Shattered Skies

by ALICE HENDERSON

  A gigantic smoking crater stood where the airstrip and hangars had been. The living buildings that she’d marveled at when she first arrived were completely gone; blackened holes smoldered in the soil where they had once stood, the rooftop gardens destroyed.

  As Byron and the others climbed out of the hatch, Raven stood dumbfounded, staring in disbelief. His chin trembled. H124 came up beside him. His mouth parted, and his brow was distorted in sorrow and confusion.

  “Good god,” Byron breathed when he saw the destruction. “They didn’t leave anything.” Then he spotted the charred lumps out in the burned grassland, and sucked in a breath.

  H124 scanned the sky, where smoke streamed ever upward, searching for any hint of an airship. It looked clear.

  Byron moved ahead of the others, checked his rifle, and started skirting the area, searching for soldiers.

  Raven still hadn’t moved.

  H124 took his arm and led him gently away, toward the closed hyperloop doors. A few other Rovers joined Byron in searching the smoldering remains of the city. No soldiers had been left behind. H124 walked past the Rover corpses, feeling a powerful new emotion rage through her body. She’d heard Byron and Astoria talk about it. Hate. It flared up inside her, and as she passed the dead body of a trooper, she resisted the urge to kick the body and stomp on the soldier’s slack face, much as she had seen one of them do to the Rover earlier.

  Raven walked beside her, an automaton, chin trembling, eyes dull and lifeless. She led him around rubble and guttering flames toward the hyperloop doors.

  “H!” She spun as she heard her name. From behind a plume of smoke, a figure in overalls limped forward, leaning on someone else. As the smoke cleared, her heart soared when she saw Gordon and Dirk. She raced toward them, hugging both.

  “You’re alive!” Gordon said, pulling away.

  She grinned before looking down at his leg. Blood soaked the cloth over his left thigh.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, waving a hand in the air. “Cut it on some metal.” He winked. “I’ll be right as rain.”

  Sweat streamed down Dirk’s filthy face. His shirt was ripped, but other than that, he looked okay. An energy rifle hung across his chest. “Can’t believe this,” he said quietly, taking in the destruction.

  With Raven and a few others, they picked through the wreckage of Sanctuary City, coming away with a few damaged pieces of equipment that could be repaired, as well as a handful of singed books. But everything else was gone. The agroforestry areas had been burned; the forest, the grassland.

  When they were sure no PPC presence remained in the city, H124 brought up her display and commanded the hyperloop doors to open. The massive doors lifted upward. The trees on their surfaces were likewise blackened and smoking.

  Light streamed into the tunnel below, where the Rovers waited anxiously. Onyx was the first to run out. Instantly H124 saw that the hacker had been shot in the arm, her PRD destroyed. It must have been why she hadn’t answered when the troopers had taken the blast deflection craft.

  Onyx dashed toward her cousin. She was halfway there when the surrounding destruction hit her. She stopped abruptly, staring incredulously at the charred remains of the city. Finally she turned to Raven. “The blast deflection craft?”

  Raven merely stared back in silence, so H124 shook her head. “They got it.”

  Onyx went slackjawed. “What?”

  “We need to get to the rendezvous point where Rivet is. Take stock of who survived,” H124 told her.

  Onyx blinked. “Right. Okay.” She looked as frozen as Raven.

  “C’mon everyone,” Byron called out. “Get into the hyperloop. We’re moving out.” He gestured for everyone to move inside the tunnel.

  Then Raven spoke for the first time. “We…we have to check for survivors.” He pointed east. “Out there. The animals.”

  H124 nodded. “We’ll go together.”

  Three hours later, they’d skirted the grasslands in the only remaining transport they had—one that two Rovers had taken with them down into the hyperloop tunnel. As they sped over the terrain, stopping repeatedly, their spirits sank lower and lower. Caribou, elk, bison, muskoxen, saiga antelope. Nothing had survived. In some cases, the grassland around the bodies hadn’t been touched. It was clear the airship had purposely targeted individual animals simply for the sheer joy of killing them. The wind turbines had toppled, the wind catchers were scorched and fallen.

