by TJ Ryan
A loud trembling filled her hearing, and she felt Tyrese tense until it had passed. Then he was pulling on her hand, heading off to God knew where. “Yes I know a better place. Well. Better than this, anyway. Come on. Hurry.”
She followed along with him, dodging rocks protruding from the wall and more than a few times, having to pull her boot out of the cloying muck of the soil. It wasn’t as hard to get out of now that she had her envirosuit on. It made her wonder if it was being in her bare skin that made the soil stick to her so well before. Something to do with the difference between living tissue and the material the suits were made of. Whatever it was, she was able to keep up with him without too much trouble as he led her along passages that began sloping downward as they went.
“We’re going further underground?” she asked, incredulous.
“Trust me,” was all he said.
It took her a long while before she realized how he seemed to know exactly what turns to take, and which way to go. There was a line of luminous sand on the floor. Once her eyes focused enough to see it, the trail was easy to follow.
She’d already decided they were walking through the hallways of some ancient complex. The cataclysm that had broken the Earth had tumbled the entire building upside down, because they were walking on the ceiling. The passage was off-center and sloping. Protrusions that were obviously light fixtures were spaced at regular intervals at her feet, and they should have been above them. It was creepy, to be this deep into Old Earth, where her ancestors had lived and worked and loved and died. Tyrese brought her further, and further, until finally he made one more turn, and they found themselves in front of a massive door.
It was made of the same stuff as the walkway they were using, and she had to suspect that the only reason these buildings had survived as well as they did was that they were made of this thick metal. She wasn’t familiar with it and didn’t know what to call it. It wasn’t steel. Wasn’t anything she recognized. Whatever it was, it would sometimes ring out with hollow accord when she put her foot down just right. The door was made of the same stuff.
There was also a meter-high gap from the floor to the top of the door, because it was upside down relative to them.
“You brought us to a dead end,” Tara said, looking back over her shoulder at the line of light on the floor-ceiling, waiting for Atria to come screaming around the corner at them.
Calmly, Tyrese reached out and rapped on the door three times, then twice, then once.
“It’s a numeric sequence,” he explained, as if that made all the difference in the world.
“Your door is activated by knocking?” she asked him, wondering if anything would ever make sense again. Maybe she was still unconscious, and this whole scenario was made up by her mind.
“Well, the knocking is actually for—”
Before he could finish his sentence, the door creaked to life, separating along a central line into two parts, each of them sliding sideways with a crunching, grinding noise that would have woken the dead.
“It’s too loud! It’s going to tell her where we are!” Tara grabbed hold of Tyrese, certain that the ominous sound of that door opening would be all that Atria would need to find them. She would only have to follow the noise and then she would be on them. She would have her naked and buried in the Earth again, and this time there would be no escape.
But the doors opened wide enough for Tyrese to step up and over the lip, and then he was pulling her in as well, and the doors closed again behind them.
She fell into his arms. There was a sense of safety that those doors afforded. They were easily as thick as her whole arm, and how Tyrese had managed to get them to open and close again without any sort of power to the building she couldn’t say, and she didn’t care. They would be safe here, and she could just hole up with him here until rescue came. Yes. That was a great plan.
Which of course, she thought later, meant it would never work that way.
“You trust me?” Tyrese said to her.
She froze there in his arms, because yes she trusted him, but him asking that now meant that he was about to ask something she was not going to like.
“Tyrese…”
“Just, don’t freak out,” he told her. “This is one of those moments like when you found out I was in a wheelchair.”
“You’re not in a wheelchair anymore,” she pointed out.
“Yes. Well… this is hopefully going to be like that.”
“I don’t understand.”
Turning her around in his arms, he held her close, but moved her so she could see the chamber they had climbed into.
The first thing that struck her was how bright it was. Not as blinding as the miniature sun explosions from before that had incapacitated Atria—somehow—but bright enough that she would have thought she was outdoors on the colony world she had been raised on, if she didn’t know better. Looking up, there were huge clusters of what appeared to be balls of sand suspended from the ceiling, all glowing as swirls of golden dust showered away from them and dissipated into nothing.
No, she reminded herself, not the ceiling. That would be the floor all the way up there. Her entire world had been turned upside down, in more ways than one.
At the sides of the room were several doors. At each of them a continuous deluge of the glowing sand fell, creating curtains that hid the rooms beyond. As she stood there staring, a similar curtain began dropping behind her, with the sound of a giant’s whisper, the grains of sand added more light. There, in the middle of the room, was the rest of what Tyrese wanted her to see.
A dozen or more people. Real people. Not her imagination, not some crazy figment brought on by exposure to Earth atmo. All of them fair-skinned, all of them thin with whipcord tight muscles outlined against their black one-piece clothing. She had noticed their huge eyes before, but now she saw their bodies were all shorter than she, and their feet bare against the metal floor. It was their eyes that held her most, though. Large, and unblinking, and all of them pale blue. They were human-like, no doubt, but there was no way they could be here. Even without their strange looks, they sent a shiver up her spine because it was impossible for them to be standing here, in these rooms, under the surface of a planet that wasn’t even supposed to be supporting life.
