by Daniel Price
“We can’t let the government take them,” she explained to Bug. “If even one of the breachers survives, they’ll be carted away to some secret facility. We’ll never be able to find them, much less kill them.”
Bug crossed him arms defensively. “If we stay, they’ll get us too.”
“No they won’t.”
The others looked at Rebel, who hadn’t budged an inch since Integrity arrived. He wasn’t worried about the government thugs. They were hopelessly out of their depth here. But they had enough firepower to legitimately threaten the breachers, which put the Pelletiers in an awkward position. They either had to show up and save their precious Silvers or risk losing them forever.
Come on, Rebel urged them. Show your faces, you cowards.
A short distance away, in the middle of the concourse, Amanda struggled to hold her shield dome intact. Her brain was still aching from her last tempic exertion.
David kept the space lit with a slice of old sunshine. He looked to the tempis and saw it wavering with strain. “We can’t stay here. We need an exit.”
“Working on it,” said Peter. He crouched down and swept a patch of floor with his arm. No use. There was too much dirt and sand. Too many grooves and broken tiles.
“Can’t do it,” he told Amanda. “You’ll have to make a wall.”
“What?”
“A flat wall,” he said. “A portal’s our only way out of here.”
Amanda looked at him through cracked red eyes. “We’re not leaving without Zack!”
“We’re not leaving at all. Just trust me!”
Before the tempis enclosed him, Peter had gotten a good look at Integrity’s solic wasps. One clean shot was all it would take to pop Amanda’s bubble.
“We’ve got seconds,” Peter urged her. “Please.”
The tempis quivered like jelly. Amanda gritted her teeth. She didn’t have the finesse to make minor adjustments at the moment. She’d have to change the whole structure.
Gemma furrowed her brow at the monitor as Amanda’s dome transformed into a large, slanted cube. “What the hell is she doing?”
“It’s Peter,” Ivy said. “He’s making a door.”
“He’s running?”
“No. He wouldn’t d—”
Ivy’s senses tingled in sudden awareness. She leaned over Gemma and switched the view on Monitor 3, just in time to see Peter’s exit portal open up on a smooth stone wall.
Jinn leaned forward and squinted at the screen. “Where is that?”
“Right here,” Gemma said.
“Right next to us,” Ivy said. “Bastard.”
Rebel chuckled. It was just like Pendergen to spread the risk to everyone. He was deliberately bringing the battle to this side of the aerport, forcing the Gothams to either fight the government or run.
As it stood, Rebel was prepared to do both.
“Get the engines ready,” he said to Gemma. “Jinn, take out the drones.”
Bug looked at him like he’d gone mad. “Wait. We’re saving the breachers now?”
“We’re saving the mission.”
Rebel saw the disappointment on Ivy’s face. They were holding their big guns for Azral, Esis, and Semerjean. But now . . .
“They’re not coming.”
Ivy lowered her head. “I know.”
“But we can still take care of the breachers today.”
Ivy pinched her lip in tortured thought. The Pelletiers had killed her children. It seemed only fair that she kill theirs.
She turned to Gemma and Jinn. “What are you waiting for? Go!”
Gemma hurried to a laptop on the far side of the kitchen. Jinn jumped back into blueshift and activated her weapons console.
Large wooden boxes suddenly broke apart on the mezzanines, each one exposing a gun turret or rocket cannon. Jinn looked at her targeting screen and smiled at her first victim: a remote-controlled mini-fighter that was appropriately known as a “gunbird.” The drone flew through the aerport at sixty miles an hour, but in Jinn’s accelerated perceptions, it was nothing. A cardboard rabbit in a carnival game.
She aimed her reticle and squeezed her triggers. The gunbird exploded in a shower of sparks. The Integrity technicians barely had a moment to process its demise before two more gunbirds and a solic wasp fell.
“The hell was that?” asked Butterfield. He’d been watching the action from the parking lot, his brown eyes glued to camera drone monitors. He’d expected resistance from the fugitives. He didn’t expect artillery fire.
