The Exodus Towers: The Dire Earth Cycle: Two

by Jason M. Hough

  Tania ignored him. “Everyone get some rest, or study the recordings if you can’t sleep. We’ll meet in four hours to plan our next move.”

  Eventually Greg and Marcus departed the room for their cabins, leaving Tania and Tim alone. She hadn’t moved from her place in front of the screen, which now replayed the drone’s footage in time lapse.

  “Tim?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want a list of all our vehicles capable of carrying walkers outside.”

  “Okay. Does that mean we’re going to go take a look in person?”

  “Someone should,” Tania said, knowing she’d go herself.

  Cappagh, Ireland

  Date imprecise

  VANESSA TOOK A cue from Skyler and left the dome to find a cart, or stretcher, anything that would help on their return walk with the unconscious Ana and the heavy alien object.

  Skyler had barely drawn a breath when Vanessa reemerged, wheelbarrow rolling in front of her. She had a heavy coat on, and a dust of snow draped her shoulders.

  “Good enough,” Skyler said. Together they lifted Ana in, resting her on a folded blanket Vanessa had tucked into the bottom. Once the girl was settled, they lifted the alien hourglass and placed it between her legs.

  Then they each took one of the two handles and pushed together, the loaded wheelbarrow lurching through the churned and muddy ground.

  When the front edge of the wheelbarrow hit the edge of the dome it began to bend the surface outward. As soon as the edge of the matte black hourglass object touched the dome, a brilliant purple-white light exploded across Skyler’s field of view. It enveloped him from every direction. He heard a sound like a cannon blast and had a sudden sensation of being underwater, surrounded by buoyant fluid. His vision blurred. He felt like the air was being sucked from his lungs.

  Vanessa, next to him, was just a vague form, obscured in a milky purple glow. She screamed.

  Then the fluid haze began to shatter and dissolve. Cracks of light appeared everywhere and grew wider. Skyler felt his mind begin to fracture in bizarre combinations of slow and fast, as if his vision had shattered like glass. Some shards presented images of the outside, frozen in time, others the inside of the dome at full speed. The shards jumbled and fractured again. Some combined, snapping together like puzzle pieces. Gradually, over what at once seemed hours and mere fractions of a second, the shards that held the picture of the outside world began to win the titanic struggle, and the images in them began to accelerate in time as the shards themselves grew and fused.

  A sound began to build, like an aircraft approaching, the noise amplifying in conjunction with the converging image of the outside world. When the last of the purple vanished from Skyler’s view, the sound peaked and vanished in a thundering boom that shook the ground under his feet.

  He stumbled to one knee, Vanessa with him.

  The purple dome had vanished. Skyler looked up in time to see a curved wall of white racing down toward him.

  “Head down!” he shouted to Vanessa, as he threw himself over the wheelbarrow and Ana.

  An avalanche of snow crashed around them, from where the dome’s edge had been toward the pinnacle at the center.

  The dome had vanished, Skyler realized, and the snow that accumulated on top of it fell in one instant, dome-shaped sheet.

  Bitter cold swallowed him. Vanessa screamed as ice pummeled the ground around them. Then Skyler felt as if someone had jumped on his back. He groaned under the sudden weight, the sensation of frozen slush on his exposed flesh.

  The avalanche ended almost immediately. Skyler’s fear of being buried proved exaggerated, as he found himself under just a few centimeters of the white powder. He leapt off the cart and brushed snow from Ana’s face and hair.

  “It’s over,” he said to Vanessa, who cowered against the metal side of the wheelbarrow. He staggered to his feet and helped her do the same. “We’re out. It’s over.”

  She coughed and looked him over before turning to see the winter world around them. “What happened?”

  “When that thing hit the edge, the dome disintegrated.”

  “It felt like …” Vanessa stopped, shivered. “God, I don’t know what. A nightmare. A hallucination.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “One time frame collapsing and another rushing in.”

  “Let’s—oh shit.”

  Skyler barely had time to register the urgency in her voice when Vanessa crouched and drew both pistols he’d given her. He brought his gun to the ready without fully understanding why, simply because the woman had done so. Only when Vanessa started shooting did he understand.

