A Dark Horizon
Final Dawn ✺ Book Three
T.W.M. Ashford
Copyright © 2020 by T.W.M. Ashford
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Any characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Tom Ashford
Dark Star Panorama
The Dark Star Panorama is a shared universe of sci-fi stories in which Final Dawn is the first series.
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Contents
1. Homecoming
2. Proxima Delta
3. Scyphozoan Rescue
4. The Great Divide
5. Pale Red Dot
6. The Pelastar
7. Road to Bureaucracy
8. The Ministerium
9. Mazes, Masks & Murderers
10. Everybody Lies
11. The Mausoleum
12. The Crimson Crosshairs
13. One Little Job
14. Black Arrow, Black Box
15. A Deal’s a Deal
16. Automata Auditorium
17. Elsewhere
18. Celest Verte
19. The Residential District
20. A Room With a View
21. Cut Off the Head
22. Fall From Grace
23. Ouroboros
24. The Battle for the Iris
25. Something Monstrous
26. Styx and Stones
27. Diplomacy
28. The Transmission
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1
Homecoming
Earth, as Jack knew it, was gone.
The Adeona drifted through the Solar System like a rowboat across an empty, star-swept lake. They’d passed one red and rocky planet. Their NavMap coordinates led them to the next one ahead.
Jack stood by the cockpit windows, searching. Hoping.
“Recognise anything?” asked Brackitt from his co-pilot chair.
“No.” Jack shook his head, his eyes forlorn. “Nothing at all.”
“Well, we’re not there yet.”
Jack heard an exaggerated sigh emanate from the back of the cockpit. Klik was sat at one of the computer terminals, scrolling through the ship’s databanks. For all her excitement at escaping slavery and joining the Adeona’s crew, the teenage Krettelian hadn’t factored in quite how boring interstellar travel could be.
The only crew member not present was Rogan. Jack had expected her to join them upon exiting subspace, but nobody had seen her since she’d locked herself inside one of the ship’s quarters with what remained of Tuner’s data core.
Jack certainly wasn’t going to make an issue out of it. He didn’t blame her for wanting to be alone after Tuner’s death. Most of the time, he wanted the exact same thing.
He may not have been alone but boy, was he lonely.
The voice of the Adeona cut through the speakers, making him jump. She sounded far too bright and jovial for the tense atmosphere within her hull.
“Pudeeta B should be visible in T-minus three, two…”
Jack felt his nerves spike to almost nauseating levels.
“…one…”
They were headed towards the system’s lone star already, and it took a few seconds after the Adeona’s countdown finished for Jack to notice anything different. He squinted in confusion at the angry red sun growing steadily larger outside the cockpit windows.
The tiniest black silhouette floated before it.
A planet.
The breath caught in Jack’s throat. Earth. But it couldn’t be, could it? He’d never seen his home planet from space before, but he was sure that from Earth the sun should have been just a tiny, bright orb of fire in the daytime sky, not so close that it filled the whole horizon.
And yet…
And yet Everett had told him that tens of thousands of years had passed since they were each catapulted from Earth in separate wormholes. The star that humanity once affectionately nicknamed Sol had been threatening to expand into a Red Giant even back then – if Everett was right, the sun would have had plenty of time to follow through on that threat.
Despite the knot in his gut telling him otherwise, Jack really hoped Everett was wrong.
“We’re approaching Puteeda B from its night side,” said the Adeona, as the planet’s silhouette grew and the sun behind turned into a glowing halo. “I’ll swing us around for a better look.”
Puteeda B. Ugh. Jack hated the alien designation it had been given. If it was Earth, getting that name officially changed would be the first thing he’d do.
The ship amended her trajectory. As they approached the NavPoint, more of the sun-facing side of the planet came into view – first as a golden-brown crescent, then like a first-quarter moon, and then finally her whole face as the Adeona stopped with her rear to the sun.
Jack felt his chest go light and his knees turn weak.
“Is this it?” he nervously asked the ship.
“This is where the coordinates take us.”
He swallowed hard. The planet before him wasn’t Earth. Not anymore, at least. Gone were the emerald greens of forests and ocean blues. In their stead lay a brown dustbowl stripped of its atmosphere. The only sight more barren was the Moon orbiting it – what was left of it, anyway. It looked as if its northern pole had been shattered by a colossal explosion.
“Not quite how you remember, I take it?” asked Brackitt.
“It can’t be,” Jack mumbled to himself. “I mean, this could be anywhere… right? What about Mercury? What about Venus?” He turned his head towards the speakers. “What about Pudeeta A?”
“Pudeeta A is the star, Jack,” the ship replied. “I wouldn’t recommend we pay it a visit. If there were any planets closer to the star before, I suspect they got swallowed by it as it grew.”
