Across the Atlantic
Tony had just wrapped up a rather successful media pitch and retired to his seventy-first floor office to drink a twenty-year-old Scotch and unwind. The pitch had been stressful, with a producer who had the reputation of getting rid of people before they’d even had the chance to prove themselves. But he’d had two successful AI reality shows in the last four months, and his new one, Weight Loss Death Match, was even better. The BEC City execs had flipped when they realized the potential impact the show would have. Already they’d been cutting into New Atlantic and Delta City feeds across the ocean.
They’d had a population plunge due to drinking water shortages, and the infrastructure of BEC City was falling into disrepair and neglect. They’d finally decided to build a stronger transmitter to start poaching the workforce of other megacities, and it had paid off. They’d been able to keep BEC City up and running with half the population of twenty years ago.
At first the execs had been reluctant to upgrade the transmitter. The tech was old, and no one was too sure anymore how it all worked. But Tony had found a team of engineers who were able to reverse-engineer existing transmitters and figure out how to make them even more powerful. And with the kinds of programming they were putting out, like Footwear of Famous Chefs and Toupee Factory Understudy, it was easy to poach viewers from other cities who still relied on entertainment like Measuring Cup Wars.
Tony poured two fingers of Scotch and stood looking out over the city, the strange shimmering of the atmospheric shield slightly obscuring his view of a grey, cloud-laden sky. Below him the city stretched out as far as he could see, a cement paradise bristling with buildings and antennae, none as tall as the BEC tower, but some almost as high.
He’d been born in this tower, raised on the twenty-second floor, his parents ensuring he received promotion after promotion, moving higher and higher in the building as his career prospered. He was now a full dozen floors higher than they were, his career far more lucrative than their own, a couple of low-end producers who picked up throwaway shows like The Laundry Room Sock Matching Game and Cupcake Smash. They were nobodies now, and he was on the rise. This new show would probably get him another ten floors up, and then he’d be able to see even more of the city.
Not that he ever went out in it. The streets below looked tidy enough, but he didn’t relish the thought of going out in all that heat below, breathing in the refuse of all those residential buildings, or seeing the laborers going about their duties of cleaning living pods or doing laundry. All those things should be invisible to someone like him.
He sipped his Scotch slowly, swirling the amber liquid in the glass, watching it cling to the clear sides. He stared up at the roiling grey clouds, briefly wondering what it would be like up there, exposed to the elements, and gave a small shudder. It wasn’t worth thinking about.
A bright light seared across the sky, something that lit up the clouds and made him squint. Then a flash erupted that was so impossibly bright, he threw his arm up to shield his eyes, dropping his Scotch with a curse. The glass fell to the floor, landing with a thud on the thick carpet and leaving a half-circle of liquor as it rolled to a stop.
He staggered back, shocked that he could see the bone inside his arm. He brought his hand up, staring in horror at his fingers. He could see every blood vessel, every bone, right through his skin.
He fell back against his desk as a sudden heat wave blasted over his body. It was so intensely hot that for a moment he thought he’d caught on fire. It felt like a flaming specter had embraced him. Then the heat passed and he gasped. He stepped closer to the window, wondering what was going on.
A shockwave blasted toward him. It thundered for a fraction of a second against the glass, then shattered the window, driving him back. It bowled him over, flattening him against the floor. The wind gusted over him, rippling his skin. When it passed, he sat up, realizing he’d landed on the fallen drinking glass. Blood seeped down his arm.
Another bright light drew his eyes to the sky. A strange cloud grew on the horizon. It billowed upward, its zenith spreading out. The bottom remained tall and thin. It reminded him of an old drawing his grandmother had of an ancient oak tree, with a tall, thin trunk and myriad branches thrusting out above.
The cloud swirled and bloomed, the grey billowing with hints of orange and gold.
He saw another fiery streak in the air, then another. These were far closer, a string of them arcing straight for BEC City. He gasped at the next burst of light, and had only the briefest impression of all of BEC City erupting in sudden flame, burning upward instantaneously, exposing him to an unbearable, searing heat.
In seconds, BEC City was gone.
Chapter 10
The flight back from the missile site was uneventful. They dropped Rowan off among a group of Badlander camps that had yet to be informed of the asteroid. Then they continued on to Sanctuary City.
Once there, H124 settled in. They awaited news from Rivet’s team that the A14 was ready. They were still converting it.
She met Raven and Gordon for lunch the next day, thrilled as usual by the delicious food in the commissary. Raven was strangely preoccupied. Several times he opened his mouth to say something, then seemed to think the better of it.
Her PRD beeped. She opened the comm window, watching the now familiar series of numbers scroll across her screen. “The Phantom Code is coming through again.” The strange sequence of numbers had been streaming into Sanctuary City from an unknown source for a while now.
“Let me see that,” Gordon said, watching beside her. “Huh.” He scratched his chin. “Back in the day, I was something of a treasure hunter. Used to crack codes for fun.”
“Want to give this one a whirl?” Raven asked. “It’s been coming in for months now.”
Gordon brought up his own PRD and saved the numbers. “I’ll take a crack at it.”
