by Paul Tassi
“During our voyage, I modified the two spare armor sets to fit you and Miss Auran,” Theta said, motioning to two suits of dramatically different sizes.
“And check this out,” Finn said, taking down a long gun from above a set of polished armor that was assuredly his. “Prototype S-class rifle. Micro-blue core. A dozen rounds a second.”
Noah eyed the rifle worriedly; it looked too big for Finn’s bony frame to carry, but the power armor’s strength amplification was supposed to help with that.
“Are you, uh, sure you can use that?” Noah asked.
“I’ve had generals train me at arms since I could walk,” Finn replied curtly, brushing his hair back. “They brought me in to test this personally.”
Noah doubted the last part of that was true, but the first bit seemed like something Madric Stoller would demand of his son. In the press, Finn was often overshadowed by his war hero older sister, Maeren, who was currently commanding a liberation fleet laying siege to a Xalan colony planet.
Noah glanced over at Kyra, who was eyeing the dust-colored plating designated for her petite frame. In the months she’d spent in the pod, her blond hair had grown out from the black dye she wore when they first met. It was easier to see his old friend in her, though he often caught himself staring at her for a different reason. She was shockingly gorgeous—distractingly so—and Erik and Finn appeared to be hypnotized by her every move as well.
Kyra had taken the fact that they had arrived at Earth instead of a casino in the Deca Quadrant rather well. Noah suspected she was still fractured by the carnage at the White Spire, and her world was shattered regardless of whether she was hiding out on some lost planet or the galaxy’s largest casino.
“I modified Miss Auran’s scattergun into something more portable,” Theta said, referring to the shortened shotgun-like weapon that hung next to her armor. “You will find it much lighter, I hope.”
“Thank you, Theta,” Kyra said, flashing a dazzling smile that made even the young Xalan blush. “But please, no more ‘Miss Auran.’ Call me Kyra.” Theta gave a hint of a nod.
Erik twirled a pair of elongated energy pistols, which glowed an electric blue. Finn said they once belonged to an overseer in the Sorvo Republic until he lost them to Madric Stoller in a bet on a sakala match. The pistols didn’t fire plasma but concentrated, flat lasers that could supposedly shear through nearly any surface as if it were paper.
Noah took his own weapon down from the hooks next to his armor. It was a sleek-looking assault rifle with less gadgetry than Finn’s, but it was exceptionally lightweight and supposedly another rare item in Stoller’s private arsenal that Finn had raided for their foolhardy mission to Earth. Noah waved Finn off when he began to launch into a story about the weapon’s history. It was his now; that was all that mattered.
While the others were suiting up in their armor, Theta ushered Noah into an adjacent room.
“I just finished this for you,” she said, pulling a long crate out from under a large, plush bed. “It would not fit in the armory.”
“How much free time did you have on this trip?” Noah asked, wondering what new creation she’d concocted in addition to the other work she’d done.
“Xalans do not attain much rest in Soran cryogenic pods,” she said, tapping through the virtual keys on the crate’s lock. “I found an abundance of materials onboard this vessel and … I have witnessed many of your bouts in the colony training yard. I thought you might appreciate this item.”
Theta opened the crate to reveal a long, dark warhammer made entirely out of matte black metal. The head had a wide, flat striking surface laid to the right in the crate’s housing with two long spikes sprouting from the left and top of the head. It was far more elegant and deadly than the graftstone practice maul he’d been using that he’d recently employed to shatter the skulls of invaders at the White Spire. On the side of the head were two circular metal objects laced with circuitry that Noah couldn’t identify.
“It is crafted almost entirely from darksteel,” Theta said as Noah took the hammer into his hands. It had to be almost four feet long, but it felt like it weighed half of what it should.
“It is the same material as your mother’s sword,” Theta continued. Asha’s black blade was legendary on the battlefield, and only a few darksteel weapons existed in the world, as it was exceptionally hard to forge the metal without incredibly complex equipment. Equipment that Theta had built from scratch in her spare time aboard the Shatterstar on their way to Earth. Noah could only shake his head slowly in amazement.
“It appears High Chancellor Stoller commissioned a darksteel statue to be made of himself for display in the dining area,” Theta said. “I thought this a better use of the material.”
Madric’s ego to the rescue again. Noah rubbed his thumb across the grip of the maul and the metal spheres lit up at the head.
“Careful,” Theta cautioned.
“What is it?” Noah asked, eyeing the blue circles of light.
“I fitted the head of the warhammer with a pair of sonic resonators. When activated, the kinetic force of the weapon is dramatically increased. But I would advise against overuse.”
Noah spun the weapon around in his hands. It thrummed with energy.
“Thank you, Theta. This means more than you know.”
“I only wish to continue the established bond between our families,” Theta said.
“We’d call this a gift from a friend,” Noah replied.
“I will agree to that classification.”
Dubai.
“Did you hear that?” Noah said, looking around.
Theta cocked her head, confused. Clearly she’d hadn’t.
The pull. It was getting stronger.
“Time to visit the homeworld.”