Jack suppressed a shiver. His model of the Solar System needed an update. Earth was the first rock from the sun now.
“Great.” Brackitt slapped the dashboard triumphantly. “There you go – you’ve seen it. Let’s go back to Detri.”
“Be patient, Brackitt.” The Adeona slowly drifted towards the planet. “Let’s at least take a look around while we’re here. Is there anywhere in particular you want to go?”
Home, thought Jack. I want to go back to my old apartment, and I want to find Amber still waiting for me there. But where was home? With the oceans evaporated and their trenches exposed, it was impossible to even tell where the continents of Europe or America were, let alone England, let alone pick out Sandhurst or a specific postal address.
“Do you have any old maps I can look at?”
“There are no maps,” said Rogan. Jack spun around to find her standing in the cockpit doorway. “This system was logged by the Ministry centuries ago, but nobody has ever bothered to charter the individual planets.”
“Great. First human to ever leave the Solar System, first human to ever come back and explore it.”
“Last human, technically.” Rogan joined Jack by the windows. “There are only two of you left, and Charon beat you to it.”
Jack gritted his teeth and exhaled. He hated
how everyone still referred to Everett Reeves as Charon. Then again, everyone else had far greater reason to hate Everett than he did.
All Everett had done to Jack was offer him a way back home. Well… that and try to frame him as an intergalactic terrorist, he supposed.
“I don’t know.” Jack shrugged. “I don’t know this place.”
“I’ll take us down.” The ship ignited her thrusters. “If anyone spots any ruins worth checking out, let me know.”
Ruins. Jack felt the floor of his stomach give out.
What an awful word for a world he’d left only three months before.
The Adeona touched down on Puteeda B about twenty minutes later, after Brackitt spotted a graveyard of dilapidated metal skeletons sprouting from a cracked, rocky steppe. A dust cloud rose around the cockpit windows as she landed.
“Finally,” sighed Klik, spinning her chair around and jumping to her feet. “Something to actually do.”
“Not so fast.” Rogan moved to block the cockpit door. “The surface of this planet can reach almost a couple hundred degrees Celsius, and there’s no oxygen. If you go outside, you’ll be roasted.”
Klik turned from Rogan to Jack with an outraged look on her face. Then she unleashed an anguished groan and stormed off towards her quarters.
“This is so unfair,” she yelled over her shoulder. “I hope you get roasted!”
“She’s going to be an absolute joy when we get to Detri.” Rogan rolled her mechanical eyes as she turned back to Jack. “Get suited up. I’ll meet you down in the cargo bay when you’re ready.”
Jack stepped off the ship’s ramp without ceremony. He still couldn’t quite believe that this wasteland of a planet was Earth yet.
The only thing keeping him from burning up was the custom spacesuit Tuner had made for him. Even so, the filters hadn’t been the same since the plasma beam incident on Krett. Its recycled air tasted hot. Everything on the other side of his helmet shimmered in a haze.
Rogan could only just handle the heat herself. She advised Jack not to try touching her metal chassis for a while after they got back on the ship, unless he fancied burning his fingerprints off.
They set off from the Adeona towards the ruins.
“I know how important this is to you,” Rogan said across their private comm channel, “but let’s try and make this quick, okay? Everyone’s at the end of their tether as it is.”
Jack nodded.
“If this truly is all that’s left of Earth, I might not want to hang around for very long either.”
The metal graveyard, as Brackitt had so eloquently described it, came into view only a short minute’s walk later. Jack’s heart fell.
This was human, all right.
Thousands of years having passed, the ground had ruptured and risen and reshaped itself into something unrecognisable. But there was no mistaking the human handiwork that had gone into building the old, twenty-first century architecture… even if little remained of it save for metal girders and patches of crumbling concrete. Some buildings had toppled; others had merely twisted and buckled in the heat.
Still. As compelling as the evidence was, it was hardly conclusive. Jack needed more to go on if he was to give up on finding the human race completely.
“How is any of this still here?” he asked.
“Metal doesn’t melt below a couple thousand degrees Celsius,” Rogan replied. “Even concrete holds up pretty well up to a point, especially in places where there’s shade. Plus there’s barely a trace of atmosphere left, so a greatly diminished chance of erosion…”
“Like the way Neil Armstrong’s footprint stayed on the Moon,” Jack distractedly mumbled to himself. “No wind to blow it away.”
“What was that?”
“Ah, nothing. It’s probably not there anymore, anyway.”
