Sam walked through the research cavern of the Agricultural Annex, staring at the magnificent trees that had taken root inside. They created almost a cathedral setting, sunlight slanting down through the branches from the light wells in the ceiling above.
Their bark was red, rough, and their branches whispered in the artificial breeze that blew through the chamber. “They’re magnificent.”
Dr. Teri Hopkins grinned. “They will be my life’s work. Our team is still working on the limiters, but these trees are like huge carbon dioxide and radiation vacuums.”
“When will they be ready to deploy?”
“It takes time—”
“Five years?”
Dr. Hopkins looked back at his team.
His second-in-command, Claria Devigne, nodded.
“We can do that.”
Sam closed his eyes, visualizing these magnificent trees on Earth, beginning the redemption for which he had worked so long.
It would come. He could finally see it on the horizon. It would come.
—From Sam’s mem cache, 11.23.2230
...scan: infrared spectrum…
Sam crossed a wide valley filled with the wreckage of an NAU fleet. He’d recognized the location from satellite reconnaissance, and was cataloging the wreckage as he passed through it for inspection later, when he had more time.
He was puzzled why an NAU fleet had been shot down approaching an NAU base. The wreckage had been too degraded for clear identification from space, but up close it was clear that they were all NAU ships.
The drone strike took him by surprise, his enhanced hearing warning him a few critical seconds before the pinhead missile had whistled past him, through the air where he no longer stood.
If it had carried a faster weapon—a pulse gun, for instance—he would have been damaged, probably severely.
…activate: defense protocol…
He leapt up onto one of the fallen ships, his feet locking onto it magnetically as he traced the direction of the missile.
He pulled out a disrupter, one of the few weapons he’d chosen for this drop, and shot in the direction of the drone, but it was no longer there.
A thunk thunk thunk behind him warned him. He twisted around and fired as he slid down the side of the grounded ship.
He ran along the side of the ship, dove, and rolled through the space between it and its neighbor, coming up with weapon ready.
When the drone slipped around his last hiding place, he fired two shots, taking it cleanly in the nose.
It sputtered and dropped to the ground with a heavy clunk.
He ran up to it, kicked it over, and fired two more shots at it to make sure it was dead. Acrid smoke curled up from its nose.
Whoever was running these things now knew he was here. So much for the advantage of surprise.
He spent the next hour carefully working his way toward the base, taking advantage of any cover he could find—a stand of zongi trees here, a broken-down farmhouse there.
Eventually he found himself in an old city block, with hundreds of houses offering both cover and potential danger.
He was about to try contacting the Launchpad again when he saw them.
Two sets of footprints, visible in infrared. Faint and getting fainter by the second in the heat.
...analyze: bootprints…
They were standard-issue dropnaut boots, matched to Hera and Ghost’s shoe sizes.
Sam’s systems were running at a fast clip to dump body heat. He checked the temperature—forty-four degrees Celsius. Far warmer than was typical in these climes. Or what used to be typical, before the Heat.
His human cohorts would be burning up. But at least they weren’t far ahead now.
If the footprints were from members of his team.
The drone that had attacked him and the defense system that had brought down the Zhenyi were proof that Martinez Base was anything but abandoned. And Tien had mentioned that there were other people down here, too.
Abandoning caution, Sam pushed ahead, determined to find out who had left the prints. And if they were from his team, to protect them from whatever was coming to get them.
Ghost hunkered down on the street, his back against an old plascrete bunker. Fuckall it’s hot. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand and pulled out his canteen to drink the last of his water.
He’d put his mapper away. They were at the edge of the base now, and there wasn’t much more it could tell them.
Hera was pacing back and forth in front of the fence, growling under her breath.
They’d come to the end of it, or at least the edge of the base where the land dipped down into the waters of the bay a few meters to his left.
“There has to be a way through.” She stopped and put her hands on her hips, glaring at the metal fence. “Maybe it’s not electrified here.” She reached out to touch it, but Ghost jumped up and pulled her back.
“Let’s just assume it is.” He didn’t relish repeating the last time, but Hera was stubborn. That trait had gotten her through her pain and anguish after her fall, when almost anyone else would have decided to lay down and die. She’d try the same thing fifty damned times in a row, if she thought it might work. Stubborn didn’t even begin to cover it.
“We have to get in there to turn this shimmer field off.” She stared at the base through the holes in the fence. “Then we can contact Sam and the others and get our asses out of here.”
“Right there with you.” He looked around to see if anything might spark an idea.
Luna’s crescent cast a silver glow across the abandoned town, its face so much different from down here. It was beautiful—shining and white, not the dull gray it appeared from the surface. He squinted, wondering if he could see the Marius Hills, but they were far too small to be visible to the naked eye, and wasn’t it nighttime there now anyhow?
Up there, in that swath of lunar darkness, was the entirety of his life before he’d become a dropnaut.
“The bay!”
Hera’s exclamation brought him out of his reverie. “What?”
“We can swim around it.” Hera was already pulling off her boots.
“That’s a really bad idea.” It was out before he thought to censor himself.
She turned on him, her face scrunched up in anger. “Our friends are over there somewhere. Maybe injured by one of these drones—or even dying somewhere in a ditch.”
That’s very specific. “But—”
“We have to get past this fence to help them, and I’m not hearing any great ideas from you about how to get that done.” Though she was ten centimeters shorter than him, she made up for it in raw anger and determination, backing him up against the hard bunker wall.
He put his hands up in self-defense. “Look, I’m in total agreement. But we don’t know what’s under the water—there could be mines, or hungry sharks, or sharp debris—never mind the water itself. Earth is a polluted postindustrial world. It might even be toxic.” He let that sink in for a second. “We can test it, but we have to be careful.”
