Scavenger: Evolution: (Sand Divers, Book One)

by Timothy C. Ward

  The glass background moved to one with a bar stocked with various colors of bottles. Rush had never seen many of their labels, especially not so free of decay. The Gov gleefully waved one more time—he really showed no remorse over the corpses he’d just caused—then walked back to his desk near the windows. The orbs in the reflection extinguished and a tall, dark shadow peaked a few floors below his. Many buildings stacked in odd heights on the other side of a horizontal gap from The Gov’s.

  None had lights on.

  The camera returned to The Gov’s desk and up to his face. “Fort Pope has an advanced clinic. I’ll direct you—”

  “What makes you think we care what you say?” Rush asked.

  “Well, I still have Avery’s wife.”

  Avery glanced away, rubbed his bloody nose on his sleeve.

  “You’re nice and banged up, but you’ll survive,” The Gov said.

  “What about Dixon and those on the cliff?” Avery asked.

  The Gov shrugged. “Maybe you ought to listen well so I can say what I want to say and then you can go check on them.” He reached below the camera, tapped something, and then the door unlocked.

  Rush looked over at the door to get out.

  “Not yet though. I can lock it back up before you get there. First, come have a look.” He extended his finger over the desk and the image changed to a blueprint. Rush helped Star as they walked together inside the desk’s shielding. The door opened at Avery’s pull.

  The Gov blinked and stared at Star for an uncomfortable moment, then went back to his blueprint with a smile Rush feared to understand. “You’re here.” A white star formed at the bottom center of the map, inside what Rush could see was the outline of the lobby and entrance. “Up here is a room with a...machine I’d like you to access for me.”

  A large rectangular room’s outline lit up, on the eastern side of the building, but buffered by hallways and smaller rooms forming small rows up around the east and northern end.

  “Avery, does your phone still work?”

  He took it out of his suit pouch and turned it on. “Yes.”

  “Good, call me when you’re inside that room. I’ll give you a few minutes to collect your friends, but don’t go loungin’ around with any body disposal. We don’t have time for that. And you don’t want to tempt me to show you what else I have control of in there.

  “You all did well. Hate me if you want, plot my disemboweled death in your dreams, whatever. But I’m not going anywhere, and if you disobey me I have plenty more people I can kill until you fall in line. We will unearth Denver, and when we do, it’ll be up to you if I let you enjoy the fruits of your labors.”

  The screen blinked black.

  SCAVENGER: Twin Suns

  Chapter 1

  Beyond the dark screen, the exterior door clicked open.

  Beside Rush, a dazed-out Star stared at the screen, as though waiting for The Gov’s face to reappear. “Star.” Rush touched her arm. She shrieked and swiped her arm away. “Star, it’s me.”

  “Cool.” Avery turned and brushed past Rush to get out of the desk.

  Cool stood in the opened exterior door, eyes wide as he took in the surrounding graveyard. Each heartbeat of exposure seemed to add years of maturity to the early teen. His gaze fell to a dead body outstretched at his feet. His expression soured and his stomach clenched. He lurched over and vomited onto its back.

  The move exposed a bearded cliff-dweller in tan fatigues standing behind him, armed with an AK.

  Rush didn’t have the bolter.

  “Don’t move.” The entry door muffled the man’s voice, but Rush heard. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

  Avery tip toed over bodies, the bolter glowing ready down his outside hip. Star gripped her arm around Rush’s elbow.

  The man pointed his AK at an inverted black dome on the ceiling between the entry and the desk. “The Gov is watching.”

  Cool’s mom leaned in to grab her bent-over son and let out a cry at the sight before her. She sobbed, wrapped her arms around him and pulled back.

  The dark haired man said something to her, then turned back to Rush. “Stay calm.”

  He checked Avery, who had halted his approach, then the man kicked open the inner door. He fired a quick burst into the dome, spun left, spotted another dome down the hall and shot it into a puff of debris.

