The Exodus Towers: The Dire Earth Cycle: Two

by Jason M. Hough

  Squinting, Tania could just see Jenny’s face in the small porthole window at the cockpit. She looked as terrified as Tania felt, and then she closed her eyes.

  “Too fast!” Skyler shouted. His words cut off then. He must have looked back and seen the looming form of the ERV.

  And then they crossed through, into the Builder ship.

  A second later the ERV slammed into the hull, too big to fit through the newly formed door. The craft crumpled against the edges of the hexagonal opening. Loose bits of material came free.

  Air gushed from the broken seal of the aircraft’s single door. Tania knew instinctively what this meant. The crew cabin was not pressurized. The cockpit was. In the violence of the impact, both the outer door and inner hatch had ruptured.

  She and Skyler kept drifting inward. In all the commotion Tania hadn’t even bothered to look where they were going, but it registered with her now that they were moving down a long, straight tunnel. The crumpled remains of the ERV, seen through the receding hexagonal opening, bounced off the hull of the Builder ship and floated away.

  Adrift, dead.

  Our ride home, Tania thought.

  The Core Ship

  13.MAR.2285

  SKYLER GATHERED HIS wits before she did. He fired his own thruster to stop their progress. They’d traveled a full hundred meters down the corridor.

  “What now?” he asked.

  Too stunned to speak, Tania just stared at the dark passageway, and the illuminated patch of Earth seen through the now-tiny entrance. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “That craft was our way home, Skyler.”

  “Can we get another one sent out? Can we contact Tim directly?”

  “I don’t know.…” Her own voice sounded strangely distant.

  “Try,” he said emphatically. “Tania, snap out of it. Try.”

  She found enough strength in his voice to come back from the shock of seeing the ERV crash. After a calming breath, Tania brought up her suit’s menu and tried again to connect via the ERV. The link still showed red. Frowning, she tried a different tactic and activated her emergency beacon. The suit’s transmitter would not be powerful enough, but perhaps if they came looking …

  An idea hit her. Tania jumped back a menu and then entered the one that listed other comms in her proximity. Skyler’s suit showed first.

  Just below his entry, she saw the ERV listed. Its entry blinked red. “That’s something, at least,” Tania said.

  “What?”

  “The ERV’s automatic emergency beacon is transmitting. Maybe Tim and the others will pick that up.” She had no doubt they would, in fact. The real question was if they could do anything about it in time.

  “How long until we know?”

  Tania met his eyes. “Going to be awhile, I’m afraid. We should … we need to conserve our air, Skyler.”

  He nodded grimly. Then he shrugged, as well as he could in the semi-rigid suit. “I say we accept their invitation and go in.”

  Tania studied him to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. “What if this is a launch tube, or the barrel of a gun? We can’t just—”

  “Sure we can,” Skyler said with a shrug. “It’s why we’re here. I don’t want to just sit here, do you?”

  Tania turned back and stared at the tiny patch of space at the entrance of the long hall.

  “Besides,” Skyler said, “who makes a launch tube that opens from the outside?”

  His comment struck Tania as trite, yet she couldn’t deny the underlying desire to keep going. They were here to explore, to try to discover the purpose of this impossibly large spacecraft parked almost exactly between the two elevators.

  Whatever the Builders were up to, she thought, the answer must be within.

  One event left, according to Neil’s message. Clock’s ticking. She reminded herself to tell Skyler about that little bit of news as soon as they departed for home. She’d tried and stopped herself a half-dozen times already, still seeking some way to explain it without making Neil Platz sound like a monster. She owed her old friend that much, at least.

  “All right, then,” she said. The heads-up display inside her helmet tracked her eye movement, and she used a button woven into her left glove to activate the bright lamps on both sides of her helmet. On a whim, she also accessed the intersuit menu and chose to display Skyler’s health vitals just below her own on the main view. Seeing his steady heart rate there, and his aggregated overall anxiety level at well within the norm, gave her a small surge of confidence. She placed his remaining oxygen level next to her own and swallowed. She had six hours; he had seven.

