by Devin Hanson
Jackson nodded and launched into telling the story, starting with his own arrival on Nova Aeria. Leila listened with half an ear. Most of the details of the story were meaningless to her, but she understood enough to grasp the basics.
Her mother had survived. Jackson’s story rolled on, a welcome distraction from her own plight. In a few hours they would arrive at Nueva Angela. She would have to find a job and a place to sleep. Despair lurked at the edges of her thoughts.
In a few hours, her new life would begin, whether she was ready for it or not.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
In almost every way, the Helix Rebuild was superior to the Womack Process. The duration of the treatment was an order of magnitude longer. Every egg could be used, rather than the roughly ten percent success rate the Womack Process could boast. Depending on who you asked, the Rebuild’s restriction to a biologically compatible recipient was a positive or a negative. On Venus, at least, there was no ambivalence on that particular point.
But the Helix Rebuild still was not perfect. In time, at around four hundred days, withdrawal would start to set in. Unlike with the Womack Process, the withdrawal built slowly and took longer to turn fatal. But make no mistake, those among the immortals on Venus who lost access to the treatment would die, and it was every bit as horrible and painful as the Womack Process withdrawals. If anything, the prolonged nature of the Rebuild’s withdrawal made it even worse to experience.
For those ainlif who found themselves bereft of their matriarch, suicide, often formalized, was the only recourse they had.
Dennison crouched at the lip of the meteor damage and stared into the void below. He was numb with shock, his mind foggy and his thoughts sluggish and circular.
How could this have happened? He couldn’t shake the sight of his brothers, faces blue with carbon dioxide exposure, eyes bulging in death. Addison and Carlson had been in the waiting room just behind him. The first responders had brought masks for the other two ainlif in the waiting room, and they had survived, though they were still unconscious.
He fought down the unreasonable fury. Why had his brothers not survived? Why had the extras not tried harder to save them? Logically, he knew there had been nothing the extras could have done. The extras had acted correctly; his brothers had already stopped breathing when they had arrived.
Of course, it was all for nothing. Alana and Cynthia Everard had been lost when the meteor had struck the habitat. The other matriarch who had been present, Emily Rey, and her daughter, had survived though. What twist of fate would put them so close together, some to survive and others to be obliterated in an instant?
Dennison swallowed back the lump in his throat. He had a sudden sympathy for the girl who had failed her Challenge. Without Alana, he and all his brothers were doomed. Garrison would be the first to die. His treatment had been scheduled for today, and his withdrawals would start by the end of the month. The rest of the Romaine ainlif would die one by one in the months following, assuming they let themselves live that long.
Through the grief and shock of loss, guilt clawed at him. It had been his call to release the ballast and raise the habitat. What would have happened if he had waited another five seconds? Or triggered the release five seconds earlier? Would the habitat have avoided the meteor swarm altogether, or would the strike have hit them more directly, destroying the habitat outright?
In a way, that the habitat had come through the swarm with only the one major strike was a minor miracle. The damage could be repaired quickly, and they probably wouldn’t have to evacuate the habitat completely to make the repairs. Nova Aeria would be back in full use in a few weeks.
He should be proud that he had assisted in weathering the storm so successfully. If Alana had survived, he would be celebrating right now.
Dennison toed a cracked tile over the edge. It clinked as it struck the floor below, and then spun off into the empty sky. He watched it until it dwindled in the distance, imagining taking the step forward himself and falling.
He shivered. With the habitat at such a high elevation, the atmosphere was thin and cold. He didn’t want to die. He still had another forty thousand years to live. It seemed unreal, impossible, that Alana was gone.
His radio chirruped and he thumbed it off irritably. He wanted to be left alone with his thoughts.
Dennison ran his hand over the half-melted examination table. Had Alana been lying here, getting her uterine implant serviced while she waited for Garrison? The thin layer of carbonization over the surface streaked and he rubbed his fingers together absently.
