The Sky Woman

by JD Moyer

  Chapter Seven

  Car-En’s eyes were fixed on the ground as she made her way through the beech wood undergrowth. Adrian hadn’t yet contacted her. She wished he would, if only to replace her dread with some sense of closure. She was ready to mourn the end of her field research; she had resigned herself to this inevitable conclusion. But the call had not yet come. She was in limbo. So she trudged along, heading north-west toward the faraway mule station, feeling sorry for herself.

  A wolf howled in the distance. It was getting late in the day and the large trees blocked much of the afternoon light. She had descended into some valley; the twisted beech grew thick here, along with a few ancient, gnarled oaks. For some reason the closed canopy made her feel safe. Maybe it reminded her of home, of being inside.

  Out of habit, she checked the swarm. There’d been some attrition; the swarm had shrunk by twenty per cent. Rewinding the data-feeds, she had learned that dragonflies were the culprits. The swarm bots’ evasive algorithms were sufficient to avoid birds, but were no match for the hunting dexterity of Insecta suborder Anisoptera. It was a type of insect she was familiar with; there were dragonflies on the Stanford as well. Many other insects had not been invited aboard, including mosquitoes, ticks, lice, and cockroaches.

  She came across an old trail and followed it due north. It was overgrown, but the packed earth was more traversable than the spongy debris that covered most of the forest floor. There was a rock formation up ahead: some large boulders stacked on the left side of the trail, leaning against a hillock. An alert from her m’eye indicated a radiation spike, a level higher than any she had yet to encounter. Even with her bioskin and her genetic resistance, the algorithm was recommending a maximum four-hour exposure. What was the source?

  The boulders concealed a cave entrance. A muddy trail sloped down into the dark. She could just make out the rotted remains of wooden steps carved from logs. She switched to infrared vision and boosted the light levels, but it wasn’t much help. The tunnel descended into deep blackness.

  It would be stupid and rash to explore this dark pit. Her research was as good as over, and she could easily injure herself in a dark, slippery cave. A sprained ankle would make the long walk to the mule station slow and painful; a broken bone might leave her stranded and helpless. It was probably just an old mine.

  However, even as she had these thoughts, she knew that her curiosity would win out. There was a chance that this hole led to the source of the radiation that was sickening the Happdal villagers. What if she could find it? What if the radiation could be contained? Could she persuade the Over Council to change their Non-Interventionism policy? Even if she couldn’t, the policy was temporary, to be reviewed in two years. The data would still have value if she could collect it.

  She switched on the narrow-beam torch attached to her rifle, dialing the intensity down to a dim five hundred lumens. Best to conserve energy; there wasn’t enough light leaking through the forest canopy to recharge the device. Not this late in the day.

  She told the swarm to patrol the vicinity of the entrance, then cautiously descended into the dark cavern. The dim light of the torch beam, combined with her enhanced vision, allowed her to see about twenty meters ahead. The tunnel turned right, sloping farther down.

  Soon she was walking on stone instead of dirt. The temperature dropped sharply. Her bioskin tried to compensate, but still she shivered; it was hard to stay warm when running a caloric deficit. She didn’t have a way to weigh herself, but she guessed she was about ten kilos lighter than when she had started her field research. On the ringstation, she’d stayed in shape, but had always been a little thick around the middle. Not fat, just smooth, with no visible abdominal muscles. Now the bioskin felt loose around her abdomen, and her body became more angular with each passing week. At first she’d been happy with her new shape, looking forward to showing off her slender form to Lydia and her other friends. But now she was just gaunt, tired, and malnourished. Her rations wouldn’t last. Despite her misgivings, she needed to kill something and eat it. Her rifle would make the killing part easy enough, and she’d checked the archives on the Stanford; there were a number of antique guides to the grisly business of gutting, skinning, cooking, and preserving wild meats. But while her body needed the food, she wasn’t sure she could stomach the task. Maybe she could ration out her energy bars and supplement with wild berries and edible roots.

