“I doubt it,” I said.
“Why? Tubes were cheap. Hell, engineers were cheap.”
“True, but you’re forgetting human nature. It makes perfect sense to put doctors and engineers and scientists into the tubes, to wake up later and help reclaim the world from the virus and its shitstorm, but that’s not what happened. At least, not on a large scale, I bet. Think about how fucking petty we were,” I said.
Andi’s face fell, and she lowered her head into her hands. “Oh, shit. You’re right. There would be fucking politicians. Elites. Lawyers.”
“Now you’ve got it. They would bribe or threaten their way in, which means that somewhere out there are completely worthless people taking up space that could have been used by—well, people like you. People we need, if we’re going to succeed,” I said.
“Sometimes I hate people,” Andi said.
“Same here, but for now, show me how to fly the Vampires. I’m tired of watching a movie when I already know it ends badly.”
She touched her tablet and the image changed to a schematic of the Vampires. “Let me introduce you to the Vampire Softwing Aircraft, also known as the GU-11. Ready?” she asked.
“Show me,” I told her, and the images on the screen began to move.
11
We took the Vampires up to greet the dawn, setting the heavy bundles down on the expanse of silo roof. The air was still, and fresh with the oncoming day. I pulled the flight gear on, marveling at how it kept me at an even temp from the second I closed the gloves and zippered the neck.
The suit clung to me, but it was light enough that I didn’t mind. Andi and I stood on top of the second silo, our helmets on and cable ready to plug into the Vampire’s avionics system. Our air would come from a second tube, smaller and linked to a pressurized bladder along the frame. Nanobots would pump and compress oxygen as we went; the entire system had been designed after I was in cold sleep, and seemed nothing short of magical to my expectations.
“Condor ready. We can hit the assembly key. Here’s how to do it,” she said, showing me the sequence from her tablet. It was a simple flow chart, and when she touched the Fly icon, both Vampires began to inflate like parade balloons. In less than two minutes, they were firm to the touch, each wing spanning nearly six meters.
“This is fast,” I said.
“Wait until you see the frame. It’s harder than steel, but flexible when it needs to be. We built larger versions of these for long distance freight drops in remote areas. They could fly in, unmanned, deliver a payload, and return without any human supervision,” Andi said.
“How long did it take before they were using them as air support?”
“About two seconds,” she said wryly. The military would never let an opportunity for bombing go to waste, especially if you could avoid combat losses.
“Hook up here?’ I asked, pointing to a cable mount on the front bar. I would step into the frame, and then when we were airborne, push my feet back to lock in place.
“Go ahead and hook up, then engage the camo,” she said.
“Camo? Where?”
“Underneath. The ‘bots act like the skin of a squid. We’ll be invisible, more or less, and high enough that no one will see us. Our suits are linked to the camo pattern, and our Vampires are linked together. We fly unseen,” she said.
My heads up display flared to life when I clicked the cable in place, and it was simple and bright. “Good HUD.”
“It gets better, too.” She took one side of the Condor and lifted. “Help me fit this?”
I lifted the other side of the drone and positioned it on the mounts just above center on her Vampire. The drone was light enough to avoid producing much drag, and its profile was so low that she would have no problem getting to the Vampire’s full altitude. When the Condor was in place, she smiled.
“We speak into the mask. There’s a wire mic in the lower edge. Ready?” Andi asked me.
“And then some.”
“I’ll launch first. Watch my feet,” she said. She took three big steps and pushed away from the silo as a low whistle began.
“It’s my engine kicking in,” her voice said in my ear.
“Quiet.”
“It pushes hard. Come on up. It’s a heluva view,” she said.
I took three steps, bunched my muscles, and leaped. I expected to fall for a second before the small engine kicked in, but I didn’t. I began to climb immediately, and fast enough that my stomach dropped. In seconds I was wheeling away from the Cache to join Andi in her spiral upward, the tress and silos shrinking fast. Around me, The Empty sprawled in a rugged vista, dotted with scrub and cacti and broken rock of every kind. The highway—and now I saw two exposed sections, running north and east—was clearly visible. There was enough material to use for a passable track that would go well over the distant horizon.
“That’s I-35 over there,” Andi said.
The ribbons of highway dipped below sand and grit, emerging in sections long enough to tell where the original roadway existed. The storm gave us exactly what we needed to find and use a resource we would be hard pressed to recreate.
“Will our helmets pick all this up?” I asked.
“Every detail. We can even zoom in on the upload. We’ve got room for two days of recordings, even though we can only remain aloft for ten hours at most. We’re going to need a thousand people to build that road, minimum,” Andi said.
“Baby steps. It’s enough to know where it is, and then open it in sections. We’ll go north and west to wherever the other locations are. I want such a surplus of gear that we’ll never worry about technology again, and I want more printers,” I said.
Andi banked, heading due east and continuing to climb. “Almost ready to launch the Condor. Better get alongside in case things go wonky,” she warned. We were high enough that I could see a vast span of The Empty, revealing new, terrible gorges torn by the storm. Two of the gorge branches were so deep that the shadows hid their bottom when we flew over. They would require bridges if we were to build in this direction—which we would, but it would be years unless we found a source of people who wanted to join us.
