Chapter 25

  Riley McFinn

  Riley McFinn’s third private jet, the one that could leave Earth’s atmosphere if necessary, came to rest on the wide back lawn of the Carter estate. The fog swirled oddly as the jet settled on the uncut green grass. A gust of wind swirled his dark nanocarbon cape as he hopped down from the hatch. His boots thudded into the lawn where he had not set foot in years. He saw with satisfaction that the fog had not entirely blanketed the estate yet. He had time. Set with tiny shards of McFinnium, his watch resisted the time-dilating effect of the Cascade. Instead of showing the time of day, it counted up from the time of the Cascade, which would be eminently more useful. It counted accurately with respect to his own perception, and most importantly, it was in perfect sync with one other watch somewhere else in the world.

  A detour took him to the barn, partly obscured by the gradually thickening fog. The tarp fastened over the missing part of the roof hung limp as he approached. He shook his head as he stopped to survey the wreckage of the explosion. Chunks of stone still littered the lawn. That had been too damn close. That had almost been everything he’d spent years working for undone in a single moment. If Kaitlyn had died…well, Riley wouldn’t have lived to see what tragedy followed because Rebecca Carter would have done him in.

  The machinery in the lab was cheap and rudimentary compared to his own. He smiled to see the crude but intuitive equations scrawled on the whiteboard, the ideas, theories, and postulations scribbled in a nearby notebook. It filled him with a warm glow, though the lab was chill and damp. She had been trying so hard to figure it all out. A bit longer, and she would have put it all together. “You truly are the daughter of Nicholas Carter,” he said. And he wondered, not for the first time, whether it had been a mistake not to tell her everything. Maybe her friends as well. But Nick had said not to, and Riley had promised to trust him.

  He took a bit more time to go through Kaitlyn’s supplies, the computer set to play Eric Walker’s music, the gallery of stuffed animals arranged to observe the proceedings. The safe was locked. McFinn removed a small metal disc from his pocket and flipped it into the air like a coin, where it unfolded into a metallic mass of spinning discs the size of a golf ball. He pointed at the safe, muttered a word, and it buzzed to the safe. Several laps in a perfect circle around the locking mechanism were sufficient to render it useless; a circular segment of the safe fell to Riley’s feet with a clang. No McFinnium within, he saw. But there was an Anchoring Disc. Dead, of course. McFinn removed the plate-like object and held it up for inspection. He remembered this one well. Nick’s idea and Riley’s design–words which described most of October Industry’s tech.

  He decided to take it back to the ship and fix it up. These things could retain their spatial position against a theoretically infinite amount of force–theoretical because the physical materials of their composition succumbed to external pressure long before any known limit was reached. They could be damn useful. The real trick, he fondly recalled as he strolled out of the lab, had been ensuring that they fixed their position relative to the gravitational center of planet Earth.

  Feeling sentimental, Riley McFinn also stopped by the Lepidopterarium to feed the butterflies one last time. Their apparently carefree happiness gave him a strange kind of melancholy nostalgia. Their atoms too had once been within a star, and to stardust they would return. Riley remembered coming to see Nick when he had built this place with Kaitlyn, the eminent scientist being instructed by his daughter for a change. That had been soon before he died.

  Riley left the door of the place open when he left. Best to at least give the butterflies a chance. Something bounded through the fog from around the corner of the house. Riley readied the McFinnium-tipped cane in his hand. The crystal glowed purple-red, and the fog cleared away in a rush.

  It was Whiskey, Rebecca’s ridiculous pet. The small marsupial bounded past Riley before coming around and circling him again. “Inscrutable as ever,” he said. “You’ll be coming with me.” He didn’t know why he suddenly made that decision, but he declined to second-guess it.

  His earpiece beeped. “Vehicle approaching,” said Clara. “Three kilometers. Estimated arrival time: two minutes.”

  “Deploy recon drone,” he replied. He continued to the back door. Locked. The small flying orb made swift work of the doorknob, and he pushed through into the manor.

  He had come seeking two objects. Nick’s globe, the hefty classical sepia-toned masterpiece that Rebecca had put to use as a commemorative pincushion, waited in the study. He rotated Antarctica to the top and pressed his hand against the white continent. He tapped the side of the globe with the crystalline tip of his cane. Antarctica flashed in a tiny grid. Scan lines moved outward in a swift circular pattern.

  He reset the globe to its proper orientation and with his right thumb pressed a quick sequence of countries. Nick had made this code, and Riley did not know whether the countries in question bore any significance.

  His headset beeped as the globe split open down irregular seams like the skin of an orange to reveal the hollow within. “Show it,” he said. An image of a solitary loading truck winding down the long tree-lined drive of the Carter Estate superimposed itself upon his vision of the globe’s interior. He didn’t recognize any of the people in the truck, but he certainly recognized the grey and orange logo on the side. He considered simply blowing it up before it got here. But no. He wanted to have a look at their things. “They are probably here for you,” he said, reaching into the globe and extracting a melon-sized ball of McFinnium crystals. The good stuff, the pure uncolored stuff, the stuff that Nick had called Arda. He added it to the cluster of crystals atop his cane. This increased the mass by a factor of five or six, yet the weight remained nearly constant.

  “Let them come,” he said. The globe, designed to shield against McFinnium radiation, closed up again. Riley, at the last moment, seized a few random chess pieces from a nearby game and dropped them in. If someone else found the globe and somehow opened it, he wanted to leave them something to puzzle over.

