The Farthest City

by Daniel P Swenson

  Sheemi had never seen a Hexi up close before. Its black skin felt rough, like sandpaper. She guessed it would be at least three meters tall standing. It wore armor with holes for its six limbs. More armor protected its four biggest legs, all the way down to the splayed, plate-sized feet. A breathing tank was strapped to its back, with tubes running down into holes under its head.

  She studied the chisel-shaped head, bisected by a long, stabbing snout. The Hexi had evolved to hunt with it, perpetually looking down for prey to impale. It had four pebble-like eyes and two the size of saucers below the central ridge of its midnight face. The eyes were round and black and shiny.

  They brought the Hexi inside the lab, a large building Sheemi had never had occasion to enter. Inside, it resembled a kitchen-office hybrid. Scientists in white coats clustered at computer work stations along the walls or at lab benches with sinks and glassware. Pressurized cylinders stood alongside complicated devices full of tubing and racks of little bottles and other stuff she didn’t recognize. Science had been one of her least favorite subjects.

  The Hexi’s neck slumped onto the concrete floor as they strapped it down using anchors embedded in the concrete to cinch the bonds tight. She couldn’t tell if it was awake, if it looked at them or not. She resisted the urge to put a round in its head.

  The other soldiers left, but something held Sheemi there. The scientists smeared some kind of jelly onto the elongated, oval pads at the end of the alien’s delicate forelimbs. Jelly. Trust scientists to do something weird and disgusting. She stuck around anyway, wanting to see what would happen, even though her muscles hurt like hell.

  One of the scientists attached clamps to the Hexi’s pads. The clamps were wired to computers. The scientists wore headphones and talked softly among themselves. One of them murmured into a microphone, then all heads turned towards the alien. It lifted its head, seeming to look at them, though she couldn’t be sure. After more discussion, the one with the microphone spoke again. The Hexi’s limbs traced patterns in the air. A few of the scientists cheered.

  Are they talking to it? But how? The Hexi wasn’t making a sound. Sheemi moved closer to a young man watching squiggly lines march across a computer display. Each time the Hexi moved its limbs, more lines appeared.

  “Do you want to listen?” he asked, excitement in his voice.

  She nodded, and he handed her his headphones.

  A familiar sound filled her ears. It reminded her of the woods each spring when cicadas woke by the millions, singing their songs, swelling and fading, until she couldn’t hear herself think.

  “They communicate using electricity,” he said.

  The sounds faded to static. She looked over in time to see the alien collapse. Its head hit the floor, its limbs limp.

  “It’s gone,” someone said.

  Dead, she corrected them silently. It’s dead.

  The first batch of scientists left as new ones arrived with tools and carefully opened up the massive body. She put a hand over her nose, but the smell seeped through—spoiled cheese and jet fuel. Underneath the black skin, they exposed glistening, coiled structures the size of her palm.

  One of the scientists scooped the coils into a glass container. “Nerve clusters?”

  “Could be parasites,” another said. “Or embryos. They seem distinct from the rest of it.”

  “Let’s assume they’re organs, Gil,” said an older scientist. “Occam’s razor, remember?”

  Sheemi had seen enough. She left them to their cutting. On her way out, she passed the young man who had given her the headphones.

  She tapped him on the shoulder. “What was it saying?”

  “We don’t know yet,” he said. “But we will soon.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t really need to know.”

  She just needed to kill them.

  #

  Back in her quarters, she peeled off her cammies and armor and went to clean up. Mud and blood blended as they trickled down her skin to the shower drain, brown and blue and red. Her back hurt more now, but she ignored it.

  Kelly and Dunn laughed, kissing next to her.

  “Hey,” said Kelly. “You’re wounded, Sheems.”

  “Fuck,” Dunn said, turning her around.

  Sheemi examined her shoulder in the mirror. Two holes not much larger than her pinky finger dripped blood onto the tile floor. No wonder she felt so bad.

  “What’s up?” Danbury asked, coming into the showers. “Shit, go see the docs right now, Sheemi. You guys go with her. Make sure she gets there.”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  Danbury gave the others his platoon leader look. They dressed and walked her to the hospital.

