The Exodus Towers: The Dire Earth Cycle: Two

by Jason M. Hough

  “I want to follow one of the three remaining tracks, see where it goes,” Skyler said. “Maybe we’ll find they landed in some pattern, and the mystery fifth ship’s location will become clear.”

  “Perhaps,” Tania said. She’d had the same thought, but with no access to satellite imagery she had no way to confirm it. Skyler and Karl seemed to be waiting for her approval of the plan. “I’m loath to risk you, Skyler. You and your crew.”

  “Everything we’re doing out here is a risk. And honestly I’d feel more comfortable in a plane than walking these streets.”

  Tania searched his eyes, trying to decide if he was deliberately looking to get away from the camp, or really wanted to seek the missing towers. Some of both, she concluded. “The colony comes first,” she said. She noted his disappointment instantly, and held up a hand. “I just want to make sure the new crews are handling their roles before you go anywhere.”

  There were problems right from the start, and Skyler began to wonder if he’d ever be able to relinquish his role as the herder of cats.

  Despite all the training, the new scavenger crews missed what should have been obvious opportunities with frustrating regularity. Not only that, but they took their marked regions on the map too seriously, and would bypass ripe sites just because they were on the wrong side of a street.

  Logistics were a constant struggle. Karl and his chosen assistant, a former secretary to Neil Platz named Alfonz, struggled to come up with a decent method of cataloging all the sites within the city, their salvageable contents, and also what had already been returned to the camp. When the colonists’ shifting priorities and daily emergencies were added to the mix, it became almost impossible to give the scavenger crews clear orders.

  Skyler spent more time venturing out with the lowest-performing crews than he did with his own immunes. A woman named Rebecca ran the Tombstones crew efficiently enough, and the crew called Eden, for Eden Estates, took to their short-straw task of farming the eastern slums with surprising zeal and energy, thanks to their two inventive leaders, Colton and Nachu. But the other crews had varying degrees of success.

  Worst of all, subhuman sightings began to rise sharply, as if the subs had been released from their vigil at the crashed Builder ship. Soon the crews were faced with almost daily encounters with the beings. The instinct they displayed to surround the crashed ship, and moan their strange chant, had apparently left them. Skyler feared that the armored versions would begin to show up, but as of yet no one had seen them, and the monitors placed at the circle showed no sign of them beyond shadows within the haze.

  Those in camp could hear the distant, sporadic gunfire roll through the city, and often found crews returning empty-handed, or worse, with injuries that required tending.

  On one rainy November morning, a battle erupted from the area called Ugly Church that lasted for almost an hour. So long, in fact, that Skyler gathered his own team and set out across the city to try to help.

  Ugly Church was so named for the massive Catholic cathedral that dominated the cityscape there. The structure itself was, ironically, quite beautiful, despite the vines that now crept over and through its lower levels, or the rats that watched from every shadow. The “ugly” part of the name was due to the skeletons. Thousands littered the grounds, and no colonist had yet dared to venture inside.

  Roughly five years ago, when the disease swept through here like a sudden thunderstorm, the pious had flocked to their house of worship, filled the place, and crowded around it in some kind of—ultimately useless—mass prayer.

  Skyler and his team spotted the Ugly Church crew’s aura tower near a low wall that partially ringed a traffic circle. The church itself was a few blocks away, but even here there were skeletal remains strewn about the ground. Time and rainfall had, at least, done away with the stench.

  They arrived too late.

  After a brief skirmish to finish off the remaining subhumans in the area, Skyler found himself amid a massacre. All four members of the Ugly Church crew lay dead. Two had apparently shot each other in an unfortunate bit of crossfire, though Skyler figured that may have been a mercy given what they were up against.

  Skyler and Pablo cleaned up the scene as best they could while Ana and Vanessa stood guard. The fallen crew were buried in a shallow grave, after the useful equipment had been removed from their persons. Skyler worked methodically, having long ago abandoned any qualms about such things. Pablo, on the other hand, paused frequently to still his shaking hands.

