“That’s creepy,” Marty said. “You sure they aren’t on Earth, too?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so. Or if they are, that Earth is progressing differently than this one. Because here, by 2012, the Firsts had taken over.”
“The Firsts?” asked Neahle.
“That’s what they call themselves. They say it’s because they are the first ‘real’ civilization on Ixeos. But we’ll get to that soon enough.” He reached over to the desk and grabbed a mug, taking a swig of water. “In 2001, the Firsts initiated coordinated attacks worldwide. They launched nuclear super-EMPs into the atmosphere, which fired off massive bursts of gamma radiation over the continents. The E1 pulse fried the world’s electrical conductors and destroyed computers and communications equipment. The E2 pulse, coming right on its heels, was similar to lightning when it fries your TV or refrigerator. Then the E3 pulse came along with the knockout punch, and it killed all the power transformers with a geomagnetic pulse.”
He paused, looking at the shocked faces of the newbies. He remembered the first time he’d heard this story, less than a decade after the event.
“Of course, the Firsts had protected some private networks and power plants. Even in our world, the government knows that they can and should protect against an EMP attack, but even the minimal systems they put in place in the Cold War have been allowed to become obsolete—meaning this isn’t impossible at home. At the same time all this was going on, they released biologic weapons in most of the third world, killing over three quarters of the world’s population…” He stopped, allowing this to sink in.
“Wait, what?” Marty finally managed. “There are over six billion people, at least on our Earth.”
“How could they kill…?” Neahle blinked back tears. “All those people, all the children…”
“The Firsts are not creatures of emotion. They learned to fake it as a psychopath does, when they were living here in secret, but to them, the goal was always a population they could control. There weren’t enough of them to control six billion people, and they didn’t care about all those third world cities and towns anyway. So when all the dust settled, the population of humans was about a million, and the population of the Firsts was less than a quarter of a million. But only the Firsts had electrical power, transportation, and access to food, and they withheld it from the people who were left until they caved.”
“Caved to what?” Clay asked, not wanting to know the answer.
“Slavery.”
Chapter Six
“Slavery?” Neahle asked incredulously.
“Yep. Our people—the humans—have been enslaved now for almost thirty-five years. The Firsts have rebuilt the large cities and that’s where they all live. Humans are tagged with GPS trackers and used for all sorts of labor. They’re not allowed to marry or live in family units. If one does get pregnant, she and the baby are killed immediately, so that doesn’t happen much anymore. The Firsts don’t procreate the way we do; they want to control all human reproduction so they can breed out the things that make us, well, us: independence, rebellion, loyalty, love, family.”
“How can they do that?” Marty asked.
“The Firsts only procreate in labs. They’re test tube babies, but all the way to birth. They always did it that way, although they went through elaborate ruses before the war so that their women appeared to have babies the human way. Now they’re trying to do the same with us and breed us in labs. They’ll raise the children to be slaves so that the children never know the love of family, or tenderness, or freedom. It’s taking awhile; they haven’t been able to get the children to survive long yet, so they’ve kept the humans who were here before the war alive to serve them. But when they have enough lab-bred slaves who are old enough to work, they’ll kill all the older people.”
Neahle was shaking her head in disbelief. “Americans wouldn’t become slaves!”
“They did. Life was really hard after the EMP. They used one gigantic one, detonated three hundred miles above Kansas, and it got the entire continental US. Think about it—no power, no water, no internet, no fuel, no food distribution. At your house in North Carolina, how many days worth of food and water do you have? Three? You’re in a hurricane area, so maybe seven? And you always expect the power to come back. Here, it never came back. Anything driven by electricity or with electrical circuits and computer chips, like cars, was dead. Fried. And the Firsts didn’t fix it. They had their own network where everything worked and they left the humans to starve, die of disease, and freeze to death… When they couldn’t take it anymore, they surrendered all over the planet.”
“No one fought back?” Clay asked.
“Oh yes, there were rebels. There still are. That’s where we come in. We’re here to help the rebels and free the humans.”
All three stared at him.
“Three hundred kids from another planet are going to fight a quarter of a million aliens and free the humans? Are you joking?” Marty said.
“No. We have some help. And if we can figure out how to free Darian, we’ll have a chance.”
“Darian?” asked Neahle.
“He’s the leader of the rebels. After the war he was leading thousands of rebels throughout Europe in an uprising against the Firsts. Somehow he even had armies amassed in the States and Asia, although we don’t know how he was communicating with them. They were making real headway against the Fists until he was captured. They caught him fifteen years ago.” Abacus raked his fingers through his hair, messing up the ponytail.
“Why didn’t they just kill him? Seems like they killed everyone else,” Marty said.
“They’re afraid that, if they kill him, it will incite the slaves and others to rebel. They still don’t know how he was communicating with humans all over the planet. Although technology is highly guarded and only the Firsts have things like phones and the internet, word still does get around, much to their chagrin. That’s another reason they’re trying to hurry along their lab breeding program. If they can get rid of all the people who knew Darian and know about his war against them, they can get rid of him once and for all.”
