by Hugh Howey
Page 51
The Seer pressed the second button, freeing most of the remaining fusion fuel. At first, nothing seemed to happen. There was a delay as the low, flat rift began to open above Palan’s solitary continent. Ryke had programmed the rift to iris out for seven hours, gobbling the rains before snapping shut forever. If the hyperdrive was his masterpiece, then this was Ryke’s crowning achievement, a breakthrough he wouldn’t have for many more years. The Seer tried to recall his explanation of how it would work, how hyperspace, by its very nature, multiplied the two keys of life: light and water. She never could appreciate how all the persistent rain and snow of her home came from mere molecules of water and a handful of photons, but she had seen enough strangeness there to take some things for granted. If Ryke said a single Palan rain, falling through a rift opened over its lone continent and multiplied a trillion trillion times would be enough to destroy hyperspace, the Seer was inclined to believe him.
Now that the second button was pressed—that button she had long agonized over—the Seer could allow herself to feel sorry for the billions of innocents she had just doomed. They would become stranded as hyperspace closed to them forever. There were ships between work and home, fleets along lines of battle, families separated from one another by work or happenstance, people injured in need of a hospital. Soon, hyperspace would be unavailable to them. Jolts of electricity might shock fusion critters in their fuel tanks, but they would no longer respond. The days of cheap, instantaneous travel for most people were over, including for the spreading Empire of the Bern.
The Seer could no longer see their massive invasion fleet arranged throughout hyperspace, but she could feel their violating presence. She took solace in knowing that the billions of lives of blood on her hands would also be the undoing of the Bern, the rulers of tens of thousands of universes. She pictured her land, a giant cone, as it filled to bursting with Palan’s water. She thought about all the slits, the little tears each of those invading Bern warships had left behind from their jumps into hyperspace. Each one would soon burst open, freeing a shower of frozen water, all of it laced with the Bern’s microscopic undoing, the creatures known as fusion fuel. Soon, they would conquer all attempts by the Bern to hem in life and control it. They would free countless other galaxies, just as they had ensured the Milky Way and its local cluster would remain too wild to tame.
A sharp pain in the Seer’s knuckle disturbed her lapse into dreaming. She was still holding down the second button, her finger trembling under the furious strain. She let go. She reminded herself to breathe.
She wasn’t sure how much more time she had. It was a novel sensation after years of not being able to be late, of never having time run out on anything, but now she had so little of it left.
The floods were going to come and take her away.
So the Bern Seer pressed the third button, the one she had begged Ryke to include, the one they had argued over, as neither of them understood its consequences. Not even Ryke and his powerful mind, not the Seer with her all-seeing vision, could tell what might become of it. Still, they saw no other way to protect the past and warn the future, so the remaining fusion fuel disappeared, moving through time and space, taking along what they chose to, or were told to.
In this case, they grabbed a simple silver canister, beat up and dented, but containing a strange and dangerous letter. It was a letter addressed to the very person who had written it, kept safe in a cylinder once used to send messages of peace through hyperspace to the planet Drenard.
The Seer knew Doctor Ryke would find the letter and use his own imparted knowledge to best purposes. He would learn about the end of hyperspace and the need for a handful of rifts stationed throughout the Milky Way, rifts to link major planets like Earth, Drenard, and now Lok. He would also learn not to build too many, about the danger in weakening the fabric of space. He would even learn hints of a new type of hyperdrive that would aid travel in strange ways. He would receive the barest tease of formulas his older brain glimpsed brilliance in, that perhaps his youthful mind could fully sort out.
Three buttons pressed, three satisfying clicks, and the Seer’s work was done. She was done and tired and ready to go. She stood, legs creaking audibly now that her home had fallen silent, and she considered crawling back into bed to wait for the floods.
But no, she decided, she would go to the front of the cabin instead, back to her wall of tin and her skinny porch. And she wouldn’t get in the saddle or take her helmet with her. She would go and stand there, stand in the rain with no protection at all. She would raise her arms and wait for the floods to wash away the wicked.