  “I’m about out of thrust,” Tania said to him.

  “No problem,” he said. He began to aim his arm in the direction they’d entered, then hesitated, fidgeted.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  He flashed a thumbs-up. “Wish my brain would stop changing which way is ‘down,’ but other than that I’ll be okay.”

  She pointed at the side of the hexagon they floated against. “Let’s call this down for now, agreed?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  She helped him guide the case. Part of her questioned the need to lug the thing around until they knew what it did, or anything about it, really. But it had opened the door, that much was obvious, and somehow it just seemed prudent to keep the object close. She didn’t want to let it out of her sight any more than she wanted to let Skyler leave again.

  The tunnel, or hallway—whatever it was—stretched on for another hundred meters. The walls reminded her of the shell ships over Darwin and Belém: dark and uninteresting after years of study.

  After another sixty meters or so the tunnel ended abruptly at a wall. Tania helped Skyler ease the plastic case to a stop and gave him a questioning look.

  “Maybe we missed a junction?” he mused. “Can’t imagine how, but—”

  A sudden, faint purple light cut his words short. They both turned to face the wall; only it wasn’t a wall anymore. The surface retracted like an iris. Multiple plates slid out from a central point, allowing more and more purple-tinged light to flow into the tunnel.

  Tania’s breath caught in her throat as she took in the room beyond.

  There were ten walls, each perhaps ten meters wide and soaring at least a hundred high. Nine walls were black, etched with the same geometric patterns that covered the aura towers in Belém. The last wall glowed with intense, deeply saturated purple light that rippled and shimmered just beneath the surface in waveforms of dizzying complexity.

  Bathed in the purple glow, she took in the whole room, looking at it all without looking at anything specific. The ripples of colored light along the glowing wall produced a discernible pattern. The waves, though chaotic and shifting, gravitated upward toward the top of the room. Tania glanced up at what she thought of as the ceiling.

  The surface was not flat like the floor. Instead it had deep channels that ran inward to a central, beveled hexagonal mass. At first Tania thought it glowed purple as well, but then she realized the surface was made up of thousands of tiny bumps that caught some of the light coming from the one glowing wall.

  Tania stared in total amazement. All the danger of their predicament melted away, and all she could think was how much she wished Tim and the others were seeing this.

  Skyler pointed at the lit wall. “Look there,” he said.

  Exactly halfway up, a circular gap in the light had formed. The circle grew as they watched, forming a dome-shaped indentation perhaps three meters wide and equally deep.

  “Help me with this,” Skyler said. He gripped the black crate by one handle and undid one of the two heavy latches.

  Unsure what he intended, Tania flipped the other latch, and together they carefully opened the lid, not wanting to make any sudden motions that might cause the object within to float free.

  She half-expected brilliant purple light to flow out of the case as the lid came up, but nothing happened. In fact, the vaguely hourglass-shaped obje
ct within no longer emanated any light at all.

  Skyler leaned over the case and pushed his hand in between the object and the foam packing that surrounded it.

  “What are you doing?” Tania asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he replied, and glanced up at the dome-shaped indentation.

  Tania didn’t think anything here merited the term obvious, but she found herself helping Skyler nonetheless. Together they eased the hourglass object from its foam cradle and then pushed off the floor to drift upward with it.

  Skyler offered her a thin smile.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said.

  “Last time I knew that,” he said, “was when I knocked on your door in Anchor Station.”

  The offhand comment hit her like a splash of ice-cold water. A sudden avalanche of memories flashed across her mind: the flight from Darwin, the news of Neil’s death and the subsequent realization that Zane had survived. The first time she’d walked among the aura towers in Belém. The thrill of defeating Gabriel followed too quickly by the shattering of her friendship with Skyler.

  If only she could go back to that moment when he’d knocked on her door. Roll back the clock, make better decisions. If only she could have left her own self-doubt in that cabin and emerged from the beginning as the leader they all wanted her to be.

