THIRTY-FOUR

ERL MADE HIS WAY into Quarters Kranz through the old, unused entrance in the depths of the Tier’s sublevel . . . except he could tell from the flaked rust lying on the deck plates around it that it wasn’t completely unused. It could have been opened by some Provost ordered to make sure the old door was secure, but Erl thought the rust more likely to be evidence he had been correct, that this was the same route Alania and Danyl had taken, no doubt at the instruction of Prime—his old friend, Lieutenant Ipsil Beruthi. He frowned. Kranz’s Head of Household Security had said nothing about Beruthi being with the youngsters; had he somehow gone ahead of them to prepare for the transfer?

He put down the duffel bag, opened it, and extracted the beamer. If Alania and Danyl had successfully infiltrated Quarters Kranz this way, then he could do it, too, especially considering he had one advantage they lacked: his nanobots were fully activated, and he knew how to control them. They didn’t make him invulnerable, but they made him the next thing to it.

He didn’t make it far before he had to put that theory to the test. Clearly the servants’ stairwell was far more closely monitored now than it had been when Alania and Danyl had come this way, if indeed they had. The door leading to the kitchen slammed open, and two Provosts appeared, beamers raised. “Halt, or I’ll—” began the man in front, but Erl cut him down before he finished the phrase, his own beamer slicing off the man’s head in a spray of steam and boiled brains.

His partner reacted with astonishing presence of mind, considering that his partner’s gray matter covered his face. He fired even as the lead man collapsed.

Erl’s nanobots deflected the energy, heating the air around him so that he was briefly surrounded by a glowing corona. That worked well, he thought as his own beamer tore through the second man’s heart. There was no blood—beamers were tidy that way, cauterizing as they cut.

He had to kill two more Provosts on the way to the fourth floor, where he burst into the hallway, firing as he went and taking down a woman standing outside Kranz’s office. Then he was inside, through the doors that had clearly been forced open. A painting had been swung away from the wall, revealing a medical monitor—Erl thought he knew whose failing vital signs it displayed—and a golden lockplate with a key already in it.

He pushed it in, and a moment later, the elevator door opened. Beamer at the ready, he rode up to Thirteenth Tier.

Danyl stripped before Alania’s unwavering gaze. He was thankful she didn’t look away, thankful she watched as he faced the unthinkable course of action to which he had committed himself. He said his farewell to her, then climbed into the command pod. The strange blue gel the robot had extruded at the bottom of the pod oozed around his naked body. At least it’s warm, he thought inanely.

His heart pounded. His breath came in quick, ragged gasps. He wanted to climb out again, run from the room, hide somewhere in the City, flee into the country, anything . . . but he knew all of that would be futile, that there could be no escape from the First Officer and his Provosts. There was literally nowhere to run.

And then, suddenly, his fear eased as the pod lid slowly started to swing closed above him. The gel took on a life of its own and began to creep across his skin as if it were a giant amoeba devouring him, yet the sensation was pleasant rather than terrifying. At the same time, his senses expanded. He felt as if his body were growing, becoming gigantic and yet somehow tenuous, as though it had no substance. The inside of the command pod faded around him, and he touched, just for a moment, an enormous, powerful presence with his mind . . .

And then, with horrible, shocking suddenness, he was yanked back into his body, a body in agony, every nerve screaming as though he were being flayed alive. He screamed and tried to struggle, but he could barely move . . .

The connection that had just begun to form vanished as though it had never been. There was only his own body, naked, cold, dripping blue-green goo, thrown unceremoniously to the floor beside Alania, whose eyes were closed and whose breathing came in shallow moans. A tendril of smoke rose from a hole in her leg.

Standing over them was First Officer Kranz.

