Children of a Dead Earth Book One

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

“But you’re not going to?”

  “Nope. I can’t get at Feng directly, he’s too well protected. But I can try to figure out who attacked me.”

  “I see.” Devorah picked a bit of lint off her jacket. “How can I help?”

  “Actually, I went down to the reclamation ponds looking for Mr Kite, but I was told he’d been transferred here, at your request.”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “I wouldn’t have bet on it, no.”

  “Mr Kite is more knowledgeable and passionate than any two of my staffers, and that’s saying something. It would’ve been a waste of talent to leave him fixing leaky shit pipes. Besides, this way I can keep an eye on him if he gets any funny ideas about coming out of retirement.”

  “Keep your enemies closer, hey?”

  “Something like that. Why do you want to see him, is he in more trouble?”

  “Not at all,” Benson said. “I just want to tap his expertise for a few minutes.”

  “Right. He’s down in the archives. I’ll let you in.”

  “You let him down into the vault by himself?”

  Devorah smirked. “Yes, and I will let him back out again when I feel like it.”

  “You’re evil.”

  “I’m efficient. C’mon, I want to catch up with the tour again.”

  “Don’t tell me you have a soft spot for kids. That would wreck your whole image.”

  Devorah put a hand on her hip. “Well, someone has to instill some respect for history into them. Their parents certainly aren’t doing it.”

  A minute later, Benson was back underneath the museum. Salvador heard his approaching footsteps and looked up from his workbench. “Oh lord, what do you want now?”

  Benson put up his hands disarmingly. “It’s fine, Sal, you’re not in any trouble this time either. I just wanted to ask you something.”

  Salvador squinted. “Off the grid.”

  “As off the grid as anything gets around here, yes.”

  “You’re a copper. Don’t you have any other perps to harass?”

  “Not of your… caliber, no.”

  It was true. In his ten years on the job, he’d slapped a lot of wrists, but by and large they had all been good people who had either forgotten the little rules, or had done well enough that they forgot the little rules still applied to them. The one really bad guy he’d busted had been led into a specially-modified hyperbaric chamber to be executed by nitrogen asphyxiation.

  “Yeah, well,” Sal finally said, “I guess that makes me a crooked unicorn.” He pushed away from the bench and put his hands in his lap. “What can I do for you today?”

  “I need to know about people without plants.”

  “Babies get a plant while they’re still in the tanks. Everybody knows that.”

  “Of course, but what about babies that aren’t born in the tanks?”

  Sal’s eyes narrowed. “Who told you about them?”

  Bingo, Benson thought. “No one told me. Someone attacked me with a knife and my stun-stick didn’t work, and they weren’t wearing aluminum foil on their head. I figured the rest out from there.”

  “That’s not their way.”

  “That’s not whose way?”

  Sal sighed long and hard. “I don’t want to bring them any trouble.”

  Something about the way he’d said it gave Benson the impression that he wasn’t talking about just one person.

  “I’m only looking for the person who attacked me, and probably helped to kill Edmond Laraby. They have brought trouble on themselves. Whoever else is out there doesn’t have to worry about me.”

  Sal turned Benson’s assurance over in his head, churning over what to do.

  “C’mon Sal, you can trust me on this.”

  “You did right by me, sure enough. OK, here’s the deal. There’s a small community that lives down in the guts of the habitats, below the surface.”

  “How small a community?”

  “No idea, but it can’t be many. They call themselves ‘the Unbound,’ but the muckers just call them Geisha.”

  “They’re all women?”

  “I expect not, but the girls are all anyone sees, maybe all we were allowed to see. I only ever met one of them.”

  “What did they want?” Benson asked.

  “Well, to trade for things, of course. Food mostly, but medicine too, and old clothes that were tagged for recycling.”

  “What would they trade for in return?”

  “Services…” Sal shuffled in his chair.

  “What kind of services?”

  “Christ, man, it’s the oldest profession in the world. Do I have to draw you a picture? Actually, I’m sure there’s some racy lithographs in a box down here somewhere.”

  Normally, that would have presented a big problem. Prostitution was expressly illegal aboard the Ark. It didn’t tend to promote social stability, for one thing, and sex was not recognized as a service that contributed to the functioning of the ship or the mission, so it was illegal to spend money on it, at least directly. Any other day and Benson would have to write him up for admitting to being a John, not to mention at least a dozen other violations of the Conservation Codes for wasting medicine, food, failing to recycle clothing…

  But he wasn’t in Avalon, so technically he couldn’t charge Sal even if he’d wanted to. And if it should simply slip his mind to tell Chief Bahadur the next time they spoke, well, who could blame him for that?

  Benson put up his hands. “OK, I get the picture. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. How long have they been down there?”

  “No idea, twenty years at least. Probably longer, though, judging by the age of the gir… young women.”

  “I have to conveniently forget an awful lot of this conversation after I leave here, you understand that, right?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Can you set up a meeting? I need to talk to them.”

  Sal snorted. “You don’t go to see them. They come to see you, and only when they’re ready. Besides, I’m out of the loop. I ain’t been down to see her in years. I’m a little past my expiration date for that sort of thing.”