“We’re at launch altitude,” Andi said. “Clear?”
“Clear. Send the bird,” I replied.
Andi grunted and the Condor broke free from her Vampire, soaring up and away at a sharp angle. It began gaining altitude quickly, turning to follow us as it climbed at an astonishing rate.
“Does it have to be close for data transfer?” I asked.
“No, but I want us together for landing. We’re going to cover a lot of ground. See that ruin?” she asked.
“Big. Looks like a single building, but huge.” I sifted my memory of the area and drew a blank.
“Hospital. Looks like some of it survived underground. I’m dropping a pin for crews later,” Andi said, and I saw her mark as a bright red point on my HUD. “You can drop them too. Just focus, blink three times, and it’s marked.”
“Got it. That river is new,” I said.
“Was a creek twenty centuries ago, but The Empty and the rain fucked things up. Nothing is as it was in our time.” Andi didn’t sound bitter, just somber. We were seeing the death of our world from the air, and it was humbling.
“Where does the Eden Chain start?” I asked. I knew there were multiple sites, but I couldn’t tell how close we were to the first marked site on Andi’s digital schematic.
“Eighty clicks northeast is the first location,” came her answer.
“Will we be able to see it?”
“We have the range to get close, but you wanted to go west as well. We can get in the area and check the Condor footage later, sound good?” Andi said.
“Perfect. Take us there, I’ve seen enough broken road to get a plan together for our eastern expansion.”
We banked again, and the sun cascaded across the land, which began to change. “It’s not as big as I thought,” I said. The Empty was losing hold, as more and more cac
ti gave way to greenery of various kinds.
We flew on for ten minutes, the Condor high above and feeding us a steady stream of data and video. Its vantage was dramatically better than ours, despite my view being nothing short of incredible. I saw evidence of a world that had fallen, regrouped, and fallen again. Based on what we saw from satellite data, it was no surprise that the ruins were all over the timeline. The only thing missing were actual towns, although we flew over something that looked like bleached bones, and I recognized it as a collapsed log stockade nearly a half klick across.
I dropped a pin because the site was at a nexus of two paths and it was close to the first legitimate stand of timber I’d seen in The Empty.
“Good call,” Andi said.
“That’s a ready-made outpost of our own, and the paths converge here for a reason. What it is, I don’t know, but it’s worth finding out someday,” I said, following the paths away to the west and southeast. They were defined enough to be ruts, as if wagon traffic had packed them down over time. When we saw the shattered remains of an old cart, I knew my suspicions were right. “Trade route, and that means people were in this area within the past few years. Could the western track run to Wetterick’s place, or even Kassos?”
Andi didn’t answer, instead dropping a pin on a massive herd of horses. There were hundreds of them, running wild and free in the sun, their coats glistening with health.
They never saw the big cat waiting along their trail.
The cat burst out of cover, lunging at a dun-colored yearling, its mane flying as it cut hard to get away. The yearling shouldn’t have bothered running, because an enormous stallion charged the cat, whirling to kick it square in the shoulder with hooves that looked to be the size of dinner plates. The predator went down, rolled, and decided that discretion was the better part of valor, at least on this day. The stallion ushered his herd north as the enormous cat slunk away with a distinct limp.
“Let me say again; nature is an absolute bitch. How big was that cat?” I asked.
“Looked like a liger or some variant. Five hundred kilos at least. Those horses are huge, too. They looked like draft animals, but taller. Things aren’t what they were when we got tubed, I’ll say that.” Andi’s voice was full of wonder as we watched the horses streak west toward a ribbon of water.
“What’s that?” I asked, dropping a pin for Andi to see. There was a depression in the land to our north, deep and irregular, but with straight lines.
Andi flashed the time in my HUD. “We can land and check it out, leave the Condor up. It’s almost time to eat, anyway.”
“Sounds good. Feet first, right?”
“Better than ass first. Follow my lead, flare the wing like in the training vids. You’ll land like a feather. Promise,” Andi said with a laugh.
We began our descent in a spiral, but not before checking the site for predators with a low-level pass. When we saw the site was clear, we flared our wings and touched down, soft as a feather. The small hydrogen engine whined to a stop in seconds, and I was struck by the utter silence.
“Seems quiet,” I said.
“Everything is after that wind. Tires me out,” Andi said. “And I have to pee.”
“Glad you said it. I thought I was going to turn this flightsuit into a wetsuit, and not the good kind.”
Andi laughed and began shucking her flight gear, then found a convenient stump to hide behind. I followed her lead and we rallied back together after pinning the Vampires to the ground with two stakes that descended from each wingtip. The Condor did lazy eights above us, and I held my pistol like a talisman.
Around us, the ground was unremarkable, except for the one thing that caught my eye from the air.
“Tell me what you see,” I said.
Andi looked around, pushing her blonde hair back in frustration. “It’s . . . well, it’s big.”