Bursting into the control room, Kranz had taken in the situation at a glance: Danyl already in the command pod, the lid closing on him; Alania watching her brother, her back to the door. Kranz needed her alive, but he also needed her not to interfere, so he had shot her in the leg, leaping over her as she screamed and toppled. The countdown on the pod showed that he still had ten minutes to complete the transition of power. If a new Captain were not installed in that time, the system would go into standby. Vast swathes of the City would suddenly find themselves without power or air circulation. The gates would seal. The elevators would stop running. Panic and chaos would grip the population. It would take a complete reboot of the system before another attempt could be made to install a new Captain . . . and Kranz knew all too well, because it was burned into his nanobot-written memories, that a reboot attempt was doomed to failure.

It would fail because of all the false information that had been fed into the computer over the years, information designed to convince the Captain she was the original commander of the giant colonization ship UES Discovery, not a clone of the original Captain commanding one of the eight colony seeds Discovery had ferried through the stars. This colony seed’s normal programming had been overridden by First Officer Thomas Kranz to prevent it from dismantling itself and spreading its component parts across a large swathe of the countryside.

That had been the disaster Thomas Kranz had averted. He had realized the truth the Captain of Discovery had denied, the truth so many of his fellow Officers had denied: that the mission plan was fatally flawed, that if the colony seed dismantled itself as intended and the Officers stepped down in favor of a civilian government, everyone would die. The first First Officer, Kranz knew from his memories, had selflessly risked everything to keep the colony seed intact, to rewrite the memories of the colonists waiting to awaken from cold sleep so they would never know what had happened, to take firm control of the Officers who remained after the revolution he led succeeded.

For five hundred revolutions of this world around its primary, the clones of First Officer Kranz had maintained control and kept that colony seed—now called the City—intact, had kept this outpost of Earth civilization functioning, had saved countless lives. But nothing could last forever. The Captain had to be replaced, and the transition had to happen now. A reboot would either crash the City’s systems permanently or, possibly worse, trigger a catastrophic and sudden dismantling of the City as it attempted to fulfil its original programming without regard for all the changes to its structure in the years since. The Cubes waiting on the Rim of the Canyon would open, and the giant robots they contained would activate. The deconstruction of the City, which was only meant to happen after its entire population had moved out into the surrounding countryside, might begin at once without regard for the humans; according to the false data fed into the system over the centuries, those people did not exist.

The death toll would be . . . catastrophic.

The City going into standby would be bad enough. The City deciding to dismantle itself was unthinkable.

Which meant Kranz had to get Danyl out of the pod and Alania into it in the next ten minutes.

The wound he had inflicted on her was of no importance. Painful, no doubt, but her nanobots would heal it without trouble even without being fully activated. The important thing was that she wouldn’t be getting up in the next couple of minutes.

Kranz reached in from the head of the pod, grabbed Danyl under his arms, and pulled him free of the gel that was designed to completely encase the body of the Captain, aiding the nanobots and his genetically modified neural wiring in the joint tasks of keeping him alive and keeping him connected to the City systems. Danyl barely reacted, dazed from the first stages of his integration, until the gel let him go with a slurping sound. Then he screamed—a hoarse, weak sound—and began to struggle, but feebly, as if he were caught in a dream instead of reality. Kranz threw him to the floor and turned to Alania.

“Get up,” he snarled. “Take off your clothes.”

“I can’t even . . .”

Kranz jerked her to her feet, then shoved her against the command pod so that she fell into a half-sitting position. “Strip! Or I’ll burn your other leg and strip you myself!”

Trembling far more with fury than with shame, Alania pulled off her clothes. The agony in her leg was already fading, far too quickly to be normal. The nanobots, she thought. By the time she had finished stripping, the pain had faded to a dull ache, though it spiked if she put her full weight on that leg.

Standing naked in front of Kranz hardly seemed to matter much considering he’d had access to video feed from her bedroom her entire life. In any event, the rapacious look in Kranz’s eyes had nothing to do with prurience; he lusted for something far different.

With the metal floor cold beneath her bare feet, she glanced down at Danyl, who lay curled in a fetal position, trembling and muttering. His eyelids flickered, but he clearly wasn’t seeing her or anything else.

