“He…he actually laughed at me for looking for her for so long. He told me she was probably long dead. I didn’t understand. He said how naïve she was, falling for his every line. He’d sold her, H,” Dirk said, meeting H124’s gaze. “He’d sold her to this traveling Death Rider fighting show, all for that beat-up old jeep he drove.” Dirk looked back out the window. “He had no remorse. I asked where this show was now. I remember he said, ‘How the hell would I know?’ and I could see then he had no conscience, no feeling.” Dirk swallowed with a downward gaze. “I don’t know how I had missed that. How I’d let her go with him.
“I kept looking, asking questions about the Death Rider show, where it went. But by the time I caught up to it, Astoria wasn’t in it. I couldn’t just go up and ask them, so I spied at night, eavesdropping. Then one of them mentioned her, that they’d lost a fortune when she’d killed her handler and fled a month before.
“They laughed that the area had been so inhospitable, that she was surely dead.
“But I knew that wouldn’t have stopped her. I remembered her determination when we’d searched for our mother. She wouldn’t give up, even when we were dying of thirst. I put the word out in every Badlander camp I came to. That’s how I met Rowan and Byron. I walked into their camp one day, barely alive myself. I’d had no food or water for days. And there she was, wounded and half starved, but alive. They’d found her and helped her. But she was so different, H. All that joy? That laughter? It was gone. She’d been beaten, starved, betrayed. We’d lost our family. When she healed and was strong enough to move, she vanished one afternoon. A few days later, she returned, her eyes like cold steel. I’ll never forget that look. It was a few days later when we learned the Death Rider fighting camp had burned to the ground, fleeing stragglers picked off as they tried to escape, their bodies viciously beaten. No one said anything, but we all knew it had been her.
“Word got around that Dooley had been found, his skull smashed so brutally that all that was left were bone splinters and brain matter. She never trusted anyone again.”
“Except you,” H124 said quietly.
Dirk clasped his hands. “Except me. I don’t know what she endured in that fighting camp, but anything left of the sweet kid was gone. They’d robbed her of it.”
“I’m so sorry,” H124 said, feeling the sheer uselessness of the phrase; her sympathy was nothing in the face of such loss. They ate in silence, but it seemed to have done Dirk a little bit of good to talk about his sister. He perked up just a tiny bit, and managed to eat a few mouthfuls of food.
Afterward, H124 resumed her place by the window. She marveled as the coast drifted away and the blue of the sea opened beneath them. She’d already been astounded by the ocean when they’d visited the sunken facility, but now, flying over a wide expanse of it, was a completely new experience. Wind tore across the surface, kicking up the whitecaps and creating hypnotic rippling patterns in the undulating water.
“How soon until we see the ice?” she asked Raven. She’d seen pictures of it in Rover books, a vast white sheet.
He peered down. “You might be disappointed. I’m not sure how much of the ice cap still exists. But it shouldn’t be long until we find out. Greenland is fairly close to the coast of North America.”
She stared down, her view momentarily obstructed as they passed through a bank of thin clouds, the vapor parting around them, its white tendrils curling around the ship.
“You might want to catch some Z’s,” he suggested.
She nodded, exhausted. She took his advice, plopping down on one of the luxurious couches and stretching out. She covered herself with the coat the Rovers had given her, the soft black one with the red sections on the back. The low thrumming of the Argo’s engines lulled her to sleep.
* * * *
She awoke to Raven gently touching her shoulder. “We’re almost there.”
She sat up groggily, wiping her eyes and stretching. She couldn’t wait to see the vast expanse of ice. Other than the blizzard she and Gordon had encountered on her way to find the Rovers, she’d never seen a lot of snow, certainly not a vast sheet of ice.
She couldn’t imagine it. She tried to picture an ice sheet 10,000 feet thick covering an entire landmass.
Moving to a window seat, she gazed down. The sapphire sea sparkled below, and a coastline was coming into view. But it wasn’t icy. In fact, as far as she could see, there was no ice at all, just brown and green mountains forming steep fjords dipping down to the sea.
“What happened to it all?” she asked him as they began to descend. “The ice.”
He too looked out the window, squinting in the brightness of the afternoon. “It’s been disappearing. As the planet got hotter, more and more surface ice began to melt, creating these large lakes on the ice cap. The water, warmed by the sun, would sink through these cracks and fissures to the bottom of the ice sheet. This caused even more warming, and more fissures to open, draining lakes in the neighboring areas, bringing more water down. It made the ice cap unstable, and melting occurred more rapidly. When it started to collapse, the flooding was catastrophic.”
H124 thought of the buildings far out in the sea, the ones off the coast of New Atlantic. All that had once been above water.
“There might be a little left, right where it was once thickest, but it’s nowhere near as massive as it once was.”
H124 leaned her head against the glass, staring down as they readied to land. The quiet hum of the Argo’s engines vibrated through the glass where her forehead met the cool surface. She couldn’t believe how different the planet had once been, and so recently too.
“The melting all happened much quicker than they’d anticipated; the positive feedback loop surprised them with its speed,” Raven added.
“So this genebank,” she asked, pulling away from the window, “was originally placed here because of permafrost too?”
