The Exodus Towers (65 page)

Neil used to tell a story in interviews. She remembered the first time she’d heard it. Neil and Sandeep, sitting together, opposite an interviewer. The woman had asked why they chose Darwin to base the massive expansion of Platz Industries, the company Neil’s father had built into an empire. “We flipped a coin, actually,” Neil had said. “Heads, Australia. Tails, India. I won, obviously, and thought the Northern Territory would be perfect. Close to Malaysia, close to China beyond. We needed materials and brainpower.”

“Why not just build in Kuala Lumpur, or Singapore?” the interviewer had asked.

Neil sat forward. Her father, Sandeep, had been uncharacteristically blank during the exchange. She’d always assumed it was because he’d lost the coin flip, the chance to base their family in his homeland.

“Money,” Neil had quipped. “You wouldn’t believe the tax breaks we were given.” Then he’d laughed with the interviewer. Sandeep had only smiled.

He’d only smiled because he knew the real reason Darwin had been chosen.

“All that time,” Tania said to the ceiling. “They knew about Darwin the whole time. Forty years. They must have … God,
they must have found the Builder ship when they were practically kids. On their first mission together.”

Zane said nothing. He’d hardly reacted at all, in fact.

She whirled on him. The vagueness of his gaze still made her uncomfortable. “Did you know about this, Zane?”

“No,” he said, numb. “I always chalked it up to incredible luck. Neil had always been lucky. A gene I didn’t inherit, or so I thought.”

Somewhere deep within Tania a coldness began to grow. She tried to ignore it, then to willingly banish it, but the cold festered and grew. Neil knew all along. “He knew the whole time,” Tania said aloud. “Neil. He knew about Darwin, he knew about the disease.”

“Hold on—”

“He knew that billions would die and yet he did nothing.”

“No,” Zane said. “No, I refuse to believe that. Neil was a ruthless entrepreneur, granted, but he could not have stood by and let something like that happen.”

Tania barely heard him. “My mother went to India to fight the disease. My father went, too. Neil could have stopped them.”

“Stop that, Tania. Stop it now.”

“He let them die to protect … to protect …”

Zane gripped her arm. “We don’t know what happened, Tania. We don’t know what they knew. You’re speculating.” He practically spat the last word, and began to cough.

She thought back to her conversations with Neil in the years after the disease. He’d encouraged her to explore the theory of more Builder events to come. In fact, the more she thought about it, all the key ideas on how to approach the problem had come from him, though he’d always voiced them as offhand comments or random musings. He’d left it to her to form the theory to the point where she felt like it had been her own.

Of course. He had to. If he’d admitted to knowing the Builders’ timetable, he admitted to prior knowledge of the space elevator in Darwin. Worse—far, far worse—the disease. Without knowing how much Neil knew it would be unfair to assume he could have done anything to save lives.
In hindsight he’d clearly known to buy the land in Nightcliff, to form the vast Spaceworks division of Platz Industries. It stood to reason, then, that he’d known something about the disease. And yet Tania couldn’t think of anything Neil had done, overt or covert, to save his friends, his family. He’d allowed her mom to go to India to study the illness. And her father …

The lack of details around the circumstances of his death hung in her mind like a black hole.

… He destroyed it…
.

He’d gone on a mission to one of the old, pre-Elevator space stations. Emergency repair work in a time when half the world had died or gone mad. And then the station had been destroyed. An explosion, a freak accident. No survivors.

… He destroyed it…
.

Why? Why not tell the world, Father?

Tania could think of only one reason why her father would destroy the first evidence of alien intelligence: guilt. He and Neil had sat on the information for decades, judging by when the Platz operations began to expand into the Northern Territory. They’d profited immensely. They’d hidden the greatest discovery in history from all of mankind.

… He destroyed it…
.

“What are you thinking, dear girl?” Zane asked, his voice a whisper full of gravel.

She squeezed her eyes closed to wring out the last of her tears. The mental hurdle cleared her mind.
I’m thinking what I’d say to Neil, and my father, if they were still here
. She decided Zane didn’t need to know that, after all he’d been through. “Six events,” she said. “This ship approaching is the fifth. Which means …”

Zane gripped her shoulder, then patted it. “One to go.”

“One to go,” she agreed. Her dreams of late were of skies filled with thousands of Builder shells, encircling the Earth like Jupiter’s rings, arriving yearly, then monthly. Daily. Hourly. Long after she’d died of old age they kept coming, until they blotted out the sun.

One to go
, she thought.
At least this will all be over soon. A year from now, give or take
.

“You won’t,” Zane said, then paused. “You won’t tell anyone, will you? About Neil, I mean.”

“I’m not sure yet,” Tania said honestly.

Cappagh, Ireland

Date imprecise

“GO NOW!”

His second shout broke through Ana’s daze so completely that he could see the transformation occur. In the time it took to blink her eyes, Ana hardened. A level of concentration, of intent, absent an instant before, flared into her eyes and the set of her jaw. She took one glance down, pivoted, and leapt down to a ledge a meter below her. Then again to another.

Skyler followed, grinding his teeth with each ache and complaint his body threw at him, unable to match Ana’s pace. Below, he saw her reach the point of the sloped column base where she could half-run, half-fall the rest of the way, and then she pulled to a halt, suddenly unsure where to focus her wrath. The shifting red shapes reacted to her presence, fanning out again, darting with dizzying speed across her field of view.

The one prone red smear had still not moved since Vanessa fired into it. The object that had snatched up Vanessa, at least the one Skyler guessed had done so—they all looked the same to him—moved differently than the others. Erratic, as if broken or maimed.

Skyler reached the slope and bounded down the incline. He yanked his ice axe from its belt loop and hefted it in his right hand, making a straight line toward the object that had struck Vanessa. In the corner of his eye he saw Ana glance toward him and begin to move his way.

