First Song

by Blaise Corvin

  His emotions roiled, but he finally decided that this was yet another thing he needed help with. It was one thing to be busy, but it was unacceptable to be seen as unfriendly.

  He quickly typed out an email on his phone to his administrative assistant, Veronica. The message asked her to start helping with his social engagement planning, and increase his time spent at school by at least ten percent. He also asked her to hire another logistics manager, and a buying agent to deal with more of the gear, fuel, and weapons he kept stocking.

  That done, Noah leaned back and thought deeply for a long time. He remembered everyone who had helped him, both in his past life and in this one. To this day, he still didn’t know if he’d killed Yusef or not, and the memory haunted him. In some ways, he realized he’d been trying to protect his friends and family in multiple ways, even from his knowledge.

  Telling people willy-nilly about the Shift and the Aelves would still be unwise, but this close to the Shift, maybe it was time to level with someone.

  The more Noah thought, the more he realized that his best friend and his greatest ally in this life had always been Johnny. Befriending the chubby kid who’d turned into a huge, honest young man had really been a huge stroke of good luck. Noah’s friendship with Johnny had also convinced him to reach out to the community more, too.

  A decision was hard to come to, and even harder to swallow after keeping secrets for so long, but next week, during his hunting trip with his best friend, he decided to tell Johnny about the Aelves. His big friend probably wouldn’t believe him, but whether he did or not, he wouldn’t judge and would keep the secret to himself. Noah trusted his friend with his life, something he had never experienced before he’d died, and something he found precious.

  He’d been doing Johnny a disservice.

  Forcing his friends and family to watch him as he tore himself apart with stress and work wasn’t keeping them safe, it was causing them harm. Sharing his burden was difficult, but in this new life, Noah had vowed to never turn away from unpleasant truths, and to never be passive again.

  His nerves a bit frayed, the tired youth turned on his tablet and began scrolling through financial spreadsheets for the companies he owned, both as himself, and through intermediaries or phantom identities.

  The idea of telling anyone about the Aelves was still a bit terrifying, but Noah felt lighter now too. It was time to accept that he wasn’t alone anymore.

  ***

  After Noah’s plane touched down, he thanked his pilot, Steve Gregory, and caught a ride to his destination in a Log Cabin security truck. Colorado was beautiful this time of the year, and Noah took the opportunity to watch the passing scenery, even as he kept thinking about all the things he needed to do. When he thought of something new, he briefly made notes in his phone’s calendar.

  Noah had placed safe houses, warehouses, and stashes all over the world. On top of that, he had also built a small number of special locations to act as bases, hidden forts. Noah didn’t know exactly where people had rallied in Colorado during his first life, but had heard too many rumors about Colorado to not establish a stronghold there.

  The truck pulled into the site he’d picked, nestled in the hills away from civilization, but close enough to several towns and cities to make it a good, strategic rally point. Noah had thought about buying old military installations a few years ago, but had rejected the idea. Military installations were usually known locations, which defeated the point of a secret base.

  This particular place had been blown out of solid rock, the base bored into the side of a cliff, and extended deep into the ground. The work crew that Noah had originally hired to build his secret warehouses had made the initial dig and construction. They’d proven so valuable, he’d actually created his own company to hire them through, and paid them several times the salary they could get anywhere else. After years of working for him, they had experience and knowledge he didn’t want to lose. Of course, the situation posed a security hazard, but this close to the Shift, Noah couldn’t afford to be too picky anymore.

  Efficiency and speed were starting to matter more than sneakiness.

  This location, what Noah called the Fallback Den, had been built as a secret command facility, and the ultimate safe house. The building’s main entrance was at the base of several hills, at the end of a long valley. The only visible part of the base was almost like the side of a castle built into the hill. Assaulting the location would be practically impossible. The walls were so thick, and part of the hill itself–they’d laugh at siege weapons.

  Over a thousand people could live at this location. Enough food was stocked up for almost two years. Living underground for years wouldn’t be pleasant, but would be possible. The location was stocked with weapons, ammo, and basic necessities.

  An underground spring had been tapped deep on the bottom level.

  The idea behind the Fallback Den and the two other similar locations that Noah had built in the US were to be impossible for human attackers to defeat, and hidden so nobody would know they were there in the first place. This would hopefully protect them from the Aelves, too.

  Due to the remote location, Noah had been using Fallback Den to test larger, more destructive weapons. He had pieces shipped out from Michigan and other places to assemble here. After the Shift, since the Den was high in the mountains, all the assembled siege weapons could be brought down to the surrounding areas if there were ever needed; it was all downhill.

  Noah drove past acres of farm in the valley, all maintained by people he paid to run the place, allowed to live in their own houses that Noah owned, rent-free. People who wanted to spend a year in the mountains, being paid to work on a peaceful farm in front of a mansion had been surprisingly easy to find.

  Of course, they didn’t know that the Den was a fortress, they could only see the outside. Houses for the helpers had only been built after the main structure had been finished. All the work on siege weapons were chalked up by the workers as Noah’s “employer” being a medieval reenactor. Still obviously a teenager, Noah had realized that acting like he was an assistant to another older person who owned the land would raise fewer questions.

