The Changeling Game, Chapter 30

30.
As the Ashes Fall from the Sky

A terrible silence had fallen over New Marrakesh.

It wasn’t a physical silence; sirens wailed constantly, ebbing and flowing as emergency vehicles traveled to and from the disaster zone. The drone of military ’copters and the whine of airtankers filled the skies. Agonized screams had even come from within Jack and Kyra’s apartment building, from people who had been standing, dumbfounded, at their own west windows when the shockwave had struck. Human wailing pierced the air from all directions as people learned that someone they loved had been near, or in, the blast zone.

But Jack felt cocooned from it all, even as she and Kyra helped Takama tend their neighbors’ wounds and joined the Imazighen in aid efforts, even as they shared tears and hugs with people who had known Tomlin—Brahim Meziane, to most of them—and had just discovered his fate. She was wrapped in something dark and quiet. In the silence, she couldn’t even hear her heart beating and wondered if she still had one.

She and Kyra cried together that night, after Takama ordered them to bed, but the silence of her heart still wouldn’t lift. The things that waited for her in her dreams left her alone. Later she had a vague memory of them arguing over whether she, and the “other larva,” might be dying. It seemed unfathomable to her at times that she wasn’t.

The initial death toll didn’t quite reach five hundred, but that was more than enough.

Of those almost-five hundred, more than half were “missing and presumed dead,” people whose last known positions had been too close to the blasts for any identifiable remains to be left. That roster was compiled from multiple lists: the shuttle’s crew, all of whom had signed in to begin their shifts more than an hour earlier; roughly fifty passengers who had already checked in and boarded the shuttle early so they could sleep while they awaited liftoff; the ground crews loading and fueling the shuttle; the clocked-in staffs of an exclusive pilots’ lounge, a small duty-free shop, and the security checkpoint located just before the departure gate… and one last, terrible, overlapping list of people whose comms had signaled their final locations within the blast radius before going silent forever.

Colonel Gavin Brahim Tomlin had been among the last group; his comm’s final location had placed him in the pilots’ lounge, less than twenty meters from the first explosion, and his bank account had a pending meal transaction originating from there. Where the lounge had been, the side of a monstrous crater now sloped down into the earth.

The initial explosion had been declared a terrorist act. Footage had surfaced of an unidentified man leaving a duffel bag on a bench not far from the pilots’ lounge doors, and it was featured in every news feed, but no clear shot of the man’s face was available.

Between the massive fire at the spaceport itself, and the dozens of violent secondary fires on the northwest end of the city caused by the shuttle’s flaming debris, the search-and-rescue operations out at sea were scaled back, almost all of their teams diverted, and the story about that disaster, now thoroughly upstaged, vanished to the back “pages” of the news feeds.

The injury count was in the thousands. The property damage was in the trillions, when six more shuttles and two Star Jumpers that would never fly again were figured in.

New Marrakesh wasn’t, in fact, Tangiers Prime’s largest city; Tomlin had simply chosen to direct the Scarlet Matador there because the planet’s most prestigious hospital was located within it, and possibly because he had his best connections to local resources and logistical capabilities there. Both space traffic and terrestrial flights were immediately rerouted to New Casablanca and New Fes, with the still functional landing pads at New Marrakesh’s spaceport transforming into staging grounds for relief efforts. Thousands of stranded passengers waited within damaged concourses, and in hastily-assembled tents on the tarmac, for transport out of the city.

Check-in stations proliferated. One man, who had initially been reported as presumed dead, turned up a few hours later; he’d been at a police station on the other side of the spaceport, filing a report about his missing comm and wallet, at the time of the explosion. He was the only one thus far, but it had raised hopes that others might reappear. One Tangiers day after the explosion, the secondary list of missing persons, who hadn’t been presumed dead yet but who might have been in the blast radius, had dropped from more than two thousand to slightly under three hundred. At the end of a Tangiers week—four of its long days, a period just eight hours longer than a Standard week—whatever names remained would be added to the list of the dead. It could no longer top eight hundred, but it might still come close. If the noon hour on Tangiers Prime hadn’t been roughly equivalent to the midnight hour on most other worlds, the death and injury tolls might have been five times as high, but the devastation had struck during the spaceport’s “quiet hours.”

Every time Jack thought of those numbers, she felt ill.

Did I cause this? Is this my fault?

