The Exodus Towers (59 page)

She didn’t think he’d be too happy about it.

Cappagh, Ireland

6.SEP.2284

T
HEY WAITED OUT
the storm in Ana’s vigil tent.

She’d thought he’d died, and only stubbornness and love kept her camped out at the edge of the dome, waiting. She’d tried to follow him in, of course. They all had. But once Skyler had stepped through, she’d explained, the field became hard as marble. An hour passed, then a day. Weeks. Every day Ana would come sit in front of the dome and try to push her way into it as he had. She’d tried to dig under it. She’d kicked it, punched it, even fired a grenade at it. Nothing helped. At one point she’d seen a bird fly up to the thing and smack against it. The poor creature had fallen to the ground in a lifeless heap, and Ana had cried then. The death of the bird had nearly snuffed out the candle of hope she’d nurtured.

He held her while she wept, a process she needed to work through on her own. He knew that from experience. While she sobbed quietly and buried herself in his arms, his mind grappled with the implications of what had happened.

From his perspective, he’d walked inside that dome, spent ten minutes fumbling about, and then exited. Outside, six weeks had passed. How that could be seemed hardly worth pondering, in Skyler’s opinion. The Builders were clearly more technologically advanced than aura towers, interstellar flight, and space elevators. They could mess with time, or at least how the mind experienced it.
The body, too
, he corrected himself. He hadn’t walked out of there thirsty or hungry, so the effect couldn’t have been just mental.

The part that unnerved him was that it had happened at all. That such a thing was possible. Six weeks gone in ten minutes. That meant a journey taken back in to see what sat atop that pinnacle, even if they worked fast, would last months on the outside. Any delays and he’d come out well past the predicted date of the next Builder event. Whatever that event would entail, Skyler felt damn sure it would be in his best interests to be outside and well clear of the alien bubble at the time.

“Have you heard anything from home?” he asked her after her sobs faded.

She shifted slightly against him. Her hands gripped his shirt just below the collar. “No,” she said, her voice muffled by her proximity to his chest. “Well, yes.”

“Which?”

“Yes, we heard from them. Two clowns named Greg and Marcus. They started out making polite requests for you to contact them; now they just joke around.”

Skyler leaned away and looked at her with skepticism.

“They’re so annoying,” Ana said, shaking her head. Then she made a face and spoke with a drawl out of some golden age sci-fi film. “ ‘Greetings people of Earth, we have come for your chocolate and your buxom women. We will negotiate only with Skyler Luiken’s penis.’ Stuff like that. I want to strangle them every time.”

Skyler couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Don’t you start,” Ana said with sincere force. “I’ll put you on the list, too, dammit. I had to listen to a month of that
mierda
thinking you might be gone forever.”

He reasserted his grip around her until the flash of temper melted away. “Sorry,” he said. “What did you tell them?”

“Nothing,” Ana replied. “Vanessa, Pablo, and I made a pact. If you were truly gone, we’d just live here and the colony could think we’d all vanished. We left it on for a while, in case anything interesting happened. After a while I stopped paying attention. I think Pablo still checks it now and then.”

Six weeks gone. Karl and Tania had probably assumed the worst by now, he thought, but he couldn’t begrudge the pact his crew had made.

The storm abated a few hours later, and Skyler helped Ana pack her gear before they set off for the farmhouse. She held his hand as they walked.

Pablo’s reaction to Skyler’s return was to prepare a dinner worthy of the event.

Wild hare roasted on a spit, with potatoes and carrots found in the nearby fields. Preservall bread dough scavenged in the depths of a looted grocery store a few kilometers away was flash-cooked in
La Gaza Ladra
’s tiny oven. The baguette that resulted tasted pretty good to Skyler. He soaked up the grease from his plate with a hunk of it while he recounted what had happened inside the dome.

“What did it feel like?” Vanessa asked when he’d finished. “Going through, I mean.” She’d traded her combat fatigues for a blue dress she’d likely found inside the farmhouse. The change in attire seemed to pull all the hardness from her face, her posture. For the first time since he’d met her, Skyler didn’t have to imagine how she’d looked before the world collapsed, before she’d been taken by Gabriel’s twisted cult.

“It felt like …” Skyler paused. He couldn’t find the right words. “It’s not fun, I can tell you that. In hindsight, I guess there was a point when part of my brain was inside and part outside, running at different speeds. Everything got out of synch, scrambled.”

Pablo dabbed the corners of his mouth with a cloth napkin. A surprising show of table etiquette from the rustic man. “What is this dome, really?”

“I’ve no idea,” Skyler said. “All I can tell you is, for whatever reason, time runs more slowly in there. There’s got to be something on top of that pinnacle, and my gut tells me we need to find out what it is before March arrives. That means I need to go back in there right away. Tomorrow, with climbing gear. I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here awhile longer. Through winter maybe.”

“What?” Ana’s question silenced the room. “Tomorrow?”

He tried to take her hand and she snatched it back. “Ana, listen. There’s no time to waste—”

“I just got you back, and now you think you’re going to leave me alone again? For
months
?”

“There’s no other way.” He could hear the impotency in his words and tried feebly to say the rest with his eyes.

Ana glared at him. Defiant at first, then simply cold. “There is another way,” Ana said. “I’m coming with you.”

Vanessa nodded agreement. “Me, too.”

Skyler raised his hands in protest. “Look, I appreciate the enthusiasm, but you’re forgetting that the dome prevented anyone else from entering last time. Only one of us can go.”

