by Wesley Chu
At first, he had tried to protect her with his atmos, thinking he could wean her off it over time. But as the Co-op continued to hunt them, forcing them deeper underground, power became scarcer, and they no longer had the energy levels to spare to keep the atmos band on at full strength, so she had to make do with a lower level of protection. It didn’t help, or at least it wasn’t enough.
Now, even though she was eating more regularly and moving about more than she ever did back when they were in the squalor of Mnemosyne Station, she looked weaker and thinner than ever. No one knew what it was, not even Grace.
None of the doctors on Earth were willing to help her. In the present, most doctors were trained and indentured to the corporations. To acquire the services of one would require authorization from the indenturing corporation, and that was something Valta made sure was denied to all of the tribes in this region. He could try to kidnap a doctor, but that would incur the wrath of the indenturing corporation, which would be almost as bad as their current war with the Co-op. That left him only one place to seek help. Unfortunately, that required a ship and would take him far away from Elise and the tribe. He had no choice; his sister’s life depended on it.
Sasha coughed again, and her entire body shook. She wiped her mouth and James noticed blood on her sleeves. He felt his hands tremble as he fought the urge to squeeze her tightly to him. That wasn’t going to help. He opened his mouth to comfort her and no words came out. His mind was paralyzed. He had never felt so helpless in his life.
Elise exchanged worried looks with him. She took out a rag and wiped the little girl’s hands. “Sasha,” she said in a calm voice. “Why don’t you let your brother and me finish our dinner. We’ll be up in the quarters in a little bit. We’ll make a fire, and you and I can finish the alphabet and numbers.
Sasha made a face. “James is leaving tonight. Can’t we just spend time together as a family?”
Elise smiled. “Of course we can, hon, but just tonight. You start studying again first thing tomorrow, all right? My lab assistant needs to know how to read.”
Sasha gave them both one more hug before running off. As soon as she was out of sight, Elise turned and cupped his face in her hands. “You go up to space and you figure out how to save our girl. I don’t care what it takes. Do you hear me?”
He nodded.
“Good, no more talk about staying to look after me and the Elfreth. We’re going to be fine. Just come back to me as soon as you can.”
THREE
OLDEST
Elise Kim stood at the water’s edge and looked out to the horizon, where the black ocean and dark sky met. The last glimmer of the Frankenstein’s multicolored exhaust signatures had just disappeared into the thick layer of low-hanging clouds. James and Grace had cobbled the ship’s engines from a couple of collies and a Valta Valkyrie attack ship. From what Elise could tell, it had taken a significant amount of tinkering to get everything balanced. She was shocked the damn thing flew at all, considering how glued and bubble-gummed the contraption was, and even more so that they were actually brave enough to take it into space. Brave or stupid. Then again, Elise was from the late twenty-first century; space travel had still been in its toddler stage then, and mankind hadn’t colonized the solar system yet. Everything about where they were going was amazing to her.
She waited until the last glimmer of Frankenstein was gone. She looked up at the vast expanse of the sky, feeling more alone than she had in recent memory. Both James and Grace were gone, her rock and her wisdom, for Gaia knew how long. She had no one left on Earth she could lean on for support or advice, and a whole bunch of people who expected her to lead them. Elise was terrified.
“Please come back to me. Both of you.” She could barely hear her whisper over the crashing of the waves against the shore.
There was a soft crunching of boots behind her. Rima stood waiting respectfully until Elise looked her way. “Oldest, the tribe is gathered and ready to depart. Oldest Franwil says we are already running short on time if we wish to cross the Long Island Sound by sunup. She warns that Moma is due soon and may not last the duration of the journey. War Chief Eriao says scouts report several bands of Neverwheres lurking upriver along the Thames half a day to a day out. He expects a raid and asks we be gone before they descend upon us.”
Elise wished they could spend a few more days at Groton. This had been the most restful time the tribe had had in months. Still, with the Co-op close by and the Neverwheres encroaching, staying at the space port was too risky.