“So break into this prison and get him out,” Clay said.
“Yeah, thanks,” Abacus said dryly. “We did think of that. The problem is, the prison moves.”
“Moves?”
“Every week. The Firsts use the same transportation technology that brought them to the planet to move the prison. From what we can tell, there are twenty-six possible locations, and the prison moves to a new one each week, so it goes to each location twice each year. But the selection seems random, and we can’t find the building, organize a raid, and carry it out in under a week before it moves again.”
“Somebody must know where it’s going,” Marty said.
“Obviously, because they have facilities on the ground in each location to provide personnel, food, maintenance, all that kind of stuff. But we’ve done everything we can to figure out how they know, and it still seems random.”
“Pay someone off?” Clay suggested.
Abacus shook his head. “The Firsts aren’t candidates for a bribe. And the slaves are almost always too scared. But even if they still have some fight left in them, they’re monitored. It would be next to impossible to find a slave who worked close enough to a prison facility, or even in one, who was able to get the necessary information out in time.”
“Where are these sites?” Marty asked.
“Turkey, the Ukraine, New York, London, Naples…”
“Wait a second!” Marty interrupted. “If humans don’t have access to technology, how could you possibly get to any of those places for a rescue anyway?”
Abacus sat back and smiled a cat that ate the canary smile. “That’s where we have an advantage. We can get to almost all of the locations
through the tunnels.”
Once again, the McClellands stared at him open-mouthed. Finally, Marty spoke.
“Through the tunnels? Hannah said there were two hundred miles of them. Now, that’s a lot of tunnels, but it’s not enough to get you to Turkey!”
“Not normally, no,” Abacus agreed. “But the tunnels here on Ixeos aren’t normal.”
“Wait!” Neahle said. “Riley said there was a cave-in by Atlanta…” She frowned, thinking.
“That’s right,” Abacus said. “My brother has mapped a lot the tunnels. That’s why they call him Vasco, for Vasco da Gama, the explorer. And while we can’t find a way back to our own Earth, what we have found are tunnels that lead to other tunnels all over Ixeos. The oldest ones are best, but we can get into dozens of cities that have a tunnel system.”
“You mean like subways?” Clay asked.
“Subways, underground malls, bunkers, catacombs, you name it. And we haven’t found them all yet.”
“So we can go down that tunnel with the cave-in, go through some door, and end up in Atlanta?” Neahle asked.
“Yep. In the subway. Atlanta’s not very stable though. That’s why the old tunnels are best. Sometimes you go to Atlanta and you can’t get back when you need to.”
Marty shook his head in wonder. “That’s incredible! So we could go to, like, Rome, and wander around the tourist stuff there?”
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of time for sightseeing. But yes, you could. You probably will go to Rome, if not to wander around. But that’s all for now. The others are waiting for you for dinner, and that’s about all your brain can handle today. We’ll meet again tomorrow with Vasco. There’s a lot going on up top right now, so you won’t have the luxury of making yourselves at home here for too long.”
He stood and held out his hand once again. They all shook it but only Marty returned his smile. Leaving the office, they were silent, each trying to figure out this new world and their place in it.
“Weird, huh?” Hannah said as they walked across the passageway and entered the library. The large room was lined floor to ceiling with books. Neahle wandered over to a section of shelves, reading off titles. There were novels, biographies, histories, and what looked like journals.
“Yeah, totally weird,” Marty agreed, smiling. “I think it’s pretty awesome, as long as I don’t think about the not-going-home part.”
Samson clapped him on the back. “That’s how you gotta look at it. We’re here to make a difference, and we were picked out especially for this job. I guess you could say this is what we were born to do. It sure ain’t no accident we’re here… This kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident.”
“Not with Landon, anyway,” Riley said.
“Except for Rod,” Hannah said. Turning to Clay, she finished, “My ex.”
Neahle scowled. “You keeping talking about him. I don’t understand how he came by accident if no one comes that isn’t brought by this Landon.”
Hannah shrugged. “Maybe Landon doesn’t know everything. One thing I know: we don’t have a choice to come here, but we do have a choice once we get here. We can either help the rebels or not. It’s pretty much that simple.”
“What happens if we don’t? Do we get kicked out?” Clay asked, picking up a book on military history and thumbing through it.
“Not really,” Riley said.
“What does that mean?” Clay asked angrily. This alternative universe thing was making him cranky.
“It means a few, like Rod, have come here and not gone with the program. They can’t go home, and Abacus doesn’t kick them out; he just asks that they do things around here to earn their keep. You know, cook, scavenge up top for clothes and supplies, that kind of thing. Usually they do it for awhile, but not going on missions, not being sold on the cause, makes them feel like outsiders, and they end up leaving.”
“Leaving?” Neahle asked. “Where do they go?”
Samson glanced at Riley, who nodded. “They go up top and try to live secretly. We know of four, including Rod. Two are dead, one got captured by the Firsts, implanted with a GPS tracker, and sent to work on a farm outside of Omaha. And Rod…”
“Rod,” Hannah said with disgust, “is missing.”