“We can try,” Ana said emphatically. “There’s no harm in it.”

Pablo leaned his chair back on two legs and shook his head. “Skyler’s right,” he said. “But either way, I’m staying. Someone should. Guard the Magpie, keep in contact with the colony.”

“It could be months,” Skyler said.

The man shrugged. “Farm life suits me, not giant alien domes.…”

“Vanessa and I are coming with you, Skyler,” Ana said. She hadn’t stopped looking at him while Pablo spoke. “We can all try going in at the same time, and see what happens.”

Skyler started to protest, but the women’s combined gaze felt like having laser beams focused on his forehead, burning into his skull. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll try.”

After the others fell asleep, Skyler pulled a blanket around his shoulders and took the pilot’s seat in the Magpie.

He switched on the comm. The link parameters were still set from the transmissions Ana had listened to, and within a second the headset crackled to life and a voice came across, in midsentence.

“… until our demands are met, and Skyler Luiken is delivered to us—”

“In a pink dress.”

“Yes, in a pink dress with a little bow across the chest.”

“That’s a sash.”

“What?”

“A sash goes across the chest. A bow goes in your hair.”

“My svelte ass it does. Go look it up.”

“You go look it up, and look up ‘fashion sense’ while you’re at it. No one wears a sash.”

Skyler fought to hold in laughter. He decided to let them go on a bit longer.

A few seconds of silence passed.

“I wore a sash once, actually,” the first speaker said.

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“Did it have words printed on it? Like, maybe, Princess of Anchor Station?”

“It had words, yes. Not those.”

“What then?”

“It said ‘Marcus is an insufferable prick.’ ”

Skyler cleared his throat. “Come in, Black Level. This is
La Gaza Ladra
.”

A commotion came through the headset. A drink spilled, someone cursed.

“Skyler, hello!” one of them finally said. “This is Marcus.”

“And Greg.”

“Greg’s here, too. Damn, it’s great to hear from you.”

Skyler smiled to himself. “Thanks. Do, uh, you broadcast like this twenty-four/seven?”

“Three hours every night,” Greg said. “I daresay it’s become performance art. Half of Black Level and most of Melville Station are probably listening. Hello, everyone.”

“I see,” Skyler said. “Well, sorry to drop in on your show, but maybe someone can go rouse Tania and switch this to a private channel? It’s urgent.”

“Sure thing,” Marcus said. “Give us a few minutes. Nice to hear from you; we’ve been … well, losing steam.”

A series of clicks followed. Five minutes passed and then Tania’s voice came through.

“My God, Skyler,” she said. “I … we’d almost given up hope.”

A familiar warmth coursed through him with the sound of her voice. Warmth he hadn’t expected, nor the sense of guilt that followed. He suppressed the urge to look over his shoulder, that he might find Ana standing there, as if he
were cheating on her. The call could have been made with everyone present, but Skyler had deliberately snuck off after the others slept to make it. For no reason he could put his finger on, he’d decided to keep his tenuous friendship with Tania separate from his relationship with Ana.

“Are you there?” she asked.

“I’m here. Sorry. It’s good to hear your voice.”

“Yours, too,” she said, a note of genuine sadness in her voice. He heard her let out a long breath. “Where are you? Is everyone okay?”

“We’re fine. We’re in Ireland, and we’ve found one of the tower groups. I’m sending the coordinates.”

The link went quiet, and he knew she was struggling to find a way to ask the next question without it being an accusation.

“Let me explain before you say anything,” he said. “The towers surround a dome. A … blister on the earth. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s huge, Tania, and you’ll never believe this, but time works differently inside it.”

“You went in?”

“We did,” he said. He saw no reason to tell her that the rest of the crew had waited outside and ignored the comm for more than a month. “Ten minutes in there and when we came back out six weeks had passed.”

“Six,” she paused. “Skyler, no offense, but time manipulation is the stuff of fiction. What you’re talking about is impossible.”

“Well, it happened. I think,” he said, working it out as he spoke, “I think it’s like the aura. Except instead of putting SUBS into stasis it puts everything into stasis, or nearly so. The air in there, it’s humid and has a strange odor. I think there’s a chemical component.”

“That’s … Coming from anyone else I’d assume this was a joke. Skyler, you’re lucky the air was even breathable. It was suicidal to go in without precautions.”

“Chastise me another time. There’s more, Tania. Inside there’s a, sort of an earthen pinnacle. It’s tall and sheer. We had no climbing gear, so we’re going back inside tomorrow properly equipped.”

“Why? Let’s get an observation team up there, study it—”

“Because something must be up there, Tania, and if for some reason it’s important there’s not a second to lose. Compared to the hell that awaits us within that circle in Belém, this is a much safer crash site to explore. Our only battle here is against the clock.”

“I don’t like this, Skyler.”

“I figured you wouldn’t, but we’re going. I figure we have an hour to scale it, see what’s there, and come back out.”

“Why an hour?” she asked. Then, “Oh, I see. Of course.”

“We want to be back outside before the Builders return. If they do, I mean.”

“There’s news on that front,” Tania said. Her voice shifted, the tone of sadness and relief replaced by urgency, business. “We’ve spotted the next ship.”

“Already? Did we screw up the date?”

“No,” she said. “The date is accurate. March seventh, or thereabouts.”

“Then how …”

“The ship is
massive
, Skyler.”