The Exodus Towers #2

The creatures surged forward.

One leapt high, its wild gaze on Ana.

Vanessa screamed, a sub racing at her low.

The monster pack leader roared with bloodlust.

Skyler …

The edge of the dome, meters away.

Skyler turned and ran.

He burst through the edge of the dome and fell into the mud beyond, his mind feeling like so much shredded cheese.

Rain spattered against his face and he let it. He stayed in the mud for a few long minutes and let the water run into his mouth, until he could no longer taste blood.

When his brain seemed to figure out what time meant again, he sat up, pushed himself to his feet, wiped his hands, and took off his climbing harness. He laid the gear on the ground very deliberately.

Then he turned toward the path that led to the farmhouse.

“Right, then,” he muttered. “Enough is enough.”

Skyler ran as fast as his legs would carry him, which wasn’t especially fast at first, but he gained momentum with each step.

At the farmhouse he called out for Pablo, but the man was not around. No matter, Skyler decided, and set to work.

“You motherf*ckers want to play with time?” he said to the walls as he dressed a scrape on his arm. “I’ll show you how it’s done.”

Six minutes later he left the cottage again. Relaxed, fed, and bandaged.

And armed to the teeth.

Skyler punched back inside the dome with a submachine gun in each hand.

The scene before him was almost exactly as he’d left it, fifteen minutes earlier. Half a second had passed inside.

He shot the leaping sub first. It hadn’t even landed yet from a jump that began fifteen minutes earlier. Surprise, a*shole. The creature’s landing turned into a lifeless belly flop, centimeters from Ana’s side.

“Down!” he shouted to Vanessa.

She dropped flat.

Skyler opened fire with both weapons, spraying gunfire indiscriminately before him. The guns pounded back against his palms, sending shock waves of pain up his arms and into his back. He ignored it utterly, held the triggers down. Someone was shouting. Himself, he realized with unexpected glee.

Before him the subhumans fell like cut weeds.

He fired until both guns were spent. Shell casings tumbled in the dirt around him.

When the clips ran dry, Skyler dropped both weapons unceremoniously and whipped around the third from his back.

Only the giant subhuman still stood, standing amid the corpses of its pack. It flexed two mighty arms in a show of rage and howled at Skyler. Then it took a long step forward.

Skyler shook his head. “Enough. Is. Enough.”

He fired the grenade launcher and the subhuman’s head exploded in a shower of bone and blood.

It fell to its knees and collapsed forward in an earth-shaking thud. A sudden, satisfying silence followed.

Vanessa was standing behind him, he realized. “Pistols, at my belt. Take them.”

She drew both weapons and stepped to his side. “I had just enough time to think you’d abandoned us before you reappeared,” she said breathlessly.

“I felt a little underprepared, decided to change the odds.”

She somehow managed a smile. “You look more ridiculous than any of those sensory action heroes.”

“You’re one to talk,” he said. “Twenty years of jujitsu, eh?”

“And finally useful.”

“Well, stay sharp. We’re not done.”

Vanessa’s face tightened. She nodded with grim determination. “I’ll take Ana outside.”

“No,” Skyler said, too stern. At Vanessa’s surprised look he added, “Time’s racing forward out there. If her injury is as bad as I think, every second is going to count. Stay here with her while I finish this.”

“Let’s just get out of here; there’s nothing—”

“Not quite yet. All of this was to protect that damn object, and we’re bloody well leaving with it.”

Vanessa swallowed. “Okay.”

All that remained was details. Skyler found no more red-hued fields whooshing about the dome, only the purples—which he shot—and some blues that moved too slowly to bother with. He simply walked around them.

The dome continued to shake. At the center Skyler saw the earthen pillar crack, then collapse into a small avalanche of debris. When the dust settled, he saw the thing he’d expected to find from the beginning.

Half-buried in the collapsed pillar’s base was a Builder ship, nose down, the back half of it splayed open like a charred flower. Skyler gave it a once-over and decided to ignore it. The hourglass-shaped object that had been placed so deliberately upon the peak of the spire was the important part, he knew with instinctual certainty.

