"It's odd they're all knocked off," I commented as we approached the Ancient control station overshadowing the buildings.
Suyef stopped his mount near the entrance to the station and pointed inside. "Find what you need. We stay only a chron."
A chron was more than enough. Now that I knew what to look for, the evidence soon lay spread out before me. I downloaded all of it to the padd, checked the upper levels to ascertain their disappointing supply situation, then we left. Suyef led us out of sight to the west, then brought us to a halt in a gully open to the south. There I perused the new information and brought him up to date.
"Well, here's a problem. These files. They're exactly the same as the previous settlement's. The only difference is the dates. All the pertinent details are the same. Water levels began dropping, the people left, but I can't figure out when." I tapped through the data, eyes scanning it. "Not a mention of a date, anywhere. All scrubbed clean."
"Intentional?" Suyef asked.
I shrugged. "It would have to be, right? I mean, other than the dates, the wording is the same as the other settlement's."
"What about personal logs or records?"
"The people in this settlement weren't as diligent in record keeping," I answered, shaking my head. "That or all of their logs were deleted. It's odd that no one ever kept a video journal of any kind. Unless we've found a settlement of paper lovers, and there wasn't any evidence of paper or writing utensils around, was there?" Suyef shook his head. "And that stuff is expensive, so, I don't know. I can only guess, but it's possible someone wiped the actual logs of this settlement. They replaced them with the other settlement's, only scrubbing any mention of the dates. Why the dates are important enough to leave out is beyond me."
"To conceal when it happened," the Nomad whispered, snapping his fingers and pointing at me. "That explains all the doors. If you had to guess, how long did that settlement look to have been abandoned?"
I shrugged. "Much longer than 15 cycles, if the last settlement is anything to go by."
"Precisely. Someone wanted to make that place look much older."
"But the buildings," I protested. "They've all been eroded from the wind."
Suyef nodded. "All to the same level of erosion. Every corner rounded to exactly the same degree. The doors knocked off to look fallen, time's long hand pulling them down. Every shutter dislodged to fall, but all buried in exactly the same level of debris around them."
I frowned at him. "You measured the level of debris around the shutters and the curves of the corners?"
"I had time while you got what you needed from the computer," he muttered, waving his hand at me. "The point is that it was intentional. Someone wanted anyone who came to that settlement to think that place was much older than it was."
"Why would someone want to trick anyone into believing that?" I asked, arching my eyebrows at him.
He sat quietly a moment, then shrugged. "I don't know," he finally said. He pointed at my padd. "The answer is in there somewhere is my guess."
I glanced down at the device and shook my head, holding it up. "If they wanted to hide the age of that settlement, don't you think someone would have thought to scrub any record of it? I mean, there isn't even a mention of a journal or diary. Nothing, all gone, hidden so they can't be found, buried amongst mountains of data so they will take forever to find, or they never existed."
"People don't just vanish from history," Suyef whispered. "Well, most people don't."
"The Ancients did."
He shook his head. "No, they just abandoned you lot. Remember, there's more to history than what Colberra records."
"Fine, then what about Rawyn?" I asked.
At the mention of that name, Suyef's entire visage changed. "If you value your pretty face, I'd suggest you not mention that traitor's name."
"He was an Ancient, not a Nomad. How can that be offensive to you?"
Suyef shook his head. "We don't discuss him or his treacherous ways. It's enough we know he led the revolution that brought down the Ancient civilization." He leveled a finger at me. "You know the Nomadic tradition claims we're directly descended from the most powerful sect of Ancients?"
I nodded. "The ones who built the Citadels."
"So, I think you can put two and two together to see why that man is anathema to our society."
"The point is," I stated, "we know he vanished from history before even the Ancients did, along with his mentor."
"Yet we knew they existed, him and his mentor, as you call him," Suyef pointed out.
"What was his name?" I asked, earning a frown from Suyef. "His mentor?"
"He wasn't his mentor. At least not according to our stories. The two were associates at best."
