Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

by Aiki Flinthart

  He snorts. “Government, ay? Pack of liars, that’s what my dad says. Stole the water, chemtrails through the sky, back-pocket, big-pharma weaponized diseases—AIDS and COVID, Pig Flu, Nypah, Hendra…So much bullshit brewed up to poison us.”

  She bursts out laughing and shakes her head. “Well, you sure have got yourself a bumper crop there. You forgot the aliens, Bigfoot, mind-control labs and new world orders…” The chain clanks as she stretches her legs. “Don’t give us government types so much credit for stealth and ingenuity. Keeping secrets from the public is harder than you’d think.” She glances around her prison cell, “Although, I don’t know. Out here it seems much easier than back home.”

  She’s cut short by a piercing shriek. Not the stackbot—this time something human. The shrieking ends abruptly—which is worse.

  Kanye’s chest feels hot and tight.

  Next comes machine-gun fire, metal slamming hard on metal, howling dogs and roaring engines.

  “Name’s Kanye,” he says.

  She leans forward. “Kanye, my government is doing its damnedest to build a future that’s safe and sustainable for all. There’s been damage done, for sure, in recent years. Big damage, slow responses. Mistakes beyond anyone’s control. But that doesn’t mean things can’t get better. Doesn’t mean we should give up on civilization itself.”

  She leans closer. “Nobody’s trying to poison you and your father, Kanye. Help me get away from here. Back to where there’s proper food and medicine. Come with me to Sydney and I’ll show you.”

  More rapid fire and a muffled blast, big enough to rattle BigZig’s walls.

  Jude swallows hard. “Your friends are running feral, Kanye. Reckon it’s time to take matters into your own hands, you know? Before it’s too late. Help me contact my people and they’ll pull us both out of here. You saved my life today, so I owe you one.”

  “No way. When my dad gets back—”

  “He’s not coming back, Kanye. If he was, he’d be here already—and I think you know it. Get me out of…wherever the hell this place is…and I’ll save us both.”

  #

  “Oh my god—fresh air!” she says. Shuts her eyes and breathes in deep. “But where the hell are we? What’s this place called?”

  They both duck as stray bullets whizz and plink.

  He shrugs. “Woomera.”

  “Woomera!” She slides from a crouch to sitting, rests her forehead on her palms and the fight kind of goes out of her. “They snatched me from Sydney—how the hell did I end up way out here?”

  Both stare at the scene spread out below. Scattered fires burning bright and high, broken-down machinery—some of it house sized, people staggering about and firing. Dogs and goats. A bulldozer attempts to ram its way through the side of a rusted shipping crate.

  Kanye clutches his gun against his chest, waves it whenever he speaks, like punctuation. “Fuckers got no fucken idea,” he says. “Nobody’s doing what they’re s’posed to be doing.”

  She shades her eyes to stare out across the desert. “No wonder nobody’s come looking for me. This really is the arse end of nowhere.”

  “Everyone knows Woomera,” he says.

  “Not for a bloody long time, they haven’t. Got turned into a theme park or a museum or something. Sold off for mining too, maybe.” She squints. “I can’t quite recall.”

  “Astronauts know about it.”

  She almost smiles. “Haven’t been astronauts at Woomera for a very long time.”

  “There’s astronauts. I’ve seen them.”

  “In fact, there weren’t even astronauts at Woomera back in the day. Rockets, yes. Mission controls and plenty of weapons testing, but astronauts no.”

  “Lady—I know what I saw.”

  She’s not listening. She’s squinting at the sky. Nothing to see, not even clouds, but a look on her face like she can see beyond the blue. She scrambles back into a crouch, checks her balance, peeps over the edge.

  “Got my gun trained on you so don’t go trying any tricksy moves,” he says.

  “Binoculars.” She holds out her hand and he passes them over. She squints through the eyepiece, past the loudly malfunctioning stackbot that’s jerking and spasming as it launches another random cube into the low roof of a demountable shed. Past the thick black smoke of the burning garbage heap and out into the desert, scattered with rocks and wrecks and human bones.