He found the object halfway out toward the dome’s edge, in a crater that had once presumably contained one of the chromatic time fields. In some delicious irony, the alien object had killed a subhuman when it fell into the depression. The creature lay just beside the thing, its head crushed.

“Get ready, Vanessa!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Coming to you!”

She hollered back in acknowledgment as Skyler lifted, pushed, and pulled the heavy object toward the edge of the dome where Vanessa and Ana waited. He half-hoped to see his young companion sitting up, alert, but she still lay exactly as she had.

“She’s got a lot of bruising on her lower back and abdomen,” Vanessa said grimly.

Skyler gave a single nod. “We’re going to have to move her.” He tried to sound strong, and thought he’d failed miserably.

Despite the reluctance in her eyes, Vanessa nodded.

“We’ll head straight back to Belém and get her to the doctors. How are we doing on time?”

She glanced at her watch as if she’d forgotten all about it. “February,” she said.

The weight of it all suddenly crashed in on Skyler like the collapse of the pillar he’d witnessed. The alien place, the violence, and poor Ana … He fought to get his ragged breaths under control. Vanessa placed a calming hand on the center of his back.

“C’mon,” he said. “We’re almost out of time.”
Darwin, Australia

24.FEB.2285

THE INVITATION ARRIVED during the night.

Samantha woke to a soft rap at her door. Her head swam from the lingering effects of alcohol and a sudden powerful sensation of déjà vu. An attempt to tell whoever knocked to f*ck off came out as a dry croak, and she fumbled about in the dark for her canteen. She found it, drank, and threw it at the door.

“F*ck off!” she said. No one had woken her in the middle of the night like this since Grillo’s blitz on the last holdout neighborhood in Darwin. She didn’t need another night like that. Not tonight, not ever.

“It’s Skadz, Sammy. Open up.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose and sat up. Sweat-soaked sheets fell away from her, the result of a blisteringly hot night and her body’s attempt to discharge the liquor by any means available. She smelled her armpit and winced. “What the hell do you want?”

“I need you to come with me.”

She growled and stumbled to the door of her tiny room. She pulled the door open a crack and looked at her old friend. His eyes were like twin moons against his dark skin, and the dark hangar beyond. “Shouldn’t you be as wasted as me? God, I’ve never seen you drink like you did last night.”

It had been a celebration, of sorts. Grillo’s position as head of the Jacobite Church cemented, along with official admission of his rule over Darwin and the space elevator. The story went that Platz Station had suffered a full and sudden depressurization and loss of spin. All hands lost, the station scuttled due to damage during the event.

Blackfield, dead.

Sam suspected bullshit from the start but couldn’t bring herself to call Grillo out on it. What difference would it make? The man had played his cards and won, and now everyone knew.

The Nightcliff guards stationed at the airport had given everyone a respite from the alcohol ban, and even joined in the forced revelry. The four who shared the hangar with her were all still asleep at the card table below.

Things had gotten … a bit wild, even by Sam’s lofty standards. She had a vague recollection of diving naked from the catwalk onto a pile of couch cushions below, part of a game to see who could land the farthest from the raised walkway. The loser had to remove an item of clothing. It made sense at the time.

At least she hadn’t woken with one of the Nightcliff goons in her bed. Or worse, Skadz.

Sam’s head pounded. She felt like she’d been run over by a truck. Skadz, on the other hand, looked alert. Energized. It infuriated her.

“I was drinking water,” he said.

“Huh?”

“All night. Water. I tried to tell you to do the same but you had a head start.”

She laughed in his face. “Why would I want to drink water?” she asked, and took a sip from her canteen.

“Because we have a meeting to attend. Like I said, I tried to tell you.”

“A meeting? Where?”

“In the city.”

Samantha laughed again, and tapped her skull. “You go. I’m still wandering the fun house up here. Besides, I suspect you’re just going to try to convince me to bug out with you and leave the city behind.” He’d broached the idea a few times since Grillo took the city. Parts of it appealed to her, parts didn’t. Mostly, she found that if she ignored anything happening beyond the fence that surrounded the airport, things weren’t all bad. The missions were boring, sure, but it beat a life of hiking around and living off the land.