  The blue areas within the dome had collapsed as well, and in the snow around them a handful of subhumans were struggling up after being pummeled with the accumulated snow. Vanessa shot three dead before Skyler could manage to find his wits and aim. He put down the last, and then everything went silent.

  “Is that the last of them?” Vanessa asked.

  A sudden change in the environment around them cut Skyler’s reply short. Something that had been there a moment ago vanished, though he couldn’t quite figure out what. A sound had gone, like being in a room when the ventilation system suddenly turns off. Vanessa looked around. She’d noticed it, too.

  “The towers,” she said. “They’re dark again.”

  Skyler looked at the nearest pillar in the circle that now marked where the dome had been. True to Vanessa’s word, the trace wave pattern of purple light within it had vanished. Once again it looked like it had before the exodus: black, and dead. The other towers around the perimeter stood dark as well. Skyler shuffled over to the close one, hugging himself against the bite of a frigid breeze, and pushed the massive object.

  It didn’t budge.

  “The hell …” He paused. The hum from the towers had begun again. A whisper, but there and building. “Jesus. What now?”

  Vanessa grabbed Skyler’s arm and pulled. “Let’s move away. Something is happening.”

  Together they pushed the wheelbarrow a dozen meters away from the edge of the circle into a snow-dappled field. By the time they turned to study the circle of aura towers again, the black obelisks had begun to move.

  Not all of them, Skyler realized, but exactly half. Every other tower pulled inward, drawn toward the partially buried shell ship in the center. Then with remarkable coordination they began to form into a wedge, the sharp point aimed along the path etched in the ground, toward Belém.

  The towers that remained in the circle formation around the crashed ship suddenly parted, and the wedge group began to move.

  “They’re going back,” Vanessa whispered.

  “Half, anyway.” Skyler tried to imagine some version of reality where this all made sense. He watched the towers pick up speed as they slid along the ground, eerily upright despite the undulations in the ground.

  “I call this a success,” Vanessa said, a proud grin on her face. “The colony can certainly use them. And if we manage the same result at the other three sites—”

  “—there will be a hundred plus in camp again,” he said, finishing her thought.

  “Maybe we get one of these weird little trophies each time, too.”

  Skyler found himself nodding, but in his mind the puzzle pieces still refused to fit together. “Right,” he muttered. “Let’s get back to the Magpie, get Ana home and fixed up. We also need to warn Karl.”

  “Warn him of what?”

  “Those towers,” Skyler said. “Nice as it is that they’re coming home, if Exodus doesn’t start planning to make room for their arrival it’s going to be another fiasco.”

  Wrapped in a musty wool blanket, bandaged hands clutched around a steaming mug of tea, Skyler waited for the comm link to turn green. He’d muttered silent thanks that he’d not turned it on in the middle of another Greg and Marcus broadcast.

  It was the last day of February. They’d found Pablo in the barn, cleaning a rabbit carcass for meat. The man looked thin and sport
ed a beard that hadn’t been there before. Other than a query about Ana’s injury, he said little when the party arrived. Skyler could see the relief in Pablo’s eyes, but the man’s restrained demeanor gave no more insight into how he’d fared while awaiting their return. Six months alone with only his thoughts. When Skyler asked if he’d heard from the colony he just shrugged. “Once a week. I tell them there’s no news; they tell me that they hope we’ll hurry. The ship is close now, that doctor says.”

  With the cold had come subhumans. Pablo figured they sought warmth, and after the first encounter he’d spent most of his time inside the barricaded farmhouse, watching from the second-floor windows for the creatures. He culled the local population by building a bonfire in the adjacent field, picking a few off as they came like moths to the bright blaze. The visits all but stopped after that. He’d either killed them all, or they’d learned to avoid the area.

  The link indicator turned green.

  “Pablo?”

  “It’s Skyler, Tania.”

  He heard a sharp intake of breath. “You’re okay,” she said. “Oh my God, Skyler, you’re alive.”

  “We all are,” he said. “More or less. Tania, we found something—”

  She spoke over him. “Skyler, please come back. Today, right now. I …” She trailed off. There was desperation in her voice he hadn’t heard since the day he found her locked in her cabin on Anchor Station. “So much has happened. Another ship has arrived. And we had another of those vibrations on the Elevator, a discharge of electricity. Something’s wrong. I need your wisdom.”