She wasn’t going to find the answer in the news feeds. Pulling out her most powerful Ghost Code, she dug into the local law enforcement chatter.

No one seemed to be connecting the shuttle crash over the Mutawassit Ocean to the subsequent explosion at the spaceport, but there was an active—if backburnered—investigation into it. Jack had been right; the Quintessa Corporation had chosen to make its move while Tomlin was off-duty and out of the way. He’d spent his day off putting together a plan for stealing his charges out from under the Corporation’s collective noses even as they were executing a plan to do the same thing to him.

Someone had switched around the evening duty rosters for Othman Tower, swapping in a set of false employee records for the new “staff” that took over the building that night. Jack recognized all of the faces immediately: the merc team. There was no record of who had made the changes.

“So Quintessa contracted out the kidnapping and let that merc team run it on the ground?” Kyra asked. She had taken to reading everything over Jack’s shoulder, partly slumped against her back. Jack didn’t mind; she needed the contact.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “But whoever engineered this was either using a Ghost Code, like mine, or is really high up in the security chain around here.”

“That’s not good. Is that who jammed the cameras and comms?”

“Maybe. Either them or the mercs. I thought they had it set up to key off the shuttles’ transponders, but everything stayed off for another twenty minutes after those had already flown off, freaked out Ground Control—” Jack faltered for a moment on those words; that had been the first name she’d had for Tomlin. “—and then crashed. Kinda ham-handed.”

“Maybe,” Kyra said, her voice considering. “Or maybe they thought having a localized blackout keep going for a while after their operation ended would make it seem less connected.”

“Yeah,” Jack admitted. “Either way, whoever it is… they’re dangerous and they don’t care who they kill, and they can ghost around as well as we can, maybe better.”

With that in mind, she dug—carefully, because it was being actively consulted by law enforcement—into the back-end records of the spaceport, looking for a ghost’s trail: abrupt changes to databases with no record of who initiated them; glitched cameras that briefly lost the ability to record people’s movements; other signs that someone was doing the things she had done on Helion Prime, but to a far more harmful purpose. It took her another hour to find what she was looking for, but at least it kept her stable, quieting the part of her that wanted to scream to fill the silence, and might never stop if she let it start.

Someone had, indeed, followed Tomlin to the spaceport and shadowed him on the way to the pilots’ lounge. Someone who could only be tracked by the wake of suddenly malfunctioning cameras, about twenty meters behind Tomlin himself. Cameras at the periphery periodically captured small glimpses of a man dressed in the same clothing the suspected terrorist had been wearing, but never in any detail. By the time he was near enough to a camera for it to get a good shot of him, it had stopped recording.

Tomlin, in the footage, looked uneasy. At one point, he spoke on his comm—probably to Takama—as he walked through the concourse toward the shuttle that would ultimately explode. He lingered briefly by a reflective surface, studying the scene behind him. Trying to identify, Jack thought, his shadow.

Other members of the spaceport staff, dressed in uniforms like his, greeted Tomlin and spoke to him at times. He was clearly popular and well-liked. When he entered the pilots’ lounge, the malfunctions following him stilled to just three cameras, obscuring a space fifteen meters from the lounge’s doors. For the next half hour, those three cameras remained non-functional while a handful of people—a man and a woman in pilots’ uniforms entering the lounge with formally-dressed guests on their arms, someone else’s departing guest in a djellaba and a face-obscuring headwrap, and a trio of curious-looking teens who entered the lounge and were escorted back out a moment later, now looking disappointed—came and went. The glitches only moved when a technician showed up to examine one of the disabled cameras.

For another five minutes, nothing happened. Then a second set of camera glitches described the wake of another person moving, unseen, though the concourse and arriving at the same location.

The arrival, Jack thought, of the duffel bag.

Soon after, two sets of glitches showed Tomlin’s shadow, and his accomplice, departing the spaceport in two different directions, leaving behind an innocuous-looking bag sitting on a bench beside a potted fig tree. They were outside in another ten minutes. The first explosion immediately followed, every camera within forty meters of the bag registering flaring light from its direction before dissolving into static, the cameras beyond that showing the almost instantaneous destruction that had been wrought, and the intense fire that had erupted seconds after, before registering their own flash-and-static deaths slightly over a minute later.

Whatever kind of bomb had been inside the bag, its position and blast radius had ensured that both the pilot’s lounge and the shuttle’s boarding area would be destroyed. They had calculated it so that, when the bomb went off, it wouldn’t matter whether Tomlin was still eating his meal in the lounge or had joined the other passengers at the gate.