At least there wasn’t any danger of precipitation. With the habitat above the cumulous cloud layer, the exposed interior to the habitat would stay dry and free of sulfuric acid.
A masked figure in work coveralls stepped through the doorway behind Dennison. “Sir? Mr. Romaine?”
Dennison turned with a glower. “What do you want?”
“Sorry, sir. I was sent to get you. It’s urgent.”
What was urgent? Alana was dead. There was nothing left in this life for him to do but die with as much grace as he could muster.
“Well?” Dennison demanded. “What is it?”
“I wasn’t given details, sir. But one of the other ainlif is awake and talking. Mr. Edison instructed me to tell you to come with all haste.”
“Edison sent you?” Dennison straightened, some of the mental fog clouding his thoughts lifting away. Edison wasn’t prone to excitement. If he thought it was urgent, then it was. “All right. Thank you.”
Dennison walked quickly to the bulkhead, where a temporary airlock had been installed to facilitate access to the damaged sector. It was only big enough for one man to stand in comfortably, and the extra waved him through, politely giving the ainlif priority.
Inside the airlock, Dennison bounced impatiently on the balls of his feet. What could have made Edison send for him with urgency? He pulled out his tablet and had it draw a map to where Edison was. He wasn’t far; the sector that had been damaged was the medical wing and the people who had been exposed to carbon dioxide found treatment almost literally next door.
The airlock finished cycling and Dennison tore off his mask, underhanded it to a surprised-looking extra, and set off down the hallway at a jog. Wild hope that Edison had found Alana alive spurred him into a full-on sprint before he squashed the upwelling of optimism ruthlessly. He knew better than to let himself have false hope. Still, he didn’t slow his pace.
Dennison burst into the hospital room out of breath. The habitats weren’t built to hold pressure, and the interior air had normalized with the exterior atmosphere. The air was thin enough to make him regret his short sprint. Edison sat in a bedside chair next to a hospital bed occupied by a man with his face covered by a bandage.
“What is it?” Dennison demanded, panting for air.
Edison stood. “This is Alec Everard,” he gestured at the man lying in the bed. “Alec, Dennison is here. Tell him what you told me.”
Alec cleared his throat. “Cynthia and Alana are alive,” he rasped. “I had a rebreather on me and after the impact I gave it to the matriarchs to share between them.”
“How can that be?” Dennison exclaimed. “The extras reported only four men were in that waiting room!”
“Then the extras lied,” Alec shook his head. “I swear on my blood and the life of my mother, when I blacked out, they were alive and well.”
Edison caught Dennison’s arm, his grip painfully tight. “You know what this means?”
“They’ve been taken,” Dennison said grimly. “Who have you told?”
“Nobody,” Edison said. “I sent for you as soon as I heard.”
Dennison took out his tablet, and in a minute had found what he was looking for. “The extra crew chief submitted an after-action report. One adult female, one adolescent female, four adult males. That’s it. No mention of our mothers.”
“Who’s the crew chief?”
“Outside h
elp. A man named Wharton. He was brought over from Nueva Angela to assist in the solar panel repairs.”
“Well, where is he now? Let’s track him down and find out what happened!” Edison exclaimed.
Dennison cursed and flipped his tablet around to show Edison. “They’re gone; left by dirigible back to Nueva Angela four hours ago.”
“Security tapes,” Alec rasped.
Edison snapped his fingers. “Yeah, that’s right. There will be footage of the airlocks.”
Dennison wished he had a workstation to use. His tablet would do the job eventually, but it took forever to buffer the videos and trying to use the touch screen to scroll through footage was painfully inaccurate. He managed to find the footage of the airlock and ran it forward quickly.
“There,” Edison said sharply from behind his shoulder.
Dennison paused the footage and backed it up a minute, then ran it forward at frame advance. A crew of extras was loading equipment into the airlock, hard-sided tool cases and garment bags for their exposure suits. The security camera wasn’t a very good one, and the images were grainy and it only saved snapshots once every few seconds.