  One more thing, and he thought he could grab it before his uninvited guests barged in. He turned to the southern corridor, but paused at the sight of a picture on the bookshelf there. It hadn’t been there the last time he’d been in his hallway, but he knew it well; he had it set as the default background image on most of his private devices. He was surprised to see it here, in full view, in a place where Rebecca lived.

  It showed Nicholas Carter, his daughter Kaitlyn, his step-sister Rebecca, and his brother-in-law Riley McFinn. There they were, all together, when Riley and Rebecca had been married. Before Nick had died. Before Riley had embarked upon his current project, the one which had cost him his marriage. That had been…what, five years ago? Not long before Nick had died. They were all smiling in the picture, young Kaitlyn at her father’s side, Riley and Rebecca behind, the Carter manor in the background. Kaitlyn’s birthday, Riley remembered. The horses. The guitar. Father and child, neither knowing there was more than one of each.

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  “Why did you wait so long?” Riley asked. And he wondered whether he should have explained everything to Rebecca.

  “I’ll trust you,” he said to Nicholas Carter, the loving father in the photograph. He said it also to Nikola Raschez, the brilliant scientist. “I promised.”

  Clara told him that the car had arrived outside.

  “Density of genesis fog?”

  “Forty-five percent,” she told him. “Eleven percent variable.”

  Form stability average, cohesiveness near minimum. That could be inconvenient, were it not for…

  He telescoped the dark cane in his hands until it extended to approximately his height. He then seized it in both hands and smashed the melon-sized bunch of pure scintillating Arda against a nearby metal grate. The ball of crystals shattered under the strength of his blow. A piercing chime rang out as though he had slammed a perfectly calibrated bell. The stabilizing influence washed over him, pushed back the creeping creative energies of the genesis fog. It was best to break them up like that after they’d been clustered for a while. More surface area.

  The shattered crystals swarmed about the head of the staff as he held it back up for a closer look. They flickered with light; the whole glittering mass phased as one through a variety of colors. The larger chunks of crystal drifted in the center, maintaining a core of mass while the rest orbited and swooped in swarms. Arcs flashed out like solar flares. It was like watching a shattered planet gradually reform under the influence of its own gravitational field.

  Well. He didn’t feel like doing this anymore, but it had to be done.

  He swept the staff at the windowed wall of the study, conjuring an idea in his mind. The wall broke outward as though smashed through by an irresistible and rapidly moving force. Books, chessboards, fragments of wood and stone and plaster and broken glass scattered themselves over the front lawn on the other side. Some even traveled far enough to reach the driveway.

  Riley McFinn stepped outside. His comfortable boots crunched on the debris-strewn grass. His dark cape swirled to the side in the lingering after-wind of the force he had summoned. There, twenty yards away at the front door of the estate, five agents of October Industries stared in his direction. They appeared to be wondering whether it had been wise to come. They should have known better.

  Riley could make a monster out of the genesis fog. He could make a giant robot. A deadly disease. With the ball of pure McFinnium at the tip of his staff, he could make nearly anything. But that all seemed like cheating.

  “I prefer the old ways,” he said. “Precision targeting, Clara. Lethal. Fire at will.”

  The recon drone, camouflaged in the trees nearby, fired five shots too quiet for Riley to hear. Four of the OI agents fell upon the steps of the Carter manor. The fifth wore an October Industries Combat Field Suit. Mark III, Riley thought, though it was hard to tell at this distance. It resembled a compact backpack that extended to the man’s helmet and arms, and it had produced a reactive projectile inhibitor field in response to the recon drone’s bullets.

  The CFS mk.III extended to encompass the man’s left hand in a gauntlet of machinery. The man raised that hand at Riley, a green glow building there. Focused concussive blast. Pinpoint. It could explode a boulder into gravel at a range of up to fifty meters. The impressive thing was that it could still work, though at a somewhat diminished effect, through a medium of liquids or even solid objects. That one had kept Riley up a few nights.

  “That was meant for mining,” he muttered with a wave of his hand.

  The inhibitor field could deflect small projectiles, but not an entire recon drone. The four-kilo egg of metal struck the man in the back of the head at a hundred kilometers-per-hour, throwing off his aim. Riley didn’t flinch as a tree somewhere behind him crunched apart into kindling.

  “Toxin,” he said as he stepped forward. The drone erupted in a small cloud of paralytic nerve gas. Riley heard the man gasping and choking as he approached. He wouldn’t be a threat for several minutes at least. The CFS would shut down, inoperable in response to the incapacitation of the man within. A safety precaution, to prevent accidental disastrous misfire.

  Riley found nothing of particular interest in the vehicle, though he did remove a computer. “Clara,” he said as he returned to the gaping hole in the side of the Carter manor. “Scavenger drone. The computer. Also the cell phones and other electronics those men were carrying.”

  Riley McFinn was talking to himself when he stepped into Kaitlyn’s room a minute later. “…say it’s silly of her to be jealous of Clara. She wouldn’t be jealous if I’d named it Steve. Did she never notice they have the same accent?”

  Kaitlyn’s room was a mess, just as he remembered it. She’d packed in a hurry. And she would not be returning. He picked up her laptop absentmindedly, then checked himself and put it back down. No need to invade her privacy. Her snowglobe collection, on the other hand…

  Ah. There.

  “Clara,” he said as he reached for the snowglobe containing only an effigy of a closed wooden door within. “Prepare for liftoff. Once I come onboard, I will be indisposed for some time. Any questions?”

  “None.”

  “Then let’s get out of here.”