Sanctuary Falling

by Pamela Foland

  “I’ve got it, an antiserum that should work!” Tina blurted, oblivious to the other goings on in the room. As she looked up from her pad she blinked twice at the prime jacket still folded in Angela’s arms. “Oh, my.”

  “Good, Tina, would you slap the girl and get her to take the damn jacket so we can get on with the round up!” Angela grunted. Tina took the jacket from Angela and wrapped it around Annette’s shoulders where she sat, still stunned.

  “Perhaps Cousin, you should finish the round up, Annette looks pretty rounded out. Plus I may need her to perfect the serum, it’s based on her immune system and all.”

  “Okay,” Angela replied, clearly reluctant.

  Annette fished out bags of tags and handed them to Angela, “Slap these on the infected people and Central computer will transport them to the stasis room. Nice and simple.”

  Angela headed for the door then stopped and trotted back to Annette, “When this is over I want you to pull a design team together. Between the quake damage, Kavir and the increasing inflow of refugees, we need some new facilities. You and your select team are going to design them. Take whomever you want or need from wherever you need them, design us a new place of refuge. Then build it. I’ll have Sinclair draw up specifications for you, and give you an information package on what your resources are.”

  Annette’s mood slumped, old wounds to her confidence still existed when it came to Sinclair Chavez. She quickly hid it with a weak smile, “So, when do you want it by?”.

  “It’ll all be in the information package. Frankly once it’s set, the deadline will be quite inflexible. I do want to make one thing clear to you, and I’ll make it clear to Chavez as well. You will be in charge of this project, he and all of his resources are at your disposal. For all intents and purposes your authority will be second only to my own, making you his boss.” A smile flickered across Angela’s face before she turned again and left.

  Annette sat stunned with the prime jacket wrapped around her shoulders. Annette tentatively clutched the jacket in place. A prime? At fifteen? Not even Angela had mentioned the possibility before.

  “Are you going to be alright?” Tina asked, her face full of concern.

  Annette blinked at Tina, “Am I really a prime now?”

  Tina smiled, “Apparently!” Annette shivered, coughed and spat up more slime. Tina took this with alarm. She quickly scanned both Annette and the small puddle of slime she had ejected. “Yes, it will definitely work.”

  Annette numbly slipped her arms into the sleeves of her new jacket, “I am so relieved. What about me, am I going to cough up black sludge for the rest of my life or is there an end to this?”

  Tina tapped her pad, “That seems to be the last of it.”

  “Oh, good, can I pass out now?” Annette asked feeling her consciousness drifting.

  “No, but a little sedation may be in order,” Tina smiled and pulled out a omnijector and held it to Annette’s neck, there was a hiss and a prick, followed by a fuzzy-warm sense of well-being.

  Annette tried to worry as consciousness left her but she was so tired to begin with that she couldn’t resist.

  - - - - - - - - - -

  Chapter 16

  Hitting the wall

  ------------------------------------

  Breaking waves and the sound of blood pounding in Yllera’s ears woke her. Foreign smells kept her conscious; sea-salt and iodine, fish and seaweed, overpowered by a familiarly frightening male scent. Yllera sat up quickly, a little too quickly for someone recovering from a stun capsule. She was in a dimly lit coral cave, dressed in a flimsy dress resembling dried seaweed. The bed beneath her was a make shift creation of rope driftwood and a grass filled pad. She searched for Max but he was nowhere to be seen. The light in the cave came from the one entrance, covered by the same flimsy fabric as her dress. By the rippling pattern the light, Yllera judged that at some point it reflected off of water.

  A mono-tonal hum echoed into the room from the hall and Yllera backed herself away from the entrance as far as she could. She was practically trying to become a part of the fossilized coral of the rear wall. The whistle stopped and a hand shoved open the drape.

  “You are awake my love,” Kavir said holding a tray of fire roasted sea-life before him.

  “Let me go!” Yllera shrieked.