"Whatever … do you remember his name?" I asked, waving my hand at him.
Suyef shrugged. "Rawyn was the one who led that revolution. He's the one that mattered. The point is, even those notorious few who do manage to disappear, we know why and at least have some record they existed prior to vanishing, else how would we know they vanished?" He pointed back in the general direction of the second settlement. "There stand buildings and dwellings that once belonged to those people." He pointed in a different direction, slightly to the north of the settlement. "A water pipeline stands as testament to the Ancients’ existence, but they all abandoned this shell within 100 cycles of the Shattering. Still, we know they were once here. Someone lived in that settlement and someone else wanted the world to think they stopped living there a lot longer than fifteen cycles ago."
I stared at the Nomad a moment, then a thought slipped through my mind. "The water?"
Suyef cocked his head and arched an eyebrow, but said nothing.
"What if the water is the reason?" I continued. "We know the water levels went down; the remaining records of two settlements prove that. We suspect it was intentional. Maybe this problem is a lot older than we think."
"Or it's not, but someone wants us to think it is," Suyef suggested.
I nodded. "Not just us, though. The people who lived in the settlements and anyone living to the north in Colberra City. I mean, unless they slaughtered all the citizens wholesale, they had to go somewhere." I pulled up the padd and accessed the network. "I wonder if there's a record of refugees."
"That search could take a while," Suyef muttered, pushing himself up. "I'll take first watch. Don't stay up too long, else you'll be tired come morning."
I muttered something that sounded appropriate and tapped through my search. The Nomad was correct in one thing: the search proved to be daunting. There's an old saying that a bureaucratic society can only survive until it's swallowed whole by the paper it produces tracking everything. Computers eventually proved that saying untrue, but multiplied the problem. The one thing you could count on was that bureaucrats loved their records, and Colberra was so dominated by them it's a shock they ever managed to get anything done. I cross-referenced everything available on the outer settlements with news articles on anything connected to the water supply running out and people moving inland, but found very little. My eyes became heavy and dry, my back aching from hunching over the tiny device while sifting through mountains of data.
Just as I was about to give up, the answer jumped out at me. After rereading it several times to make certain my thought was correct, I stood up, stretching my back out and waving at Suyef to come closer. He caught the device when I tossed it at him and looked at it. He stared for a moment, not moving save to arch one eyebrow at me. Then, I remembered he couldn't read it.
"Sorry, guess I'm pretty tired," I muttered, taking the device back. "It's not clear if it's the people of that settlement specifically, but a group of refugees was transferred from an edge settlement for relocation into Colberra City. According to the news agency, the refugees never arrived at Colberra City, as they were transferred to a Seeker hospital and quarantined."
Suyef shrugged. "So, they got sick. How does that help us?"
I lowered
the padd, eyes locked on his. "The Seekers don't run any hospitals. It's one of many things my parents taught me: stay away from anything named a hospital run by Seekers."
"So, where did they go?"
I shook my head. "Who knows? But I can tell you what is suspected of Seeker 'hospitals.'" I sighed and looked away from him. "People don't come back from them, not as the same people they were at least. There was a guy at the outpost I grew up in, he wasn't right in the head. Older guy, off his rocker bonkers. Had a particular fondness for robes, a multi-colored, striped cloak, and a stick he loved to talk to. Couldn't recall anything of his past, if you asked him. I'm not sure where he lived or how he survived. No one knew, actually. My parents used to point him out to me and whisper, 'That's what happens to people who end up in Seeker hospitals, kid. Behave, or that'll be you someday.'"
Suyef grimaced. "Do we know where these facilities are?"
I shook my head, trying to forget the images from my childhood. "Some say in the citadel itself. Others in outposts along the edge of the mountains. One rumor that circulates more than others is that it's all one place and it's buried under a mountain. I recall my father discussing it with another Northern Isle man assigned to the outpost. Paranoia is common among that lot, trust me. Anyway, he claimed that if the Nomad shell ever orbited close enough to Colberra, we might be able to look up at the underside of the shell and see where the Seeker 'hospitals' were all ingeniously hidden on the bottom of the land mass."