“That’s not it at all,” he said. “It’s about Skyler.”

They slipped out through a loose section of the fence on the airport’s north side, avoiding the still-guarded main gate.

Skadz ushered her along at a brisk walk. The pace, the fresh air, helped clear Samantha’s head enough that soon she didn’t need to lean on her friend. Her clothes still clung to her like a clumsy lover, damp with sweat and the hot sticky air of Darwin’s slums. She could smell herself and felt vaguely embarrassed at how disgusting she must be, but the worry vanished when Skadz led her into the thick press of the Maze.

The stench of the place hit her like a wall. Shit and piss, incense and hookah, fresh rain and stagnant murky puddles all blended together in the cauldron of a district. Whatever odor she brought to the mix would be a marked improvement.

“I’m gonna be sick,” she said just in time to release the meager contents of her stomach onto a brick wall. Skadz held her wet strands of blond hair out of her face, and stood watch while she retched a second time.

Even at this hour, people were wandering by. Not many, though; not like before. The bustle and energy of the Maze seemed gone, and not due to the time of night. The people Sam saw were huddled, dark shapes. Heads down and shoulders slumped, their gaze never wavering from the ground in front of them.

Skadz matched their hunkered, depressed posture and guided her through the twisted mess of alleys. Twice she smacked her forehead on low pipes before she got the hint and bent over.

Three Vietnamese men in soiled clothes came from a doorway and said something to Skadz. A threat of some sort, too quick for Sam to follow. Skadz didn’t break stride. A gun appeared in his hand in response, and they retreated back into the shadow.

“That kinda shit hardly ever happens here anymore,” he muttered a few sharp turns later. “The Jakes have this place locked down.”

“Don’t call them the Jakes,” Sam said. She’d heard the slang and chastised Skadz twice already for using it. To Sam it tarnished the memory of her sniper, her friend. The term might be widespread and unstoppable, but that didn’t mean she had to hear it from friends.

“Hell. Sorry,” Skadz said.

After another dizzying set of turns they stumbled into a wide merger of alleys. Wide by the Maze’s standards. Sam recognized it. The café, Clarke’s, where Prumble had paid them for the Japan mission, stood at one corner, dark and uninviting.

Skadz walked up to the door and rapped it twice. Seconds later they heard a steel gate behind the door retract. Then the latch made a series of clicks and the door swung open. He said something in a language Sam didn’t know, and the old woman within responded in kind with a motherly tone. She ushered the two of them in and pointed at a stairwell half-hidden behind an ornate drape that hung from the wall next to her shop counter.

Skadz went through and Samantha followed him. The stairwell was pitch-black, the narrow steps precarious. At the top a candle lit the hallway. Wood floors creaked under their feet as Skadz strolled calmly to a door. He entered without knocking.

Inside, two men sat on a faded Afghan carpet. One was gaunt, with stringy gray hair and a thin face that seemed stretched across the skull below. He looked vaguely familiar.

The other man was Prumble.

Her hug turned into something of a tackle. Prumble laughed as they fell back against the wall, his girth just enough to save him from toppling over under her affectionate assault.

“Sammy, Sammy,” he said, and clapped her on the back.

She released him and put her hands on her hips. “Where the f*ck have you been?”

“Right here,” he said. “Lying low, gone to ground. The shadow, the snake.”

A giggle escaped her lips. “Stealth has never been your strong suit.”

“I have a strong suit?”

“You tell me.”

Prumble looked up at the ceiling. “Hmm. I have a purple suit with yellow pinstripes. That’s pretty strong.”

“Seriously, where have you been? You couldn’t say hello?”

“Here,” he said, the mirth not entirely gone from his pudgy face. “I became an investor in this scraper’s rooftop garden, and in the café below. Honestly I haven’t left in almost two years, Sam. Haven’t spoken to anyone until these two sought me out. I’m still a wanted man, though that particular attribute seems to be waning.”

The thin, sickly man next to him shuffled slightly.

“Who’s this?” Sam asked.

“Meet Kip Osmak,” Prumble said. “Communications officer in Nightcliff Control, former assistant to Russell Blackfield, and longtime supplier of Orbital wish lists to myself.”

