The Toll Page 5

  “Your Honor, forgive my impertinence,” Jeri told Sydney—because now they were most certainly on a first-name basis, “but it’s a steel vault sealed within another steel vault, buried beneath a thousand tons of wreckage on the side of a dangerous slope. Even if it wasn’t at the bottom of the sea, it would be hard to reach. It requires meticulous engineering, effort, and above all, patience!”

  “If we don’t wrap this up in short order,” railed Possuelo, “Goddard will swoop in and take everything we bring up!”

  Yet Goddard’s presence at the site was, thus far, conspicuously absent. He had sent no salvage teams or representatives to ensure he got his share of the diamonds. Instead he raved publicly about defiling hallowed waters and dishonoring the dead, claiming he wanted no part of anything that was found down there. But it was all posturing. He wanted those diamonds as much as anyone, if not more.

  Which meant that he had a plan to get them.

  There was no denying that Goddard had a knack for getting whatever he wanted, and that kept every scythedom in the world on edge.

  “Scythedom.”

  That word used to mean the global organization as a whole—but now regional thinking had taken over. There was no sense of a world scythedom anymore—only provincial politics and petty grievances.

  Possuelo had nightmares of a world where Goddard had all the diamonds and could handpick every single new scythe. Were that to happen, the world would tilt so heavily toward his so-called new order, it would tip off its axis. And the voices of those who resisted him would be lost in the pained wails of those he so gleefully gleaned.

  “Will you ever tell me what’s in the vault that’s put such a bee in everyone’s bonnet?” Jeri asked after a dive that was deemed “successful” because no equipment was lost.

  “A bee? More like a hornet’s nest,” Possuelo answered. “The vault, as does any vault, contains objects of great value. But in this case those objects are not your concern, because they are only of value to scythes.”

  At that, Jeri smirked. “Ah! I always wondered where the scythe rings were kept!”

  Possuelo cursed himself for having said anything at all. “You’re too clever for your own good.”

  “That,” Jeri said, “has always been my problem.”

  Possuelo sighed. Was it so bad that the captain knew? The affable Madagascan was not a greedy sort, treated the crew well, and had shown nothing but respect for Possuelo. The scythe needed someone to trust in all this, and Captain Soberanis had certainly proven herself trustworthy. Or himself, as the sky was currently under heavy cover of clouds.

  “It’s not the rings but the gems themselves—many thousands of them,” Possuelo admitted. “Whoever controls those diamonds controls the future of the scythedom.”

  While we in the LoneStar region would like to remain neutral in this matter, it’s become clear to us in Texas that High Blade Goddard intends to impose his will upon all of North Merica, and perhaps the world entire. Without Grandslayers to check his ambition, we fear his influence will grow like a mortal-age cancer.

  As a Charter Region, we are free to do whatever we wish within our borders. We are, therefore, breaking off all contact with the MidMerican scythedom. Effective immediately, any and all MidMerican scythes found within our region shall be escorted to the nearest border and ejected.

  We go as far as to question Mr. Goddard’s right to be High Blade, since an edict from Endura was never publicly made before the Grandslayers perished.

  As a matter of policy, we do not wish to involve other regions in our decision. Others can do as they see fit. We just want to be left alone.

  —Official proclamation from Her Excellency, High Blade Barbara Jordan of Texas

  5 Your Service Is No Longer Required

  from: Thunderhead Primary Communication Exchange

  to: Loriana Barchok

  date: April 1st, Year of the Raptor, 17:15 GMT

  subject: Re: Authority Interface dissolution

  mailed by: TPCE.th

  signed by: FCAI.net

  security: Standard encryption

  My Dearest Loriana,

  I am sorry to inform you that your services as a Nimbus agent are no longer required. I know you have performed to the best of your ability, and this permanent release from service is by no means a reflection on you or your work for the Authority Interface. However, I have decided to dissolve the Authority Interface in its entirety. Effective immediately, it shall cease to exist as a managerial entity, and therefore you are released from service. I wish you luck in all of your future endeavors.

  Respectfully,

  The Thunderhead

  If someone had told Loriana Barchok that her job would cease to exist less than one year out of Nimbus Academy, she would not have believed it possible. She would not have believed a great many things possible. But those things had all happened. Which meant that anything could happen now. Anything. For all she knew a hand could reach out of the sky with tweezers and pluck her eyebrows with impunity. Not that they needed plucking; her eyebrows were fine. But it could happen. She wouldn’t put anything past this peculiar world anymore.

  At first, Loriana thought that the e-mail from the Thunderhead was a joke. There were plenty of pranksters at the Fulcrum City AI offices. But it became quickly evident that this was no prank. At the end of that horrible earsplitting noise that blew out many a sound system around the world, the Thunderhead sent every Nimbus agent everywhere the identical message. The Authority Interface had been shut down; every single agent was now unemployed—and unsavory—just like everyone else.

  “If the whole world is unsavory,” another agent lamented, “then of course we’re out of a job. We’re supposed to be the professional interface for the Thunderhead; how can we do that if we’re unsavory, and, by law, forbidden to talk to it?”