  The doc didn’t make a fuss. Pulled out some metal, real small pieces, patched her up and gave her some tranqs. She was done in short order.

  “Fit for duty?” she asked as the doc entered her visit into the logs.

  He looked at her, gauging more than the holes he’d patched, she guessed.

  “You’re fit, Sergeant Tanamal.”

  She rejoined her unit in the mess. Most of Second Platoon was there, chowing up before starting the evening’s maintenance cycle. Back before the Hexi had begun to raid the settlements surrounding King City, they had bitched about the hours of weapons cleaning. No one complained anymore. They did the work with a reverence for the tools that helped keep death at bay.

  Danbury called her over. “You’re off tomorrow, Sheemi.”

  “No, I’m in,” she said. “With Xan down, you need me.”

  “We can take Sweeney.”

  “Shit,” she said. “Sweeney’s a nice guy.”

  He didn’t have the fight in him. She knew it, and so did Danbury. Some citizens didn’t.

  “You’re wounded. You need rest.”

  “Hell I do. Doc said I was fit for duty. Says so in my record. You can check it.”

  He looked down at his food tray.

  “I want to be out there, Dan. Not sitting holed up here in King.”

  “I know you do, Sheems.” He looked her over much like the doc had. “Okay, zero five hundred. Pad C.”

  “See you then.” She smiled, grabbed a fritter, and left for the weapons bay.

  #

  The insects sang to her in the night. Waves of sound, millions of singers, vibrating, calling. Blue blood dribbled from Brin’s mouth. “Don’t give up,” he said. Then he died and died and died and—

  Sheemi woke the next morning wanting to see more blood. Blue blood. She blinked. Zero four thirty. Time to gear up. See you soon, brother. But not until she did more killing. Kill until killed. She laughed and shut the door behind her. She stopped at the armory on her way out, then took an elevator to the surface.

  Her father caught her as she stepped onto the airfield, appearing out of nowhere as he always did.

  “Dad,” she said. Beyond him, she saw Danbury and the other soldiers assembled at the flier.

  “I remember when it was Daddy,” he said.

  He looked older than she remembered—his hair mostly gray, worry wrinkles above his nose, the same hard eyes, broad shoulders like Brin’s. She remembered riding on his shoulders at a picnic long ago. Mama was alive then.

  “I’m a soldier, Dad.”

  “I know.”

  She nodded toward the flier, wanting him to get out whatever it was he’d come to say. “I’ve got a mission.”

  They hadn’t talked much since Brin died. It hurt too much, and he’d wanted her to get out of the fight. That was a no-go. She had the fight, too much of the fight. Or it had her. Either way, there was no going back now.

  “You do have a mission,” he said, “but not that one.”

  She looked at him sharply, eye to eye. What had he done? Her father the colonel.

  A message popped. She blinked it, and the text overlaid itself on her natural vision. Orders to report tomorrow. Zero nine hundred. The hospital. Coded by General Enge himself, commander of all North American forces.


  The muscles in her neck pulled taut, her hands clenched on her K. She scrutinized her father with narrowed eyes. “What is this?”

  He brushed a strand of hair from her forehead, kissed her there. He gave her a look she couldn’t place, a searching look. For a moment she felt like a child again. Was that what he saw? She looked down at her boots, unable to face whatever it was he couldn’t communicate. What had he done?

  “Goodbye, sweetie,” he said and walked away.

  He hadn’t called her that in years and years.

  The flier rose up overhead and turned north, flooding the airfield with jet wash.

  “What is this, Dad?” she yelled at his back.

  The flier leapt toward the horizon, her voice lost in its roar.

  Chapter 3 – Underground

  A few days passed by without any sign of Izmit. Kellen had begun to worry he’d been caught, jailed, or worse. Instead, Izmit turned up one evening with a woman. She shed her hat and scarf, releasing a cloud of frizzy dark hair. She seemed younger than Kellen, but not by much. Her clear brown eyes gazed past him, taking in the artwork on his walls.

