The Exodus Towers: The Dire Earth Cycle: Two

by Jason M. Hough

  Only two or three window holes were lit. The flicker of candlelight, or the soft blue-white glow of an LED lantern.

  Ocean Cloud approached her target from the south. The fires Skadz had so anxiously pointed out earlier were all north of them, a few blocks away at least. The buildings in this area were so quiet Sam wondered if they’d been abandoned in the face of the attack.

  More likely, she thought, their targets represented the enemy’s fallback position. A sandwich attack. She leaned forward, squeezing her head into the space between Pascal’s seat and the curved glass of the canopy. To the right of their craft, she saw the dark shapes of four other scavenger vehicles as they closed in on other target buildings. Pascal spoke quiet commands into his headset, too soft for her to hear, but the synchronicity of the other planes told the story. If they’d planned the operation for days she doubted they could have achieved any more coordination.

  Sam leaned back and turned toward the crowded rear compartment. “Thirty seconds,” she said. “What’s the plan? Torch and run?”

  “Their fighters will be to the north,” Grillo said. “Where our ground assault started. Our aim here is to take and hold these buildings, then move on to others as we can. You will take off immediately and return to the stadium for another run, until our faithful have been delivered to all the buildings on the map.”

  “Copy that,” she said, feeling suddenly a thousand kilometers away. This is war, she thought. And by morning, Grillo will own all of Darwin.

  All of it that mattered anyway.

  They had made three more trips by the time the sun crested the eastern horizon in a thin red line.

  The third trip proved unnecessary, though. Other than a few sporadic gunfights, the war appeared to be over, and for once in her life Samantha did not mind being left out of the action. The dead and wounded loaded into Ocean Cloud’s bay for the return flight were proof enough that the operation had been a sloppy, fierce affair. Cries of anguish and muffled grunts of raw pain filled the otherwise quiet cabin as Pascal guided the craft back to Grillo’s stadium.

  Back in the safety of that concrete bowl, the mood was quite different. Sam sat with Pascal in the open cabin door, their legs hanging over the side. Pascal had brought a zippered bag full of small overripe apples and shared one with her. He ate in silence, which suited Sam just fine.

  Across the field Jacobite soldiers celebrated in groups of ten or twenty. Even in the old stands, where shacks and small tents covered every flat space, the fighters mingled with others, laughing and talking in animated fashion. Battle stories, she knew. The favorite pastime of the newly bloodied.

  At least as many groups were huddled in prayer. They knelt in circles, as few as four in number. One such group consisted of at least fifty men and women, and Sam recognized a certain air about them. The hard looks on their faces, the crowd of supporters around them. These were the leaders, she thought, or perhaps the elite fighters. Grillo stood in the center of their ring, speaking quietly with his hands outstretched in piety.

  Eventually Grillo made his way back to the aircraft. Pascal saw him coming. “I’ll be in the cockpit,” he said as he rose from their perch. “Let me know if we’re clear to leave.”

  “Okay,” Sam said.

  Grillo strode up, a hair slower than he usually walked. He wiped his face with a clean white handkerchief, folded it, and returned it to his breast pocket before speaking. “Thank you for your help tonight,” he said.

  Sam shrugged. “I hardly did anything.”

  “You’ve held up your end of the bargain, Samantha. I may have been too harsh with you before, and I’m sorry if Sister Jo no longer wishes to join you at the airport.”

  “She can make her own decisions,” Sam said. She hoped Kelly wanted her to stay away. Listen to the ghost.

  “Quite.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “Her choice could have eroded your loyalty, however, and I just wanted you to know that I’m grateful you’ve remained on our little team.”

  “Not so little anymore,” Sam said, casting a glance around the busy arena. Anything to get the focus off herself.

  A flash of pride crossed his face. “I’m going to make a small speech soon, and lead a prayer. Would you stay? Stand at my side?”

  “At your side? Are you fucking kidding me—I’m sorry. It’s late, I … at your side? Surely there are others who deserve that kind of honor.”

  “None more than you. And, truth be told, it might help your … status.”

