Future Reborn Box Set

by Daniel Pierce

  Even if we didn’t find the reactors, the trip would be worth it. I stared back at the open doors, making a list of how many people it would take to secure the loot.

  “A lot of work,” Silk said, reading my mind.

  “At least three caravans of wagons, but that road out there has me thinking,” I said.

  “You think it’s drivable? For the car?” Silk asked.

  “If we secure fuel, no sense in leaving it rot. We’re close enough to the Oasis that we could make two trips a day. I know this is sacrilege, but if we could build a trailer for it, then Dixie could carry all the gear from here in short order,” I said.

  “Dixie? You named the car?” Silk asked me, raising a perfect brow in question. She ran a hand over her leg, then looked at me with mild interest. “Not enough women in your life?”

  “Well, she is a southerner, and there’s a rich tradition of naming cars. And ships, and other things, but Americans were obsessed with cars, and Mustangs were a kind of—it’s hard to explain. Cars were a lifeline to adulthood, and friendship, and being in a club. I’m glad we have it, but not using the car for the Oasis doesn’t make sense. Seeing that road changes things,” I said with a shrug.

  “I’m not the jealous type, but on the day that you add a woman to your collection who makes you forget where my bed is, we’re going to have a little chat,” Silk said.

  While we talked, Chloe and Mira were rooting through another metal locker, making exclamations at the neatly stacked pants and shirts. They weren’t natural fibers, so they had survived intact. Dark blue, the uniforms were like nothing I’d ever seen, bearing patches made after my long sleep started.

  “You have my permission to knock me unconscious if I ever forget where your bed is. Promise,” I said, raising my hand to seal the deal.

  “Noted,” Silk said, turning to look down the hall. Chloe and Mira were done with their inspection. “What do you think?”

  “They’ll work. Yet another thing to take. Those would made good work clothes. Tough, not like anything I’ve seen before,” Mira said.

  “Good,” I told her. “Let’s move to that big chamber on the right. It connects to the room next door. We’ll go in both doors at once.”

  “We’ve got right,” Mira said, taking Chloe with her, weapons up and eyes alert.

  “Left it is,” I said in agreement. “I go in first, you follow in a second. No mistakes.”

  I opened the door with a swift, certain motion, the hinges still smooth after all the years. In the gloom, I saw the glow of machinery that struck a chord of familiarity with me, making me pause in my headlong charge.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed. My mind began assembling what I saw, taking a good moment to process the facts. Chloe and Mira crept in from the side of the room, guns lowered when the lights flickered on and they saw me standing, hands down and head tilted in disbelief at the contents of the room.

  Mira spoke first, standing still as we all stared at the object dominating the back wall. “Is that one of the things we found you in, Jack?”

  “It sure is,” I said. Stepping forward, I peered in the small port of the tube, my mind falling through time as I remembered what my long, last look had been 2000 years ago, just before the drugs took me into a place of nothingness. “She’s here.”

  “Who’s here?” Mira asked.

  “I don’t know, but she’s in there, and she’s waiting. Looks alive to me,” I added, noting her pink, healthy skin and slack features. She was about thirty, with short blonde hair and high cheekbones. There was an elfin quality to her, with a cupid’s bow of lips and eyebrows that gave her a natural look of mischief. After staring for a long time, I saw the artery in her neck pulse. She was alive.

  “Do we . . . wake her up?” Chloe asked.

  “We do, for a lot of reasons,” I said.

  “Reasons? Other than she’s one of your people?” Silk asked.

  “Look at her uniform.” I pointed to the blue overalls she wore. A patch was sewn to the upper collar, the gold and white thread as new as the day it was made.

  Fortress: Cache

  Exhaling in a low whistle, Mira stepped even closer. “That’s the same thing as the skeleton. I recognize the lettering. This is is—her place?”

  “No. Government facility, but she worked here, and they put her in cold storage for a reason. I can only think of good reasons as to why they would hide an officer while the world fell to shit around them, and every idea I have means something good for us. We wake her up, just not in the way you found me,” I said.

