Skyfall

by Anthony Eaton

  ‘Are you certain this is the only way?’

  ‘Lari, look at them.’

  Lari stared across to where Jem and Saria stood facing each other. Saria was tracing her forefinger silently down the line of her sister’s cheek, her expression unreadable.

  ‘They’re creatures of sunlight, Larinan. Both of them. They belong outside and they belong away from this dying world we’ve built. And so do you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You’re just like your mother, so yes, of course you do.’

  Kes walked across to them. ‘Jem says she doesn’t know how long Janil will be out, but she thinks it won’t be much longer.’

  ‘Then you should go.’ Dernan Mann took his son’s shoulders and turned him so they stood face to face. ‘Goodbye, Larinan. Look after them.’

  ‘Dad …’

  His father grabbed him in a brief, awkward embrace, then pushed him away.

  ‘Go!’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Now!’

  Jem and Saria were making their way towards the hub, Jem supporting Saria with an arm around her waist.

  ‘Jem!’ Dernan Mann called, and the two girls turned silently to face him. The similarity between them was unsettling, Lari thought. ‘Your father …’

  ‘What about him?’ The girl’s voice was cold.

  Dernan Mann hesitated. ‘Tell him I said he was right.’

  For a long moment Jem didn’t move, and Lari thought something like relief might have flickered across her expression, but then her face became frozen again, almost as blank as if she was still wearing her mask.

  ‘I will.’

  They turned back to the hub, where Kes was already summoning a maglift.

  ‘Goodbye now, son. Be careful.’

  Propelled by a gentle shove from his father, Lari allowed himself to join the three girls. There he looked back, taking what he suddenly realised would be his last look at the world he’d always known. His father still stood behind reception, the glowing red lettering behind him casting his shape into a bloody silhouette. Over by the internal lifts, the pile that was his brother groaned and shifted slightly.

  The maglift doors slid open.

  ‘Let’s go, Lari.’

  He was barely aware of Kes taking his elbow and gently pulling him into the lift. All he saw was the empty foyer and the sad, gentle smile on his father’s face.

  Then the doors closed and the four of them dropped into the bowels of Port City for the final time.

  Falling …

  The room was falling around her She feels it deep in the pit of her stomach and in the delicate connections of her inner ear.

  But her eyes tell her that nothing is moving and her brain struggles to cope with the mixed signals.

  None of the others seem worried, though.

  They just look … empty.

  Around her, she can feel the skyfire throbbing and pulsing.

  This room is bathed in it, flaring and surging and sizzling at the edges of her awareness.

  Falling …

  Saria feels her legs turning to jelly, even before they start to tremble, and a rush of bitter bile rises up inside her.

  ‘Saria!’

  The girl. The other her is shaking her gently, one hand on her bare arm.

  ‘Look at me.’

  She does. Saria stares into those dark eyes so like her own. And she reaches instinctively. Through the intrusive, pervading hum of skyfire, she reaches through that tenuous thread of contact and searches until she finds what she’s looking for.

  There.

  Faint, so faint, hut so familiar.

  Earthwarmth.

  Falling …

  The first thing he was aware of was the light. Cold, hard and white, it beat down on him from somewhere above.

  ‘Shi!’

  Janil’s head ached abominably. A pounding sensation behind his eyes set every nerve-end jangling. Slowly he opened his eyes, shielding them against the glare until they stopped streaming and he could take in the white, circular walls, the white floor, and the mirrored obs windows set high around the bright ceiling.

  ‘Can you hear me, Janil?’ His father’s voice refracted around the hard room.

  ‘Let me out, Father.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve reset the radiation system. It’s all filtered light you’re getting.’

  ‘You don’t really think they’re going to get away, do you?’

  ‘They already have, Janil.’

  Slowly, Janil eased himself sideways off the padded podium. He’d watched the girl down here, the first time she woke up. She’d made straight for the walls, searching for a way out. Now it took every bit of self-control not to do the same.

  ‘It’s not pleasant, is it, son? Down there.’

  ‘It’s the price of science.’

  Dernan Mann didn’t reply, and Janil wondered if he’d gone away and left him, but then his father’s voice crackled around the chamber again.

  ‘You see, I’m not certain about that any more. I think we were wrong, Janil. Completely wrong all along. And I think what happened in the foyer proves that once and for all.’

  ‘What did happen to me, Father?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  ‘I remember the copygen and the girl. And something cold on the back of my neck. Then … just pain. And then nothing.’

  ‘You missed out, then.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On meeting a ghost.’

  ‘Talk sense, Father.’

  ‘All these years, Janil, we’ve been looking in the wrong direction.’

  ‘What in the sky are you talking about?’

  ‘Ever since the night Kravanratz took Jani out of that chamber, we’ve been looking outwards over the horizons for a solution to our problem, just like we’ve done for a millennium.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘We should have been looking down, Janil. We should have searched through the rubble we’d thrown at our feet.’

  Janil had no idea what his father was talking about, but decided to let it pass. The pain in his head had subsided to a throbbing ache. ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know you can’t keep me down here. The Prelate is expecting me to report the termination of the project. When I don’t answer her calls, she’ll send Jenx to find out what’s going on.’