And she would go gladly.
Part XXIV - The Circle Closing
“We are born into this universe.
We live, we play, we war in it.
And over time, it changes us. ”
~The Bern Seer~
52 · Free
“This is it?”
“Yeah. ”
Cole peered out his porthole at the maze of canyons below, at the web of black traces and the tan marble like the latticed skin of a Callite.
“How can you be sure?” he asked. “They all look the same to me. ”
“Trust me,” Molly said. “This is the one. ”
She lowered Parsona into the dead-end canyon, aiming for a bank of shade long enough to reach the cargo bay and keep them out of the sun. The ship’s struts met the hard rock and settled under the pull of Drenard’s gravity.
“Be careful,” Parsona said through the radio.
Molly didn’t reply. She unbuckled her harness and left the cockpit without bothering to wait on Cole.
“I’m coming too,” Cole yelled after her. He shrugged his harness off and hurried to catch up.
“Here. ” Molly handed him a set of egg graspers as he entered the cargo bay. She kept a set for herself. Neither of them wore any of the rest of the Wadi gear, their flightsuits comfortable enough in the shade. Molly stomped down the cargo ramp and into the eerie howling of the windswept canyons. Cole watched her click the graspers nervously as she went.
“You’ve gotta talk to me about what’s going on,” Cole said, running up beside her. “How do you even know these eggs need rescuing?”
Molly pointed toward one of the Wadi tunnels at the base of the high cliff, then started off toward it. The sight of the large tube, big enough to crawl inside, sent a powerful numbness through Cole’s knees. He remembered his ordeal in just that sort of cave not so long ago. He hurried after Molly, his fears about her deep depression taking a new and more severe turn.
“Molly—”
She ducked her head inside the cave, one hand resting on the upper lip of the smooth hole in the marble. She turned and looked back, her face veiled by a shadow on top of a shadow.
“The Wadi told me,” Molly said flatly. “I saw this place in her mind like I was here. I saw the eggs, what the other Wadi did to her, and what we need to do right now. ”
With that, she turned to the darkness and stepped inside.
Cole fumbled in one of his pockets for a glowstick. He cracked it back and forth, then hurried in after her, shuffling along on his knees and knuckles, his egg graspers in one hand and the feeble glowstick in the other. Molly moved ahead of him as if she would’ve slid through the pitch black even had he not joined her.
They crawled for dozens of meters, past holes in the floor and drips from the ceiling. The green light from the stick would fade, Cole would work it back and forth, and a bit more soft glow would keep the cave barely discernable. When Molly stopped, Cole bumped into her, his knuckles scraping on the rough rock.
“Oh my gods—” Molly breathed.
Cole held the glowstick aloft.
“I didn’t realize they would be this big,” Molly said. She moved to the side to allow more of the light to pass, and Cole felt goose bumps surge up his arms when he saw the objects on the other side of
her. There were at least three of him that he could see, nestled against one another and halfway reaching the roof of the cave. The colors and patterns were remarkable, even muted by the awful green cast of his glowstick. The shells of the eggs seemed to dance and waver like the skies outside. They were big enough that a fully-grown human could pop out, which had him worrying about what was inside of them, and how safe this “egg canyon” really was.
“Hey, Molly, I think we need to reconsider this. ”
She looked back at him and brushed some loose strands of hair off her face. She bit her lower lip and nodded.
“I think you’re right,” she said. “I think we’re gonna have to free them right here. ”
“No,” Cole said, shaking his head. “That is most definitely not what I meant. ”
“Give me your knife,” Molly said. She leaned on one palm and stretched her other hand out to him. Cole’s lightstick ebbed a little, dimming the light in the tunnel.
“Molly, we need to pause for a sec and talk about this—”
“Give me your knife,” she said again. Her voice had not risen nor modulated, but Cole felt himself succumbing. The past weeks had been full of one attempt after another to soothe Molly’s hurts. He knew there was no denying her this, not after what they’d gone through to get permission to fly out there unescorted.