  A bucket-wheel excavator lies on its side, half buried under mounds of sand. Like a dinosaur. He used to have a book of dinosaur pictures.

  “Hey—what’s that wreckage over there. Away from the other junk—is that a plane? Get me there and I can get us the hell away from here,” she says.

  He stares at her with sullen disbelief. “It’s broken. You don’t know—”

  “Shut up, kid, and listen to me if you want to get out of this place alive. Government satellites pass over this big old dump. Come and help me send a message, or stay up here alone if you’d really rather.”

  The gun weighs heavy in his hands. Protecting the cash cow is one thing, taking orders from her is something else. So tired and his head hurts and what if his dad really isn’t coming back?

  He leads the way along the goat track hacked into BigZig’s side. They’re three tiers down when the rumbling starts. Horribly familiar. He can’t bear to look—perhaps it’s coming from the ’bots or from one of those random monster storms. Could be from lots of things, no need to panic.

  Jude’s face flushes with color as he feels the blood drain out of his.

  “Oh my! Kanye—there’s a train coming!” She jumps up and down and waves.

  His stomach lurches like he’s gonna spew. Spins around and slaps at her. “Stop it, ya fucken idiot! It’ll see you!”

  She’s got this dumb look on her face. “Why—What’s the matter? A train can take us back to civilization.”

  Kanye doesn’t move, despite the raucous fighting on the ground not far away. He stares fixedly as the train approaches the compound. It’s all happening again. The train zips through like a dirty bullet and his chest hurts from breathing ragged. He doesn’t turn to watch where it is heading.

  Jude nudges him as bullets fly. He slaps her hand away and keeps on moving.

  “Where’s that train heading, Kanye?”

  He grips the gun tight like Uncle Jaxon taught him. He runs across a stretch of open concrete strewn with rubble, some of it still smoke charred and warm. She follows. Air explodes with random weapon fire. Two women wearing knitted hats and oil-stained gloves gawk from beneath a tattered awning, but don’t do anything to stop them.

  But Jude stumbles to a halt, her bare feet leaving bloody footprints in the dirt. “Hang on! Kanye—it’s bloody cold at night. We need supplies.”

  He waves the gun at a shipping container covered in skull graffiti. Jude ignores the dead man slumped beside it. Makeshift door swings off its hinge as she pushes past. She’s banging around in there a few minutes while he’s trying not to think about that train.

  She comes out swigging from a canteen, wearing a big man’s jacket with bulging pockets. Walks like a clown with her skinny ankles stuffed in battered trainers.

  “First things first,” she says. “Need to get out to that wrecked plane.”

  “Plane’s fucked,” he says.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  She takes the lead. He dawdles, kicking stones and bits of metal. Not listening, but she’s still talking, banging on about not being where she thought she was.

  “Think I’ve figured out this place,” she tells him. “One of those off-the-grid white elephants knocked up during the decade of big fire. A relic of the New Cold War—the kind that doesn’t make it into history books. Back then they did what they had to do to make up budget deficits. Sold off slabs of useless, barren land to any bastards keen to pay for it.”

  Darkness falling, chill nipping at his bones.

  “Drug lords, terrorists…Wouldn’t get away with that today, of course
—Jesus. Where did all this twisted metal come from?”

  “Rockets,” he tells her.

  She trips and swears but rights herself. “Well, I suppose there could be old space hardware. Ancient British missiles. Black Knights and Blue Steel…that sort of thing. Brits used to test their nukes out here—did you know that? Early days of the space race and all that.”

  No point in arguing. He pushes on and reaches the smashed-up Hercules ahead of her. Doesn’t look like much in the fading light.

  “All right, this is far enough. Now we get to work,” she says, short of breath, swigs on the canteen again. “Find me a bunch of fist-sized stones and scraps of metal.”

  He watches Jude trace huge numbers and letters in the sandy dirt with a stick.

  “My tag,” she tells him, smugly. “Kind of like a secret code. Military algorithms will pick it up via satellite, even if my ministry has written me off for dead. Which they might well have done—a month spells a long time in politics, let alone kidnapping. I’m heavily insured, so someone will be pushing for a rescue once my tag is scanned and verified…”

  Kanye’s only half listening and he doesn’t look up and he most definitely doesn’t glance to the place where that train was heading. He slams down rock after rock in draining light as another explosion shakes the camp behind them.

  His dad will fix it…his dad should have fixed it…his mum should never have left in that Hercules. If she’d stayed, his dad would never have got so angry. He’d never have shot the plane out of the sky.

  “So, I’m guessing you grew up in all this junk,” says Jude as she places rocks inside the letters.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Kanye, what’s your dad been doing out here?”

  He shakes his head too vigorously, stares at the ground and not her face. Walks away to collect another rock.

  “He’s been taking care of you—that’s something. Loads of kids out there with no mums and dads”

  Kanye slams his rock down hard.

  “Why don’t you tell me about the trains? Where they’re from and where they’re going? Gotta say, I’m surprised to find a functional line out here.”

  He stares into darkness. “Used to run through regular. Locked up tight, never stop, just push on through.” He slams another rock down on the line.

  She places one not far away from his.

  “We used to try and guess what was inside,” he continues. “Food and stuff, ya know. Good stuff from the coast, maybe. Kind of stuff used to drop out of the sky.” He pauses to relive the memory. “Everything was different when I was a kid. Better—ya know?”

  Jude nods. “Oh yeah, you got that right.”

  He searches for another rock.

  “So, what happened? You followed the train?”

  Kanye nods. Clutching a rock, he flicks his gaze in the direction of the tracks.

  “And?”

  He smashes the rock down, straightens, dusts his hands on his pants. Swallows. “Astronauts making people push yellow barrels into the ground. Cranes swinging big blocks of cement.”

  “Astronauts? Are you sure?”

  “In space suits. Like on TV.” Shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear it. “People off those trains were sick. Infected or something. Astronauts kicked ’em over the edge, down there into the pit with all the barrels.”

  Jude’s been hanging on every word, a rock gripped tightly in her hand. She drops it, rummages through the big coat’s pockets. Pulls out a torch, slaps it against her palm a few times to get it going.

  “I was saving this until we really need it, but…oh my god…” The beam cuts through darkness, moving as she moves. “Jesus…Kanye, those big shapes over there. They aren’t junked planes or old British rockets.”

  She hurries from one mess of metal to the next, like she’s looking for something specific. “These look like Dongfeng ICBMs, Kanye. They’re not ours—and they definitely shouldn’t be here. None of this should be here.”

  She kills the beam and backs away from the missiles. Stares up at the night sky, as if it might hold answers to her questions.

  “My dad says…” His words are drowned out by a rising rumble loud enough to shake the ground. Wind tears at their hair and clothing as a long, cold shadow falls across their faces.

  The moon hovers, impossibly big and low. Through streaming tears, Kanye’s vision skews. Not the moon, but the underbelly of a Hercules. Smudgy images dance across its surface. All gray and white, like dead TV static.

  Jude is laughing, waving and jumping, but he can’t hear anything she’s saying. He clutches the gun against his chest. His lucky boots are white with churned up sand.

  Because the Hercules is not a Hercules—it’s a Chinook with tandem rotors, bright lights flooding stronger than the sun. Sets down and the back end opens, spills astronauts pointing guns and barking orders.

  Jude is screaming. Kanye backs up until he’s pressed against the broken plane that holds his mum’s burned bones. And it’s not his uncle’s Smith & Wesson clutched against his chest at all, but the plastic Hercules stuffed with special treasures: the seashell, feathers, lipstick, unknown soldiers and faded photo all tossed, tumbled and mashed against each other.

  River of Stars

  By David Farland

  Aracai rose to the surface as the fishing boat sped away, motors whining softly. The surface of the Atlantic was dimpled with waves that lapped softly, as if the sea were slightly perturbed. The stars shone so brightly they throbbed, and the moon was in its dark phase, but light from the Arab colonies there created a bright band that slashed across the moon’s equator like a gathering of rogue stars.

