by Wesley Chu
His levels were nearing 30 percent when Grace spoke up. “Wait. Backtrack to that previous room.”
Levin ducked back into a large room near the back. It was a garage filled with several vehicles, transports, and combat crafts. “What of it? We can’t use any of these.”
“Grab that machine in the left corner.”
“The scout mechanoid? Why?”
“Just do as I say. You’ll have to unload some of your stores to hold it. Hurry, you have only four minutes left.”
Grumbling, Levin opened his netherstore and unloaded some of the containers of clothing and arms. He eyeballed the weight of the eight-legged mechanoid with the human upper and top, and then lifted it up. It was surprisingly lighter than he had thought, though still pushing the containment field of his netherstore perilously close to its limit.
“You’re going to need to unload more. Your levels are at thirteen percent.”
Levin dropped the mechanoid again and removed a few of the foodstuff containers.
“Not the food!”
“Too late, Mother of Time.”
He picked the mechanoid up again and dropped it in. His netherstore capacity filled to a hundred and his levels dropped to 6 percent. He was heading toward the exit of the ship when the gravity gave out. Several of the crafts in the garage broke free from their restraints and slid across the room. Levin was unprepared as a tank-like vehicle slammed into him. He barely got his exo up in time before it crushed him into the wall.
Dozens of floating objects began to careen around the room, bouncing off walls and smashing anything that got in their way. A transport craft collided with the tank-like vehicle and exploded, spewing shrapnel and burning debris all over the room. A cascade of smaller explosions followed.
“Auditor, get out of there. You’re at eighteen minutes. If you’re not out in the next forty-seven seconds, you’re going to fall into the sun.”
“Can I jump back right now?”
“No. It’s far too dangerous considering the ship’s trajectory and spin. Get out and stabilize in open space first.”
“Easier said than done.”
“I thought you were supposed to be good. I will be very put out if you die on your first jump, Auditor. Do not disappoint me.”
Additional pressure and a critic. Great, just what Levin needed. To die on his first jump after getting thrown out of ChronoCom and breaking out of prison would be humiliating. He narrowly dodged a fiery metal beam soaked in oil that speared into the wall behind him. He oriented himself and powered on his exo, ready to punch a hole through the ship’s outer hull. Then he realized he didn’t have enough levels. The only way he could get out was the way he had come in.
Ducking and pushing aside wreckage all the way, Levin shot himself down the length of the main corridor, having to fight off the bodies and debris flying at him. A woman with desperation on her face clutched at him as she flew past. He pushed her face out of his mind. It was a look he had seen thousands of times before. A good chronman had to have a short memory. It was the ones who didn’t who ended up poking a gas giant in the eye.
He checked the time: thirty seconds until nineteen minutes. He wasn’t going to make it. He had to try. Levin continued up the main corridor, dodging the stream of objects. Gravity had now completely abandoned the ship, its out-of-control rotation creating pressure and forces that moved every which way. Levin felt like a pinball.
Fifteen seconds.
He wasn’t going to make it. What a way to go. Dying in a sun was probably the most painful death he could think of. It would be a torturous few seconds before his body burned into a crisp, his fluids evaporating in a flash once the ship around him melted and his exo and atmos shields give way.
The timer had already hit the twenty-minute mark when he reached the hatch. His levels were down to 3 percent. Even if he got out of the ship now, chances were, his levels were too far down for him to survive the trip back to the collie. Still, he had to try.
Levin punched out of the ship and was temporarily blinded by the sun’s brightness. Using his AI band to show him the way, he shot himself toward the designated jump point. Even then, he knew he wasn’t going to make it. He checked his levels one last time; less than 1 percent. It was over. The jump would consume the rest of his levels and then the sun would burn him up.
“Let no one say that Levin Javier-Oberon did not fight to the last,” he said, closing his eyes.
The black space in front of him began to glow yellow. There was a flash and then an upturn of his stomach, and before he knew it, the ugly collie was floating right in front of him. Levin pushed the nausea down into his gut and shot himself into the hatch. A few seconds later, the netherstore container was hooked up to the collie and he collapsed on a hard metal bunk, heaving and sweating.
Grace’s upside-down head appeared. “I told you not to miss that nineteen-minute mark.”
“Your times are off,” he huffed, picking himself off the bunk.
She gave him a condescending smirk. “I’m never off. I padded them. I knew you were going to be a little incompetent the first time back.”
“I’m a little rusty.”
“Same thing, Auditor.” She felt his forehead and then checked the readings on the wall panel of the collie. “Your atmos failed before we picked you up. Your rad band managed to ward off most of the radiation, but you didn’t come out completely unscathed. Fortunately, I have a rad tank you can soak in back at the All Galaxy. Until then, I recommend you rest.”
“I’m fine, Mother of Time.”
“I didn’t ask you how you were, Auditor. I don’t know why chronmen are always so hard of hearing.” Before he could say another word, she activated his cryo band and Levin felt darkness sweep over him.
