“You’re giving him far more credit than he deserves,” the scientist responded coolly. “His forces would have been annihilated if it had not been for that storm. He could not have predicted when it would hit or that it would be of that magnitude.”
The assessor set his jaw the way he did when his mind was fixed on a certain course of action. “True. But the renegade would be more of a test than defenseless andros.”
“You’re certain this isn’t personal?” asked the scientist. It was a rhetorical question.
The Assessor Primary’s eyes flitted about the room for a moment, lost in thought. He would never have put up with these sorts of questions from non-military personnel when he was still serving the Delegation. But here, things were different. They had so few resources left at their disposal. He could not afford to alienate the chief scientist in the Collective. They had to work together if there was any hope of survival.
“So what if it is?” the assessor asked at length, “Tactically it’s still the best decision. His presence at Landfall can mean only one thing.”
The scientist retreated inside himself, hiding behind his tightly drawn expression.
Though he would never have admitted it, the assessor feared whatever calculations his colleague was pushing through that organic computer inside his head. It was like facing a hidden enemy on the battlefield. The only thing he feared more was the mind reading memorants. But all but one of them had perished in the storm.
“I still think you overestimate him, but I’ll defer to you in this matter.” The scientist relaxed his expression and dropped the mask. “Now tell me what our course of action will be. And let’s dispense with this inefficient verbal chatter.”
The dark-haired man gave him a wary look. He didn’t like having anyone inside his head, but this meeting had gone on long enough, he supposed.
“Very well.” He reluctantly switched to the bioseine connection, “We should be able to deploy the first wave within three days, sooner if the storm lets up.”
“It can’t go on forever.”
“As if you and your scientists knew anything about this accursed atmosphere.”
The scientist’s mind bristled at the assessor’s reminder. The storm which had destroyed Oasis had been a singular event. Nothing even close to it had ever been recorded before or even thought possible. It was highly unlikely anything like it would ever happen again.
“You take care of your responsibilities and we will take care of ours,” came the scientist’s terse response. “Just send me the tactical data so that I can make sure your forces will have what they need.”
In acquiescence to his companion’s request, images, diagrams, terrain maps, and equipment lists came pouring out of the Assessor Primary’s mind. Deep down inside, the old soldier felt a sense of relief. He didn’t like being holed up in this underground facility. He was looking forward to doing what he did best: going to war.
Pock marks scoured the walls of Will’s abandoned compound. Chips and pebbles flew off on the wind as Adan and Gavin approached. But at last they were free from the storm.
A mixture of emotions seized Adan as he staggered into the small patch of sand surrounded by four char walls: relief they had made it, hope for what they might find, but above all the hollow reminder that he would never see Will again.
“Where did he keep the extractor?” Gavin asked. Some of his lost memories were stored in this device and it was for this reason they had come all this way.
“In the shelter,” Adan said.
They passed by Will’s barrels and sacks of scrap and into the small enclosed room in the corner, the only part of the compound which had a roof.
Lighting up one of Will’s lumins after shutting the door, they hunted through the menagerie of storage compartments and spare parts jammed into every corner. After checking all the containers they could find, they came to the conclusion that the extractor must have been left outside. But with the wind still blasting sand over the crumbling walls, all they could do was hole up and wait for it to die down.
“That’s fine. I’m exhausted anyway,” Gavin said, but Adan could tell he was disappointed.
They stretched out as much as possible in the cluttered enclosure, but Adan couldn’t sleep, afraid the storm might get worse again.
The journey back from Oasis had been far more difficult than he had imagined, harder than going hungry when the shifter broke, harder than being captured by somatarchs, harder even in some ways than Will’s death. It wasn’t just the grueling ten-day trek through sand and storm; that had certainly taken its toll; it was not knowing whether Gavin was going to live or die.
The after effects of the solec drug had caused Gavin’s muscles to seize up with cramps. After a few microslices, he couldn’t move at all. Knowing that Gavin never would have taken the drug if he hadn’t needed it to rescue Adan only made matters worse.
After sitting out in the open desert for half a day, waiting for Gavin to recover enough to be able to move again, another storm swept in across the desert. Adan dragged Gavin’s paralyzed body into a dip in the dunes and used his friend's unfurled garrick as a makeshift tent to protect him. Then he battened down his own and prepared to wait out the storm’s fury. Throughout the howling assault. doubts about whether they would survive beat against Adan’s mind, every bit as fierce as the winds threatening to carry them off into the Vast.
The only way he had gotten through was to pray. Perhaps that decision had been brought about by the memory he had received from the remin fluid. Will had given it to him just before they parted, and the vision it had shown him—part real, part synthetic—had been of someone in prayer to Numinae, the mysterious being spoken of by the Welkin, the people who dwelt beneath the Vast.
Adan knew he couldn’t save Gavin on his own. But Numinae, who somehow transcended space and time, had the power to do anything. He was bigger and stronger than anything Adan could imagine.