He nodded. “It looks that way.”
She thought of the rotten smell and disaster of the one they’d just come from. “Will everything be ruined here too?”
“I think we need to brace ourselves for that possibility. If there was no backup refrigeration system, and if the PPC has cut the power to the liquid nitrogen tanks again…” His voice trailed off as they felt the Argo set down gently in front of a tall structure that rose out of the side of a mountain. In the center of it stood a pair of thick double doors. They were still closed.
“That’s a good sign,” she said hopefully, standing.
In a nearby couch, Dirk stretched and rose with a yawn. He ran a hand through his long dreads. “Fingers crossed,” he said, and approached the exit.
They filed out the descending ramp, toward the genebank doors. They were locked. “Even more promising,” Raven said. “Dirk?”
Dirk cracked his fingers, then moved to an ancient keypad behind a protective Plexiglas box. He opened the case and studied the keypad, then pulled out his multitool. In a moment he’d jimmied off the cover, exposing the wires beneath. He rewired them, twisting some together, and before long they heard a dull clunk as the lock disengaged. “We’re in.” He folded his multitool and put it back in his pocket.
He pushed open the door, revealing a similar setup to the one they’d just come from. A dark stairwell led steeply down, and an elevator waited to transport visitors. H124 sniffed the air. It smelled a little musty, but no hint of decay hung about. Raven moved to the power panel and switched on the lights. They powered up instantly, flickering on in the stairwell. “Shall we?” he asked.
They started down, the musty smell growing stronger. Mold and mildew grew along the walls, growing thicker as they went deeper inside the mountain. When they neared the bottom, she saw a dark black stain forming an even line all the way along the wall. “What is that?” she asked, pointing.
Raven paused to consider it. “It looks like a high-water mark
.”
The musty smell suddenly made sense. All the water streaming off the ice cap had caused the facility to flood.
They descended lower, finding another high-water mark below that one, and yet another as they reached the bottom.
“Looks like the water receded in stages.”
The lights had burned out at the bottom of the stairs. H124 stepped into darkness. As she crossed the stairwell landing to another door, she stumbled on something. Shining her headlamp down, she found a huge crack in the foundation that had been patched up. The floor was uneven where water had made the ground swell.
Raven opened the door at the bottom, admitting them into a large series of rooms. All along the floor and bottoms of the walls, other gaping cracks had admitted water. But all the cracks had been repaired, and the floor was dry in here. The liquid nitrogen tanks were all still functioning, and the shelves containing seeds and animal artifacts still held all their supplies.
Raven walked along the rows, grinning and turning, taking it all in. “This is amazing!”
Dirk knelt down by one of the cracks, feeling it. “This work is recent,” he told them, standing back up. “Someone’s been here.”
Raven inspected one of the liquid nitrogen tanks. “All these fittings look new, too,” he said, walking around it.
She surveyed the area carefully. “So who’s been maintaining this place?”
Raven met her gaze. “I don’t know.” He turned in place. “But this is incredible. This is a wealth of DNA material. And so far deep underground, it should be shielded from the effects of the impact.” He moved to a nearby terminal. It wasn’t as old as the ones she’d found in the university beneath New Atlantic. But it wasn’t as new as their PRDs, either. It had a floating display. Raven powered it on and paired it with his PRD, then downloaded the contents of the genebank. He scrolled through countless DNA samples. “H! There is hummingbird DNA in here!”
She smiled, already imagining the little jeweled birds he’d described on top of the train.
Raven was still midway through the download when her own PRD beeped. She brought up the comm window, expecting to hear from Byron or Gordon. Instead a familiar string of numbers played out in her message window.
It was the Phantom Code.
“Look at this,” she said, moving closer to Dirk and Raven.
They watched the numbers scroll by. “Isn’t this the strange message we were getting in Sanctuary City?”
Raven nodded, approaching her display. “Yes, but…wait…there!” he said, highlighting some of the numbers. “I’ve seen that code so many times I know most of it by heart. But these numbers are different. Most of it’s the same, but…” He studied it a while longer. “Yes, some of these numbers are definitely different.”
She brought up her saved version of the Phantom Code from Sanctuary City, and they compared them side by side.
Dirk came closer, scanning it. “Yes. Here,” he said, pointing out one sequence of numbers, “and here, too. It is different.”
“But what is it?” she asked.
“I wish I knew,” Raven said. “And why receive it here?”
“Have you ever picked it up anywhere but Sanctuary City?”
He frowned. “No. Never.”
They puzzled over the code a few minutes more, and H124 forwarded the new message to Gordon and Onyx, who’d been taking a stab at deciphering the string of numbers from Sanctuary City.
“Well,” Raven said as the contents of the genebank finished downloading into his PRD. “Let’s seal this place back up and move on to the next genebank.”
They checked over the other rooms, ensuring no more flooding was seeping into the foundation. Whoever had repaired it had done an amazing job. She wondered if it was the PPC. Maybe they had realized what a mistake they’d made by destroying the other facility, and wanted to keep this one around for future use.
Raven hacked into the security footage, but it had been wiped recently, and the mystery of who had been maintaining the vault remained.
