The Exodus Towers (69 page)

Tim took the statement as permission to zoom in on the inset piece. Soon the widescreen display in front of Tania was filled with a simple image of dark gray, with a lighter gray hexagon in the center. It looked in a metaphorical sense like a flag hanging before her in the room, and she wondered then if that was what she was indeed staring at: a ship identifier, like those painted on military boats on Earth for centuries.

“There’s something near the center,” Marcus said, pointing.

The image only hinted at it, but Marcus had it right. Just below the center of the hexagon Tania could see a bright red dot. She glanced at the smaller monitor off to the side and
studied the quadrant devoted to an infrared view. “Look at that,” she said.

Everyone turned. On infrared, five such dots glowed bright in a rough ring around the very center of the door. They brightened in unison, then faded. The cycle repeated at a pace that gave Tania the unsettling impression of a beating heart within.

“Zoom in,” she said.

“That’s max zoom,” Tim replied.

“Then go in farther.” She answered his next question before he could ask it. “Until we can see those lights close-up.”

Tim complied and the remote drone lurched forward in a burst of thrust. Tania’s focus alternated between the IR view, the distance-to-contact readout, and the main screen’s visible-light presentation.

As the craft moved closer—fifty meters, forty—the pinpoints of light became visible on the main screen. Then they became something more than single points of light, but shapes.

“There’s another hexagon in the center of them,” Marcus said.

Tania squinted. She couldn’t see it at first, but then found what he referred to. This five-sided portion was the same color as the surrounding one, and if not for the five lights around it she would have missed it. The only clue was a thin groove that marked its border with the area around it. The groove caught some of the light coming off the five pulsing beacons.

Five sides. Five lights. Five small shell ships crashed to Earth
. She shivered at the thought. But the aura towers dispersed in only four groups. That fact troubled her in a way she couldn’t explain.

When the craft loomed just twenty meters from the drone, Tim fired a braking thrust.

Tania stepped forward, studying the screen. The lights were not lights at all, she saw. Not exactly. They were more like portholes. She knew instinctively that the light coming through them was from a single, interior source. She’d had the same impression when she’d seen the pulsing grooves on the aura tower’s surface.

Each light was a shape: a circle, a square, a triangle, each with a minor imperfection. The fourth had an oval shape, with one side undulating in an even waveform. The last resembled an hourglass, albeit with small extensions on the top and bottom that reminded Tania of teeth.

No one spoke for a long time. Then Greg asked, “Is it a code?”

“Maybe that’s their writing,” Tim offered.

Tania nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. Like a ship moniker. An identification system.”

“Right,” Marcus said. “So you don’t confuse it with some other behemoth.”

“Everyone remember where we parked,” Greg said.

The room fell silent again as everyone tried to puzzle out the purpose of the shapes, as if staring at them long enough would somehow unravel the mystery. Tania felt like she’d been given just five characters of Kanji and was expected to learn Japanese from the clues.

“What now?” Tim asked after a minute or two had passed. “We’re at fifty percent fuel on the drone. Cap’s about the same.”

Tania sighed. She wished she was there herself so she could reach out and touch the surface, or peer inside those portholes. Prudence won out. “Bring it back.”

Marcus groaned in disappointment.

Tania ignored him. “Everyone get some rest, or study the recordings if you can’t sleep. We’ll meet in four hours to plan our next move.”

Eventually Greg and Marcus departed the room for their cabins, leaving Tania and Tim alone. She hadn’t moved from her place in front of the screen, which now replayed the drone’s footage in time lapse.

“Tim?”

“Yeah?”

“I want a list of all our vehicles capable of carrying walkers outside.”

“Okay. Does that mean we’re going to go take a look in person?”

“Someone should,” Tania said, knowing she’d go herself.

Cappagh, Ireland

Date imprecise

V
ANESSA TOOK A
cue from Skyler and left the dome to find a cart, or stretcher, anything that would help on their return walk with the unconscious Ana and the heavy alien object.

Skyler had barely drawn a breath when Vanessa reemerged, wheelbarrow rolling in front of her. She had a heavy coat on, and a dust of snow draped her shoulders.

“Good enough,” Skyler said. Together they lifted Ana in, resting her on a folded blanket Vanessa had tucked into the bottom. Once the girl was settled, they lifted the alien hourglass and placed it between her legs.

Then they each took one of the two handles and pushed together, the loaded wheelbarrow lurching through the churned and muddy ground.

When the front edge of the wheelbarrow hit the edge of the dome it began to bend the surface outward. As soon as the edge of the matte black hourglass object touched the dome, a brilliant purple-white light exploded across Skyler’s field of view. It enveloped him from every direction. He heard a sound like a cannon blast and had a sudden sensation of being underwater, surrounded by buoyant fluid. His vision blurred. He felt like the air was being sucked from his lungs.

Vanessa, next to him, was just a vague form, obscured in a milky purple glow. She screamed.

Then the fluid haze began to shatter and dissolve. Cracks of light appeared everywhere and grew wider. Skyler felt his mind begin to fracture in bizarre combinations of slow and fast, as if his vision had shattered like glass. Some shards
presented images of the outside, frozen in time, others the inside of the dome at full speed. The shards jumbled and fractured again. Some combined, snapping together like puzzle pieces. Gradually, over what at once seemed hours and mere fractions of a second, the shards that held the picture of the outside world began to win the titanic struggle, and the images in them began to accelerate in time as the shards themselves grew and fused.

A sound began to build, like an aircraft approaching, the noise amplifying in conjunction with the converging image of the outside world. When the last of the purple vanished from Skyler’s view, the sound peaked and vanished in a thundering boom that shook the ground under his feet.

He stumbled to one knee, Vanessa with him.

