I should be thinking about survival. I should be scared as heck about what might happen next.
But instead, it’s like my world has opened up. A month ago, I was one of the last people alive on Earth. Maybe in the Universe. My life was a long, gray descent into obscurity.
Now, there are possibilities. Places to go. Things I never thought I’d see. And Rai.
It’s hard to be scared when you’re consumed with possibility…
—Aidan’s Journal, 6.19.2282
Sam paused on a hillside overlooking the base. The sun was low on the horizon, the storm from earlier in the day gone as if it never existed. A warm breeze blew up from the south.
...access: weather report…
The new relay system was working well. Dek fed him the weather forecast—no more storms for the next twenty-four hours, but it would get hot tonight.
The EMP field still glittered around the site—a dome that stretched above it two point five kilometers high.
Down there, somewhere, were his dropnauts.
He could cancel out the effects of the field for himself, given enough time. He would just have to figure out its frequency. Then he could find and rescue his crew.
...access > communications module…
He uplinked to the station. “Launchpad, this is Sam. Any word from Team Two?”
“No, sorry.” It was Lorelei. “We’ve got the other teams deployed for constant coverage.”
He was pleased to see how well the relay was working. “Please get me the Gday, the Zulu and the Liánhuā on com.”
“Just a sec.” She sounded nervous. “Nice to hear from you, sir.”
“Likewise.” He waited impatiently, eager to get to the edge of the field.
“Team Three here, Sam.” That was Corey on the Gday.
“Team Four here.” Denis, for the Zulu.
“Ying Yue and team here.” The Liánhuā.
“This is Sam—I’m almost to Martinez Base.”
“Have you found them yet?” Corey sounded worried too.
“Not yet. The EMP Field is still up, so I’ve got to find a way to counter it. I may be unable to contact you once I do, until we can find a way to shut it down entirely.”
“Do you think they’re okay?” That was Pix on the Liánhuā. Their voice cracked at the end.
Sam understood. It was difficult not knowing the status of the Zhenyi’s team. “I don’t have any reason to think otherwise yet.” It wasn’t a yes, but it was the best he could give them.
There was silence on the line for a long moment.
“We’ll find them.” Terra sounded certain, and the rest joined in.
“Of course we will.”
“They’re probably camping down there with marshmallows over a cheery fire.”
“We’ll all laugh about this tomorrow.”
Sam nodded. He had selected his dropnauts wisely. They would find a way to keep going, to figure things out even when the future seemed bleakest. Even the team from the Zhenyi. Each one a shiny moonstone pulled out of the gray dust. “I’ll contact you all again before I go in. Stay strong.”
He was about to cut the connection when Lorelei’s voice came across the comm again.
“Sam? This just came in from Redemption. For your ears only. Something’s going on up there.”
“What is it?”
“There are widespread reports of glitches and errors across the city. Airlocks spontaneously venting, power going out, and the like.”
“Get me a channel to Alpha.”
“I’ve tried. Alpha’s not responding.”
That stunned him. “Keep trying and let me know as soon as you have anything to add.” Alpha always responded. For the first time, he regretted his rash decision to come down here. Maybe the station manager had been right.
“Will do.”
“You’re doing a great job, Lorelei.” Sam knew by now that humans needed encouragement, and he’d taught himself to supply it, even when they were just doing their jobs.
“Thanks, Sam.” The relief in her voice was palpable. “I’ll contact you as soon as anything else comes in.”
“Sam out.”
He stared at the shimmering base below. Trouble down here, and now trouble back home. The odds that the two were unconnected were astronomical.
He set off at a trot toward the perimeter of the EMP field, determined to get inside to help the dropnauts of the Zhenyi. His people.
Rai rested against the cool plascrete wall of the tunnel, his breath heaving in and out of his chest like steam from a jumper. The hallway was long and gray, both the wall and floor made of gray plascrete. There were no visible doors along the walls.
Aidan sat next to him, his chest heaving up and down, his face pale and his eyes closed.
They’d finally outrun the flood. Or out-climbed it, at least.
The flashlight was slowly fading, letting in the darkness.
He cranked it back up and reached for his pack, then cursed when it wasn’t there. Stupid hissing drone. And the fuckall of it was he was thirsty. Really thirsty, his mouth dry as the lunar surface in full sunlight.
All that water, and not a drop fit to drink.
Cracking hell, I’ve made a mess of things. He’d lost his pack and his team and been run ragged to who-in-the-hell-knew-where underground. I should have stayed home.
