The Last City (The Ahlemon Saga Book 1)

by Casey McGinty

  “Actually, the males are smaller than the females.”

  “Leevee,” Jenn said, sheepishly.

  Everyone turned to look at her.

  “A girl Leviathan—Leevee.”

  Several heads nodded, as if they got it. Ham rolled his eyes. Jenn elbowed him. “Shut up. They like it.”

  The Director continued. “As you saw with the building of the runway, the Leviathan—”

  “Ahem,” Jenn said quietly.

  “Leevee,” the Director corrected himself. “Leevee reacts aggressively to any mechanical disturbance of the surface water. Her sensitivity extends for a seventy-mile radius around her. She would detect your boat and intercept you before you could reach Alto Mair. She is the reason that the Breakers took all the larger submersibles in their original exodus.”

  “I don’t mean to chase a rabbit trail,” the doctor interjected, “but based on what you’ve just said about her behavior, why did she keep attacking the hangar after she destroyed the runway?”

  “She was trying to rescue her offspring,” the Director said.

  There was a unanimous look of surprise.

  “After your plane entered the city,” he went on, “a low-frequency audio signal began broadcasting from the hangar; it was inaudible to human hearing. The Mekens detected it, but we have only recently identified it. The audio signal imitated the distress cry of Leevee’s offspring; she attacked the hangar thinking that her child was trapped inside. As with the sabotage of the polarity field relays, the broadcast had been prearranged by Rakaan on the chance that your plane was not destroyed before entering the hangar.”

  “A baby sea serpent?” Jenn said, in a motherly tone.

  “Yes. And that is why Leevee is particularly aggressive at this time.”

  “And that is why a boat is our ticket in,” Tygert reasoned. “The Breakers would not expect us to use a boat. We just need to find a way to get past Leevee.”

  “What about the rhaji?” Jhemna said, thinking out loud. “Director, do they still swim the channel?”

  “Yes. The herds are very large now, although they are a food source for Leevee, and she keeps their numbers in balance.”

  “What’s a rahji?” Kane asked.

  “It would be similar to a whale on Earth,” the Director said. “It’s a large aquatic mammal, ranging from fifty to eighty Earth feet in length at full maturity.”

  “What are you thinking?” Kane asked Jhemna.

  “Rhaji travel in herds and are drawn to boats. They like to swim alongside, gliding under and over the surface of the water. Before our suspension, I purposefully traveled the channel by boat because they would often join us. It is quite breathtaking to be in the middle of a herd.”

  “I’ve seen dolphins do that on Earth,” Jenn said.

  “We could identify a herd traveling from Alto Raun toward Alto Mair,” Jhemna continued. “We could send out decoy boats to distract Leevee while the rescue team joins the herd. If we retrofit the rescue team boat with a submersible motor, it should not attract Leevee’s attention. And the rhaji would cloak the boat from the Breakers.”

  “Director, what do you think?” Kane asked.

  “It is possible, particularly if Leevee is distracted. She does not attack the submersibles.”

  “And the Breakers?”

  “They would think they were tracking a herd of rhaji,” Jhemna said. “You could row the boat into Alto Mair once it reached the coastal shelf.”

  “OK, but how do we get back?”

  “The rhaji herds travel the channel at regular intervals,” Jhemna said. “Using an onboard radar, you could return with another herd. We could monitor the coast for your return and launch additional decoy boats to ensure your safe crossing.”

  Kane and Tygert looked at each other. “Sounds crazy,” Tygert said. “But no crazier than anything else we’ve done.”

  “That’s what bothers me.” Kane looked around the table. “Is this the best we’ve got?”

  “Barring a disruption in the rhaji’s customary channel movement,” the Director said, “the odds for success are more favorable than the rescue plan we recently executed in the suspension chamber area.”

  Kane rubbed his forehead, weary of the constant risk in everything he touched. “OK. Let’s do it.”