  “The ship’s arrived then?”

  “It’s enormous, Skyler. Terrifyingly so. Six kilometers long.”

  Six. Jesus. “Where did it stop?” Part of him, a big part, hoped she’d say Ireland.

  “Over Africa. We sent a drone to survey it, Skyler, and found something. There’s a door, or airlock, surrounded by these … symbols. Shapes, like writing in a way. Karl and I are planning to—”

  “Shapes? What shapes?”

  “There’s five,” she said. “Each is basic, but they all have an imperfection. A circle with a half-circle dent at the top, a square with a notch, a triangle missing one tip. The oval one is wavy on the top half. And the last looks like an hourglass, with little teeth on the top and bottom.”

  “Tania,” he said evenly, “don’t do anything. Wait for us to get back.”

  “Why?”

  “We found something in the dome. An object, hourglass-shaped just like you described. And when I entered that cave east of Belém, I saw another. I thought it was a little altar, remember? About the same size as this thing, but circular.”

  “God, Skyler,” she said, then went silent for a few seconds. “I wish I knew what this all meant.”

  “Me, too, Tania. Me, too.”

  “Okay. Okay, we’ll hold off, but please hurry.”

  The urgency in her voice came through loud and clear. “Is the ship doing something? Building another Elevator?”

  “It’s quiet so far. That’s not the reason I want you back here.”

  “Well, regardless, we’re leaving immediately. Ana’s injured, and I need you to have whatever medics you can muster ready to look at her the moment we arrive. No, more than that, have them contact me as soon as possible. We might be able to diagnose her in flight.”

  Tania’s voice lowered. “Skyler, Blackfield is with us.”

  The words hung in the air like a bad odor. Skyler tried to digest their meaning, but each thought he had brought with it a hundred questions, none of them good.

  Tania spoke before he could. “He came here with Platz Station. There was a battle—”

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “Did they win? If you tell me he’s in charge—”

  “Slow down,” Tania said. “The battle was in Darwin, not here. Russell fled and couldn’t go anywhere else.”

  The words settled on him like the lid of a coffin. Everything that had happened, everything else going on, vanished.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “It’s a lie. Put him out an airlock right now, Tania.”

  “We think he’s telling the truth.”

  “Right. Everything is on the up-and-up, everyone’s friends, and yet you want me to rush back there and do what, exactly? Confirm your bad decision to let him in?” He took a deep breath. “Tania, put him out an airlock or I’ll do it myself. Nothing that fucker does is truthful, and you know it.”

  For a long moment she didn’t speak.

  Skyler closed his eyes. “Please don’t tell me he’s sitting there with you. That he’s joined the colony.”

  “No,” Tania said. “He’s confined to quarters here on Melville. The rest of his people are under house arrest on Platz Station until we can figure out what to do.”

  “There’s nothing to figure out,” Skyler said. “Put the bastard out an airlock and send the station back to Darwin before it explodes or something. It’s a Trojan horse, Tania, it has to be.”

  “I can’t do that. Platz Station is a boon, regardless of who brought it. It doubles our living space and—”

  “And you want me to come back and advise you? When will you listen to a word I say? I can’t seem to get through anymore.” He recognized the flare of temper too late to stop the words, and took a long breath. His ears felt hot and he could feel the pulsing veins in his temples.

  “I did what I thought was right,” she said. “I know we have had our differences, but I value your judgment. If I made a mistake, fine, come help me fix it, okay? And … honestly, I’d feel that much safer with you here.”

  Further argument wouldn’t matter. He knew he had to get back, for Ana’s sake more than anything. None of this news changed that.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’re leaving today. Do not … do not … let Blackfield out of his cell.”

  “We won’t, I promise.”

  Her voice held the hint of a buried apology that he hadn’t expected. He tried to see things from her perspective. Blackfield arriving with the crown jewel of Darwin’s space stations, and a six-kilometer-long behemoth Builder ship arriving right after that. And now these strange symbols, and matching objects within the crashed shells. She’s overwhelmed, beset on all sides with things she can’t wrap her mind around. He chastised himself for not seeing it sooner.