Raven looked at them all in turn, his face growing stern. “I need to say something. An opinion that’s not going to be very popular.”
“What is it?” H124 asked, taking the last bite of her dessert—something called orange sherbet.
But before he could go on, Nimbus, the Rover meteorologist, rushed into the commissary. She spotted Raven and hurried over. “You’ve got to have a look at this.”
They got up at once, following her to her lab.
“This is crazy,” Nimbus said, tucking her long, wavy black hair behind an ear. She brought up a series of readings on her display. “Something massive just exploded over BEC City.” She’d explained to H124 earlier that she used ancient satellites to monitor different parts of the globe. The tech was old, but they were self-course-correcting and powered by solar energy, so some of them were still functional. She’d been able to receive sporadic images from them. Now Nimbus’s bronze hands flew over her button display as she brought up an aerial image of a megacity on an island. Its orange glowing atmospheric shield covered most of the southern portion of the landmass. It was a daylight image, with the blue ocean surrounding the brown island and a few high, scattered clouds.
“This is BEC City about a month ago, looking much as it has for years.” She waved through the display, bringing up a second image, this one taken at night. “Same with this one, taken about two weeks ago.” In this one, the atmospheric shield glowed, and beneath it H124 could make out millions of gleaming lights from the city.
“Now look at this. I thought it was a mistake at first, that the coordinates were off. This came in a while ago.” It was another night image, but this one was almost completely black. No shield, no artificial lights, just a few bright, irregular patches of red and orange. “I double-checked the coordinates, and this is where BEC City should be. So I waited a bit for the satellite to pass again when it was light. And check this out.”
She brought up another daylight image, this time showing the blue ocean, but where BEC Ci
ty had been lay a smoldering pile of grey rubble. Fires burned in a number of places.
“Then I tried to tune into BEC City’s feed. Nothing.” She swiveled in her seat and faced them. “They’ve just been wiped off the planet.”
H124 kept staring at the image of the destroyed city, disbelieving.
“What was it?” Raven asked. “An asteroid fragment we didn’t know about?”
“That’s what I thought at first. But look at these atmospheric readings.” She brought up a series of numbers and graphs. “Whatever it was, it was more than one hit, each with an intensity of 1200 kilotons of TNT, and the radiation readings are off the charts, higher than anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Nuclear radiation?” Dirk asked.
Nimbus nodded.
He and Raven exchanged glances with H124. The missile silos. The PPC showing up there, learning of the location. H124’s mouth came open. “You mean the PPC launched nuclear missiles at BEC City and destroyed it?”
Nimbus cringed. “I think so.”
“My god…” Raven breathed. “They have no idea. They just have no fucking idea!” He paced furiously around the room. “The blast, the radiation poisoning alone!” He brought a fist down on the table before him, causing H124 to jump. “They are un-fucking-believable!” he roared, and stormed out of the room. She’d never seen him like that.
She hurried out after him, finding him halfway down the hall, leaning against the wall. “You okay?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t see how we can proceed with the PPC here. Not only do they destroy our experimental forests, but they kill their own kind without flinching. All they care about is power. They don’t care about the planet, or other living things. They’d destroy countless species just to get a hit show, and these megacities are completely unsustainable. Do you know what the latest thoughts are on Delta City? They won’t last the decade. Their water sources are contaminated, and their air quality index fluctuates between 250 and 350. People are already starving there. Yet they go on as if they’re going to last forever, as if humanity hasn’t already destroyed this planet and every other living thing on it, and as if none of those things even matters as long as they have their powerful positions and luxury housing. Goddamn it!” He pushed off angrily from the wall. “Do you know what that radiation is going to do to the atmosphere? The ocean? To any organisms who managed to survive there until now?”
She placed a hand on his arm. What could she say? He was right.
Onyx came running down the hall, out of breath. “Guys? We have a problem.” She stopped, gasping.
Raven looked up, instantly alarmed. “What is it?”
“You know those PPC drones that have picked up in frequency? Well, my cloak didn’t work this time. It saw us. The PPC knows where Sanctuary City is now.”
The color drained out of Raven’s face. “They’ll destroy us.” His eyes went wide. “My god. They could even nuke us.” They ran back to Nimbus’s office. “We need to evacuate now!” Raven called out.
The others looked at him in shock.
“The PPC knows where we are.”
Onyx followed them in. Raven turned to her. “How much time do you estimate it would take for airships to arrive?”
“I’d say less than two hours.”
Raven looked back at the others, all still too stunned to move. “We need to move personnel, equipment. Get the blast deflection craft out of here.” He reached over to a panel in the wall and waved his hand in front of it. It slid open, revealing a red lever with large white letters above it: “Emergency.” He took a deep breath. “From the day we installed this thing, I hoped I’d never have to do this.” He pulled the lever.
Out in the hall, a bright red light began flashing, followed by a klaxon blaring in their room. She could hear other alarms ringing in labs all the way down the corridor. “I need to secure the DNA samples in the lab, move the creatures that are in the incubators and newborn pods. We need to get to the blast deflection craft. Rivet’s team are all with her at the satellite location, so that thing has no one looking after it right now.” He started out of the room at a sprint.