  After identifying a command team, they split up to gather all the colonists and passengers for an assembly. They met in an auditorium at the base of the central tower, where Thorin and Captain Tygert updated the group on the situation. Two dozen people volunteered for the rescue team.

  Immediately following the assembly, the command team and volunteers gathered at the front of the auditorium for a briefing. The Director led with a review of the Breakers. “When the Breakers agreed to leave Alto Raun, they negotiated to borrow our six large transport submersibles to cross the channel safely to Alto Mair. They also requested several Meken aircraft, which I refused to give them; the aircraft were too vital to our ongoing interstellar missions and the maintenance of the orbital suspension arrays. Then, in their first serious act of betrayal, the Breakers refused to return any of the submersibles. At the time, I did not feel that they were critical to our primary missions, so I did not attempt to retrieve them. Several years later, the Breakers managed to steal one of our large transport aircraft and three of our smaller autonomous aircraft. I increased security of our various fleets, and no additional ships have been taken since.”

  “How many Mekens left in the exodus?” Tygert asked.

  “Almost half our Class 3 population, 2,332 sentries and builders, evenly mixed. And, they took more Class 1 and Class 2 Mekens than we originally bargained. With this loss, I focused our remaining manpower to three critical areas: the interstellar search for compatible human life, sustaining the Colony, and ongoing agriculture. As you have seen, with the exception of the central tower, maintenance of the city was reduced to a bare minimum and monitoring of the Breakers was nonexistent. We have seen or heard very little from the Breakers in the last thousand years.”

  “What can you tell us about their home city?”

  With that question, the Director started a holographic slide show. The first slide was an image of a massive rectangular building. “Like Alto Raun, Alto Mair is a self-enclosed city. The structure is approximately a mile and a half deep, three miles long, and three hundred feet tall.” As he spoke, he moved through the slides, showing various angles and resolutions of the building. “Both cities are located near the Ahlemon equator, where the climate is very conducive to vegetation growth. As you can see, with the exception of its central tower, skylight, and wharf, Alto Mair has been virtually swallowed by the surrounding jungle. On the coastal side, the wharf runs the entire length of the building. The last known whereabouts of the hostages is here”—he pointed with a laser pointer—“the west marina.”

  He then displayed various schematics of the city’s interior. Its design was straightforward and logical, but there was a myriad of sections spread over a vast area, including two floors underground. “The city has been occupied by the Breakers for a thousand years. It is very possible that they have modified its internal structure.”

  Moving into a discussion of Breaker weaponry, the Director continued. “All we know is what we have seen in the recent Breaker attacks. In addition to standard laser-based firearms, they have used homemade explosives and projectile guns. The Breakers do not have the sophisticated manufacturing capabilities that we have on Alto Raun, but they do have access to an abundant source of raw materials, and they have sufficient fabrication tools to create weapons.”

  He started another video showing an arial view of the roof of Alto Raun. “I’d like to point out two recent discoveries. Two-man Breaker patrols now walk the perimeter of the roof every half hour. And these structures”—he laser-pointed to a number of huts located equidistant along the edges of the roof—“did not exist a year ago.”

  “Patrols are always a challenge,” Tygert said. “But those
huts concern me. They could contain larger, stationary weapons.”

  “Seems pretty clear to me that the Breakers have been preparing for our arrival,” Kane said.

  In closing, the Director briefed them on Leevee. Her territory extended two hundred miles out to sea from the mainland and ran for three hundred miles along the coast. She made her home in a deep oceanic trench not far off the mainland, southwest of Alto Mair, where her baby spent much of its time in a cave that Leevee had outgrown long ago.

  “How big is she?” Rhogan asked.

  The Director started a new slide show. The colonists had not seen her, and they gasped at the first image. She was towering out of the water, the Meken aircraft hovering around her head.