  Every other crew was called back to camp after that. The setback ate away at Skyler’s optimism. Since Gabriel and his cronies were defeated, and the strange alien ship with its black-clad defenders had been willfully ignored, the camp had operated with surprising efficiency. But the relative lack of subhumans in the surrounding region had lulled the colonists. Many had still never seen a subhuman since setting foot off the climber car that brought them down. Now that the dam had broken, it almost didn’t matter that the Builders had provided movable pockets of aura. Everyone cowered within the camp, patrolling the crude wall, crying alarms at every shadow that moved in the surrounding slums.

  After much discussion a revised system was put in place. A new crew would be trained to replace the one they’d lost, but in the meantime the three remaining would be reshuffled to give each at least one skilled combat veteran. For a time they would forget scavenging, though, until the sudden population burst of subhumans could be dealt with.

  Skyler had lived through one purge. The Purge, as it was called in Darwin. He’d fought in it, side by side with Jake, among others. Weeks of roaming the flat, scrubby lands around Darwin, killing every one of the creatures they came across. And in those days they were legion.

  A similar effort was mounted in Belém. The scavenger crews, along with a handful of volunteers who could handle weapons, began to run sweeps back and forth in an expanding circle centered on the Elevator base. Skyler rode in the back of a pickup truck driven by Vanessa. Ana and Pablo were with him, and the three of them armed themselves with good high-power rifles. They drove back and forth along the line all day, helping if needed, scouting if not.

  On the first day, no subhumans were encountered, but the circle had only expanded out two hundred meters from the wall. By the end of that week, they’d pushed out a full kilometer, and more than forty subs had been shot without a single injury to the colonists.

  To go farther would strain resources to the limit. After a brief debate with all the various leaders, Skyler pointed out that unless they could somehow actually hold that ground, which was impossible given their numbers and the limited aura towers, the best course of action was to simply unleash the “ring of extermination” once a week, in order to keep the buffer zone around the camp as clear as possible. Any scavenging missions beyond that one-klick area would require special permission and would be handled by two teams working together.

  By the height of wet season, the camp was running like a machine again.

  Climbers worked their way up or down the Elevator cord daily, sometimes even in multiples. Subhuman encounters around camp dropped to manageable levels as the weekly purges became a camp routine. Indeed, the colonists became accustomed to the creatures, and most were now adept at fighting them. The sight of rifles slung over shoulders, or pistols holstered at the waist, became the norm.

  Every month, with only some variance, Melville Station would receive another forty “volunteers” from Darwin. The people who could be vouched for by friends or relatives in camp always integrated quickly enough. Everyone else, those chosen via suspect criteria by Russell Blackfield, were kept on the station under guard for a few days, and then sent to places where they could be watched around the clock. To everyone’s amazement, and intense suspicion, none showed signs of being spies. A few reported that Russell no longer bothered to pick the migrants, that he’d delegated the task to one of the old Orbital Council members. One migrant, Skyler heard, told of a newfound sense of purpose
in Darwin. Gardens apparently flourished, and along with the farm platforms Russell had schemed out of Tania, the food situation was almost under control. Neither Tania nor Zane was overly troubled by this news, as neither felt the colony could handle too many more migrants. Soon the ecosystems surrounding each Elevator would no longer have need of one another, and this worried Skyler.

  Skyler woke one December morning to the familiar sound of rain rattling against the roof of the APC, which had become his home. He checked the adjacent vehicle and found Ana’s bunk was empty, which was not uncommon since she’d finished mourning her brother. Depression behind her, the girl woke early with an abundance of energy and often slipped out to wander the camp before Skyler stirred. She had a voracious appetite to learn, and he rarely found her in the same place twice when he called the crew together. Sometimes she would be helping load or unload a climber. He’d found her helping in the gardens, pouring concrete, dismantling electronics for parts, and fishing. Always she would be under the tutelage of one camp expert or another, and she made fast friends with just about everyone she spent time with.