  He dove beneath the water and followed the backpack dropped by Escalas’s contact twenty meters to the ocean floor. The sea here was alive with sounds—the crackling of snapping shrimp, the eerie bellow of a grouper, the chiming sounds of baitfish. Though the sea was dark, Aracai’s night vision was excellent. He’d been engineered to see in infrared, so many creatures seemed to emit a soft glow.

  He followed the backpack down to a place where rocks were covered in splotches of anemones and starfish, all gray shapes in the night, and began circling it, swimming on his side, watching it as if it were some strange creature that he dare not approach.

  He made a soft whistle, “Here,” and in moments two more mer swam up, hugging the sand. Like Aracai, they were both nude. Dulce, his young wife, had hair of amber, and his…mentor, an old mer named Escalas, whose streaming white hair was held back by the silver circlet of the mindlink around his head, swam near and circled the backpack, too, but he did not watch the pack. Instead, he swam on his side, deep-set eyes watching Aracai.

  He knows what is in the pack, Aracai thought. That’s why he brought us here. And now he is waiting for me to pick it up…

  Dulce circled behind them a few meters off.

  Three months back, Aracai and Dulce had been living to the south, at the tip of Brasilia, where the cold waters of the Antarctic were among the cleanest in the world and the fisheries still thrived, when he’d met Escalas.

  He was a living legend. Not only was he old and wise, he was the only mer to have a mindlink, so if he wanted to know something, he could wonder about it and thus access Heavenly Host—the AIs linked in geosynchronous orbit—and learn what he wanted to know.

  Upon meeting, Escalas had eyed Aracai a moment and then said, “Swim with me.” Among the mer, it was an invitation to swim for a ways, to talk, or perhaps to swim for a lifetime.

  Now, Aracai realized that the old man had been bringing him to this point for months. “What is in the backpack?” Aracai sang, his voice a low thrumming that ended in a higher squeal.

  Escalas hesitated, as if he hoped Aracai would guess, then answered, “A bomb.”

  Many questions crowded Aracai’s mind. What kind of bomb? Who will Escalas kill? But one burst to the forefront: “How did you get it?”

  Escalas’s answer was leisurely, a rumble. “I bought i
t…from the neogods.”

  The news took Aracai’s breath. It did not surprise him that Escalas had bought the weapon. No, he felt surprised at mention of the neogods. They had been human until their genetic and mechanical upgrades had boosted their intelligence so much that they no longer wished to associate with mankind any more than Aracai would want to associate with amoebas. The neogods had left Earth decades ago, learned to bend space and time, so that now they explored the edges of the universe...

  “Those creatures do not talk to men—or bargain with them,” Aracai said, worried that Escalas was teasing him.

  “Ah, Spirit Warrior, they bargained with me,” Escalas affirmed. “Perhaps I made the right offer, or asked for the right weapon?” He jutted his chin toward the backpack. “Pick it up.”

  Spirit Warrior? He thinks I am a warrior? Aracai had never thought of himself as a warrior at all.

  But he had begun to believe over the past weeks that the world needed one. There was poison coming from Rio Negro—heavy metals and acids from mining, human waste, pesticides and industrial chemicals. In some places, over the past four decades, the poisons had turned the sea floor into a wasteland that even crabs could not survive. The mer were dying. Escalas, Dulce, and Arakai were among the last.

  Old Escalas had petitioned numerous national leaders, sought to get the humans to stop the “genocidal poisoning of our people.” But the governments in South America did not enforce their own laws. Those who had been charged with protecting the environment merely took bribes and turned a blind eye.

  Escalas swam past Aracai, studying him. “It is time to go to war,” he said. “But the notion of violence sickens you.”

  “Yes,” Aracai said. His whole frame was shaking.

  “As it should,” Escalas said, swimming close. “Feral humans do not need a reason to go to war. Violence is in their nature. But when they made us mer, they took our bloodlust away. So the idea sickens you, though it is long past time for us to act.” He jerked a nod toward the backpack. “The problem with us mer is that we circle our problems endlessly, when we should merely grasp at the solutions.”