Carthage

“WE’RE COMING!”

Tania’s voice spilled into his ears, sweet as anything he’d ever known. Skyler slumped against the wall and closed his eyes, fighting tears of his own. “Are you okay?” he asked. “The others? Tim wouldn’t let me—”

“I know, I know. He kept it from us. That’s over now. We’re all alive. Is Vanessa with you?”

Just like that, the despair wormed in again. “I haven’t seen her. I hoped she was with you, but Tim said she wasn’t.”

“That much at least he told the truth about.” She paused, catching her breath. “He won’t be lying about anything else, though. He took his own life.”

Skyler shut his eyes in grief. Not for Tim, not after what he’d done here, but for Tania and the awful position all this had put her in. “God. I’m so sorry, Tania.”

Her voice quavered as she spoke. “I’d like to say it was a heroic deed, to hide his knowledge from the Scipios, but the truth is I caught him talking to you. He couldn’t look at me.”

“The bastard had no right to.” He tamped down his anger. “It’s not important now. What is important is the rest of us making it out of this.”

Some commotion came through the earpiece. Argument, tension.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“We need to move,” Tania said. “Situation still a mess.”

“Understood. Keep the channel open, I’ll talk as you move.”

He sank to the floor then, watching the pile of dead virus grow and spill farther into the room. As Tania and the others sneaked and battled their way out of danger, he talked. Skyler spoke of his rough landing, and what he’d seen since. How Eve had landed him in a city near a space elevator, and the building here marked for transfer.

“I think we’re directly above you,” she replied then, the first acknowledgment she’d made since he started talking. “We’ve seen similar markings up here.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard since…well, since I heard your voice.”

“We’ll work our way down there,” Tania said. “Sam thinks—”

“Bad idea,” he said, cutting her off. “Something’s happening down here. I think they’re preparing to evacuate. At the very least they’ll have the climber port guarded like a fortress.”

“Evacuate? What makes you think that?”

“Something happened to the virus. The little flakes in the air, it all just fell. It’s piling up on the ground everywhere. Two meters deep and counting.”

“When did that start?” she asked.

“I don’t know. A few hours ago?”

“Hmm,” Tania said. “I think maybe we did that.” She quickly explained. A station with a control room not too dissimilar to the plague forge in Africa. How they’d let it sample them.

“Why’d you do that?” he demanded. Then he softened his voice a little. “Tania, you may have just made it easier for them to attack us. What made you think it would help?”

“A hunch,” she replied. “This whole place is just a big medical station, if you think about it, Skyler. Aliens are brought here to receive the mind-transfer process, right? And the Scipios must facilitate that, but also guard the tech with total ferocity. I think they use the virus not just to keep the local population mollified, but any unwanted entries to the system, too. When a customer is accepted for the treatment, they reconfigure the virus to let them in, and probably undo that the moment they leave.”

“Why’s it all dying, then?”

“Oh,” Tania replied, “well. We sort of destroyed the station.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Doesn’t make sense to me. They rely on this tech utterly, and it all just dies if one station is knocked out?”

“It’s a good point,” Tania admitted. “To your left! Sam, left!” Skyler’s ears were assaulted by the sounds of swearing and weapons discharge. Tania swore, grunted, and finally howled in either pain or victory, he couldn’t tell. “What was I saying?” she asked him, oddly calm.

“The dying virus.”

“Right. Okay, good point, we can’t be sure our actions are what has caused it to die off. Whatever the case, it has, and I think this is our opportunity to act.”

“My turn to act, you mean,” he said.

“What?”

“Tania, listen. I’m already down here. Eve sent me here, specifically. She had a plan, poorly explained as it might have been. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do down here, for Eve, but I do know what I need to do for me. And that’s survive. Get home. Be with you and everyone else. I realize this now, about me. Achieving our goal is not enough. We have to make it out of this.”

“What are you saying, Skyler?”

“Find us a way home. Secure one of their craft, and wait for me.”

More sounds of battle. This time the cacophony went on for several minutes.

