by David Peters
END WORLD
Horizons
By David Peters
Copyright © 2015 by David Peters
The End World Series:
End World One: Dawn of the Corrupted
End World Two: Ultimate Corruption
End World Three: The Captain’s Tale
End World Four: Corruption Undone
End World Five: Horizons
End World: Loose Ends (no release date)
Other Books by David Peters:
A Darkness (Darkness Book One)
An Uneasy Rest (Darkness Book Two)
Solvi
How to Survive the Apocalypse
Of Science and Wizardry (no release date)
This one is for my brother, Dan. Sorry I killed you in the first book but you did take my beer. You were always Travis anyways…
Copyright © 2015 by David Peters.
Cover Illustration Copyright © 2015 by David Peters
Cover design by Niccole and David Peters
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Revision 1.2
Prologue
Charles Lewis leaned against the cold railing as he looked over the fields stretching out far below him. Several farm hands were on their knees busily repairing the corn rows after an unexpected storm had moved over them the previous week. The rain and high winds had torn at the farmland without mercy for almost three straight days. Stalks that could be repaired were straightened and held in place by wooden dowels and string while those that could not were taken to the compost pile for recycling into future replacement soil. Even their garbage had immense value in the new world.
Weather was a constant battle and slowly but surely they were losing to the never ending winds and driving rains. Even with the large windbreaks they had attempted to build had little effect during the largest storms. Mother Nature would reclaim what was always hers to begin with.
Yields from the last season’s harvest of wheat were less than half of those from the previous years. The kernels of grain had been small and shriveled, signs that their soil was no longer viable. Even more problematic was the fact that more than two-thirds of their corn would be processed into compost before anything would ripen. The soil they had was dead when it came to the nutrients the crops needed to grow. The teams of fishermen continued to bring in a larger and more varied catch but they would need more than sea bass and bait fish to keep themselves alive and healthy. The old fish carcasses were showing promise when used to fertilize the depleted soil but the smell on warm days was overwhelming if the breeze was just right. Even though the people welcomed the small quantities of extra food, it didn’t stop them from relentlessly complaining about the wretched odor. When he was being honest with himself, he had to agree it was pretty bad. If not for the breeze at his back, he wouldn’t be leaning against the railing at this moment.
He pushed himself away from the walkway railing and wandered around to the other side of the large observation deck. Far below he could hear the sound of hammers, hacksaws and the occasional bout of cussing as the repairs continued on the heavily damaged water tower. When the high winds had blown through the farm, the rusted mounts on the jury rigged water tower had finally given way and collapsed under the stress of the wind and the weight of the water it held. He was just thankful that no one was injured, the loss of water was replaced easily enough but the volume of crop land that had been flooded and washed away would be impossible to fix. He just didn’t know how much longer they could keep going. Every month they used a little bit more than they had the previous month. Reserves of things that used to be considered mundane were nearly depleted. The string used to repair the corn rows had been scraped together through donations from the town’s people and even then it wouldn’t be enough to do the job.
He stepped off the observation deck and entered the warmth of the tower, “Any luck on the repairs, Neil? You going to be able to pull some more magic out of that mystical bag of yours?”
A man with long black hair pulled into a ponytail held up a silver box with a handful of loose plastic connectors “Not going to happen, man. This thing is truly fried and that was the backup machine for the backup machine. There just ain’t any way I can get it online without new parts. I’ve cobbled together everything that is running and, well, I’m running out of cobble. Even in here the sea air is wrecking everything slowly but surely. The salt is grinding this gear down to the nub. If it isn’t corroding, it’s rusting.”
Charles sighed “Is there really nothing else we can slave to the antenna? What about one of the systems from the secondary control room? A bunch of them aren’t doing anything anymore. Can’t we wire one of their displays into the system? We don’t have any shortage of cabling and they are all mounted in the same chassis.”
“We don’t have anything left that will run the software and no way to rebuild what we have.” He held up the over-sized and armored hard drive “This military stuff is built out to pretty much just do one thing. If I can’t get this one running we are flat out of luck, nothing else will talk to the system. They were built to survive a nuclear attack and the shock of war but they weren’t made to run forever. Besides,” he said as he held up another one of the hard drives, “all the encryption we needed to communicate with the satellites was on this thing and it’s a paperweight now. I think half the drives I’ve seen fail now are bad bearings. We can’t expect these things to spin forever.”
“So,” Charles said with a hint of anger, “no more weather reports, and no more satellite information. Just another dark screen.”
“No way I can make it happen, sir. I couldn’t get this thing to play solitaire at this point. I’m officially throwing what remains into the supplies pile,” he dropped the remains of the machine into his bag as if to make his point. “One more worthless shell of a machine in a room full of worthless machines.”