7
“Sensor readouts are proving unreliable,” said Theta as she scrunched up her face at a series of displays on the bridge of the Shatterstar. Finn had taken the ship as close to the atmosphere as he could manage, and thrusters were keeping them in place several hundred miles above the desert where they were supposed to land.
“What about optics?” Noah asked. Erik was flipping through some projections of the city of Dubai itself, before the fall. One of Earth’s most lavish supercities, it was full of shining buildings and crystal-clear artificial pools.
“Some structures are intact, but most are destroyed, as to be expected. There is a great deal of sand,” Theta said, unaware that she was stating the obvious. “There is no movement on the ground, though without adequate sensor data I cannot say for certain if lifeforms are present.”
“What’s wrong with the sensors?” Noah pressed. Theta shook her head.
“Atmospheric disturbance, technological disruption, I cannot say for certain.”
“Those are two very different things,” Noah said worriedly. The pull of the city was constantly battling his gut instinct, which told him this was some sort of Xalan ambush.
“There are no other Soran troops nearby?” asked Kyra, staring out the viewscreen at the strange looking planet below.
Theta shook her head.
“The last Soran mission authorized here returned four months ago. Nothing remains aside from a few scattered Xalan signatures planetwide. But again, the sensors—”
Erik cut her off.
“The sensors will work as we get closer. If there’s a Xalan fortress down there, we’ll call it a day and head home. If there isn’t, we’ll land and go exploring.”
Noah suspected that even if there was a Xalan fortress down there Erik would try to talk them into landing, but if that did happen, Noah would force the ship back to Sora even if he had to lock up Finn and Erik and “Dubai” started being chanted in his head all day long.
“I’m dropping in,” Finn said. The viewscreen started to glow red as their hull met the atmosphere. “Better suit up.”
Noah broke away from the readouts and helped Kyra finish putting on her armor. This was undoubte
dly her first time wearing such a suit.
“Just remember,” he said, as he fitted her shoulderplates on top of her form-fitting mesh undersuit. Her chestplate snapped up automatically and encased her torso. “Always keep two of us in your vision, and make sure one of them is me.”
Kyra nodded as she put her hand into an armored glove. Noah snapped more plating around her upper arms. She looked scared. Noah hoped that his own fear wasn’t showing on his face.
“Lead them.”
“It’ll be fine,” he reassured her. “We’re just going to take a look around, and we’ll be on our way back to Sora in no time.”
She shivered.
“Sora doesn’t seem safer than here right now, to be honest,” she said.
“Well, then think of this like a vacation,” Noah said with a smile, which she reluctantly returned.
“Fifty out!” called Finn from the captain’s chair. Noah retreated to finish donning his own armor. He clasped his new warhammer into the housing Theta had built for it on his back. The Xalan was already fully suited up and Erik was checking the readouts on his pair of pistols.
“Sensors clearing,” Theta said. “No signatures in our radius.”
The city was empty? Noah wasn’t hoping to stumble upon a Xalan military base, but he secretly wondered if there was perhaps some surviving colony of humans that had weathered the apocalypse and somehow summoned them to return to their planet. But three-hundred-degree peak temperatures on the surface had made sure that was impossible. Sora’s Colony One truly did hold the last remnants of humankind.
The revelation seemed to noticeably puzzle Erik as well. What were they looking for in Dubai if not something alive?
“Thirty,” called Finn.
“Atmospheric readouts indicate normal levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide,” Theta excitedly relayed. “The air is breathable! And look!”
She pointed out the window. Hovering at the edge of space was a long, colossal-looking metal shape, though it was hard to gauge its scale. A ship? Noah froze.
“A terraforming orbiter!” Theta clarified. “It must be responsible for the temperature decrease.”
“Wait, that’s Xalan?” Noah asked. He’d never seen anything like it. A hazy blue gas was pooling off the sides of the machine and drifting lazily toward the Earth below. Theta was recording video of the object via a tiny lens attached to her armor and scanning it with a device on her outstretched hand.
“The project was commissioned by my grandfather, but never progressed past the prototype stage. They must be testing it on Earth to gauge its effects. There have to be dozens in orbit to create the sort of worldwide fluctuations seen in the data.”
The landscape of the surface was starting to come into focus. The area that was once vaguely named the “Middle East” was more of a desert than it ever was. Dubai had once been a coastal city. It sat on the bank of a vast gulf that had long run dry. Though rains had started filling in sporadic lakes and oceans elsewhere on the planet, nothing of the sort had happened here yet.
“Still nothing on the biological sensors,” Theta said, indicating that if this was a trap, they hadn’t sprung it yet.
Ten miles up, the city was now visible beneath them. Noah pulled up the images of the glimmering metropolis as it once was. The contrast was stark.
Once, manmade islands had been crafted off the coast. But with the water gone, all that remained were oddly shaped lumps of earth, littered with dull specks that were likely wrecked sea yachts and cruising ships. Of the few skyscrapers that still stood, all were covered in dust, and the Earth’s former tallest structure, the Burj Khalifa, had apparently collapsed into nothingness.