“Now get into the programming cabinet,” Kranz said. “Move.”

Holding herself erect, refusing to cower or cover herself, she stepped into the cabinet Danyl had already entered. Fiery insects ran over her bare skin, galloped through her bloodstream.

It was as if a fog she hadn’t even recognized lifted from her vision. She suddenly felt . . . sharper. Powerful. The remaining pain in her leg vanished as though she had never been shot.

The cabinet door opened, and she stepped out again. “Now,” Kranz said, “get into the pod.”

“Or what?” Alania said. “You can’t kill me.”

“No,” he said, “but I can damn well cripple you as painfully as possible, then lift you in myself. Now get in.”

Giving in to the inevitable, Alania walked to the pod and looked down into it. The blue-green gel awaited her. She gave Danyl one final look, turned what she hoped was a withering glare on Kranz, then climbed as gracefully as she could into the pod and lay down in the gel.

Blood-warm, the strange substance wrapped itself around her bare back and bottom . . . and then, horribly, it began to move, creeping up around her body. Alania stiffened, clenching her fists, but the gel didn’t slow its inexorable advance.

Kranz came over to the pod and looked down at her. “At last,” he breathed. His eyes held a strange light, bright, fanatical. “This is your birthright, Alania. This is your destiny. Your entire life has led up to this moment. You are about to become Captain . . . and then, once I enter the final command to activate the memories piggybacking on your Captain’s nanobots, you’ll also become First Officer. You will preserve the City for decades—centuries—longer. You will preserve me and all our ancestors, all the way back to the first First Officer Kranz. My memories will soon be yours. His memories will soon be yours.” Horribly, he smiled at her, the indulgent smile of a proud parent. “I’m sorry you faced so much unpleasantness and unnecessary danger, but you have arrived exactly where you have always been fated to arrive, just when you were needed . . . daughter.”

“Don’t call me that,” Alania said. “And once I am Captain, I promise you this—I won’t do what you ask.”

“I won’t ask anything,” Kranz said. “I won’t have to. The nanobots know what to do. First you will become the Captain. Your heart and brain and nervous system will become the heart and brain and nervous system of the City. Your life will give it life and thus give life to all the teeming thousands who rely on it. Once you are integrated into the system, I will give the final command, and the nanobots will rewrite your brain. You will become First Officer Kranz, the eighth in succession from the original. Your childhood is over. You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time to work.” He smiled. “Good-bye, Alania.”

He stepped back. The pod began to close . . . and this time, there was no one to stop it.

As the lid began its slow descent, Alania felt her consciousness altering . . . expanding. Her mind grew too large for her brain, too large for the body with which she was already losing touch. Strange smells and sounds and sights she could not name slipped phantom-like through her senses. The core of her self, her soul, her inner being, seemed to be shrinking, dwindling away like a dying fire. But it didn’t go out. She was still Alania, still herself . . .

. . . but for how long?

She tried to move, tried to raise her arms and push at the pod lid, but she had lost control of her limbs. She could still feel her heart beating, but she had the strangest feeling it was pushing more than just blood through her veins, that it was somehow also pumping water and sewage and lubricants and other unnamed fluids through an endless network of pipes. She knew she was breathing, but every breath also seemed to be moving air through ducts and vents and fans.

She closed her eyes—though she had no way of knowing whether they were really closed or not, since it made no difference to the strange welter of images flooding her mind—and tried to sense what was happening in the chamber in which she lay. She pictured Thirteenth Tier, the gardens, the small, white, temple-like building . . .

. . . and suddenly she saw it, though her perspective was strange: she found herself looking down at the top of Kranz’s head as the pod lid slowly descended. She saw Danyl, still curled up like a baby, lying on the floor behind him.

In a moment, Kranz would give his final command, and she would cease to exist. She strained muscles she could not move, tried to scream, tried to protest, but nothing worked. All she could do was watch, helpless, as he leaned forward to execute her.

