by Paul James
The women and families who continued arriving in increasing numbers found the undersea world terrifying at first, and some became a problem. With time, however, confidence in the city’s safety grew and the unrest subsided. Claustrophobia was another issue, as at first there was no connection between the domes. But as connecting tunnels opened, and families could travel from dome to dome, feelings of being shut in dissipated and the families settled in, creating social lives that soon consumed their attention. On balance, Shane felt, his early misgivings had been overdone.
Shane believed that, at this time, the underwater world was as serenely safe as it appeared. Part of the underwater security system monitored the world’s communications, constantly searching for any hint of a threat to the institute’s underwater cities. So far, there had been none. The Moon City was what the world knew about, thanks to Alexis and his assiduous interviewing, and they focused on that. His mind wandered to a particular interview—one from 2033, when the world was recovering after the chaos of the Post-Recession years—and he flipped on the monitor, deciding to watch it again. A moment’s search by the AI librarian set it running.
Interviewer: Despite always telling us we’re a failing and impoverished society, you people are advertising for an inaugural trip to the moon for vacationers. Doesn’t this suggest we’re still rich and you’re still poor enough to want us as your customers?
Alexis: Today’s new “medieval” period is no different from the old Middle Ages. Back then there were wealthy people—kings, princes, dukes, wealthy burghers, traders, and so on. Some people were fabulously rich, but most people were miserably poor. Today is the same, with most Westerners growing quickly poorer as they return to the world average income. The good news for us is that the very rich are still growing richer and they have more than enough money to buy tickets to our new Earth View Hotel at Moon City. So yes, we do see ourselves as serving the few who can afford to buy our services, but no, it doesn’t mean any of the West’s regular citizens will be going there anytime soon.
Interviewer: Surely, like all travel, the costs will come down.
Alexis: I’m afraid you’re growing poorer faster than the costs are coming down. Life in space is too expensive for mass tourism to ever take off.
Interviewer: Then why go there? There’s nothing there for humans, so why bother?
Alexis: When Westerners colonized many of the lands around the world, there was nothing there either. They started out on rocky land, bare islands, deserts, swamps, and tundra. They developed them all into the valuable places where millions of people now live. You all think that what you have now was somehow always there. Indeed, many of you regularly pretend that those lands were always valuable. They were not, but they are now because people made them so. Once we get started, the same will be true of the moon, Mars, and other places. They’re worthless now, but they won’t be when we’ve made them our home.
Interviewer: If that happens, what of the people back here? How do you see us?
Alexis: You’ll have settled back into the preindustrial world you’ve already entered. There’ll be little growth, little progress, just a regular cycle of seasons and people getting by. China and India will be the dominant powers but only because of the size of their populations. Europe and North America will be quiet, impoverished backwaters hoping their distance from the two superpowers will keep them safe.
Interviewer: Would that be so bad?
Alexis: In the sense that it will be a sustainable world that lives within its own means without the huge output of industrial pollution or products, it could be considered “not so bad.” People will live locally, so there will be no spreading of disease or trash everywhere. It is what you say you want, so for you, it will be fine. For us it would be a nightmare, so we will press on without you to a different future in space and on our few small islands here on Earth.
Shane smiled as he switched off the video. From his viewpoint, Alexis’s answers were perfect. They stressed the institute’s migration to space and never mentioned the institute’s undersea program. The space program couldn’t be hidden; its landing sites and space plane flights were too visible for secrecy. The undersea world, however, was being developed from islands well out of sight of land. Invisibility would be their salvation.
Even if the institute was wiped from the surface of the earth, its growing size and strength under the sea would continue. The new mediaeval world above would never be able to discover what lay just beneath the surface. Just as humans of the early Middle Ages didn’t know there was the huge landmass of the Americas across the oceans from the Old World, humans of the future wouldn’t know of the life going on beneath the sea. The institute could live on for decades, maybe centuries, before they were discovered, and by then, the institute would be technologically so far ahead of the surface dwellers that they needn’t fear them at all.
Only one thought made Shane uneasy: How should the undersea security team react if word got out? There were still people leaving the institute to live back home, though they were fewer now. One of them may let something slip at any time, and what then?
Chapter 33: Spaceport Besieged
One of the benefits of being in charge of the institute’s security system was the ability to see the feed from every surveillance camera on Institute property. Usually the footage was boring, but not always. And now that he was as suspicious of Alexis as he was of Tomas, his personal surveillance of both had become a priority. So, when the African spaceport came under attack, Shane watched it all on his room’s monitor—right from the moment he knew Alexis was flying in to support Jamie, who’d been sent there days before to take command of its defense.
The spaceport’s runway shimmered under the African sun as Alexis brought the space plane to a halt at the terminal building. The automatic gangway moved into position and locked itself on the plane’s hull. Leaving the robot assistant pilot to do the end-of-flight checks, Alexis exited the cockpit.