“Hello,” the man said.

Sam looked him up and down, reassessing her opinion. “Nightcliff comm, huh? Must be interesting work.”

“I hear many things,” Kip said, as if this was a curse. “Interesting things.”

“Which brings us,” Skadz said, “to the reason for this little reunion  . Tell her what you told us, Kip.”

Before the slight man could speak, the old woman from downstairs came in with a fresh pot of Darjeeling tea and a plate of pasty white buns dappled with spice. She placed them in the center of the small room and left without a word.

“Many thanks, Renuka,” Prumble said as the door clicked closed. “Sit, everyone.”

Sam took a cushion near the door, next to Skadz. Prumble sat opposite them, with Kip sandwiched between the giant man and the wall.

“Damn that tea smells good,” Skadz said, pouring a cup.

“Good enough to mask my flatulence,” Prumble said. He winked at Samantha. “Kip, speak. I’ll sample these buns for dangerous poisons while you tell your tale.”

“As Mr. Prumble said,” Kip began, “I have a position in the control tower within Nightcliff, and thus access to—”

Prumble held up his hand and Kip went silent. “Christ, man, skip to the good part.”

Kip gave a shy nod, his eyes downcast. “Of course. Well, you see, after the schism between Mr. Blackfield and Neil Platz, I—”

“Skyler’s alive,” Prumble said over the man. “There’s a new space elevator over in Brazil, and Skyler’s there. They’re all there, the runaways, the traitors.”

“I … holy shit,” Sam said. She’d known somehow, but it had always felt more like a childish hope than firm conviction, like a kid who clings to the idea of Santa Claus long after the other children have accepted reality and moved on.

“It gets better,” Skadz said. “Well, it gets crazier.”

“Oh?”

Kip looked to Prumble, as if seeking permission to speak. This time Prumble nodded at him and sat back.

“Blackfield is there, too,” Kip said. “He took Platz Station and joined up with the colony, along with everyone aboard, after the Jakes tried and failed to take over the station.”

He let the words sink in for a moment, and Sam felt the reality Grillo and his people had crafted shatter and fall away. For all of Grillo’s supposed virtue, he wasn’t above a little propaganda to suit his cause. But Skyler and Blackfield, together? On the same side? That she found impossible to believe.

“That ain’t the crazy bit,” Skadz said.

“It’s pretty f*cking crazy,” Sam said.

“Well, it ain’t it.”

“In a few days,” Kip said, “Grillo and his people will begin something called ‘Project Sanctify.’ ”

Samantha stared at him. “I don’t like it already.”

“Grillo, his followers, see the Darwin Elevator as a gift from God,” Kip said. “They’re now aware of the Elevator in Brazil, and as you can probably guess they’re not thrilled with the idea.”

“Suddenly our Elevator ain’t so special,” Skadz said. “Bible didn’t say ‘Jacob’s Ladders,’ yeah?”

Prumble leaned in. “Grillo went to all this trouble to steal the Darwin Elevator from Blackfield, to purify it, you could say, only to find the job’s only half-done.”

“F*ck,” Sam said.

“Indeed.”

“So Grillo’s going to try to capture that one, as well.”

“No,” Kip said. “From what I hear, Project Sanctify is about eliminating the colony, and the other Elevator.”

“Seems they think it’s the devil’s work,” Skadz said. “Or some shit. The Anti-Elevator.”

“Okay,” Sam said slowly. “You’re right. That’s officially crazy.”

“Well, Sammy, Kip has even more than that,” Skadz said.

An apologetic look crossed the thin man’s face when Sam turned her full attention to him.

“Tell her the rest,” Prumble said to him.

Kip nodded. “Sanctify is bigger than that. Arrangements are being made to transfer personnel on Darwin’s stations down here. Soon only the Jacobite faithful will be allowed in orbit. Anything else is considered blasphemous, apparently.” Before Sam could say anything, Kip went on, gaining his voice the more he spoke. “And in the coming weeks, decrees will be announced. Laws to govern Darwin, the city. All of us.”

“Jacobite laws,” Prumble said. “You can imagine how liberal they are.”