And then she sensed in a way she could not describe that someone else was approaching. She tried to expand her view of the Tier, and her perspective shifted. Now she was looking down the path of crushed white rocks leading from the antechamber to the “temple.”

Someone rushed along that path: Erl.

He reached the door.

Alania jumped back to her previous view as he burst into the control room—and shot Kranz at point-blank range.

With no way of knowing how far things had progressed in the Captain’s control chamber, Erl burst out of the antechamber at a dead run, the powerful beamer in his hands. A robot scuttled toward him, and he burned a hole through its central processor, then pounded the length of the white path. Counting on the element of surprise, he slammed through the door, saw Kranz standing over the Captain’s bed, barely registered Danyl curled naked on the floor, and fired directly into Kranz’s back.

Light flashed and acrid smoke billowed, and Kranz whirled to face him. The back of his uniform was burned away, but the man himself was clearly unharmed. Erl knew instantly what had happened: the First Officer’s nanobots had deflected the energy of the blast just as his own had saved him from the Provost’s beam in the Quarters Kranz stairwell. The effort must have taken a huge bite of the nanobots’ available energy, and if he could have fired two or three more times, he was certain he could have overwhelmed them. But he never got that chance; Kranz swung his own beamer up and fired, not at Erl—he’d clearly made the lightning-quick deduction that Erl could only be standing here unharmed if he, too, were protected by fully active nanobots—but at Erl’s weapon. It shattered in his hands, and he let it drop as he hurled himself at the First Officer.

Kranz toppled backward, Erl on top of him, and then everything devolved into a whirl of blows and counterblows. All Officers learned unarmed combat, though most completed only the minimal required training and never practiced. Erl had worked hard at it when he had been living on Twelfth Tier, and he had trained in the simulator and sparred with Danyl as the boy grew into a man, but he knew at once that he was outclassed. Though he’d landed on top of Kranz, an instant later, he was thrown backward and slammed to the floor, rolling over and out of the way a split second before Kranz’s fist would have crushed his windpipe.

He fought on, but the contest had already been decided. Less than a minute after he’d charged into the control room, Erl lay crumpled not far from Danyl, breathing hoarsely, his broken left leg bent awkwardly beneath him. From the agony in his chest, he knew he also had broken ribs and suspected he might have punctured a lung. The nanobots were working, but even they could not knit bones in minutes, and minutes were all he had left.

If that.

Kranz limped over to him, his face splattered with blood from his broken nose—the satisfying crunch it had made when Erl’s fist connected with it had been his one triumphant moment of the brief battle. Kranz’s beamer lay near Danyl. He didn’t bother to pick it up. Erl knew Kranz could kill him with his bare hands if he wanted to, and clearly he wanted to.

“You’ve failed,” Kranz snarled, standing over him. “The pod is closed, and when I activate her nanobots in a moment, she will become both the new Captain and the new First Officer, irretrievably, for the rest of her life. Beruthi is dead. And now . . . so are you.”

He reached down to snap Erl’s neck . . .

. . . and then screamed and jerked upright as his own beamer, held in Danyl’s trembling hands, burned into his back.

Danyl came slowly back to himself, his shattered consciousness contracting and coalescing, the strange fire that had scorched his nerves receding. His awareness of his own body grew bit by bit. He realized first that he was cold, then that he was lying on a hard surface, then that he was naked . . .

And then, all at once, his lingering connection to the City vanished. He was suddenly fully aware, fully awake, shivering, hurting, but himself again. And when he raised his head, he saw the First Officer beating the man he had always thought of as his father to a bloody pulp.

Kranz stood over the sprawled, crippled Erl, ready to deliver the coup de grâce . . . and Danyl realized that a beamer lay close at hand. He forced his aching muscles to move, seized the beamer, rolled over, sat up . . . and fired.

