The Exodus Towers (21 page)

After three steps the “drain” through which the water escaped came into view: a wide concrete pipe, cracked in half
by the collapse of the ground above it. The dark water rushed into it in sloshing gulps as the wake from her passage pushed waves into its wide maw.

Lapping against the pipe’s opening, a body listed gently in the water. Clad in the trademark yellow of an environment suit, the limp form bobbed with each ripple.

Samantha saw parallel cuts in the legs and back of the suit, as if claws had raked it. The sight filled her with sudden fear. She pressed herself against the wall and swept the beam of her rifle’s light across the entire space, looking for any sign of what had caused such damage.

But the place was quiet. Dead. She slowly exhaled and spoke into her headset. “Found another of your lost crew,” she said. “Something cut him to shreds, I don’t know what. Can you hear me?”

A garbled response came, full of scratchy hisses and deep clicks.

“Piece of shit,” she growled. Grillo could get the highlights later. She continued on her path around the object, stopping long enough to inspect the body. She rolled it over in the water and cringed at the face inside the suit. The mask had been shattered, as had the face. Bruises covered the nose, one cheek, and an eye.

Something must have given this poor bastard a haymaker of epic proportions
, she thought. That, or he fell in. She flipped the corpse back over and turned to the alien shape in the center of the pit.

Three more steps into her route, Sam froze. The flickering red flare lay only a few meters away from her now, and its dancing light illuminated a gaping hole in the side of the object. She trained her own beam on the opening. Not a hole, she saw, but an actual entrance, square in shape.

Inside the shell was a cube-shaped cavity, roughly two meters on a side. The walls were laced with thin grooves, drawn in sharp, straight lines and perfect ninety-degree corners.

Thin arms jutted out from the corners of the cavity, converging near the center around a cube-shaped object, perhaps a half meter tall and wide. A channel three or four centimeters deep ran down one side. Sam knew somehow
that the thin black arms were not connected to the object, but rather were holding it in place.

The cube had the same angular patterns of lines etched into its otherwise smooth black surface. But these lines were different. As Samantha watched, pale blue light rippled along their lengths, the same color as the thorny branches above. To Sam the cube’s surface almost looked like a circuit board, or city streets viewed from high above.

“Sam?” David called down from above.

“Here,” she called back. “I’ve found something.”

Wading through the warm water, Samantha approached the cube, unable to take her eyes off the fine patterns of blue-white light that rippled beneath the lines etched into its surface.

She reached the opening on the side of the shell and climbed up onto it, warm water dripping from her legs and sloshing in her boots. The liquid should have pooled around her feet, but instead the Builders’ material drank it in. For a moment she marveled at this before turning her attention back to the cube suspended in the center of the chamber.

Flexing her fingers, Samantha reached out for it. The blue laser light pulsing along its surface shifted, growing brighter where her hands were about to touch, and darker elsewhere, as if sensing her presence. She paused only for a second, gave a small shrug, and gripped the cube by two sides.

A pulse of light exploded from the cube, blinding her. The object hummed under her hands as if she’d gripped a live electrical wire, and she couldn’t let go.

Above her came an avalanche of noise, like a thousand butcher’s knives being sharpened at once, so loud it hurt to hear. Somewhere beneath that noise she thought she heard a scream, silenced abruptly. Something splashed in the water at the bottom of the pit. Something large. Sam turned but all she saw was the afterglow of blue light.

Her hands remained clasped to the cube, vibrating. She yanked, hard, and the cube came free. It weighed as much as a concrete block, and she stumbled, falling backward out of the shell and into the warm water.

The cube landed on her stomach and forced the air from
her lungs. A mouthful of gritty water flooded into her mouth and nose and she tried to spit it out, but she had no air to do so.

Somehow she found her footing, rolled over, and stood up. The raking, calamitous sound of glass sliding against glass continued above her. Sam coughed and retched the water from her lungs. When she opened her eyes, she could see again.

The cube lay in the water at her feet, still pulsing with blue light. She turned and looked up. Above her, the bundle of glassy limbs that stretched from the top of the shell were writhing. They’d taken on the color of fire, and burned as bright. The glow faded the farther up the trunk she looked. Above the pit, she could see the latticework of branches flailing about violently. The segments no longer had a pale blue color. Now they were blood-red. She thought it must be like standing in a whirlwind of barbed wire up there. “David! Faisal!” she shouted. No response came.

The violent movement of the branches dispersed the fog, and Sam could see that the alien structure stretched at least fifty meters above her head.

She focused on the thick trunk of tangled branches that jutted from the tip of the shell. Gritting her teeth, Sam unslung her rifle, set it to fully automatic, and took aim.

Her bullets raked across the bundle, punching through the tendrils easily, and sparking as they ricocheted off the wall of the pit beyond. Each branch that she severed turned gray instantly. By the time she’d depleted her ammo, most of the trunk was gray, and the violent motion above had all but stopped. Two or three branches still swayed, so Sam reloaded and took care of those, too. Her ears rang from the sound of gunfire.

“Faisal?! David?!” she shouted again.

The rope they’d lowered her on still rested against the pit wall, a few meters away.

A shape in the water caught her eye. Another body in a yellow suit, the material sliced into tatters, tainted with fresh blood. She waded over to it and flipped the corpse over. David’s eyes stared back at her, glassy and wide with terror.

“Fuck,” she muttered, and pushed his body away.

Shaking, Sam climbed the rope, leaving the alien cube where it lay.

At the top of the pit she found Faisal’s body, or what was left of it. He’d been farther from the lip of the sinkhole, and sliced to pieces when the thorny branches went haywire. Bits of his flesh hung from the gray limbs, along with pieces of his environment suit. Yellow and red ornaments on a dead alien tree.