“It looks like the outline of that hospital you pinned. Same size, if you continue the walls. The shape. But it’s buried, except for this side and part of that section that goes north. Same style, same setup. What do you think? Do you remember a hospital out here, in the middle of nowhere?”
“This was Oklahoma. It was all the middle of nowhere.” She looked around, tapping a nail on her teeth. “You’re right. What the hell would they build a hospital out here for?”
“Since you don’t know it, maybe it was built after we went under,” I said.
“Holy shit. We need to dig, maybe—something to confirm it,” she said.
“And if it is, then it means that whoever ran it was practicing medicine after the virus broke out.” The thought of all that data—and maybe treatments—was dizzying. I had no idea if the virus was dormant, or even if it had ever gone away, but I knew that nanobot treatment made a lot of sense if you were going to combat something that cracked life apart like an egg. What the virus left behind was nothing short of impossible, and yet here it was; animals from the deep past, things out of nightmares, and forms of humans who had been robbed of their dignity and lives.
“This is a huge place. We need help,” Andi said.
“I agree, but I have a simple way to confirm it’s a hospital.”
“How?”
“Does our suit system have a Geiger counter?” I asked.
Andi smiled, then slapped her forehead. “Sure does. We assumed these suits would be used during all kinds of war, not just conventional.” She blinked in rapid succession and began walking toward the center of the depression. When she’d gone a hundred meters, she stopped. “Rads below. Welcome to the department of nuclear medicine, sir.”
“You may address me as doctor,” I told her.
“You’re no doctor,” she said, grinning.
I touched her face, smiling. “Wait until tonight.”
12
We took off after lunch and a good look around at the buried hospital. In open air, we could make ninety klicks an hour, but with a tailwind. We pushed well over a hundred, and still the Vampire wing held firm as the ‘bots adjusted for pressure and stress. The Vampires were nothing short of magic, letting us wheel and dip all while collecting a running survey of lands that would be close to half of ancient Oklahoma, the Texas border, and points north. Other than natural predators, we’d seen nothing more menacing than a small group of prospectors who were reworking an ancient mine of some type.
They never saw us, and we didn’t stop to chat. When we turned west for the final leg of our flight, we saw a series of small lakes that looked like a chain of gems, the mirror waters crowed with herd animals and greenery at the edges.
“Good looking land. How far to The Outpost from here?” I asked.
“It’s sixty klicks north and west. I thought you said The Empty was peak desert?”
“It was. I think that storm knocked something loose with the local climate. This isn’t nearly as grim as when I woke up. I’m seeing a lot of growth, and the animal herds are way too big to be desert dwellers. We were hunting rattlers and blood chickens for every meal. This is a totally different kind of landscape,” I said.
“I’ll patch us into the Condor and see how far north the changes are,” Andi said.
She did so, and I had a moment of vertigo as my helmet view switched to the Condor’s camera far above us.
In the distance, I saw a column of smoke.
“Andi, look.”
“Got it, pulling the lens in. It’s—shit,” she said, her voice sour.
“I may be wrong, but that looks like a war party, and they’re coming from The Outpost.” Three wagons and a small hut were burning, sending black smoke skyward. I could see dots of people moving around, then the Condor lens focused again.
“Fuck me,” I hissed.
Twenty men and women were in the process of staking a man to a pole. There were bodies on the ground, and as I watched, I saw a figure break free and run. A woman with black hair smoothly drew a rifle and shot the fleeing victim in the back. The body tumbled once and fell still.
“And heading south. Toward our place,” I said, following their path. “No drone. I want one of them alive. I have . . . questions.”
“How long have we got?” she asked.
“A day. Maybe two. Time to head back, I think. I need to greet our friends and take care of something I should have done a long time ago.”
“Kill everyone in The Outpost?” Andi asked as we banked hard and began streaking south.
“Not everyone. Just the ones who don’t want to join us, and I have an easy way to find out who they are.”
We landed before sunset, breaking the Vampires down by command process and tucking them back underground. I decided to leave the second reactor for another trip since time was of the essence, and it was just getting dark when we got in the truck and rolled out, our thoughts turning back to war as we rode in silence.
“I should have done this some time ago. This is my fault,” I said.
“What is?”
“The people who died. It’s on me. We’ll find out if there are any survivors after I’m done with those pricks. I have to decide if I leave one alive or not. I need to get the message out, but if they’re murderers, I can’t let them live,” I said. I could hear the anger in my own voice, and I tried to dial back any unreasonable rage. Killing the raiders wasn’t personal. It was business, and I had to remember that when the bullets were flying and people were screaming their last sounds.
“I don’t want your default to be killing. That’s not the man I want, and it’s not what we need as a society. We need you, Jack, not a tyrant, and your natural desire to avoid being that is why this thing is working. It’s why you have us.” She rubbed at her scalp, then shrugged. “Your women, I guess. There’s a phrase I never thought I’d be a part of, but you’re not some knuckle dragging asshole. You use violence as a tool.”
Future Reshaped: A Post-Apocalyptic Harem (Future Reborn Book 3) Page 6