  “No offense, Grillo, but prayer really isn’t my thing. Besides, I’m exhausted, and our planes need to be recharged and, um … cleaned.”

  He sighed, his mouth curling in an almost imperceptible frown. “Suit yourself,” he said.

  “Um. What’s wrong with my status, anyway? You mean because I’m a—”

  “Immune?”

  “I was going to say heathen.”

  “Ah.” Grillo took a step to one side and gestured toward the space elevator. The thread was invisible in the hazy morning, but a few climber cars marked it. “We don’t care much if one believes in the ladder or not; the proof is right there. It’s just a matter of seeing it … differently.”

  Sam pretended to study the length of the alien cable for a moment. “Why’d you think I was going to say ‘immune’?” she asked.

  He shifted. A brief expression of discomfort passed across his face. She’d seen it once before, and enjoyed it just as much this time. “We don’t know what to make of your unique attribute. Some, like me, think you may be the key to our salvation. Others, many, think the opposite.”

  “Is that why you keep me so close?”

  “Partly. You are useful, obviously.” He regarded the hull of Ocean Cloud. “And if I coddled you, or kept you from harm’s way, I would incur not only your wrath but that of the faction skeptical of your nature. If I let you go, or ignored you, I’d go against my own instincts, and the faction that looks at you with awe.”

  In an instant she went from feeling like a prisoner to feeling like some cherished possession. A tiny voice in Samantha’s head, one she usually scoffed at, told her to tread with care. Grillo was all but admitting that she had a lot more power, a lot more leverage, than she’d previously known. “I’m not the only immune,” she said.

  “I’m afraid all of your old crew are gone now, Samantha. There may be others like you, people who live happily in Darwin without any knowledge of the trait. Unfortunately there’s no known test.”

  He doesn’t know about Skadz, then. She hadn’t thought to keep his immunity secret before. Certainly everyone at the airport knew he’d returned. That no one had mentioned his condition in the presence of Grillo’s overseers was sheer luck, though, and she resolved to put the word out that the topic should be avoided.

  “You might be thinking right now,” Grillo went on, “that some pendulum of favor has swung to your side. It’s true. You’ve proven yourself to me, Samantha. Despite confiding with Sister Josephine against my explicit instructions, you’ve continued to follow my orders without hesitation.”

  Sam spoke before her fear of him could stop the words. “They have a word for what you did; it’s called entrapment. Anyway, I keep hoping Kelly will change her mind.”

  “She may. Who can say? In the meantime, consider yourself a part of this … this …” He couldn’t seem to find the right word for the scene around them. He waved a hand at it. Hundreds of Jacobites, many still in combat gear, many more moving about. And beyond, Darwin’s skyline.

  Grillo’s skyline, she corrected herself.

  Then she glanced up, following the invisible thread of the Elevator marked by three climber cars below the cloud layer, all the way to the zenith. Somewhere up there were a series of space stations, and Russell Blackfield with all his grunt mercenaries. She wondered what he thought of the transformation Darwin had experienced since he’d left, or if he was even aware.

  She didn’t think he’d be too happy about it.

 
Cappagh, Ireland

  6.SEP.2284

  THEY WAITED OUT the storm in Ana’s vigil tent.

  She’d thought he’d died, and only stubbornness and love kept her camped out at the edge of the dome, waiting. She’d tried to follow him in, of course. They all had. But once Skyler had stepped through, she’d explained, the field became hard as marble. An hour passed, then a day. Weeks. Every day Ana would come sit in front of the dome and try to push her way into it as he had. She’d tried to dig under it. She’d kicked it, punched it, even fired a grenade at it. Nothing helped. At one point she’d seen a bird fly up to the thing and smack against it. The poor creature had fallen to the ground in a lifeless heap, and Ana had cried then. The death of the bird had nearly snuffed out the candle of hope she’d nurtured.

  He held her while she wept, a process she needed to work through on her own. He knew that from experience. While she sobbed quietly and buried herself in his arms, his mind grappled with the implications of what had happened.