They climbed the stairs and locked up the vault again. As they walked back to the Argo, Dirk’s PRD beeped. He brought up his display, watching for a minute, then waved them over eagerly. “Hey, come take a look at this!”
H124 hurried to him, and peered over his shoulder.
“This is the live feed from Delta City,” he said, looking at them poignantly. “The only live feed.”
Willoughby’s face filled the display. He spoke with gravity. “For months now you’ve been seeing pirate broadcasts warning of an imminent danger to you all. These broadcasts should be taken very seriously. An asteroid, a giant rock that orbits the sun just as our planet does, is on a collision course with the earth. It’s going to fall on Delta City like a bomb, and it will obliterate this place. This is not a hoax. Check your feed source. You can see this is an official PPC transmission. I’m a high-level producer, and I’m here to tell you that this is a very real threat.”
It flashed on images of New Atlantic, the city a smoking crater with no sign of life. “This is what happened when just a fragment of the asteroid hit New Atlantic. The one coming here is far bigger.” He stared intently into the camera. “Each of you, every single one of you, must seek shelter. There are refugee camps located in bomb shelters to the east and west of the city, as well as a vast network of tunnels located deep beneath the city that can offer shelter. You must leave your living pods and seek safety. There is very little time now. We have arranged for water and food cubes to be available at these locations. But you must get there yourself.” He paused, glancing at someone off camera, then returned his intense gaze to the screen. “Again, I cannot stress this enough, the broadcasts you’ve been seeing are not a hoax. You must seek shelter, and you must do so now.” The screen briefly went blank. Then Willoughby appeared again, his message looping from the beginning.
She stared up at Dirk. “They did it! They got the broadcast out. How long has this been looping?”
Dirk checked the source feed. “About six hours now.”
She grinned. “Amazing! And the PPC hasn’t figured out how to shut it down yet?” She thought of Willoughby, and a knot formed in her gut. “I hope Willoughby got the hell out of there.”
Chapter 15
They flew on to the next genebank, in a place once called Siberia. The old maps she’d scanned and overlaid onto her PRD map called the area the Yamal Peninsula. The brown terrain rolled beneath them, with snow dusting certain parts. The area had once been freezing cold for much of the year, and permafrost had been locked up in the soil. Vast grasslands had spanned the entire region, home to grazers such as mammoths, woolly rhinos, saiga antelopes, reindeer, and muskoxen.
She could imagine these creatures moving in mixed herds across the landscape, eating leisurely in the sunshine. Now, no animal caught her eye as they rumbled over the landscape. Strange, nearly perfectly circular holes dotted the ground here and there. Even from their altitude, the depressions appeared large. In other places, odd little hills appeared, like a giant had pressed up on the earth from beneath, splitting the soil.
“We’re nearing the coordinates,” Winslow called from the cockpit.
H124 peered out of the window, trying to spot the genebank entrance. A tall spire flashed in the sun, catching her eye. It rose from a hillock, a towering metal structure similar in design to the first one they’d visited. As before, the spire was only the entrance, the vault itself deep underground so as to take advantage of the natural cold there.
About a quarter mile off, she spotted another of the strange round holes. She pointed it out to Raven. “What’s that?”
He wrinkled his brow. “Not sure. Sinkhole, maybe? The ground here is likely unstable with all the melting permafrost.”
As the Argo set down on its inflated landing rails, H124 studied the entrance. Relieved to see nothing scattered
on the ground around it, she hoped the PCC hadn’t found this one. The exterior of the spire had oxidized, and some kind of green mold or moss grew in some areas.
Winslow opened the doors, and H124 grabbed her toolbag. Eager to explore a new place, she was the first one off the airship.
Blinking in the sunlight, she breathed in the air. Something vaguely rotten met her nostrils, and she wrinkled her nose. As Dirk emerged beside her, he covered his nose with his arm. “What is that? Decay?”
“Something’s gone off,” said Raven, stepping out beside them.
“But it’s not the same smell as the first vault we visited.”
Raven cupped his nose. “No, this is something else. Maybe decaying plant matter.”
They crossed to the entrance, the ground soggy, giving way with every step of her boot. Nearby stood another of the hillocks, the soil on its perimeter broken and fractured.
They were almost halfway to the entrance when a loud boom wracked the quiet afternoon and the ground shook. H124 went down on her hands and knees. Dirt rained down on her head, rocks peppering her back.
“What the hell?” she heard Dirk cry, whipping her head to see him lying on his side, shielding his face as pebbles and soil cascaded over him.
The ground settled, and the last of the dirt fell. H124 rose, confused, looking around. Behind her, Raven struggled to his feet.
She looked up, expecting to see a PPC airship that had fired on them, but only clouds dotted the searing blue sky. She looked back at the ground. The little hill was gone. In its place stood a gigantic hole, identical to the ones she’d spotted from the air.
“Look at that!” she shouted, pointing.
Raven followed her gaze. He glanced around nervously. “Methane. It’s so warm that all that buried organic matter is decomposing and building up gas.”
Dirk stared at the ground at his feet. “You mean the ground itself could explode at any moment?”
Shattered Skies Page 15