by Nick Webb
She examined the man in front. His eyes were open, but not looking at anything. And his skull was open as well. Hundreds of wires trailed out of the exposed brain and snaked up into a receptacle on the pylon. The other two drones were similarly linked.
“What … are you?” She didn’t expect them to respond. She closed her eyes and reached out into their minds.
Blank. Except for the orders firmly planted, written, etched as if in stone, in their minds. These were so firm, so deeply implanted, it was as if they were etched directly on the gray matter itself, physically, with a stylus.
These drones were only a tool. A smaller part of a greater ploy. She opened her eyes suddenly, and bolted out the door, back onto the main rickety walkway.
She had to get back to the surface.
These drones were placed here by her.
By Ka’sagra. They were tapped directly into the main Telestine mainframe of floating London. And they were controlled from far below. Beyond the notice of Tel’rabim and or any other Telestine official. She paused to gaze down at the old city, looking with her mind and her eyes. She followed the unmistakable trail of the mental connections, and traced it with her eyes, and finally came to a spot directly underneath the inverted tear-drop spire.
More drones down there. Many more.
Time to see what Ka’sagra was up to.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Earth
London
Glass and gravel crunched behind her, but Walker couldn’t bring herself to turn around. The view was just too much. It had been the better part of twelve hours since the girl had left them, dumped them rather, unceremoniously, and dashed off alone in the shuttle leaving them stranded in London.
And she still hadn’t tired of looking around.
“What are you looking at?” Pike asked her curiously.
She gave him a wide-eyed look—just for a moment, and then her gaze was drawn back to the landscape in front of her. “Are you kidding?”
London itself wasn’t pretty anymore, not in any real way. The buildings were crumbled and shattered and there was rust and debris everywhere. But the sun was also setting in the distance and the light was slanting in a way she’d never seen before. Lights were directly overhead, bar-shaped bulbs that cast few shadows. This light cast shadows, and the light and the shadows alike hung in the dust of the air.
In a station, that dust would be deadly. Here, somehow, it wasn’t.
And she’d always thought sky was shades of blue, not this riot of red and orange.
“You’ve never seen a sunset before,” Pike said wryly. “I forgot that.”
“A sun….” The term explained itself. “Right.” How many other words didn’t she know, simply because there had been no use for them in her life? She pointed at the beams of shadow that traced backwards from the ruined skyscrapers. “What d’you call those?”
Pike smiled, a genuine smile. “Just shadows. They don’t have a specific name, that I know of. But … I grew up in the mountains, not in a city. I suppose I wouldn’t know if there was a name.”
She nodded, and caught sight of something glinting in his hand. “What’s that?”
“Oh.” He held them up. With one hand in a sling, he should have looked awkward. Instead, he still moved easily as he tossed the packet in his hand over to her. “A treat. I found somewhere for us to eat … and some things to eat that aren’t rations. Come on. And this is for you.”
“Yes, but what is it?” She peered through the shiny plastic to two domed, dark brown shapes. They were hard—though at one point she supposed they might have been soft.
“My dad said they were called Twinkies,” Pike called over his shoulder.
“What on Earth…?” She held the packet out in front of her in one hand, unsure that opening it was a good idea.
“They never go bad, you know.” He laughed. “At least, that’s what he claimed. They’re horrible, really. After sixty years or however long it’s been, they’re truly awful. But the fact that they’ve lasted this long and still recognizable as food….”
“Barely,” she said, after taking a small nibble of the end of one. It had the unmistakable moldy odor and taste of very old wheat. Barely tolerable. But the surprising taste of sugar was … delightful.
“He said … he said …” Pike had descended into uncontrollable chuckling, “he said they only made one production run of these in 1950, and that the supply lasted for a hundred years.”
That only opened up the far more disturbing reality that these had been made before the human exodus. “I don’t believe that at all.” But she smiled all the same. She followed him down the broad avenue, holding the packet away from her on a flat palm as if it might bite her rather than the other way around.
“I’ve had one before. That was enough,” Pike said. At one of the corners, he held open a door for her to walk through and waved her into the interior of something like a shop. Boots, read the sign above the door in faded plastic. Walker at first wondered if there would be any boots left in the store at all, but then realized it was not a boot store at all but rather some sort of … what was the word … she looked up at another sign on the front entrance. Pharmacy? She preceded him through the door and looked around herself in amazement.
It was funny how much you didn’t have to worry about when the gravity was always there. The place looked so bare bones that it didn’t even seem to make sense. Everything was wrong: the ceiling height compared to the shelves, the way the shelves didn’t have any casing on the front, the haphazard size of the remaining packages, the faulty joinings between the ceiling and the walls. Nothing here seemed to be made with any thought to the greater city around it.
But of course, they didn’t have to worry about anything being airtight or still working in zero-G, or attracting mold. If their windows leaked, it didn’t matter. If there was mold, they could clean it up and not have to worry about the rot setting into their lungs.
“What are you thinking?”
