Shattered Lands

by ALICE HENDERSON

“Wasn’t expecting to hear from you so soon, H.”

  She was relieved to see him inside the vehicle, but dreaded the news she had to give him. “We had a . . . mishap. Cal is dead.”

  He immediately leaned forward. “What?”

  “There’s something out there, in the sand. Don’t go outside.”

  “I’m coming to get you guys.” He moved to the front of the vehicle to start it up.

  “No, it’s too dangerous. We’re safe for now. I just wanted to let you know.”

  He withdrew his hands from the controls, albeit reluctantly. “I don’t like this.”

  “Neither do we.” She scanned the spooked faces around her. “We’ll contact you when we’re heading out. It’ll be at night.”

  “Night . . . are you crazy?”

  “Raven has a theory that the night stalkers are vulnerable to these things, too. They may steer clear of here.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “A theory?” He glanced around, seeing the others through her PRD. “H,” he said quietly.

  She stepped away from the others. “Yes?”

  “We don’t really know this guy. He could be dead wrong about this.”

  She bit her lip. “We have to take the chance.”

  Rowan sighed in frustration. “If you’re sure.”

  She looked back to see everyone nodding. They were still listening, apparently. “We’re sure.”

  “You be careful.”

  “We will.” She shut down the communication window.

  Orion had switched the mapping unit to the plans of the building. “It’s down here.”

  With heavy hearts they turned and descended the stairs.

  Once they reached the subbasement, the old place creaked around them. A deep silence settled over them as they moved through a structure entombed and lifeless. Orion led the way, consulting an old schematic on the mapping unit. At last they reached a metal door with a sign: Radar Astronomy Research.

  The rusted door came open with a piercing screech, admitting them to a vast room with several computer workstations, shelves of books, tables, and chairs. Some were still strewn with papers, the chairs pulled out slightly as if the researchers were due back any minute. Two coffee cups sat near one another on a table. H124 approached them. Grey dust coated their empty insides.

  Cobwebs hung thick in some places. Orion chose a workstation and brushed the chair off, a plume of dust billowing up. He waved it away and stifled a sneeze. He couldn’t hold back a second one, which thundered along the walls. He checked over the computer. “Looks okay.”

  Raven steered the sled over to the station, where they hooked up the UV charger. Rivet had drifted over to the books, browsing titles.

  “Here goes,” Orion said, pressing the power button on the computer. For a discouraging moment nothing happened. Then they heard the whir of a fan and a ticking noise. He switched on the monitor, which soon glowed. “Outstanding!” he cheered, clapping his hands together.

  Once it booted up, he tinkered with the programs installed on the computer, clicking through icons and opening folders. H124 looked over his shoulder in fascination. It was the same kind of ancient tech she’d found under New Atlantic. So huge and bulky, so physical. Ingenious how the screen was made out of glass.

  She wondered why it had all been left here, the cups on the tables, the loose papers, all of this equipment that must have been worth something back then. Maybe they’d meant to come back or had to leave suddenly. Maybe frequent megastorms had driven them out, or the crushing drought.

  “I think I found it,” Orion said. He looked up sheepishly. “But I’m a bit out of my depth here. I didn’t go over this stuff with Cal. This isn’t the kind of astronomy I do.”

  H124 gazed around the space at all the books, the equipment designed to study the stars, and a sudden sadness welled within her. How had all of this been lost? How could this all have been dropped in favor of mindless entertainment and ignorance?

  Even the Rovers, who had held on to some of it, had lost so much. She’d asked Raven about that, and he’d told her that the Rovers hadn’t existed continually since the great departure from science. They had formed later, from a group of people who realized that something vital had been lost—ways to study the earth, its systems. People who saw that whole ecosystems had been lost, whole biomes, and wanted to see if they could get some of that back, see if they could somehow restore balance to the Earth.