  “C’mon, how hard to find can they be?”

  Sal looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Have you even been in the sublevels? Never went down on a Halloween dare?”

  “Yeah, of course I did.” Everyone had. Sneaking down into the basement levels was a rite of passage among primary school kids. Most of them didn’t make it much past the first sublevel. Benson had gone back and fixed the sticky hatch he and his friends had used as kids.

  “The first thing you gotta understand is there’s six levels,” Sal went on. “Think of it as a six-story building wrapped all the way around Avalon.”

  “I know that,” Benson said defensively, but, if he was honest, the full implications of it had never sunk in. He did the math in his head, ignoring the plant calculator that automatically popped up when he struggled momentarily. Each habitat was two kilometers long, times two wide, times pi. Just over twelve and a half square kilometers, times six. Right around seventy-five square kilometers of area to search, in each habitat.

  Sal saw the light dawning on Benson’s face. “That’s right, now you get it.”

  “Holy crap. What’s down there?”

  “Plumbing mostly, and a shitload of electrical conduits and atmospheric ducting. But that’s mostly in the top three levels. Below that are the ballast tanks–”

  “Ballast tanks? This isn’t a submarine.”

  Sal rolled his eyes. “You’ve been living on this barge your whole life and never wondered how it worked? The ballast tanks balance out people moving around and keep the habitats spinning straight. If you have ten thousand people collected by the lake for a beach party, that’s a thousand tons all in one place that needs to be balanced out on the other side of the module. Otherwise you start getting stresses on the main bearings that’ll burn them out if you let it go on too long. Those parts can’t fail, we hav
e no way to replace them, and they’ve had to run continuously for more than two centuries. So, whenever there’s an imbalance, we pump water from one set of tanks to another to cancel it out.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Sal shrugged. “I’ve bounced around from one dirty job to the next for thirty years. You pick up things. Anyway, after that the last levels are mostly just structural matrix, insulation, and radiation shielding. Each level gets colder with more cosmic ray exposure the lower you go, so I’d take a jacket with you. If you get to the bottom, I wouldn’t recommend staying for very long, not that you’ll want to.”

  “So, how do I find one of these Geisha if you can’t introduce me?”

  “Go down there and wait. Hope one of them takes an interest in you.”

  “How will they know I’m there?”

  “Believe me, nothing happens on their turf that the Unbound don’t know about. They’ll be watching you the second the lift doors open.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The doors slid open and a rush of cool air licked Benson’s face. The space outside was dark and cramped with a maze of pipes in every size and color, providing countless opportunities to bash one’s forehead or shins.

  Sal had given him what meager intel he could. He knew which lift to take down, and he knew it would be dark. The Unbound preferred the dark, so they’d simply disabled the motion detectors that controlled the lights inside their territory.

  Benson had run back to his apartment to throw on a turtleneck under his sport jacket and grab a hand torch to fight against the cold and shadows. On a whim, he also pocketed the tablet he’d broken in a fit of anger and a few protein bars so he had something to barter with. He felt ready for what he’d been told to expect.

  What he wasn’t ready for was the decay. He stepped out of the lift and flicked on the torch only to be met by two centuries of neglect. Paint flakes the size of potato chips curled off the thin, perforated metal frame members. Insulation foam yellowed by age disintegrated and accumulated on the deck in little piles that looked like muffin mix. Corrosion streaked any unprotected metal. Rust crept into his nostrils, smelling of dried blood.

  Benson stopped a few steps outside the lift for a long, uncomfortable moment. His younger self didn’t remember the decay, either because he hadn’t noticed, or had been too young to understand its significance. It was the only place where the Ark revealed her true age. But seeing the rot down here made the pristine buildings and perfectly manicured parks only ten meters above his head seem all the more artificial. A façade.

  It was an eerie feeling, to say the least, made all the more unsettling by the overpowering quiet. Even in the dead of night, the habitats bustled with activity. A constant din of machinery, conversations, even wind rustling through the trees filled the air. But down here, its absence was deafening. The only sound Benson’s ears could pick up was the metronomic tap-tap-tap of water leaking from a loose pipe fitting somewhere in the distance.

  The sound of the closing lift doors startled him. Already he regretted coming alone. It had made sense at the time; Theresa was busy holding down the Avalon unit and spare manpower was hard to come by. He’d thought about bringing Bahadur along again, but being the chief here in Shangri-La, he wouldn’t have the luxury of overlooking any code violations he saw, which, if Sal’s intel was right, would be numerous. That, and Benson didn’t want it to look like he was leading a raiding party to round up these Unbound once and for all.

  All of those considerations made Benson think it was best to fly alone for this one, but now a sick feeling trickling up his spine made him wonder how much of his old Zero captain’s ego had pushed that decision.

  He pushed forward regardless. The air was cool, damp, and stale. It felt utterly abandoned, like the ruins of a long forgotten city. People were always walking about in the habitats. You had to work to escape them and find any privacy. But here? No one came down here unless something broke, and they obviously limited their time to whatever it took to complete the work order and not a second more.

  Benson couldn’t help but think of the isolation he had felt inside the EVA pod. He had to remind himself people lived down here. They’d just grown very adept at being seen only when it suited them.