Even though at first, Numinae seemed not to answer Adan’s pleas for help, those prayers sustained him somehow. They gave him hope when he had no other reason to hope.
Microslice by microslice, Adan’s lonely vigil passed, one hundred microslices in a slice, twenty slices in a day, until a sense of peace came over him, and he knew, he just somehow knew, that Gavin would get better.
For two days Gavin’s health shifted like the wind. One moment he would open his eyes and manage to look like himself again, the next his face would turn ashen and his skin go cold.
But on the third day Adan’s prayers were answered. Gavin started breathing normally again. By the next day he had recovered enough to walk. At that point he insisted they resume their journey. Though Adan thought he could have used another day of rest, Gavin said that walking would help work out the stiffness in his limbs.
They made steady progress from that point on, weathering a few minor storms, but nothing like the first one, and certainly nothing like the one that had destroyed Oasis.
They arrived back at the compound six days later, disheveled and exhausted, but alive; alive and with new hope for the days ahead.
A feeble light filtered through the cracks around the shelter door. Gavin, oblivious to the new day, slept on. Adan, who had fallen in and out of sleep all night, waited until the winds settled down to the occasional murmur before rising and stepping outside into the haze-filled air.
Dust floated by on a few stubborn currents. The barrels, crates, and walls lay coated under a thick layer of the stuff. They resembled a sort of bumpy, odd shaped dune. In several places the char walls had crumbled and left holes to the outside world.
Images from the storm in Oasis flashed through Adan's mind. Black walls of silt pounded his memory and the tangled remnants of the Institute swirled inside his thoughts. He could almost feel himself falling again through that tempest until something caught him. Then the memory faded and he was back in the compound again.
Adan wandered about, searching for the extractor with his mind.
That would be the quickest way to find it now that the storm could no longer suppress bioseine connections. After several microslices of mental probing, it became clear he was not going to find it that way. The extractor had either lost power or been blown outside the range of his bioseine. Either way, finding it would take a lot more work than he had first hoped.
He started sifting through the containers. He removed the lids, pulling out every last piece of scrap he could find. To Adan’s anxious mind, a great many of the metal bits looked like the silvery torc at first glance, but in the end, none of them were. He rifled through the canvas sacks, but again his search came up empty. By that time it was late afternoon. Weary from picking through the piles of scrap, he walked outside the compound. With all the holes in the walls it was possible the extractor might have been swept outside. If that were the case, the likelihood of finding it was slim.
At first he walked around the compound, trying once again to sense it with his mind. He found no trace, but did spot something he had forgotten about: the lev, the hover vehicle Will had used to bring him back from Oasis. Will had shown it to him before they were carried off by the somatarchs. It was still parked out behind the compound, covered by a large tarp. Adan could sense with his mind that it was still functional.
He stood staring at it for a moment, wondering whether he should uncover it and see if for some reason the extractor was hidden beneath the tarp. In the end he decided to unfasten the pins on one of the corners and take a peek. All he saw was the empty metal platform with handles around the edge and a steering column up front.
Dismayed, he wandered back inside. As he entered, the shelter door scraped open across the sand and Gavin emerged.
“I see you’ve really fixed up the place,” he said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and surveying the upended barrels and emptied sacks. He gestured towards the disintegrating walls. “And the windows are a nice touch. Should let in a nice breeze in the evening.”
“I’m glad you’re finally awake,” Adan said. It was nice to have Gavin back in good spirits. “I’ve been looking for your extractor. So far, I’ve found nothing.”
Gavin’s expression turned serious. “We’ll just have to look harder, then. Let me make some atol first and then we’ll start looking again.”
A pleasant sensation spread through Adan’s memory at the mention of the warm, grainy drink Will had introduced him to not all that long ago.
“I’ll get the shifter,” he said, licking his lips.
The shifter had been the one bright spot in their return. They found it tucked away inside the shelter the night before, and the cutter along with it. The cutter was what Will used to chop up the nearly endless supply of scrap from the barrels. He fed the resulting ‘plugs’, as he called them, into the shifter, transforming them into any elemental compound he wanted. That was how they got their food and water, as well as char to repair the walls.
The kern they’d salvaged from the Waymen in Oasis was getting old. The desert dwellers may have been tenacious when it came to surviving storms out in the Vast, but they were not much when it came to culinary skills. After eight days of the sinewy fare, Adan was more than ready to try something different.
Gavin set about making plugs with the cutter and Adan dropped them into the shifter. In little time at all they had hot, thick liquid swishing down their throats. The grainy drink was just as satisfying and tasty as Adan remembered.
Refreshed, they resumed their hunt for the extractor. They searched for most of the day, but never found it. They went through all the piles of scrap Adan had previously searched through and even a few barrels and sacks he’d missed.
“You said you looked outside earlier?” Gavin asked as the daylight began to fade.
“Yes, but only a little. I didn’t think there would be much chance of finding it out there.”
“Stumbling across it out in the dunes would take a miracle, but I don’t see what choice we have.”