At first, the beam seemed to have no effect other than burning away swatches of the First Officer’s already ragged and bloodstained uniform, though Kranz cried out and straightened. But Danyl, desperate and despairing and deeply, deeply angry, held down the firing stud, discharging the weapon in one long, continuous blast, and as Kranz lurched toward him, whatever strange protection he had against the beam suddenly failed utterly and completely.

The beam sliced through his midriff like a scalpel, and Kranz looked down with an expression of almost comical shock as his guts spilled out, sizzling in the still-burning beam. He raised his head. “You . . .” he began, but he got no further—the beam had found his spine. It scored the wall above Erl’s head, then sputtered out.

The First Officer died before his steaming body hit the floor. Blood spilled out of him, a vast pool of it, slicking the floor, soaking Danyl’s and Alania’s discarded clothing. Danyl dropped the beamer. He stared at the Kranz, then suddenly remembered Alania. He staggered to his feet, staring around the small chamber, but she was nowhere to be seen.

“Transfer complete,” the strange male voice said. “We have a new Captain.”

“No!” Danyl cried hoarsely. He stumbled toward the command pod through Kranz’s blood. “Alania . . .”

“You can’t . . . stop it,” a voice said. He turned to see Erl hauling himself slowly into a sitting position, grimacing with pain as he did so. “Once it’s done . . . it’s done.”

“You . . .” Danyl took an unsteady step toward his erstwhile guardian. “I thought you were dead.”

Erl coughed and grimaced again, holding his side. Blood stained the corner of his mouth. “I should be,” he said. “Would have been a minute ago, if you hadn’t grabbed Kranz’s beamer. But . . .”

“Nanobots,” Danyl said. “The damned nanobots. You have them, too.”

Erl nodded.

Danyl had to hold on to the bottom end of the command pod. He didn’t want to look into the other end, didn’t want to see Alania’s face behind the window where he had first glimpsed the Captain’s. “You’ve known,” he whispered. “All my life. You’ve known what I was meant for. You knew I would end up here. You planned for me to end up here. When you sent us off to Yvelle . . . you knew.”

Erl nodded again. “Yes,” he said. “Beruthi was Prime, but I was . . . Prime Secundus, I guess you would say. Equal to Beruthi, but I chose to be the one who withdrew from the City to look after you—our pride and joy. When Kranz made Beruthi Alania’s guardian, we thought we couldn’t lose. Then everything went wrong, and against all odds, you two were thrown together. From there . . . we had to improvise.”

The strange prickling heat Danyl had felt from the nanobots in his bloodstream seemed to have returned, but he knew this heat was fanned by his own fury and had nothing to with microscopic machines. “Everything you told me growing up was a lie. You rewrote my memories to keep me in the dark. You pretended to care for me, but all the time I was just a . . . a spare part, a cog in a machine.”

“A machine intended to make the City better,” Erl said. “And if you were a cog, you were the most important cog of all.”

“Make the City better how?” Danyl said scornfully. “Beruthi said I’d be able to seize control, overthrow the Officers . . . but that was never the real plan, was it?” He slammed his fist down on the command pod in which Alania was imprisoned. “This thing would have left me with no control at all. You programmed the nanobots inside me, didn’t you? Just like Kranz programmed the ones in Alania. You set me up so that once I was in the pod I would do whatever you and Beruthi told me to do with no more free will than one of Beruthi’s robots.”

“It couldn’t be left to chance,” Erl said.

“You could have told me the truth!”

“Only to have you reject it all and join the Greenskulls or Rustbloods just to get away from me?” Erl snapped back with sudden heat. “I told you: it couldn’t—could not—be left to chance.”

Danyl, fueled by his fury, found the strength to step away from the pod until he stood over Erl just like Kranz had before Danyl had cut him down. “You and Beruthi didn’t want to overthrow the Officers at all. You just want to replace Kranz as First Officer. Nothing would have changed except that you would have been in charge!”