Jack couldn’t bring herself to watch the feeds of the explosion from inside the lounge itself yet. Instead, she ran through all the exterior feeds, hoping that one or even both of the men might have accidentally let themselves get caught on a camera that didn’t glitch. Nothing. The only shot she found was the one law enforcement was already circulating, the moment when a camera, too far down the concourse to capture any detail, recorded Tomlin’s shadow placing the duffel bag on the bench and walking away.

The uniformity of the glitching suggested that he and his accomplice had been carrying scrambling devices rather than using Ghost Codes. There were no unexplained changes to any of the databases. Jack felt disgusted with herself for being relieved about that, about the fact that she didn’t have to reveal the existence of the back doors she used, possibly closing them against herself in the process, in order to get justice for Tomlin.

Even though she’d put it off for the very end, Jack still couldn’t bring herself to watch the recordings from inside the pilot’s lounge. As much as part of her desperately wanted to see Tomlin again, even for a moment, she didn’t want to have to watch him die in that moment. Neither did Kyra, who had been petting Sebby while resting her head on Jack’s shoulder.

“So everybody thinks it was terrorism when it was an assassination?” Kyra asked.

“Yeah,” Jack sighed. “Looks that way.”

“Why’d they make it so big?” Kyra asked after a long, morose pause. “I mean, they knew where he was. Did they have to take out the whole concourse to get him? The whole spaceport, for fuck’s sake?”

Of all the infinite ways that the disaster had struck at them, the sheer, brutal magnitude of it hit hardest after losing Tomlin himself. To ensure one man’s death, the Quintessa Corporation had knowingly killed hundreds of people, injured thousands more, and crippled a city.

Jack’s words to Tomlin from the night before came back to her. They can’t threaten to cripple the economy if you don’t turn over people you don’t have, because they already took them from you…

She’d been wrong. She’d been so very wrong. Whether it was because they suspected Tomlin still had the Matador survivors, or because they wanted to prevent an inquest into the secrecy around Level Five Incidents, they’d been willing to do a whole lot more than just threaten. She wondered if the explosion was a message: If you rescue two hundred lives from us, we will take three times as many in their place…

Nobody could be so casually, inhumanly brutal, could they?

Death to the things that killed us… death to the makers of the cages… death to the ’verse that trapped us… a trillion deaths for every one you took from us…

She shuddered. Whatever that was, its malice was personal and vengeful. This was cruelly indifferent. It wasn’t as if Tomlin had known, or could have proven, anything that would actually break the Quintessa Corporation’s monopolistic power over space travel, was it?

I think I know what the Quintessa Corporation is hiding. It’s much worse than we thought. We must never let them find my charges… or either one of you…

Had he discovered something that powerful?

“I think…” she said slowly, aware that Kyra was seeking an actual answer from her, “whatever it was that he figured out about them posed a big enough threat that they didn’t care how many people got hurt, as long as they eliminated it. But…”

She pulled up the spaceport’s schematics as she talked. Anything other than the lounge videos was a welcome tangent.

“…that doesn’t really explain how strong that bomb ended up being, or how it started that fire, or why the shuttle exploded. Shuttles are made to deal with much worse when they hit atmo. It should’ve been okay. Maybe not space-worthy anymore, but still…”

The structure housing the concourse was multi-level. The upper level, where the pilot’s lounge and departure gate had both been situated, was positioned six meters above the tarmac, level with the airlock into the shuttle’s passenger cabin. Beneath it, the ground level was a long, vast warehouse-style structure with conveyors for both baggage and freight, carrying it from the spaceport to the shuttle’s belly. And beneath that—

“There,” Jack groaned, pointing on the screen. “Oh fuck, there it is.”

“What?” Kyra leaned forward, touching the conduit Jack was pointing to. “What is it?”

“Hydrolox-M fuel lines,” Jack managed, feeling ill. “For refueling the shuttle. It was still an hour until launch time, maybe more. The lines were open and pumping.”

