The Exodus Towers: The Dire Earth Cycle: Two

by Jason M. Hough

  The three men were staring at her, waiting. None of them needed to voice the question; she could see it on all three faces. Kip she couldn’t care less about, but to see that accusation on Prumble’s face, on Skadz’s, cut like a knife.

  “I’m on your side,” she said. “I’ve been an idiot, yes, but I’m on your side.”

  Prumble and Skadz exchanged a glance. “Happy to hear you say that, Sammy,” Skadz said.

  “So,” she said, “I assume we’re not just here to gossip. What’s the plan? Run for Brazil? Try to stop Grillo?”

  “Whoa, now hang on,” Skadz said. “Kip isn’t done. There’s more.”

  “Goddamn, guys. I don’t know if I can handle more,” she said.

  Now Kip leaned in. His expression changed. He glanced at each of them with sudden familiarity, as if he’d gone from outsider to conspirator. Near enough the truth, Sam realized.

  “I still have contact with Platz Station,” he said. “A friend there. Our messages are relayed through … it doesn’t matter, the point is that exchanging information is difficult. Sporadic, terse.”

  Prumble cut in again. “It’s the Builders, Samantha. They’re back.”

  Kip nodded, unfazed at having his big announcement stolen by the big man. “My contact doesn’t know much, just that the ship is ‘huge,’ and almost here.”

  “Safe to assume,” Skadz said, “that Grillo is going to want to be on top of that shit this time around.”

  Sam found herself nodding. “Equally safe to assume,” she said, “that we’d rather it be Skyler, and Tania Sharma? I’m guessing she’s with him?”

  “She runs things over there,” Kip said.

  “Wonder if Sky’s getting a piece of that action,” Skadz mused.

  “Mmm,” Prumble said. “There’s a mental image. Lucky bastard.”

  “Knock it off, perverts,” Sam said.

  Prumble mocked surprise. “We meant a piece of the leadership!”

  “Right, and I suppose you think he should grab on to that leadership by the ponytail and ride it till sunrise.” She let their chuckles fade until the tension rolled back into the room like a dense fog. “So, what are we talking about? The four of us form a ragtag band of freedom fighters to overthrow Grillo and his freak brigade? A plucky group of misfits that stage another coup in Darwin because third time’s a charm?”

  Prumble shook his head. “I had in mind something more like agents provocateurs,” he said. “We can make the man’s life very difficult. Very difficult indeed.”

  Samantha thought of her time aboard Gateway with Kelly. There’d been a visceral satisfaction from playing spoiler there, mucking about behind the scenes. The thought of Kelly filled her with a sudden sorrow. One way or another, rescuing her needed to be part of the plan. Sam filed that for another day.

  “In other words,” Skadz said soberly, “give Skyler a fighting chance when the shit hits the fan.”

  “And if we fail?” she asked.

  Skadz grinned. “Don’t know about you wags, but if the freak train won’t stop, I’m getting the bloody hell off.”

  Black Level Station

  7.MAR.2285

  THE BUILDER SHIP settled into high geostationary orbit above North Africa, and its size defied imagination.

  Even viewed through the remote repair craft, Tania had to rely on radar to confirm the dimensions. She glanced at those numbers every few minutes, hoping they were just confused, hoping the LIDAR readings were somehow being baffled by the surface material of the massive vessel.

  The numbers didn’t change. Roughly six kilometers from the tapered tip that pointed down toward Earth up to the bulbous end. In shape it resembled a teardrop pointed in the wrong direction—the vessel had flipped around in the last days before arrival—except that the nose of the spherical end did jut out slightly.

  There were many protrusions. This surprised Tania, as neither of the previous shell ships had similar features. The extensions were tucked under the main bulb, pointing down toward Earth. Each spike looked small and flimsy compared to the hulking vessel, until Tania estimated the length of the longest among them at half a kilometer. The sizes varied, and if she flipped the image the extensions looked like a cityscape, unlit and dead like the great cities of Earth.