Skadz plucked a white bun from the plate. “We’re going to go from anarchy to religious fascism. Extreme to bloody f*cking extreme, Sammy.”

She felt a weight begin to press on her shoulders. A burden of guilt, and unspoken accusation. She’d been complicit in Grillo’s rise. She’d helped him deliver on his vision of a prosperous Darwin, and had closed her eyes to what that would mean in the end. Theocracy. Russell Blackfield was no doubt ruthless and dictatorial, but for the most part he’d let people go about their lives. As long as nothing threatened the Elevator, he’d left Darwin to its own devices. It was a shitty way to run the last bastion of humanity, but the idea of living under a totalitarian cult of religious freaks held even less appeal.

The three men were staring at her, waiting. None of them needed to voice the question; she could see it on all three faces. Kip she couldn’t care less about, but to see that accusation on Prumble’s face, on Skadz’s, cut like a knife.

“I’m on your side,” she said. “I’ve been an idiot, yes, but I’m on your side.”

Prumble and Skadz exchanged a glance. “Happy to hear you say that, Sammy,” Skadz said.

“So,” she said, “I assume we’re not just here to gossip. What’s the plan? Run for Brazil? Try to stop Grillo?”

“Whoa, now hang on,” Skadz said. “Kip isn’t done. There’s more.”

“Goddamn, guys. I don’t know if I can handle more,” she said.

Now Kip leaned in. His expression changed. He glanced at each of them with sudden familiarity, as if he’d gone from outsider to conspirator. Near enough the truth, Sam realized.

“I still have contact with Platz Station,” he said. “A friend there. Our messages are relayed through … it doesn’t matter, the point is that exchanging information is difficult. Sporadic, terse.”

Prumble cut in again. “It’s the Builders, Samantha. They’re back.”

Kip nodded, unfazed at having his big announcement stolen by the big man. “My contact doesn’t know much, just that the ship is ‘huge,’ and almost here.”

“Safe to assume,” Skadz said, “that Grillo is going to want to be on top of that shit this time around.”

Sam found herself nodding. “Equally safe to assume,” she said, “that we’d rather it be Skyler, and Tania Sharma? I’m guessing she’s with him?”

“She runs things over there,” Kip said.

“Wonder if Sky’s getting a piece of that action,” Skadz mused.

“Mmm,” Prumble said. “There’s a mental image. Lucky bastard.”

“Knock it off, perverts,” Sam said.

Prumble mocked surprise. “We meant a piece of the leadership!”

“Right, and I suppose you think he should grab on to that leadership by the ponytail and ride it till sunrise.” She let their chuckles fade until the tension rolled back into the room like a dense fog. “So, what are we talking about? The four of us form a ragtag band of freedom fighters to overthrow Grillo and his freak brigade? A plucky group of misfits that stage another coup in Darwin because third time’s a charm?”

Prumble shook his head. “I had in mind something more like agents provocateurs,” he said. “We can make the man’s life very difficult. Very difficult indeed.”

Samantha thought of her time aboard Gateway with Kelly. There’d been a visceral satisfaction from playing spoiler there, mucking about behind the scenes. The thought of Kelly filled her with a sudden sorrow. One way or another, rescuing her needed to be part of the plan. Sam filed that for another day.

“In other words,” Skadz said soberly, “give Skyler a fighting chance when the shit hits the fan.”

“And if we fail?” she asked.

Skadz grinned. “Don’t know about you wags, but if the freak train won’t stop, I’m getting the bloody hell off.”
Black Level Station

7.MAR.2285

THE BUILDER SHIP settled into high geostationary orbit above North Africa, and its size defied imagination.

Even viewed through the remote repair craft, Tania had to rely on radar to confirm the dimensions. She glanced at those numbers every few minutes, hoping they were just confused, hoping the LIDAR readings were somehow being baffled by the surface material of the massive vessel.

The numbers didn’t change. Roughly six kilometers from the tapered tip that pointed down toward Earth up to the bulbous end. In shape it resembled a teardrop pointed in the wrong direction—the vessel had flipped around in the last days before arrival—except that the nose of the spherical end did jut out slightly.