“Everything would have changed!” Erl was starting to look stronger, his dark face less gray and beaded with sweat, as his nanobots repaired the damage he had suffered. “We would have seized power, yes, but we would have tried to restore the City’s functions, tried to make things better for the lower Tiers, even for the people in the Middens. We would have provided more freedom than the Heartland has ever known—”

“Freedom as long as no one did anything you didn’t approve of, you mean! And my freedom was never a consideration at all. You kidnapped me as a baby and raised me to be Captain, pretended to care for me—”

“I do care for you!” Erl cried. “Danyl, you have to—”

“Pretended to care for me,” Danyl went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “and all the while, you didn’t see me as a human being at all. And if you didn’t see me as fully human, how the hell am I supposed to believe that you see the people in the Middens or First Tier or the Tenth Tier prison or any of the other Tiers as human, either?” He turned and looked at the crumpled, oozing body of First Officer Kranz. “I should have thanked him for freeing me from that pod instead of killing him!”

“Danyl,” Erl said urgently. “Danyl, please believe me. Yes, I knew what you were fated to be, but I’ve always loved you as my own child. I was proud to think you would someday be Captain, proud of the young man I had raised, proud—”

“You’re a filthy, lying son of a bitch, and the only reason you’re not a steaming pile of smoking meat and shit like First Officer Kranz is that I used up his beamer charge!” Danyl shouted. “The only person who has ever really cared about me is my sister, and now she’s the new cog in this vast machine of yours. Dead, even if her body still lives. Someone else will take over as First Officer, and nothing will change. Everyone who has died, everything Alania and I have been through, has all been a waste. Go to hell.”

He turned away, walked to the top end of the command pod at last, and looked down into it.

All he could see of Alania was her face and her bare shoulders. Her eyes were closed but flickering. He had never fully connected with the City; she had. All her life she had been subject to the same kind of programming as he had been, though to different ends. Now that programming had fully engaged. Danyl reached out and touched the window. “Sister,” he murmured. He felt a strange pain in his chest, as though his heart were being torn apart. Alania had never had someone who truly cared for her, and as it turned out, neither had he. For four brief days, they had had each other, but now it was all ending in dust and ashes.

“Good-bye,” he barely managed to choke out through a suddenly constricted throat. He leaned down and planted a kiss on the glass . . .

. . . and then jerked back.

Alania’s eyes had just opened.

And then she screamed.

Erl watched the young man he truly had thought of as his son turn away from him, saw him run his hand along the command pod, lean over, and kiss the window above his sister’s face. Something broke inside him.

Go to hell, Danyl had said, but Erl knew in that moment that he was already there.

For twenty years, he had raised Danyl to be Captain, and the decades-long plan he and his best friend, Ipsil Beruthi, had concocted together had come to fruition at last . . . only to collapse so spectacularly in the last few minutes.

Beruthi was dead. Kranz had said so, and Erl believed him, all the more because Danyl and Alania were here but Beruthi was not. Yes, the First Officer was dead, too, and he had had a hand in that . . . but Danyl was not Captain. Alania was, and she had been programmed by Kranz. She would carry out his wishes; she might literally become him, the latest in a long line of tyrants, but this time with all the power of a fully awake Captain to draw on as well.

Nothing would change, and Erl could not escape. The Provosts would come. He would be taken to Tenth Tier, and he would never again leave it alive, though he might well linger there for years.

Ipsil is dead. Danyl has turned his back on me. Our plan has failed. We achieved nothing. We failed, and Kranz won, even though he died at the moment of his victory.

If the victor dies, surely the loser should die, too.

It didn’t take any great effort on his part. He could command his nanobots to do whatever he wished, and so he commanded them to slip him into unconsciousness, then stop his heart.

The last thing he saw before darkness claimed him forever was Danyl suddenly jerking upright and stumbling back from the command pod. The last thing he heard was the thin sound of Alania screaming inside.

What . . . ? he thought, and then he thought nothing more ever again.