  Her m’eye flashed a warning; she’d lost contact with the Stanford. The signal couldn’t penetrate solid stone. Adrian, with his bad news from Academic Conduct, would have to wait.

  The descending passage had a natural, irregular feel. Any markings from picks or drills had been smoothed over by the water dripping over the cool stone. Several times she stepped over icy rivulets carving their way across her path. She checked the radiation levels – still rising. The passage opened to reveal an immense cavern, punctuated by stalactites dripping onto stalagmites, some of them joining to form icy pillars. Continuing forward, she lost sight of the walls, surrounded by tapering white columns of calcium salts, shining in the light of her torch. The beam cut across the mineral towers, creating a dance of shadows. Or had something actually moved, deeper in the cavern? Startled, she stopped, pointing the rifle and light at the ground. She stared into the darkness, listening, but heard only slow, reverberant drips of water.

  She tried to summon a few drones from the swarm. No response – she was too deep underground. Briefly, she considered going back. This was a foolish mission. But she’d come this far, and she was curious. She raised her rifle and continued onward, placing her feet carefully on the slippery stone.

  The cavern narrowed; she could see the walls again. They pressed in farther until she found herself in a funnel-like tube. The passage turned again, to the right, descending sharply. She stepped on some loose pebbles, slipped, fell, hit her hip on a sharp rock, and tumbled down a rocky slope. She cried out when she landed. Her voice echoed as if inside a vast cathedral.

  She was on her hands and knees. Having dropped her rifle, she could see nothing at all. Beneath her hands were cold, smooth pebbles. Water seeped through the permeable skin of her gloves. Shakily, she stood. Her left hip hurt badly. She gingerly touched the wound. The bioskin had torn, and the exposed skin felt damp. In the darkness, she couldn’t tell if it was blood or water, but an icy chill was spreading down her leg where the bioskin was no longer protecting her. She ran a quick diagnostic on her kit. Luckily, the thin, flexible strip strapped to her left thigh, packed with computing and communications technology, appeared undamaged. She ignored the frantic alerts from her m’eye regarding her own physiological status. She could guess their contents well enough: elevated heart rate, spiking cortisol, physical injury, core temperature precipitously falling. She didn’t need her m’eye to tell her she was cold, terrified, and alone.

  Car-En turned in a slow circle. She spotted the dim light of the torch, partially buried in gravel, halfway up the slope. Wincing in pain, she slowly climbed the hill. Retrieving the rifle, she slid back down on her butt, not willing to risk another fall. Back on level ground, she detached the torch from the rifle barrel and pointed the light at her hip. It was a shallow cut, only about five centimeters long, but it was still bleeding. Beneath the smeared blood the surrounding flesh was already starting to discolor. She would have an ugly bruise. It must have been a razor-sharp rock; the bioskin material didn’t tear easily. Without it, she would surely be looking at a gaping wound down to the bone.

  She extracted the first aid kit from her pack and smeared a disinfecting gel over the cut. Within seconds the gel stiffened and became opaque, forming a flexible bandage. Luckily the cut wasn’t deep enough to require sutures. It was the bruising and muscle damage she was worried about; she still had a great deal of walking to do. And the cold added to her worries; she was starting to shiver. Reluctantly, she signaled her implant to release a brown adipose stimulant. Minutes later
she was comfortably warm, but her body had only so much fat left to burn. Now that her suit was torn, her food situation was more desperate than ever.

  She dialed up the torch and expanded the focus from a narrow beam into a bright cone of light, then gasped at what she saw. The strip of wet pebbles formed a narrow beach; ahead of her stretched a vast underground lake, black and calm. She shone the light above; she could barely make out the outlines of the rocky ceiling, which must be at least sixty meters above. The cavern was immense.