  From his perspective, he’d walked inside that dome, spent ten minutes fumbling about, and then exited. Outside, six weeks had passed. How that could be seemed hardly worth pondering, in Skyler’s opinion. The Builders were clearly more technologically advanced than aura towers, interstellar flight, and space elevators. They could mess with time, or at least how the mind experienced it. The body, too, he corrected himself. He hadn’t walked out of there thirsty or hungry, so the effect couldn’t have been just mental.

  The part that unnerved him was that it had happened at all. That such a thing was possible. Six weeks gone in ten minutes. That meant a journey taken back in to see what sat atop that pinnacle, even if they worked fast, would last months on the outside. Any delays and he’d come out well past the predicted date of the next Builder event. Whatever that event would entail, Skyler felt damn sure it would be in his best interests to be outside and well clear of the alien bubble at the time.

  “Have you heard anything from home?” he asked her after her sobs faded.

  She shifted slightly against him. Her hands gripped his shirt just below the collar. “No,” she said, her voice muffled by her proximity to his chest. “Well, yes.”

  “Which?”

  “Yes, we heard from them. Two clowns named Greg and Marcus. They started out making polite requests for you to contact them; now they just joke around.”

  Skyler leaned away and looked at her with skepticism.

  “They’re so annoying,” Ana said, shaking her head. Then she made a face and spoke with a drawl out of some golden age sci-fi film. “ ‘Greetings people of Earth, we have come for your chocolate and your buxom women. We will negotiate only with Skyler Luiken’s penis.’ Stuff like that. I want to strangle them every time.”

  Skyler couldn’t help but chuckle.

  “Don’t you start,” Ana said with sincere force. “I’ll put you on the list, too, dammit. I had to listen to a month of that mierda thinking you might be gone forever.”

  He reasserted his grip around her until the flash of temper melted away. “Sorry,” he said. “What did you tell them?”

  “Nothing,” Ana replied. “Vanessa, Pablo, and I made a pact. If you were truly gone, we’d just live here and the colony could think we’d all vanished. We left it on for a while, in case anything interesting happened. After a while I stopped paying attention. I think Pablo still checks it now and then.”

  Six weeks gone. Karl and Tania had probably assumed the worst by now, he thought, but he couldn’t begrudge the pact his crew had made.

  The storm abated a few hours later, and Skyler helped Ana pack her gear before they set off for the farmhouse. She held his hand as they walked.

  Pablo’s reaction to Skyler’s return was to prepare a dinner worthy of the event.

  Wild hare roasted on a spit, with potatoes and carrots found in the nearby fields. Preservall bread dough scavenged in the depths of a looted grocery store a few kilometers away was flash-cooked in La Gaza Ladra’s tiny oven. The baguette that resulted tasted pretty good to Skyler. He soaked up the grease from his plate with a hunk of it while he recounted what had happened inside the dome.

  “What did it feel like?” Vanessa asked when he’d finished. “Going through, I mean.” She’d traded her combat fatigues for a blue dress she’d likely found inside the farmhouse. The change in attire seemed to pull all the hardness from her face, her posture. For the first time since he’d met her, Skyler didn’t have to imagine how she’d looked before the world collapsed, before she’d been taken by Gabriel’s twisted cult.

  “It felt like …” Skyler paused. He couldn’t find the right words. “It’s not fun, I can tell you that. In hindsight, I guess there was a point when part of my brain was inside and part outside, running at different speeds. Everything got out of synch, scrambled.”

  Pablo dabbed the corners of his mouth with a cloth napkin. A surprising show of table etiquette from the rustic man. “What is this dome, really?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Skyler said. “All I can tell you is, for whatever reason, time runs more slowly in there. There’s got to be something on top of that pinnacle, and my gut tells me we need to find out what it is before March arrives. That means I need to go back in there right away. Tomorrow, with climbing gear. I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here awhile longer. Through winter maybe.”

  “What?” Ana’s question silenced the room. “Tomorrow?”

  He tried to take her hand and she snatched it back. “Ana, listen. There’s no time to waste—”

  “I just got you back, and now you think you’re going to leave me alone again? For months?”

