Relapse (Breakers Book 7)

by Edward W. Robertson

  "I'm in," Tristan said. "But when we're inside, we should take a look around. Then we'll be prepared to come back—and hit them hard."

  They filed down the ramp to the interior. Ness consulted with Gohel, then headed to the control room to pass the directions on to Sebastian. They had about 25 miles of sailing ahead of them, which would take about ninety minutes, accounting for some close-quarters maneuvering. That'd leave around three hours to find and extract Sprite before daybreak. Ness was already looking forward to the moment he could collapse into his bunk and finally put an end to a day that felt like it had lasted a century.

  Contemplating a quick nap, he headed into the hall. There, Dr. Gohel lifted his head and smiled. Tristan stood behind him, watching.

  "I am to understand," the doctor said, "that you are working with one of the aliens?"

  "More than working with," Tristan said. "Ness and Sebastian are best friends."

  "Incredible. How did you come to meet? To understand each other?"

  Ness shrugged. "Thankfully, he knew English. He's taught me some Swimmerese, but I'm still a guppy."

  "Might I be allowed to meet him?"

  "How about after we're all done with this? He's a little busy at the helm."

  "Yes, of course." Gohel smiled in wonder. "I know of humans and aliens forming strategic partnerships, but I've never heard of them working side by side. Our two species might have a very strange and intriguing future ahead of us."

  "Wouldn't get your hopes up. I think Sebastian's just a black sheep."

  While the sub cut its way north along the coast, they hashed out something resembling a plan. Unsure of whether the Swimmers had any long-range sensors, particularly for their own vehicles, they'd dock a mile from the tower and approach it on foot. The party would consist of Ness, Tristan, and Sam, with Gohel operating as guide. On the sub, Lionel and Emma would seal the hatch behind them and hold down the fort if the guys they'd retaken the ship from sailed in to try to steal it again. Sebastian would lock himself in the control room and would not open the doors for anything.

  They entered Sydney Harbour and motored into the main bay. Ness went up top to keep an eye on things. Arms of land reached to embrace them from the north and south. The shores were thick with dark houses. They threaded between a small island and a protruding point and hove west.

  Two miles ahead, a massive bridge connected the north and south banks of the city. A single arch spanned the bay, held up on either end by a fat stone tower. The deck was well over a hundred feet above the surface of the water and the arch peaked at four or five hundred feet, dwarfing everything but the black skyscrapers just south of it.

  Most times, Ness didn't feel too bad about how things had gone down. The scope of the apocalypse was too enormous to get bummed out about. Losing the few people he'd been close to bugged him now and then, but how were you supposed to process the deaths of nearly seven billion strangers?

  The only time it really struck him, hit him so deep that his guts resonated like a temple gong, was when he looked on things like the bridge. That was the summary of what civilization had been—astoundingly powerful, capable of engineering colossal wonders involving billions of dollars and hundreds of man-years of labor. It was just so fucking cool.

  And it would be centuries before humanity could do something like that again—if they ever could. When he thought about that, he finally understood what had been lost.

  The sub turned into an inlet and drifted toward the many piers waiting at its end. Towers of all kinds rose from the city center. Gohel had told Ness the bank looked like a kind of triangular knife, only the tip was more like scaffolding, like the outline of a drawing that had never been painted in. Ness couldn't spot it within the cluster of skyscrapers.

  The sub bumped into a dock. Wood creaked, but the timbers held. Tristan, Sam, and Gohel climbed out and joined Ness on the pier. The hatch sealed behind them.

  "Well," Gohel said. "Shall we?"

  Tristan swept her arm toward the city. Gohel headed down the pier, head bobbing, eyes on the cityscape to the west. Dozens of small boats were tangled against the shore. Dead fish wafted on the breeze. They crossed a parking lot and into the usual downtown mix of restaurants, clothing shops, bars, and salons. Most of the windows were busted up and the stock had either been stolen or strewn around the floors where it was now filthy and useless, but Ness felt no pangs about that. It wasn't like the bridge. It was just stuff.