  She reattached the torch to the rifle, dialing back the intensity to conserve energy. Slowly, she advanced up the beach, the pebbles crunching beneath her boots. Her hip still hurt but the gel’s numbing agent attenuated the pain. She ascended a gentle slope. Now she was walking on rough, larger rocks. Looking down, she saw rubble, the crumbled remains of a large concrete slab. Twenty meters ahead she could make out the decaying outlines of what might have been a live-work area. Rusted cot frames lay next to moldy residue from fiberboard partitions. Not far away, a few rotted timbers were all that was left of a long communal dining table. Farther on, she found the collapsed remains of a large kitchen, compost toilets, and a greenhouse once fueled by artificial light.

  From her history lessons, she knew this was a Survivalist camp from the Remnant Age. To see it in the flesh was both fascinating and creepy. From the looks of it, a few dozen people had lived in this cave, hidden away, protecting their scarce scavenged resources from other tribes. This sad existence was the dying breath of Earth-based civilization (already weakened by population decline and natural disasters). Leading up to the Remnant Age, global commerce and industrial-scale production had collapsed, leaving civilization’s stragglers to scavenge what they could from fallen cities, cobbling together the rest. Early Survivalist tribes had been well-stocked and industrious, but without formal education, and without a global network providing access to the world’s accumulated knowledge, expertise deteriorated with each generation. Machines were poorly maintained. Fuel ran out, as did ammunition. Technology devolved. The last of the Survivalists, savage and illiterate, had killed each other off with rusted machetes and antique crossbows.

  Car-En stumbled on a chunk of rubble, almost going down. She had to be more careful; she couldn’t afford another fall. Past the greenhouse, she found the remains of a laboratory or workshop area. This group had been well-organized and, from the looks of it, creative. The torch beam gave her glimpses of what had once been work benches, bins of parts, half-assembled projects, even what might have once been a computing tablet. Maybe this tribe was early Remnant Age, from the late twenty-fourth century, before things had gotten really bad. Certainly they’d generated electricity; they’d managed to grow food underground.

  What had happened here? She’d yet to see any human remains. The settlement had been abandoned.

  Beyond the workshop, the rest of the concrete slab continued for as far as she could see. Carefully she picked her way across the field of rubble. Ahead, she saw a squat, roughly constructed stone tower. She could hear a brook trickling in the distance. Even before she checked the ambient radiation levels, the scenario became clear. She stopped in her tracks.

  The reading confirmed her suspicions. These Survivalists had been industrious indeed, constructing their own miniature nuclear reactor, housed in a stone tower, cooled by a natural stream (which fed into the lake below). The reactor had provided all the electricity they’d needed to grow food underground, to stay warm, to power their scavenged and constructed devices. The reactor had probably fueled their lifestyle for a number of generations.

  She imagined the sequence of events as it might have played out. The engineering genius who had built the reactor had passed away. The survivors painstakingly followed the instructions for maintaining the device. Until they didn’t. Something bad had happened – a breakdown or a radiation leak – and a mass exodus had followed. The isotope signatures pointed to a thorium reactor, one of the ‘safe’ types of reactors that should not have been capable of a core meltdown. But something had gone wrong. At least they had known enough to get out.

  Now, over two hundred years later, waste from this miniature power station was contaminating the underground lake, seeping into the groundwater that fed Happdal’s wells.

  Bad luck. That’s what was killing the villagers. The radiation levels weren’t that high, nor of the most lethal variety. If only Happdal had been founded one valley over….

  But if they were willing to relocate their village, the people of Happdal could stop dying young.

  Car-En shivered. Using the torch, she examined the remains of the pipes and cables that connected the decrepit reactor to the infrastructure ruins of the camp. She tried to imagine people working here, maybe even children running around, playing in the nearby lake. Even populated and well-lit, this place must have been dreary. Though was it so different from the Stanford? For most of her life she had lived in an artificial ecosystem, protected from the harsh outside environment. But the ringstation had trees, and natural sunlight streaming in from the mirrored hub. Most importantly, ringstation citizens still had a sense of progress, pushing forward the horizons of science, invention, and the human spirit. On Earth, progress had died sometime during the Corporate Age; the Survivalist tribes of the Remnant Age had devolved into a grim sustenance existence ruled by fear and superstition.

