The whole thing swayed under the moving weight of Walker’s thudding descent.
“Okay, so where the … are we and am I the only one who feels like this whole thing is about to collapse?” asked Annora. The light from the torches blended with the darkness at about fifteen feet. Walker landed, panting, and together their breaths added a fog to the dense atmosphere.
“Hello...” Walker shouted. It felt amplified by the darkness, but also by the lack of an echo, as though the sound had just travelled and travelled.
“Over here,” said Caia. “There’s a circular staircase leading down.”
“What?” said Annora, walking over. She shone her light on the beginnings of a metal framework that bent down and around to the left. “Seriously?”
“There’s a switch too,” said Walker.
“We shouldn’t press it. Just in case it eats the remaining power.” Caia grabbed the handrail. “Here goes.”
Annora, shivering, looked at Walker. “Isn’t there some point where we just go enough and turn back?”
His teeth were gritted and his lips blue. There was sweat, but it was tension sweat, straining against the shivers and the need to keep pushing. “We’ve come this far. I’ll follow.”
As she placed her own hand on the handrail, her fingers stroked the button hooked to the top – one of those large, red push buttons she’d only ever seen in the watchtower and in films, usually reserved as an emergency stop. One little push and maybe they could see just where they were.
“Come on,” said Walker.
And she went, taking deep steps, rounding left, twisting down further into the abyss. There were unlit lights on the central column placed at metre intervals, and all she’d had to do was press the button. The column itself felt sturdy, but the framework of the steps continued to shake. And the shivers shook her from head to toe. She felt about ready to rattle her teeth loose.
“Caia,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Distract me. Tell me your story about what happened to the Krul crew, and how you ended up at New Kingdom.”
“Good luck there,” said Walker.
It must’ve been a quiet sigh, but a quiet sigh all the same reached their ears. “How’s that important right now?”
Their footfalls clomped. “Take my mind off how dangerous this is suddenly feeling.”
“You can always go back.”
“No splitting now,” said Walker.
“It’s... fine.” Each time it seemed as though Caia would come back into view, she disappeared again, a phantom just beyond the ever-present next bend. “You wanna know? If it’ll put your mind at ease. There’s really not a lot to it. Krul took the crawler somewhere he shouldn’t have, and I don’t know if it was a colossal fuck up, or just an unfortunate accident, but there was a sandquake. Most of us were inside, playing cards or some such shit, and Krul was in the forward cabin steering us on. Said he had a void in his readings. Whatever that meant. And he was gonna detour to check it out. And so he did. Next thing I know I’m sliding on the floor, going headfirst straight into the wall. Luckily I was in my alcove when it happened, so when the crawler dived headfirst into the crater I was able to hold on. Keanna, KC, all the others; they weren’t so lucky.”
“I remember Keanna,” said Walker. “Hard as nails. To think she went out like that.”
“Yeah, well. They say it’s rare. Fuck, I’ve never know it happen to a crawler before – to wanderers, sure. They talk of sandquakes, of holes just opening up and swallowing you whole. I had my face flat against the wall as the crawler lunged down. It probably happened over a few seconds, but it felt like forever. And then it just slammed to a halt and straight away there was this rush of sand swirling around the air. It properly roared. And of course, the tracks were still working. They were digging deeper, if you can imagine that.”
“Damn,” said Annora.
“How’s this going? Distracted enough?”
“I was,” she stressed.
“Well, think how I felt knowing I was about to be buried alive.” Caia’s dull boot-steps accentuated a moment of pause. “I always kept my locker closed. I had that to thank for my goggles and oxygen. They could have been thrown around, broken, buried in the sand rushing in from the bottom. Or the front, that should be. But no. I jumped over to the locker and grabbed them and put them on as quick as you like and for just a second stood there running everything around in my mind, like...” she took a deep sigh. “I could feel it inside that the longer I stood there, the deeper I was getting in the sand.
“Like now. This place feels fucking huge. So I dropped down the corridor, jumping down from alcove to alcove, with one thought: get to the hatch. The dayroom was empty – properly empty – everything: chairs, water condenser, table, my friends; they had all been thrown and were now somewhere down there in the dark, rising sand. I tried to remember if I had heard them scream, but couldn’t. Still can’t. Too busy screaming myself most likely.”
Caia’s footsteps ceased. “Finally.” Her torchlight arced out revealing a narrow walkway that circled around.
Annora pointed her torch in the other direction when she too reached the bottom. “Seems like this goes around in a circle.”
“Shine it into the middle,” said Walker, and together they did. The outside of a rectangular structure peered from the gloom. “Let’s walk round this way.” Their light reflected back from what turned out to be glass; the nearer they got the easier it was to tell it was a clone of the watchtower. Same size and shape. Same windows surrounding it on all sides. The torchlight did nothing to reveal the insides.
“So how’d you get out?” asked Annora.
“I... it wasn’t...”
“You okay?”
“Fine. You have to understand I was buried alive. There is no way to describe just how that feels. It was enough for me not to want to set foot in another crawler ever again.”
“You made it very clear,” said Walker. “Never approach a void in the readings.”