She looked up to see Pike staring at her. “I can’t imagine living like this.”
“Like what?”
“Free.” The word came to her lips before she thought how it would play out. “Careless,” she clarified. “They didn’t have to worry about anything, did they? What must that be like?”
They looked away from one another, and she could hear the retort he wasn’t saying. Then he started tossing her things. Metal cylinders. “Hold these. We’ll bring them out to the river overlook to eat.”
“Are they safe to eat?” But she accepted them gratefully, glad not to be having that fight, and piled them in her arms. “And what do they taste like?”
“All sorts of things. Lots of salt. Lots of sugar. Lots of dried vegetables. There are about twenty times as many vegetables as you’ve ever tasted, you know. That was weird getting used to when we ended up on a station. And they last forever in these tin cans.”
“Vegetables like what?”
“Leeks,” he said, at random. “I think that’s enough. Let’s go.”
“What are leaks?” Then, dubiously: “And … what do they leak?”
“Oh. No. Two E’s. Leek.” He shrugged. “They’re kind of like onions. But a tube, not a ball. And they don’t taste quite like onions. More …green.”
“Green’s not a flavor.” She didn’t understand anything about this world. She hurried to catch up in the fading light, and gave a weak smile at his laughter.
It was exhausting, not having this fight—the fight she knew was inevitable. They were both trying a bit too hard.
“Food on Earth follows patterns,” he explained, “if you farm it. So at some times of the year you have one kind of fruit, and at other times of the year you have another. Not so much in Colorado—it’s high desert and a lot of fruit doesn’t grow there, but in other places. And then you have wheat and corn. Oats, barley, millet, amaranth. They grow at certain times of the year, and then you have to cycle them each year or they suck
the soil dry.”
Her head was whirling. “Dry?”
“The soil is filled with different minerals.” He blew out a breath. “Different crops take different minerals, and leave different minerals. So you have to do different crops on the land each year, or at least every few years. It’s not like in the grow-tanks where they just add in the minerals and turn the grow-light on each time they plant.”
“It seems needlessly complicated.”
“Not needlessly.” He sounded almost offended. “It’s how the planet works. It wasn’t made to be convenient for us, you know, we were made to survive with what it gave us.”
And now we can do better in space. Thousands of worlds to choose from. She didn’t say the words. He wasn’t going to agree, and in any case, she had the sneaking suspicion that a lot of people would think the ease of living here outweighed the strange capriciousness of the world. Crop rotations, rain storms, earthquakes—the very planet seemed to conspire against humans, in more ways than one.
Her eyes found the sunset again and her breath caught in her throat at the sight. Earthquakes, she reminded herself. Rainstorms. The … turn-y things. Tornadoes. Wildfires.
And, lest they forget, a very hostile alien occupation.
He led her through a dizzying array of streets until they found a tumbled-down building, which gave them an almost entirely unobstructed view of the fading sky ahead. They dumped the food onto the ground and Walker craned her neck around to see the deep blue on the other side of the sky, the twinkle of stars—stars!—and the last pale light ahead of her.
She watched while he lit a small fire with ancient, dry boards, and placed the cans directly on the coals to warm the decades-old food inside. Pike pierced the tops to prevent the pressure from building, and within ten minutes they were hot and bubbling.
She tried them, with great trepidation. It gave her a good excuse not to speak, at any rate. There were strange, flat, crispy things with so much flavor on them that her eyes watered. The little oblong cookies tasted of something she’d never had before—“almond,” Pike informed her—and when the soup things were ready, the hard, wiry cake she’d seen inside had turned into salty noodles. “Cup-o-noodles,” Pike announced. She picked out little floating specks of green and orange with her fork and examined them before eating them.
At last, all that remained was the Twinkies. Pike took a bite of one, staring her down, and then handed it over like a challenge.
“Oh, God, this is awful.” But she ate it, with a little laugh, and found that inside the hardened shell it was soft and sweet, with some sort of cream inside. “You’re sure these don’t go bad?”
“Oh, come on. You like it.”
“How do you know?” she demanded.
“You finished it and then licked your fingers.” He looked triumphant. “See? Quite an interesting array of food we have down here.”
“How did they manage to make protein into all of these things?” She studied the remnants of their meal.
“Oh.” He started laughing. “Oh, no. No, no. There is nothing good for you in all of this mess.”
“What?” She picked up the packages, scattering dust all over. “What did we eat then?”
“A lot of salt,” he said whimsically. “Fat. Some spices. Mostly salt and fat. Oh, and sugar. Lots of sugar.”
“And people on Earth used to just….” She shook her head. She’d seen places, like Venus—anywhere the Funders Circle lived, really—that had more food than they needed. Some of them had foods that weren’t common, like fruits that the scientists were still learning to grow in hydroponics stations.
But this wealth of food, this much food—a whole store of it!—that had no purpose at all beyond having a flavor…. Well, that was new. She didn’t know how to process that. She turned the wrappers over and over in her hands.