  The drone continued to drift in closer. Tim sat in front of Tania in Black Level’s control room, operating the automated craft from a touchscreen. He tapped a bright red icon and on the screen Tania could see a puff of exhaust shoot out toward the alien ship. Braking thrust. The craft slowed a bit, now five hundred kilometers away from mass.

  “Bring it to a stop at fifty klicks,” Tania said.

  “Okay.”

  Off to one side of the room, Greg and Marcus huddled in front of another screen, studying high-resolution shots. They panned and zoomed the images on their monitor, talking quietly between themselves.

  A pang of nostalgia warmed Tania. She’d spent many long nights working in this room, studying gamma-ray bursts or impact events on moons in the outer solar system. It felt good to be back here, engaged in science again. She’d grown tired of waiting on pins and needles for word from Skyler. He and his companions were still inside that dome. They’d failed to emerge in time for the event date, and with each additional hour they remained inside, Tania found her hope fading like a dying fire. She’d be stirring embers soon.

  It also felt good to be away from Melville and the proximity to Russell Blackfield. Away from Platz Station, too. Zane continued to recover, but their conversations had been awkward since they’d read Neil’s final letter.

  Tania had left all that behind for now. Everything else could wait.

  “Any signs of activity?” she asked Greg and Marcus.

  Without looking back, Greg dismissed her with a wave. “All quiet.”

  “Signs of cratering on the bulbous end,” Marcus said.

  Greg snorted. “That’s what she … um, never mind.”

  Tania sighed in frustration and turned to the main screen again. Cratering? That didn’t mesh with the Builders’ previous smooth-surfaced arrivals. It made sense, though. If this craft had crossed the vast distance between stars at high speed some erosion was to be expected. Hell, total annihilation was the expected result, without some kind of protective aura.

  She smiled privately. Even now, with the auras in Darwin and Belém, plus the miniature versions projected by the towers, she still couldn’t put herself in the mindset of what the Builders were technically capable of. Cratering, though, implied they weren’t gods. Even such an advanced race couldn’t send such a large ship this far completely unscathed. She found a little comfort in that.

  The drone continued toward the ship at 500 kilometers per hour. Already the object dominated the screen, and the drone was still an hour away from reaching it.

  The lack of activity bothered her. No third Elevator, no stream of packages racing down to the planet below, no sign of the invasion fleet that Neil Platz once predicted. Nothing. Why so big, then? Tania still had no idea what the Builders planned to do, but she couldn’t imagine sending such a massive object across the vast emptiness for no reason at all.

  “Good thing it slowed down,” Tim said. “That thing would have demolished the planet if it had kept coming at its initial speed.”

  “They already demolished the planet,” she shot back, followed by a squeeze on his shoulder to assure him she knew what he’d meant.

  When first detected, the alien craft had been approaching Earth at incredible speed, already decelerating. They’d not spotted it early enough to know the top speed, but when their scope did find the slowing vessel its velocity was a breathtaking 50,000 kilometers per second. More amazing to Tania was that the method of thrust used to slow the ship, whatever it might have been, produced no visible light. The other detectors were off the charts, but in visible light the gigantic ship had been nearly invisible.

  An hour passed. Tania stood, impassive, unable to sit or rest. Part of her wis
hed the tiny station had a gun range. It had been one of the great surprises of her life, days earlier, to find out how mind-clearing target practice could be. Absently she rubbed at her palm, still sore from where the pistol had recoiled against her before she’d learned how to absorb the impact. Karl’s instruction had been remarkably good. She had to force herself to blink now and then when her eyes ached from staring at the display. The ship grew and grew until its surface filled the entire screen, and still it was sixty kilometers away from the drone.

  Tim hit the braking thrusters again. He’d programmed the sequence, and sat back now as the drone’s computer released pulses of exhaust every few seconds, until it came to a stop. A fuel indicator in the corner of the main monitor indicated that just over 80 percent remained. Plenty to circle the vessel a few times before coming back.

  “Let’s take a look around,” she said.