  Tania forced the distraction away and willed herself to focus on the present, and on what little future she feared they had left. The oxygen gauge continued its slow, steady decline, hers faster than his. She needed to relax.

  He raised his right arm and nodded at her to do the same. On a three-count that he timed to their arrival at the midway point along the wall, they both pulsed their thrusters to halt their momentum.

  “I’m out of fuel,” Tania noted.

  The concave recession on the purple wall was nearly pitch-black, just like the object they held. Skyler nodded to Tania again and used his own thruster, alone this time, to propel them the rest of the way to the wall.

  “What now?” Tania said.

  “I think we’re supposed to plug it in.”

  He started to move to push the object into the cavity.

  “Wait,” Tania said.

  Skyler paused. He looked at her with one eyebrow raised.

  She thought of what Neil Platz had written about her father. He destroyed it before we could truly learn. “We have no idea what this will do,” she said. “What if this is some kind of arming switch? A self-destruct mechanism? A trap?”

  Skyler glanced at it, his brow furrowed, then back at her. “What if it bakes cookies?” When she frowned he tried again. “What if it activates an aura generator big enough for the entire planet? A ship of this size could do it.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it without answering. He was right. Faced with no knowledge, no context, there was no choice but to push forward into the unknown. If one trait defined humanity, surely it was that.

  He took her silence as agreement and nudged the hourglass object into the inverted dome.

  The hourglass began to glow as it crossed the threshold of the cavity. Faint at first, growing brighter with each centimeter. Then it rotated, pushed by some invisible force, and aligned itself with the room beyond. The edges of the inverted dome began to warp and reshape, taking on the same hourglass form and color. Soon the object and its receptacle glowed as bright as the wall around them. Then brighter, and brighter still.

  On instinct, Tania pulsed back from the wall. Skyler followed her lead as the purple light grew to almost blinding intensity. Tania felt a vibration through her spacesuit, as if sound waves buffeted her despite the vacuum. The vibration grew in conjunction with the intense glow, and with it Tania noticed that the wave patterns within the purple glow along the wall became agitated, even violent. Her entire body began to shake, though whether from fear or some external pressure she couldn’t tell. “Skyler?!”

  “I feel it!”

  “What’s happening?”

  With sudden, blinding ferocity the purple light exploded in a crescendo of energy that pushed her backward to the far wall. She smacked into the surface and felt her skull rattle against the inside of her helmet.

  “Erg,” Skyler grunted.

  Tania tasted blood, and realized she’d bit her tongue. For a moment she drifted, nothing but stars before her eyes and clouds in her mind. Her suit beeped and a mechanical voice said, “Concussion warning.” The alert repeated a few times.

  Tania forced her eyes closed and held them tight until the residual energy patterns on her eyelids faded.

  When she opened her eyes, she found herself at an odd angle, and a wave of disorientation swept over her. Light came from all around now. The purple wall pulsed and roiled, but there were new colors in the cavernous room. Five of the ten walls glowed now, giving the tall space a striped pattern of alternating light and dark. She saw red, green, and yellow, exactly like the other tower groups that had dispersed from Camp Exodus.

  There was a fifth color as well, one not seen among the towers from Belém. Pale blue, as bright and pure as glacial ice under a clear summer sky.

  She glanced up at the ceiling. The knobby hexagon in the center echoed all the colors from the walls around it simultaneously now. The reflections merged and danced hypnotically. One of the five ribs, the one that extended out to the edge and connected with the purple wall, now glowed with the same color.

  “Unbelievable,” Skyler whispered.

  “It’s incredible,” Tania agreed. She whispered, too, on pure instinct. She felt like a visitor to some ancient, forbidden temple.

  A chime went off in Tania’s helmet. Skyler’s must have as well, because he glanced sharply at her. The air in her suit had reached 20 percent. Skyler’s readout showed just below 40.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Nothing to do but wait,” she replied.