  From the data disks and the small metal pieces, which she now knew to call drives, an ancient way of storing data, they’d learned about this facility and the capabilities of radar astronomy. They needed a more accurate picture. But so far the disks had not yielded up the information they needed most—how to stop the asteroid from hitting the Earth.

  She looked back to see Orion sitting with his head in his hands, his shoulders trembling. “I don’t think I can take Cal’s place. We need him.”

  Raven steadied his shoulder with a palm. “You can do this.”

  Orion took a deep breath and faced the screen again. He set his jaw. “Okay. Here we go. The moment of truth.” He clicked on something, and a window opened up. “I’m trying to establish communication with the radio telescope.”

  She didn’t remember seeing anything like that on their walk in. “Where is it?”

  “Miles away, in another valley.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “The data you brought from New Atlantic said it was converted over to solar power in antiquity. Let’s just hope it’s still standing . . . and is operational.” Orion looked back at the screen. “It’ll be a miracle if it is.” The window flashed, and they all crowded in. Orion clapped once more. “Communication has been established!” He ran a diagnostic check on the telescope. “There are a few minor problems, updates that need to be made, but it looks like I can still calibrate it. This’ll take a bit.”

  He did so while H124 explored the room, joining Rivet over by the shelves. She saw now that the engineer hadn’t been perusing the titles. She’d been crying behind the books. She noticed H124, and quickly wiped her eyes and nose. “Sorry,” Rivet breathed.

  “Don’t be,” H124 told her. “That was horrible out there.”

  Rivet took a ragged breath, and managed to crack a smile. “The old curmudgeon drove me crazy most of the time. Even someone with my cheerful disposition struggled with that jerk.” She wiped away another tear. “But he was our jerk, you know?”

  H124 smiled back. “Yes.” She hadn’t known Cal for long, but could see he had been an integral part of the Rover camp.

  Rivet stared upward, toward the surface. “And now he’s gone. That fast. I can’t believe it.”

  She wanted to comfort the engineer, but wasn’t sure how. H124 had grown up alone, only recently being in the company of other people. She didn’t know if she should hug her or just squeeze her shoulder. She opted for the latter.

  “Thanks,” Rivet said. “I’ll be all right.”

  H124 decided to give her some privacy and return to Orion.

  Raven stood intently at the man’s side as Orion kept nodding at the screen. “Okay. I’ve calibrated it. I’ll aim it at the first fragment.” He looked up at them and crossed his fingers. “I hope.”

  Bringing up the display of his PRD, he scanned through some notes and calculations. She knew he’d had a terrible time finding this first fragment. They’d managed to pull data off the disks she’d taken from the university to determine the orbits of the two other fragments and the main asteroid. Then Orion had searched the sky with his visual telescope, using a method described on the disks. In the general area where the pieces were supposed to be, he photographed the sky night after night, then had his PRD compare the images to see if any of the points of light were moving against the background of fixed stars. When one was, then he’d found the asteroid pieces.

  But all weren’t quite whe
re they should have been, and one remained elusive. He’d wondered if the Yanofsky Effect might be responsible for some of the shifts in orbit. He’d read about it on one of the recovered disks and described it to them. It happened when sunlight struck the light or dark surface of an asteroid. Coupled with how the asteroid was shaped, that heat difference could end up affecting the object’s orbit. But he still couldn’t find the elusive fragment. He wondered if it had already hit some decades ago, but the problem was that it was too big to have hit unnoticed. It was still out there, he’d been sure. Then finally he’d found it, off course from where the disks had predicted.

  That was the one he focused on now. “Okay. I’m targeting it with the radar. The waves will hit it and bounce back several times, and we’ll get an idea of the size and shape of this thing, along with a much more accurate orbit than what a visual study can tell us.”