The door to the terminal was already open when he reached it. Shane saw Jamie waiting impatiently for Alexis inside the gangway.
“Hi, Jamie.”
“Hi! You’re late.”
“There was a storm over Asia,” Alexis said. “I decided to go around it.”
“Whatever,” Jamie said. “You need to come out to the boundary right away. Things are kicking off there worse today than when I called you yesterday.”
“What do the Founders say?”
“They say evacuate, as they’ve already done.”
The Founders and council had left the African lands when the borders first came under attack. They’d moved Institute HQ to the South American lands around the Andean spaceport. For the Founders and council, the moon and Mars weren’t a priority. They were happy to walk away from the space program’s landing sites. Shane knew that space was everything for Alexis; he’d never give up even one square foot of the spaceports.
“Have all the guests gone from the vacation resort?” Alexis asked.
“Yes. We got the last of them out three weeks ago. The farmers were moved out at the same time. I didn’t think it safe to let any of them stay.”
“And today is worse?”
“In terms of violence, yes. They still haven’t penetrated the fences, but they’ve been firing missiles over the fence and are still firing guns at anything that moves on our side.”
“Has anything been done today to discourage them?” Alexis asked.
“We’ve moved the food factories and other facilities to a safe place farther up the coast and we used mosquitoes to put the guys launching rockets to sleep because they were the biggest risk to the spaceport. That stopped them for a time, but new people took over the missile launchers as soon as the previous ones went to sleep. It’s been quiet for an hour now—I think they might have run out of rockets.”
Alexis and Jamie stepped into the desert vehicle waiting outside the terminal and the truck moved off.
“How many are there?”
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“That’s the thing,” Jamie said. “The drones estimated thirty thousand yesterday, and there are more again today. Far more than we have mosquitoes here. We’ve reached the point where we fight and kill, or we leave. In that respect, the Founders were right. It’s decision time. That’s why I called you in.”
“Thanks,” Alexis said, though he felt anything but thankful. “How did they get here? It’s hundreds of miles of desert on the land side and miles from anywhere by sea.”
“Some walked, hitching on anything that was coming this way, and, if you look to the south, you can see that some came on what looks like hundreds of boats abandoned on the beach. The difficulty is, even if we could knock all the people out—which we can’t—we can’t drop them back anywhere that’s safe. It’s them or us. They know that and now so do we.”
“Do we have enough food to survive a long siege?”
“We do. They don’t. Long before their food runs out they’ll attack in full force, and that will probably be soon. We haven’t seen anyone out there eating for days.”
“So today or tomorrow at the latest.”
“That’s about it.”
“We can’t abandon the spaceport,” Alexis said. “It’s vital for the safety of our space fleet.”
“Could we leave for a week or two?” Jamie asked. “I think if we left with all the moveable gear and food, they would come in, find there’s no food, and leave.”
Alexis thought hard. He scanned the massed hordes outside the fence for media TV cameras and saw none. He did see hundreds of phones being held up, looking for a signal.
“Can we use one of our EMP devices to knock out their electronics?”
“We can.”
“Then do it. If we have to kill people let’s at least not have it broadcast on social media.”
“You don’t like the idea of leaving for a week or two?”
“I do, but at this point I think it may be too late.”
“We have Manta Ray freighters arriving later today,” Jamie said. “We can load overnight so they don’t see the food leaving.”
“If we can, that’s what we’ll do,” Alexis said, “but if they attack in numbers before then, we’re going to defend ourselves and the facility.”
Jamie gave orders to prepare to move the food and equipment to loading bays over the vehicle’s radio.
“Let’s get back to the terminal. We need to arm the robots and put security on high alert.”
“They’ve been on nothing else for days now,” Jamie replied with a grim smile.
“Then we’re as ready as we can be. If we’re lucky, they won’t attack today or tonight and we’ll be out of here by tomorrow morning.”
Jamie nodded. “I plan to sit offshore in the Rays, underwater, until we see them leave. Then we’ll return and re-establish the spaceport.”
“You didn’t need me here at all,” Alexis said.
“Yes, I do,” Jamie said. “If they attack, we will have to kill many, if not all. You’re the future Founder, so you’d better be here saying ‘go.’”
Their discussion was momentarily paused by the flash and boom of the EMP device. Outside the fence, men dived for cover in panic as purple light and smoke swept over them.
“They’ll realize their phones are dead soon,” Jamie said, “and that may be enough to trigger the attack.”
“I know,” Alexis replied, “but we can’t leave anything to chance now. Many of them or many of us are going to die here in the coming hours, and I don’t intend that to be any of us. You have everything in hand here, so I’m going to talk to Shane. We’re going to need his help if this goes badly.”
Chapter 34: Gaining Support
Shane felt his phone vibrate as Alexis’s call came through, and he answered. “What do you want, Alexis? I’m busy.”
“Then stop what you’re doing and listen. I need your advice and probably support.”