There were many protrusions. This surprised Tania, as neither of the previous shell ships had similar features. The extensions were tucked under the main bulb, pointing down toward Earth. Each spike looked small and flimsy compared to the hulking vessel, until Tania estimated the length of the longest among them at half a kilometer. The sizes varied, and if she flipped the image the extensions looked like a cityscape, unlit and dead like the great cities of Earth.

The drone continued to drift in closer. Tim sat in front of Tania in Black Level’s control room, operating the automated craft from a touchscreen. He tapped a bright red icon and on the screen Tania could see a puff of exhaust shoot out toward the alien ship. Braking thrust. The craft slowed a bit, now five hundred kilometers away from mass.

“Bring it to a stop at fifty klicks,” Tania said.

“Okay.”

Off to one side of the room, Greg and Marcus huddled in front of another screen, studying high-resolution shots. They panned and zoomed the images on their monitor, talking quietly between themselves.

A pang of nostalgia warmed Tania. She’d spent many long nights working in this room, studying gamma-ray bursts or impact events on moons in the outer solar system. It felt good to be back here, engaged in science again. She’d grown tired of waiting on pins and needles for word from Skyler. He and his companions were still inside that dome. They’d failed to emerge in time for the event date, and with each additional hour they remained inside, Tania found her hope fading like a dying fire. She’d be stirring embers soon.

It also felt good to be away from Melville and the proximity to Russell Blackfield. Away from Platz Station, too. Zane continued to recover, but their conversations had been awkward since they’d read Neil’s final letter.

Tania had left all that behind for now. Everything else could wait.

“Any signs of activity?” she asked Greg and Marcus.

Without looking back, Greg dismissed her with a wave. “All quiet.”

“Signs of cratering on the bulbous end,” Marcus said.

Greg snorted. “That’s what she … um, never mind.”

Tania sighed in frustration and turned to the main screen again. Cratering? That didn’t mesh with the Builders’ previous smooth-surfaced arrivals. It made sense, though. If this craft had crossed the vast distance between stars at high speed some erosion was to be expected. Hell, total annihilation was the expected result, without some kind of protective aura.

She smiled privately. Even now, with the auras in Darwin and Belém, plus the miniature versions projected by the towers, she still couldn’t put herself in the mindset of what the Builders were technically capable of. Cratering, though, implied they weren’t gods. Even such an advanced race couldn’t send such a large ship this far completely unscathed. She found a little comfort in that.

The drone continued toward the ship at 500 kilometers per hour. Already the object dominated the screen, and the drone was still an hour away from reaching it.

The lack of activity bothered her. No third Elevator, no stream of packages racing down to the planet below, no sign of the invasion fleet that Neil Platz once predicted. Nothing. Why so big, then? Tania still had no idea what the Builders planned to do, but she couldn’t imagine sending such a massive object across the vast emptiness for no reason at all.

“Good thing it slowed down,” Tim said. “That thing would have demolished the planet if it had kept coming at its initial speed.”

“They already demolished the planet,” she shot back, followed by a squeeze on his shoulder to assure him she knew what he’d meant.

When first detected, the alien craft had been approaching Earth at incredible speed, already decelerating. They’d not spotted it early enough to know the top speed, but when their scope did find the slowing vessel its velocity was a breathtaking 50,000 kilometers per second. More amazing to Tania was that the method of thrust used to slow the ship, whatever it might have been, produced no visible light. The other detectors were off the charts, but in visible light the gigantic ship had been nearly invisible.

An hour passed. Tania stood, impassive, unable to sit or rest. Part of her wished the tiny station had a gun range. It had been one of the great surprises of her life, days earlier, to find out how mind-clearing target practice could be. Absently she rubbed at her palm, still sore from where the pistol had recoiled against her before she’d learned how to absorb the impact. Karl’s instruction had been remarkably good. She had to force herself to blink now and then when her eyes ached from staring at the display. The ship grew and grew until its surface filled the entire screen, and still it was sixty kilometers away from the drone.

Tim hit the braking thrusters again. He’d programmed the sequence, and sat back now as the drone’s computer released pulses of exhaust every few seconds, until it came to a stop. A fuel indicator in the corner of the main monitor indicated that just over 80 percent remained. Plenty to circle the vessel a few times before coming back.