  They moved single-file, Tristan in front, Ness ahead of the doctor, Sam in back. The night was silent. A mile away, a giant, Space Needle-type tower stood head and shoulders above the more typical skyscrapers around it.

  "So which one's the DB?" Ness whispered.

  "You won't be able to see it from here," Gohel said. "You'll know it when you do."

  Something rustled from the eaves of a department store, startling Ness. A small flock of birds swooped through the street and found a new perch on the roof of a twenty-floor hotel. The rising buildings weren't as modern as the ones he'd seen in Hong Kong, but they still looked futuristic, their bands of windows like Geordi La Forge's visor. Between the blue-green waterways, the trees, the spire, and the downtown, it felt like if you moved Seattle someplace sub-tropical and cranked the color up to eleven. Ness thought it might be the prettiest city he'd ever seen.

  The towers swallowed them up. They turned a corner. A plaza stretched before them. Half of it was parkland, but the trees had been cut down and hauled away by scavengers. The ground was blanketed with a thick layer debris. Featureless junk. Here and there you'd see an office chair, or a computer monitor, but for the most part, it was just churned-up mess. Splintered walls and cemented dust.

  The culprit lay across the square. There, a tower sat in the remains of itself. Steel beams gored the sky. A chunk of the facade had survived, the blown-out windows high and narrow, but Ness could tell there was nothing behind it. Only the lower fifty or sixty feet was reasonably intact, but this looked less like a habitable structure and more like a garbage bin for everything that had fallen into it from above.

  "Here we are," Gohel said.

  "That's it?" Ness said. "You mean, the pile of rubble?"

  Gohel nodded. "That is Deutsche Bank Place. It was damaged in the invasion. It collapsed a few years ago."

  "I don't think it gets to be called a 'building' anymore. More of a 'rubble-ing.' Why did you take us here?"

  "Because it is where you asked to go."

  "He can't be inside that. There's nowhere to be."

  "Hang on," Sam said. She had her binoculars pointed at the base of the building. "Anything about this look funny to you guys?"

  Ness scowled. "You mean besides the fact it looks like somebody blew up a toothpick factory?"

  "Yeah," Tristan said. "Someone's cleaned it up."

  "Swept the grounds. So they could see anyone trying to get close." Sam shifted her binoculars to a dark slit at the base of the tower. "And the parking garage—it's been sealed up. All except for a gap at the top. Bet you the next candy bar we find that they're living under the building."

  "I'm going to make a wild guess that's the only way in," Tristan said. "Suppose we should take a look?"

  "Nope," Ness said.

  "Let me rephrase that: if you ever want to see our buddy Sprite again, we will now go take a look."

  Ness pointed at the rubble-strewn gap. "I'll bet you a thousand dollars they got motion detectors set up inside the blockade. They'll be all over us before we're done picking our way through."

  "Motion detectors? Where would they get those?"

  "They grow them. We ran into some in the Philippines. Guarantee you that if they've gone to this much trouble to lock this place down, they've put up sensors, too."

  Tristan bit her lip. "And shooting the sensors out wouldn't be less suspicious, huh?"

  "We can take a look around," Sam said, "but if they've taken these measures to secure themselves, there won't be another point of entry. Decision
time. Go in through that gap, knowing there's a high chance it's going to cost our lives. Or walk away."

  "And leave Sprite to be probed for the rest of his life?" Ness gripped his laser. "You guys can run off if you want. I'm not leaving without him."

  Tristan put a hand on his arm. It was somewhere between comforting and restraining. "This is how things go now, Ness. You can't throw your life away just because it's not fair."

  He stood, weapon in hand. "I can do whatever the hell I want."

  "You don't have to do this," Gohel said. "I believe there may be another way."

  Ness swung to face the doctor. "Oh yeah? Were you going to tell me this before or after I went all one man against the world?"

  "Forgive me. I left the city two years after the plague and have had little business with it since. During the invasion, however, we didn't live in the city—we lived under it."

  "Is there a tunnel into the building?" Tristan said. "A subway stop?"

  Gohel got a funny look on his face. "It's not so much a subway for humans as it is for feces."

  "The sewer."