  Avery ducked and aimed the bolter’s blue tip at the man’s chest. “That’s enough!”

  The thick-muscled man slowly turned to face Avery. “I said, stay calm. I’m trying to help.”

  “He has my wife.”

  “You’re Avery?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Nedzad. Let me through and I’ll get her back.”

  Avery’s weight sank on his heels, but he kept the bolter raised.

  “You need leverage. I can get it.” Nedzad took a step and reached out his free hand to lower the bolter.

  The computer screen lit up on Rush’s left. The Gov’s face appeared close up.

  “Is that a sentry come to join our party?” The Gov laughed. “Oh, this day keeps getting better.”

  Rush pushed Star away.

  “Star, come!” The Gov’s voice boomed from inside the double door to the northwest.

  Star swept her arm through Rush’s attempt to catch her and ran for the double door. She opened one side, passed through, and shut the door before Rush arrived. A bolt clamped through the middle and bolstered the wood against his charging body. The impact shot pain into his shoulder and dropped him on his back before he knew what happened. She watched him on the ground—blue dust sparkled in her eyes—then turned and ran into the darkness of the unknown room. A metal sheet descended on tracks on the other side of the windows.

  “Star!” His headache clenched as he rose from the floor. Star was falling deeper into The Gov’s plans and farther from his ability to help. He was failing her.

  “She’s mine now,” The Gov said from the computer speakers inside the shielded desk.

  Nedzad rolled a chair up to the screen.

  “Rush, if you’d like your wife to remain in good health, be a good boy and take the sentry’s manual.”

  Nedzad began typing.

  The Gov cocked his head and smiled, tracking Rush as he walked over to see what Nedzad was doing. Rush hated the smooth, youthfulness of The Gov’s face. If anyone deserved to live out in the sands, it was him. “Look at him, Rush. Thinks he can walk in here and take right over. Every second you waste with him allows progress for the change making Star mine.”

  Nedzad typed furiously. The Gov was winning.

  “Try remembering what her unencumbered desire felt like, turn it around on me, and you’ll have her future.” The Gov’s threatening stare was replaced by a replica image of the base’s insignia.

  Nedzad growled and pounded on one of the corner keys. Then he ripped the monitor off the desk, spun and slammed it on the ground.

  “Let’s go.” Nedzad brushed past Rush and walked around the desk toward the entry.

  “Where?” Rush followed, hoping he could prove The Gov wrong.

  “Come inside,” Nedzad said to Viky, who crossed the exterior doorway. She cringed at the view of fallen bodies. Behind her was Jeff, Cool, their mom, Dixon, and Carroll. “Your only escape is through this base.”

  “How do you know that?” Rush asked.

  “We saw three sarfers,” Viky said. “The tunnel ought to refill with more cliff dwellers any minute.”

  “It sounds like our best escape is getting his manual.” Carroll tightened her arm within Dixon’s. Viky shot her a nasty look. Carroll offered one back. “Look around you. I say we give him what he wants before he does something worse.”

  “Listen kid.” Viky stepped close enough to punch Carroll in the mouth. “I’ve seen what happens when you try and play nice with guys like him. It never ends well.”

  “I’m going this way,” Nedzad said. “Feel free to stay and let us know when his reinforcements
arrive. Until I regain access to the security system and lock this door, I could use someone to slow them down.”

  Carroll sneered.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Dixon said. “We’re coming with you.” He half-carried, half-dragged her inside, but her struggle was only an attempt at saving face. Rush could tell she didn’t want to be left outside.

  Nedzad motioned them south to the hallway on his right. As he walked, he lifted his AK and shot out another dome on the ceiling. “I’ll explain on the way.”

  He led them in a jog.

  Rush’s body wanted to shut down, but Star’s unknown danger forced him to move step after another.

  Behind him, Dixon took up the rear, pushing the group to keep up. Like Avery, he’d changed out of his dive suit into surface threads, his backpack straps cinched tight over his shoulders.