The red object loomed in front of Skyler, still dancing
about in impossible, abrupt movements. Suddenly it was right in front of him. He roared and swung down.

Skyler’s axe hit the shape with no result at first, as if he’d hit nothing but air. Then a resistance slowed the axe blade, and he felt as if he’d just swung down on a giant pillow. At the point his blade stopped and should have rebounded, Skyler saw the red-hued morass curl and conform around him. With an alien
pop
, the field surrounded and then consumed him, just as the dome had done when he entered.

Just before becoming enveloped, Skyler saw the red shape bulge and something dart out. He saw enough to register Vanessa tumbling away before he was inside.

And then he understood. These were pockets of time, or, rather, fields identical to the dome itself, only much smaller and on a different clock.

A subhuman stood scant centimeters away. Blood trailed from the corner of its mouth, and it held a patch of Vanessa’s shirtsleeve in one clenched, black-coated fist. And though his former opponent had just dived aside, the creature already had turned itself toward Skyler, coiled, and swung.

Unfortunately for the creature, it had aimed its attack based on Skyler’s speed before he’d entered the faster-moving pocket. Skyler entered to see the fist, black to the wrist, swing wide past his head. The being’s upper arm smacked against Skyler’s head with no real force behind it.

Their eyes were inches apart. Skyler smelled the foul stench on its breath, saw the individual capillaries in its bloodshot eyes.

Movement behind it caught Skyler’s attention. Vanessa, or so he assumed, for the red blob that surrounded him made everything beyond murky. She bounded toward the creature’s back in slow motion, constrained by the slower time scale just outside the red pocket that seemed to cling to the subhuman.

“Deaaaattthhhh,” the creature hissed, whipping Skyler’s attention back.

“You first.” He swung up with his axe, intending to spike the sub’s abdomen. But it bounded back in the same instant. The head of the axe sailed upward, slicing the creature’s chin open in a spray of blood.

The being howled. It swiped one hand in reflexive counterattack while Skyler’s arm still extended upward from his swing. The black-coated fist caught him in the side just above the waist, a solid blow that drove Skyler to one knee.

Blood dripping from its chin, the subhuman reeled back and lifted its other arm to swing down on Skyler’s head.

Then Vanessa’s form pressed into the border of the red aura and she popped through. She came in low, barreled into the back of the creature’s legs, and lifted upward all in one motion. The surprised subhuman vaulted into the air and flipped completely over, landing face-first in the churned earth.

Twenty years of jujitsu
, Skyler had time to think.

Vanessa wasted no time. She spun and jumped simultaneously, twisting in midair. She landed on the creature’s back with both knees and Skyler heard the air rush from the subhuman’s lungs just before Vanessa gripped its head with both hands and twisted savagely.

The animal went limp.

“Thanks,” Skyler croaked.

“You okay?” Vanessa asked.

“Where’s Ana?”

She shook her head, didn’t know.

“Where’s your gun?”

Vanessa shook her head again, standing up. “Dropped it somewhere.”

The ground beneath their feet rumbled. Around them vague shapes moved around the dome floor. Some slow, some at what felt more like real time. All were too obscure to make out from within their own time-shifted pocket. Skyler glanced down at his axe, stood, and hefted it. He looked at Vanessa.

She had no axe, but when she saw him ready his she seemed to suddenly understand the situation they were in. She reached to her calf and unholstered a hunting knife. The carbon-coated blade took on the color of blood inside the red field.

“Find Ana,” Skyler said, “and find that Builder object. Then we go.”

“Agreed.” Then, “Hey. Move with your axe held out before you. Use their speed against them.”

He nodded.

Again the floor of the dome trembled. A crack shot across the ground just centimeters from Skyler’s feet. He leapt back on instinct as the fracture widened. It went on, the gap as wide as a hand, then almost a full meter in places. Rock and clumps of soil tumbled in.

Skyler felt a pressure against his back and realized too late that he’d come to the edge of the red pocket, which seemed …

“The red blob,” Skyler blurted. “It’s attached to them somehow.”

It seemed patently obvious when he said it, but up until that moment he’d hoped that perhaps it would move with him as he went after the others. No such luck.

Vanessa looked down at the creature by her feet, then back at him. He had enough time to see her grin before he popped through the shifting edge of the red space and back into the “normal” time frame of the dome.

His mind scrambled again, but the effect was starting to become something he could manage now, like a pilot learning to handle the press of g-forces. He hunkered, forcing himself to stop and focus on everything and nothing until the neurons in his brain started to fire in synchronicity again.

Ana was nowhere to be seen. All about him the reddish smears of time flowed between the chunks of upthrust earth and rock. He saw one misjudge its path and drop into a crevice formed in the last jolt the dome experienced. There were some purple auras among the red now, moving at a speed closer to reality. In a few places, blue-hued shapes were just starting to lift out of their craters, implying that the color and rate of time’s passage were linked. He filed that and swung his attention to the red fields again. A few were close by, and from what he knew of being inside the accelerated pocket, the world outside was not much more clear than shadows and hazy forms. If he stayed far enough away, they’d miss him. That explained, he thought, their erratic movement. They were searching, and as far as he could tell
none were moving outside the dome and the aura towers that encircled it.

He heard movement behind and spun about too late. A red was speeding past diagonally to him, and when it came within a few meters the shape’s lead tendrils seemed to flow down invisible channels that led straight to Skyler.

Unaware he’d been doing so, he found he held the axe in front of him as Vanessa had suggested. The red blob hit him, enveloped him, forcing his mind to snap once again between two clocks. He shuddered and put all his thought into holding on to the axe as the creature within the ruby cavity slammed into him.