  “There’s no other way.” He could hear the impotency in his words and tried feebly to say the rest with his eyes.

  Ana glared at him. Defiant at first, then simply cold. “There is another way,” Ana said. “I’m coming with you.”

  Vanessa nodded agreement. “Me, too.”

  Skyler raised his hands in protest. “Look, I appreciate the enthusiasm, but you’re forgetting that the dome prevented anyone else from entering last time. Only one of us can go.”

  “We can try,” Ana said emphatically. “There’s no harm in it.”

  Pablo leaned his chair back on two legs and shook his head. “Skyler’s right,” he said. “But either way, I’m staying. Someone should. Guard the Magpie, keep in contact with the colony.”

  “It could be months,” Skyler said.

  The man shrugged. “Farm life suits me, not giant alien domes.…”

  “Vanessa and I are coming with you, Skyler,” Ana said. She hadn’t stopped looking at him while Pablo spoke. “We can all try going in at the same time, and see what happens.”

  Skyler started to protest, but the women’s combined gaze felt like having laser beams focused on his forehead, burning into his skull. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll try.”

  After the others fell asleep, Skyler pulled a blanket around his shoulders and took the pilot’s seat in the Magpie.

  He switched on the comm. The link parameters were still set from the transmissions Ana had listened to, and within a second the headset crackled to life and a voice came across, in midsentence.

  “… until our demands are met, and Skyler Luiken is delivered to us—”

  “In a pink dress.”

  “Yes, in a pink dress with a little bow across the chest.”

  “That’s a sash.”

  “What?”

  “A sash goes across the chest. A bow goes in your hair.”

  “My svelte ass it does. Go look it up.”

  “You go look it up, and look up ‘fashion sense’ while you’re at it. No one wears a sash.”

  Skyler fought to hold in laughter. He decided to let them go on a bit longer.

  A few seconds of silence passed.

  “I wore a sash once, actually,” the first speaker said.

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it have words printed on it? Like, maybe, Pri
ncess of Anchor Station?”

  “It had words, yes. Not those.”

  “What then?”

  “It said ‘Marcus is an insufferable prick.’ ”

  Skyler cleared his throat. “Come in, Black Level. This is La Gaza Ladra.”

  A commotion came through the headset. A drink spilled, someone cursed.

  “Skyler, hello!” one of them finally said. “This is Marcus.”

  “And Greg.”

  “Greg’s here, too. Damn, it’s great to hear from you.”

  Skyler smiled to himself. “Thanks. Do, uh, you broadcast like this twenty-four/seven?”

  “Three hours every night,” Greg said. “I daresay it’s become performance art. Half of Black Level and most of Melville Station are probably listening. Hello, everyone.”

  “I see,” Skyler said. “Well, sorry to drop in on your show, but maybe someone can go rouse Tania and switch this to a private channel? It’s urgent.”

  “Sure thing,” Marcus said. “Give us a few minutes. Nice to hear from you; we’ve been … well, losing steam.”

  A series of clicks followed. Five minutes passed and then Tania’s voice came through.

  “My God, Skyler,” she said. “I … we’d almost given up hope.”

  A familiar warmth coursed through him with the sound of her voice. Warmth he hadn’t expected, nor the sense of guilt that followed. He suppressed the urge to look over his shoulder, that he might find Ana standing there, as if he were cheating on her. The call could have been made with everyone present, but Skyler had deliberately snuck off after the others slept to make it. For no reason he could put his finger on, he’d decided to keep his tenuous friendship with Tania separate from his relationship with Ana.

  “Are you there?” she asked.

  “I’m here. Sorry. It’s good to hear your voice.”

  “Yours, too,” she said, a note of genuine sadness in her voice. He heard her let out a long breath. “Where are you? Is everyone okay?”

  “We’re fine. We’re in Ireland, and we’ve found one of the tower groups. I’m sending the coordinates.”

  The link went quiet, and he knew she was struggling to find a way to ask the next question without it being an accusation.