Tyrese held onto her, thankfully, or she would have tried to bolt. These were the good guys, she tried to remind herself. They had saved her from Atria so no matter what else was going on, these were the good guys.
As alien races went, they weren’t the weirdest she’d ever seen. Not even the scariest. They had to be aliens, right? They couldn’t be human even if that was how they appeared. Aliens had been trying to get onto the Earth for centuries now, so…
“They shouldn’t be here,” Tara said, low enough that her voice would only carry to Tyrese through the comms in their suits. “No alien has landed on Earth since the cataclysm a thousand years ago. Not one. How did they get here? How are there so many of them? Overwatch would have seen if a force this big tried to land on the Earth, and the Defense Engineers would have kept it from happening. Right?”
“Tara,” Tyrese started, and then hesitated. “Um. This was the part I needed you to trust me on. Look, you and I were separated for quite a long time. You were knocked out for what felt like days. I had the chance to get to know these people pretty well.”
“People, huh? Well, aren’t you progressive.” Tara kept her eyes on the aliens. They didn’t move. They just stood there, watching. “How do they look like us? Are they utilizing some sort of image reflective technology to mimic our appearance?”
“They aren’t aliens,” he said. “These are humans.”
“You’re insane.” Tara took one more step closer to Tyrese. “Have you been exposed to the atmosphere, too? Have the toxins taken hold of you? You need to explain what’s going on.”
“I’m trying to,” he told her. “It’s just all so complicated. First things first. Take your helmet off.”
&nbs
p; “Tyrese! I can’t…you just told me to put the envirosuit back on! You said I needed it to stay safe!”
With a slow smile, he reached up to his own helmet and unsnapped the seals. Tara watched in horror as he lifted the helmet off and let it hang loose at the back of his neck. “Out there, outside of this complex, it is the only thing that’s going to keep you safe. Might even have to find some way to mend the rips. But in here, the air is safe. At least, in this section of the complex it is. Atria’s explosion damaged the outer surface of the complex, allowing the atmosphere to infiltrate part of the building.”
“What are you talking about? Tyrese, the air is toxic. You saw what it did to Atria. Put your helmet back on, please! I beg of you.”
“Trust me.”
She almost took her own helmet off. He seemed so certain. So positive that this was safe. Only, she remembered the look in Atria’s eyes, how they turned red and she had obviously gone round the bend. She remembered how Atria had wanted to bury her alive. The toxins in the air had driven the woman insane. Was the same thing happening to Tyrese? Would it happen to her?
He took her hand, and held it out straight behind them, into the pouring sand cascading in front of the door. The light poured around the thick fingers of her glove and continued on to the floor. “This,” he said, “is the reason why we’re safe here. Somehow, in some way that I just don’t understand, this sand filters out the toxins in the Earth’s air. They’ve got cascades of this stuff at every single door in their area. Between this and the complex exterior shell, the atmosphere down here is safe at the moment.”
“At the moment? Who told you about this?”
“Apparently six weeks ago, the atmosphere was safe everywhere.”
“What in Hell’s name are you talking about Tyrese?”
He dropped her hand, and then pointed to the group of aliens, still standing and watching them. “I know this, because they told me.”
Maybe one of them had already gone crazy. “Tyrese. There’s no way you learned their language already. This is first contact. It would take days to learn the basics. Are you sure the atmo is clear down here?”
A strange expression crossed his face. “I already know their language, Tara.”
“What? How?”
“Because they speak the same language we do.”
She stared at him. “Impossible. Even the alien races stationed closest to our systems use translation devices to communicate with us. You know that.”
“Yes, I know that.” Tyrese told her. “Aliens and humans can’t communicate with the same verbal language.”
Tara stared at them again. Not the strangest aliens ever. “Them how is that possible?” she asked again.
“Because,” he said. “They speak our language. They aren’t aliens, Tara. They’re human.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Now I know you’re insane.”
“Hear me out,” Tyrese said to her. “There’s a whole story here, and I only understand part of it.”
“Tyrese, please,” she begged him, reaching past his shoulders for his helmet. “Put this back on. Let the filtration systems work the atmosphere out of your lungs. Please? Just put this back on.”
“No, Tara, stop it.” His hands fended off hers, and then he held her hands and sighed and hooked her gaze with his own. There was something about his eyes, something about him in fact, that let her know she could trust him. “I know it’s a lot to believe, but it’s true. These are the descendants of the original human beings who lived on Earth.”
“No, Tyrese, that’s us. We are the descendants of humanity. We are the ones trying to reclaim the Earth… although from what I’ve seen so far, I’m not sure I want to.”
One of the aliens, the tallest in the group, stepped closer with a sort of loping gait that was more graceful than a normal human gait, as far as Tara was concerned. He lifted his arms, and with both hand gestures and fluid arm movements, he began to speak.
Tara had to remember to breathe.
“We welcome you, Engineer Tara Royce.” His voice was high-pitched and raspy, but the words were spoken clearly in her language. “Your friend tells the truth. We are human. I suppose that makes us cousins. My name is Dar.”