  The smooth surface of the Builder ship drifted past the drone as if the tiny craft were floating across a still ocean at night. The sun had dipped below the horizon an hour earlier, plunging the vessel into shadow that would persist until morning. Tim suggested moving in closer and using the drone’s searchlight, but that would burn power Tania would rather save, and besides, she still felt uncomfortable with getting too close to the new ship until they knew more about it.

  She felt anxious, often pacing the room, her eyes never leaving the screen. She convinced herself that at any moment some calamity would unfold. That those protrusions pointing at Earth were so many gun barrels, and in a sudden bright instant the Builders would pulverize the planet below. Or that they were launch tubes, from which thousands of tiny attack ships would swarm out like wasps and fan across the globe, eradicating the few humans who remained.

  When it occurred to her that all the scenarios running through her mind were doomsday ones, she forced herself to stop speculating and focus on the facts in front of her.

  “Take a look at this,” Marcus said.

  Tania broke her gaze away from the main screen and walked over to the two men. Greg moved aside a bit to make room for her.

  A close-up image of the pockmarked end of the ship, the end that pointed away from Earth now, filled the screen. Marcus tapped the screen and the image changed. Another portion of the ship, she guessed, with distinctly fewer craters and gouges.

  Marcus flipped back to the first image, then bounced between them in rapid succession. After a dozen cycles, Tania realized they were looking at the same section of the ship’s surface. Some of the craters were in the same position in both images, only smaller in the second picture.

  “It’s healing,” she said.

  “Yup!”

  Greg whistled. “Maybe they can do something for your scalp, Marcus.”

  “Maybe they can do something for your mom’s—”

  Tania elbowed him. “This is a historic moment, gentlemen. Please, act like it.”

  Marcus repeated her words under his breath in an exaggerated, mocking tone. He brought up additional pairs of images and began to cycle them. Each showed the same change. Then he tried a pair of images from the tail end of the craft, the end pointing down at the planet. It looked the same, but then, it didn’t have the scarring in the first place.

  “What about the naughty bits,” Greg said. “Er, sorry, Tania. The, um, raised posterior protrusions.”

  Tania smirked despite herself. Marcus snorted a juvenile laugh and went back to a library view of all the images taken so far. He selected two. No changes between them, but seeing the extensions close-up, Tania realized they had hints of grooves in their surfaces, like the aura towers.

  An hour later dawn broke and warm light bathed the alien ship. The drone made another circuit of the huge mass, shifting its path to look up at it from below.

  “Guys,” Tim said, “I found something.” Then, “Wow.”

  Tania sat with Greg, while Marcus slept in a curled ball on the floor behind them. She looked up, startled, and crossed back to the center of the room. Greg followed her, and Marcus stirred as if sensing the change in mood within the room.

  “What is that?” Greg asked.

  On the screen, nestled between four of the huge spikes that jutted from the underside of the main bulb, was a hexagonal mark. A portion of the ship’s surface was darker than the rest, with five perfectly straight edges forming a rough circle. Inset within the hexagon was another, smaller one. Tim enlarged that portion of the image while simultaneously activating instruction of the remote-controlled vehicle to stop above the shape. Still fifty kilometers distant, the small drone’s camera couldn’t discern fine detail. “Push in?” Tim asked.

  A laugh caught in Greg’s throat. He withered under Tania’s sidelong glance.

  “Yes,” she said. “Get to within a kilometer.”

  Tim turned to her. “Really?”

  “Do it, and if we have any other bands, IR or UV, see if you can put them on the side monitor.”

  “Okay. Right, here goes.”

  On the screen Greg and Marcus had been huddled in front of, the camera view vanished and a grid of four new images appeared. Infrared, ultraviolet, and two telemetry views. The repair drone wasn’t built for this kind of work, but it was pretty good at finding microfractures in a station’s hull, or detecting escaping air or water. The tiny craft began a slow approach to the surface of the alien ship. Soon the towers surrounding the hexagonal discoloration filled the edges of the screen, and then even they moved out of view as the little craft drifted closer. Ten kilometers. Five.