  Having seen enough, she turned and picked her way back across the dark field of rubble. Alone, there was nothing she could do to contain the radiation. Surely the right team of engineers and decontamination specialists from the Stanford could deal with it, but that would constitute Intervention. Without a political sea change, there was nothing to be done. At least she had discovered the nature of the problem. She would include the details in her final report. Maybe in two years’ time the policy would be revised and a team could be sent.

  Because of what she had done, trying to rescue Katja, she would surely be censured by Academic Conduct. But that wouldn’t invalidate her research. She’d collected a huge amount of valuable data, a trove of information that would benefit anthropologists and archeologists on all the ringstations. It might be a long time before she was allowed to do more field research, but it wasn’t as if her career was over. Her colleagues would still want to talk to her, to learn from her, to hear firsthand what it was like to walk on Earth.

  She returned through the giant cavern with the stalactite/stalagmite pillars, feeling tired but buoyant. Her hip ached, but she could still walk. Her m’eye informed her there was no incipient infection; the wound was clean. Whatever penalty Academic Conduct meted out, she would accept without complaint, move on with her life. In some ways it would be a huge relief to be back home. She could eat, for one thing, and sleep in a real bed. As she walked, her mind cycled through various comfort and recreation fantasies; a hot shower, a spa session in the low-grav inner rings, catching up on the latest shows and music, drinking wine and gossiping with Lydia. It would be good to relax, to not be so alert all the time.

  As she neared the surface and regained connectivity, several messages from Adrian queued up. The first was audio-only. Her body tensed as the recording of his low, sonorous voice transmitted through her cochlear implant.

  “I’ve discussed your situation with Academic Conduct. They’re…deliberating. We’ll know something soon.” It was hard to tell from his tone where he stood. What would be a good outcome, from Adrian’s point of view? Did he want her to continue her research on Earth or not? After a pause, her advisor continued. “Look, I’ve been thinking about the Happdal villagers. From the genographics and other data you’ve sent us, we’re starting to get a clearer migration picture. This group definitely migrated from Northern Europe, probably moving south with the glacial line. They were nomadic for a number of generations, which may explain why they escaped detection for so long. They weren’t building anything that would have been visible from space – no structures, n
o fields, no large fires. They eventually resettled, probably about a hundred years ago, in a more temperate region, but by that time we’d classified Earth as post-Inhabitation and weren’t really looking. Until Townes.”

  Ahead, Car-En saw a dim patch of gray light that might be the cave opening. She increased her pace.

  Adrian’s message continued. “But all that is beside the point. What I’ve been thinking about are their cultural traditions. These villagers have retained preindustrial metalworking, woodworking, and glassmaking techniques that were all but lost during the Corporate Age. Such crafts might have been practiced by hobbyists and eccentrics, but were far outside of the mainstream. So I don’t think we’re dealing with the descendants of a Survivalist tribe. At least not a normal one.” The last line gave Car-En pause for thought. Did the profile of a ‘normal’ Survivalist tribe include a nuclear reactor?

  “So here’s my idea: the Happdal villagers are descended from a Scandinavian traditionalist group, maybe a ‘medieval Viking town’ of sorts. There was probably a tourism aspect, but the inhabitants actually lived without electricity or industrial tools. They practiced traditional metalworking, leather-curing, glassblowing, cheese-making, various modes of fish preservation, and perhaps even spoke an ancient dialect – maybe Old Norse or something similar. During Depop and the decline of global commerce, this group thrived. Economic collapse didn’t matter to them. While other Survivalist tribes were running out of canned food and ammunition, these people were forging swords and growing their own food. The others might have been stronger at first, but their traditional skills gave them an edge. After Campi Flegrei, they migrated, probably with animals and carts in tow, to escape the advancing ice fields. And here we find them today, in the Harz mountains.” Adrian paused for breath. “Pure speculation, of course. But that’s my hypothesis.”