Charles stared at the large, blank screen. The last screen to go dark in an entire wall of screens. It used to be filled with a view of the Pacific Ocean. Swirling clouds and storm fronts. Some showed natural light, other probed deeper into the storms using radar, infrared, even measurements of wave heights. Courses from other naval ships all over the world left thin lines criss-crossing the planet. Notations for ships from other nations, civilian transports. More information than he could ever recall needing. All he wanted back was the weather.
They could easily see the storms forming all over the world and tell what was, and what was not going to be a threat. Most of the time it would give them upwards of two weeks’ warning. Enough data to form their own, shipboard weather predictions. Now there was nothing. A multi-million dollar wall of worthless junk.
Charles looked at the group of circular screens behind him, “We still have the radar, but that isn’t going to give us enough lead time on weather warnings to do much about it other than to baton down the hatches. Hell, half the time we will see the front with our own eyes before the radar can really give us an idea of what is coming.”
“I think I have to agree with you on that, sir.”
“That time we all talk about is coming faster than I had thought it would.”
“Can’t disagree with that one either, sir. I think this old girl’s days are numbered.”
“Come on, enough with the ‘sir’ crap. You aren’t even in the military, Neil. Weren’t you a web developer in the valley or something like that? Some rich, punk kid that drove a car worth more than my house, more woman than you could shake a stick at? Party until you had to get back t
o work just so you could pile more money on your big-ass pile of money?”
“In a different time, yeah. Well, except for the car, girl and party part. My reality was more about locking myself in my condo and playing games until I passed out on my couch. I’m kind of hoping I left the punk part of me back with my gaming machine and the condo.”
“You have shown yourself to be something else. You have earned that right I would think.”
“Anyway, sorry about the sir thing. I hear enough people call you that, so it’s kind of habit. Feels,” he rolled his head side to side as he thought about it, “natural,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders.
Charles smiled and nodded, “Close up the panels and go get yourself some dinner. I think Cookie is making that corn chowder you seem to like so much and one of the guys actually caught a pretty big tuna. Might want to get in on that before it’s all gone.”
“You comin’ down for chow?”
“Think I’ll pass tonight. Going to keep an eye on the repair crews and make sure they don’t try to work past dark again.”
The silence told them both that this was a lie. The captain hardly ever ate with anyone and when he wasn’t working he could be found in his cabin.
Neil picked up his worn leather bag of tools and stepped into the corridor. He paused and looked over his shoulder, “Sorry I couldn’t do more.”
“Not your fault. You did what you could. String and tape will only get us so far.”
Charles took one more look at the bank of now dead screens before he turned toward the far door. Pushing the heavy door open, he stepped back out onto the observation deck. As was his habit, he pulled the steel door closed behind him and rotated the handle until it stopped.
He grabbed the railing and squeezed hard in frustration. He let his eyes wander over the fields below. Four and a half acres of open deck and every single square foot was being used to produce food. He turned his gaze out to the horizon more than twenty nautical miles away. The sun was just touching the water, it would be another two minutes and twenty-seven seconds before dusk and eventual darkness. Nothing broke his view. The water around them was devoid of the cruisers and support ships he had grown so used to seeing over his decade’s long career. Gray blobs on the distant horizon that would signify another edge to the massive defensive shield surrounding the battle fleet. The smaller ships running on bunker fuel had burned their last drops or the crews long since turned and headed for different waters. His deck was devoid of anything that even looked remotely military, replaced by crudely built farm equipment and fields, not the fighters and patrol aircraft he had managed for years. No sounds from massive turbine engines, the screams as jets leapt off the deck, or the constant rush of air from the catapults. All of it was gone.
His carrier was engineered and built to stay at sea for years, a power plant that could run the ship and every piece of equipment on the ship for more than two decades given the right conditions. Of course that was all under the assumption that they had support and resupply. That every two years they could return to port and fix all the minor things that tend to break or wear-out and repair any combat damage. When they left port they had more than three million gallons of jet fuel in their storage tanks. An enormous number that was eaten up in the first four weeks of the war as they flew against attackers they didn’t understand and could barely see. The last few precious gallons had been used to rescue those that they could from the mainland. Even that had been a tragedy waiting to happen. He shook his head again as he thought back to those early days. Confusion, miscommunication and eventually fire and death marked the first few weeks of the war. He shut the thoughts out before he followed them too much further. Those memories led him to a dark past that he would visit often enough in his nightmares.
As he looked out over the ocean, he tried to calculate how far they had traveled in the last six years and lost count at over three-hundred thousand nautical miles. He shook his head as he thought about it, they had traveled the equivalent of twelve times around the planet, the majority of it so far from land that they never saw anything but water.