He reached back, pulled his knife from his ankle holster, and placed it hilt-first into her palm.
Molly situated herself in the tight confines, wedging her back against the side of the tunnel, her legs folded up beneath her. She gripped the knife with both hands and slammed its point down into the shell of the massive egg. There was a solid twack, like an axe on wood, but nothing more. She looked over at Cole as she reared the knife back once more.
“In my vision, I saw a Wadi claw doing this. ” Molly struck the egg again, harder this time. It left a mark, and she pulled the knife up for another blow. “I don’t think the moms sit on them. I think they guard them, and then they do something like this right before they die. ”
She hit the same spot, and a series of cracks appeared, fanning out from the impact. Molly ran her finger over one of the cracks, feeling it. Cole held the glowstick closer, but he was searching Molly’s face. There was a grim determination, a profound sadness there that he wanted desperately to break through. He had high hopes that this day, this mission she had spoken of for weeks, would do her some good. He was suddenly worried that nothing ever could.
“I think it’s trying to help,” Molly said.
Cole moved the light and redirected his attention. Something seemed to stir beneath the colorful shell. Molly scrambled to the next one, the knife attacking with vigor.
“We need to hurry,” she grunted between blows.
Cole extended the glowstick over the first egg to help light up the next two. He watched the creature inside the egg move like an amorphous shadow. Between Molly’s blows, he could feel something striking the egg beneath him, but from the inside.
Molly moved to the last egg. “We don’t have much more light,” Cole warned her. He worked the plastic back and forth, but his efforts did little. Molly struck the egg’s shell, her palm flat on the back of the knife’s hilt, both arms driving as hard as they could. She rubbed the cracks in the shell and whipped her head around to face Cole.
“Go,” she said.
Cole turned and went. He left the graspers behind and threw the glowstick ahead of him, crawling toward it on his palms and knees. When he reached the stick—barely glowing now—he scooped it up and tossed it further ahead, repeating the process until the light of the tunnel’s mouth came into view.
Behind him, something shrieked, a high and piercing wail that surfed down the skin of solid rock all around him. Cole looked over his shoulder for Molly. He stumbled forward, away from the blackness and toward the growing light. The peals of something newborn and powerful shot out again, the voices overlapping and resonating now that there was more than one of them. Cole scrambled the last few meters, dove for the edge of the tunnel, fell out to the shaded rock beyond and rolled to an aching, sore stop. He looked back to the hole in the cliff. The screams came in triplicate, now. Molly tumbled out after him.
“C’mon,” Cole yelled.
The shrieks from the tunnel mixed with moans from the canyon walls, the combination causing Cole’s heart to race. He reached for Molly, tried to pull her toward Parsona’s open bay, but she darted out of his reach and moved up against the cliff face to one side of the cave. She waved Cole over to her side, her arm wheeling in fast and tight circles, beckoning haste.
Cole dashed over, obeying. He took up a spot between Molly and the mouth of the cave, shielding her with his body. He felt her hands on his shoulder, on the side of his ribs. Her arms were trembling, but not with fear. He looked back to see the barest of smiles on his love’s lips, a sight that nearly erased the terror of the approaching screams and the harsh clack of claw on solid rock.
Cole put his arms around Molly and held her close while the awful sound grew and grew.
The first Wadi shot out of the cave in a shimmery blur. It shot out and kept moving, its feet not touching the rock, its body not falling toward the floor of the canyon. It burst out in a straight line, there was the leathery pop of fabric flapping straight in the air, and then a graceful curve up into the canyon winds.
“What the flank—?”
Cole traced the soaring flight of the Wadi as the next blur whizzed by to join its mate. The wings popped straight, the breadth of them several lengths of a man, and up the creature went, its colorful scales bursting with brilliance as it left the shade and met the light of the twin stars above.
Cole turned to Molly, wondering if she knew about any of this. He felt his own mouth agape as her hands clutched his flightsuit with a renewed vitality. He turned and saw her looking up at the two circling Wadi, a wide smile on her face, tears welling up in her eyes.