  None of this troubled Skyler in the least. A multitude of friends within the colony meant she wouldn’t always be following him around like a puppy. Not that he didn’t enjoy her company. She was bright and funny and, sometimes, impossible. Where Tania always seemed to enter into conversations as an equal, Ana either played the eager student or the headstrong, passionate firebrand. There was little in the way of middle ground for her, and it made her constant company an exhausting affair.

  So her absence most mornings didn’t bother Skyler at all, and indeed he learned to love the early hours as he used to. Coffee and a serving of oatmeal with fresh fruit or avocado. He’d sit around a small heater and sip his drink, discussing everything and nothing with whoever happened to join him. Pablo usually, though he talked little. Vanessa could hold her own on just about any topic, but tended to sleep late.

  Karl would drop by to share a cup once in a while. They saw each other most mornings anyway, for the list reviews, and anyway the older man’s motor home was all the way on the other side of camp. Word had it he’d taken a lover, a woman of similar age who had been some midlevel analyst on Platz Station, and Karl’s rare appearances for morning coffee seemed to corroborate the rumor.

  And so Skyler was surprised that morning when he found Karl seated at the cook fire, next to a pot of boiling water and a pair of mugs.

  “This is a rare honor,” Skyler said as he pulled on a sweater. All of the vehicles left behind by Gabriel were parked with their back doors facing one another, forming a ring. A fire pit had been set up in the center of this, surrounded by a mismatched collection of plastic chairs and tables. Rain drummed on a giant blue and white patio umbrella that covered the small communal space, tied to the roof racks of the surrounding vehicles.

  “I miss seeing your pretty face in the morning light,” he shot back. With two hands he carefully extended a full mug to Skyler. A few drops sloshed over the side and sizzled as they hit the portable stove.

  After a careful sip, Skyler rubbed his eyes and settled into a low beach chair. The constant prattle of raindrops on the umbrella drowned out the sounds of the colony around them. “What dire problem has you making me coffee at six in the morning, Karl?”

  “The comm’s out again,” he said flatly.

  “Give it a good smack on the side.”

  “Tried that. But it seems some water dripped through a hole in the roof of the container and fried the antenna dish.”

  “Is there a spare?” Skyler asked. “Wait, don’t answer. You wouldn’t be here if there was.”

  Karl took a noisy slurp at his own drink. “I was thinking, maybe you and the others could bring back a larger dish, more powerful. We’ve got plenty of surplus juice coming in from the campus thor, and it would give us a lot more bandwidth to Melville. Hell, we could even reach the farms or New Anchor without the relays.”

  “Have one in mind, or are we supposed to track one down?”

  In answer Karl slipped a slate from his inner jacket pocket and handed it across. The thin black tablet’s screen came to life as soon as Skyler’s thumb brushed its surface.

  “Those boys from Eden have started an effort to do a photo survey of the city, so we can ‘scout’ from the comfort of the comm room.”

  “Smart,” Skyler said. An image appeared on the screen of Belém’s skyline, taken from the eastern slums somewhere north of the Elevator base. Karl had dropped a marker on one office building’s rooftop. It appeared to be the largest building in Belém, with a logo of PGF marking its side. Skyler zoomed in. As he did, he realized the genius of a photo survey. The image was fantastically high resolution and even had illusory depth to it. Skyler tracked in until he looked at a single window on the building’s top floor, and still he could make out small details. This one image of the city alone could be studied and marked up for potential scavenging all without leaving the safety of home. “Very smart.”

  He panned the image until he found Karl’s marker again. The notation pointed to a white dish-and-antenna assembly on the roof.

  “It’s about a meter tall,” Karl said. “Compact but heavy. I suspect you’ll need bolt cutters or even a torch.”

  “Rain has hammered that thing for five years,” Skyler noted. He usually eschewed electronics that he didn’t find indoors. “It might not even work.”

  “Hydrophobic coating. I’ve seen that model before. Expensive as hell, but it’ll last ten wet seasons without batting an eye.”

  Skyler zoomed in even farther, almost as impressed with the sharpness of the image as he was with the clean, white surfaces of the comm tower. Karl had it right; there wasn’t a sign of discoloration or rust anywhere on it.