The Elfreth had run into the Neverwhere tribe while passing through New London. The vicious bastards had been hounding them ever since. Elise had thought the Elfreth had lost them when they holed up in Groton to finish building the Frankenstein. She glanced back up toward the sky. Not a moment too soon, she guessed.
It was probably for the best. They had hung around this place almost two weeks now, far longer than any other time since they had fled the Farming Towers in Boston. Couple that with the Frankenstein launch, whose maiden voyage, if it did not go fully smoothly, would raise who knew how many alerts tonight. They could only hope the stealth systems on the collie functioned properly. In either case, best not stick around to find out.
Elise checked her AI band. Sunrise was four hours away. They should have already left by now. Using the skypath highway to cross the thirty-kilometer Long Island Sound was dangerous. On the elevated road some three hundred meters up in the air, the Elfreth would be exposed not only to enemy patrols, but to Earth’s harsh elements. If just one enemy patrol spotted them, there would be no more Elfreth tribe by dawn. However, it was the only direct overland path they could find that went all the way to their destination. Most of the roads in this area, a veritable swampland so close to the ocean, were impassable.
She turned to Rima, who was awaiting instructions with a chalkboard in hand. “Let’s get this show on the road. Tell Eriao to have guardians five hundred meters ahead of the main group. Once our people are halfway up the ramp, we pace as fast as the tribe can go. Where is Oldest Franwil?”
“She is with the kowrus.”
“Tell her we will have to hope for the best for Moma.”
Elise watched as Rima scribbled furiously on her chalkboard in shorthand and then sprinted away. The girl had grown up since they first met less than a year ago. For one thing, Elise used to have to look down at her when they spoke. Rima must have hit her growth spurt, because she was now half a head taller than Elise. That wasn’t saying much, since Elise’s nickname on the badminton team had been Low-Hanging Fruit, and yes, it had been ripe with double entendres. Secondary school girls could be bitches. Elise still felt a little self-conscious when she had to speak with the entire tribe and barely reached the neck of most people.
Rima had matured mentally as well, having been forced to grow up quickly over the past few months. When they first met, she had been an illiterate wild child who only knew how to hunt, fight, and cause the elders headaches. Elise had tapped into the girl’s potential, taught her basic math, and cultivated in her a love for reading. In a short while, under both Grace’s and Elise’s tutelage, she became one of the most literate people in the tribe. Who knew what Rima could have become if she had grown up in a more enlightened time. It wasn’t too late, not if Elise had a say in the girl’s future.
Elise walked to the foot of the ramp and followed the road with her eyes as it inclined and disappeared into the fog. A few minutes later, she heard gravel crackling behind her. She watched as the front of the caravan passed, the group of vanguards followed by hundreds of men, women, and children. The sound of their footsteps, little pitter-patters, became louder. The creaking of wooden axles and wheels grinding on the road soon joined the chorus. Farm animals came next—several dozen cows, a flock of chickens, followed by pigs, goats, and kowru, a genetically engineered fast-reproducing cross between brahman and giant rabbits bred during the early twenty-fourth century. Oldest Franwil was with this group, watch
ing over some of the flock. She pointed at Moma, the very pregnant kowru, and held up five fingers. Elise nodded. They would have to cart the mare soon.
ChronoCom and Valta had returned the week after their attack on the Farming Towers with forces ten times larger than the one Levin Javier-Oberon, the former high auditor of Earth, had led against them. Instead of another battle, they came upon an abandoned settlement. By that time, the Elfreth had packed up and gone deep underground, hiding inside Boston’s maze of buildings and old transit systems.