“These two. How long is that case between them?”
The extras in question had a black plastic tool case carried between them. The case was around two meters long, and half a meter square.
“You could fit a person in there,” Dennison allowed.
He froze the frame and stared at it. Such large equipment lockers weren’t exactly unusual, but it struck him as strange that the extras would have bothered to bring anything so bulky from Nueva Angela. Any heavy equipment they needed would have been provided by Nova Aeria.
Dennison stepped through the footage some more, and found a second long case loaded after the first. The airlock was cycled after that, and the crew vanished to go fetch another load. He watched the rest of the footage, but those were the only two cases that were loaded.
He thumbed off the tablet and stretched a crick from his neck. It was possible the cases were holding equipment. It wasn’t unheard of for specialist crews to have custom-designed equipment that wouldn’t be available on Nova Aeria.
“Edison, dig through the security records and find the footage of them offloading from their dirigible on arrival. I will bet every credit in my account that they didn’t arrive with those cases.”
Edison nodded and pulled out his own tablet.
“My brothers,” Alec rasped. “They need to know Cynthia is alive.”
“I will get them,” Dennison promised. “And all of my brothers who are here. But until we decide what to do, this does not go anywhere. If our mothers were taken, then surprise may be our only chance to rescue them alive. Those equipment cases had to have been given to them by someone living in Nova Aeria.”
“Go, brother,” Edison urged. “I will gather the evidence.”
Dennison reached out and clasped Alec’s hand. The injured ainlif returned his grip painfully tight. “We will find them,” he promised. “And we will rain down such a fury upon them that they will wish for death.”
It was a council of war. Calling it anything else would have been blind to the truth.
The ainlif of the two missing matriarchs gathered and sealed off access to a wing of the hospital, blustering and pulling rank to empty out the rooms. Methodically they unplugged every security camera and recording device in the wing until they were satisfied nobody could eavesdrop on their council.
The Everard ainlif: Alec and Derek, both still lying in hospital gurneys, their heads swathed in bandages. Chase, Evan and Ferrell had been occupied elsewhere in the habitat when the meteor had struck, and they stood with barely contained fury. The remaining six of the Everard ainlif were attending the council remotely from New Galway, watching and listening from tablets held by their brothers.
The Romaine ainlif: Addison and Carlson were dead, killed by carbon dioxide exposure. Bryson, Dennison, Edison, Ferguson, and Garrison were present, with the four remaining Romaine ainlif attending via tablet.
Dennison held up his hand, quieting the discussions and bringing all attention to him.
“Our matriarchs have been taken,” he said. Absolute silence met the pronouncement. The gathered men knew exactly what the stakes were. He didn’t have to spell any of it out for them. They were ready to act, and, at least for the moment, were willing to let Dennison take the lead.
“Here’s what we know,” Dennison started. Edison had gathered a damning portfolio while the ainlif were gathering and securing the wing, and Dennison read from it as he briefed the others. “At 0600 yesterday, a dirigible from Nueva Angela docked at Nova Aeria carrying a crew of twenty extras. The crew chief is one Remer Wharton, an extra veteran of four decades. He has a record of malcontent, with three recorded incidents of inciting others against matriarchs.
“With him are three extras from a smaller crew, led by Millicent Nicks. Nicks has no record but is married to a woman who failed the Matriarch Challenge. It is unknown how involved Nicks is, but given her connections, she may be harboring malcontent as well.
“I’ve sent video footage of the dirigible unloading upon arrival, which you can review later to your own satisfaction. Following the emergency measures taken when Nova Aeria was struck by meteors, the extra crew loaded their equipment back into the dirigible they arrived on. At 1432, today, the cameras in the airlock bays recorded the extra crew taking on cargo that they did not arrive with.”