Aidan shrugged off his waterlogged pack and rolled over to lay on his side. “I want to die.”
Rai barked out a laugh. “I know. All those stairs.” He’d thought they would have reached the surface by now. But the passage had leveled out at a pair of solid banded metal doors that were open about a foot, just enough for the two of them to squeeze their way through if Aidan took off his pack.
With a bit of effort, they’d managed to pull them closed with a loud clang that echoed down the long hall. If there was anyone—or anything—down there, they would be well alerted to the invaders’ presence.
Rai smacked his dry lips and took a deep breath. He pushed himself to his feet, cranking the flashlight again. Nothing but to go on.
Aidan clutched his stomach.
“You okay?”
“Just overexerted, I think. Don’t talk for a minute.” He looked a bit green.
Might just be the light. Rai nodded. He’d done that once, in the first week of training on the Launchpad. He’d felt light-headed and his stomach had twisted. Soon he’d been in the head, throwing up everything he’d had for breakfast and maybe the entire day before.
Not a pleasant memory.
He knelt beside Aidan’s pack. There was a canteen strapped to the outside.
After freeing it, he cranked the flashlight again and knelt next to Aidan, pouring a little water on his hand and wiping it across Aidan’s forehead.
“Better?”
Aidan nodded, then shook his head. His head flipped away, and he threw up on the cool floor.
Rai rubbed Aidan’s back, feeling a strange sense of intimacy with this stranger from another world. “Just lie still. It will pass.” He held up the canteen. “Do you mind?”
Aidan shook his head miserably.
Rai took a couple small sips of the tepid water. It tasted sweet as junlei wine. Better save the rest.
The flashlight went dark again, and this time Rai left it off.
It was pitch black and silent. The temperature was comfortable in the underground passage, the air reasonably fresh except for the smell of vomit. There must be an exit somewhere.
Air that was trapped underground too long became stale, even deadly, but he felt no ill effects.
As he sat next to Aidan, rubbing the other man’s back, he slowly became aware of a sound in the distance.
It was a low hum, almost beneath his perception. If he hadn’t been sitting still, he never would have heard it, but now that he had, he became hyperaware of it. It cycled, low to high, every ten seconds or so. Some kind of machinery?
“Rai?” Aidan’s voice was weak. Small.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
Rai laughed softly. “For what?”
“For throwing up. For being weak. Papa told me to never be weak.”
Rai snorted. “Weak? You just outran a flood.” He picked up the flashlight and cranked it.
Aidan reappeared out of the darkness. He sat up and moved away from the pool of vomit, wrinkling his nose.
Rai placed the flashlight between them, the beam pointing off down the hall, and rummaged through Aidan’s pack to find something to wipe the Earther’s face. The pack was full of things—a few cans of food, wrapped zongi fruit, bundles of clothes, and even an old leather-bound journal. He found a square cloth and poured a little water on it. “May I?”
Aidan nodded. “Thank you.”
He wiped Aidan’s face clean and folded up the washcloth to put it away.
Aidan reached out to touch Rai’s cheek.
Rai closed his eyes, feeling the warmth of Aidan’s fingers, a spark running through him at Aidan’s touch.
Then Aidan’s hand was withdrawn, and Rai heard him getting up.
Opening his eyes, he found Aidan teetering on his feet. “Careful there.” Rai stood to help steady him. “Here, drink a little water.” He handed Aidan the canteen.
Aidan took it gratefully, washing out his mouth and spitting. Then he took a few gulps.
“Someone will have a mess to clean up.”
Aidan blushed. “Sorry.”
Rai shook his head. “No need. I’ve been there too.” Too many times after late-night benders, feeling sorry for himself.
“Rai?”
“Yeah?”
Aidan smiled weakly. “Thanks.”
Rai stared at him. “You’re welcome.” I did something right. It felt good. Rai cocked his ear, listening for the sound again. “Can you hear that?”
Aidan looked down the empty hallway. “The thrumming sound?”
“Yeah.”
Aidan nodded. “I could really hear it with my ear to the ground.” He knelt down to pick up the flashlight and then shouldered his pack.
“Want me to carry that for a bit?” Rai held out his hand.
“Nah, I got it.” Aidan looked over his shoulder. “Don’t suppose we’re going back that way?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Well, then, forward it is.” Aidan turned away and started down the empty tunnel without another word. The walls had gone back up.
Rai watched his back for a minute. Mixed signals. Aidan clearly wasn’t comfortable with himself, or his desires. Not that they had time for anything but the mission. It’s just as well.
