The counters began ticking down.
“I must reset the devices daily. That’s my failsafe. If anything were to prevent me…”
Rikki shivered. “What if something comes up? What if you can’t do the daily rest?”
“Après moi, le déluge.”
“What?”
Li sneered. “Didn’t they teach history on Mars? You all deserve to be extinct. It’s French. Louis XV. ‘After me, the flood.’ And, as prophecies go, close enough. His son lost his head.”
“Meaning?” Rikki asked despairingly.
“Meaning you’d best see to it that nothing ‘comes up’ before I’m prepared to disarm. As to my purpose until then, you shouldn’t be surprised. A free hand with raising the children. You and your friends wouldn’t allow that when I offered you all the choice.”
“Poisoning the children’s minds against us didn’t give you enough leverage?”
“Sadly, no.”
“Then why warp them?”
“I’m molding them,” Li said. “Dana’s job was to find a refuge, a haven, like Dark. Now it’s my turn. To mold the children. To mold a civilization. The rest of you don’t have what that takes.”
“Now that we know how important this is to—”
Li snickered. “Little Miss Sunday dinner? I’m supposed to believe you’ll change your mind? Come back up. I have more to show you.”
The heavy bunker door slipped from Rikki’s grasp when she closed it, too. This time, aware of the explosives, she cringed.
Li gestured up Main Street with her handgun. “Good. They’ve finished.”
Carlos was ushering children—their clothes, faces, and hands inexplicably filthy—away from the gate. One by one, they dropped gardening tools on a pile. Once the last child started down the street, Carlos did something with a gadget from his pocket.
Most of the children gave Rikki a wide berth. Some stared as they passed.
Rikki burst into tears. “I love you children.”
If they heard her, if they cared, none showed it.
Behind Rikki, from one of the playground speakers, Marvin announced, “Discovery’s radar shows Endeavour is inbound. It will be on the ground within ten minutes.”
*
Li motioned Rikki forward. “I’m almost impressed. They got suspicious faster than I expected.”
The barren rock near the fence was…changed. Textured. Dug up, somehow, by the bulldozer? By the children, too, Rikki guessed from all those begrimed faces and hands.
Two paces closer and Rikki saw that something covered that strip of ground. A wavy gravel bed, all tiny hummocks, hollows, and shoeprints, extended about five meters inside the fence. The broad gravel band paralleled the fence until both, curving around buildings, were lost to sight.
“Stop!” Li picked up one of the rocks that little feet had kicked and dragged into the compound. “Do not approach the gate.”
“Why not?”
Li lobbed her pebble toward the middle of the gravel strip, about ten meters to the left of the gate. Nothing happened.
“That was anticlimactic.” Li took a rake from the tool pile. She tossed it after the pebble.
Blam!
Rikki ducked, hands clapped to her ears, as gravel rained down and something stung her cheek. Stones pinged off the fence and concrete chips flew from it. Children screamed. When the smoke and dust had cleared, a meter-wide crater remained. Of the rake itself, only scattered twisted shards could be seen.
“Pressure activated. That’s why you should stay off the gravel.”
Rikki wiped grit and tears from her face. “Why, Li?”
“The fence and gate suffice to keep the children in. The land mines are to keep you and your friends out. Except, of course, when I have need of you inside. The mines are radio controlled. I can turn them on and off.”
“Six minutes,” Marvin called.
“You see,” Li went on, “we on the inside—and our numbers will grow—require food, water, and clothing. Every year or so we’ll want a fresh bottle of deuterium. So rejoice. The four of you can still serve the new order.”
“And if we aren’t able to produce enough? If, say, the weather doesn’t cooperate? You would blow the bunker?”
“You want to know, can you starve us out? You could try. But there is plenty of food and water in the pantry for just Carlos and me.”
“You would take food from the mouths of babies?”
Li shrugged. “If you withhold food, what happens is on your heads. And when you come to your senses and resume deliveries, we can replace any children you starved.”
Rikki just stared, dumbfounded.
“For lesser infractions, if you should be so foolish, I’m sure I can find other ways to get your attention. I might cut off power to your homes for a while. Have any other bright ideas?”
Did she?
Rikki pointed at the fence. “That encloses what, maybe a square klick? You can’t mean to stay inside for long. You can’t fit many more children inside.”
“The secure compound is just about half that area, but you’re correct. We won’t stay forever. A few years will suffice. By then, hundreds of children, the cadre of a new civilization, will have been thoroughly shaped.” Bright, fanatical eyes proclaimed, “They’ll be thoroughly mine.”
“How about this?” Rikki said desperately. “We construct a second settlement elsewhere. Far down the coast of Darwin Sea. Or on the coast of a different sea, if you prefer. You live there. You build your”—insane, twisted, tragic—“society there.”
“Or you could move. Except no one will be going anywhere, because I need workers here to farm. Or I may find I need resources only Endeavour can fetch. And even if those weren’t possibilities, I would still refuse. Know this: restored humanity will be a single society. One perfect society.”
With Mad Queen Li to rule it.
The children, terrified by the explosion, had crowded around Carlos. Eve, taller than the rest, very blond, was unmistakable—and Carlos’s hand rested on her shoulder.
Amid cosmic disaster: a tragedy of human scale.
Rikki said, “To feed so many, we’ll need Carlos’s help, too.” Whether or not that was true, she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him inside the fence, with the little girls.
“Carlos outside?” Li hesitated. “No, I need him.”
“Three minutes,” Marvin advised.
Li took the controller from her pocket. “You have thirty seconds to cross the gravel.”
“But I—”
“Twenty-five seconds.