What must it be like to live here, really live here? Not in the refugee camps, in hiding, but in these buildings nearby, with all of those foods in the shops and unlimited air?
No. Best not to go down that road.
“Laura.”
She tensed, jerked unexpectedly back to reality. There was something unfamiliar in his voice.
She should get this over with, though. Weird foods and jokes and even the sky wasn’t going to change her mind. Walker turned to face him, and stopped dead. “What?”
She’d never seen that look on his face before.
“You look….” He scratched awkwardly at his head with his good arm. “Really beautiful.”
No one had said anything even remotely like that to her in years. Walker stared at him, sure that there was supposed to be some response to that and not knowing what it should be at all, and then he crossed the glass-strewn ground, bent his head tentatively toward hers, and waited.
Good Lord, Pike, we’re on the precipice of a civilizational calamity, and all you can think about is your dick? But in spite of herself, in spite of the apocalyptic surroundings, she touched his chest and bent her head towards his.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Earth
Telestine London
Shuttle
She piloted the shuttle, almost automatically, by rote action, back down to the surface. The archives above called to her—she knew now where they were, deep up inside the core of the city. But, somehow, she felt that the true answers lie beneath and not above.
She passed the crumbling palace she’d seen earlier, and slowed down over what might once have been a park but was now grown over with stunted trees—spindly from growing in the weak light of dawn and dusk. The looming Telestine city overhead made normal vigorous growth impossible.
The inverted tear-drop spire of the giant floating city pointed directly down at her, just a few kilometers up.
This was the place.
The street where she landed was strewn with debris, which made finding a clear spot tricky, but she managed it, and soon isolated the building where she was sure the drones above were linked to.
It was … she peered at the faded gold letters above the decayed wooden door … a library?
“The London Library,” she read.
She felt many minds inside. The door opened with an obnoxious creak. But the minds ahead of her were not their own. Whatever the drones were doing here, it had been arranged by the Telestines.
So many books. The vast hall she’d entered was like nothing she’d ever seen. Thousands of books. Could there be millions? It was … beautiful was the wrong word. But it was … breathtaking.
She toured the area, one part of her brain screaming about the urgency of her mission, and the other part marveling at the idea of an entire building devoted to storing millions of pieces of paper. She’d only seen an actual book once. In Pike’s quarters on the Aggy II. His father had given it to him, and he treasured it. That there were hundreds of thousands of them here was incredible to her. She weighed the idea of grabbing a handful of them and bolting back to Pike and Walker and giving them as priceless gifts.
Until she found the doorway. She knew immediately it was the right one. The wired drones far above her in the sky were linked to a spot directly past it.
It wasn’t much, hardly visible unless you had felt the minds ahead—and who would be searching for anything here to start with? The girl edged forward, very aware of the holster on her leg and the knife at her hip. Practicality said she would need those if she stayed here, and this wasn’t her fight, whatever it was. They had enough mysteries without stopping to untangle this one.
So her mind said. Her feet kept moving.
I’m not here. You don’t see me. I’m not here. You don’t see me. She let the thoughts fill her mind entirely. I’m not here. You don’t see me.
Through the doorway. I’m not here. You don’t see me.
Down a tiny passageway. You didn’t hear anything. There’s no need to look around.
There were a handful of them, no more. They sat at smooth, white computer terminals, fingertips splayed, and t
hey obediently did not look around at the girl. She wasn’t even sure if they would have been able to hear her. They were deep under, consumed with the command they had been given: wait for my orders.
And she recognized the flavor of the mind that had given those orders. She had tasted it only briefly when she found Parees imprisoned, but it was a flavor that could not be forgotten.
Ka’sagra. She wasn’t here, not in person—but this was her handiwork, all of it.
The girl walked in a slow circle, examining the terminals, the room. What was this place?
Her hand touched a drone’s shoulder. I’m not here, you don’t see me. You’re waiting, just like she told you to. He moved obediently as she guided him, until he stood in the center of the room looking lost, and she took his place at the terminal.
She placed her fingers on the controls and let her mind move, feather-light, through the terminal pathways. What was here, and where did it lead?
When she saw the truth, her mouth dropped open.
A pathway in. A backdoor. Complete, unfettered access to the entire Telestine mainframe, undetectable to Tel’rabim or any other official Telestine governmental figure.
Of course Ka’sagra had made one. She wasn’t military or government, so she would not have been granted access to the classified files. And so she had built herself a conduit, using drones—some of them hardwired into the system itself, to take what had not been granted to her.
I’m not here, you don’t see me. You will not tell her I was here. You will not tell her what you did for me. She let the thought expand until it filled the room. You will show me what she has had you find, and you will help me send it all to a human ships in orbit.
She let her eyes drift closed and sank deep down.
Soon, she would know everything.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Earth
London
He’d wanted to kiss her since he first came back to the fleet and saw that familiar face. It didn’t make any goddamned sense, given what she was and what she wanted—but he’d learned by now that when it came to Laura Walker, what he wanted never made any sense.