“They’re getting tougher,” Tania said finally. “That was close.”

“Anyone hurt?”

“No. Well, not seriously.”

Skyler stood up abruptly. The mound of powder blocking the hole he’d made in the wall had started to vibrate. As he watched it seemed to coalesce. The powdery nature of it shifted to something more solid, like watching a pile of fresh snow suddenly harden into solid ice.

Then, all at once, the solid mass burst and sluiced apart, a liquid ooze now that spread across the floor of the room, slapping against the walls like a wave against a rocky shore. Skyler hopped up onto a low counter and watched the gelatinous fluid settle. Bits of carpet, or something like it, sizzled under the fluid and began to come apart. Acid?

The whole room seemed to boil and hiss around him. Then, as quickly as it had started, the fluid began to drain away.

“Something’s happening here,” he said. “I think I need to move.”

“Move where?” she asked with palpable worry in her voice.

“I’m heading to you, Tania. Even if I don’t find a way to break the siege, this has gone too far. I’m heading to you.”

“What about Vanessa?”

Skyler battled back a sharp pang of regret. If we haven’t heard from her by now…But then he had only just heard from Tania. That was reason to hope. “Keep trying to reach her. Find us a way home and be waiting for me. Something tells me when I get there I’ll have an angry bunch of Scipios on my tail.”

“We’ll be ready.” After a moment’s hesitation she added, “Keep the comm open, okay?”

“You too,” he replied.

The floor around him had become coated with the slimy residue of the collapsed viral powder. Tentatively he dipped a toe into it. The mucuslike fluid frothed around the edge, but was otherwise totally inert. Skyler stepped onto it and crossed the room, careful not to slip and fall. His feet were armored still, but the rest of his suit had too many holes to count, never mind his wide-open face mask.

At the outer wall he placed a hand on the edge of the ragged hole and leaned outside.

The sky had cleared. Without the virus, night had become day even though the star was dim, a crimson orb hanging low above the horizon. He saw wisps of purple clouds high above, and the thread of the space elevator darting upward to vanish into the clear morning sky. No climbers at the moment. He wondered about that, and then put it out of his mind. Could mean anything. He had to ignore the part of his mind that guessed “all traffic shut down until further notice.”

Skyler studied the rooftops around him. He’d descended quite far from his original perch, and now most of the buildings rose high above, blocking much of the view to his left and right. Street level was only twenty meters below him. Given the change in visibility, he decided to go down. Move in the shadows and through the ground levels of the buildings, or drop another level and navigate the subterranean layers again. As long as he was moving toward the goal, he’d do whatever it took. But the rooftops seemed so exposed now. He could see for many kilometers, and had to assume the Scipios were now watching.

He leapt from the balcony outside his hole and dropped in the low gravity, blipping his thrusters a second before impact to slow his fall. Not the most graceful of landings, but no one was around to see.

Quickly Skyler dashed across the walkway he’d come to and pressed himself into the shadow of the adjacent structure. With the star so low in the sky the shadows were long and very dark, but he’d found himself on a lane angled east-west, straight toward the rising orb. He jogged along the façade until he reached something like an alley, though it was wide and had a shallow trench running down the middle, serving what purpose he couldn’t imagine. The ground everywhere was slick with the post-viral residue. Great clumps of it fell from above and splatted against the streets and walkways. It was as if the planet itself had just gotten over a centuries-long illness. The goo oozed out of cracked windows and open doorways, and when he stopped he could actually hear it as it sloshed and wormed its way through the interiors of the buildings around him. Perhaps subterranean travel was a bad idea, after all. Everything below street level must be totally inundated with this gunk.

He kept moving, avoiding the shallow trench, if only because it had completely filled with the viscous fluid and threatened to overflow, surface tension the only thing holding back the slick goo. At least here he had shadow. Skyler glanced back every few steps, but saw nothing in the way of pursuit. Or any other activity for that matter. Perhaps the Scipios had abandoned the city. He could only hope.