  “Good,” he said with as much warmth and calm as he could muster. “Now, put me through to Karl. There’s a bunch of aura towers coming back from here and the camp needs to be ready for them.”

  Platz Station

  12.MAR.2285

  A WOMAN NAMED Jenny completed the preflight check under Skyler’s watchful eye.

  He couldn’t yet quite bring himself to trust anyone who arrived with Blackfield, but Tania had insisted. Jenny had all the qualifications, and as Tania pointed out, she couldn’t really be blamed for doing her duty in the midst of that attack.

  She’d been aboard Platz Station when Grillo’s forces had attacked, and she’d been the one to handle the station’s move to Belém. Tania assured Skyler such an operation was no simple task. Station records confirmed Jenny’s story: a transfer to Platz Station from Midway Station after the original crew had evacuated with Zane. So, she wasn’t one of Russell’s cronies, at least at that time. She claimed to have hated the post and would have preferred to remain on Midway, Darwin’s smallest station with a crew of just four. When Skyler asked her what she did to pass the time on Midway, she replied, “Flight sims.” Her original post in orbit had been in flying construction craft and loaders in the vast interior bay of Penrith Assembly, and she couldn’t shed that itch to fly. Begrudgingly, Skyler decided he liked the woman. She reminded him of Angus.

  “EVA suits are here,” Tania said from the passenger compartment below the cockpit.

  He looked down at his feet, through the hatch in the floor that allowed entry to the cockpit. Tania drifted in the compartment below. “We’re about done,” he said.

  The repair craft had an odd vertical
layout, unintuitive at least to Skyler. His mind was hardwired to expect flying craft to be aerodynamic, but of course such considerations didn’t matter in space. From the outside it looked like a metal cylinder with six robotic arms of varying size and purpose sticking out from three bulky, square sections. The conical thrusters that guided the craft poked out in clusters of five at seemingly random sections of the hull.

  “It’s going to be a tight fit down here,” Tania said. “I brought six extra air tanks, enough for fifty hours or so round-trip. We should suit up beforehand, I think.”

  Skyler nodded. The craft had been designed for a two-person crew, one being the pilot, one to venture out and make hull repairs to the station. Apparently Platz had originally intended to provide every station with one, but only three had been manufactured before such pursuits became all but impossible. Belatedly Skyler wondered where he would sit during the journey. The cockpit barely provided room for Jenny. Below, the passenger compartment had been built for one person and welding supplies. Now it held Tania and six air canisters. The hourglass object recovered in Ireland had been packed neatly in an airtight case that originally housed welding gear, and which sat nestled within the craft’s robotic arms. Gray nylon straps secured it in place.

  “Go get suited,” Jenny said. “I can finish this.”

  Deciding he could trust her, Skyler pulled his legs together and pushed off the ceiling, drifting down to the compartment below. Tania had moved to one side to make room for him. If he positioned himself in the center of the cylinder, he could have easily reached out and touched each side with his fingertips.

  A single reddish LED illuminated the cylindrical room and cast Tania in a mixture of warm glow and stark shadow. She smiled meekly at him and looked away an instant after their eyes met. He’d forgotten how effortlessly beautiful she was. Even here, with a sheen of sweat on her brow, her raven hair pulled back in a hasty bun, and an expression equal parts anticipation and exhaustion, she made his breath catch in his throat.

  The thought gripped him between two conflicting sensations of guilt. One for the rift that had formed between him and this remarkable woman, and one for the injured young lady he’d left on the ground in Belém. Ana. She’d flown into something approaching a rage when he told her he would be going up the Elevator, and ultimately onto the alien ship. Given her condition, her situation, she’d argued with an almost admirable vehemence. She was still in the infirmary, awake though sedated. Her injuries were extensive: internal bleeding, bruised ribs, and a fractured lower vertebra. Or as Ana growled, “a hell of a backache.” When Karl knocked and announced it was time to board the climber, Ana had finally accepted that he was going. She kissed Skyler’s forehead and said, “Come back to me, Sky. I miss you already.”