  The once-amazing paradise of Sanctuary City was gone.

  Chapter 13

  H124 stood beside Raven at the hyperloop doors. He took a long, last look at the destruction, then turned silently and descended the stairs to the hyperloop. She followed.

  The transportation pod rustled with somber activity as equipment was stowed and secured and Rovers settled into their seats for the journey. She and Raven took a couple of empty seats next to Byron.

  H124 had noticed that Rovers kept their distance from Byron. One look at him and you could tell what a rough life he’d had. He was hard around the edges, a cactus in their garden of roses, and it was easy to see why people who had led peaceful lives might be instinctively wary of his combative presence.

  She collapsed into the seat next to him, momentarily laying her head on his shoulder. He brought an arm around her, and for a moment they settled into a comforting embrace. Gordon sat down on the far side of Byron, wincing as he bent his leg. As soon as they got to the satellite location, they could get him into a medpod.

  Raven helped secure the last of the cargo, then slumped into the seat next to H124, still mute.

  A Rover at the back asked if everyone was ready, and a murmur of assent spread through the pod. H124 felt the gentle tug of the pod’s securing mechanism releasing, followed by a gentle acceleration.

  She lifted her head and scanned the survivors. Many stared off into the distance with eyes like glass. Tears streaked down their dirty faces. The woman with the fern cradled it in her lap, her eyes fixed on its greenery.

  H124 had no idea what they would do now.

  * * * *

  When the hyperloop dropped them off at the satellite location, she escorted Gordon to a medpod. All around her, Rovers helped their wounded comrades. She spotted the Rover doctor, Felix, applying pressure to a head wound while the person waited for an available medpod. She helped where she could, comforting people and attending to minor wounds.

  Raven found H124, an injured woman leaning on his shoulder. “Can you go talk to Rivet? I just learned she was out scrounging for parts. She just got back. But in all this chaos, no one’s been out there to talk to her. She still doesn’t know.” Rivet’s workshop lay on the far edge of the satellite location, and all this commotion wouldn’t have reached her there.

  “Sure.”

  “Tell her…tell her to keep working on the A14. We can get the blast deflection craft back.” But his words fell like dead stones, and his eyes showed no trace of hope.

  H124 found Rivet in the hangar, working on the A14. She stood at the top of a ladder, arms covered in grease up to her elbows, happily digging around in the fuel system. She was midway through converting it to run on their specialized methane fuel.

  When she saw H124’s face, the soiled and ripped state of her clothes, she descended from the ladder and strode over to her, wiping her hands off on her coveralls.

  “What happened?” she breathed.

  H124 described the attack, the Rovers who had been killed, the seizure of the blast deflection craft. Rivet rocked back on her heels in disbelief. “They got the craft?” She shook her head and added, “I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” H124 mumbled, a painful knot scratching at her throat. “But a lot of the others didn’t make it.” She briefly ran down a list of the survivors, at least the ones she knew.

  A long, slow breath left Rivet’s chest. She
turned and looked at the A14 over her shoulder. “Without the blast deflection craft…”

  “Raven wants you to keep working on it. We’ll get the craft back.”

  Rivet nodded, the uncertainty plain on her pale face.

  When H124 returned to the main compound, she spotted Nimbus. The meteorologist hurried over to Raven, and they talked gravely before rushing off together. Nimbus had been lucky to be in the first evacuation wave out, safely away in the hyperloop as the attack had raged on in Sanctuary City. H124 flashed back to an image of the Rover shot with the energy weapon, his hair bursting into flames, his body trampled by indifferent soldiers. She returned to the main building to see if she could help unload the hyperloop car.

  Raven appeared and intercepted her. “Can you come join us in the engineering lab?”