  "It's not nearly as bad as it used to be."

  "Funny how shit is one of the few things made less disgusting by time," Ness said. "Well, it sounds a lot less suicidal than the front door."

  The doctor gestured to the left of the plaza. "I know an entry. It will be a simple thing to follow the line beneath the building."

  Tristan's mouth turned down on one side. "How will we know once we're under it? I'm guessing the sewers don't have mile markers."

  "We'll pace it off," Sam said. Everyone looked at her. "What, you don't know how long your pace is? Then how would you ever expect to accurately estimate the distance you're traveling through the sewers beneath a ruined skyscraper?"

  "So we're doing this?" Ness said.

  Tristan gazed up at the steel beams slanting across the stars. "Let's circle around first. Make sure we're not missing a better way in. Then we'll try the pipes."

  They made their way around the wreckage of the tower, keeping their distance, eyes sharp for any sign of alien biostructures that might house a motion sensor. With the exception of doing something insane like flying over it with a hot air balloon, there was no other obvious way in. Even if they bashed their way through the debris, the ground floor would be choked with rubble.

  They walked away from the scene. Sam counted paces. After a block of travel, Gohel brought them to a manhole cover. While Ness made a quick run into a department store, Tristan popped the trunks of the parked cars until she found a tire iron. With a metal scrape, she pried the cover aside.

  Ness hung back, waiting for a fecal-rich blast of air that never came. Tristan got a toehold on the metal rungs lining the side of the vertical tube and started down. They weren't using any lights yet—they were way too close to the Swimmers—and her tan face dimmed, then disappeared.

  Ness started after her. The hole smelled dank and stagnant. Five feet down, he could hardly see the rungs. It was cooler than on the street, but in no way cold. Tristan's shoes and hands rasped beneath him. He didn't like the way his breath echoed tightly around him, but he let the whisper of Tristan's steady descent lead him down.

  Once Sam was below the surface, she clicked on her flashlight. It jostled as she moved, flinging wild, dizzying shadows over the dilapidated brick walls. Below him, Tristan touched bottom and gave him a thumbs up.

  She stood on a flagstone platform a few feet above the tunnel floor. After walking through Sydney's modern downtown, Ness had been expecting an equally modern sewer system. He was as wrong as wrong got. The curved tunnel was made of brick, much of which was distressed to the point of whiteness. It looked at least a century old.

  "Awesome," he said. "So long as we dodge Jack the Ripper, we'll be fine."

  Tristan snorted, the sound bouncing down the tunnel. At the department store, Ness had looted garbage bags and tape. They secured these around their feet. Ness and Tristan drew their lasers. The platform ended, forcing them to climb down into the tunnel, the bottom of which held three inches of water.

  Ness didn't want to look, but he couldn't help himself. It looked blessedly clean—rain runoff, probably from the storm the day before—but a layer of yielding sediment rested beneath it. As they slogged along, they stirred up a stink that might once have been human waste, but was now a general organic miasma of bacteria and decay.

  "Dare you to lick that," Tristan said.

  Ness glanced up from his feet. Her flashlight danced on the close ceiling. There, a thick, waxy substance had congealed inches deep on the bricks, making the tunnel look like a giant's ear canal.

  "I've just discovered one upside to tromping around the sewer," Ness said. "If I barf, I don't need to aim."

  Sam folded her arms. "Can we get going before I lose count of my steps?"

  Tristan rolled her eyes. "You're about as likely to lose count as Ness is to change his shirt." She turned and moved on.

  "We're beneath the plaza," Sam said after another minute. "In about two hundred feet, start looking for a tunnel on the left."

  They had only passed one intersection so far. Ness told himself the building had been one of the largest in the city and would surely have an access tunnel of some kind. 53 steps further, they came to an intersection, but Sam shook her head. 58 watery strides after that, a tunnel spoked to the left.

  "That'll pass right under the tower," Sam said. "All we have to do is find a way up."

  They headed left. The composition of the tunnel changed, the bricks largely replaced by coarse-pebbled cement that didn't look any younger. A hundred feet in, rungs appeared on the wall, leading up into a shaft. As usual, Tristan took the lead, but she stopped after just ten feet of climbing.