The alley did not run straight. Several times it bent at a ninety-degree angle, which he guessed was by design. A way to make the lane seem more cozy, as you could never see too far ahead or behind. He wondered if there were street markets here, despite seeing no evidence for it.

At the next intersection he came upon a very wide plaza, a favored feature of the Creator-built city. The pathways here were long, swooping things that were at once chaotic and also harmonious. A work of art, really. They wound around what surely were once elaborate fountains and planters full of vegetation. It had all fallen into abject disrepair, though, but the layout so strongly suggested former greatness that he couldn’t help but feel impressed. And profoundly sad, for what had been lost here. This had been a truly great civilization once. The fact that the minds who had devised this place, engineered and constructed it, were still here, only made the loss that much worse. They were trapped inside the bodies of their diseased hosts, forced to watch their once mighty culture decay into total ruin.

He paused there for several minutes, getting the lay of the land. He sipped at his water tube and took a healthy long gulp from the nutrient dispenser, choking the bland goop down. It resembled the slime all around him, and smelled just as bad. If not for the knowledge of its digestibility, he would have left it behind days ago, content to starve. The water, though, tasted wonderful. Cool and clean, quenching his thirst while also removing some of the foul taste in his mouth from the air he’d breathed.

The space elevator loomed, not far now. Perhaps half a kilometer, where it disappeared behind a cluster of squat, ugly buildings. Scipio buildings. Funny how much they resembled the wall of junk that had been erected around Nightcliff in order to defend the Elevator there.

He glanced up again. The cord remained empty. Just a line against the sky, no climbers at all to mark its nearly invisible path. “Getting close to the Elevator,” he said to Tania. “No traffic, though. Not sure how I’ll get up there.”

“How much thrust left in your boots?” she asked.

Not that he’d be able to reach orbit with the tiny thrusters, but he figured Tania knew that already. She probably hoped he could reach an already ascending climber, should one start up soon. “No idea,” he replied. “My visor broke. Shattered. I can see a little of the translation display, but that’s about it.”

“You’ve been breathing the air?”

“Yeah.”

“Side effects?”

“It’s made me twice as handsome.” She laughed, bright and true. His heart swelled. He had to get back to her. To all of them. “Seriously, though,” Skyler added, “it was strange at first, like altitude sickness, but it passed.”

Tania considered that. “Good to know. We’re running low on supplies.”

He caught the undercurrent of fear, but could think of nothing to say that might help. “Going silent for a bit, I need to concentrate. You okay?”

“For now,” she said, though he could hear the tension in her voice. He hadn’t heard that tone since they’d left the Key Ship together after their first visit, just before she gave him her air, saving his life and almost costing her her own. “Don’t worry about us. Sam and Vaughn are in the zone.” An annoyed outburst in the background followed that. “No, you’re not in the zone, Prumble. You are the zone.”

“That’s better!” the big man replied, loud yet barely audible.

Skyler grinned despite himself. Hearing that voice, and their banter, eased his fears massively. We can do this.

He left the link open and continued his journey. He crossed the wide plaza in a dead sprint, sliding into a shadow on the other side and immediately turning, arms raised, in case anything had seen him and decided to pursue. Nothing had. He wasted no more time, jogging off along a high wall that lined this side of the plaza. Intricate patterns were embossed into its sandstonelike surface. Art, perhaps, or even something as mundane as signage. Impossible to tell now, so weathered the surface was, and covered in moss and creeping roots. About a hundred meters along the wall, near the center of the plaza, a gap opened to a terraced maze of irregularly shaped plots that may have once been gardens. The section was unruly, with no obvious purpose or plan, but it stood between him and the ugly, squat buildings the Scipios had erected around the elevator base, so Skyler began to work his way up the twisting path.

He took a route that favored shadows and cover, until that proved insufficient. He’d come to a small alcove with a cathedral-like dome of vines above it, all dry and bony, skeletal fingers interlaced above him.