“Find those turrets and take them out!”
“Yes, sir.”
He pointed to the image of Amanda’s tempic force field. “And break that damn shield already.”
—
Mia and David were the first through Peter’s portal. Jonathan moved to follow, then jumped back at the last second. A ripple in Amanda’s tempis caused the gateway to flutter out of existence.
“Hold it steady,” Peter told her.
“I’m trying!”
She calmed the wavering tempis. Peter re-formed the portal, then nodded at Jonathan. “All right. Go.”
“Uh . . .”
“Come on. It’s now or never!”
Hannah couldn’t blame Jonathan for hesitating. He’d never jumped through a portal before, and this one seemed anything but stable.
She climbed onto his back and shifted them to 40x. The tempis took on a dull gray tint. Amanda and Peter became as still as mannequins.
“It’s okay,” Hannah told Jonathan. “We’ll jump together.”
He kept his tense eyes on the portal. “I really don’t want to get cut in half.”
“You won’t,” she promised. “We won’t.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“Then I’ll buy you a Coke in the next world.”
Jonathan looked at her over his shoulder, mystified. “That was strangely profound.”
“Just go.”
“Okay.” He tightened his grip on Hannah, then steeled himself with a breath. “I have deep, crazy feelings for you. Just thought you should know that before we die.”
“We’re not dying! Go!”
He carried them through the portal at accelerated speed, then stumbled out the exit side. In all their haste, Hannah forgot to warn him that the first portal jump was always the hardest. The body gradually built up a tolerance to the rigors of teleporting. Until then, the experience was agonizing, like being flushed down a toilet of boiling hot water.
Hannah de-shifted them in mid-fall. They crashed to the floor at normal speed, then rolled all the way into the wooden shell of Rebel’s base.
David crouched at Hannah’s side. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
She dropped to her knees and turned Jonathan over. His skin was a bright shade of pink, as if someone had scrubbed him all over with pumice stones.
He struggled to open his eyes. “Oh Jesus. It burns.”
David looked to Hannah, then jerked his head at the restaurant. “We’ll need him to drop some of the wood planks. At least enough to get us in there.”
“Just give him a minute.”
“We may not have one.”
Mia kept her anxious gaze to the west, where the turrets and drones continued to wage war on each other. Amanda’s tempic cube wiggled precariously in the middle of the battlefield. She and Peter were still stuck out there, and there wasn’t a damn thing Mia could do about it.
“C’mon,” she muttered. “Come on already.”
The last solic wasp made a suicide dive toward Amanda’s tempis, just as Jinn fired a homing missile at it. They collided together on the floor, creating a loud and massive explosion in the middle of the concourse. Mia covered her mouth as a fist-size chunk of floor tile struck the ground by her feet.
Once the fireball dissipated, Mia took a step forward and surveyed the damage. Among the mangled benches and burning wood shards stood Amanda’s tempic shield.
Mia gasped with relief. “Oh God. Thank God.”
Rebel frowned at the image on the monitor. There was no way Amanda’s tempis could have survived a blast like that, not in her current state. Either the woman was a lot stronger than he’d realized or someone else had bolstered her power, a hidden tempic in the margins.
Jinn de-shifted at her console and turned around in her seat. Though her short blond hair was matted with sweat, she grinned like she was having the time of her life.
“All drones down,” she told Rebel and Ivy. “We still have four working turrets. Want me to take out the foot soldiers?”
Gemma eyed her worriedly. “Damn, girl.”
“Shut up.”
“Not yet,” Rebel said to Jinn. “Lower the elevator. Tell Mink and the others to strap themselves in.”
For once, Bug knew exactly what Rebel was planning. “We’re really doing this.”
“Yup.”
Ivy clasped his hand. “Are you sure, hon? Because once we start, I won’t be able to teleport.”
“I know.”
“We’ll be trapped in here with them.”