They continued down a long, straight furrow in the earth. It must have once been a busy street – Jack imagined the cars weaving back and forth between the buildings, their drivers oblivious to the desolate future in which Jack now stood. He remembered how infuriated they all became whenever the universe had the audacity to make them wait in a traffic jam, how the cities had become symphonies of horn honking.
It finally struck Jack why he found the sight of the ruined buildings so unnerving. It wasn’t the skeletal remains themselves – he’d seen plenty such wreckages in the years after the first solar flare hit. But for some reason he had always imagined nature would inherit the Earth after humanity was gone – vines overrunning houses, birds roosting at the top of radio towers. He knew now how stupid that vision of the future had been.
There were no birds or vines or life forms of any kind. Nature had died and burned away like everything else.
The hairs on the back of his neck pricked up.
Jack felt like a tourist walking through someone else’s memory… and a pretty bad one at that.
“Hey.” Rogan called him over from the edge of a sinkhole at the channel’s end. “That’s different.”
At the bottom of the pit was a huge metal box the size of a mansion. Even as the earth and concrete around it had crumbled, even as the pipes underground had split and burst, the black, featureless cube had remained in one piece. Piercing sunlight bounced off the corner of its obsidian roof.
There was a lone door down amongst the rocks.
“That definitely wasn’t here before,” said Jack, growing excited. “Maybe it’s a bunker of some kind. Can we take a look?”
“Sure.”
Jack scrambled down the rocky slope towards the monolith. He knew it was foolish to hope that they might find people inside, but he couldn’t help it. There must have been some reason for humanity to erect a giant metal cube before the end times.
He tried the door handle – fit for a human hand, he noticed – and found it stuck. A quick punch from Rogan buckled the lock.
“You first,” she said, gesturing for Jack to head inside.
It was pitch-black; if the box was there to keep the worst of the sun’s rays out, it had done its job. Jack waited a second for his helmet’s night-vision sensors to adjust to the dark, then let out a little gasp. A wide set of concrete steps led up to a row of giant, classical pillars – twelve in number from left to right, though a couple had partially collapsed and a third leaned precariously. An even darker room loomed beyond.
He’d stumbled across something ancient… ancient even for his time, that is.
Humanity must have tried to protect Earth’s sites of historical importance right up until the end. Jack wondered what humanity had been protecting the landmarks from, however. The sun? Or, as society collapsed even further, itself?
Rogan joined him, and they climbed the old steps together.
A large statue sat in a throne at the top. Jack didn’t know which god the figure was supposed to depict. Even inside the protective monolith, most of the detail was lost to time, and its decapitated head lay in a pool of its own chalky dust a few metres away.
There was some text stencilled into the wall behind it, however. Some of it was missing where the wall had fallen away but, with mounting dread, Jack found he had no difficulty reading the rest.
—E PEOPLE FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION THE MEMORY OF ABRAH—
“Oh my God,” said Jack, backing away from the wall. Every inch of his body suddenly felt as unsteady as the ruins around him. “I know this place. This is the Lincoln Memorial. We must have walked up the Reflecting Pool to get here.”
“Hey, I found something else.” Rogan returned from the other side of the hall with a thin, rectangular sheet of metal in her hands. “Does this mean anything to you?”
“Washington DC. Huh.” He absent-mindedly turned the embossed license plate over in his hands. The paint had long since flaked off. “You know, I’ve never been to Washington DC before. I heard they had an Ark being built over near Cedarville.”
“I guess that means this is Earth, then.”
“Unless you know of a differe
nt extinct species with a penchant for American vehicle registration, I guess it does.” Jack paused and then shook his head. “Man, it doesn’t feel real. It isn’t sinking in at all.”
“I’m sorry, Jack. Really, I am. But at least now you know for sure.”
“Yeah.” Jack continued to spin the plate over. “I guess.”
Rogan stepped away to make contact with the Adeona. Jack didn’t tune his comms to listen in – he wanted the peace and quiet.
His whole body felt numb. His thoughts were sluggish, as if tranquillised. This couldn’t be real, could it? It didn’t feel real. It didn’t feel like anything at all.
He should have been knelt on the floor, bawling his eyes out, inconsolable at the realisation that the only world he truly knew and loved was lost. That humanity had failed. That Amber was long dead. That last revelation alone should have been enough to destroy him, hollow him out, tear the very foundations of his life apart.
And yet he felt nothing.
He couldn’t tell if it was a passive acceptance of facts he already knew to be true, or if he was in shock and the full reality of the situation would come unexpectedly crashing down on him at some later point. Or maybe he’d simply got all his mourning out of the way on the trip there.
Either way, it was over.
It had been over from the start.
He jumped as heavy footsteps approached from behind him.
A Dark Horizon (Final Dawn, Book 3) Page 1
