Earth is just like I pictured it, but so much bigger. It’s hard not to crouch down in fear when I look up at the overarching blue sky. And despite all the training, I feel tired. My muscles are protesting this heavy gravity, and I can tell Ghost feels the same.
We thought we’d arrive as conquerors, hailed as returning heroes by these empty lands, but the Earth cares nothing for us. Not only that—something down here is openly hostile to our presence.
Ghost and I used to make a blanket fort in the creche’s Nest—what we called the common room—hiding away from the world.
I wish there was a way to hide here.
It sucks to be an adult.
—Hera’s Journal, 6.19.2282
Ghost and Hera made their way along the old cracked road, dashing from cover to cover. The dead grove provided hiding places for about half the way, but after that it thinned out, and they had to find other things to provide cover.
Ghost was nervous, outside and exposed to danger. They’d already seen one drone and had no idea how many others there might be, if they were running on a standard patrol grid, or if one might just pop up out of nowhere at any time.
The dropnauts weren’t carrying much that could be used offensively. The mission planners, including Sam, had considered the possibility that they might run into drones, but it had been thought highly unlikely so long after the Crash.
Better to avoid the blasted things altogether than to chance a potentially deadly encounter.
Most of the tools they had were rendered useless by the shimmer screen, and they had thrown a lot of their training out of the window.
But one thing stuck. No matter where you land, get to the base. It’s where Tien and Rai would be headed, if they had survived. They must be alive.
“What now?” Hera peered over the last fallen tree trunk at the way ahead.
The closest farmhouse was still about fifty meters away. It looked pretty sturdy to Ghost, especially for being at least a hundred and twenty years old. The back corner had collapsed inward, but the rest of the structure was holding up.
Ghost pointed. “There’s a culvert about ten yards over that way, under the road.”
Hera nodded. “I see it.”
He tried not to think about how being this close to her, being alone with her, made him feel. I will not fuck this one up too. He and Hera were better off as friends. If he tried hard enough, he could convince himself of that. Eventually. “I’ll go first and signal when it’s safe to follow—”
But Hera was already gone, running in a crouch toward the dip in the ground next to the old roadway.
Dammit, Hera. Ghost took a quick look around and decided it was as safe as it was going to get. He ran after her. “You have absolutely no sense of self-preservation.” He settled down next to her, huffing from the run.
She laughed. “That’s rich, coming from the guy who has absolutely no common sense.”
Her laugh filled him with warmth. Even if she was laughing at him. “Hey. I’ve got plenty of—”
“Look!” She was staring at something in the metal pipe that led under the road.
“What?” He knelt next to her. “Looks like a drainpipe to me.”
“No, right here!” She poked at midair.
He refocused his gaze. “Oooh.” A spider hung there, an exotic eight-legged orange creature banded with brown stripes.
“She’s beautiful.” Hera reached out toward the little creature.
It scrambled away into the pipe, disappearing into darkness.
“You should be careful. It might be poisonous.”
Hera stared at him. “I know that.”
Ghost sighed. Always saying the wrong thing. “I mean—”
“There’s still life down here, Ghost. Besides just the grasses, and in spite of everything we did to kill this planet. Birds, spiders… who knows what else? Just think what that means.”
Hera had always been better at the big picture stuff than he was, but she was right. For all its efforts, humankind hadn’t been able to entirely destroy their homeworld. “I know. But still… why couldn’t it be something cuter and fuzzier? Like an otter? Or a lemur? Or maybe even a koala?”
Hera smirked. “Wrong hemisphere. Plus I read koalas could be mean sons-of-bitches. You’re more of a softie than you like to let on.” She kissed his cheek. “Come on!”
She was off again, and Ghost after her, following her lead.
They zigged and zagged from one cover to another, hiding behind a rock here and a rusting piece of farm equipment there, finally reached the front door of the farmhouse.
Ghost stared up at it. It was much more ramshackle up close than it had appeared from across the yard.
He had second thoughts about entering. They set down their packs in the yard, looking up at the ancient home.
“Come on!” It seemed Hera hadn’t even gotten past her first thoughts. She pulled him up onto the porch, which barely seemed to hold their weight, protesting their presence with a loud groan. She pulled open the door and disappeared inside.
Afternoon sunlight streamed through broken windows. Any window coverings had long since rotted away. The floorboards groaned with every step.
Ghost stared at them. Seeing actual wood used for construction… it was so much more beautiful than gumdust.
He knelt to pick up a picture frame that lay face-down on the ground, brushing off the dust.
A woman and man smiled back at him, floating above the surface of the frame in SD.
He set it back down, unnerved at their seeming happiness before the world-ending tragedy. They had no idea what was coming.
“So what are we looking for?” Hera was nosing through a closet. A shelf collapsed, showering her with dust and making her sneeze.
“Careful! This place is probably being held together by gum dust and fairy wings!” Ghost looked around through the living room and kitchen. “For these people to live here, either the shimmer field was never on, or they had something that allowed them to block its effects.” He started exploring the walls.