TWENTY-SIX
THE CARROT OR THE STICK
Elise sighed in resignation as she made a loop around the rooms that now held the key to saving the entire planet. The new lab, on the seventy-ninth floor, was easily ten times the size of her old one back at the Farming Towers, but not nearly as nice. Actually, it was downright filthy in here, but it was one of the least damaged parts of the tower. She sniffed the air; it would probably take her a week before she could get this place clean enough to work in.
Not that she had been putting many hours into her work recently. Elise had been pretty delinquent researching the cure for the Earth Plague, though she gave herself a pass, albeit just a temporary one. Being on the run tended to have that effect. The upheaval of the past several months had not only halted any progress, it had probably set her back a little. Hopefully just a little. She would prioritize her work here now that things had settled. It was the most important thing she could do for the people.
She went to the racks of testing beds that housed the various strains of the Earth Plague. Right now, six of the beds, mostly old aquariums the children of the tribe had scrounged up from an old pet store and re-purposed for her use, were intact. A few had suffered cracks from the long journey from Boston, but it wasn’t anything a little duct tape couldn’t fix. Four hundred years in the future, duct tape was still king. The remaining containers were an assortment of old pots and plasticware, which was appropriate, since the vast majority of her actual science equipment consisted of kitchen utensils.
She was making headway toward a cure, albeit slowly. Even now, samples LL and R3 showed promise. Bacteria levels in those two had stabilized, with decomposition of organic matter functioning as it should before the fungal taint’s infection. This formula worked only on a very specific strain of the plague. It would be useless against the dozens of other identified strains of the plague. Whatever the cure was would have to be synthesized to work on the entire family of the fungus or possibly be adaptive to hundreds of different variants.
That would require the bacterial sequencer James had stolen from the Nutris Platform. Unfortunately, they were no closer to locating the machine than when she had first arrived. In fact, he had dropped the ball compl
etely on it. Not that she could blame him. The two of them had been running and reacting for so long now they’d hardly had the chance to do any of the work that was really important. Like him finding the bacterial sequencer. Or her actually working on a cure.
Elise worried that so much of their plan hinged upon retrieving the machine. She had originally hoped that Grace and Titus could just reinvent or build new machines to duplicate what they needed. However, genius only went so far. Their specialties were too far from this field of work to bridge the technology and knowledge gap. As brilliant as they were, the work on the Nutris Platform was cutting-edge. It would take several years for them to get caught up, years neither of them had. The one time James had tried to retrieve a scientist who might have been able to reengineer the machine, he had failed.
Still, Titus 2.3 was fitting right in and had already proven his usefulness ten times over. Within the first couple of days of his arrival, he had dug up the Elfreth’s stash of solar panels and hooked them up to part of the building’s existing grid, meaning Elise could plug something into a socket in her lab and it would actually work. The power was limited to certain floors, and she had to prioritize its use carefully, but it still made a huge difference. The electronic equipment she had been forced to work without for the past several months was coming back online.
He also got the water purifiers working in the kitchen two days ago, and he and Grace were designing a working elevator and an analog telephone network for the building. When news of what they were working on reached the tribes, the Elfreth and the Flatirons practically deified the two old geniuses, and they both reveled in the attention.
Rima appeared at the door. “Oldest Elise, Oldest Grace and the new chronman are returning. Chawr says they should be arriving on the landing deck soon.”
“Did Grace give a time?”
“Yes, Oldest. She said seven-zero-nine.”
Elise pointed at the working digital clock—the only one in the entire building that she was aware of. “How long until they arrive?”
Rima scrunched her face as she worked on the math. She almost used her fingers until a disapproving glance from Elise made her put them behind her back.
“Seventeen minutes. No, seven,” she said finally.
Elise nodded and waved her away. The only way the girl was ever going to reach her full potential was if she stopped treating time and measurements in approximations. She got up and walked over to the south-facing window. It was dark outside, and the mist tonight was heavy, so there wasn’t much to see. However, a few minutes later, she saw a beam of light slowly swimming in the darkness just above the waterline. The Frankenstein weaved lazily between buildings, ducking under bridges, getting closer and closer to the All Galaxy. Between the EMP fog and its anti-detection abilities, the collie should be safe from the Co-op’s surveillance, which constantly blanketed the region, but it was best to be careful anyway.
Elise left her lab and went down to the landing deck on the seventy-third floor, bounding down the stairs two and three at a time. The deck was the highest of three large open areas in the building and the largest of the Elfreth’s storage floors. If for some reason the Elfreth and Flatirons lost the lower levels, the seventy-second floor would be the last line of defense.
This was their first salvage in months. What if something had gone wrong? What if the jump had failed? What if something had happened to Levin? So much depended on the former auditor providing them with a steady source of supplies. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until she saw Grace and Levin unloading their haul from the netherstore container and dividing it into parcels for the children to move to storage.