  When the hexagonal patch on the Builder ship filled the monitor, Tania called a halt.

  She stared at it for a long time. One hundred meters across, she guessed. The smaller section within spanned perhaps fifty. Long shadows cast from the surrounding protrusions draped black patches horizontally across the area.

  From this distance the drone’s camera could pick up some fine details, chief among which was an obvious groove that ran along the edge of the inner hexagon. The outer portion had no such groove, instead appearing to be painted onto the broader surface of the massive ship. Not painted, exactly, but a cosmetic feature, whereas that small inner area was clearly a separate portion of hull. Like a …

  “Door,” she said. “It looks like a door.”

  Tim took the statement as permission to zoom in on the inset piece. Soon the widescreen display in front of Tania was filled with a simple image of dark gray, with a lighter gray hexagon in the center. It looked in a metaphorical sense like a flag hanging before her in the room, and she wondered then if that was what she was indeed staring at: a ship identifier, like those painted on military boats on Earth for centuries.

  “There’s something near the center,” Marcus said, pointing.

  The image only hinted at it, but Marcus had it right. Just below the center of the hexagon Tania could see a bright red dot. She glanced at the smaller monitor off to the side and studied the quadrant devoted to an infrared view. “Look at that,” she said.

  Everyone turned. On infrared, five such dots glowed bright in a rough ring around the very center of the door. They brightened in unison, then faded. The cycle repeated at a pace that gave Tania the unsettling impression of a beating heart within.

  “Zoom in,” she said.

  “That’s max zoom,” Tim replied.

  “Then go in farther.” She answered his next question before he could ask it. “Until we can see those lights close-up.”

  Tim complied and the remote drone lurched forward in a burst of thrust. Tania’s focus alternated between the IR view, the distance-to-contact readout, and the main screen’s visible-light presentation.

  As the craft moved closer—fifty meters, forty—the pinpoints of light became visible on the main screen. Then they became something more than single points of light, but shapes.

  “There’s another hexagon in the center of them,” Marcus said.

  Tania squinted. She couldn’t see it at first, but then found what he referred to. Thi
s five-sided portion was the same color as the surrounding one, and if not for the five lights around it she would have missed it. The only clue was a thin groove that marked its border with the area around it. The groove caught some of the light coming off the five pulsing beacons.

  Five sides. Five lights. Five small shell ships crashed to Earth. She shivered at the thought. But the aura towers dispersed in only four groups. That fact troubled her in a way she couldn’t explain.

  When the craft loomed just twenty meters from the drone, Tim fired a braking thrust.

  Tania stepped forward, studying the screen. The lights were not lights at all, she saw. Not exactly. They were more like portholes. She knew instinctively that the light coming through them was from a single, interior source. She’d had the same impression when she’d seen the pulsing grooves on the aura tower’s surface.

  Each light was a shape: a circle, a square, a triangle, each with a minor imperfection. The fourth had an oval shape, with one side undulating in an even waveform. The last resembled an hourglass, albeit with small extensions on the top and bottom that reminded Tania of teeth.

  No one spoke for a long time. Then Greg asked, “Is it a code?”

  “Maybe that’s their writing,” Tim offered.

  Tania nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. Like a ship moniker. An identification system.”

  “Right,” Marcus said. “So you don’t confuse it with some other behemoth.”

  “Everyone remember where we parked,” Greg said.

  The room fell silent again as everyone tried to puzzle out the purpose of the shapes, as if staring at them long enough would somehow unravel the mystery. Tania felt like she’d been given just five characters of Kanji and was expected to learn Japanese from the clues.

  “What now?” Tim asked after a minute or two had passed. “We’re at fifty percent fuel on the drone. Cap’s about the same.”

  Tania sighed. She wished she was there herself so she could reach out and touch the surface, or peer inside those portholes. Prudence won out. “Bring it back.”

  Marcus groaned in disappointment.