  The rest was details. By noon that day, Skyler and his crew were clanging up the steps of Belém’s largest building.

  Darwin, Australia

  10.NOV.2283

  “IS HE IN?” Sam asked the stranger sitting outside Grillo’s Nightcliff office.

  “No,” the woman said. She had frayed red hair and a narrow face laced with worry lines. Her gaze drifted to the parcel Samantha carried. “That for him?”

  Sam looked down at the package tucked under her left arm. The plastic bag that covered the book had a visible coat of sandy dust on it, just like her clothing, skin, and hair.

  “You can leave it with me,” the woman said.

  “No,” Sam replied. “He asked me to bring it to him specifically. He was very clear on that.”

  “Well, you’ll have to wait till Monday. He’s gone to Lyons, and tomorrow is the Holy Day.”

  A shiver ran along Sam’s back at the mention of Grillo’s original base of operations, out on Darwin’s eastern edge just beyond the Maze. As far as she knew, Kelly lived there now, supposedly as a Jacobite nun called Sister Josephine.

  “Thanks,” Sam said. She turned and walked out, the idea forming in her mind with each step down the long stairwell that would let her out of Nightcliff’s tower.

  Outside a stiff breeze whipped light rain about. She tucked the parcel back under her combat vest and continued to walk. Halfway across the yard she caught a glimpse of the door that led to the cell block where she’d been held. She flirted with the idea of dropping in to see Vaughn, to apologize for using him. To make amends. And perhaps …

  No. Another time. She had a small opportunity here to find out where Kelly was, to perhaps catch some additional small clue from her friend as to just what the hell she was doing.

  Sam walked on. She slipped through the side door next to Nightcliff’s main gate with a polite wave to the guards, ignoring their suggestion that she wait for someone to escort her back. It was a halfhearted request, anyway, given the metamorphosis Darwin’s streets had experienced.

  She followed the fortress wall, leaving Ryland Square to the east. The skyscrapers quickly gave way to smaller structures ranging from five to fifty stories high, pressed together a
s if they’d been through a trash compactor. Tight alleys wormed between the loosely defined blocks, plunging into darkness.

  Sam picked one at random and ducked into the Maze. The light rain that had been swirling about her like a swarm of tiny translucent insects stopped almost instantly, replaced by eerie droplets that tumbled down from the endless balconies and awnings above. Day turned to twilight and then night in the span of five steps, as completely as if she’d stepped indoors. She glanced straight up, past the clotheslines and exposed pipes, past the buckets that captured water or served as toilets, past the occasional face in the darkness, watching her out of vigilance or, perhaps, boredom. Above it all she could just make out a crooked gray line that was the sky. Even if the sun had been out she doubted she could have used it to tell her direction. She’d have to rely on asking, but this didn’t concern her. She still wore her combat gear from the mission, and such garb made people wary even in a city as jaded as Darwin. Plus, her reputation among the Jacobites preceded her more and more these days. Grillo, it seemed, had put the word out that she was to be treated as a friend. A sneer-worthy heathen friend, yes, but still a friend.

  She’d been through the Maze on foot only a few times before, but always with Skyler to lead the way. Things were different back then, dangerous in a different way. Swarms of people flowed through the twisting alleys like blood through arteries. Vendors and beggars alike shouted pleas for attention. Scrawny children dressed in rags would trail along behind them, gawking at their weapons, their combat gear, the sight of boots that didn’t have holes worn through.

  None of that remained. The alleys were practically empty of people. She passed one old woman who lugged a burlap sack that reeked of mold. A few turns later she came across two children, six or seven years old, splashing back and forth through a puddle. Their laughter seemed completely alien in this place. When they saw Samantha, though, the kids ran off. One whistled, a long blast followed by a short. Not ten steps later Sam heard and then saw a street patrol approaching; five young men in thrown-together Jacobite robes. They were armed with faith, but since that would go only so far they also carried clubs of various shapes and sizes. One carried a lantern that gave off bright yellow light from an LED.