  “No point in obsessing over it,” said another colleague, who didn’t seem bothered at all. “What’s done is done.”

  “But to fire all of us?” Loriana said. “Every single one with no warning? That’s millions of people!”

  “The Thunderhead has its reasons for everything,” the nonplussed colleague said. “The fact that we can’t see the logic shows our limitations, not the Thunderhead’s.”

  Then, when the news of Endura’s sinking broke, it became evident, at least to Loriana, that humanity was being punished for it—as if somehow everyone was complicit in the crime. So now the Grandslayers were gone, the Thunderhead was irked, and Loriana was out of a job.

  Reevaluating one’s life was not something easily accomplished. She moved back in with her parents and spent a great deal of time doing a whole lot of nothing. There was employment everywhere—free training and education for any profession. The problem wasn’t finding a career path, it was finding something she actually wanted to do.

  Weeks passed in what would have been despair but was dialed down to melancholy by her emotional nanites. Even so, that melancholy was deep and pervasive. She was not accustomed to idle, unproductive time and was completely unprepared for being cast into the winds of an uncertain future. Yes, everyone in the world was subject to those winds now, but at least others had jobs to tether them to the familiar. Routines to keep their Thunderhead-free lives in some semblance of order. All Loriana had was time to dwell on things. It was overwhelming.

  At her parents’ behest, she had gone in to get her nanites tweaked in order to raise her spirits—because not even melancholy could be tolerated these days—but the line was too long. Loriana could not abide waiting, so she left.

  “Only unsavories wait in line,” she told her parents when she got back, referring to the way the Thunderhead organized the AI’s Office of Unsavory Affairs—with intentional inefficiency. Only after she said it, did the obvious occur to her. She, herself, was unsavory. Did that mean that pointless lines and horrendous waits were now going to be the norm? It brought her to tears, which in turn made her parents more insistent tha
t she go back to have her nanites tweaked.

  “We know things are different for you now, but it’s not the end of the world, honey,” her parents had told her. Yet for some strange reason, she thought that it might be.

  And then a month after the world went unsavory, her former boss showed up at their door. Loriana assumed it was just a courtesy call. Clearly it couldn’t be about rehiring her, since her boss had been laid off along with all the other agents. Even their old offices were gone. According to the news, construction crews had shown up at Authority Interface headquarters throughout the world to convert the buildings into apartments and recreation centers.

  “The work order just showed up,” said a construction foreman on the news report. “And we’re happy to do whatever the Thunderhead wants!” Work orders, supply requisitions, and the like were the closest thing anyone had to communication with the Thunderhead anymore. Those who received them were to be envied.

  Her boss had been the head of the Fulcrum City office. Loriana was the only junior agent to be working with Director Hilliard. If nothing else, it looked nice on the résumé Loriana never sent out.

  How she had become the director’s personal assistant was less about her abilities and more about her personality. Bubbly some might call it, although others would call it annoying.

  “You’re perpetually cheerful,” Director Hilliard had told her when she offered Loriana the position. “There’s not enough of that around here.”

  That was true—Nimbus agents were not known for their sparkling personalities. She did her best to liven things up and see many a miserable glass as half-full, which, more often than not, irked the other agents. Well, that was their problem. Loriana suspected that Director Hilliard took guilty pleasure in seeing her subordinates rankled on a regular basis by Loriana’s positive penchants. Although these many weeks without a thing to do, and no prospects for the future, had popped most of her bubbles, leaving her about as flat as any other Nimbus agent.

  “I have a job for you,” Director Hilliard said. “Actually, more than a job,” she corrected. “More like a mission.”

  Loriana was thrilled—the first positive thing she had felt since the Authority Interface had been shuttered.

  “I have to warn you,” Director Hilliard said. “This mission will involve some travel.”

  And although Loriana was much more skilled in staying put, she knew this might be the only opportunity she’d have in the foreseeable future.

  “Thank you so much!” Loriana said, vigorously shaking her boss’s hand long past the point where most others would have stopped.

  * * *

  And now, two weeks later, she was out in the middle of the ocean on a tuna long-liner that wasn’t doing any fishing, but still reeked of its last catch.

  “There weren’t many options when it came to ships,” Director Hilliard had told everyone. “We had to take what we could get.”

  As it turns out, Loriana wasn’t the only one chosen for this mission. Hundreds of Nimbus agents had been brought in. Now they populated a dozen mismatched ships. A bizarre ragtag flotilla bound for the South Pacific.

  “8.167, 167.733,” Hilliard told them in the preliminary briefing. “These numbers were given to us by a reliable source,” she said. “We think they represent coordinates.” Then she brought up a map and pinpointed a spot somewhere between Hawaii and Australia. The targeted spot showed nothing but empty sea.

  “But what makes you think they’re coordinates,” Loriana asked the director after the briefing. “I mean, if all you had were random numbers, they could mean anything—how can you be sure?”

  “Because,” the director confided, “as soon as I spoke my suspicion that they might be coordinates, I began to receive advertisements for ship charters in Honolulu.”

  “The Thunderhead?”