They had made it all the way from the Indian Ocean, to southern tip of South America and back to the Pacific Coast off the coast of the United States. The Indian Ocean had been a constant battle. Ships from at least seven different nations were running amok in the open waters. Some captains would be peaceable while others would open fire. At one point they had been attacked by an unknown submarine but the missiles had been destroyed before they hit his ship. One of the escorts that had managed to stay with them wasn’t so lucky. He had screamed in rage as the Mobile Bay and more than five-hundred sailors and civilians and slipped beneath the waves in towering flame and smoke.
Most of the Asian coastal waters had set their radiation detectors off so they left and never returned. His guess was that the nuclear plants on the tightly packed island of Japan hadn’t faired so well once everyone was dead and the fires raged out of control. They had seen parts of Tokyo from the air and what wasn’t obscured by smoke and fire didn’t look very inviting. Their small drone had come under fire, encouraging them even more to leave the area and find somewhere safe.
South American waters were so unpredictable that the stress of constantly running from storms began to grate on the crew. Once they were north of Baja, the fishing and weather had improved so they chose as a group to call those waters home. For the last three years they had been making a four-thousand mile race track-shaped oval up and down the coast, racing out of the reach of storms and searching for smooth waters.
He felt a rough patch on the railing and looked down. The rust underneath was causing the paint to blister and peal. He absently picked at the small wound in the ship. It was nothing compared to other, larger problems that now plagued their home but it was a sign of the ships steady decline. The sea growth on the bottom of the ship was one of their biggest issues. The amount of drag it generated meant their top speed was reduced drastically. The ship was simply too big to clean by hand and in retrospect it was a good thing for the time being. They were a virtual floating reef at this point and the varieties of fish they had been able to catch in the last year was a nice change.
A small fleck of the railing paint fell away and was caught by the breeze. He sighed deeply as he watched it drift away on the air currents until it was too small to see. They had made the best out of their floating city. Managed as well as they could while people began to lose hope and falter. Suicides happened, people would simply step off the back deck and never be seen again. Someone wouldn’t show up for work shift or a spouse wouldn’t be able to find someone. It happened.
They continued to make do with what little they had remaining. Things like medicine and toilet paper had long since vanished. Supplies that would normally come from a number of support ships stopped before the war was even over. The majority of the fuel for the few small boats they had was long since burned up getting load after load of topsoil. It was the last time they had seen land, the last time they were within more than a thousand nautical miles of any shore for that matter. There was never anything for them to see beyond the miles of hive material and burned out cities. There would be no refuge on a shore like that.
Locked in a fireproof safe in the steel armored room behind him, they had all of the data that had been collected globally about the Corrupted. Several hard drives were filled with information, more than they could ever hope to process. Gigs upon gigs of hard data with everything from cellular make-up to chemical analysis of the material they used to build their massive hives. All of it broadcast through the military networks in the hopes that someone, somewhere could use it.
His final order was to get the data into the hands that could do something with it. Aside from keeping everyone on this floating island alive, that was all he had left to do in the world. It was fundamentally that last thing he lived for.
He watched as two crewmen below struggled with a long section of eight-inch iron pipe. The
re were dark days coming. He and his crew had done everything they could to avoid the inevitable but they had staved it off as long as they could. The ship just wasn’t meant to operate continuously in this manner. Every day another random part of the vessel would fail, another part that had run out of replacements and been running on bailing wire and spit. They had come up with some ingenious ways to manufacture many of the things they needed to keep a modern, nuclear powered ship working but it was never enough and certainly not of decent enough quality to last. It was only a matter of time before something big would fail.
His ship was dying and he had to figure out how to keep three-thousand, four hundred and sixteen people alive in the world beyond his steel walls. The Navy had owned the world’s oceans for nearly one hundred years and slowly but surely the seas were reclaiming their lost territory.
He had no clue where to go and no idea what to do when they got there but life aboard their floating safe-house was coming to an end. He turned his back on the ocean and walked back into the darkened room.
Chapter 1
Niccole closed her eyes and leaned back in her ancient and well-worn office chair. She cupped her hands over the headset as she tried to block out the noise in the room and focus on just the sounds she thought she was hearing. After nearly ten minutes, she was still unable to convince herself that she was actually hearing something and not digging patterns out of the static that didn’t exist.
Years of spending hours every day in a struggle to find a voice in the darkness was taking its toll and her desire to hear someone new was beginning to make her hear things. Normal static would take on the form of distant voices, sounds that weren’t actually there. She sighed again as Daniel ran across the small living room screaming and stomping his feet.