“For what?” Shane stood up and walked away from the console where he’d been watching the spaceport’s troubles.
“The African spaceport is being attacked right now and we don’t have enough non-lethal defenses. If they break through or climb over the fence, we will have to start killing people because they won’t leave any of us alive when they get in.”
“I have no problem with self-defense,” Shane said.
“But you know what Dean is like,” Alexis said. “It’s always ‘run away, run away’ with him.”
“And can you? Run away, I mean?”
“We’re working on that,” Alexis replied, and explained the plan that Jamie was working on.
“You think they’ll attack before you’re out of there?”
“I’m almost sure of it,” Alexis said. “They’ve been here for weeks now and they have no food left. Their desperation will drive them to attack, probably after dark. The only thing keeping them off, I suspect, is they don’t realize we’ve used up all the sleeping gas and tranquillizers, so they’re still a bit afraid.”
Shane laughed. “I can imagine. No one is going to want to be unconscious while their comrades eat and drink all the supplies they capture.”
“Exactly, but after dark, I’m guessing they’ll grow braver.”
“The Rays are still an hour away if they continue underwater,” Shane said, checking his screen for their progress.
“If they fly in, the hordes will attack when they see us loading the food. It’s a problem. Better to keep them underwater.”
“Why not drop food to them, away from the fence, and let them fight it out among themselves. That might gain you enough time for the Rays to arrive.”
“Because the spaceport ran its food stocks down after everyone left and we only have enough for about three weeks, which is how long we think we’ll have to wait for them to leave when they find there’s no food here to be had.”
“We can have more food dispatched. It would arrive in days,” Shane said.
“That’s where I need your support. The Founders want us to leave and may be unwilling to supply the spaceport in what they see as a lost cause.”
“I can see that,” Shane said. “They won’t want you to go back to the spaceport because the moment you do, the hordes will reappear at the fence and we’ll be right back where we are today.”
“Well, that’s what I think too, unless we put some serious defenses in place after they leave,” Alexis replied. “Even if we can get away today without killing anybody, it’s only a matter of time before we have to. We are keeping the spaceport. We need the Founders and council to get onto the country’s government and get some troops here. We pay a lot for these lands and they will lose that money the moment we leave.”
“That government, like so many others now, has pretty well disintegrated,” Shane said. “Rather than defending us, some general is likely to be leading the attack.”
“I think we should still have enough pull to get some action. Somebody is still getting the lease money, so you and I need to persuade the Founders and council to pressure them.”
“Politics takes time,” Shane said. “Nadia and the Founders did work on them only a few weeks ago but, in the end, they decided it was safer to leave.”
“They decided it was safer to leave because I was at Moon City and they don’t value the space program.” He didn’t add that Shane also didn’t have much interest in the program, and that, in Alexis’s opinion, had been part of the decision too.
“All of us here feel safer on Earth,” Shane said. He knew Alexis blamed him for his weak support. “You can see why we think putting the Earth-based Institute in danger for a precarious life on the moon, and someday Mars, isn’t a good bet.”
“You might feel safer here,” Alexis retorted, “but you’re not, and if you were here right now you’d understand that. You’re like the people on the Titanic who wouldn’t get into the lifeboats. They couldn’t believe they weren’t safer on an ‘unsinkable’ ship than in tiny lifeboats. The islands and underwater cities on Ea
rth are all vulnerable to attack even by people using primitive weapons. The moon and Mars will be safe.”
This was an argument they’d had many times before, both together and with the Founders and council. It didn’t convince Shane or the others. Though this new attack did suggest that Alexis had a point. All the institute’s non-lethal weapons couldn’t stop hungry, desperate people from seeking food, and Institute lands and food factories were among the few remaining food producing places on Earth.
“As I said at the start,” Shane said, “I don’t have a problem with self-defense. After all, now that they’re destroying their own farms, farmlands, and societies, they’re going to starve to death anyhow.”
“Then you’ll support me?”
“Yes. I think both our projects are at risk now, and without them we have nowhere to retreat to.”
“Let’s get the Founders on the communicator and talk it out.”
The meeting of old Founders, soon-to-be Founders, and the governing council was grim. At first feelings were high, and it was as well Shane was in his underwater city and Alexis at the African spaceport, for there may well have been fists flying if they’d been there in person. They had one ally in Tomas; he was still in favor of action.
Shane, though, was surprised how quickly the leaders’ anger ebbed. Listening to Alexis and being shown the situation at the spaceport’s fence convinced many of them that the institute was at a point that could not be dodged.
“Very well,” Alexander said, ending the discussion when it was clear from their silence the leaders were no longer opposed. “We agree. Do everything you can to avoid bloodshed but, if it can’t be avoided, we will support your decision. Supplies will be sent so you can reoccupy the spaceport when they leave, which means you could use some of your food stocks as a diversion if the timing works.”