  The piping and ductwork only got thicker as he ventured further away from the lift. Benson had, hesitantly, downloaded a schematic of the lower levels and synched it up to his plant. A ghostly white map floated in an overlay on the right side of his vision, but it quickly became clear the schematics were inaccurate, out of date, or both. Paths that should have been open were cluttered with pipes, square ducts, or large gauge electrical conduits. Signs of splices and bypasses were everywhere. Benson marveled at how patched up his home was just under the surface. It was obvious now why these levels were restricted. If the cattle understood just how fragile the bubbles they lived in really were, mass panic would follow.

  What had Mahama said? Appearances to maintain, he thought sourly. Sweeping his torch around, Benson wondered if appearances were the only thing the crew maintained. He swiped a fingertip over the top of an ancient electrical box, leaving a shallow trench in the accumulated dust.

  “I must remember to speak with the maid about this.”

  Someone giggled behind him. Benson span around on a heel and jabbed his torch at the sound like a spear, but saw no one. He took a deep breath, then let it leak back out nice and slow. Maybe his mind was playing tricks. The torch cast long, strange shadows through the maze of pipes and conduits. With a million places to hide, it only made sense that his brain stem would start to insert monsters into every nook and cranny.

  A light sound of footsteps came from behind him. Again Benson span around and shone the light, and again he was met by empty air. He thought about turning the light off completely. It was messing with his night vision and made him far too easy to spot.

  But he was trying to be found, wasn’t he? Instead of chasing ghosts or shouting into the darkness, Benson decided it was best to just sit down and wait. He found a little clearing in the forest of conduits and laid out the items he’d brought for barter in front of him, then crossed his legs and leaned back against a large diameter air duct. Hopefully, it wouldn’t take long before whoever was out there grew tired of playing hide and seek.

  The duct was a return line from the surface and warmed his back. As he waited, Benson wondered just how many of the Unbound there could be. The space down here in the basement levels would be enough to fit the entire human population a dozen times over.

  However, it was a question of resources, not room. The people living down here scraped by on whatever they could barter or steal from the surface. Margins up top for food, water, oxygen, and raw materials for clothing, furniture, and electronics were incredibly thin. The total population never varied more than a tenth of a percent due to strict birth licensing. Any more than that threatened to collapse the whole life support infrastructure.

  With every cup of water and calorie of food monitored, how many people could possibly survive on table scraps before the drag was noticed? Twenty? Fifty? Probably no more than that. Still, if things went badly, twenty people were more than enough to make sure Benson never made it back to the surface to tell the tale. Sal had said they were nonviolent and preferred to avoid confrontations. If trouble came looking, they just melted deeper into the lower levels and waited it out.

  Benson hoped he was right. His stun-stick would be useless against these folks, and if the last time he fought without it was any indication, the outcome wouldn’t be in his favor. Just as the first shiver of cold ran through his legs, Benson heard footsteps. Not echoes this time, but a slow, deliberate pace. With all the obstructions, he still couldn’t place the exact direction. They stopped as abruptly as they’d started.

  Goosebumps on the back of his neck stood at attention. The whole scene was starting to feel too much like a dozen different horror movies he’d watched with Theresa at the Golden Age Theater. He con
tinued to sit, trying to look impassive and unthreatening.

  A sharp clang of metal hitting the deck sent a tremor through Benson’s body as if he’d been shocked. That had definitely come from behind him. He jumped to his feet and turned around to see past the air duct he’d been leaning against.

  Nothing.

  “Getting tired of this game, friends,” he shouted into the shadows. He turned around to settle back in when he saw eyes staring at him.

  A startled little yelp emerged from his mouth. A girl crouched on top of a junction box considered him with almond-shaped eyes. Just like with his attacker, Benson’s plant had no information to offer about her.

  She looked down at him curiously, then slowly unfolded like an origami crane until her feet touched the deck. She stood at her full height, which, at a meter and a half, wasn’t much. A light blue, formfitting dress clung to her thin, elegant frame, swelling at her hips and ending just above her knees.

  It wasn’t hard to see why the workers down here called them Geisha. Her Asian ancestry was obvious from the shape of her eyes to her straight, raven-black hair. Her skin was smooth and milky, save for some dirt on her hands and knees, made all the more pale by the contrast against the darkness surrounding her. She almost looked painted. As she gazed down at him, Benson realized she wore no makeup, but her face was all the more striking because of it.

  And young. So young.

  Her attention turned from studying Benson to the items he’d set out for barter. Without saying a word, she knelt down and picked up one of the protein bars, tossed the wrapper aside, and sniffed it. Benson almost scolded her for littering, but fought back the reflex. She took a small nibble from a corner with her tiny mouth. Apparently satisfied, she set it down and moved on to the broken tablet. She pressed the power button and the screen lit up her face. In spite of the shattered glass, she looked up at Benson and smiled excitedly.

  The smile turned into more of a smirk as she set the tablet down to stalk towards Benson on her hands and knees like a jungle cat. Despite the girl being half his size, he actually retreated from her until his back was flat against the air duct behind him.