  Noah had come to the Fallback Den for a few reasons, and one was to inspect some of Venu’s new inventions. The parts had been shipped to this location and assembled by interns. After the truck stopped, Noah got out and continued on foot. He passed a row of rabbit hutches before ducking under a huge pavilion that had been set up to build and test post-Shift weapons.

  He briefly studied the ballista built with modern cams to function more like a huge compound bow before continuing. The design had potential, but not with spears or arrows. Shock from the giant bow being fired was too great for wooden shafts, even with reinforced ends, so his engineers had been working to convert it to fire steel balls instead.

  Weapons designed to throw Molotov cocktails full of napalm stood in a row and were particularly nasty. They would be one way to keep a valley like this safe if it were ever attacked.

  He approached the end of the pavilion where some railroad tracks had been set up. A box on wheels sat on the tracks, and another similar one stood behind it, resting on thick rubber tires. Noah pulled out his cell and dialed Venu’s number. When the quirky inventor answered, Noah switched to a video call, and his phone displayed a hologram image of Venu at his workstation. He wore a honey badger hat with a snake in its mouth.

  “What is going on, boss?”

  Noah turned the phone around to show Venu what he was looking at, then turned the phone back. “Okay, I’m here. What are these things?”

  “You know, if you would come by my workstation more often, maybe you would not need to fly all the way to other states just to see my inventions. As a reminder, my workstation is in Steelton...where you live.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Noah said, ignoring the man’s gibes. Venu had gotten married a few months before and was still settling into married life. He’d been a little more testy than
usual lately. The stress from a new marriage, moving to a new home, being back in the US from India, and his parents finding out he didn’t work in IT anymore had obviously been adding up. Noah said, “I remember some of this stuff from the last time I dropped by the armory, but walk me through it. If you remember, I told you to ship this stuff out here because with my schedule, I would be able to actually see it faster this way.”

  “Of course, of course.” Venu absently scratched at his cheek with the eraser end of a pencil, looking up at the ceiling in thought. “What you are looking at are the prototypes I created for the travel scenario you gave me. As usual, the scenario involved a post-apocalypse America with no electricity and arbitrary limits on pressure. Because steam power and solar were out of the question, the most obvious choices were horses and muscle power.

  “Included in your scenario were combat capabilities, defenses, and robust construction. The two vehicles you see before you are basically the same, but configured to either follow railroad tracks, or be pulled by horses.”

  “Oh, I see.” Now that Noah’s memory had been jogged, he could see how the two boxes might move, and the differences in the wheels. At times like this, it was frustrating that his [Memory Palace] skill had so many limitations. “I can see how the one with rubber tires would be pulled, but what about the rail one?”

  “The version to ride on railroad tracks uses a modified mechanical system like an old handcar, the kind with levers that people push up and down with a pumping motion. This one has two pumps, so it can be crewed by two to eight people. The pumping mechanisms run using ceramic bearings so efficiency is very high. All the pumps also have gears, so once the vehicle gets momentum, the pumpers can change gears to go faster.”

  “Huh.” Noah walked forward and opened one of the doors to the vehicle on railroad tracks. Sure enough, there were two sets of pillars with perpendicular bars attached to pump with. He was reminded of old black and white movies with the weird railway cars; handcars, Venu had called them. “What about steering?”

  “Okay, that is one way that these two are different. Only the horse-drawn version needs to be turned. The railway version needs to stay as light as possible. These armored railroad cars are really best suited to transport people, and maybe light cargo. Humans are just not strong enough for heavy loads on railroad tracks. If more people are added to pump, the car would need to be larger, and it would weigh more. There is a point of diminishing returns.”

  “Okay, I can see that.”

  Venu said, “So again, there is no driver for the railroad version, just someone on top who has a stationary bike. The bike has a chain going all the way down to the driving mechanism to help add power.”

  Noah nodded, noting a tube coming down the center of the car, probably with the chain inside. He said, “Go on.”

  “Okay, please climb the ladder and look up top.”

  Noah could see the top of the bike and something else up there. He nodded and climbed the obvious ladder, then his eyebrows went up. “Oh, I see.”

  “Yes, the person on the bike has a brake. The people inside would have brakes too, but the person on the top also has two hard point weapon mounts, maybe four if you want to get real crazy. The mounts right now are on the sides, but if you want one front and back, the driver would need to actually get up to use them or they would not be able to point down. If they were pointing up, then they could be mounted closer...like if they were shooting at a dragon or something. You didn’t mention dragons in your fantasy scenario, though.”

  Noah rolled his eyes. “Okay, so they could put some heavy weapons up here. Got it.”

  “You can go down now to check out the inside.” Noah climbed down while Venu kept talking. “There are sliding windows on every side of the car, and also sliding panels for murder holes, in case someone wanted to use dazzlers or another defensive weapon from the inside.” Noah rolled his eyes again. Most of Venu’s inventions got cool names, but for some reason the man would not change his mind about dazzlers.