“Oh, you knew?” asked Annora.
“Some details.”
“If it wasn’t for the goggles and oxygen – fuck, even the blower – I’d be dead.” They came to a meeting point on the walkway where a retracted bridge should have been, leading to the structure’s entrance. “Okay, well, if ever there was a button we should press I guess it’s this one.” Caia pushed a replica of the button at the top of the spiral staircase and a quiet murmuring began, followed by clanks, something like a ratchet head falling into place, rising, and falling into place again. Lights blinked on an extending bridge, and the outside lights of the structure also came on. Dimly at first, but they grew brighter.
Even with the extra light there were no additional details revealed. Annora looked up and saw the spiral staircase fading away; and below, a pool of blackness. They were on an island of light floating in space.
“I made my way to the hatch,” Caia continued as the bridge extended, “and grabbed one of the blowers. At that point the roaring stopped, and the tracks froze, perhaps too clogged up with sand. The hatch didn’t want to open. I got it open a crack and then used the blower on it. It moved enough sand I was able to squeeze out, but it was like going blind. Once out of the hatch I pressed my body against the crawler and just climbed up its surface, all the while the sand pressing against my back and pushing me. I had my oxygen mask on but it was still difficult to breath. The fucking sand just squeezed all around me, getting in my ears so even my own breathing was this dull moaning in my head. The vacuum of sound is what comes back to me. I could’ve been screaming. Someone could’ve been calling my name. No way to tell. I just gripped the top of that crawler hoping for handholds and pulled my way up. No way to know how deep I was at that point. When I got to the top I pulled myself over and pulled my way along a little further. The absolute worst bit was trying to turn over at that point. Getting onto my side and then onto my back was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I could barely move. Whe
n I got as far as I could I triggered the blower. It created a hole to the side of me which then pushed me back down onto the crawler. Eventually I was able to aim it up, a little at a time.”
The bridge slid into place and Caia stepped upon it.
“Five minutes. An hour. I have no idea how long it took, but the force of the blower pushed the sand above me out so I was eventually just lying in the rock bottom of a huge crater. A fucking blower saved my life. My one single thought was ‘Don’t die on me. Don’t die on me.’ I’d never been so happy to see the fucking clouds. Turned out it wasn’t even that deep – any deeper and the sand, as light as feathers it may be, would have just been too much; a ton weight on my chest.”
“Damn,” said Annora. “That’s horrific. And you just climbed your way out?”
“Scrambled. Got half way up so many times only to slide back down I thought this was life’s way of fucking with me. Used the blower to eventually make the slope shallower and shallower. Was there half the day just trying to get out of the hole. Night by the time I did.”
“And then New Kingdom rescued you?”
“We must’ve sent out a distress alert as we were going down, and when we didn’t respond to their hails, they sent out a team to investigate. I woke up on the back of one of their tanks.”
“Wow. How do you even step foot on a crawler again after that?”
“Still better than dome-life,” responded Caia, reaching to the panel beside the door. As her hand approached it, the door just gave way, sliding left into a recess.
“Oookay. That’s weird.”
Caia entered first and the autolighting worked, flooding the room with light. On two sides were consoles with blank displays, and on the far side was a large glass-panelled room. Against the left wall a mattress lay on the floor with the decayed skeleton of a previous inhabitant. There was so much in the room to examine, buttons to press and cupboards to explore; so many questions about it that needed answers – but it was the skeleton that drew their immediate focus.
It had long, dark hair perched on top of its skull, thin and wiry. A long beard too. As the three of them crowded around it, their combined breath spilled into the air and gave an eerie mist to the scene, as though something within the skeleton had awakened. At some point it would have smelled, but that had gone now. The cold had prevented rapid decay, but not stopped it. Its grey overalls were stiff. Bony hands protruded from the cuffs. The weight of its boots had caused its feet to fall into an unnatural split. Its eyes were sunken in the eye sockets, devoid of matter within.
Walker knelt down as Annora stepped back. The light was too bright. She found herself wishing for one of those rolling blackouts, but even then she knew something indelible had been burned into her mind. “Poor soul. To die alone, like this, down here.”
“No sign of injury,” said Walker. “Either natural causes, or poison perhaps.”
“How long do you think he’s been here?”
“Hard to tell. The cold’s preserved him some.”
“What’s this?” asked Caia, bending down. She picked something up from beside the mattress.
“What’s any of this?” asked Annora, crossing her arms and pressing her hands into her armpits.
Walker straightened, gave his neck a rub and hunched his shoulders. “What you got?”
Something clicked, and Caia held the item out. “If you’re looking to hook up the backup generator,” said a male voice, “you’re out of luck. I’ve had that thing running for months.” The voice then coughed.
“A recording device,” said Annora, who was quickly hushed by Walker. She hugged herself tighter.
“More than likely, I don’t have long to live. I don’t know what’ll go first: me or the power. Either way, I hope I didn’t give you too much of a scare.” He coughed again. “Hell, who am I even talking to? No-one will ever find me. You’ll all be dead, if not already. For all I know I’m the last living person.” There was a period of silence from the recording. Sounds of clattering, and thuds as though doors were being closed.
“Okay. I’ll do my duty to Kingdom City. I’ll finish this recording for the one in a million chance of discovery. So, what will you want to know? My name? What happened to the Ark? I guess that’s a good place to begin. I’m Alten Janis, and... well, as you may or may not know, we had about two-hundred-and-fifty people living here at the Ark. That’s a lot of deaths on your conscience. I’m an engineer. Unfortunately, one of many, but the only one who accurately guessed what was happening. And worse, I couldn’t even convince Sara. I couldn’t convince anyone. No-one listened to me damn it!” There was a thud on the recording. “Something went wrong with the power generator. The whole team was down here for weeks trying to figure out what it was, but we couldn’t prevent the power outages. We replaced what we could; power relays and cables and electronics, but it was like this thing had some kind of half-life and it was just determined to fail, no matter what.”
Absently, Annora, Walker and Caia had gathered together around the device; partly for warmth but mostly enraptured.
“The generator would lock up, but no amount of lubrication could keep it running smoothly. The price we paid for not having a bio-gen backup. Burning oil and gas – that’s something you can rely on. Taking power from the atmosphere, not so much, I mean – you can’t just light a match and presto!
“The cloud-capacitor – it absorbed solar energy from the atmosphere and then by osmosis, charged the generator under the Ark. Only it wasn’t charging. And when it seized up it began to take longer and longer to get going again. We didn’t even know why it got going again, when it did! The problem, and where we disagreed, was that when it seized, it began letting an out an almighty roar, which escalated beyond anything you can imagine. We had to wear ear protection but even that was not enough – and in this chamber too. The roar just bounced off the rock until it felt like the whole chamber was shaking. But then it really was. The chamber was evacuated.
“Everyone was convinced the generator was going to blow, and who could blame them? You could hear it from level one, apparently. The whole ground shook. But you see, the thing was, there was nothing inherently dangerous about the generator. It had no fuel. There was no combustible. There was something strange at work, sure, and the noise and the vibrations were scary, but it was just seizure, something frozen and straining that would just reach an eventual breaking point and then cease. And then we could switch to the backup. But no-one listened to me. The Ark was evacuated topside. Then it dawned on me: what happens when a charge builds and builds? It gets discharged right? And that’s what happened. I... what the hell... I was under my bed when it happened. Call me what you like. The boom was nucleonic, or at least it sounded like that. One, very loud, huge, powerful explosion from the sky as the capacitor discharged on the dome, trying to reach the receiver. Except it hit the watchtower, destroyed that, and then shattered the dome into pieces. Those who weren’t impaled by flying glass were burned alive by the explosion.”
Annora gasped.
“I didn’t move for hours. Too terrified of what I might find. Hoping that I would hear someone’s voice, or footsteps, which would mean I didn’t need to go look. I only left the bed once I couldn’t hold it in any longer. The silence was somehow worse now that I was making my own noise. I’d never felt so alone. I had to see what was left so I forced myself up to the emergency hatch. The smell of fire and burning was thick on the top level. It was a miracle it didn’t cave in. I found a hatch and poked my head up and haven’t been back since. Just a sea of black. The dome had halted the lightning bolt or else there would just have been one giant crater. Instead, I think, right before the dome shattered, the raw heat of the electricity was superconducted into the air and just... disintegrated everything. There were some standing ruins, but I didn’t see a single body.”
Tears welled in Annora’s eyes and she blinked them free, while Caia and Walker looked stoic, staring at the device. Those poor people, she tho
ught.
“But... I can only surmise it happened quickly. So there’s that. One thing though: the sky. I could see the sky. Above was an island of orange sky so clear and beautiful it made me forget, for a second, what had just happened.” The man – Alten Janis – coughed. “I might have cancer. I might just have a tickly cough. Hypothermia’ll get me before anything else. Time is running out, I can’t carry on using the resources like this, hoping to be found in the meantime. I have to protect the Ark.” There was a sound of scrabbling over the recording, and they could hear Alten murmuring to himself.
“What’s the Ark?” asked Annora, shaking.
Caia shushed, her brow furrowed, her ear tilting towards the device.
“I’ve rigged a backup generator to provide enough power, should you come down here, should you find me. Should I not be talking to myself and wasting my breath. I don’t know how much you understand about how this works, I... I don’t think I really understand myself. There should be power enough to take this coffin down to the Ark and hook it up and get everything you need from it. I thought about using myself, but I don’t know what’s safer for the data – electronic storage with the risk of degradation of who knows how long before it is found again, or DNA storage, with my own cell degradation beginning as soon as I die. It... makes no sense to me, but logic says stick with the electronic storage. For what it’s worth, the electromagnetic shielding seems to have protected it from the worst of any damage – I haven’t been able to find any data loss yet. Of course, when I put systems on shutdown I’m not sure what’ll happen then. I read traces of radiation, and I’m coughing, put two and two together and what do you get, folks...? Bingo. But I don’t like to think too much about that – the repercussions are sickening. To imagine the Ark going out like that...
“I’ve lost everything, but what is my insignificant loss compared to humanity’s?”
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