"So, you don't know," Suyef stated and pointed at the padd in my hand. "What about on that thing?"
I shook my head. "I already tried that. They weren't that dumb."
Suyef sighed, eyes on me. "Your parents don't sound like they're big fans of the Seekers."
"That's an understatement," I said, laughing and shaking my head. "Set aside that they're Northern Isle in origin. No one in the Expeditionary Force is fond of them. Ever since its founding, the Force has been mistreated by Seekers. It's bred some bad blood. On Colberra itself, the Force was virtually powerless against them." I pointed at Suyef. "On your shell, it's a different matter."
"Seekers don't come to your outpost?"
I shook my head. "Not openly. Oh, it's a certainty a Seeker or two has infiltrated the place, all in the name of keeping an eye on our citizens' interests. But they keep themselves hidden. That far from their power base, there's no telling what might happen." I leaned closer, waving Suyef over, my voice dropping to a whisper. "One Seeker did try to assert his authority once, I'm told. It was when I was a baby. No one talks about it now, but there's evidence he never made it back to Colberra."
"Your people killed him?" Suyef asked, one eyebrow elevating.
"Not us," I said, shaking my head and leveling a finger at Suyef. "According to the records, the Seeker tried to force a squad of Force members out to capture some Nomads for interrogation. No one would go with him, so he did it alone." I dropped my hand. "No one ever heard from him again."
Suyef frowned. "I'd have heard if one of your Seekers tried to attack or waylay any Nomads."
I shrugged, spreading my hands out to either side. "Whatever happened to him, that Seeker never came back to us."
"Or someone altered your records to make it look like that happened," Suyef suggested, pointing at the padd. "You've already found evidence Seekers do that stuff."
I nodded in agreement. "Just as strong a possibility. But nowhere near as good a story," I said, laughing. "And whatever happened, Seekers have stepped lightly around that outpost ever since."
"That can't have gone over well back here."
"It didn't," I agreed, "and the Force has faced many hearings about it. All brought by the Seekers' allies in the ruling councils concerning the need for such an outpost. Honestly, I think the only reason it's still populated is because of the cost of bringing them back. At this point, it's far less expensive to keep them minimally supplied and in contact with Colberra than it would be to bring them all back."
Suyef shook his head. "We've gone a bit afield here."
"The point is, set the bad blood aside, Seekers don't operate hospital facilities," I said, refocusing on the issue at hand. "They never have or, at the very least, have kept them a secret."
"Why hide such a facility?"
I grimaced. "To keep your citizens from discovering what you're actually doing there."
Chapter 9 - Tensions
Needless to say, I didn't sleep much that night. Suyef returned to his watch, and when he came back a few hours later, I hadn't slept a wink. The sensor on the mount worked well in scanning for any life-forms besides our own, freeing me to work on my research. When core-night lifted and Suyef rose from his slumber, about as much progress had been achieved on that as on sleeping. I tucked it away and resigned myself to another fruitless practice session.
Suyef had other ideas.
"We move," he said, pausing to scarf down a nutrient pack before mounting up.
We made good time that day, probably because Suyef didn't keep cutting back and forth across the terrain. Instead, we raced west along the edge of the shell, Colberra's high mountains to our right. By midday, we came to a halt at the next water pipe extending from the Citadel. There lay another settlement, as abandoned as the previous two. We stood for a moment, staring down at the empty buildings, before Suyef waved and we raced down. I made my quick check of the station as he checked the settlement, and we went on, having found the same thing. We did this for several days, finding settlement after abandoned settlement along the shell's edge. Each had the same story, but none carried the artificially aged look of that second outpost. On top of that, none of the records had been scrubbed of their dates. Each had been abandoned in the past two decades, most between ten and fifteen cycles past. And, as with the first two we'd encountered, no record of where the citizens had gone existed.