  The way Rush was sweating in his suit, he looked forward to when he could take his off, too.

  “Why are we going this way?” Rush asked Nedzad.

  “I need a computer The Gov hasn’t locked out.”

  They crossed a brief entryway and a closed double door on their left, but continued on toward a set of shut doors twenty paces away.

  “How do you know where another computer is?” Rush asked.

  Nedzad ignored Rush and looked back at Avery. “Get that sunbolt ready.”

  Sunbolt?

  Avery took the bolter out of his pocket.

  Nedzad nodded. “We’re going to cut our way through the doors that can lock from the security system.” He slowed at the end of the hall and tested the door handle. “Yep.”

  He pointed where he wanted Avery to fire the bolter. “We’ll get into some halls without cameras, and hopefully he’ll lose track of us.”

  Avery pressed the center button on the bolter, igniting the hall into bright blue light as it cut a hole in the door. Rush shielded his eyes to protect himself from the light making his headache worse. The electric charge whined through the metal, adding a sharp odor to dampen the dead-body stench from the lobby behind them.

  “How do you know about this base?” Rush asked, catching his breath. His head throbbed.

  “Fort Pope has been kept secret for nearly two hundred years. My job, and that of my predecessors, has been to keep it that way from the wrong sort. The only people that know about it swore an oath to die before they’d reveal its location.”

  “So what about the manual he wants?”

  Nedzad took a small book out of his front pocket. “It has computer passwords, electrical schematics, nanotech research, you name it. It was written by my predecessors to train me for this very moment. He’s not touching it.” His attention shifted to Avery, as though unafraid of Rush trying to steal the book. “Okay, that’s close enough.”

  Avery released the bolter’s beam and backed up.

  Nedzad stepped back and kicked the center of the door where Avery had cut. Metal screeched as it scraped over locks Avery had severed in the floor and ceiling. The group filed into a cafeteria and continued on to another locked set of gray doors.

  Rush turned away as Avery used the bolter on the door. The cafeteria had a dusty black screen mounted on the ceiling at the center of the dining area. The tables looked like they were ready for a next morning that never came for whoever had resided there. Had they been prepared for what made them leave, or did it happen in their sleep?

  “So how’d you get the book?” Rush asked. “Is there anyone else? Any other sentries?”

  “I hope so, but I don’t know where. I was taught by a woman, Sady, who took me and my parents in when I was too young to remember. She trained me from a large library, but we never found a sunbolt to gain access to Fort Pope. She, and then my parents, died over five years ago.”

  Nedzad kicked through the new set just like the last.

  “With all that reading, do you know why everything’s covered in sand?” Rush asked.

  “Partially. Most of the books are from before the war.”

  Of course there was a war. Mankind hasn’t stopped fighting since.

  They entered another long hall. The artificial lights and their depth below the sun created an awareness of wandering around where he shouldn’t be, where he would be punished if caught.

  Rush would ask Nedzad more when he wasn’t about to run. His throbbing head didn’t incline him to talk more, either.

  Not far down the hall, Nedzad pointed to a door on their left. Avery shot the bolter pulse into the door and they broke in. A narrow hall bent east past a stack of pallets leaned against a wall.

  “Is it much farther?” Cool asked, huffing.

  “Not much.” Nedzad pointed Avery to the left door of the two at the end. Avery cut through the handle.

  “Is there somewhere we can hide until this rolls over?” Cool’s mom asked.

  “In here, for now.” Nedzad led them into a dark room. He searched around in a circle until he moved toward a wall and flicked on a light. A U-shaped arrangement of computers on tables bordered the room. Nedzad turned on a computer and sat before it.

  Rush plopped onto the seat next to him, wishing it were a bed. He unzipped his suit to check his power on the underside of his dive button. Two percent. Wow. That was close. He unspooled the power cable from his belt and plugged it in the wall.

  “Good idea, Poke.” Av sat next to him. “Where you at?”

  “Two.” Rush turned his computer on.