Dennison sent the stills from the video footage to a projector with a swipe of a finger. “Two equipment cases, measuring one hundred and eighty centimeters long, forty centimeters wide and thirty tall, were loaded into the airlock. These cases were not unloaded by the crew upon arrival.”
Edison stepped forward. “I tracked down the provenance of the cases to a supply depot. The clerk says he sold the cases to an extra from Nueva Angela, who claimed damage to their own and needed replacements. At this time, we do not think anyone from Nova Aeria is complicit, but we cannot be certain, thus the need for security.”
“How did the extras capture our mothers to begin with?” Evan demanded.
“I’m getting there,” Dennison said. “We weren’t able to track the cases through the hallways, but we ran a search on all airlocks used after the accident happened. Seven minutes after the meteor strike, an airlock was opened from the outside; not an airlock nearest to the damaged sector, but one further away, that the extra crew had been operating out of while performing repairs before the storm.”
Dennison played footage from his tablet on the projector. The view was from the airlock foyer, and it showed a shot of the airlock door. The image was grainy and out of focus, but it was clear that the airlock was crowded to capacity. After a moment, the processing lights turned green and the airlock door slid open.
Remer Wharton stepped out first and scanned the room. His eyes lit on the camera and he strode toward it. With a single swing from a wrench, he smashed the security camera and it went dark.
“Just before Wharton destroys the camera,” Dennison said quietly, “we have an angle into the interior of the airlock.”
He backed the video up and played it at frame advance, tapping his tablet to move the footage forward a single frame at a time. Wharton came into view, his teeth pulled back into a grimace, the wrench already traveling forward toward its destination in the camera housing. In the background, blurry but still recognizable, a woman was struggling from the airlock, one fist raised, her long black hair swinging wildly in its plait.
“It is unmistakably Cynthia Everard,” Dennison said. “We have no footage of Alana Romaine, but given the circumstantial evidence, we are assuming she was held further back in the airlock.”
“Leave it to mother to fight free,” Evan said with a grim smile.
“Yes,” Dennison agreed. “This footage is all the proof we need to know for certain that Wharton and his crew have taken prisoner Cynthia Everard and Alana Romaine. It is up to us, now, to r
ecover them. I don’t know about the rest of you, but this is my fight.” Dennison smashed a fist into his open palm. “These extras and their cohorts will feel the weight of justice. I will not stand by and let anyone else take my place in this.”
“Damn right,” one of the Everard ainlif muttered. “We’re with you on that, Romaine.”
“We’ve pulled the flight plan and logs of the dirigible,” Dennison said. “We know the dirigible made contact with Nueva Angela roughly an hour ago. Our mothers are being held somewhere in that mega-hab, probably at gunpoint. Make no mistake, gentlemen, Nueva Angela is their home turf. If we roll in heavy, they will see us coming. I will not put my mother at risk. A subtle approach is required.”
“Do you have a plan?” Alec rasped.
“Only the beginnings of one. That is what you all are here for. We expect Wharton will have demands for us and will use our mothers as hostages. Likely they will present their demands to the Council.”
Garrison gave a wry laugh. “That will go poorly for them.”
Dennison nodded. “The Council will not tolerate a matriarch being held hostage. They would sooner shoot Nueva Angela out of the sky as a warning to other would-be extortionists than give in to Wharton’s demands. We must be able to demonstrate to the Council that the matter is under control when the ransom video comes in, so we have a hard timeline.”
“Damn these bandages,” Alec growled. “They say my eyesight will take months to fully recover, but I will be mobile in another day. I will take a dirigible to Horizon and interface with the Council.”
“We need a Romaine representative,” Bryson said. “I will go.”
“No, we need your gun,” Dennison shook his head. “Garrison, what say you?”
Garrison growled something inaudibly but nodded. “You won’t be needing a second pilot. Fine. I’ll go. Mother has strong support from the Council. Maybe we should pre-empt Wharton’s demands?”