  My decanting had been abrupt, but the ‘bots made my transition little more than an hour of discomfort. Considering I’d been entombed for 2000 years, that was nothing short of miraculous, but I knew I didn’t fully understand the power of my nanobots. Not yet.

  11

  Sometimes, a problem is a nail. In that case, you use a hammer.

  The woman in the tube was one such case. The need for subtlety was swept aside by our time crunch, so I pored over the tube, trying to remember where Marsten’s hands had been as he set the commands that sent me into my long sleep all those years ago.

  “I’m going to go in a sequence of three. Power, then gate command, then revive. It’s the closest thing I can do, but in the event she can’t breathe, you’ve all got to step back, okay?” I said.

  “Step back? Why?” Chloe asked with a touch of alarm.

  “Because I’m taking this tube apart in a hurry. By hand. Trust me, you don’t want to be in the way. When Silk found me, there was air coming in; I can remember the heat of it on my face. I don’t know everything about this tube, but it’s intact and the power hasn’t been cut. My tube was self-sufficient, which means there was a small, working power source that kept me alive. She—” I pointed at the beautiful woman. “—has the benefit of this entire facility, but there might not be a backup. That’s why you should stand back.”

  “Do you think there was a buried rector where we found you?” Silk asked me.

  “Now, I’m thinking there was. Worth a look someday, and if we find one, it opens up a whole new purpose to scavenging The Empty. It might be that people have found the reactors and not known what they are, which means there are more for us out there, waiting to be found.” I rested my hands on the tube, staring down at the woman. “Time to wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”

  I didn’t hesitate. With my thumb, I pressed all three command variants, finishing with the universal green button labeled Revive/Cycle.

  Nothing happened.

  Mira leaned over the viewing pane, watching the woman with animal intensity. “She’s awake.”

  “She is? How can you tell?” I asked, then I saw the woman’s throat move. She was breathing on her own.

  A small hiss broke the silence as the tube unsealed. A thin blue line of light brightened around the exterior edge of the canopy, and the entire lid slid forward just enough to release a puff of cold gases. The smell was stale, but clean. This tube was a more advanced model than what I’d been in, though the setup appeared to be roughly similar.

  I lifted the lid with a finger. It was heavy, but balanced on a trio of pneumatic shocks that still worked, swinging the canopy up and away to reveal the interior. Another internal light came on, but this one was a buttery gold, heating up quickly to warm the occupant from her long rest.

  “Now what?” Chloe asked, looking down at the sleeping woman.

  “We wait. I don’t want her to go through what I did—no offense, Mira. You did the best you could in The Empty. I was disoriented for a minute or two, but the recovery was a heluva lot faster than I expected after 2000 years,” I said.

  The woman’s hand shot out to grab my wrist, and I damned near went through the ceiling, dropping my hands when I saw her eyes were open and alert, brilliant hazel in a heart-shaped face.

  Her smirk was rusty, but it was there. After a moment of flexing her jaw, she spoke in a pure midwestern accent that was music to my ears.

 
; “Hey, handsome. How many fucking years were you in the tube?” Without any fanfare, she sat up, a bit slowly, but with a steadiness that betrayed none of the disarray I’d felt.

  “Two thousand,” I said, “give or take a few.”

  “Fuck me. Two thousand.” She patted the tube like an old dog, smiling at it with genuine affection. “I knew they were good, but I didn’t know they were that good. Got any water?”

  “Slowly,” Chloe said, handing her a skin. We were all a bit stunned at her recovery, but she made no notice of it.

  “Don’t have to go slow. I was hooked up to an auxiliary system, and the humidity cycled through on the reg. My skin is fine, my guts are set, and I’m fully ambulatory. Lots of improvements since you went under, I’m imagining. Are you from—my time?” she asked me.

  “Just before. Went under in a clinic, but I know it’s a black site now. Looked like your average strip mall doctor office,” I said.

  “Ahh, Weston. He didn’t get out. Sorry to see him go, but not everyone made it.” She looked at me blankly for a minute until I stuck out my hand.

  “Jack Bowman. I was Marines before the planet went to shit, apparently. Woke up in The Empty—that’s what’s around us now, huge desert that we’re trying to reclaim. I’ve been awake for less than three months. Still getting my legs, so to say,” I told the woman.

  “Dr. Andi Greer, and you’re probably going to want to kiss me,” she said.

  “I figured I’d let you wake up first. Things have changed while you were sleeping. You see, all beautiful women worship at the Altar of Jack. It’s a tough job, but I’m naturally humble, so I thought we would bring you onboard after the ceremonial fitting of the retro prom gowns,” I told her.

  “If you think I slept two millennia to wear a fucking prom gown, you can put me back in that tube for another thousand years,” Andi said, laughing.

  “We could, but what if you woke up and people wore bell bottoms again?” I asked.

  “Do any of you have a gun?” she asked everyone but me. When the women all made noises of assent, she lifted her chin. “Shoot me now. I’m not wearing bell bottoms under any circumstances.”

  “In that case, welcome aboard. All worship requirements are waved until further notice. What kind of doctor?” I asked her. Her beauty was two-fold, being physical and charisma. She was stunning, with short blonde hair and hazel eyes that lit from within. I stared, then broke away, my thoughts going to how valuable she would be for the Oasis.

  “The best kind. An engineer. I fix things, and I find ways to blow things up, but for now, take a look around. This place? All my design. I designed it, I built it, and I know all the secrets. What happened out there, by the way?” Her brow furrowed, and she looked young for a moment, but it was a fleeting thing and the confident woman returned.

  “The virus, that’s what,” Silk said.

  “I fucking told them—how many?” Andi asked.

  “How many what?” Chloe answered with a question of her own.

  “People left. There were systems in place for when the entire thing went afterpoint. We were supposed to—” Andi started, but I held up a hand.

  “Afterpoint?” I asked.

  She seemed confused, then clarity filled her eyes as she realized the term was beyond my year. “Of course. You wouldn’t have known. I mean, you couldn’t have known. So much happened, so fast. We didn’t even know how soon it was coming, but some of us did.” She shook herself, sensing my need to know. “Right. This facility is part of a network, set up in two regions of the ‘states.”

  “Fortress: Cache?” I asked her.

  She wasn’t surprised, but it wasn’t the whole answer. “Only part of the network.” She worked her shoulders with a small groan. “Gotta pee and then sit down. Tiring out while my ‘bots adjust to breathing. Mind if we move locations?”

  “Let he help you,” I said, taking her hand. It was small but strong, and damp with sweat. She was feeling the effect of waking up.

  “We found a shower and bathroom that have water, and we can sit in the mess. You know where, I take it?” I asked her as she wobbled to her feet.

  “Sure do. Drank a few bottles in the mess during our time here. Ladies, one of you come with?” Andi said.

  “Silk, Chloe, Mira,” Silk said with gracious nods. “We’re sort of in this together. A pleasure to meet you.”

  “And you. I worried that I would wake up and find a planet of men,” Andi said as they wheeled out of the room and down the hallway.

  “It’s not actually like that at all. Now, as to your choice of men, well, that’s another story. Sure you don’t want food first?” Silk asked her.

  “The ‘bots fed me all along. No hunger, but damned thirsty despite our best testing,” Andi said as their voices faded. I stood in the hall, my gun half lifted and listening hard while Chloe and Mira watched the women leave. “An engineer. I’m the luckiest sonofabitch in the entire world.”

  “Don’t you know it,” Mira said, grinning. “Don’t crush her with questions, Jack. Go slow. She might think she’s fine, but I remember how weak you were for two days.”

  “We haven’t got two days, but I get you,” I said.

  We shared a skin of water in the mess room, waiting for Andi to settle.

  “Tell me about The Empty,” she said.

  Mira spoke first, since it was her backyard. “Open, Brutal. Desert conditions, variable wind and rains. Dunes over most, but oases and endless ruins. The monsters are the worst.”