  "There's a hatch." She held the flashlight in her teeth and grabbed the handle projecting from the ceiling of the hatch. Her arms flexed against it. "Not sure if I can get it. Might have to use the lasers—"

  With a squeal, the handle turned. Rust showered over Ness' upturned face. He swore, blinking. One hand on the rungs, Tristan drew her laser. She glanced down and nodded.

  She scrambled out the opening. Ness climbed after her as fast as he could. He emerged into a concrete room dense with pipes and valves. Tristan spun her light from corner to corner, clearing it. Sam and the doctor exited the hatch. Ness located the room's only door. Tristan gave him a nod. He opened it and swung out into a dark hallway.

  This was only about thirty feet long, with two metal doors on either side. It didn't have the feel of a secret Swimmer hideout, but they checked the rooms anyway. Maintenance and storage. At the end of the hall, a final door led into a stairwell that only went up.

  The next landing was marked B2. Tristan met eyes with the others, clicked off her flashlight, and opened the door. Hinges whined through a yawning space. Ness strained his eyes into the pitch black room. From somewhere in the garage, a human voice rang out in a foreign tongue.

  "That's… singing," Tristan whispered.

  Ness laughed. "It's not just singing. It's a Chinese pop song."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Because Sprite won't quit singing it when he's doing his chores. At this point, I know the words."

  The hinges whined some more. The singing stopped for good.

  Tristan eased the door shut. "Sam, do you have your night vision on you?"

  "A scope. It's not my favorite, but it should do the trick."

  Shuffling noises; a zipper unzipped. The door creaked open again. Since getting inside the bowels of the building, Ness' heart had been going pretty good. Now, it kicked up to a trot. A full thirty seconds later, the door clicked closed. Tristan flipped on her flashlight, pointing it away from the door.

  She gazed at the bare ground. "Well, the good news is we're in the right place."

  "Didn't we already know that?" Ness said. "What's the bad news?"

  "The bad news is the place is a parking garage, and it's so full of their bio-matter it
's like an alien honeycomb."

  "You see any Swimmers?"

  She shook her head. "Saw some nesting holes in the walls. There's enough material to house fifty or more."

  He beckoned. "Let me see the night vision."

  She handed it over, then clicked off the flashlight. He put the scope to his eye and the world reappeared in shades of green and white. There in the stairwell, the other three shared an identical posture: the wide-eyed, almost-panicked blind gaze of people who couldn't convince themselves a saber-toothed tiger wasn't about to leap at them from the darkness. Ness opened the door and peeped into the garage.

  The level was your typical underground parking structure—yawning open space broken up by the occasional concrete pillar—but the aliens had made it their own. It was now a labyrinth of spongy, rubbery matter, the walls of which ranged in height from five to ten feet. They were broken up by holes a foot in diameter. These looked way too small to allow an alien to crawl inside, but Ness had spent enough time with the Collective to know better.

  He cupped his hands to his mouth. "Hey, Sprite!"

  "What are you doing?" Gohel said from behind him, somehow managing to whisper and shriek at the same time.

  Ness glanced away from the door. "What's your problem? The aliens can't hear a thing."

  "Can't they? Are you serious?"

  "Do you see a swarm rushing in here? How do you not know that about them?"

  "Because I have made it a priority to stay away from the murderous extraterrestrial invaders."

  "Ness?" Sprite had been calling his name for a couple seconds. "Is that you?"

  "You know it!" Ness said. "Is this place as full of Swimmers as it looks?"

  "You know that scene in Aliens when the marines first go in to find the colonists and then all the aliens jump out and kill the marines? That would be you."

  "We'll see about that. What kind of restraints they got you in?"

  "It's not exactly high security. I'm in this box with a weird rubber handcuff on my ankle. It's connected to the wall."

  "Sweet. Hang tight, all right? We'll work this out." He closed the door, took off the night vision, and let Tristan know she could turn on the light. "Getting him out will be a snap. All we have to do is get to him. Ideas?"