  Hilliard nodded. “While it’s against the law for the Thunderhead to communicate with unsavories, it’s not against the law to imply.”

  * * *

  On the fourth day out—still several hundred miles from the coordinates—things began to get weird.

  It began with the autopilot losing its connection to the Thunderhead. Without that connection, it could still navigate, but couldn’t problem solve. It was just a mindless machine. Not only that, but they lost all radio connection to the outside world. This sort of thing simply didn’t happen. Technology functioned. Always. Even after the Thunderhead went silent. And in the void of answers, speculation quickly became incendiary.

  “What if this is worldwide?”

  “What if the Thunderhead is dead?”

  “What if we’re truly alone in the world now?”

  There were people who were actually glancing at Loriana, as if she might lighten things with a silver lining.

  “We’ll turn around,” blustered one of the agents—Sykora was his name—a small-minded man who had been a naysayer from the beginning. “We’ll go back and forget about this nonsense.”

  It was Loriana who made the crucial observation as she looked at the blinking error screen.

  “It says we’re thirty nautical miles from the nearest network buoy,” she said. “But they’re supposed to be twenty miles apart, aren’t they?”

  A quick check of the buoy grid showed no signals. Which meant the Thunderhead had no presence in these waters.

  “Interesting…,” said Director Hilliard. “Good catch, Agent Barchok.”

  Loriana wanted to preen from the praise but didn’t let herself.

  Hilliard took in the uncharted waters ahead. “Did you know that the human eye has a huge patch of nothing just off the center of its field of vision?”

  Loriana nodded. “The blind spot.”

  “Our brains tell us there’s nothing to see there and fill in the blanks so we don’t even notice it.”

  “But if the Thunderhead has a blind spot, how would it even know that it exists?”

  Director Hilliard raised her eyebrows.

  “Maybe someone told it….”

  I continue to keep this journal, even though there is no need. A daily endeavor is difficult to break once it becomes engrained in who we are. Munira assures me that, come what may, she will find a way to slip this journal into the archive at the Library of Alexandria. That would be a first! A scythe who continues their dutiful journaling even after death.

  We have been here at the Kwajalein Atoll for six weeks now, with no communication from the outside world. While I itch to hear news of Marie, and how she fared at the inquest on Endura, I cannot dwell on it. Either all went well, and she is presiding over MidMerica as High Blade… or it did not go her way, and our task becomes an even greater challenge.  All the more reason to unlock the secret of the atoll and access the wisdom of the founding scythes. Their contingency plan for the scythedom’s failure, whatever it is, could be the only thing that can save it.

  Munira and I have taken up residence in the bunker we found. We’ve also constructed a rudimentary canoe that is small enough to evade the island’s security system. It can’t go any distance, of course, but we’ve been using it to paddle out to the nearer islands of the atoll. We’ve been finding much the same there as we found here, evidence of earlier habitation. Concrete slabs, fragments of foundations. Nothing extraordinary.

  We have, however, learned the original purpose of the place—or at least how it was used toward the end of the mortal age. The entire Kwajalein Atoll was a military installation. Not for the actual waging of war, but as a proving ground for emergent technologies. While some of the other nearby atolls were blasted with tests of nuclear weaponry, this atoll was used for the testing of rockets—as well as for the launching of spy satellites—some of which might even still be in the Thunderhead’s observational satellite network.

  It’s obvious now why the founding scythes chose this place; it was already protected by layers of secrecy. Thus, with a foundation of shadow already in place, it made it easier to erase from the world completely.

 
; If only we could access everything in the bunker, we might learn how the founding scythes repurposed this place. Unfortunately, we can’t get beyond the uppermost level. The rest of the installation is behind a door with double gem-locks that require two scythes—one standing on either side of the door—to open.

  As for the island’s defense system, we don’t know how to disable it, but being very literally under the radar makes it a moot point. The problem is, now that we are here—whether we find anything or not—we cannot leave.

  —From the “postmortem” journal of Scythe Michael Faraday, May 14th, Year of the Raptor

  6 Fate of the Lanikai Lady

  Far from feeling trapped, Munira found being on the atoll freeing. For a person with a penchant for archives, the bunker provided endless fodder for her imagination. Endless information to be sorted, organized, and analyzed.

  In one of the closets, to Munira’s amazement, they found a robe that had belonged to Scythe Da Vinci—one of the twelve founders. She had seen pictures of his robes, all slightly different, but each featuring drawings done by the original Leonardo da Vinci. This one had the Vitruvian Man spread across it. When the scythe opened his arms, so would the Vitruvian Man. It was, of course, nowhere near the condition of the pristine robes that were enshrined in Endura’s Museum of the Scythedom—but even so, it was priceless, and would be the pride and joy of any collection.

  Their mornings consisted of fishing and gathering food. They’d even begun tilling and planting seeds to create a garden, just in case they were marooned there long enough to harvest. Some days they would paddle out to search the outlying islands of the atoll. Other days were spent studying the records they found in the bunker.

  Faraday was less interested in the mortal-age records than he was trying to get through that steel door that had been locked by the founding scythes.