Rebel looked to Monitor 5, where Amanda and Peter were rejoining their companions. He’d had two and a half days to prepare for this fight, and had backup plans for nearly every contingency. Plan F was the most extreme option by far, not to mention the riskiest. But Ivy was looking at it the wrong way. They wouldn’t be trapped in here with the breachers. The breachers would be trapped in here with them.
—
Jonathan squinted at the boarded-up restaurant, his fingers pressed hard against his temples. His skin was still sore from the portal jump, but that wasn’t his biggest concern at the moment.
“I’m not used to this,” he warned. “Dropping whole objects is easy. Dropping pieces . . .”
“You’ll be fine,” Peter told him, though the croak in his voice was hardly reassuring. The heat of the missile blast had filtered its way into Amanda’s tempic shell, nearly cooking them both like clay pots. Now Peter was weak and Amanda looked ready to collapse.
Jonathan took a deep breath and focused on the wooden sheath of the restaurant. The boards at eye level began to teeter and shake, until a large chunk of the wall fell intangibly through the earth.
“Good work,” said Mia.
Jonathan blinked dazedly at the eight-foot hole he’d made in the lumber. “Huh.”
David peeked inside the opening and shined a light beam from his hand. The restaurant was nearly nonexistent on the ground floor. All he could see were four large support struts and a fat metal column in the center.
“Strange.”
He shined his light upward at the underside of the restaurant. The whole thing was covered in duct-taped bedsheets.
“Very strange.” He aimed his puzzlement at Mia. “Are you sure this is a restaurant?”
Mia flipped her hands. “It’s what the note said.”
“Looks more like a trap,” Jonathan grumbled. “How are we even supposed to get in?”
“I don’t know,” said David. “But if Mia’s right, then Zack’s in there.”
Amanda took a nervous look to the west. “There are still soldiers coming. A lot of them.”
Peter draped her arm around his shoulder. “Come on.”
Two by two, the group crossed the threshold, into the dark underbelly of the restaurant. They’d barely proceeded ten feet before a loud electric whirr startled everyone. A sliding door opened on the central support column, revealing the brown leather interior of an elevator car.
“I don’t like this,” David grumbled. “Not one bit.”
Hannah pulled a billy club from her thigh holster and held it defensively. “Jonathan’s right. This is a trap.” She jerked her head at the lift. “That thing’s probably a gas chamber.”
“The elevator’s fine,” Peter said. “They want us inside. That’s the part that worries me.”
He turned around at the door and faced the others. “I suppose I can’t convince you all to wait here while I get Zack.”
“No,” said Mia.
“Don’t be stupid,” Hannah said.
“‘Stupid’ is all of us marching up there.” He took an uneasy look at the elevator. “Just stay sharp and keep close to me. If things get choppy, I’m porting us out of here.”
They filed into the lift. Peter pressed the button for the main floor. The car had only climbed a couple of feet when Amanda felt a shuddering twinge, like four cold hands being pressed against her spine.
“Wait. Something’s happening.”
“What do you mean?” David asked.
“I don’t know. It feels like tempis, but . . . different.”
“Aeris.” Peter’s eyes bulged in sudden realization. “Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me . . .”
“What?”
As the elevator rose, a fluorescent glow spilled in through the door crack. The walls hummed with vibration. Something loud and bright was happening beneath the restaurant.
“What is that?” Mia asked Peter.
“We’re going up.”
“I know but—”
“No, I don’t mean the elevator. I mean this whole thing.”
Fifty feet above them, Zack felt the structure rumble. He looked up at the wood beyond the terrace windows. The boards were trembling, breaking apart at the seams.
He watched as Mink scrambled to strap himself into a bucket seat. “What’s going on now?”
The tremors reverberated all throughout the concourse. Butterfield gawked at the surveillance monitor as the wooden shroud began to fall apart.
“What the goddamn hell are they doing?”