  ‘I know. But hopefully by the time that happens, your brother and the girls will be long gone.’

  His father talked in the plural. ‘Girls’, he’d said, not ‘girl’. Interesting, Janil thought. He must be taking that mixie girlfriend of his, too.

  ‘They won’t be able to hide down there forever. Jenx’ll tear the underworld apart looking for them.’

  ‘He probably will,’ Dernan Mann agreed. ‘He won’t find them, though. Not likely.’

  Janil’s self-control finally broke and he rose from the podium and strode across to the wall where he knew the door was hidden.

  ‘Open it, Father.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Janil.’

  ‘Open the door!’ He slammed his fist hard against it, but the only effect was to send a dull, heavy ‘thud’ reverberating round the circular room. He pounded it again and again, only stopping when a bolt of pain shot from his hand up his arm.

  ‘You’re finished, Father. You know that, don’t you?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘We’re all finished, Janil. You know that.’

  ‘We don’t have to be. That girl wasn’t our only option, and now she’s gone, if you let me out we can concentrate on other possible—’

  ‘Save your breath, son. Save it for the Prelate and her political friends. At least there’s a passing chance they’ll believe it.’

  Janil strode back across to the podium and flopped onto it with a sigh, cradling his aching hand to his chest.

  ‘I think I’ve broken something.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  �
�I should see a medik.’

  ‘It’s only a hand. You’ll live.’

  There seemed nothing more to say, and a deep silence fell around the chamber. It was slightly unnerving, Janil thought. Once or twice he fancied he could hear his hearbeat echoing off the walls. He must have dozed off, because the next thing he was aware of, his father was speaking again.

  ‘Janil?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ll be pleased to know that Jenx just called. He wasn’t too happy when I answered his com. He’s on his way across.’

  ‘Are you going to let me out, then?’

  ‘No. He can do that when he gets here.’

  ‘So you’re just going to let me stay down here?’

  ‘I have to go now, Janil.’

  ‘Where to?’

  A pause. The comlink cracked through the silence.

  ‘I’m going to see your mother. Goodbye, son.’

  ‘Father? Father!’

  Silence.

  Janil stood up and stared up into the glare, shielding his eyes and trying to discern even the slightest hint of movement behind the obs windows.

  ‘Dad?’

  But the comlink stayed silent.

  Janil paced the perimeter of the chamber, his movements short and angry, a beast contained. Then suddenly he threw himself against the hidden door panel, hurling his whole weight as hard as he could against the unyielding plascrete, again and again, until finally his temple caught the wall and a bright starburst behind his eyes flung him to the ground, where he lay, for how long he had no idea.

  ‘Doctor Mann? Are you all right?’

  Jenx’s voice echoed from the com.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hold on. I’ll open the doors. Just give me a moment.’

  Silently the airlock slid open. In a daze, Janil hauled himself to his feet and stumbled towards the beckoning darkness, only dimly aware of Jenx’s voice still echoing behind him.

  ‘Meet me in the laboratory. We need to talk.’

  By the time Janil had climbed the stairs to obs, the security man had already made his way through to the lab. There Janil found him idly scanning through a set of results on the display of one of the machines.

  ‘So, what happened?’ Jenx looked at Janil expectantly.

  ‘My father. Where is he?’

  ‘No idea,’ the security man said. ‘He’d gone by the time I arrived. I presume he took the girl?’

  ‘The subject? No, she went with my brother.’

  Janil could tell from the brief flicker of surprise that Jenx hadn’t been expecting that.

  ‘Larinan?’

  ‘And some other girl. I think his mixie girlfriend.’

  ‘Kesra Anatale.’

  ‘Yeah. They came and took her. Surprised me in the foyer.’

  Jenx stopped scanning the data. ‘Are you certain it was them?’

  ‘I know my own brother.’

  ‘And you saw the girl?’

  ‘No, not exactly. But it had to be her.’

  ‘Where did they take her?’

  ‘Don’t know. The underworld, presumably.’

  Jenx cursed and stood deep in thought, before turning back to Janil.

  ‘Are you still with us?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can I still trust you, Janil Mann. Can the Prelate still trust you?’

  Janil met the man’s stare evenly.

  ‘Why do you think my father locked me up down there?’

  The answer seemed to satisfy Jenx.

  ‘Good. Are you in any state to fly?’

  ‘Fly?’

  ‘I want you to get every pilot you can muster and start combing the old city with flyers. Use infra, searchlights, anything you have to, but find them. And any life you spot down there, I want to know about.’

  ‘It’s dangerous to take the flyers too low below the city. Most of those old towers are coming apart, and the resonators can cause—’

  ‘I don’t care, Janil. Just do it. The longer we delay, the less chance we have of catching them.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Do you have any idea at all where they’d go?’

  Janil shook his head. ‘None.’

  ‘Pity. We’ll do it the hard way, then. Get to it.’

  Jenx marched to the door.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to inform the Prelate what’s happened, and then call up every security division in the city to get on the ground and start searching.’