Hera dusted off her hair and face. “Makes sense.”
“They could have used some kind of heavy-duty special coating on the wires, which would have worked on anything in the walls.” He found an outlet and pried the cover off with his hands. The plastic broke easily, exposing the wires behind it. He pulled one out. “See? This is shielded.” It was thick—as big round as his thumb—and wrapped in some kind of black plastic. He snorted. “They really did use petroleum for everything.” He set the cable down, pulled out his knife, and sliced it in half. “Good thing it’s not live.” He held it up so she could see it. “Lead sheathing.”
He wished he had a month to explore the house, the ships out on the battlefield, every bit of the old Earth tech that lay abandoned everywhere here—to pull it apart and see what made it tick. His engineer brain was in heaven.
Hera was exploring the house. “It’s so weird to think someone actually lived here, over a hundred years ago.” She knelt to pick up something off the floor, dusting it off.
It was a hard-bound book, old-style, no 3D illustration, showing a brown, furry cartoon animal. She held it up for him to see. “Wump World.” Hera frowned. “Never heard of a wump before.” She opened it, and the contents fell apart, creating a fine, glittering dust.
Hera threw the book away and sneezed. “It’s all dust in here.
“That’s what you get for nosing around someone else’s place.”
She shrugged. “They’re long dead.” She rounded a deteriorating couch and her face went pale. “Here’s one of them.”
Ghost joined her, looking down at the former occupant. The body was small, maybe four feet long. It lay on the floor next to the couch on its back, its arm reaching toward a collapsed chair. It was all bones now, wrapped in a bit of remaining cloth.
Another form was slumped over in the chair.
Ghost’s stomach twisted, and he ran out the front door, not caring if he brought the porch down on top of himself. He fell to the ground outside, throwing up the contents of his stomach.
“Hey, you okay?” Hera was beside him almost instantly, rubbing his back.
“I just didn’t expect….” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
A child. He knew children had died in the Crash. Everyone had died, including probably billions of kids. But still, to see one of them like that… It was heartbreaking.
“Come here.” She helped him up to the steps. They looked like wood, but they were probably made of plas or some other artificial substance. Wood wouldn’t have survived out in the elements this long.
“It doesn’t bother you?”
She nodded. “Sure it does. But I’ve seen a lot more of it. I spent weeks reviewing the tapes from the drone Sam sent down to Mexico City. Remember?”
Ghost nodded. It felt weird to be comforted by Hera instead of doing the comforting, but he thought he could get used to it.
She put out her hand, opening it to show him something. “Both of the bodies had these.”
They were small buttons the size of his thumbnail.
He picked them up to look them over.
He pulled out his flashlight and put one of the dots on top of it. He held it out in the sunshine, and immediately it started to charge in the sunlight.
He kissed her cheek. “Hera, you’re brilliant.”
“I am?”
“Yes. I think these are field cancellers—the things I was looking for. With them, we can use our electronics, including our communications.”
Hera nodded. “But are you sure we should? Someone might be listening.”
“We have seen no signs of life, beyond the zongi trees, the bird, the grass, and the spider.” He grinned. “Unless you think the spider has it in for us.”
She shoved him back on his ass. “Stop being a smartass. Something shot the Zhenyi out of the sky. And there was a drone.”
Ghost paled. “True.” He looked at the field cancellers again. “They have a clasp. Here.” He reached up and attached one to her collar, then pulled away quickly.
“Thanks. Let me do yours.”
Ghost nodded and handed it over.
Hera reached up and fastened it gently on his collar. Her fingers were warm against his neck.
He got up abruptly, moving away from her to lean on one of the porch posts. “We should probably get going—”
The post collapsed, and the house behind them groaned loudly.
“Run!” Hera grabbed his arm and dragged him away from the farmhouse as the whole thing staggered and then collapsed with a loud crash into a pile of dust and broken debris.
They landed on a patch of thick grass, knocking the air out of him.
Ghost sat up, trying to catch his breath, looking back at where the house had stood.
“You okay?” Hera put a hand on his shoulder, but he was too busy suffocating to protest. He gasped, desperate for air, and at last managed to suck in a deep breath. He put his face down in his lap and just inhaled and exhaled, glorying in the ability to breathe again.
“Ghost, you okay?”
He nodded. “I will be.” Slowly his breathing returned to normal. “Knocked the air right out of me.” He crawled over to his pack and pulled out his mapper. “We need to figure out where we’re going.”
Hera stared at him across the empty farmyard. “Do you think Rai and Tien survived?” Her voice cracked a little at the end.
Their teammates had been on his mind too, since they’d landed. “Yes, I do. They were well trained. They’ll have figured something out.” He was outwardly confident with Hera, but inside he wasn’t so sure. This new world held too many unexpected dangers and surprises.
The mapper flared to life. It had the general landscape from Sam’s earlier satellite surveys. “Look, we’re right here.” He pointed to a series of long foothills. “Best I can tell, Tien and Rai dropped over here.”
Hera wasn’t paying attention, staring instead across the yard.
