The Toll (Arc of a Scythe) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,148

It meant she had a legitimate excuse for not being reachable when she didn’t want to be reached.

But as the island’s communications queen, she also had to deal with the brunt of disgruntlement – and when hundreds of people were trapped on small islands, there were plenty of disgruntled people.

There was one particularly enraged team of construction workers that burst into her office, demanding a way off the atoll, or they would take matters into their own hands. They threatened to render her deadish, if only to make a point – which would have been quite the nuisance, because, even though they had a revival center on the main island now, the lack of wireless communication meant that her memories had not been backed up since her arrival. If she went deadish, she’d wake up wondering where the heck she was, with her last memory being onboard the Lanikai Lady with poor Director Hilliard the moment they passed into the blind spot.

It was that thought that gave her the answer!

“The Thunderhead will supplant you with yourselves!” she told them.

It confused them enough to take the wind out of their homicidal sails.

“It has memory constructs of all of you,” she told them. “It will simply erase you and replace you … with you. But only with the memories you had before coming here!”

“Can the Thunderhead do that?” they asked.

“Of course it can,” she told them, “and it will!”

They were dubious, but without any viable alternatives, they accepted it. After all, Loriana seemed so very sure of herself.

She wasn’t, of course. She was making the whole thing up – but she had to believe that the Thunderhead, being the benevolent entity that it was, would make good on this request, just as it had made good on the requests for more cereal choices.

Only when the first team of exiting workers was restored as themselves, but with no memory of the atoll, did she know that the Thunderhead had accepted her bold suggestion.

There were a lot of workers leaving now, because the work was done.

It had been done for many months. All that was in the schematics that the Thunderhead had given her had been completed. She didn’t overtly oversee the construction. She merely worked secretly behind the scenes to make sure it didn’t go awry – because there were always those who wanted to insert their noses where they didn’t belong. Such as the time Sykora refused to pour a double foundation, insisting that it was an unnecessary waste of resources.

She made sure that Sykora’s revised work order never reached the construction team. It seemed a lot of her job at first was undermining Sykora’s meddling.

Then a new work order came in that was not on Loriana’s plans. It was delivered directly to Sykora. He was charged with overseeing the construction of a resort placed on the farthest island of the atoll. Not just a resort, but a full convention center. He threw himself into it, never knowing that there was absolutely no plan to connect it with the rest of the atoll. The Thunderhead, it seemed, had sent him a job just to get him out of the way. It was, as Scythe Faraday had once put it, a sandbox for Sykora to play in while the adults took care of the real business of Kwajalein.

It wasn’t until the end of the second year that it became clear to everyone exactly what that business was – because the structures that were beginning to rise on the double-thick concrete pads, and beneath the massive sky cranes, were very specific in nature. Once they began to take shape, they were hard to deny.

In Loriana’s schematics, they were referred to as Cradles of Civilization. But most people would simply call them spacecraft.

Forty-two massive ships, each on immense rocket boosters augmented by magnetic repulsion for maximum lift. Every island of the atoll large enough to accommodate a launchpad held at least one craft and gantry tower. Even with all the Thunderhead’s advanced technology, getting off the Earth still required old-fashioned brute force.

“What does the Thunderhead mean to do with them?” Munira had asked Loriana.

Loriana had no more explanation than anyone, but the plans gave her a glimpse of the big picture that no one else had. “There’s an awful lot of aluminized Mylar in the plans,” she told Munira. “The kind of stuff that’s only a few microns thick.”

“Solar sails?” suggested Munira.

That had been Loriana’s guess, too. In theory, it was the best kind of