  The door closed behind him and Janil listened to the man’s footsteps receding down the empty hallway outside. Crossing to a spigot set into the wall, he poured himself a glass of water. Then he sat at his terminal and issued the commands to call the remaining DGAP pilots from their homes. His hand still hurt like hell, but he picked at the terminal with his remaining good one. I’ll fly one-handed, if I have to, he thought as he punched a simple brief into the database, so that each pilot would receive his instructions from the onboard interface. Then he headed out to the lifts and down to the hangar deck. He wanted to be the first out there. If anyone was going to catch the copygen and the girl, Janil wanted it to be him.

  The moment he stepped into the vast hangar, Janil knew something was wrong. The flyers were all there, parked in their long lines, but something was out of place, and as a dry, dusty breeze ruffled through his hair, Janil realised what.

  One of the hangar doors was open. The enormous iris was recessed all the way out, allowing cool air from outside to flow freely in and around the parked flyers.

  ‘Hello?’

  His voice rebounded from the shadowy depths.

  ‘Father?’

  Nobody answered. The first pilots would start arriving in about half an hour, he figured, and it would take them another fifteen minutes to get suited up and in the air, so he didn’t have much of a start. Leaving the hangar door open, he slipped into the changeroom, used a medkit to bandage his hand, which helped slightly, and climbed into a flying suit.

  He strode across to the first flyer in the line. It was the same machine he and his father and brother had taken out to the field a few months earlier, and it hadn’t been used since. Already the wind through the open door had left a thin layer of dust clinging to every surface, dulling the usually gleaming canopy and the black, beetlelike reflective surfaces.

  It took only a few moments for the flyer to spool up, and Janil eased it into the air, the resonators thrumming off the plascrete walls. As he lined up the nose with the outer hatchway, Janil wondered again how it had come open.

  ‘Must be entropy,’ he muttered with a grim smile.

  Through the round iris, the million lights of Port City gleamed in the black night, beckoning.

  It’s like coming home, Janil thought, as he eased the flyer out into the sky. Then he pointed the nose down, into the hazy murk of the underworld.

  They redirected the maglift five times before Jem finally decided it was safe to get down to ground level. Saria had vomited twice, and the pool of sour-smelling bile which now sloshed around the floor of the lift had left them all feeling queasy.

  ‘We should have just gone straight down,’ Lari said.

  ‘At the base of Port North Central? Where do you think is the first place they’re going to start searching?’

  ‘But look at her.’ Lari touched Saria’s arm. ‘She can’t take much more.’

  Jem considered the Darklander for a moment, reaching out and brushing a loose curl of black hair off her sister’s face.

  ‘Yeah, okay. We should be far enough now, anyway. Take us to Dome 2204 ground level,’ she directed Kes, who nodded and started the redirect process.

  A moment later the maglift transited through one last horizontal shaft and then began the long drop.

  ‘Nearly there,’ Jem said.

  ‘What’ll we do once we’re down?’ Kes asked.

  ‘Dad said to get her clear of the city.’

  ‘That’s not possible,’ Jem snapp
ed.

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘Can’t be done. Hiding is one thing, but you of all people should know what happens if we leave the city. We max out.’

  ‘I might. You two shouldn’t.’

  ‘She shouldn’t. But that’s all we know for sure.’

  ‘You’re her sister. Your skin—’

  ‘Doesn’t mean a thing. And the only way I can think of to test whether I can take it is to deliberately go out and get exposed.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Lari argued. ‘The city’s not safe any longer.’

  ‘The upper levels, the skycity, perhaps. But the underworld’s different, copygen. We can hide down there, live down there, for as long as we want. My father and I are proof of that.’

  ‘No.’ Lari shook his head. ‘Not any more. It’s all changed. Don’t you get it? For one thing, you can bet that Jenx and Janil aren’t going to just let us walk away with Saria. They’ll tear the underworld to pieces looking for her, and they’ll keep at it until they find us. But that’s only a short-term problem.’

  ‘What’s the long-term problem?’

  Lari sighed. ‘The entropy scenario. It’s happening, and according to Dad it’s unstoppable. Everything that breaks down, every system that shorts out, every riot that the Underground incites, it’s all adding up, and it’s going to continue until there’s nothing left of either Port City or the underworld.’

  ‘So that’s when we leave. Not before.’

  ‘No. It’s happening now, Jem. Don’t you get it? Now. So we need to leave the city now.’

  The argument was cut short as the doors opened. Even the smoky, acrid air of the underworld tasted good by comparison with the inside of the maglift.

  ‘I feel sorry for the next person to be assigned that particular mag,’ Kes commented, as they led Saria out into a crumbling wasteland of fallen concrete.

  The moment her feet came into contact with the cracked and broken bitumen, Saria let out a low moan and sank to her knees, pressing one cheek hard against the ground.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ Jem shot Lari a hard glare.

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Haven’t you been studying her for the last four months?’

  ‘Yeah. But I’ve never seen her do anything like this.’ He knelt beside the crumpled girl. Her eyes were shut tight and a couple of pebbles were pressing indentations into the side of her face. ‘Saria? Are you all right?’