“Let’s take a look around,” she said.

The smooth surface of the Builder ship drifted past the drone as if the tiny craft were floating across a still ocean at night. The sun had dipped below the horizon an hour earlier, plunging the vessel into shadow that would persist until morning. Tim suggested moving in closer and using the drone’s searchlight, but that would burn power Tania would rather save, and besides, she still felt uncomfortable with getting too close to the new ship until they knew more about it.

She felt anxious, often pacing the room, her eyes never leaving the screen. She convinced herself that at any moment some calamity would unfold. That those protrusions pointing at Earth were so many gun barrels, and in a sudden bright instant the Builders would pulverize the planet below. Or that they were launch tubes, from which thousands of tiny attack ships would swarm out like wasps and fan across the globe, eradicating the few humans who remained.

When it occurred to her that all the scenarios running through her mind were doomsday ones, she forced herself to stop speculating and focus on the facts in front of her.

“Take a look at this,” Marcus said.

Tania broke her gaze away from the main screen and walked over to the two men. Greg moved aside a bit to make room for her.

A close-up image of the pockmarked end of the ship, the end that pointed away from Earth now, filled the screen. Marcus tapped the screen and the image changed. Another portion of the ship, she guessed, with distinctly fewer craters and gouges.

Marcus flipped back to the first image, then bounced between them in rapid succession. After a dozen cycles, Tania realized they were looking at the same section of the ship’s surface. Some of the craters were in the same position in both images, only smaller in the second picture.

“It’s healing,” she said.

“Yup!”

Greg whistled. “Maybe they can do something for your scalp, Marcus.”

“Maybe they can do something for your mom’s—”

Tania elbowed him. “This is a historic moment, gentlemen. Please, act like it.”

Marcus repeated her words under his breath in an exaggerated, mocking tone. He brought up additional pairs of images and began to cycle them. Each showed the same change. Then he tried a pair of images from the tail end of the craft, the end pointing down at the planet. It looked the same, but then, it didn’t have the scarring in the first place.

“What about the naughty bits,” Greg said. “Er, sorry, Tania. The, um, raised posterior protrusions.”

Tania smirked despite herself. Marcus snorted a juvenile laugh and went back to a library view of all the images taken so far. He selected two. No changes between them, but seeing the extensions close-up, Tania realized they had hints of grooves in their surfaces, like the aura towers.

An hour later dawn broke and warm light bathed the alien ship. The drone made another circuit of the huge mass, shifting its path to look up at it from below.

“Guys,” Tim said, “I found something.” Then, “Wow.”

Tania sat with Greg, while Marcus slept in a curled ball on the floor behind them. She looked up, startled, and crossed back to the center of the room. Greg followed her, and Marcus stirred as if sensing the change in mood within the room.

“What is that?” Greg asked.

On the screen, nestled between four of the huge spikes that jutted from the underside of the main bulb, was a hexagonal mark. A portion of the ship’s surface was darker than the rest, with five perfectly straight edges forming a rough circle. Inset within the hexagon was another, smaller one. Tim enlarged that portion of the image while simultaneously activating instruction of the remote-controlled vehicle to stop above the shape. Still fifty kilometers distant, the small drone’s camera couldn’t discern fine detail. “Push in?” Tim asked.

A laugh caught in Greg’s throat. He withered under Tania’s sidelong glance.

“Yes,” she said. “Get to within a kilometer.”

Tim turned to her. “Really?”

“Do it, and if we have any other bands, IR or UV, see if you can put them on the side monitor.”

“Okay. Right, here goes.”

On the screen Greg and Marcus had been huddled in front of, the camera view vanished and a grid of four new images appeared. Infrared, ultraviolet, and two telemetry views. The repair drone wasn’t built for this kind of work, but it was pretty good at finding microfractures in a station’s hull, or detecting escaping air or water. The tiny craft began a slow approach to the surface of the alien ship. Soon the towers surrounding the hexagonal discoloration filled the edges of the screen, and then even they moved out of view as the little craft drifted closer. Ten kilometers. Five.