  Kavir put the tray on the bed and reached for Yllera. She shrugged away from him but could not evade his touch. Warmth and tingling anticipation spread from where his slime covered hand left a trail on her arm. Her sudden scream announced her terror. Kavir’s mind pressed at her from without and to a strange extent from within. Yllera shivered. He pushed his way past every one of her shields, and she wasn’t even sure she wanted to stop him.

  There was intimacy there, more than she had experienced ever before. They had been one organism, now they were two. Yllera knew from deep within, that Kavir considered it only right and proper for them to become one once again. All of his influence, telepathic and expertly physical, was poured into convincing her of that truth.

  “Do not resist,” He whispered huskily, crawling onto the bed to join her. He planted his lips on hers, and she limply kissed back.

  She pulled herself away from him in shock for her betrayal of her feelings for Max, “No!”

  “What does no mean?” Kavir wondered telepathically deep within Yllera. His lips pressed on hers and his slippery black mucous filled her mouth.

  It flowed against gravity into her synapses changing hours to eternity and eternity to moments. Time in an ecstasy Yllera did not, could not choose to resist. Her consciousness blended with his and she knew her body did as well. He left her still caught in his thrall and he fed her, sometimes despite herself, though she had long since lost the desire to resist. It wasn’t until a rhythmic pain took hold of her that she came into herself again. Then it was to the horror of eight black slimy sacks passing from her womb. Kavir gently lowered each into a tub of seawater as they moved and flexed from some form within.

  Struck suddenly with the horror of what Kavir had done to her, Yllera once again screamed. The pain came again harder and faster. Yllera struggled for breath around the pain. Muscles stretched; bones ground; flesh tore, and out came an actual child. Kavir seemed confused by it. Yllera was enthralled it was a perfect little copy of herself. The pain remained acute and Yllera could feel herself bleeding, perhaps a little too freely. Her heart beat pounded in her ears again and she felt herself blacking out. Ba-dump, she needed. . . ba-dump. . .Kavir had no concept of how to stop the blood. She needed help!

  - - - - - - - - - -

  Annette awoke, like any other morning, too aware of her responsibilities. Her prime jacket hung from its hook on the wall next to the door into the hall. She showered and dressed quickly in one of her blue jumpsuits, though the rest of her training group had moved on to fourth-year green, and she was technically beyond training entirely.

  A lot had been accomplished in the slightly over two years since Angela gave Annette the order to design and build a new place of refuge. The last year and a half had passed her by too quickly for her to notice. In that time many things had happened.

  For one Annette had moved into a clear place of leadership among her floor mates. They still called Carl “Captain,” but Annette’s old nickname of “Quick” had fallen away, replaced, jokingly, by “Chief Jr.” By now it had taken on a more serious tone, some of the adults who helped with the Refuge project had begun using it as well.

  Annette had tapped the resources of her floor mates first and foremost. Mike and Tamar did the mathematics necessary to the project. Scope and Popper had worked on the aesthetics. Net organized all the information and Carl helped Annette with the allocation of time and resources. All of them except Annette received credit in their training for their work with Annette, but in the end they returned to the simplicity of their classes when not occupied with the project. For Annette it was a full time job, but it wasn’t her only responsibility.


  Annette glanced at the time stamp on her media screen and raced to help Tawny with the pre-trainees. Then she bolted down breakfast and rushed to the room she had appropriated for the design team. It was a large room full of workstations and design computers. Printouts filled the walls, showing the various stages and levels of the new design. The room was empty of people, they were still in class or busy with other duties.

  Annette called up a holographic projection of Refuge, the de-facto name of their future home. She walked through it stepping closer to the image of the main cavern, designed to act as a pocket world, With a pie shaped footprint, each slice of the pie would be a mile high and more than two hundred wide. The main cavern was designed to simulate a temperate climate. It even had a small sea, and that was just one of five major caverns.