  “Monsters? Like—real monsters? Are you fucking joking?” Andi asked, bewildered by our bland expressions.

  “And then some. The virus. It cracked life wide open and left a mess behind. We’ve got monsters right overhead at this instant. Part of our problem is figuring out how to get rid of them,” I said.

  “Overhead? You mean on level G?” Andi asked, pointing up.

  “Yes. Giant rats on one side, and scorpions on the other. They have hunting access to The Empty and use this place as their lair. They don’t like the harmonics from whatever you’ve got powering this place, so the level is clear. So far, anyway,” I said.

  “Harmonics? There shouldn’t be any,” Andi said, her voice grave. “That means an issue in the sheathing. Or the centrifuge.” She turned to me, eyes curious. “What did you do in the service?”

  “Computer systems after I did my years. Combat while I was in. I know just enough to hear a problem, and we’ve got one here,” I said.

  Andi closed her eyes, listening. “Level three. There are five levels here, along with the silos up top, Those are a different system, but still tied to the same power. You say these—fuck, giant rats? Really?” She shivered, but recovered with a grim smile. “I dealt with rats the size of dogs in Africa. Not my cup of tea, but whatever it takes, we will do to clear this place. I take it you’re trying to rebuild?”

  “I am, and we are. Got an oasis nearby,” I told her.

  “Describe it?” Andi asked, putting her hands out flat on the table.

  “Radial, centered around clean water source. Some ogres—yea, they’re real—found a cache of altered seeds and started planting trees. We’re continuing their work after liberating it from them. Building out in concentric rings, using small channels to get water out to the edges. The water is protected by the canopy, so we think we can go for almost two klicks before we need another source,” I said.

  “How many people?” Andi asked.

  “Sixty or so, as of now. More coming. Skilled labor but nothing like you. Mira is a scavenger, good in fight. Chloe is a tracker and hunter, and Silk used to—she was in data collection,” I said with mild reservation.

  “Data collection? You have experience with systems?” Andi asked.

  “If by systems you mean men’s genitals, then yes, I’m an expert at data extraction,” Silk said without a hint of a smile.

  Andi burst out laughing at the brazen reply, then grew serious. “Oh, shit. You’re not kidding.”
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br />   “Not even a little. I ran a whorehouse in a nearby outpost. My trade goods were secrets. My expertise was—” Silk began.

  “Apparently everything, given how loud Jack is when he’s with you,” Mira said, rolling her eyes. “I may be a rowdy scav, but I have the decency not to howl like a coyote.”

  “Really?’ Andi asked, her eyes flicking back and forth in amusement. “Care to add anything, Chloe?”

  Chloe dipped her head, smiling. “I don’t fuck and tell.”

  Andi threw back her head, laughing until she snorted, a noise that fit her just right. “And I worried about enough men in the future.”

  “If we could discuss your skills and how they might save the world, that would be great,” I said with what I thought was great dignity.

  “Naturally,” Andi said with a small bow. She was of average height but maximum impact, a combination I found worth another long look. Mira rolled her eyes at me, while Silk and Chloe looked at me with varying measures of amusement.

  “Maybe start here?” I said, placing the hardshell wall map down on the table between us. “It might help to know what our goals are. I can’t imagine they’re the same now that you’re here. And awake,” I said.

  “And an engineer,” Andi said.

  “Exactly. We came here for the reactors, because they’re the seed of everything we want to do at the Oasis. And beyond,” I said.

  “You’re in the right place, and you made the right call. But,” Andi began, flipping the map over to expose the back, “you’re only asking part of the question. There are five levels here, all of them filled with enough gear to build your nation. Despite the—rats, and scorpions, too—I believe we can clear this place and restore it. If certain things go right, that is.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Getting to the power stations before any hard resets. I know that hasn’t happened because I would have been forced out of my tube if there was a safety glitch. But you’re right about the harmonic. The system is deteriorating, and you can’t risk letting that happen,” Andi said.