Gwendy’s Final Task

Despite this little speed bump, today has been a good day. Maybe even a great day. For the first time since saying goodbye to earth’s atmosphere—who am I kidding? she thinks; for the first time in probably five or six years!—Gwendy Peterson enjoyed an uninterrupted night of sleep. She’d dreamt she was camping out with Olive Kepnes in her back yard in Castle Rock. They’d toasted marshmallows, flipped through a new issue of Teen Beat magazine (Shaun Cassidy oh God such a hunk!), and giggled about cute boys until the sun came up.

When she’d awakened, fifteen minutes before her alarm was set to go off, she felt like a brand new woman—brimming with energy and determination and, most importantly, clarity. Don’t forget hope, she’d told her reflection in the steamed-up mirror after a long, relaxing shower. Two more days and all of this madness will be over.

Gwendy is humming the theme song to The Sopranos and practically skipping down the main corridor in Spoke 1 when she runs into Dr. Glen heading in the opposite direction. When Dale looks up and sees the Senator, he flashes a grin. “Someone got up on the right side of the bed this morning.”

“Absolutely, Doc. I’m a free woman. No Zoom meetings, no conference calls, no weather girl duties. Not a single thing on the schedule today. I just might crawl back into bed after breakfast and stay there for the rest of the day! So I ask you, who’s better than me?”

He raises his eyebrows as he glides past her on the tips of his toes. “I guess that would be no one, at least not up here.”

“See you at breakfast in a few,” she says, cheerfully waving a hand over her shoulder. “Just need to grab something from my room.”

“Want me to wait?”

“Nope, go on ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”

Gwendy is still smiling when she opens the door to her suite. She takes a couple of steps inside—and freezes.

Gareth Winston is down on one knee in front of her sitting room closet. The door is open and Gwendy’s extra pressure suit has been pushed out of the way. She can see some kind of gadget—black shiny metal, not much larger than an iPhone—attached to the keypad on the safe. Several dark wires run from the base of the gadget to what looks like a small calculator with a digital read-out screen. Winston is holding the calculator thingamajig in his hands. When Gwendy bursts into the room, he drops it and scrambles to his feet, leaving the gadget to float.

“What are you doing here?” She’s pretty sure she already knows the answer. Her brain may be broken, but she’s not stupid. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in? Tampering with classified material is a federal offense.”

“I don’t believe I’m in any kind of trouble at all, Senator.” Winston’s eyes look nervous, but his voice never wavers.

“I guess we’ll see what Commander Lundgren has to say about that.” She turns to leave.

Rattlesnake quick (and twice as mean, she has just time to think), Winston lunges across the sitting room and grabs her arm. If Gwendy hadn’t just seen it with her own eyes, she would’ve never believed the man was capable of moving that quickly. Of course, she thinks, that’s zero-g for you. His fingers dig into her flesh as he drags her toward the center of the room and shoves her down onto the sofa. “Even if you somehow managed to get away, it would be too late by the time you got back with the others.”

“What do you mean, too late?”

“You see that little black box over there?” He gestures to the gadget affixed to the safe’s keypad. “That marvel of technology is called a LockMaster 3000. It’s available to the public for not much more than the cost of a decent laptop. It usually takes no more than ten minutes to reset a four-digit combination and provide a new entry code. These Many Flags safes are a little trickier, probably because Tet is expecting some high-powered people to eventually be using the quarters up here, but in the end it’ll do the job. May take twenty minutes or even half an hour, but oh yes, it’ll get there.”

“I’d be back here a lot quicker than half an hour—and with plenty of help, too.”

He scratches his chin thoughtfully. “That’s assuming I let you go anywhere. It’s a fair assumption on your part, I suppose—as a U.S. Senator, you’re used to going wherever you want, whenever you want—but this time the assumption would be wrong. I don’t want to go all Snidely Whiplash on you, dear, but why would I set you free to roam before I get my hands on the button box? And once I do … goodness! Who knows what might happen?”

When she hears the words button box come out of Gareth’s Winston’s mouth, for a dizzying moment Gwendy thinks she may pass out. That would be a very bad idea, she thinks. That would be the end of everything.

“What do you know about the button box?”