  “Two? Wow.” Avery plugged in his suit and turned on his computer. “Close, man. I’m at seventy-two.”

  Seventy-two? Thanks for your help. Rush took a long swig from his canteen and wiped his mouth. Avery had almost died as well. He wouldn’t have known what to do to help Rush save Star, anyway. Rush barely had. His anger at Avery eased.

  Nedzad pulled up a program on his screen. “I’ll free up this computer through a ghost program one of Sady’s books described. That’ll let me create a beachhead to regain control of the network, then hopefully lock him out before he realizes we’re in.”

  Viky sat on Nedzad’s left, with Dixon beside her, and they turned their towers on. Dixon took his dive suit out of his pack and plugged in. The computers’ white screens lit their eager faces. In spite of their danger, there was no hiding their excitement to work on Old World computers in their original environment.

  Nedzad’s muscular form seemed out of place at the keyboard. Most of the people in Springston who could type were either bird-thin or rich and overfed. Viky and Dixon were the only ones poised with hands over the keyboards as though they knew what they were doing. Divers like Rush and Avery had little use for the machines. Dixon was a different generation.

  “Do you have computers where you live?” Nedzad asked.

  “None this nice,” Viky said. “Hand-me-downs that only survived the decay of time and use because they have been stripped down to their bare functions. Legends, and journal histories, speak of them as running the Old World.”

  “I found one inside a buried plane that looked pretty nice, but it didn’t work,” Dixon said.

  Nedzad’s black screen with white letters blinked into a moving picture of an American flag flapping straight in the wind. He clapped. “Got it!”

  He tapped into Viky and Dixon’s computers until they also showed an image of an American flag. On his screen, he double-clicked an icon of an open parchment. A blueprint of the base filled the screen. Nedzad rolled the cursor from left to right along the bottom, digging up half-hidden icons. He double-clicked LL4 and changed the image to a large circular room. He double-clicked the bottom option: NETWORK. After a rapid series of opened text boxes and quick typing, Nedzad tapped a key and sat back. “Okay. We’re good. For now.”

  “Good how?” Rush asked. “What about Star?”

  “Good in that the nuclear fusion reactor is locked from outside control, so if The Gov wants it, he’ll have to come pry it from my fingers.”

  “That’s good, but did you lock him out? Did you turn off his voi
ce?”

  “Not yet. Locking the reactor and the front door were first. I couldn’t risk doing too much right away. He knows we’re in now and will fight back.”

  “Fight back how?”

  “Relax. We’re going after her in a minute. I need to check the T.S. system.”

  “T.S. system?” Viky asked.

  “Twin Suns. That’s the name of the reactor.”

  “Sounds hot.”

  “Are you kidding me, Viky? Flirt some other time.” Rush stood up, hoping Nedzad was done. “Ned—”

  “Another minute, Rush.”

  “Can you at least turn off whatever speakers he used to lure her away?”

  “If I take out the intercom he could go local from desktop speaker to desktop speaker to control her.”

  “Has he turned them all on, though? It took…what…a couple minutes to get these up? That could be enough time if I can get her into an area he isn’t suspecting or which doesn’t have computers up. Can you get into the cameras? We need to find her.”

  “I have a better idea. And one that will get us both into better suits than yours.” Nedzad stared intently at his screen as he typed and clicked away, his face showing growing concern. “Ninety-six? Shit. It should have cycled out by now.”

  He tapped harder. A diagram image of three tanks on a page titled ‘Plasma Reserves’ showed the blue space inside lowering, marked on the side with a percentage declining from ninety-six. He exhaled and sat back. “That should have been automatic. We’ll need to get there soon to see if something’s keeping it from flowing out the supply tube.”

  He opened up a map of the third floor lower level, and pointed to a vertical-set room along the central hallway near the elevator: W3L. “Get familiar with these maps,” he told the group. “That’s a weapon’s locker. And that’s our medical storage and clinic. We’ll go down there soon to stock up and clean up that wound, after we find Star.”