Adan nodded, his head heavy with exhaustion. They set out into the desert surrounding the compound, splitting up.
The sand near the compound was almost completely free of the metal scraps which littered most of the Vast. It made sense that Will would have already picked the closest areas clean. A few small rocks, flecks of metal, or bits of char were all that was left. They were on their fourth sweep, increasing the distance each time, when Gavin’s voice came to Adan from the other side of the compound.
“Adan,” he shouted. “Come here. There’s something you have to see.”
Adan rushed towards the sound of his voice, connecting to Gavin’s bioseine once he got within range.
“Did you find the extractor?” Adan asked, his thoughts brimming with anticipation.
“No, it’s something else.”
The image of what Gavin saw appeared in Adan’s mind. He was staring at an open metal container, half buried in the sand. The elongated, opaque tube was a little wider than a man and a little taller, like a giant pill. The opened lid had exposed the interior, now coated in a thick layer of sand.
“What is it?” Adan asked, coming up alongside his friend. When Will had initialized Adan’s bioseine, he had implanted a great deal of information inside of it, but nothing matched what he was looking at now.
“A stasis capsule. They are used for keeping someone alive in long term storage.”
“Do you think it belonged to Will?” Adan shared the question both of them were thinking. If it did belong to him, Adan didn’t see how he could have failed to see it when he was here before. Perhaps the desert storms had uncovered it; it was buried rather deep.
Since it was an esolace enabled device, Gavin mentally searched the capsule’s activity log. “It doesn’t list any details about whether or not there was ever anyone inside, but the capsule was timed to open fourteen days ago. That would have been the day after I left for Oasis.”
“I can’t imagine it being set to open if someone wasn’t inside.”
“I agree.” Gavin’s mind worked quickly, analyzing what possible reasons there might be for such a device to be planted out in the Vast. “I’d say there is a distinct possibility that you weren’t the only one Will freed from Oasis,” Gavin concluded. “And I’m guessing that whoever was in this capsule is the person who took the extractor.”
Adan’s insides felt as hollow as the capsule. If the extractor was lost, that meant Gavin’s memories were lost as well. “Oh Gavin,” he said, “I’m so sorry.”
Two
Iterations
“So what do we do now?” Adan wondered as they trudged back to the compound. Night was coming on and they had learned all they could from the capsule.
Gavin stared up at the cloud-choked, swirling green sky.
Despair crept in with the encroaching dark. Had they come all this way for nothing? No, there had to be some way of recovering those memories.
“Didn’t you say the Developers kept the memories they erased somewhere in the Institute? What if we went back? Do you think they might have survived somehow?” He stared expectantly at Gavin, waiting for his reply.
Gavin’s face remained impassive. “Yes, the Repository would have contained our memories. We stored them there in memory arrays. But it was destroyed, along with everything else in the Institute. There’s no way it could have survived the storm.”
“The Repository.” Adan held the name in his mind for a moment, as if that would somehow bring it back.
Gavin was right. There was no way anything could have survived that storm, but something inside Adan refused to accept it. Until he saw Oasis again with his own eyes, he could always hope.
Gavin stopped in front of the door to the compound, a look of resolve on his face.
“Our only hope of finding the extractor is the chronotrace.”
“The chronotrace? How could that help us? Whoever was in that capsule might have taken over a ten span ago. The chronotrace can’t go back that far.”
Adan’s mind flashed bac
k to the trace he’d created in Oasis. Reconstructing the past with Gavin’s invention may have led them to Darius, but it had taxed the energy mesh of the city to the point of it crashing. If the mesh hadn’t been enough there was no way they’d be able to the kind of power they needed out in the desert.
“You’re right. The device doesn’t have the functionality we need—yet.” Gavin glanced at him, a gleam in his eye. “But there was a saying we had back at the Institute, ‘expand what’s possible today and you’ll shatter tomorrow’s impossibilities.’”
“Did you learn that from Darius?”
“Not everything he taught me was a lie,” Gavin replied.
Adan recalled Darius’ cunning eyes and the way he had spoken to him, as if Adan were just a thing, another piece of technology to be managed the way Darius managed the rest of Oasis. But he was dead now, taken by the storm which destroyed the city.
“So, you really think you can improve the chronotrace quickly enough to find the extractor?” Adan asked.
“No,” Gavin admitted. “But I have to try.”
“Well, I don’t suppose I’d be of much help with something like that.”
Gavin gave him a thoughtful look. “Perhaps not. But there are plenty of other things which need to be done.”
“Like what?”
“Well…” Gavin gazed around the compound. “Fixing these walls would be a good place to start. I won’t be able to accomplish much if this place crumbles to the ground around us.”
Ah, well, that was something he could do, he supposed. Adan nodded and the two of them headed for the shelter to get some rest. It looked like tomorrow would be a long day for the both of them.
The next morning Adan began repairing the walls. He made plugs with the cutter, created char with the shifter, and spread the rocky paste over the walls, just the way Will had taught him.
The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set Page 37