“How…?” It was all Tara could manage to say. The impossible was now happening. There were people on Earth.
“We’ve lived here all along,” Dar explained. “Not us personally. Our ancestors. The ones who came before. We are descended from them. We are the descendants of the Earth. We have been here, underneath the surface of the Earth, since the time of the breaking. When that happened, we survived. Not many other did, but our ancestors were, at the time, in this bunker below the surface when the detonation took place. This place you see around us, it was built specifically to withstand the forces that destroyed the planet.”
He held his hands out around himself, indicating the rooms and corridors around them, protected by the golden, glowing sand.
When she could remember to breathe again Tara wiped a gloved hand up Tyrese’s arm, wanting to feel his solid strength next to her. “This is incredible,” she said, intending her comment for Tyrese, but forgetting to keep her voice down so the aliens—no, the descendants of the Earth—wouldn’t hear. “This is… I don’t know what to call this. I can’t believe this. How can this be possible?”
“Please believe me,” Dar said. “This was unexpected for us as well. There have been many things foreseen for us. The beginning. The end. But this… finding you here with us in our safety zone… this was not expected. This is the first time in our history that we have seen other humans besides ourselves.”
Other humans, Tara repeated in her mind. She shook her head, trying to fit the pieces together without any idea what the big picture was supposed to look like.
“See,” Tyrese interrupted, trying to explain it better. “When the fission bombs were unleashed on the Earth a thousand years ago, Viktor Ravnak came up with the plan for the escape ships. They packed as many people as they could into those ships and shot them off across the universe. They settled on the colony worlds, and had children, who had children, and so forth, and eventually those people became us. The Academy. Overwatch. The Defensive Engineers. All of it came from those escape ships.”
Tara knew that part. It was history that every child learned in primary lessons. That was the reason why human beings existed anywhere in the universe. “Right. We colonized other planets. But that still left millions of people on Earth when it blew up.”
“Billions,” Tyrese corrected. “One of the greatest losses of life the universe has ever known. And, up until now, a killing event that we had thought was complete. Nothing was supposed to have survived down here on good old Terra Firma. Turns out, not only did human life survive our self-inflicted cataclysm, but it thrived. A thousand years of a completely separate evolutionary tract brought us… them.”
“Dar,” Dar said, proudly thumping a hand against his chest as if that word meant far more than he could ever express in spoken word.
“Er, right.” Tyrese breathed in a deep breath of air, held it in his lungs, and only after closing his eyes to savor it like a fine wine did he let it go again. “The air here is fresh. It gets recycled on a regular basis through a completely biological method. They tried to describe it to me but, well, there really wasn’t time. These buildings here were disaster shelters meant to withstand a comet strike or maybe even the meltdown of the Earth’s core, or at least that’s what their main intentions were for. Ravnak, often believed to be delusional and a conspiracy theorist, designed them to withstand much worse than just impact. They were stocked with more than enough supplies to keep our ancestors alive. At least, the lucky few thousand who made it here before everything went boom.”
Tara was feeling less crazy by the second. Everything Tyrese was telling her made sense. It fit in with the history she had been taught. She didn’t pretend to understand it all because, quite frankly, she would probably need an entire
solar month and a few dozen charts if she tried
This was an amazing scientific discovery. One that would set the entire universe on its ear. At the same time, it was all completely pointless as far as she was concerned. Actually, after a new moments of though, it was all absolutely insane.
The air was toxic, it was affecting her mental capacity. She was delusional, Tyrese was delusional. This may not be a hallucination, but it sure as hell was a trick. No humans would be able to survive in this toxic atmosphere for 1,000 years. They must be an alien species that have managed to alter their appearance.
“We can’t stay here,” she told Tyrese. “As much as I’d love to bring a research team down here and talk to the, um, whatever we’re calling these guys…hominoids? Homo Primus? Whatever. If I could—”
“We’re people,” Dar told her. “We’re just as much human as you are, Engineer Tara Royce. You and we are the same.”
“Hardly,” she growled, “we’re not.”
“Tara…”
“No, Tyrese. Damn it. You can’t just dump this on me and expect me to accept it lock and stock. Whether they’re people or not… I don’t know. It’s really not possible. Right now I don’t care. We can’t stay here. We have to get the tech we need to fix the fission power cell and we need to figure out a way to send a signal to Lieutenant Danvers so we can get off planet again.”
Unless, of course, whatever Atria has been talking about would kill them first. If that was the case… well, then nothing they did was going to matter anyway, so they might as well stick to the plan. Bagging Hell, she had a lot to figure out.
“This is the safest place for us,” he told her. “I’m open to suggestions, but for the moment I really think we’re stuck right where we are.”
“No!” she almost shouted, fisting her hands inside of her gloves. “That is not acceptable. We can’t be stranded here. I need to get back home!”
“I know,” he said to her. “But Tara, in case you forgot, the atmo is toxic and your suit is broken. The only place we can breathe outside of our envirosuits without it poisoning our minds is right here in these protected rooms. And let me ask you this. What do we owe Danvers? Hmm? Do you really want to put a dangerous piece of tech like a fission weapon in the hands of Overwatch?”