The purple dome had vanished. Skyler looked up in time to see a curved wall of white racing down toward him.

“Head down!” he shouted to Vanessa, as he threw himself over the wheelbarrow and Ana.

An avalanche of snow crashed around them, from where the dome’s edge had been toward the pinnacle at the center.

The dome had vanished, Skyler realized, and the snow that accumulated on top of it fell in one instant, dome-shaped sheet.

Bitter cold swallowed him. Vanessa screamed as ice pummeled the ground around them. Then Skyler felt as if someone had jumped on his back. He groaned under the sudden weight, the sensation of frozen slush on his exposed flesh.

The avalanche ended almost immediately. Skyler’s fear of being buried proved exaggerated, as he found himself under just a few centimeters of the white powder. He leapt off the cart and brushed snow from Ana’s face and hair.

“It’s over,” he said to Vanessa, who cowered against the metal side of the wheelbarrow. He staggered to his feet and helped her do the same. “We’re out. It’s over.”

She coughed and looked him over before turning to see the winter world around them. “What happened?”

“When that thing hit the edge, the dome disintegrated.”

“It felt like …” Vanessa stopped, shivered. “God, I don’t know what. A nightmare. A hallucination.”

“Yeah,” he said. “One time frame collapsing and another rushing in.”

“Let’s—oh shit.”

Skyler barely had time to register the urgency in her voice when Vanessa crouched and drew both pistols he’d given her. He brought his gun to the ready without fully understanding why, simply because the woman had done so. Only when Vanessa started shooting did he understand.

The blue areas within the dome had collapsed as well, and in the snow around them a handful of subhumans were struggling up after being pummeled with the accumulated snow. Vanessa shot three dead before Skyler could manage to find his wits and aim. He put down the last, and then everything went silent.

“Is that the last of them?” Vanessa asked.

A sudden change in the environment around them cut Skyler’s reply short. Something that had been there a moment ago vanished, though he couldn’t quite figure out what. A sound had gone, like being in a room when the ventilation system suddenly turns off. Vanessa looked around. She’d noticed it, too.

“The towers,” she said. “They’re dark again.”

Skyler looked at the nearest pillar in the circle that now marked where the dome had been. True to Vanessa’s word, the trace wave pattern of purple light within it had vanished. Once again it looked like it had before the exodus: black, and dead. The other towers around the perimeter stood dark as well. Skyler shuffled over to the close one, hugging himself against the bite of a frigid breeze, and pushed the massive object.

It didn’t budge.

“The hell …” He paused. The hum from the towers had begun again. A whisper, but there and building. “Jesus. What now?”

Vanessa grabbed Skyler’s arm and pulled. “Let’s move away. Something is happening.”

Together they pushed the wheelbarrow a dozen meters away from the edge of the circle into a snow-dappled field.
By the time they turned to study the circle of aura towers again, the black obelisks had begun to move.

Not all of them, Skyler realized, but exactly half. Every other tower pulled inward, drawn toward the partially buried shell ship in the center. Then with remarkable coordination they began to form into a wedge, the sharp point aimed along the path etched in the ground, toward Belém.

The towers that remained in the circle formation around the crashed ship suddenly parted, and the wedge group began to move.

“They’re going back,” Vanessa whispered.

“Half, anyway.” Skyler tried to imagine some version of reality where this all made sense. He watched the towers pick up speed as they slid along the ground, eerily upright despite the undulations in the ground.

“I call this a success,” Vanessa said, a proud grin on her face. “The colony can certainly use them. And if we manage the same result at the other three sites—”

“—there will be a hundred plus in camp again,” he said, finishing her thought.

“Maybe we get one of these weird little trophies each time, too.”

Skyler found himself nodding, but in his mind the puzzle pieces still refused to fit together. “Right,” he muttered. “Let’s get back to the Magpie, get Ana home and fixed up. We also need to warn Karl.”

“Warn him of what?”

“Those towers,” Skyler said. “Nice as it is that they’re coming home, if Exodus doesn’t start planning to make room for their arrival it’s going to be another fiasco.”

Wrapped in a musty wool blanket, bandaged hands clutched around a steaming mug of tea, Skyler waited for the comm link to turn green. He’d muttered silent thanks that he’d not turned it on in the middle of another Greg and Marcus broadcast.

It was the last day of February. They’d found Pablo in the barn, cleaning a rabbit carcass for meat. The man looked thin and sported a beard that hadn’t been there before. Other
than a query about Ana’s injury, he said little when the party arrived. Skyler could see the relief in Pablo’s eyes, but the man’s restrained demeanor gave no more insight into how he’d fared while awaiting their return. Six months alone with only his thoughts. When Skyler asked if he’d heard from the colony he just shrugged. “Once a week. I tell them there’s no news; they tell me that they hope we’ll hurry. The ship is close now, that doctor says.”

With the cold had come subhumans. Pablo figured they sought warmth, and after the first encounter he’d spent most of his time inside the barricaded farmhouse, watching from the second-floor windows for the creatures. He culled the local population by building a bonfire in the adjacent field, picking a few off as they came like moths to the bright blaze. The visits all but stopped after that. He’d either killed them all, or they’d learned to avoid the area.

The link indicator turned green.

“Pablo?”

“It’s Skyler, Tania.”

He heard a sharp intake of breath. “You’re okay,” she said. “Oh my God, Skyler, you’re alive.”

“We all are,” he said. “More or less. Tania, we found something—”

She spoke over him. “Skyler, please come back. Today, right now. I …” She trailed off. There was desperation in her voice he hadn’t heard since the day he found her locked in her cabin on Anchor Station. “So much has happened. Another ship has arrived. And we had another of those vibrations on the Elevator, a discharge of electricity. Something’s wrong. I need your wisdom.”