  Each of the other four simulated a different environment, from Jelarian desert to glacial tundra. Rivers flowed through the land and tunnels connected the seas. It was beautiful and would have one thing Annette hadn’t seen since she was a very young child, weather. Annette sighed standing at eye level with the central city of refuge named Grand central, because it was the central point around which the pie shaped environmental caverns would be arranged. Another city, one more civilian oriented was offset into the main cavern just a few miles had the name of Hub. None of the design team had been much more than practical about the names they gave the towns and cities.

  Annette grabbed a stylus from a counter and began editing the hologram, erasing the straight pie-slice lines, jumbling them up making them jagged mountains more reminiscent of nature. Annette was deep in reworking the edges of the caverns when Mikey, Scope and Net rumbled in from lunch. Each took up their standard places. Annette finished her touch ups and Net joined her in the hologram.

  “Chief Jr., that’s just what it needed,” Net began.

  “Thanks, I hope it won’t mess up the program you’ve set for the excavators,” Annette replied.

  “No, I can integrate the new footprints with a couple of points and a click or two,” Net jabbed at her pop-pad, “There we go. Not so hard, now that we’ve got the right programs involved.”

  Annette smiled and wandered over to check on what Mike, the mathematician was up to. His fingers were furiously tapping away at the keyboard and his eyes were glued to the screen. Manically he turned to face Annette, “Chief Jr. We have a problem! A very big problem!”

  “Mikey don’t tell me we have problems we are just about ready to start construction!” Annette pleaded.

  “Oh, no it has nothing to do with that! Sanctuary is in severe risk of being crushed!” Mike blurted, everyone else in the room rushed to see what he was talking about. Mike pounded the execute key, “I’ve done the calculations twice. You have to tell Angela, clearly someone is trying to destroy Sanctuary. What’s worse is that according to my calculations it’ll work. “

  Annette smiled weakly, he’d finally stumbled upon the pressing concern bothering Annette for months, “I think she already knows, and that it’s why she asked us to design Refuge. “

  Scope nervously looked at the display, “Why wouldn’t she just tell us that then?”

  Annette frowned, thinking hard, “She probably didn’t want us to stress out over it. She needed us to get the job done and she probably worried we’d crack under the pressure.A

  Mike swung his seat around to face them, “We won’t, but Sanctuary sure as hell will! I can’t believe she didn’t trust us to get the job done.”

  “She does,” Angela said stepping into the workroom, I just wanted to spare you. I didn’t want you left sleepless thinking the fate of all of us rested on your work. By the way how goes it?” Everyone looked sheepish, especially Mike.

  Net was quick to respond, “We’ve selected the planetoid, thanks to the help of an army of surveyors. The cavern designs are complete, and I’ve already programmed the excavators.”

  Mike groaned, still appearing to be upset by the lack of information, “And I finished the calculations for the bubble generator. Basically everything rests on whether or not the design for the generator was valid and whether or not Sinclair’s team was capable of executing the design.”

  A noncommittal smile crossed Angela’s face, “Not a problem, they tested it. It works. So, it’s going well? You can have it done how soon?”

  Annette took charge waving off Net’s incipient response, “We can have it done by the deadline, if we excavate, terra-form, and landscape it before en-bubbling it.”

  “But Mike hasn’t finished the stress calculations to determine the structural specifications necessary to withstand the stresses of en-bubbling. He ran the Sanctuary calculations instead. I guess he’d rather wait until after en-bubbling to do the construction,” Scope weighed in. Annette smiled as Mike glared at her for not letting them know Angela was lurking in wait.

  Annette glanced at Angela and saw a flicker of worry cross the older woman’s face, “There probably isn’t time for that, not if we try to replicate the temporal differential of Sanctuary. “

  Mike stiffened, clearly coming to the realization he had proven the need for a deadline. “I was taking a break, messing around with the stress equations before I got started.” Defensively he turned back to his terminal and typed frantically.

  Annette watched Net glance around nervously before asking, “So, is the deadline when Sanctuary’s set to implode?”