With a sigh, he set off after his new companion.
Aidan led the way this time, trying to hide the turmoil that roiled his mind.
He felt something when he looked at Rai, when Rai touched him. Something he wasn’t ready to acknowledge, not even to himself. It was one thing to know he wasn’t like his father. That he carried these perverse desires. But it was quite another to come face to face with them in the form of another human being.
Hesitation was unusual for him—normally he just charged ahead into new situations. But this…
So he said a quiet prayer to the Lord asking for… change? Clarification?
The deity was notably silent.
Aidan grunted, concentrating on his surroundings instead.
The hallway was made from heavy-duty plascrete, probably leaded like the halls back home. He’d prowled many a tunnel like this in his youth, always looking for places to hide, to get away from the others he spent almost all of his waking days with.
The walls were perfectly squared, though they were cracked in places—long finger-wide cracks that had let streaks of dirt run down the walls to the floor.
Rats fled from the light, their ropy tails the last thing he’d see of them. How they’d survived down here, he had no idea. They were another form of life, something else that had survived the Collapse, but somehow they made him less hopeful than the birds and fish he and Ally had spotted in the bay.
Ally said they’d had rats at Boundary Peak once, too, but they’d died from lack of food.
“What do you think’s after us?” Rai’s voice shattered the tense silence between them.
“Don’t know. Maybe an AI?” Aidan hated AIs. The bastards had destroyed the old world and brought them to this sad near-endpoint.
“Yeah, I thought so too. No signs anyone’s still alive here.” There was an awkward silence. “Except you two, of course, and the birds and rats.”
“And fish.”
“Really?”
Aidan nodded, cranking the flashlight again. “Ally and I saw a few jumping in the bay, just before you two dropped in.”
“Wow. Wait until I tell Sam—”
“Who’s Sam?” They passed another crack, this one almost as wide as his hand at one point. Only a matter of time before the Good Lord reclaims this whole place.
“He’s the project leader for the Return. That’s the program to bring us back down to Earth—”
“Yeah, got it.” Aidan wondered how many moon folk planned to come down to Earth. Not like there wasn’t plenty of room, but he felt strangely anxious about the prospect. “Are the sky trees—the zongies—part of the Return?”
Rai’s face lit up. “Yeah. They were genetically engineered from soybeans and redwoods and a few other things. They’re cleaning up the air, bit by bit. They pull radiation and carbon out of the air and secrete them as nodules inside their trunks and deep underground.”
“But won’t that poison the water?”
Rai shook his head. “The nodules are almost as hard as diamond. They’ll trap the radiation inside for thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years.”
Aidan whistled. “What’s it like, up there?”
“It’s… human. I don’t know how else to explain it. We try to live a better way—Recycle, Reuse, and Restore!—but there are different ideas, different kinds of people. We’re kind of a melting pot.”
Aidan nodded. “I don’t know how it was for you after the Collapse—the Crash—but things got bad fast down here. Papa Astin told me all about it. There were some other underground places—a few—where people survived. He said the Boundary Peak rules forbade us from responding to them, but Base comm officers would pick up their chatter from time to time. One by one, they went dark.” He wondered what life had been like for those people. At least I have my family.
“Yeah, it was bad moonside for a while too. Only Redemption survived.”
“Redemption? I never heard of it.” He’d been fascinated with the idea of outer space. An immense place to escape to, bigger than all the Earth. He’d been there many times, on Rama with Clarke, flying the skies of Pern a dragonback with McCaffrey, and roaming the city-world of Asimov’s Trantor.
“It used to be Moon Base Alpha.”
“Ah.” The NAU base. “Near Marius Crater.”
Rai looked over at him, raising an eyebrow. “You’ve heard of it?”
“Yeah. I studied the moon when I was a kid. The archives had a full set of maps.” He’d dreamed of going there as a child. Who knew one day it would come to him? “I always wanted to be a pilot. Or an astronaut.”
Rai laughed. “Me to. Did you have an AI under the mountain?”
“At Boundary Peak? No. AIs are evil.”
Rai’s footsteps stopped behind him. “Why do you say that?”
Aidan turned on him, agitated. “Everybody knows they started the Last War.”
Rai was staring at him like he was an idiot. Then the light from the flashlight faded out again, plunging them into darkness.
Angry, he cranked it and looked up at where Rai was been standing.
He was gone.
A second later, someone grabbed Aidan from behind and pressed something soft over his face. He struggled as the chemical scent entered his nostrils.
Then he felt nothing at all.