Chapter Seven
The kitchens had been set up in a series of adjoining chambers running off the back of the living area. The last of the rooms had a tall ceiling with large crevices running across it, and the cooking area was set up here so that the smoke and heat were drawn off through them like chimneys. There was a large medieval-looking fireplace with a huge spit in the middle; several iron stands holding large pots were resting on the floor. A camp stove had been set up on another wall, a line of propane tanks trailing off beside it. On the third wall a stone oven had been built, the hot air, smoke and steam rising up through one particularly large crack in the roof.
Three people were cooking in the small space. A teenage girl with long black hair pulled back in a braid was monitoring bread in the oven. She turned and smiled when they came in, a bakers peel in one hand.
“Hey! I’m Sarah. Nice to meet you.” She had a ready grin, friendly blue eyes, and a tall, slim build. Her eyes were a startling sapphire blue.
“Marty,” the young man said, smitten. “How old are you?”
Laughing, the girl said, “Eighteen. You?”
“Me, too. Same. Uh, eighteen.” He mentally gave his forehead a smack. Why was he always such a doofus with girls?
Glancing with pity at her cousin, Neahle jumped in. “I’m Neahle, eighteen. This is my brother Clay, nineteen...”
“Almost twenty…” Clay grumbled.
“Almost twenty,” his sister agreed with a smile.
“Over there is Will. He’s thirty and our head chef,” Sarah said. A short Asian man with his long hair pushed behind his ears was stirring a large aluminum pot. He smiled at them and kept stirring.
“And that’s Kiara, turning the spit. She’s sixteen.” The girl’s skin was the color of bittersweet chocolate, her eyes an unusual amber. She grinned at them, her muscular arm turning the heavy iron spit over the fire, the meat on it sizzling and brown.
“We’re gonna have venison tonight—you got here at the right time! We don’t get deer very often, but Vasco and the boys brought one down on Guernsey. It’s a nice fat one. Should be just about done; just need Will to check it out,” Kiara said.
Will nodded but kept stirring. “He takes his sauce very seriously,” Sarah whispered.
“Let’s get out of their hair; looks like we’ve got a little while til dinner.” Samson led the way back through the cold storage room and the prep area. Neahle noticed baskets full of root vegetables, tomatoes, unshucked corn, and apples, alongside large plastic bins holding what appeared to be different grains and flour.
“Where does all this come from?” she asked.
“All over. Whenever we can, we bring fresh stuff back from our missions. Meat isn’t on the menu as much as most of us would like, but we eat it when we’re topside, so it’s not too bad. I brought back a bushel of apples last week when I went to Montreal,” Riley said as he picked a few out of a basket and handed them around.
“Montreal? Canada?” Mary asked.
“Yeah… You’ll see a map tomorrow. Probably best not to think about it tonight or you’ll never sleep. Jet lag’ll be hard enough to get over.”
“Jet lag? We didn’t fly anywhere,” Clay said, biting his apple and wiping juice from his chin.
“No, but you came from Eastern Daylight Time, right? Now you’re in Paris; we’re six hours ahead. That’s why we’re getting ready for dinner…” Riley took an enormous bite from his apple, savoring the crunchy sweetness.
Clay shook his head, overwhelmed and confused. They’d kayaked less than a mile
, walked a few hundred yards, climbed through another hundred feet of pipe, and ended up six hours ahead, in a France that didn’t exist in his world. He took another bite of his apple. Maybe he’d been in an accident and this was all just a coma-induced dream. One could always hope.
The dining area was a wide passageway coming off the prep area of the kitchen. Rough tables and benches had been stretched down the center of the hall with enough seating for at least a hundred. Less than fifty gathered around the tables on the McClellands’ first night in Paris; all were welcoming. They were soon overwhelmed with names and stories, and were glad that they were seated together. The food was surprisingly delicious. Fresh loaves of bread were accompanied by butter. Will had made a red wine sauce with pearl onions, mushrooms, bacon and cream that was perfect with the gamey meat. Plates of grapes, apples, and berries were passed around.
Marty chewed his crusty bread thoughtfully. “They’ve got a pretty amazing set up down here,” he observed. “Fresh food, the air is okay, there’s apparently water for drinking and washing and bathing. Dorms, a library… It’s pretty sweet!”
“Sweet?” Clay asked in amazement. “We’re two hundred feet underground, apparently recruited to fight some kind of alien serial killers, and we can’t get home! How is that sweet?”
Neahle laid a hand on his wrist just above his tattoo. Her thumb rubbed the spot. “We’ll be okay, Clay,” she said quietly. “We just need to get our bearings. You know. Figure out what we’re supposed to do.”
Clay put his hand over hers for a minute, then pulled his arm away. “How do we know that what these people are saying is true? It’s nuts! And this Landon—who’s he supposed to be? How come he can leave here, and we can’t?”
“We’ll find more out tomorrow,” Marty said. “But we were chosen, dude. There’s something we can do here to make a difference in this rebellion thing, and that makes us special. I mean, Landon chose us for a reason, right?”
Ixeos: Book One of the Ixeos Trilogy Page 4