  Annette watched Angela’s face while the older woman clearly weighed the possible answers, “It’s slightly sooner than the earliest possible time. We may have more time if our factors can manage to stop enough of the dark teams. “

  “So, maybe we can extend the deadline indefinitely?” Scope blurted hopefully.

  Angela quickly shook her head no, “Our people are good, but I’m not optimistic. The dark has too many windows of opportunity, too many possible patterns to trigger the implosion. We can’t tell which pattern they’re going after until they’re halfway through it. It doesn’t give us much time to stop them from completing it. We’ve already cut it close twice, and one of those times was sheer luck.”

  Annette grimaced, “The quake.”

  Angela looked at Annette approvingly, “Yeah. Look, I’ve got to get back to other. . . things. I’m glad things are going so well. Please, don’t spread the word about the threat, I was hoping to wait until after the new place is ready.”

  “We’re calling it Refuge,” Annette supplied.

  “Really, Refuge? Sounds good, let me know when you’ve got life support started in it so I can check it out,” Angela said making a quick retreat.

  Annette took a seat by Mike’s terminal and spoke softly, “She’s worried.”

  “And she probably hasn’t looked at the numbers. I’ve seen them and I’m twice as worried,” Mike said while he typed. Then he stopped and looked at Annette, “How are you doing?”

  Annette froze at the personal question, since the sluggoids she’d been hesitant to open up to even her trusted friends. “I’m doing as well as can be expected, given the quake, the slugs and the pressure of developing a new home-world from scratch.” She tried to smile but it came out as a grimace instead.

  A piercing whistle announced Carl’s arrival. Annette swiveled in her chair to face the door. He came trotting in the room with a pizza box. “Annette, you will eat!” Carl announced with a smile which dissolved the moment he saw the other people in the room, “What? Did someone die?”

  “No, Carl,” Net said softly, “We just found out that Sanctuary is going to be destroyed, we’re working under a definite >dead’-line.”

  “Whoa! Are you serious?” Carl asked almost dropping his pizza.

  “Got it from the Chief’s mouth. Oh and by the way we aren’t supposed to be spreading the word around about it,” Mike said with a wry dead-panned grin.

  Carl tossed the pizza box onto a counter top, “Then I guess we should get started with the building, shouldn’t we?”

  - - - - - - - - - -

  An
gela pressed her back to the wall of her paint-room. It wasn’t wet yet. She’d come directly from the design room. Annette’s team had hit a raw nerve by figuring out the peril they were all in, and attacking her with it. Angela focused her mind on the stack of paint cans and began randomly opening the lids. When she found a grey matching the fear churning in her gut Angela raced to it and began flinging it around the room with her mind, like a mini tornado. Since the attempted takeover by Kavir, when Annette had broken through the paint on the painted over door, Angela had painted it shut again, after permanently disabling the door mechanism. The only way into or out of the room now was teleportation.

  Angela emptied the paint can and tossed it into the pile of empty ones. She would need more paint soon, a lot more before things drove her to another breakdown. The Kavir incident had shaken her to immobility until Annette showed her a path of action. Now all of Angela’s hopes rested on the girl being able to create a new Sanctuary. Refuge, it was a good name, and it fit. Everyone moving into it would be a refugee, fleeing the destruction of their home.

  How was Angela going to break the news to the people? “I’m sorry folks we all have to move or be killed in the universe’s largest trash compactor. No problem since it’s no longer secure against threats from outside,” Angela covered her mouth realizing she’d said that out loud. Perhaps she didn’t need to worry about a future breakdown, considering that she was currently going through one. Angela slapped herself to dry up the panic bubbling in her stomach. She wanted Daniel’s arms around her, but still was terrified of her husband because of Kavir.

  Thinking of Kavir reminded Angela of Yllera, who was still missing after two years. Max alternated between harassing Angela and moaning his grief at her. Angela couldn’t take much more, especially since his connection to Yllera was their only real hope of finding the girl.