Levin’s eyes met hers as she walked by, and her body shuddered involuntarily. She had been avoiding him ever since he had arrived; the incident of the battle at the top of the Farming Towers was still the stuff of her nightmares. Elise pushed those thoughts away. That was all in the past. Things were different now. She turned her attention to the pile of containers and equipment appearing out of midair and let some of her tightly-wound nerves loosen. She hadn’t realized just how dependent the Elfreth were on James’s salvages until he couldn’t run them anymore. “Did everything go all right?” she asked.
Grace nodded. “The auditor here almost fried in the sun, but he’ll be around for at least another jump.”
“I’m out of practice,” Levin said.
“I’m glad,” Elise said, still unable to look him in the eye. “This will really help the tribe.”
The ex-auditor looked unconvinced as he took out a crate of dried rations and gave it to one of the children to run down to the kitchen. “We need to acquire some miasma,” he said flatly. “Otherwise, I’ll burn out like James within months.”
“We’ve tried,” Elise said. “It’s not easy to find.”
“Try harder.”
Grace walked over to Elise and took her hand. “Come here, girl. We have a present for you.”
The Mother of Time led her to the other end of the balcony, where the collie was parked. Elise rounded the corner behind a pallet of supplies and squealed. There, next to a stack of metal drums and an array of solar panels, was Charlotte, or at least the cousin of the beloved mechanoid she had lost back in 2097. It was all she could do to not jump up and down in excitement.
“She’s beautiful,” she exclaimed, throwing her arms around Grace.
Grace squawked at the sudden show of affection and awkwardly accepted her embrace. Elise approached the mechanoid and touched one of its eight legs. It was sleek, its skin a dark cobalt that seemed to shimmer and change depending on the angle of the light. Its limbs were much thinner than Charlotte’s back in 2097, almost impossibly long, considering its size. She tested her weight on one of its legs and then climbed to its human-shaped torso. Her fingers ran up the side of the headpiece until she felt a small indention. She pressed it and the front upper torso of the mechanoid opened, splitting outward from the middle.
She grinned and turned to Grace. “It’s definitely a more advanced version of Charlotte, but a lot of it is the same. I’m going to name her Aranea.”
Grace nodded. “Don’t try to take her out for a spin yet. Titus and I will need to clear the security protocols, reprogram, and check functionalities first. The last thing we need is for the savior of Earth to lose control of her new toy and plummet off a building to her death. It’s over a century more advanced than the ones you’re used to, and it’s a military vehicle, so it’s probably weaponized.”
Elise held her hands up. “You got it, Grandma. I promise I won’t play with it until you give me the go-ahead. I’m so excited. Thank you, thank you!”
She hugged the Mother of Time again. Charlotte was one of the biggest things she missed from her time. Sure, clean air, good food, and controlled room temperatures were great too, but piloting her mechanoid had been one of her greatest joys. With all the bad things happening lately, this little spot of good news was exactly what she needed.
“Thank the auditor,” Grace said. “He’s the one who risked his life to retrieve it for you.”
Elise went back to the other side of the roof where Levin had just finished divvying up the salvage. She bit her lip, forced her eyes to lock onto his face, and walked toward him.
He looked at her as she approached. “What?”
“I wanted to thank you for getting me that mechanoid. It was very thoughtful.”
“The Mother of Time told me to get it.”
“Still, thank you. For everything.” She offered her hand. “Welcome to the Elfreth.”
Levin stared at her hand for a few moments before finally accepting it. “It still doesn’t mean I approve of your being in this time. You’re an anomaly and you set a poor precedent.”
“You know I’m a person, too, right?” she said dryly.
“Oldest Elise!” Sammuia rushed up the stairs, breathless. “Raid on both eastern and western barricades. The western has already fallen. The Flatirons are beggin
g for help.”
It must be serious for the Flatirons to have lost a barricade so quickly. The attacking tribe must have come in hard. She hoped it wasn’t too late. If whoever was attacking managed to establish a foothold on the floor and secure one of the stairwells, then the entire building could be compromised.
“Where’s Eriao and James?” she shouted, running down the stairs with Sammuia and Levin close behind. Already, several of the guardians were massing at defensive points along the stairwell entrances.
“Elder Eriao is rallying five teams in Lower Village and taking them down to the barricade.”
“And James?”
“He is already fighting.”
“Of course he is,” she grumbled. James ran toward trouble. The stairwells were a mess as she fought the flow of elderly and children running up to the safety of the upper levels. She reminded herself to put a process in place for situations like this. The guardians and fights had to be able to move up and down quickly without being disrupted by civilians.
She reached the barricade level and saw Eriao directing teams of guardians to different sides of the floor. He was deep in a heated discussion with the Flatiron teacher and Maanx. The teacher’s son offered her a slight nod as she approached. That was something, at least.
Crowe hurried to her. “Oldest, thank you for your people responding so quickly. “
“Of course,” she said, putting a reassuring hand on the old Teacher’s shoulder. “That’s what alliances are for.” She motioned to the teams of guardians nearby. “Let’s get moving.”
“No, Elise,” Levin said. “You stay up here with Crowe.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’ve had this talk with James and Franwil already. I don’t need to have it with you. And Gaia help me if you say something about my being a woman…”