It was odd to Noah that so much of Dubai still stood, given the tactics of the Xalan invading fleet. He initially wondered why the entire place wasn’t one massive glass crater. But the reason he’d never heard of the city until now was that it had had almost no impact on the war during the sacking of Earth. The entire region’s contribution to fighting the Xalans was largely negligible. As much of a threat as the other countries of Earth had thought the Middle East posed before the invasion, the actual capabilities of their armies had been weak compared to the giants of China, America, and Europe. Only the neighboring country of Pakistan was chronicled as being involved in a major battle of the war; the country had unleashed its nuclear arsenal to cripple a reinforcing wave of Xalan ships trying to ravage its neighbor, the once-populous India.
Rather, Dubai had escaped the worst of the conflict, and had apparently fallen to man and the sun rather than the Xalans. Noah wondered how many had still lived within the city for a time after the war, before the heat had burnt them all away.
“Setting down,” Finn said. The ruined skyline loomed ahead of them. Rampaging fires had turned many of the buildings into mere husks, and there were few windows left unshattered. It wasn’t a crater, but it certainly wasn’t a city anymore either, merely a loose collection of metal and glass that looked like it might crumble completely if a strong enough wind blew through.
No one spoke as the ship touched down. They’d just landed on Earth. Noah felt like this could be some elaborate dream.
The ship wouldn’t stay cloaked in an unpowered state, so they left it to the mercy of the sands and trudged up the coast toward the dead buildings. The Shatterstar had crushed the last remnants of an old marina boathouse when it landed and was surrounded by a sea of giant decaying ships lodged in the sand. The heat hadn’t quite been enough to melt the fiberglass of their hulls, but many had started to sag before dropping temperatures had frozen them back in place.
The streets were littered with the primitive carriages humanity once called “cars,” their paint long stripped by the harsh sands, their archaic rubber tires liquefied and caked onto the cracked roads. Many had old Earth animal emblems planted on their noses: horses, bulls, and the like. The wheeled machines were now as extinct as the creatures they were named after.
Noah heard Kyra gasp when she saw the first human remnants strewn on the road. A blackened skeleton lay prone in the street. Then another, and another. Theta scanned the bones and found that they were indeed human, not Soran, and they’d been dead for years, dating back to when the war still raged.
Theta was fascinated by everything around her, particularly the readouts that scrolled across her vision, projected from her suit. She informed them the temperature was far lower than anticipated, and oddly, the air did feel almost chilly.
Erik and Finn were mercifully silent as they walked, too awed by the magnificent decay around them to ruin the scope of their arrival with their usual quips or jokes. About a mile into their trek, it occurred to Noah that he and Erik were the first humans to walk on Earth in years. Most had predicted such a thing would never be possible again. Earth had been considered a dead planet, and though that was certainly how it looked, Theta’s data said it was coming alive again, slowly.
Finally, Kyra asked the obvious.
“Where are we going?”
The group stopped. Erik and Noah looked at each other.
“Do you hear it anymore?” Erik whispered.
“No,” Noah said, realizing the voice had left him now that they were in the city. It was a massive place, and they could explore it for years without uncovering whatever secrets it contained.
“I don’t—” began Noah, but Theta cut him off. Surprising; she was never one to interrupt.
“I am picking up a reading,” she blurted out.
“Life?” Noah asked, suddenly clutching his rifle more tightly.
“No,” Theta said. “A power source.”
“Coming from where?” asked Finn, holding his gun cocked against his hip like an action hero, eager to prove his worth.
Theta shifted her scanning equipment. She panned away from the looming skyscrapers ahead and up the coast. She came to rest on a strange shape a fair distance away.
“There,” she said, extending a white claw toward it.
Back wh
en there was still water in the area, the building must have floated on its own little island in the gulf. It was triangular, with one curved edge that made it look like an ancient watercraft with a tall sail. Noah remembered that such wind-powered ships had still been used on Earth before it was destroyed.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Let’s find out,” Erik said as he trudged forward.
The aqua-blue sky had given way to a dusky gray by the time they reached the structure. The small sun had set and hazy, dim stars hung above them. But other lights were now flickering, which made all of them uneasy.
The mammoth structure was emitting artificial light from a select few of its windows.
They arrived at a building that read “Welcome Center” in English, with some other sort of looping Earth language written above it. The others looked around nervously as Erik picked up one of a few hundred disintegrating brochures that littered the ground.
“The Burj Al Arab,” he said, as he held up the picture on the front of the faded document, comparing it the damaged building ahead of them. “It used to be some sort of high-end resort.”
What the place used to be did not concern Noah. He turned to Theta.
“Still nothing on the readouts?” he asked. She shook her head, tapping her display with a claw.
“But the energy source within is Xalan in origin,” she cautioned.
They moved around the welcome center through a sea of marooned cars and more mummified remains. When they reached the other side, they saw that the pier that had connected the manmade island to land was badly damaged. Chunks of the road had fallen down to the sands below, along with the cars that had once sat abandoned on the bridge.
“Careful,” Noah said as he slowly moved across the cracked pavement. It was a short distance to the base of the hotel, but a treacherous one.