  Noah said, “That makes sense. So if it’s hot outside they can keep the windows open, but if it’s cold or they’re under attack, they can close them up.”

  “Exactly. Also, the walls are mostly made of decently strong aluminum panels with steel framing to keep the weight down. For armor, I added one of my inventions from earlier this year - the corrugated steel net.”

  “Oh yeah, I can see it now.” Noah poked his head in the car and looked around, noting how the strong, thin mesh had been anchored at the top and sides of each wall, but not the bottom. “This stuff catches arrows, right?”

  “Correct. The diameter of the holes will stop any arrow tip, and since the netting flexes, it actually absorbs a lot of the kinetic energy. It would be useless against bullets, but works great on arrows. In testing, the combination of the walls and the net stopped anything I shot short of siege weapons. Well, some of the modern crossbows penetrated, but I could just add an extra net and they’d be stopped too. It all comes down to weight.”

  “I understand. Okay, this makes a lot of sense now.”

  “Yes, well, it’s still just a prototype. If you give the go-ahead to use up more funding, I can improve on the design.”

  Noah pursed his lips. He liked what he saw so far but wasn’t entirely sold yet. “Okay, what about the carriage version.”

  “The carriage version is still light, but more heavily armored, with three mesh net layers inside. There are no hand pumps, and as you can see, it was easy to remove them. “

  “Go on.”

  Venu said, “This design is practical because the box part can be used for both applications. The carriage version has a driver’s section up front that is easy to bolt on. Other than that, the axles and wheels are a simple switch out. In fact, the main bodies could even be drilled for both applications to make the change even faster.”

  Now that Noah was up close, he could see what Venu was talking about. He asked, “So there are still hard points for weapons up top?”

  “Correct, and since horses are much stronger than people, you could easily put heavier weapons up there.”

  Now that everything had been explained to him, Noah crossed his arms and carefully examined both vehicles before putting Venu on hold, climbing into the driver’s portion of the horse-powered variation.

  As usual, the IT Programmer-turned-engineer had really created something special. The fact that the vehicles could be repurposed would definitely come in handy. Noah couldn’t remember people using railways after the Shift in his first life, but he was sure they had.

  Over the last few years, he had looked up tactics used in wars that involved trains. An obvious weakness of anything on rails was that an enemy could mess up the tracks. Noah liked that the armored pump car could be stopped and reversed. This meant it could stop and run away from an ambush, or torn up tracks. What’s more, if an enemy destroyed all the rails, the vehicles could just be converted to be pulled by horses.

  Noah smiled, his mind made up. “These are good. Let’s build at least a couple dozen of them to start with. I’ll figure out where they all go later. You have my permission to modify them as you see fit.”

  “Understood.”

  Noah asked, “Is there any other stuff at this location for me to see, or was that all you had shipped and built here?”

  “Yes, boss, that is all. I will not take any more of your time, so now you can go back to doing all the other strange things you do. I would wish you a good day, but you are probably determined to keep trying to give yourself an ulcer.”

  “You have a good day too, Venu,” chuckled Noah. His inspection of the weapons finished, he turned and began walking to the Den itself. There was something else he wanted to check on inside the fortress.

  The teen’s cargo pants rustled as he walked, and he absently pulled a harmonica from his front pocket to play while he thought. He wasn’t using [Harmony] or even playing for anyone else. Sometimes it was just good to get lost in music
.

  After walking past several courtyards, all designed to make the building even more defensible, Noah entered the lobby, barely noticing the robust but attractive architecture. Instead, he looped around, heading for the garage and the first set of underground warehouses. A hand-operated lift would allow anything stored in the Den to be transported to the surface.

  Once his destination had been reached, Noah surveyed rows and rows of bicycles. Most were fairly standard, twenty-one-speed mountain bikes, but several rows were sturdier, military bicycles, meant to support a great deal of weight. The last row included a handful of experimental bicycles that Venu and his team had invented. They were rigged for tandem riders. The forward rider steered, and the rear rider faced the opposite direction, with a large, bicycle-mounted crossbow. The weapon could be cocked quickly because of how it was attached to the bike, and had a magazine for bolts on top. If Noah remembered correctly, it could hold five. Since each shot had to be cocked, it was not as fast a weapon as a dazzler, or one of the newer, similar weapons that Venu had developed. However, the 150-pound draw weight crossbow was plenty powerful and easy to aim with the offset scope.

  Noah could think of multiple ways that bikes like this could come in handy. Each new tool or weapon that had been developed to prepare for the Shift couldn’t solve every problem, but the more, the better.

  Problems, he thought, and moved to the next area he wanted to inspect.

  The next warehouse he eventually located was filled with heavy duty shelves full of steel parts, and strange looking pipes. To the average person, nothing in this room would be that impressive, but Noah smiled. All the parts and pieces could be assembled to make large, powerful manual pumps. Water shortages had been a huge problem in post-Shift America. Noah had several solutions in mind for this problem, but for this solution, he wasn’t freely sharing with the world.

  Whoever had water would have power, which was one reason why locations by waterways had fared well at first, until the predators had come.