He grinned wryly. Careful was not in Hera’s vocabulary. “I want to help our friends as much as you do. But we have to keep ourselves alive to do it.”
She stared at him a minute longer, her breathing gradually slowing to normal. “Hissing cracking hell.” She pulled her boot away from his face and spat to one side. “I hate this fucking world. And I hate it even more when you’re right and I’m wrong.”
Ghost laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just… we’ve been talking about nothing but dropping down here, how amazing it was going to be, how we were making history. And now….”
“Now?”
“I hate this fucking world too.”
She burst into laughter
He joined her, releasing hours of tension. It felt really good. Good to have some relief, and good to remember they were in this together, however much it sucked at the moment.
“Hey,” he said when the laughter finally subsided. “We can at least get ourselves some clean water. Get out your purifier.”
Hera nodded. “I think I’ve sweated out ten liters.”
They dug into their packs, pulling out twin devices—long tubes that were made to attach to their canteens at the base.
He found one of his cook pots and set about scooping up some water from the bay where it lapped at the edge of the land, careful not to touch it. He poured it into the filter, which set about analyzing and cleaning it.
The water took about a minute to funnel into the canteen. Ghost checked the results.
“And?”
“Not bad, actually. A little higher on heavy metals than I’d like, but it wouldn’t kill us. Now the sharks carrying landmines, on the other hand—”
Hera punched him in the arm.
“Hey! That hurt!” He rubbed the spot where she’d hit him. She had a mean left hook.
“You deserved it.”
Ghost chuckled. “Probably. Here. Try it.” He handed her his canteen.
She took a sip. “Not bad.”
He scooped up some more water to fill her canteen’s filter, then poured another potful over his head. “Holy Buddha, that feels good.”
“Give me the pot.” Hera held out her hand imperiously.
“Say please.”
“Please give me the cracking pot.”
Ghost grinned and handed it over.
Hera doused herself, laughing, the water pouring down her cheeks and soaking her shirt.
A noise brought him around to look back the way they’d come. “Um, Hera?”
“Yeah, I’ll give the pot back. Just a second.”
He tapped her shoulder. -We have company.-
She spun around and her mouth dropped open.
Sam stood there. Clearly, impossibly Sam. As close to them as they were to the fence.
Their boss cocked his head and took in the scene. “I see you two are solidly on-mission.”
“Sam!” Hera squealed and threw her arms around the mech, even though she knew it made him uncomfortable. Or maybe because it did. Wild displays of human emotion often had that effect on the project leader. She looked over his shoulder. “You have a sail.”
“It’s to cool me off.” He squeezed her back, gently and awkwardly, and then held her out at arm’s length. “You have enough power for your biframe?”
She laughed. “Yes. Ghost, genius engineer here, deduced that the people who lived here before the Collapse must have had a way to power their devices when the shimmer screen—”
“EMP field.” Sam let her go.
“—the shimmer screen was on. We found these in a farmhouse on the way in.” She showed him her button.
Sam looked at it closely. “Ah, a field canceller. Early version. Very smart.”
“Of course, then I went and fried mine on this stupid fence, so Ghost’s without one now.”
Ghost came up beside her. He looked a little put out, staring at Sam and then down at the ground.
Clearly he’d seen himself as her protector, and now that Sam was here, those services might no longer be necessary.
Not that she needed him to protect her. But he liked to do it—always had. It was sweet, if a little misguided.
“So what about you? How are you able to move in here?” He pointed up at the barely visible blue glow of the screen.
“I found the field frequency. From there it was fairly simple to block it.”
Hera laughed in delight. “You have an anti-shimmer screen.”
“An anti-EMP field. But yes.”
Hera snorted. “Whatever.”
“Where’s Rai? I hoped he’d be with you.”
She stared at him. “Don’t you mean Rai and Tien?” Oh holy Buddha, does he know something we don’t?
“Tien’s safe up on the Launchpad, with Ally and Harley.”
“Ally? Who the hell is Ally? And Harley?” Hera felt like she’d been asleep for a week since the drop.
Sam tilted his head again, a gesture so human it made her laugh in spite of her confusion. “Tien said Ally is an Earth native. And Harley’s an old AI, from San Francisco.” He looked around. “So Rai’s not with you?”
Hera shook her head. “We were separated from the two of them when whatever controls the base destroyed the Zhenyi. We were hoping to find them inside—they came down much closer to it than we did.” She wiped sweat from her forehead. The water from the bay had only helped cool her off for so long. Now the heat was getting to her again. “So… Earth natives?”
Sam nodded. “We didn’t anticipate this.”
“Kinda makes you wonder what else we didn’t anticipate.” She immediately felt remorseful for saying it. She knew how much time Sam and Alpha had put in to planning for the Return.
Even AIs made mistakes.
Sam’s shining silver eyes seemed full of regret.
Or maybe it was just her, anthropomorphizing his reactions. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it as a dig.”
“You’re right. The mission has suffered from a number of irregularities. Once this whole thing is over, it will be necessary to review where and how we made those mistakes.” He looked at the fence. “You’ve been trying to get to the other side?”
“Yes, but—”
He reached out and grasped the chain-link with both hands and ripped it in two.
“…it’s electrified,” she finished lamely.
“I know. I channeled the electricity into the ground. It didn’t harm me.” He gestured for them to go through.
Ghost grinned. “He’s like Superman.”
“Not like. Is.” Hera threw her pack to the other side and then slipped through the hole in the fence, careful not to touch the edges. She was tired and a bit hungry, but those things could wait. Now we’re getting somewhere.