After half a can of peaches he stopped and said— Our last chance was to talk to our government, tell them everything we knew. It wasn’t like they’d stopped listening, but we got the impression that they couldn’t listen to us unless we all came in with our hands up.
He said, We never should have talked to them at all. What we said spooked someone, who told someone else, and word got through to the fucking FTL project, who started moving like their asses were on fire. The timeline changed. We were down to days, not months. Our intel said they were getting their people on board, setting up the elevators to get to the orbital launcher, which we were told was fully operational. I was going to have to physically stop those ships from launching. Problem was, they were launching from multiple platforms, and I didn’t know if I could stop every single one.
C— had been saying, Can’t we gin up some kind of miracle? John, can’t you do an act of good wizardry? Any way to stabilise the North America glacier? Any way to trap atmosphere over the Northern Territory, show them we can fix things here? But A— said, That’s for later, first things first, bum-rush the ships, pull the bastards out, make them do the cryo plan instead. Get the population safely out, and we can stay behind and clear the planet. If John’s up for it.
He said, I was trying. I was so close to cracking this third thing, the soul. I’d realised there was the energy you produced from being alive and the energy you produced when you died, but the fact that energy was produced when you died meant there was another phase. I could get a corpse’s heart beating and get all the neurons firing in the brain, but it wasn’t producing the alive stuff anymore. It wasn’t an on-off switch. I’d stopped sleeping and I wasn’t eating much, I was keeping my body going just by fiddling with the processes.
He said, It made sense that every human had a well of this energy, this soul energy, but I couldn’t distinguish it from anything else. Even on the day I’d killed all those cops there was too much noise and I couldn’t work out what the noise was. I could tell it was the thing I was looking for, but I didn’t understand why it seemed so big. And I didn’t know what to do with it, or how to use it.
So I said to everyone, I can’t stop them myself, not yet. We have to stall them. We know they need Pan-Euro’s orbital gate access, so let’s make sure they can’t get it. Let’s make sure nobody wants to give them orbital gate access.
He said, And all of us looked at the floorboards.
He said, None of us wanted to actually nuke anything. But a nuke’s good blackmail, right? A nuke adds a lot of pressure, right? The people who knew it was there, they knew that if we talked about having a nuke everyone would find out who gave us a fucking nuke. So we said to our client, Pan-Euro cannot be allowed to let these people through. They’re cutting and running. They’re leaving ten billion people behind to die, having stolen financing and support and materials. They’re leaving us to drown. And we said, We don’t want to make a scene, but …
They said, Okay, okay, but hand the fucking nuke back, we’ve changed our minds. We’ll stop Pan-Euro, we’ll put our whole weight into making sure they don’t get out of orbit. But we want the bomb back before you do something crazy.
He said, They took so long that the ships were counting down to launch. We were about forty-eight hours away from Wave One at that point. A couple of nations were all, Hang on, this is early, this isn’t to schedule, but the FTL project said they were doing a mock run because preparation was going so well. How the hell did anyone buy that? How much money was changing hands? Didn’t they realise that if these bastards were giving away insane amounts of cash it was because they didn’t think cash was worth anything anymore?
He said, So here’s us, planning to meet these agents in neutral territory, across the ditch, over in the huddle where the Territory refugees were. They wanted us to pass the nuke back. We all voted to trust them, but A— and G— and M— and I came up with a just-in-case plan. Forty-eight hours became twenty-four so quickly. G— fixed up the case and carried it over alone, with caveats. Nobody liked that. They were all, Shit, John, send someone dead, send a puppet. But I wanted G—。 P— volunteered to go with him, but G— said he wouldn’t arm it if P— was in range. P— went off at him, but it was one of those times where he held his ground against her. I remember. She called him a stupid kid.
He said, I had—I had this weird gut feeling before we sent him off, on that private plane. And I was getting pretty good at that time, even if I wasn’t good enough. I took G— downstairs and I got him to face the wall, and I took his arm off.