  “Kellen,” Izmit said, “meet Abby Tau.”

  Kellen eyed him, but Izmit gave away nothing.

  “Abby, this is Kellen Beaudin.”

  “Welcome,” Kellen said.

  She looked at him, and he looked away. He thought she might laugh at him. He hadn’t talked with women much since coming to Jesup.

  He made coffee, and Izmit helped himself to his usual cola.

  Abby's gaze leapt from drawing to drawing. Izmit watched her with a sloppy smile.

  Why did you bring her? Kellen asked with his eyes.

  Izmit looked back, his expression encouraging. Give her a chance, he seemed to be saying.

  Abby walked over to inspect a painting he’d done, all creamy pastels and thick, generous brush strokes of paint to convey dappled tones of afternoon light. “You made this?”

  The subject, a voluptuous woman, carried fruit on her head, two kids in tow, the ration market a backdrop. Abby pointed out the tall chine, absurdly folded in on itself to mimic a vendor’s stall, and laughed.

  She glanced Kellen’s way through the steam rising from her cup. “Clever.”

  Most people only noticed the woman.

  “I had to get the scanner fixed,” Izmit said. “Someone knew a family with a daughter who could fix anything.”

  Abby snorted.

  “Anything,” he said. “She didn’t even need any extra parts. She already had them in her workshop.”

  “Just my room.”

  “You’re a Lighter,” Kellen said.

  She grinned. “And you’re a Drawer.”

  Izmit was practically glowing. His budding family. A family of freaks.

  Kellen looked away. “So what now? We keep digging?”

  “Exactly,” Izmit said.

  “We’re still missing a Singer,” Abby said.

  “I’m working on that,” Izmit said. “I’ve heard rumors there might be one here in Jesup.”

  #

  Later that night, Kellen was surprised to see soldiers in the plaza, busy servicing squat tanks. The vehicles’ menacing shapes conflicted with the plaza’s theme of civic harmony. Normally, ground vehicles were restricted to the roads beneath the city. A transport flier lingered, engines whining, dwarfing the statue of Mary Musgrove and the Creeks, as soldiers loaded equipment and supplies. The soldiers seemed to take no notice as Kellen, Izmit, and Abby crossed the plaza and went through the gate.

  Kellen glanced back at the soldiers. How badly is the war going if our forces have been pushed back into the city?

  They retraced their steps underground, passed their previous excavation, and went deeper until the tunnel ended, the smooth, rectangular surfaces dissolving into an irregular face of roughly mined raw rock, water trickling from the broken seams and running under their feet.

  Kellen shivered. Who comes down this far anymore? What happens when a wall collapses on us? He doubted anyone would find them.

  Izmit pulled aside a drop cloth. A hole gaped in the dim light, broken concrete exposing raw earth. Abby pointed her flashlight into the hole. Kellen couldn’t see where it led, just shadows. Izmit let a line down into the hole and secured it to a pipe running along the tunnel wall.

  Claustrophobia threatened to reduce Kellen to a gibbering coward. They really expect me to go down there?

  He balled his hands into fists. He wouldn’t make an ass of himself, he vowed, not in the company of this woman who Izmit had been exploring with all these days, not even bothering to tell Kellen he’d found a new protégé. I really am a fool.

  Izmit lowered himself down the line, his headlamp illuminating the passage. A thump echoed up when he stopped. Izmit crouched down, but Kellen couldn’t make out what he was doing. A metallic screeching sound reverberated up from the hole.

  Kellen looked back the way they’d come. They’d rarely seen anyone else in these lowest levels, but he couldn’t shake the fear they’d be caught.

  “You next, Kel,” Izmit called.

  Kellen could no longer see him, not even the light from his headlamp. Abby nodded and smiled. He grasped the line. With his feet propped against the sides of the hole, he let himself down in fits and starts until a jutting stone came loose underfoot and he fell with a jerk. He cried out but managed to arrest his fall just as his boots struck something solid.

  “Are you all right?” Abby asked from above.

  “Fine.” He released the line and rubbed his rope-burned hands.