Soon the entire building rose off the ground. Two feet, four feet, eight feet, twelve. The higher it ascended, the more its plywood shell fell apart. At sixty feet, the last of the boards broke away, revealing an enormous black saucer made of glass and titanium.
“It’s an aerstraunt,” Butterfield said.
“An aerstraunt,” Peter told the Silvers.
AN AERSTRAUNT, Mink informed Zack, in red lumic letters. NOW IT GETS INTERESTING.
FIFTEEN
It had been gathering dust in a New Jersey jet hangar: a two-hundred-ton Douglas Mark VI commercial-class flight carrier. On government records, it was Saucer D-669. But to those who’d experienced the aerstraunt in its heyday, it would forever be known as the Absence.
To understand the name, one had to know a little about America after the Cataclysm. The nation had lost two percent of its population on October 5, 1912, an unprecedented tragedy that triggered a spiritual sea change among the survivors. Millions of people found God overnight, while millions more abandoned him in a fit of dismay.
A strange new culture began to form among the ex-believers. By 1920, they could be seen everywhere: angry young nihilists in black clothes and bowler hats, contemptuous of all things cheerful. They were known as the Sinkers and they were mostly despised, though their mantras played like music to the ears of the disaffected:
We’re all just flickers in a cold and empty universe. Morality and conformity are merely constructs designed to control us. Free yourselves. Live your lives. The same void awaits us all.
The movement kept growing, despite the scorn and abuse their members received. Hurting the Sinkers merely bolstered their cynicism. Hating them only made them more popular.
Then, in the 1950s, temporis changed everything. Rarely a week went by without a scientist announcing a brand-new way to bend the fabric of time, a chain of discoveries that pushed America into a golden age of prosperity. Suddenly anything seemed possible and bleakness felt . . . pass�
�. The Sinkers hung up their hats and faded into obscurity.
But time has a way of moving in circles. In 2005, an ex-priest named Drew Gavin wrote a seminal essay entitled “Embracing the Absence” that re-explored the philosophy of the Sinkers and updated it for the Temporal Age:
Fifty years of progress and we haven’t learned a thing. We still cling to the fantasy of a clockwork universe, where everything has meaning and everyone has a role to play. Perhaps the microbes in my soda bottle suffer the same illusion. I’m sure it comforted them mightily as I threw their world into the trasher and erased it out of existence.
The essay became a viral hit on Eaglenet and embroiled the country in a year-long shouting match between the believers and the cynics. All across the land, millions of people who barely knew about the Sinkers were shocked to learn how much they agreed with them.
By 2007, the movement had returned with a vengeance. Dark clothes and pessimism were suddenly back in vogue, and shrewd investors scrambled to capitalize on the craze.
The most brazen of these cash grabs was the Absence, a two-hundred-seat aerstraunt that catered to the rich Manhattan nihilist. It offered ninety-dollar entrées in drab little portions and sailed a nighttime circuit over the Atlantic to showcase the sheer nothingness out there. It was a place to while away the hours until oblivion came, a place for Sinkers to float.
While the Absence did well as an eccentric urban novelty, its shtick got old rather quickly. After a hundred and twenty dinner flights and six attempts to sell the business, the owner declared bankruptcy and relinquished the ship to the U.S. government.
It languished on a municipal airfield until just yesterday, when Ivy broke in and rebooted all the systems. Though she was hardly the first person in history to steal a dormant aerstraunt, she was the first to get away with it. By the time security guards noticed the lights inside Hangar 19, the ship had disappeared through a massive portal and had begun its slow descent into Atropos.
Now, after thirty-six hours on the lowest level of the concourse, the Absence was taking flight again.
The Integrity agents in the parking lot watched in stupor as a chain of explosions rocked the northern side of the aerport. A huge swath of the dome fell crashing down, and an ebony saucer made a diagonal ascent through the opening. One by one, the duct-taped bedsheets fell away from its underside, exposing four glowing liftplates, each one the size of a swimming pool.