Elise had initially hoped that they could wait out the Co-op as the enemy scoured the ruins for them. She had underestimated their resolve. The Co-op hunkered down and began to systematically wipe out all the other tribes that lived there. Boston became a graveyard and a prison within a few short days. Dozens of ill-prepared tribes who had survived hundreds of years of famine, pestilence, and disease in the harshest of lands were decimated by a genocidal onslaught. The Co-op was undiscerning as to who fell into their crosshairs. Elise, feeling the guilt of bringing so much death to these people, had ordered the Elfreth to take in all refugees, swelling their numbers from the original three hundred to nearly a thousand.
The fighting became a slow bleeding game of cat and mouse as the Co-op hunted the Elfreth and the tribes sprung ambushes to pick off the invaders one by one. Eventually, James and Eriao convinced her that they couldn’t win this fight, and that their only chance was to flee the city.
It was a tough call, but Elise had reluctantly agreed. The weight of her responsibility to her people sometimes made it difficult to breathe. Every victory felt slight, every defeat crushing, and every mistake magnified. But for some reason she couldn’t quite fathom, the tribe continued to look to her for guidance. Why did these people still have faith in her?
The past few months had been hard, and the Elfreth’s long list of problems grew daily. Now on the run and completely nomadic, the tribe was unable to farm. They were also too large and unwieldy, having been joined by several smaller groups caught in the conflict. While that made them stronger than most other wastelander tribes, it also made hiding difficult. The tribe had been resolving this by splitting into small organized bands and never staying in one place for more than a few days. However, they were constantly encroaching on other tribes’ territories. Most of their skirmishes were with them rather than with the real enemy. A thousand tribesmen was also a lot of mouths to feed. With winter on the horizon and the joint forces of Valta and ChronoCom continually on their heels, the Elfreth faced the real threat of starvation.
The rest of the Elfreth continued streaming out from the darkness, merging into one long caravan as they got onto the ramp. The parade continued as small groups of the Elfreth—Elise had organized the groups to be self-sustaining in case they were separated—began to make the slow climb up to the skypath highway. A few waved at her, and some who had only recently joined the tribe bowed. She muttered each of their names as they passed, trying to remember as many of their faces as possible. So many people, so many needs. She waited until the last of the main body passed before starting her own journey up the ramp.
Elise joined a group of new tribesmen. The people here were formerly known as the Acquina, a small tribe that had lived down the river from the Farming Towers before the invasion. She shared a few friendly words with Lia, their former Brightest, before picking up her pace to catch up to the next small group. There, she spoke with a group of older Elfreth, with some of whom she had shared duties tending to the crops on top of the Farming Towers back in their home. Most of them embraced and encouraged Elise, nearly moving her to tears. She missed those simpler days.
She continued up the parade, taking advantage of this long walk to get to know her people again. There was a group of nomads who had joined just last week now serving as scouts for the guardians. She spent a part of the walk being scolded by some of the older kitchen staff about food stocks; not that they were low—everyone knew that—but they needed to spend more time foraging for sapphire fruit, a spice that preserved meat and vegetables from spoiling. Elise assured them that she’d look into it.
Next, she gave an encouraging pep talk to a group of children who by now were used to being fugitives. That broke her heart. She spent a few minutes longer than she had to, telling them a story about her time in the twentieth-first century, now commonly referred to as the Golden Age of Humanity. She watched their eyes get big as they soaked in every word.
“And you’ll bring those days back, Oldest?” a little girl asked.
“Of course we will, child.” It was a straight-up lie, but hope was one of the few things Elise could offer these people in abundance. As far as she was concerned, hope was as nourishing to these children as food, even if it was a lie. Especially if it was a lie.
She continued moving up the line and was particularly grateful when the highway leveled off. She checked the time: three hours until sunrise, and then several more days’ journey to the dreaded Mist Isle, a place so dangerous, it almost wiped out the Elfreth when they first passed through generations ago. Now she was leading them back to it.
Elise hoped to Gaia she was making the right call. In any case, the decision was made, and for better or worse, the Elfreth were heading west. She looked up at the sky, where a gap between the clouds had revealed thousands of stars. Her rock and her sage had left her alone down here. All she had to rely on now was her own judgment, and that scared her more than anything else in the world.