We found ourselves sitting huddled together in a hollowed-out building on the edge of one such settlement. Suyef had taken to mapping out the locations of all the places we'd found like this. Using the padd, we projected a map of the shell into the air before us and began dropping pins along our route. The outpost from which we'd stolen the mounts stood just to the west of the Wilds, at the end of the closest arm of the pipeline network to the uncontrolled region. A trail of pins proceeded in a westward direction from there, extending a quarter of the way around the shell heading away from the Wilds, a region that dominated a third of the shell's outer edge and the abutting mountains in the Central Dominance. The Seekers and government had spent centuries trying to repair the Wilds after the collision of shells destroyed that region, but nothing they'd done had worked. In the end, they contained it and kept everyone away from it. As such, it meant anyone wanting to traverse the shell had to do one of two things: cross the Colberran Mountains and thus Colberra City, built around the Citadel at the shell's center, or travel around the far edge, as we were doing.
"Looking at this—it looks like they've managed to empty all the outposts and settlements on this half of the outer edge," Suyef muttered.
I pulled up another map and overlaid it on top of that one. "This is a grid of the water pipes," I said, pointing at the Wilds. "Obviously, those aren't right anymore, as no one knows what happened to that region outside of Seeker circles." I tapped at some near us. "If you watch this," I commented, pulling another overlay up and depositing it over the other two, "this shows you which of these water lines is still active."
The result was telling. Whereas before all the lines had been lit blue, now most of the lines reaching out to the outer edge were red. Almost three quarters of the pipes had been turned off or disabled for some reason. None of the water pipes on this side of the shell worked beyond the edge of the central Colberran Mountains. Only two still remained on: the one extending to the outpost we'd started at and one coming up, which also led to a Seeker outpost right at the edge.
Suyef pointed at one green line reaching out halfway between the outpost we'd started at and
the Seeker outpost just ahead of us to the west. "What's that going to?"
I squinted at the text and sighed. "That's a raider settlement. You'd think when they turned off the water and forced the settlements to move inland, they'd have closed that off," I muttered.
"So they raid . . . who?"
I shrugged. "Anyone foolish enough to be on the outer edge," I replied, nodding toward the central mountains. "There are reports they also raid the outskirts of the Colberran Mountains and certain offshoots of Colberra City, but those are rare." I shook my head. "Honestly, I don't know much about them or why the Seekers tolerate them."
"You'd think with all these settlements unpopulated they'd have stopped raiding." Suyef stared at the screen a moment, then muttered, "Unless the Seekers are using them for some purpose."
I looked at him. "Like what?"
The Nomad moved, looking away from me, eyes shifting around and shaking his head. "Nothing, just thinking out loud."
He knew more, but if pushed he'd just dig his heels in and say nothing at all, so I moved on.
"Regardless, this overlay tells us a lot about what's ahead," I said, pointing back at the image floating before us. "There are only six major pipelines still functioning that lead out beyond the edge of the mountains. We've passed two"—I pointed at the raider pipeline and the one leading to the outpost we landed at—"and are approaching the third. That leaves three more. That one there," I said, pointing at the farthest one around the shell, standing just east of the other side of the Wilds, "leads to the other major raider outpost. This one here leads to another Seeker outpost on the shell's edge, like the one we are approaching. This one between those two, however, seems to be going to the only remaining settlement on the outer edge still occupied by people. It's also one of the oldest settlements in the Outer Dominance districts."
Suyef looked at the settlement in question. "What do we know about it?"
"Nothing beyond the standard information. Population, water usage, Seeker reports on the relative law-abiding nature of the citizens, although you'll note there's not a standing Seeker presence in the settlement." I shrugged and shook my head. "Or it's just not mentioned. Seeker units aren't assigned to places like that in secret. Waving the flag and all that jazz."
Rise: Paths (Future Worlds Book 2) Page 8