“Grillo,” she coughed into her headset. “Come in.”

The device had shorted out, she decided, from her fall into the water. She ripped it off her head and threw it angrily into the pit.

From a pocket on her vest she produced the flare Faisal had given her. Sam closed her eyes and wished for luck as she cracked it open. Even after being submerged when she fell, it crackled to life and soon a red fire blazed on its tip, dripping sparks.

Gingerly, Sam held it out to the nearest branch, wondering if the now-dead segment would recoil as it had before. Instead of shrinking away, the material blackened and disintegrated.

After what felt like an hour, Sam finally emerged from the alien forest and trudged back to the barricade at Aura’s Edge. The sight of Grillo standing there, waiting for her, was a strange comfort.

Sam sat in the back of the APC, wrapped in a blanket and nursing a bottle of water, when the cavalry arrived. Dozens of trucks filled with armed fighters encircled the area, securing it. Grillo’s private army.

She stared beyond them, at Darwin’s dirty skyline. Unable to focus, she had only a vague awareness of the activity around her. A dozen people gathered, clad in environment suits, armed with flares and torches. They walked out of her field of view toward the barricade.

They were talking about the space elevator. Something about a vibration along its length, and a surge of power, when she’d removed the cube from the crashed ship. They
were laughing about it, like someone laughs after walking into a surprise birthday party, so her action must not have caused any damage. Still, it meant the object was connected, somehow, to the alien cord.

Numb and exhausted, Sam pulled her blanket tight and fought to stop shaking. Despite everything she’d seen, the only image that she seemed able to conjure was David’s dead eyes, staring at her, accusing her. Like Jake’s, in a way. She shuddered at the memory.

Sam hardly noticed when the group returned later. Four of them carried a cube-shaped bundle of blankets, and were moving with slow, deliberate steps. The people around them cleared the path, and soon the package disappeared into one of the newly arrived trucks.

The group began to remove their environment suits once the crate was secure. Dazed, Samantha hardly recognized their Jacobite garb before the rear door of her APC was thrown shut, blocking her view.

Seconds later she heard the vehicle’s caps begin to whine. She swayed in her seat as it lurched into movement. Sam leaned back, closed her eyes, and let the gentle rocking of the vehicle lull her to sleep.

Melville Station

5.MAY.2283

S
HE WAS IN
the cargo bay, helping unload a shipment of apples, when the station rattled. An alarm went off somewhere, one she hadn’t heard before.

“What the?” Tania said to no one in particular. The people working around her looked as worried as she felt.

“Collision?” someone asked.

Tania doubted it. The vibration seemed to come from the Elevator cord itself. “Excuse me,” she said, and pushed off for the intercom on the wall. Her mind raced as she flew across the room. She imagined Blackfield’s troopers swarming through the station like they had on Anchor.

At the wall she steadied herself with a handhold and tapped the activation switch. “Tania here. Someone talk to me. What’s going on?”

Tim’s voice came through a few seconds later. “Unknown. A vibration rippled up the cord. Black Level reported it first, then the farms a few seconds later. Now us.”

“It started at the shell ship? An explosion or …?”

“Some kind of electricity discharge, hence that overload alarm. Our draws on the cord went into emergency disconnect mode when the surge hit us.”

Tania frowned. The cord generated electricity due to friction with the atmosphere, something the stations tapped as a backup source. The climbers relied on the source exclusively to make their journeys. A change in that would be catastrophic.

“Everything’s fine now,” Tim said. “Greg says all systems are reading normal up there.”

Memories of Darwin’s Elevator malfunctions raced through Tania’s mind. Nothing like this, but still, if something similar was happening again … “Put all stations on maximum alert. All personnel should be required to check in. If the aura failed …”

“Already done. Commanders will report within the hour.”

“Thanks, Tim. Keep me posted.” Her hand shook as she switched the intercom off.

Tania sat cross-legged on the floor of Room 17, her chin resting on steepled fingers.

The room, which had been stocked to the brim with weaponry by Neil Platz, was all but empty now. A few crates remained here and there, mostly gear no one knew what to do with. That simple fact seemed to encapsulate for her everything about the state of the so-called colony. Gear and resources depleted, and no one who knew what the hell they were doing.

She sighed, exhausted from the mental effort it took to stop thinking, even in brief spans, about the fate of the aircraft she’d sent down to the planet below. Crew and craft lost, and they hadn’t even made it to the edge of Camp Exodus. By any measurement the entire endeavor had been a complete fiasco.

The bizarre fluctuation along the cord didn’t exactly help her nerves, but all personnel were accounted for and there’d been no repeats of the event.

Failings aside, what bothered Tania more was that she had no idea what to do next. The strike team had been her last-ditch effort. She glanced around the nearly empty room. “You’d know what to do, wouldn’t you?” she asked, her voice echoing from the walls. She wasn’t quite sure if she’d meant the question for Neil Platz, or for Skyler.

The soft sound of a key-card swipe came to her from outside, and the door behind her opened.

“There you are.” Tim, of course.

“Here I am.” She felt immediate guilt for the unappreciative tone in her words. He’d been trying, hard, to lift her from the melancholy she’d fallen into since the failed rescue.
It seemed wholly unfair to treat him badly for the effort.

“I brought chai,” he said. “Can I sit with you?”

With a sigh she hoped she’d hid, Tania nodded and patted the floor next to her.

He handed her one of two mugs and mirrored her cross-legged position. “Spared no expense,” he said, gauging her reaction.

The cup had a twist-on lid and when Tania opened it the warmth and smells contained within hugged her like an old friend. “This is the good stuff, isn’t it?” she asked.