She could see it all now. The bomb had been strong enough to ensure that, whether Tomlin was still in the lounge—whose entry doors had been fifteen meters from the duffel bag—or was waiting at the departure gate thirty meters further down the concourse, he wouldn’t survive. But that was also strong enough to reach, and rupture, the hydrolox-M fuel lines eight meters beneath it, while they were actively pumping one of the most combustible materials in the universe into the shuttle’s enormous, almost-filled tanks…

Safety valves further down the line toward the spaceport hub would have tripped closed automatically upon sensing a sudden pressure drop, but if the concussive blast had damaged the valves leading into the shuttle itself, the hydrogen fire would have traveled, in moments, into its tanks, generating a blast whose power was just shy of nuclear.

Had they known the bomb would do that? Had they cared at all about the chain reaction it would set in motion?

And I thought I’d seen monsters on the crash planet…

“I hate not being the bad guys,” Kyra grumbled.

For a moment, Jack’s mind stuttered over that. But technically, she realized, they were both criminals. Escaped from custody and fugitives, they had stolen money and property and falsified documents along the way. They had participated in the hijacking and destruction of two shuttles, albeit ones that were empty aside from some merc bodies. But those were the bodies of their victims. They had committed murder—Jack for a second time, while Kyra had added another dozen or so notches to her belt.

I am technically a multiple murderer now, Jack thought, feeling a bubble of nausea rise in response. Whether she’d been defending people’s lives or not, both of her victims had, at least nominally, been the ones on the right side of the law.

But the world would still be a far better place, she admitted, if their crimes were the worst ones on the board, if they were the worst villains on the stage.

“Yeah,” she finally agreed with a heavy sigh, “me, too.”

A soft knock on their door alerted them to Takama’s arrival before she came in. She wasn’t alone.

The silver-haired woman who came in next was unmistakably Takama’s sister. Safiyya Meziane, Jack realized. Which meant that the fair, Celtic-looking man walking behind her, whose appearance was hauntingy similar to Tomlin’s, was his father Cedric. A younger woman, who looked like both Safiyya and Cedric, followed them in—his sister. Jack recalled that Takama had said her younger nephew was away at flight school, following in his brother’s and father’s footsteps.

She rose from the couch to greet them, Kyra rising beside her. It took her a moment to find words. “I’m so sorry—” she began, before she found herself enveloped in a crushing mass hug.

Sebby, who had been sitting by Jack’s tablet tapping ineffectually at the screen with a pincer, scooted back into the bedroom, perhaps fearing that he was next to be squished.

“Was that it? The creature from the other universe?” Tomlin’s sister, Tafrara, asked.

“Yeah, that’s Sebby,” Jack told her, wiping her eyes. “Sorry, I think he’s feeling shy.”

“We brought you food,” Cedric said. “Takama says you don’t seem to keep any in your home.”

Jack felt terribly embarrassed suddenly. Amazigh culture was huge on hospitality, and they had nothing to offer. “Thank you. We, uh…”

“We’d love it if you’d stay and eat with us,” Kyra said, rescuing her.

That, Jack decided a few minutes later, had been the plan from the start, based on the quantity of food the Tomlin-Meziane family had brought with them. Soon everyone was settled in the living room with fragrant plates. Jack, who hadn’t thought she would ever want to eat again, found that she was suddenly ravenous.

Conversation inevitably turned to the explosion, and to loss.

“They’ve told us that there will be nothing to bury,” Cedric said. “He was too near to the blast. But they haven’t told us anything useful about why this happened. No terrorist groups have taken credit, nobody seems to know—”

“I know,” Jack said heavily. “I know what happened. And I know why.”

For the next half hour, she walked them through what she’d discovered, showing them the glitch patterns and the small amount that had been captured on camera. She showed them the schematics, and how the size of the first explosion had made the second inevitable. They watched somberly; like her and Kyra, they didn’t want to see footage of Tomlin’s last moments in the pilots’ lounge.

“You are every bit as formidable as our son said you were,” Cedric murmured as she put the tablet down at last.

“All this… to kill our son?” Safiyya finally asked. “Why?”

“’Cause they don’t want people knowing about Level Five Incidents,” Jack sighed. “T—Brahim…” That seemed to be what everybody had called him in the Rif, when they weren’t referring to him as El Krim or, as some had pronounced it, Il Karim. “He thought he knew why. Something that happened, when we were rescuing the Matador survivors, made him realize what Quintessa had to be hiding. Maybe they figured out he was onto them.”

“He didn’t tell you what it was?” Cedric asked.