  While they waited, H124 looked through the titles of the books. One was filled with glorious color images that astounded her, taken by something called “The Hubble Telescope.” They seemed to be pictures of things in outer space, though when she’d peered through Orion’s telescope back at the Rover camp, she hadn’t seen anything like these. They showed towering, green, ethereal clouds; distant galaxies brimming with golden stars; dense clusters of blue and white-hot stars being born in ruby mists. She thumbed through the entire book, taking a seat by one of the old coffee cups.

  When she finished, she returned to the shelves, skimming the other books. She stopped at a section devoted to near-earth objects. Among the volumes was a binder labeled Deflection Techniques. She pulled it down. It was heavy, full of schematics and tabbed dividers. She thumbed through it, growing more excited with every turn of the page. “Hey, look at this,” she said, walking back to the table and setting it down. “They were building a ship that could rendezvous with the asteroid and push it off course by detonating an explosive near it. It’s called the ‘blast deflection technique.’” She flipped through the pages. “Looks like they were doing it in a hurry, delegating the work to a number of different companies to speed up the process.” One piece was located on the east coast, another in what was now Delta City, and the third in the west.

  Raven approached and looked over her shoulder. She could feel the warmth from his body in this chilly place. She still wasn’t used to being around other people, their constant proximity. For the first few days in the Rover camp, her throat had grown sore from saying more than two sentences in a row to people.

  “Looks like they got pretty far with this,” he said, flipping through the pages. He moved to a tab marked Current Status. “The ship was all but done. They just had to bring the pieces together, assemble, and launch.” He frowned as he read on. “But the project lost funding. Their budget was cut by ninety percent. It says here this was the twentieth year they’d applied for the funding to finish the project, and were denied again. They were planning to reapply, but this final year, even more massive cuts meant everyone was laid off.”

  H124 stared around at the cavernous room. These people had been trying to save the planet. What was more important than that? “But without this project, no one would survive.”

  Raven exhaled slowly. “Maybe the problem wasn’t immediate enough. Something so many years in the future might not have seemed as important. Back then, a huge amount was spent on military funding. It’s probably where the money went.”

  Once more flipping through the pages of the binder, H124 found the section that detailed where all the disparate pieces had been built. “This is what we’ve been looking for,” she said. “And there’s finally some good news. Looks like a series of megastorms devastated two of the facilities early on, so they started assembling these pieces in the deep subbasements of buildings. It was a required part of their protocol to protect the craft.” She looked up. “This means these pieces might still be there, buried like that university I found.” She met Raven’s eyes. “We have to find them and assemble this ship.”

  Raven smiled with a look of relief.

  Orion spoke up. “And now we’ve got another bit of good news.”

  They all crowded around the monitor. He flipped through radar returns. “Looks like the composition of these fragments is rocky, and not metallic.”

  “That’s good?” Raven asked.

  “Yes. It means the impacts won’t be quite as devastating.” He leaned closer. “But oh, no. This isn’t good.”

  “What is it?” H124 asked.

  “That first fragment? It was impacted by another body in space, I think.” He pointed to the fragment’s shape on the screen. It was a black and white image of a jagged object. A second shape followed closely, with a stream of smaller debris trailing behind. Orion pointed to the two main shapes. “See these two pieces? I think they were originally just one, the first fragment. Now there are two. This is why the thing was off course by so much.”

  He leaned in to a window that read Ephemerides.

  “Oh, no. No, no, no.”

  H124 gripped the back of his chair. “What is it?” she and Raven asked at the same time.

  “Its orbit has really changed. From these calculations, it’s going to hit a lot sooner than we thought. Originally it was supposed to hit on its way back from the sun. Now it’s going to hit on its way toward it.”

  She leaned closer to study the orbital diagram, then the simulation of where the first half of the initial fragment would hit—just off the coast of New Atlantic. The second half would follow shortly afterward, hitting land. A burst of crimson bloomed out from the impact site, sweeping over a large area in all directions.

  Then he turned the radar equipment to the other fragments of the main asteroid, and they waited while he imaged them. The next main fragment was going to strike some large islands north of continental Europe. The third would hit the Pacific Ocean, followed by the main asteroid itself. She held her breath. It was going to come straight down on top of Delta City.