Being here, in the daylight, reminded him of his first explorations of Belém, and the day he’d spotted Ana dancing in a long-abandoned courtyard. A chill ran up his spine at the memory. Not because of the place or who he’d seen there, but because of the strange way this place made him think of it. Once again he found himself wondering if this had been the Builders’ plan all along. If Eve had somehow known his path would take him to this particular place in this particular city, and that what she’d ultimately caused him to go through in Belém that day would somehow be relevant here.

On higher ground now the slickness caused by the viral residue abated. As he walked on he tried to recall the events of that day. How Ana had run from him, startled by the sudden presence of another person in her city, and for good reason. How he’d eventually found her and her brother, and helped them free several other immunes from the clutches of a madman named Gabriel. After a time he shook his head. The only thing that could come of searching for similarities between these events would be insanity. A mountain of false correlations and, worse, the second-guessing of his own actions when the time came to act. He did his best to banish the train of thought. He focused on his footing, and stole the occasional glance at the space elevator.

He’d moved at a slight angle as he traversed the maze, and this had given a thickness to the cord’s appearance. The Scipio style of space elevator was shaped like a ribbon rather than a cord as those on Earth had been. Tania would probably have theories as to why, but he found no energy to spend thinking about it.

Ahead the first Scipio-style building loomed, and this close he could see that the original architecture had been obliterated to make room for the structures. Foundations left to rot, poking through the caked muddy ground. Portions of elegant wall now just islands, the rest of the structure they’d once supported now just dust. This had happened on Earth, too. Plenty of times. A slum rising up around a once-beautiful and magnificent creation of a long-dead civilization. Only here, the original architects were not long dead, merely held prisoner. A worse fate, in truth. Much worse. All those intelligent minds, trapped inside infected hosts, occasionally called upon to die just to facilitate some alien’s longevity treatment.

At the Scipio-built wall Skyler glanced left and right, but saw no obvious door or even break. He sighed and looked up, and decided he’d had enough of hiking. So he jumped, fired his boots in midair, and powered up to the top of the wall where he landed shakily. The wall was in truth more of a fence, barely half a meter thick, supported on the other side by trusses placed diagonally and welded to one another with crossbeams. A hastily erected thing, designed to keep something out. More similar to Darwin’s than he’d guessed. Perhaps there’d been some resistance at first. Perhaps there’d been immunes who’d tried to fight their way here. Eve had never implied such a thing, but then why build this wall?

It did look ancient, he had to admit. Rust and dust in even application. Whatever they’d been worried about it had been a long time ago. Perhaps with the installation of the Swarm Blockade at the edge of the solar system, and their mastery of the virus tech, the bastards had gotten lazy. The thought, and not for the first time, warmed him.

Skyler sat on the wall and forced himself to be motionless as he took in the view. The area around the space elevator was perhaps a half-klick in diameter. Buildings ranged in size from one-story huts all the way to thirty-story skyscrapers. Much like Nightcliff, the one at the center of it all was tallest. From here the building looked more like the cooling tower at an old nuclear reactor, only instead of a white plume of steam pouring out there was only the cord, a thin band that punched up from the middle of the wide, tubular tower that surrounded it. The tower was wide enough to accommodate whatever sort of climber the Scipios might use. There were no windows along its two-hundred-meter height. Just an unbroken, dark gray, hollow pillar that looked a bit like a gun barrel pointed straight up. Halfway down its length the buildings began to attach to it. Clusters of angular slabs, studded with antennae, pipework, and ventilation grates. They rose up next to the tower and were connected to it by squared gantry halls, tubes, and bundles of sagging wires.

He must have been staring at the place for five minutes before he realized that, every now and then, words would blip into the corner of his vision. Something out in that industrial nightmare had lettering on it, and his visor was occasionally able to latch on to the words and translate them.

INTELLECT RECOMBINATION, the display flashed.

Skyler swiveled his head until the words appeared and stayed on the visor display. He kept his head still and studied the buildings in the center of his vision. There! A wide, flat, two-story structure adjacent to the main elevator complex. Only a tiny portion of one corner was visible, but that’s where the signage was, and it didn’t take much imagination to guess what went on inside.