Jack shook her head. She could see Kyra and Takama doing so as well. Whatever he’d discovered, he’d seemed reluctant to voice his suspicions, and had taken them with him into the black.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “This is all my fault—”

“Shut that down,” Kyra snapped. “Shut that down right now. You didn’t do this. They did. You want to know why people keep dying around you? It’s because you don’t bail when things go bad. Ever. So shut down this ‘my fault’ bullshit.”

“Dihya is right, Tislilel,” Cedric told her, and Jack abruptly realized that neither she nor Kyra had ever actually told anyone their names since their arrival in the Rif; now the names that Tomlin had given them had stuck. “I’m an old hand at these kinds of intrigues. They may have been planning on killing Brahim ever since he took the survivors back from them after the high tide. If he was going up to the space station to retrieve evidence of their wrongdoing, they’d have wanted to stop him in a way that didn’t look too specifically targeted at him.”

“I think,” Takama said, “from watching the footage, they may have intended to abduct him, or possibly engineer an accidental death for him… until they realized that he knew they were following him, and he made himself inaccessible to them by going into a lounge that only pilots and their guests can enter. Technically, he still numbered among the pilots even if it has been three years since he last flew a mission.”

Cedric nodded, looking thoughtful. “That’d explain why the bloke on his tail staked out the lounge and called for backup… and a much more violent plan. You say they were using portable jammers on the cameras, not jacking into the security system?”

“That’s what it looks like,” Jack said. “None of the signs of someone with my kind of access were in the system.”

Cedric gave her a weighing look, his expression heartbreakingly like Tomlin’s when he had restrained himself from asking when and how she’d learned so much high-level espionage. Jack swallowed, suddenly feeling like her food had gotten caught in her throat.

“So they may not have had any idea that their briefcase bomb was going to trigger something catastrophic,” he said after a moment. “I suspect, if they’d been able to gain access, they’d have put it on the shuttle itself and timed its detonation for sometime during launch. So whoever it was had top-level tech, but not top-level clearance. Could you have walked a bomb like that onto the shuttle?”

Jack winced, feeling ill, and nodded. She knew exactly how she could have done it, too. “I would never do that,” she whispered.

“We know,” Takama said, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Maybe I should be bothered by how much access you seem to have,” Cedric agreed, “but I’m not, because it seems to me like it’s in pretty safe hands. Incredibly young hands, but—”

“Now hush, Cedric,” Safiyya said in a gentle scolding tone. “You know that my cousin Lalla looked like she was twelve years old until she was nearly thirty. Don’t embarrass her. Or yourself.”

“The point is,” Cedric continued, giving his wife a somewhat subdued playful glance, “you aren’t at all responsible for what happened. The two of you are, in point of fact, also victims of Quintessa. Both of you could’ve run away and hidden, but you stood beside him when he needed allies most of all. You’re why almost two hundred people survived long enough to escape into the mountains. And you saved his life.”

“I didn’t, though,” Jack blurted. “I just postponed his death.”

Just like Fry…

“No one gets to choose how long their life is,” Cedric told her, his voice becoming a bit stern.

I tried to…

“All we can do is make the days we have count. My son would have no regrets about how he spent his last days, and who he spent them with. Nor do we.” He took a deep breath. “Which brings us to one of the reasons we came here today. We’ll be holding his memorial a few days from now, once the search-and-rescue is over and the Islamic funerals are dealt with first. And we would like it, very much, if both of you would join us at it, and stand with us as part of his family.”

Jack looked at Kyra, who was looking back at her in speechless astonishment, eyes filling.

All she could do was nod and try not to start crying again.

Tomlin, she knew, would have wanted this. She had a sense that, on some level, she and Kyra had awakened fatherly impulses in him, and he’d have wanted his family to pull her and Kyra into their orbit and take them in on his behalf. But unlike Kyra, she had a father who was waiting for her, and a life and self that had been put on hold for far too long. For Kyra, what Tomlin had offered was the life she needed, not a further detour away from it. But even as part of Jack had been—and still was—a little tempted to let herself be enfolded into Tomlin’s world and family, she knew it wasn’t where she truly belonged. She needed to be Audrey MacNamera—not Jack B. Badd, not P. Finch, not Tislilel the mermaid—and inhabit a world without mercs, monsters, or murder. But first…

She would do this. She would honor Tomlin at his memorial ceremony. She would make sure that someone kept his promises to Kyra so she would have a future on Tangiers Prime that she could take pride in. But then…

It was, Jack knew, time for her to go.