“Take a look. It’s not all that far—”
Her hand grasped his chin, turning his head in the direction she was staring.
The drone they’d seen earlier, or one just like it, hovered twenty meters away.
“Got it!”
Sanya sat up, her back sore from dozing at a weird angle on the gumdust chair. She’d been daydreaming about Avri. “Got what?” She rubbed her eyes and grabbed the mug of syncaff he’d given her. It was stone cold, but she drank it anyway. She needed the caffeine.
She tapped her temple. It was one fifteen in the morning.
“Here. Look.” Rafe swiped something from the deck up into the air between them, a wavering series of blue lines.
“What am I looking at?” She’d woken up in the middle of the night dozens of times with a man at her disposal. But somehow this time was a lot less fun.
“It’s the cleaned-up voice print. Let me run it through the registry.”
“There’s a registry?”
“Yes. Every time you talk to your loop or to Alpha, your voice is recorded. The system knows your voice so it can respond appropriately when you say “call Rafe” or “get me that syncaff brand I liked before.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.” She’d never really thought about it that way. “So can anyone see these voice prints?” That would have been really handy for a few stories.
“Not really. But I have special level access. Give me a sec.” His hands danced across his deck like a virtuoso piano player.
She saw him in a new light after the time they’d spent together trying to crack the voice print. In public, he played the cad, the guy who could make or break you in the eyes of the city press, and by extension, everyone in Redemption.
But in private, he was a tech geek at heart, happy to be spinning from stack to stack.
She liked this Rafe much better. “How long—”
“And done.” He frowned. “That’s odd.”
“What?” Her brain was too tired to process odd.
“There’s no match.”
“That’s weird. Maybe someone disguising their voice?”
He shook his head. “Not possible. We had a big enough sample, and it cleaned up nice.” He put his chin on his hands, staring at the print. “Something’s strange here.”
Sanya laughed. “You’re just figuring that out?” She’d been neck-deep in strange for weeks, and it had her worried.
“No, I mean with this print. Look.” He spread his hands, and the print spread out, revealing more bars. “Normal human voices have natural variations in pitch. We can expect the voice to go up at the end of a question, or down when someone tells a secret. But this… it’s a little too uniform.”
“You think it’s a fake?”
“Maybe… or maybe run through a synthesizer, though that still wouldn’t be enough to fool the registry…” He ran his hands across the deck. “Give me a sec.”
She sat back and let him work. She pinged Terry back at the RedNews.
-Whassup? Don’t you know it’s one in the morning?-
-And you’re sleeping?-
She could see his grin in her head. -Of course not, or I wouldn’t have answered.-
-You would too. You’re always looking for a scoop.-
There was a brief silence. -Yeah, I probably would. So?-
-Hold a space for me in tomorrow’s morning bulletin.-
-You mean today’s?-
She laughed. Rafe glared at her. -Sorry. Can’t talk much. Yes, today. I’ll ping you when I have more.-
-Deal.-
She closed the connection and waited for Rafe to finish doing whatever he was doing.
“Gotcha.” Rafe looked up at her, and his excitement faded to dread.
“What?” She’d had enough excitement herself for one day. Odd was bad enough, but she certainly wasn’t ready for dread.
“It’s artificial.”
“What the hissing hell?”
“Look.” He pulled up another pattern and put it next to the first one. This one was a series of white lines. It wasn’t an exact match to the blue one, but close. “So?”
He slapped up another. Its yellow lines were all over the map, far different from the first two. “The yellow one is you. The white one is Alpha. The blue one—I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s not human.”
“Could someone have used a synthesized voice?”
Rafe nodded. “Maybe? This looks more sophisticated, but I guess it’s possible. You said this came from the Launchpad?”
She nodded. Her mind took one of those intuitive leaps that made her an ace reporter. “Rafe, who sent you that bundle of data when the power went out?”
His face went pale. “I don’t know.
It wasn’t the answer she expected. A chill ran down her spine. “What the hell did we just find?”
The door to the office slid closed.
She stared at him. “Did you do that?”
Rafe shook his head.
A strange hissing filled the room.
Rafe jumped up and sprinted to the door, palming the sensor. It wouldn’t open.
Sanya was feeling light-headed.
“Hold your breath. The air!” He pointed to the vent and grabbed her hand.
She couldn’t work out if he meant something was coming in, or the air was going out, but holding her breath seemed like a good idea either way.
He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to the back wall and waved away the jungle. It melted into nothing, revealing a door with a manual knob.
She stared at it, as surprised as if she had just run across an Earther.
Rafe pulled something out of his pocket—a metal object—and inserted it into the lock.
A key. What the cracking hell? Sanya felt like Alice falling into Wonderland.
Her lungs were burning.
Rafe fumbled with the lock, and at last the door unlatched. He pulled it open—it practically exploded into the room—and fresh air slammed them in the face.
That answered that. The air was being sucked out of the room.
Someone was trying to kill them.
She managed a grateful breath as Rafe hauled the door shut behind them and led her down a flight of stairs into darkness.