  “Yes.” She followed him outside, weaving through a number of Rovers carrying rescued equipment.

  When she entered the building, she found Nimbus, Dirk, Orion, and Byron sitting at a table, waiting for them.

  “Have a seat,” Raven said, taking one next to her. She assumed they were going to come up with a plan to locate the blast deflection craft, so Raven’s unrelated first sentence surprised her.

  “Something bothered me about the labs we found in Basin City,” Raven started.

  H124 swallowed. She’d never forget the rows of operating tables with shackles, the hideous videos of torture and genetic manipulation. Ground zero for the night stalkers.

  “And not just the horror of it all,” Raven went on. “I mean the tech. I’ve never heard of the PPC doing that kind of genetic manipulation. Sure, they physically alter people’s brains, but that’s after they’re born. The kind of genetic engineering we saw in Basin City was entirely different.”

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “That the tech wasn’t theirs to begin with. I think they found it and tried to adapt it to their own ends.”

  “Found it where?” Dirk asked.

  “That’s what I wondered.” Raven leaned forward, resting his arms on the table. “While we were waiting for Marlowe to pick us up there, I powered up an old terminal using our PRD power cells and hacked into the mainframe. I downloaded everything I could find, but only recently had the time to look over it.”

  “And what did you find?” Dirk asked.

  “It’s both exciting and terrifying.” He met their gazes in turn. “Apparently, on one of their routine scouting missions, looking for new transmitter sites, the Basin City PPC came across an ancient genebank.”

  “A genebank?” H124 asked. “You mean like what you have in the de-extinction lab?”

  “Kind of, but not as sophisticated. It sounds like it was an old storehouse of some kind, a vault where a number of plant and animal DNA samples were kept as a sort of safeguard against extinction. But that wasn’t all that was there.”

  “Why am I worried now?” Dirk asked.

  “There was a device that used something called CRISPR, a tool for manipulating genomes. The Basin City PPC took DNA samples back, along with the CRISPR setup. They modified it and began to create their new workforce that would be able to work in volatile, near-pitch black conditions.”

  H124 sucked in a breath. “The night stalkers.”

  Raven nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Well, that turned out great for them,” Dirk said. H124 thought of the swarms of night stalkers infesting the abandoned city. Even if the earth weren’t on fire beneath the place, no one could live there among the sheer multitude of night stalkers. The PPC had completely destroyed their own home.

  Raven raised a brow, looking hopeful. “But while it ultimately led to their downfall, it could be an absolute boon to us.”

  Dirk crossed his arms. “In what way?”

  “That vault, if it’s still there, could supplement the DNA samples we have in the de-extinction lab. And the Basin City records show that it was only one of a handful of other genebanks. They were planning to visit the others, but by then night stalkers had overrun the city, and the coal seam fires had spread to the point of making the city uninhabitable. When the execs there assimilated into other cities, the plan to visit the other genebanks evaporated. So the vaults might still be out there.”

  Byron brought a hand up. “Why do I have a feeling this is all leading to some crazy, foolhardy mission to travel to these places and secure the vaults?”

  Raven cracked a smile. “Because that’s exactly what I want to do.”

  “Shouldn’t we be concentrating on getting the blast deflection craft back?” Dirk asked.

  Raven bit his lip, looking gravely at each of them. His smile dissolved, and he didn’t continue.

  Beside him, Nimbus, who’d been quiet, stood up. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, looking away to the floor.

  “Okay, what is going on?” Byron demanded.

  “The asteroid impact,” Raven began to say, then went quiet.

  “The main show, you mean? The big one?” Byron prompted him. There was still another fragment that would hit the Pacific Ocean before the main asteroid fell.

  “Yes. The big one.”

  When it was clear no response was forthcoming, Dirk prodded. “What about it?”

  “It’s what I wanted to talk to you about back in Sanctuary City. A natural disaster like that can lead to great diversity. When the dinosaurs went extinct, it led to the rise of mammals. Before that, mammals were tiny creatures, barely eking out an existence. Think of all the diversity of creatures that happened when they had room to grow and evolve.”

  H124 had read, enraptured, about dinosaurs and other animals that went extinct millions of years before humans evolved. She’d found an old, tattered book in the Rover library at Sanctuary City and scanned it into her PRD. She swallowed, realizing that that library was now destroyed.

  Raven continued. “Though the dinosaurs had already been experiencing a decline in population and a number of other factors were leading to their extinction, an asteroid strike dealt a powerful blow to their chances.”

  H124 thought of all the animals that had existed, even just hundreds of years ago. But it hadn’t been disease or an asteroid or massive volcanism that had led to the recent extinctions—it had been humans. Other animals hadn’t had the chance to expand into new territories, to evolve into new creatures. They had died off at a terrible rate, over hundreds or even tens of years instead of millions. Humanity had stolen their chance to live on this amazing planet.

  Raven set his jaw. “I’m just going to say it.” He stood up, resting his fists on the table. “If we let this thing hit, if we secured all the DNA vaults we have and take shelter to wait out the worst of it, we might have a chance to make some of humanity’s destruction right.”

  Nimbus grimaced and spoke up. “I admit I’ve been thinking along similar lines. I didn’t want to say this before, but the Apollo Project…” Her voice trailed off.

  H124 had learned of the Apollo Project in one of Raven’s lectures she’d found in her first weather shelter. Instead of using preventative measures to curb anthropogenic climate change, people had attempted geoengineering, sending up millions of particles into the atmosphere that would reflect back sunlight and stay suspended. The first attempt had led to the particles crashing down in one tumultuous event that created a devastating heat wave. The second attempt, designed to make the particles stay up longer and come down gradually, had backfired. The particles had remained in the atmosphere, forever falling and rising, but never coming down completely.

  The particles had been designed to flip as the composition of the two different sides warmed or cooled at differing rates. While originally they’d been spread uniformly, the particles had eventually migrated, growing erratic, clustered too densely in some places and completely absent in others, drifting chaotically around the globe and causing the alrea
dy unusually violent and damaging storms brought on by anthropogenic climate change to reach a cataclysmic level. The atmosphere’s relationship with the ocean, the continents, and the fresh water cycle was much more complex than anyone had understood at the time. Predicted catastrophic scenarios of such a geoengineering project had fallen short of what the fatal reality turned out to be. Lethal heat waves and unprecedented blizzards befell the planet, killing millions. Drought, which had already taken countless lives, became devastating in some regions, while calamitous flooding claimed lives in others.

  No one knew what government or private corporation had launched the particles, but they were still up there, altering the sun’s natural incoming solar radiation with disastrous results.

  “What about the Apollo Project?” Dirk prompted her.

  Nimbus took a deep breath. “Because the first Apollo Project came down so suddenly, they wanted to avoid that problem with the second. It’s not just that each particle has differing material on its sides, which heat up and cool with the sun’s radiation. If a particle began to lose its loft, it would emit a negative charge, which would attract a healthy, positively charged particle. The two would glom onto each other, with the failing particle leeching what it needed from the healthy one. Then when its charge went positive again, they would separate, and the failing particle could remain aloft.”

  “You mean they fix each other, like the agrobugs?” Byron asked, referring to the deadly engineered swarms they’d encountered at the radar astronomy facility.

  Raven stepped in. “Exactly. It’s not going to come down. Not any time soon, not before this planet has become uninhabitable for the life that evolved on it during humanity’s time here. Coupled that with the current methane and CO2 output from the PPC, and we have even less time than we thought. The PPC is everything bad about humanity boiled down to a refined brew, laser-focused on selfish gain at the expense of all other life. They are dangerously short-sighted, and have a stranglehold on the planet.”