  “Leevee is the largest leviathan that we have encountered in our travels of the Ahlemoni oceans. She is slightly over an Earth mile in length. I estimate her to be over three thousand years old. Her offspring recently passed its three hundredth birthday and is already twelve hundred feet long. This is Leevee’s second offspring since the Colony entered suspension. When it reaches maturity, around eight hundred years of age, it will seek out and establish its own territory, accompanied by Leevee for protection. All leviathans are highly territorial and, with the exception of mating and raising their offspring, they live solo lives. Every thousand years, Leevee ventures out of her territory to find a male for mating and then returns to start the cycle over again.”

  “Thank God we only have to deal with one of them,” the doctor said.

  Ehlan interjected, “When we went into suspension, the largest leviathans were half this size, and they were all relatively docile creatures. Is this the result of the ionic storm?”

  “While we have not studied the dramatic changes in the leviathan, that would be the basis of my initial hypothesis for such a study,” the Director replied.

  With a concerned look, Ehlan added, “I can only imagine how it has affected the other animal life on the planet.”

  Shutting down the projection, the Director went on to describe several other large sea creatures that could take an interest in the rescue team boat, but he didn’t think they would be a problem, particularly while they were with the rhaji herd. He cautioned them to watch the air for a very large predatory bird from the mainland that occasionally ventured over the ocean waters for food. It was large enough to carry off an adult human.

  The briefing ended with Kane standing among the group and making an announcement. “Let me be very clear: I will not hesitate to kill, on sight, any creature that even appears to pose a threat to our mission. You should recuse yourself from the mission if you are not willing to do the same.”

  No one did.

  Kane looked to the Director, who responded, “The Mekens will comply if human lives are at risk.”

  ———

  That evening, the Director gave Kane and Tygert a tour of Alto Raun’s north marina. It was a huge indoor marina, crisscrossed with canals that interconnected and finally led to the hangar doors and outlets into the ocean. One of two marine hangars in Alto Raun, it contained a vast array of boats in dry dock ranging from small runabouts to large ships capable of transporting hundreds of people.

  “The boats have not seen maintenance in a thousand years,” the Director said.

  Kane knocked his knuckles against the hull of a midsized boat. “Amazing. I can’t believe they’re in such sound condition after all this time. What is this stuff?”

  “We have developed materials that Earth will not discover for hundreds of years.”

  He led them to a corner of the marina that was a buzz of Meken activity. A team of builder and maintenance Mekens had already begun restoration of a dozen runabout-sized boats, rebuilding the engines and electrical systems. The roar of several engines indicated that testing was already under way. As they walked through the testing area, the Director explained, “The decoy boats will be set to run in a straight line; there is no need for remote control since we intend for Leevee to catch them.”

  Then he led them to a forty-foot, twin-hull-style boat topped with a platform deck. It had been stripped and was being rebuilt from the ground up. “This is the rescue team boat,” he announced.

  The Director called the lead builder over to answer their questions. He explained that the primary engine would have the equivalent of a thousand horsepower. They were adding an ultraquiet propulsion system, a modified version of the engine that powered the submersibles. A nearly silent drive, it would provide enough power to run with the rhaji herd. Oar mounts and oars would round out the propulsion options. Lastly, they were installing a new radar/sonar system and high-gauge laser rifles attached to swivel mounts on the bow and stern of the boat.

  The four of them reviewed the plan. The builders would launch three small decoy boats to distract Leevee, immediately after which the rescue team would make a high-speed dash to the rhaji herd. Then, switching to the ultraquiet drive, their boat would accompany the rhaji across the channel until they reached the shallow, underwater shelf that extended a mile out from Alto Mair’s coast. Upon reaching the shelf, the rhaji would veer off and the boat would coast as far as possible. The team would then use the oars for their final approach, beaching and hiding the boat on the jungle coast just beyond the western tip of Alto Mair’s wharf.

  As they were leaving, Kane laid both palms on the hull of their boat, leaned in, and whispered, “We’re depending on you, baby.” Then he retired to his quarters for the night, satisfied with both the boat and the plan.