  “This is bad,” Orion said, pointing to the impact site in Delta City. “From what I’ve learned from those disks that H found, a large terrestrial hit is far worse than an ocean impact. An ocean impact can cause tsunamis and earthquakes, but a terrestrial hit sends so much material up into the atmosphere that the effects are far more devastating. Global fires. The shutdown of photosynthesis. This initial hit off the Atlantic is going to be bad enough. The tsunami there will wipe out New Atlantic. It would be even worse if there wasn’t a continental shelf there. That’ll help dissipate the wave a bit. But anything that survives that wave will be destroyed minutes later by the second half as it hits land.”

  As H124 studied the impact sites, an alarm went off inside her. “Wait a minute.” She hurried back to the binder and flipped to the section that listed where all the spacecraft pieces were being built. “One of these pieces is just to the south of New Atlantic,” she told them. “It’s going to be destroyed.”

  Raven clenched his jaw. “Then we need to get there. Fast.”

  Chapter 3

  H124 hefted open the hatch, peering up at the welcome night. Above, stars glittered in one part of the sky, while dark clouds gathered in the west. She climbed out, eyes darting over the sand for any sign of those things. The others followed, the maglev sled taking up the rear, its small rotors whirring softly in the dark. Together they formed a grim line as they trudged back the way they’d come.

  The temperature was cooler now, in the seventies, and she welcomed the break from the unbearable heat they’d experienced earlier.

  As they advanced, her headlamp picked out a lump on the ground ahead—Cal’s body, covered partially by windblown sand. “Are we just going to leave him here?” she asked. Her job in New Atlantic had been to remove corpses from their living pods when citizens passed away. It felt strange to just leave him in this lonely place.

  Raven put a hand on her shoulder. “We can’t risk one of those t
hings coming back with his body. They could be embedded in his suit somewhere.”

  “What about our suits?” Rivet asked, stopping beside them. Her eyes were wide behind her faceplate.

  “We’ll decontaminate before we enter the vehicle.” He looked down at Cal. The white of his skull reflected back in their beams, his jawbone slack as if he were still screaming. “We can’t risk any of those things hitchhiking back with us on the all-terrain.”

  Rivet gave a shudder.

  They trudged on, Orion and Raven taking up the rear, the sled thrumming along behind them. She saw Orion look back over his shoulder and whisper, “I’m sorry, old friend.”

  The thought of encountering night stalkers while in the bulky suit sent a shiver through her. She’d barely be able to run, let alone fight. She checked her PRD, seeing how far away she was from Rowan and the waiting vehicle.

  “What exactly are night stalkers?” she asked Raven. She hadn’t seen them in any of the field guides she’d read.

  “No one’s really sure. Nothing that existed in antiquity, we don’t think. They’re not in any records, even those from before the Anthropocene Extinction started. They just didn’t exist before.”

  Raven had told her about the Anthropocene Extinction, a human-caused mass die-off of animals that began many years ago and was still ongoing. It had started long ago, back before the ruined cities they now walked through had even been built, many hundreds of years before something Raven called “The Industrial Revolution.”

  She glanced around in the dark. Maybe Raven was right that those things in the soil kept any living thing away, even the night stalkers. Still, she hurried on.

  The dark city spread out to the west, leaning towers and toppled spires, a graveyard of steel and shattered glass silhouetted against the stars. She scanned the ground around her, searching for hunting shadows creeping up on them. Her mouth went dry, but she didn’t dare stop to reach into her pack for a drink of water.

  As dawn started to glow on the horizon, Rowan’s lights came into view, and relief flooded over her. The others were close behind, all sticking together. Then she could see Rowan himself, sitting in the driver’s seat, a grin on his face as he waved at them. It was a huge vehicle, with eight giant all-terrain tires and a side-loading door that opened upward like a hatch.