  “I mean after we get rescued and get back home,” he said. He’d somehow forced a playful tone into his voice.

  “I think it’s clear what we have to do next, though for what purpose I still cannot imagine.”

  “At least we know where the red one is,” Skyler said. “The red … key.”

  Tania studied him, a profound sense of dread building within her. He saw it in her eyes.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll go in with every weapon I can find, and some serious motivation.”

  She tried to smile and couldn’t. Her gaze kept shooting back to the oxygen readout. “There’s five colors here, but only four tower groups left the camp. So where’s the fifth?”

  “I can guess,” he said. “The one place an aura tower wouldn’t be needed.”

  After a few seconds she understood. “Darwin.”

  Skyler nodded, gravely.

  “We need to talk to Russell Blackfield,” Tania said. The immune’s eyes narrowed to thin slits. “When I spoke with him after we fled to Belém, he gloated that our attempt to kill him from orbit failed. He also noted our failure at destroying Nightcliff, said we’d missed.”

  “We didn’t drop anything on …” Skyler paused. Then, “Oh …”

  “Exactly. Russell Blackfield can tell us exactly where the fifth ship crashed.”

  Skyler frowned, but he was nodding all the same. A few seconds of silence passed, and their attention was drawn back to the light show within the vast room.

  “We should wait by the exit,” Tania said quietly.

  “I kinda like it in here,” he replied. “But you’re right. Hold on to me, I’ve still got some fuel left.”

  He brought them to a stop just at the end of the hexagon tunnel. With nothing else to do, they floated side by side in the opening and watched the planet below as the line between day and night began to creep across the Sahara. The ERV was now a glinting speck in the distance. It would burn up in a few days, Skyler guessed, though Jenny had surely suffocated already.

  She must have been one of Grillo’s, he realized. Or at least sympathetic
to the Jacobites, if not one of them. Perhaps she’d been in contact with them during the flight and reported everything they’d found. He shuddered at the idea.

  Skyler twisted to say something to Tania.

  “Hold still,” she said.

  She was working on something on the back of his suit. “What are you doing?”

  “Just double-checking the air pack.”

  He tried to keep from moving, a difficult trick without gravity.

  “All set,” Tania said, and moved away.

  He heard a slight quiver in her voice. A fear that hadn’t been there before. “We’re going to make it,” he said.

  She didn’t reply. Instead she just looked at the planet below, and took his gloved hand in hers. For a long time neither of them spoke. Skyler kept thinking of things to say, only to find the silence somehow better.

  A full half hour passed before his suit began to beep in warning. Hell. Not yet, surely? He fumbled through the menu to find his vitals readout, and saw that he had—

  “That can’t be right.”

  His oxygen level read almost 50 percent, higher than the last time he’d looked. Some kind of reserve tank they hadn’t known about, perhaps. He grinned. But why is it beeping at me?

  It hit him, then. It wasn’t his suit complaining; it was Tania’s. In a panic he brought up the display of her vitals, and he froze when he saw the number. One percent. “Oh God, Tania, what did you do?”

  She didn’t answer. Her hand had gone limp in his.

  “Tania!” he shouted at her. He turned and took her faceplate in both hands. She was drifting in and out of consciousness, as if on the verge of sleep. “No, dammit!”

  Her lips moved, but no words came through.

  “Why?!” he shouted again, fighting tears. The answer, he realized, was obvious.

  The speaker in his helmet crackled then. A voice within a harsh cascade of static. “… is … condition? Repeat …”

  “Get the fuck over here, now!” Skyler blurted, aware of how shaky he sounded. “She gave me her air. She’s almost out!”

  “… Approaching … ETA in … minutes.”

  Skyler put his helmet against hers, looking for any sign of life. He held his own breath and waited. Seconds passed. He thought he saw a puff of condensation on the inside of the helmet. A breath. “You hold on, dammit. Hold on, they’re close.”