  ———

  In a fabrication center located in the outer ring of the city, Dr. Manassa and Jhemna collaborated to create two basic portable explosives: a simple hand grenade and a form of plastique that could help the insertion team get through standard metal door hinges or locks with minimal report. They set a team of builder and maintenance Mekens to work mixing the materials and constructing grenades, including belts to carry the explosives. Then they talked late into the night about other possibilities.

  16

  Day 3

  0900 hours

  Hostage compound, Alto Mair

  Charly woke on her own, feeling as if she had overslept. Javier and Laura were still asleep, but Arthur was gone. Gripped with panic, she jumped out of her bed and rushed to the bathroom. It was empty. She ran to the cafeteria, where she found Arthur sitting at a table, writing, Atticus standing next to him.

  “Ah, Charly,” Atticus said. “I trust you are well rested. You can thank Arthur for convincing me to let you sleep. He has been instructing me in the art of journaling. Fascinating. Come join us.”

  Afraid to disobey, she sat across from Arthur, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. A stack of crude writing pads and pencil-like writing instruments sat on the table.

  “Good morning, Charly,” Arthur said, jovially.

  Arthur could just as well have been sitting comfortably at home with his coffee and Sunday morning paper. Amazing, she thought. She faked a smile.

  “At Arthur’s request,” Atticus said, “I have provided you with writing materials. They will give you optional ways of expressing your thoughts and feelings creatively and provide me an opportunity to learn more about nonverbal human expression. Would you write or draw something now?”

  Charly looked at him as if he were an idiot. “It’s kinda early for me to get all creative, Atty.” She winced as soon as the nickname escaped her lips. She had a habit of shortening people’s names back home. “Maybe later, Atticus?” she asked, politely.

  “Atty,” he said, mulling the name. “I will consider it a form of endearment. You may call me Atty, but only you. And I look forward to reviewing your writing and drawings sometime in the near future. Now, you should eat. In fact, all of you should eat; I’m ready for the day to begin. Charly, please wake your fellows and ask them to join us for breakfast.” Then he returned his attention to Arthur’s writing.

  After breakfast, Atticus called Laura to the lounge for her interview.

  ——�
��

  Several hours later, Charly, Arthur, and Javier were on their beds in the bunkroom. Arthur was writing, Javier was lying down with a homemade cold pack on his bruised cheek, and Charly was unsuccessfully trying to take a nap.

  “Uggghhh,” she said, sitting up and slapping her mattress. “I hate this waiting.”

  Arthur left the room and returned with a pencil and writing pad and handed them to her. “That is the very reason I asked for these. There’s no telling how long we’ll be confined to these quarters. Mental and creative exercises will help us with the isolation and boredom.”

  “I hate writing.”

  “Why don’t you tell us something you don’t hate,” Javier said.

  Charly glared at him.

  “What about drawing?” Arthur asked.

  “I doodle.”

  “Perfect. I suggest you think about what you’re feeling and then doodle. It will help; I promise.”

  She sat on her bed, leaning against the wall, a pillow at her back. After staring for several minutes at the blank pad sitting on her lap, she started an internal monologue. I’m a verbal communicator. She twirled the pencil in her fingers. What am I feeling? Everything! She chewed on her pencil. Finally, she started drawing a manga-style figurine, her favorite type of doodle. A gothic-looking girl unfolded on the page, with tangled hair, clenched fists, gritted teeth, mascara stains, and razor-like tears falling to the floor. Absorbed in her artwork, she became oblivious to the world around her. That is, until Arthur cleared his throat. She looked up, certain that he would be pleased that she was working so diligently. But he wasn’t looking at her; he had stopped writing and was looking across the room. Following his gaze, she froze. Rakaan was standing at the bunkroom door, watching them. Seeing that he had their attention, he strode forward, an intimidating figure in his long, burgundy cape, bloodred body decals, and heavy footsteps. He stopped beside Javier’s bed.

  “What happened to your face?” he asked.

  Javier didn’t respond, but instead tried to hide the dark bruise on his cheek.

  Rakaan made a sound that reminded Charly of a chuckle. “You are lucky it was Atticus and not me. I am not so gentle,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear.