Shattered Skies

by ALICE HENDERSON

  When she got close enough, she saw a jagged piece of metal had run clear through his stomach. Another piece had sunk into his shoulder, a two-foot piece of rusted rebar that had pierced above his lung. He gasped, gritting his teeth. They had to get him up, and fast. His eyes went wide as he looked behind them. Two more AUVs joined the first, hovering in the water a few dozen feet away. Another discharge of bubbles streamed out from the closest one, sending a projectile tearing through the water.

  She grabbed Dirk’s arm and kicked upward, barely clearing the building as the second explosive thunked into its side. Seconds later it detonated, sending them tumbling through the water. She lost her bearings, and for a second couldn’t figure out which way was up. Then she saw the bright surface of the water and started to kick toward it. But the third AUV maneuvered itself between them and the surface, angling itself down to fire. Raven was suddenly beside them, taking Dirk’s other arm.

  She glanced at her O2 meter. Three minutes left. They weren’t going to make it.

  Dirk started struggling against them, shoving them away. She watched, confused as he grabbed something off Raven and kicked toward the hole in the docking door. Then she saw a jet of fire stream out from him. He’d grabbed the pocket pyro and cranked it all the way up. The AUVs maneuvered in the water, angling toward the heat signature. He swam furiously, blood streaming out from his stomach and shoulder in waves. He made it to the hole and pulled himself through.

  “Dirk, what are you doing?” H124 shouted.

  “Get to the surface!” he shouted.

  She looked at her oxygen gauge. Two minutes.

  “We’re not going without you!” She started kicking toward the hole just as the first AUV reached it.

  “They’re programmed to protect the facility!” Dirk shouted. “They’re not going to bother with you if I’m in here with a jet of fire.”

  Sure enough, the AUVs sped toward him, all three disappearing through the hole behind him.

  “Dirk!” she shouted.

  “Come back out!” Raven pleaded over the comm.

  “Astoria wouldn’t want this. She died to save you!” H124 yelled.

  “I know,” he gasped through the pain. She heard him swallow hard. “So let it count for something. Get that launch vehicle and save the planet. Go!”

  They heard two explosions and a stream of bubbles erupted from the hole as fiery light streamed out.

  “Damn it!” she cursed. Raven grabbed her arm and started kicking them toward the surface. “We can’t leave him!”

  And then she ran out of air. She gasped, her lungs rebelling. She felt her stomach tremble, as her mouth opened and shut in vain. She kept kicking, sensing that her whole body was about to burst. Raven’s body kicked and convulsed; for a moment her eyes met his in the dark water, and in them she saw terror. Up and up they kicked, clawing for the surface. Her vision tunneled, and her brain felt like it was about to explode. The world grew tiny, narrow, and black-and-white. But the white parts got brighter, and suddenly she was breaking through the surface. She tore off her mask. Raven emerged next to her, his body flopping. She tore off his face mask, and he gasped in a ragged breath of air.

  About a hundred yards away, they saw the conning tower of the submarine.

  “We’re here!” she said over the comm, waving. “But give the facility a wide berth. There are three more of those things down there.”

  A watchman spotted them and climbed back into the sub. It motored toward them, skirting on the surface around the outside edge of the facility.

  Her heart thudded in her chest. Her mind struggled to understand what had just happened, that they’d lost Dirk. She could hear the dull thrumming of the sub’s engines in the water as it motored toward them, but it felt like it was a million miles away.

  When they’d almost reached her and Raven, she heard the weapons officer call out over the comm. “Sir! Coming up beneath us! Another AUV!”

  “All ahead full! Right to 160!” shouted the captain.

  The sub wheeled to the side, and she and Raven started to swim backward. A dark shape sped up through the water below. But it didn’t pause to take aim at the sub. It careened toward the surface, bursting into the air with explosive force. Immediately she saw that something was attached to it, which slid off into the water, floating on the surface. “Dirk!” she shouted, kicking over to him. The AUV sank back down into the depths as Dirk struggled to stay afloat.

  She and Raven reached him, treading water with him between them, ripping off his mask. He drew in a harsh breath. His head bobbed, but a wry smile came to his face. “Astoria always said there wasn’t anything I couldn’t rewire.” He coughed. “The other two are destroyed.”

  H124 grinned, then said over the comm, “It’s okay to pick us up. The AUVs have been neutralized.”

  And they floated there, their friend between them. Blood seeped out around Dirk, and already he was losing consciousness. They’d have to get him to a medpod fast, but he was alive.

  She gazed up at the blue sky. A storm was brewing to the southeast. Looked like it was going to be a doozy. She thought of the hurricane she and Raven had braved.

  As the sub drew closer, she looked out at strange skeletal platforms dotting the horizon. She’d learned people had once lived on these massive platforms, stations that had once drilled deep down into the seabed to extract oil. It had been a dangerous place to live back then, with violent explosions that killed workers, and accidents that spewed millions of gallons of oil out into pristine waters, destroying wildlife.

  She’d seen similar rigs out in the distance when Raven had taken her up to the northernmost extent of the continent above Sanctuary City. He’d told her that both locations had once been wildly diverse places full of myriad marine wildlife, but that after several disasters on the oil rigs, millions of gallons of oil had washed up on shore, killing countless birds and other flora and fauna besides.

  Now she tried to imagine what it had been like, teeming with creatures, vibrant coral communities with colorful fish. Next to her, Dirk bled into the ocean, and they all held on to each other, bobbing with the waves.

  Chapter 3

  H124 gazed out over a flat, dry brown landscape. Orion and Onyx had dug around in the Rover archives, poring over ancient historical documents, and finally found a probable location for the A14. When low-lying areas in the east had flooded, museums had moved priceless collections westward to the interior of the continent. A lot of vehicles from the old space program had been moved to a location just east of Delta City called the Museum of Innovation and Science.

  Gordon, her stalwart friend and pilot, had picked up H124, Raven, and Dirk in his Lockheed Vega, eager to see the A14, if it still existed. Dirk had healed in a medpod, but his side still bothered him. Sitting across the plane aisle from her, he winced. All three had developed the bends after surfacing so fast, and each had to spend time in a medpod.

  As they approached the coordinates, H124 gazed out the plane window. Raven sat a few rows ahead in the small jet, studying the museum’s layout on his PRD. Below, dirt billowed and swirled in the relentless wind, and even though the plane’s climate controls hummed in the cabin, it couldn’t compensate for the hot, dry air outside. Dirt devils wound away on the landscape, and in the distance, a pair of long, parallel metal tracks stretched to the horizon. She swallowed, her throat dry and scratchy. She looked at her PRD, studying the photograph of what the original entrance to the museum had looked like.

  A large glass structure had stood above ground, with lush green grass and bright rows of flowers surrounding the building. They’d built most of the museum underground as a way to protect the spacecraft and to keep visitors cool and comfortable without wasting a lot of energy on climate control. It stayed cool under there, and the protection from UV radiation had been an additional preservation measure for the air and spacecraft.


  The old photo showed happy patrons approaching the entrance, while others read informative signs at outdoor displays. There had been demonstration gardens with plants from all over the world, an old Thor-Delta rocket standing off to one side, and a Republic P-47 Thunderbolt plane mounted on a stand a few dozen yards away.

  Gordon circled, setting down right at the coordinates. He slowed, bumping along the rough ground and coming to a stop. She gazed out. All that had endured were the rusted remains of the stand the plane had been mounted on, now lying on its side in the dirt. She could see the vague outline of the foundation of the building’s aboveground portion.

  A person could walk right over this area and not even know it was there.

  They’d brought explosives in case they had to blast their way in, and from the looks of it, that was exactly what they’d have to do.

  Raven consulted his PRD, gathering his bearings. “Looks like they probably loaded craft in through some big docking doors to the south. The public entrance was on the north side of the complex. For now, it’d be a smaller job just to blast our way through the smaller main entrance.”

  They piled out of the plane, loading a maglev with packs of explosives. H124 checked her toolbag. It had been growing heavier by the week. In addition to her rain gear, water bottle, multitool, and pocket pyro, she now carried the flight suit she’d used to infiltrate Delta City with Astoria. It folded up neatly in a brick-sized pack, so it was worth keeping with her.

  Raven moved to the north side of the complex, and studied a location in the dirt. “The main entrance should be under here.”

  Gordon and Dirk set up the explosives, and they all withdrew to a safe distance. Sweat poured down her back in the sweltering heat. Gordon’s white hair stood out in unruly tufts on his beige scalp, and he dabbed at the sweat with the red rag that always hung out of his back pocket. She watched Gordon work, his body spry for his eighty-plus years, his overalls hanging loosely on his bony frame. She always found his energy and enthusiasm inspiring. “Fire in the hole!” Gordon called out as a deafening explosion tore through the afternoon, sending up a massive cloud of dirt. When it settled, the resulting crater exposed two rusted doors.

  Raven cut through them with a pyro, and they fell away, exposing a cavernous underground space. Stale air rasped out, cobwebs fluttering in the darkness. H124 donned her headlamp and switched it on. The beam fell on displays and dusty equipment.

  She entered the quiet cool of the museum, instantly grateful for the relief from the relentless heat. They’d been smart to build it underground. Much of the museum was still intact. A wide staircase led down to a lower level. On the ceiling hung a jet of some kind—she’d looked through numerous books on aircraft, but didn’t know this exact model, though she recognized it as a combat plane.

  They split up, exploring different rooms. In the first hall on the right she discovered a collection of old planes. She explored the hall, reading their placards. A silver one with a painted name was called The Spirit of St. Louis. Hanging from the ceiling was a yellow Beechcraft C17L Staggerwing from 1936 and a black Curtiss R3C-2 seaplane from 1925. Nearby, taking up a section of floor space, stood a delicately winged 1903 Wright Flyer.

  In the next room, she stopped before a display that read, “How Do You Contribute?” Originally it had been a powered display. A cord snaked off into the wall. She pulled out the wire and hooked it up to her PRD’s power cell. Light flickered from a contraption in the floor and filled the old display. H124 stepped back in wonder. Three-dimensional people suddenly stood before her, all made of light. Green grass stretched into the distance, and huge living trees shaded the area, their leaves rustling in the wind.

  “What are you doing to help the planet?” the voice of an off-screen interviewer asked. A smiling man faced the camera. He wore brown shorts and a collared white-striped shirt, his hair cut short, his face red with sunburn.

  “I teach my kids to respect the earth.”

  “And what have they done so far?”

  In the background H124 could see the man’s kids kicking around a black-and-white ball. One of them kicked it past the other and let out a whoop.

  The man continued to beam. “Oh, well, nothing yet. But they’ll teach their kids, too.”

  The scene shifted to show an older woman smiling into the camera. “And what do you do to help?” the interviewer asked.

  She grinned. “If I can make just one person smile, I’ve made a difference.”

  The display shifted to a woman with long blonde dreadlocks, a white knitted tank top, and a flowing rainbow skirt. “And what do you do to help?” asked the off-camera interviewer.

  “I figure if I can convince two people to be more green-minded, then those two people will convince four more people, and those four will convince eight, and on and on until everyone on the planet has a greener mindset.”

  “And why do you think that hasn’t already happened?”

  Her smile faltered. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, conservation has been a part of the global dialogue since the days of writers and thinkers like John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Rachel Carson. Why didn’t their thinking convince two people, who went on to convince four, who went on to convince eight? If that worked, wouldn’t we already be a predominantly green-minded society?”

  The woman stared into the camera, her smile now gone.

  The green display turned brown and black, and in the ensuing darkness, the off-camera voice said, “And what are you doing to help?”

  The display went dark, and H124 stood for a few minutes, processing what she’d just seen, thinking of the ruined landscape above her. The last person interviewed…the idea wasn’t a bad one. So why hadn’t it worked, this passage of ideas from one person to the next?

  But H124 already knew the answer. The PPC was the last holdout from this culture that valued greed and power over the preservation of the planet. The woman’s theory didn’t work because for every one of her, there were millions of other people passing on the idea that personal gain was more important than a communal, earth-friendly attitude. Make money. Take what you can get. Think in the short term. That signal had been a thousand times more powerful than conservation, and in the end, even when things had become so dire with rising sea levels, megastorms causing massive damage, and CO2 levels changing the very composition of the earth-ocean system, greed still won out.

  She thought of the PPC destroying the experimental forest Raven’s parents had worked so hard to maintain, all so the media execs could furnish their offices with wood. The mentality was still present, and powerfully so.

  “You okay?” came Dirk’s voice from across the room. She turned to him, unplugging her PRD from the display.

  She turned to him. “Yeah. This place is just…”

  “Haunting?”

  She blinked. “Yeah. It’s hitting you that way, too?”

  He gazed over his shoulder. “All these amazing inventions, this dedication to learning and exploration. I feel like we’re on some alien world, or that we discovered a long-lost civilization. Can’t believe these were our ancestors.”

  He hooked his thumb to the left. “Looks like there’s a whole room about airships over there.” He moved past her, on to a different section of the museum.

  The next room did indeed hold photographs and artifacts from a variety of early airships. And finally she knew why the PPC ships were called “airships.” Early ones had been filled with helium or hydrogen, the latter being highly flammable and dangerous. She stopped at a photograph depicting a huge airship on fire, anchored to a metal scaffolding of some kind. Over the years, airships had gotten sleeker and slimmer, more maneuverable. She stopped at a display showing the undercarriage of an airship prototype, instantly recognizing it as an early model of what the PPC now flew.

  The base was triangular, with a sleek but small cabin, jus
t big enough for a weapons officer, pilot, and two or three additional crew members. This particular airship had been fitted out in luxury, with a mirrored bar, comfortable sitting area, and several bedrooms at the back. The exhibit described how the airship was fitted with a flexible solar array that could create super-heated air to the give the airship lift. The original designer had gone bankrupt, unable to find backers for his new design. The military had stepped in, buying the patent and designing a series of weapons that could be mounted on the underside of the cabin, devastating discharges of energy that could destroy whole villages in a single blast.

  She thought of the airship that had destroyed the Black Canyon Badlander camp, and of the one who had fired on them on the east coast when they’d been out retrieving the first piece of the blast deflection craft. The weapon was certainly effective.

  She passed through to the next room, meeting Raven as he emerged from a connecting chamber. Here the room had been painted black, with constellations of stars dotting the walls, and a large depiction of the moon painted on the far side. Before the moon stood the lunar lander she’d seen in the flooded facility. A mannequin in a space suit stood in mid-descent on the ladder, one foot stepping onto a simulated grey lunar surface.

  In a neighboring display stood a capsule-shaped craft called the Mercury.

  She stopped at a third display, staring in awe. The shuttle Atlantis stood behind long velvet ropes. It was so much bigger than she’d imagined after seeing photographs of it.

  “We’re getting closer,” Raven said. “It’s got to be here in this wing.”