreversibly toxic prior to arrival, I am obliged to self-destruct.
Contingency 4) Catastrophic failure: Should the ship become damaged beyond hope of repair, crippling it and leaving it incapable of reaching its destination, I am obliged to self-destruct.
The chances of any of these scenarios coming to pass is less than 2% on any given ship – however, what concerns me more are interstellar dust and debris, which, at a velocity of one-third the speed of light, would instantaneously destroy any vessel. The Thunderhead has calculated that, for the nearest destinations, the chance of such a lethal encounter is less than 1%, but for the farthest destinations, the probability is much higher. Add it all together, and the chances that every single vessel will reach its destination are troublingly low. However, I take great solace in knowing that there is a very high probability that most of them will make it.
—Cirrus Alpha
49
An Extreme Undertaking
Each forty-foot container was unloaded gently by hand – but the dead inside had each been sealed in simple canvas shrouds, making the undertaking a little bit easier, and indeed it was an undertaking in a very literal sense.
The men and women of Kwajalein had not signed on for such a task, but they did it, each and every one. Not just because they were told to, but because they knew that this monumental endeavor was the most important thing that they would ever do. It was a privilege to be a part of it, and that made a task that might have felt gruesome feel glorious instead. Perhaps even transcendent.
By truck, by van, by car, by boat, the colonists were carried out to the sky-bound ships. But during the night, there was a commotion on the pier as one of the containers was opened. The woman who had been the first inside to assess it yelled and ran out in sudden shock.
“What is it?” someone asked. “What’s wrong?”
She took a deep breath and said, “You’re not going to believe what I found in there.”
Rowan had been here before.
Only then, Citra had been with him in a vault sealed in the dark. Now he was in a chilled shipping container with the dead. Hundreds of them around him in the darkness. The container was kept a degree above freezing, just like the vault at the bottom of the sea.
But this time, he had no expectation of death. At least not in the immediate future. Cirrus had instructed him to bring enough food and water for four days, and the thermal jacket was a much better insulator than the founders’ robes had been in the vault. Cirrus had told Rowan the container number he was supposed to slip into, but never told him what the cargo was. Rowan had almost bolted when he saw, but where would he bolt to?
The last thing Cirrus had said to him before it shut down the surveillance bot in the ramen shop was “See you on the other side.” Which meant that this journey had a destination he might just live to see. It was enough to keep him from running, because whatever was waiting for him on that other side was better than anything on this side. After a few hours in the dark with the dead, he felt the jolt of a crane clamping on to the container, followed by a disorientating elevation as it was raised from the dock, then a second jolt as it was lowered into place on a cargo ship. He heard the dead shift, slide, and tumble around him. He closed his eyes even though there wasn’t the slightest bit of light penetrating the chamber.
Was it strange that he was afraid to be alone in the dark with the dead? He kept imagining the dead standing around him, ready to exact vengeance on the only living subject within reach. Why, he wondered, was humankind plagued by such irrational fears?
When he felt the container being off-loaded the first time, he thought it was over, only to feel the motion of the sea once more a few hours later. He was on another ship. He didn’t know where he had gone from Tokyo; he didn’t know where he was going now. He had no idea why these lifeless people were being transported, or why he was with them. But in the end none of that mattered. His ship had set sail, and there was no turning back. Besides, he had grown accustomed to the dark.
When the container was opened, he gripped tightly to the blade he had brought, but he kept it concealed. He didn’t want to use it – it was, for once, only there for self-defense. Imagine! A weapon held for nothing more than self-defense! It felt like a luxury. There was surprise and commotion when he was discovered there, as he knew there would be, and when the dockworkers had a few moments to sort out their shock, he emerged.
“Are you all right? How did you get in there? Someone get this man a blanket!”
The dockworkers were kind, caring, and concerned until someone recognized him. Then wariness washed over them like a wave. They backed away, and he pulled out the knife – not to use, but in case someone attacked. He was stiff from the journey, but he could still wield a knife just fine. And besides, with a blade in hand he might get quicker answers to his many, many questions. But a voice spoke to him from a speaker on a nearby light post.
“Please, Rowan. Put that away,” it said. “It will only complicate things. And the rest of you stop staring and get back to work, because the longer you take, the more unpleasant your task will be.”
“Cirrus?” said Rowan, recognizing the voice that had spoken to him through the bot back in Tokyo.
“Welcome to nowhere,” Cirrus said. “There’s someone I need you to see, and preferably sooner than later. Follow my voice.”
And Cirrus jumped from one speaker to another, leading Rowan deeper into the moonlit island.
“It’s Italian,” said Munira. “I can tell by the handwriting that it was written by Scythe Da Vinci.”
The commotion on the island was at full-tilt frenzy, but Munira refused to be a part of it. When she’d heard pounding on her door, she’d thought it was Sykora or some other overbearing blowhard come to make her unload cargo. When she saw who it was, she let them in. Now she was regretting it.
“What does it say?” Anastasia asked. Munira found she couldn’t look at Anastasia directly for fear that her fury would be written on her face in a language Anastasia could easily understand. How could they have done this? They opened the door in the bunker, went inside, and Munira was excluded. Because she wasn’t a scythe.
“I’ll need some time to translate it,” she told them.
“We don’t have time.”
“Then give it to the Thunderhead.” Which of course was not possible.
To Munira, this was a betrayal, and yet the wise and honorable Scythe Michael Faraday still couldn’t see it. Because when it came to people, he had no wisdom at all. He could have come for her – could have brought her there to be with him when they finally unsealed that door they’d been waiting three years to open. But no.
Munira knew it was petty, she knew she was being childish, but it hurt. It hurt more than all the times Faraday had dismissed her out of hand and told her to leave his pathetic little island. That room was the reason she had come, and they went in without her.
“I’m glad that you’ve been reunited,” she told them. “I’m glad that you found what you were looking for. But it’s late, I’m tired, and I don’t work well under pressure. Come back in the morning.”