FOUR
KUO
Senior Securitate Kuo Masaki-Europa of the Valta Corporation’s Special Operations Division floated a hundred meters in the air above what looked like an antique-ships graveyard. An assortment of primitive-looking crafts, some half submerged, littered the field. According to Ewa, her second in command, this space port hadn’t been searched because it had been completely underwater up until a month ago.
Below her, a trio of Valta hounds skulked inside the buildings, supported by forty ChronoCom monitors and Valta troopers. Surveillance had captured a strange blip exhibiting both Valta and ChronoCom ship signatures less than three days ago. The blip had disappeared shortly after. As a precaution, the hound pack—Valta’s elite field scouts—was deployed to investigate. They called for the monitor backup shortly after, when they detected a large mass of people coming in from the north.
Large groups of savages on the move was rare among these ruins. The hounds felt there was a good chance these were whom the Co-op were searching for. Out of curiosity and the need for exercise, Kuo had decided to accompany the assault team. She had to give it to the temporal anomaly scientist and her tribe of savages, this project had taken far longer than expected, to the point it had come to the attention of Valta’s Board of Directors. This was not the type of recognition she wanted within the megacorporation.
“This is Hound Two,” a voice crackled through her comm module. “Inside a hangar. Located stacks of cannibalized ship parts. Recognize part of a collie hull.”
That ship signature was not a fluke after all. What were the savages up to? What could they possibly want with a ship, especially with her fleet of Valkyries blockading the region?
“Hound One reporting,” another voice joined in. “Located living quarters. The hearth is cold, but has recent signs of use. Probably a day, no more than two. A large group of people was here recently. By the waste levels, estimate several hundred, if not more.”
“Verify their identity,” she said. “Find which direction they went.”
“It’ll take time to scour the grounds,” Hound One replied. “The rising tide will be problematic.”
Kuo checked her AI module. The tide would rise two meters within the next hour. She cursed. This was the closest they had gotten in months. The savages had been cunning, hiding among this filth, keeping themselves just one step ahead of the Co-op. They leveraged the terrain well and employed hit-and-run tactics to steal supplies.
“Hound Three here. I have movement in hangar g
rid nine!” There was a scream, and then static.
“All Co-op converge on nine.” Kuo pulled up the map of the area in her AI module and located grid nine. She launched herself north to the edge of the space port and landed in front of a large hangar with massive double doors. She powered on her exo and created a thick white trunk. Using it as a bludgeon, she slammed it against one of the doors and knocked it off its hinges.
A barrage of small-arms fire struck her shield, sparking the electrified white sphere protecting her. She expanded the field and flew into the hangar, the white-bluish tint of her exo illuminating the room. She saw a dozen figures slinking back into the shadows. Hot red flashes of energy beams, mixed with antique projectile weapons, bounced against her shield.
Kuo focused on one of the energy streams coming from behind a stack of containers. She shot the trunk—as thick as she was tall—straight into the source of the weapon fire. The resulting impact exploded containers and bodies into the air and knocked over a portion of the wall.
Ocean water rushed in from the outside, sweeping savages, water, and rubble across the room. Another cluster of shots hit her from the right, and she swung the trunk down, killing her assailant instantly. The rest of the savages had seen enough and tried to flee. Kuo punched several with the trunk, easily breaking bones and crushing skulls.
She extended the trunk until it covered the length of the room and then swept it in a full circle. The remaining walls collapsed, and the entire building fell on top of everyone inside. A moment later, Kuo shot back up into the air and watched as the savages fled.
By this time, the plodding monitors had arrived, swarming around the stragglers who hadn’t been quick enough to escape. The ones still trying were cut down by the Valta troopers guarding the perimeter. The entire area around the destroyed building was reduced to a chaotic melee.