  He stood on the rim of an open metal hatch. Izmit’s lamp illuminated a horizontal passage below, but Kellen couldn’t see much else. He looked for rungs below the hatch but saw none. Shrugging, he held onto the line again and slid down through the hatch and onto the bottom of what turned out to be a metal tunnel at least a meter higher than himself. He stepped aside as Abby came down the line, dropped through the hatch, and landed with a thump.

  “The hatch was locked,” Izmit said, coming up to him, the light on his helmet blinding Kellen’s eyes.

  Kellen squinted until Izmit turned his lamp to face down.

  “But Abby was able to unlock it after a few trips. We explored a little ways, but not far. That was yesterday.”

  Kellen suppressed a twinge of jealousy at not having been included. Grow up, he chided himself. He flipped up his headlamp to face forward and walked along the new tunnel. Unlike the rectangular tunnels above, this one was tubular, gently curving beneath his feet. Cables, pipes, and toothed grooves, like spiraling train tracks, wound around the tunnel surface. Seemingly random chinks and protrusions peppered the tunnel surface amid the winding tracks. What purpose had this tunnel served?

  Kellen touched one of the grooves. “What are these?”

  “The chines must have used these as handholds,” Abby said. “For their version of hands.”

  Despite the abundant handholds, the convoluted tunnels slowed them down. In contrast to right-angled human architecture, these tunnels curved and split and spliced. Some were so small they had to crawl through or avoid altogether. Others could have accommodated a train. Kellen assumed they’d been designed for chines of varying sizes.

  They crept through a tunnel so small Kellen got stuck. Izmit managed to tie a line to him and pull him out. It was as if the chines had constructed a second, hidden layer of infrastructure not meant to accommodate human passage. What else could it be? Was it so surprising? As they pushed forward, he imagined the city’s roots delved into earth and stone.

  They’d reached a point where the tunnel split in three. Chine symbols had been engraved in the tunnel’s metal surface at the junction.

  “Look,” Izmit said. “What do you think?”

  Kellen traced the symbols with a finger. He’d spent months learning hanzi and kanji. There were similarities between those ancient human symbols and these more sophisticated markings. The metal had been scored and stained in a g
rid pattern. He suspected the dark and light cells conveyed some indecipherable code layered within the graphics of the overall symbol.

  Two symbols marked one branch, a single symbol each of the others. The paired symbols looked familiar, one vaguely helical within a bounding ring, the other a nested set of arcs and circles like a beaded necklace, a twin-rayed star at one end. These two were the right ones. How he knew, he couldn’t explain.

  He tapped the paired symbols. “This way.”

  Izmit looked down each of the three tunnels, then glanced at Kellen. “Lead on.”

  Kellen set off with Izmit and Abby in tow. They went down and followed another branch, only for Kellen to examine a symbol and turn them back. Back and forth they went, up and down, left, up, down, right. One intersection split off six ways from the larger tunnel. More symbols at the junctions.

  Kellen examined them as Abby jotted notes on her pad. “What are you writing?”

  “Our turnings,” she said. “I might be able to make a map.”

  Kellen considered the twisty-turning arteries they’d traversed, dizzy at the thought of it. Mapping was beyond him, despite his skills as an artist. He’d sometimes gotten lost in his own neighborhood.

  They passed more tunnels, symbols at the intersections saying different things to Kellen in a language he understood only as feelings, familiarities, almost-memories in some part of his brain he couldn’t access. He led them on a mad hatter’s quest down the rabbit holes. Some symbols appealed to him, while others did not. Sequences of symbols, from one junction to the next, began to impress themselves on his mind.

  They crawled on for another hour until Abby began to lag. Izmit sighed and called a halt to their march.

  #

  Back home, Kellen collapsed into bed and dreamt of marching symbols and doors that would not open.

  On the second day, they passed several junctions where the symbols almost seemed to blink or glow, gaining a linguistic momentum. Kellen felt a sunny warmth, a comforting familiarity, as he led them through a large tunnel, its diameter wider than his reach. The feeling ended further down where the tunnel split in two.