He hopped down off the wall and began to weave his way through the structures. No weeds or roots poked through the hard surfaces beneath his feet here. This had all been patched or resurfaced recently. He kept low and constantly looked left, right, and behind, but saw no one. Maybe evacuation had happened, after all.

Skyler slowed up. Something wasn’t right. It seemed with each step the environment around him changed in some subtle way, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. It felt…He paused to think about it. The sensation felt very familiar. Something he’d felt in Darwin many times. He’d be moving through the city and then…then what? He glanced up and understood. The sky had changed. The subtle darkening before a storm. He’d been so focused on the uneven ground that he’d stopped looking up, save to check the Elevator for climbers. He’d barely noticed the sky at all. But the clarity that had come when the virus died off was vanishing now. Something new had begun to creep in, like beige, barely coherent clouds at high altitude. Only, these clouds were not starting as small puffs and accumulating from there. This was as if someone was taking an image of a clear sky and slowly cross-fading it to one completely overcast.

He ran, no longer caring if anyone saw him. Every instinct said to get indoors, and quick. He moved as fast as his legs, and the awkwardness of partial gravity, would let him. With each step the sky seemed to dim a shade. It transformed, too. From an even blanket of color to the hazy contours of a cloud layer that spanned horizon to horizon. This seemed to refine itself even as the coloration continued to deepen, and soon Skyler could make out tendrils, like reaching hands, stretching downward from the mass.

The sky, it seemed, was falling.

Skyler switched his thrusters on, skating over the ground now and churning up a huge cloud of dust in his wake. The sound was terrific, booming off the structures all around him and echoing out into the city all around. God, if they weren’t aware of him before they would be now. Yet he still saw no one, not even a curious onlooker behind one of the many grimy windows around him.

He weaved and darted, leapt and slid his way through the crowded complex. Finally the building marked Intellect Recombination came into full view. Behind it, the lowest reaching tendrils of the plunging sky neared the ground, like smoke bombs. He’d once seen footage of a volcanic ash cloud as it descended all at once on a nearby village, and this looked exactly the same, save for the coloration.

Skyler aimed for the door, pushed the tiny thrusters to their maximum and slid on his armored feet like he was riding some invisible snowboard. Twenty meters out he lifted his arm, ready to blast the door to pieces, but some instinct made him hold fire. The sky was crashing down all around him. He’d seen no one outside. Not a single one of them, whereas before they’d been milling about, outside the elevator complex, gathering to watch as two coffins were floated in.

They’d gone to ground. They knew this danger was coming. Not him, but the sky. And they feared it.

“Tania,” he said. “Might have a serious problem here.”

The cloud fell, like the powdery wave of an alpine avalanche, only everywhere, all at once. It swallowed the top of the elevator tower and kept falling. A hundred meters above him now. In places the faster-falling tendrils, spearheaded by heavier clumps, began to crash into the city. Skyler watched one as he ran. It hit the roof of a building about half a klick away. The powder exploded outward, flowing over the roof and down the sides of the ten-story structure. The building itself seemed undamaged, as if the impact had been nothing more than a wad of loosely packed confetti.

Five meters to the door.

Skyler looked away from that rooftop and focused. He could hear the early impacts now, all around him, as a strange erratic drumbeat. A shape in the corner of his vision drew his attention back to that first impact. Where the powder ball had struck and disintegrated, something now stood. A large mirrored sphere, studded with blistered sections. In a flash those blisters punched outward and tentacle legs took shape. They slammed down into the roof and the sphere stood up.

A swarmer. A large one, and newly coated in some reflective skin.

“Tania?” he repeated, suddenly realizing she’d not replied the first time.

She made no response now, either.

“Tania?!”

A garbled, incoherent burst of noise assaulted his ears.

“Shit,” Skyler grunted, and reached for the door.

All around him, the sky crashed down.