“I’ll help you,” H124 told him, following close on his heels. She glanced back as the others all piled out of Nimbus’s lab. “I’m going to the armory,” Byron called out.
“Me, too!” Dirk yelled, turning in the same direction as Byron.
She and Raven sprinted down the corridor, running through the large double doors that led to the de-extinction lab. Already a few Rover techs were packing up samples and had secured the baby muskox that she’d first watched Raven remove from its amniotic sac. It looked up at them in surprise, its large brown, watery eyes startled as they moved it into a comfortable transport enclosure.
An automatic sorting arm was pulling out samples and placing them inside metal cases with handles. She grabbed the cases as it finished and loaded them onto maglev sleds.
Raven checked all the nursing pods, making sure all the young creatures had been moved to transportation enclosures. “I think we’re good.”
She loaded the last few cases onto a maglev. His team took them out of the room, running down the hall.
“What now?” she asked.
“The blast deflection craft.”
She stared out into the hall, watching fleeing Rovers carrying books and equipment, the blaring klaxon and flashing red light making her heart pound. “Where will everyone go?”
“We’ve prepared for something like this. People will evacuate to the satellite site where Rivet is. We can all rendezvous there and come up with a plan.”
They took off down the hall. A tech in front of her tripped, a box full of ancient maps spilling out onto the floor. Some, held in tubes, rolled across the hall. H124 stopped to help the woman, picking up the tubes as they rolled away into a neighboring lab.
“Thank you,” the Rover told her, stacking them back inside the box.
“Raven! H!” She heard Orion’s voice calling through the chaos. He stopped in front of them, catching his breath. “I’ve got bad news. We don’t have nearly the time we thought we would. I was just up in Cal’s radar lab. There’s an airship less than thirty minutes out, heading this way. It must have been in the area for some other reason. Why it would be all the way up here, I don’t know.”
H124 thought about Dirk and the deadly sphere that had been inside his head, transmitting. Had it given away their location to Olivia? If so, why had she waited so long to attack?
Raven gaped at Orion with wide eyes. “Less than thirty minutes?” He pivoted, staring at the Rovers rushing past him. “Send the new timeline to everyone’s PRD. Get as many people to the hyperloop as possible.”
Orion sped off and Raven took off at a sprint, H124 beside him. “Do you have any defenses?” she asked him. “Anything that can fend off an airship?”
“You’ve seen our armory,” he said, jogging around two Rovers with a maglev loaded with antique books. “We don’t have anything big. Just small arms, really. Our defense was our invisibility.”
“You said when I first came here that you could survive in tunnels beneath the surface.”
“That’s true, but only if the PPC didn’t know we were here. We always thought we’d have more time than this. From the air, it’s hard to make out the living buildings unless you know to look for them. We could have hidden down here. But they know the location now. They know exactly where to look.”
When Raven and H124 reached Rivet’s lab, they found the doors closed and all the lights off. Raven waved his hand in front of the door and it slid open, lights blinking on. The blast deflection craft stood in the center of the room, completely assembled and covered with a clean skin. A special maglev sled had been built to accommodate the craft’s size and weight, and it stood curled up against one wall.
Raven unfurled it while H124 sta
rted up the copters with her PRD. They aligned themselves to each other as Raven spread the cover over them. They levered beneath the craft and lifted it, arms whirring and gently maneuvering it onto the sled base. When it was secure, H124 programmed the maglev to follow them.
As big as the doors to Rivet’s lab were, the craft barely made it out. H124 didn’t think it would fit, but the maglev slowed to an agonizing pace as it turned and lowered and readjusted itself to pass through the opening without damaging its cargo.
Then they there were in the hall, Rovers dodging out of their way as they dashed down the corridor, the massive craft in tow. There was no way it was going to fit onto a lift, so they had to take the long way through the facility, using one of the large ramp exits that led up to the surface.
When they got close, the loading doors slid open, and the sunlight poured in. She squinted, watching chaos unfold before her eyes. Everywhere Rovers ran with equipment, all streaming toward the hyperloop entrance. She knew its large doors had to be firmly shut before the PPC’s arrival. They could never know about the hyperloop. She knew from experience that the doors were so well hidden you wouldn’t know they were there even if you did know to look for them. Even trees grew on their surfaces.
A Rover transport waited outside by the de-extinction lab building, hovering as techs ran back and forth, piling crate after refrigerated crate of DNA samples into it. Then the scientists piled into the transport and took off for the hyperloop doors. They vanished inside. A few moments later the transport emerged again, empty save for the driver, who made a trip out to the farthest outbuildings to pick up Rovers and supplies. She watched it disappear into the hyperloop entrance again.
She and Raven fell in with a bigger crowd, the maglev whirring along behind them, the rotors sounding like they struggled to keep up with the weight of the craft. A few times they sputtered and the sled tilted before correcting itself. They were halfway to the hyperloop doors when she heard the unmistakable sound of a descending PPC airship.
The hyperloop doors clanged shut just as a gleaming silver airship, its familiar, triangular shape striking a chord of panic within her, descended through the clouds into view.
Shattered Skies Page 10