When the hexagonal patch on the Builder ship filled the monitor, Tania called a halt.

She stared at it for a long time. One hundred meters across, she guessed. The smaller section within spanned perhaps fifty. Long shadows cast from the surrounding protrusions draped black patches horizontally across the area.

From this distance the drone’s camera could pick up some fine details, chief among which was an obvious groove that ran along the edge of the inner hexagon. The outer portion had no such groove, instead appearing to be painted onto the broader surface of the massive ship. Not painted, exactly, but a cosmetic feature, whereas that small inner area was clearly a separate portion of hull. Like a …

“Door,” she said. “It looks like a door.”

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

VANESSA 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.”

“The ship’s arrived then?”

“It’s enormous, Skyler. Terrifyingly so. Six kilometers long.”

Six. Jesus. “Where did it stop?” Part of him, a big part, hoped she’d say Ireland.

“Over Africa. We sent a drone to survey it, Skyler, and found something. There’s a door, or airlock, surrounded by these … symbols. Shapes, like writing in a way. Karl and I are planning to—”

“Shapes? What shapes?”

“There’s five,” she said. “Each is basic, but they all have an imperfection. A circle with a half-circle dent at the top, a square with a notch, a triangle missing one tip. The oval one is wavy on the top half. And the last looks like an hourglass, with little teeth on the top and bottom.”

“Tania,” he said evenly, “don’t do anything. Wait for us to get back.”

“Why?”

“We found something in the dome. An object, hourglass-shaped just like you described. And when I entered that cave east of Belém, I saw another. I thought it was a little altar, remember? About the same size as this thing, but circular.”

“God, Skyler,” she said, then went silent for a few seconds. “I wish I knew what this all meant.”

“Me, too, Tania. Me, too.”

“Okay. Okay, we’ll hold off, but please hurry.”

The urgency in her voice came through loud and clear. “Is the ship doing something? Building another Elevator?”

“It’s quiet so far. That’s not the reason I want you back here.”

“Well, regardless, we’re leaving immediately. Ana’s injured, and I need you to have whatever medics you can muster ready to look at her the moment we arrive. No, more than that, have them contact me as soon as possible. We might be able to diagnose her in flight.”

Tania’s voice lowered. “Skyler, Blackfield is with us.”

The words hung in the air like a bad odor. Skyler tried to digest their meaning, but each thought he had brought with it a hundred questions, none of them good.

Tania spoke before he could. “He came here with Platz Station. There was a battle—”

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Did they win? If you tell me he’s in charge—”

“Slow down,” Tania said. “The battle was in Darwin, not here. Russell fled and couldn’t go anywhere else.”

The words settled on him like the lid of a coffin. Everything that had happened, everything else going on, vanished.

“Bullshit,” he said. “It’s a lie. Put him out an airlock right now, Tania.”

“We think he’s telling the truth.”

“Right. Everything is on the up-and-up, everyone’s friends, and yet you want me to rush back there and do what, exactly? Confirm your bad decision to let him in?” He took a deep breath. “Tania, put him out an airlock or I’ll do it myself. Nothing that f*cker does is truthful, and you know it.”

For a long moment she didn’t speak.

Skyler closed his eyes. “Please don’t tell me he’s sitting there with you. That he’s joined the colony.”

“No,” Tania said. “He’s confined to quarters here on Melville. The rest of his people are under house arrest on Platz Station until we can figure out what to do.”

“There’s nothing to figure out,” Skyler said. “Put the bastard out an airlock and send the station back to Darwin before it explodes or something. It’s a Trojan horse, Tania, it has to be.”

“I can’t do that. Platz Station is a boon, regardless of who brought it. It doubles our living space and—”

“And you want me to come back and advise you? When will you listen to a word I say? I can’t seem to get through anymore.” He recognized the flare of temper too late to stop the words, and took a long breath. His ears felt hot and he could feel the pulsing veins in his temples.

“I did what I thought was right,” she said. “I know we have had our differences, but I value your judgment. If I made a mistake, fine, come help me fix it, okay? And … honestly, I’d feel that much safer with you here.”

Further argument wouldn’t matter. He knew he had to get back, for Ana’s sake more than anything. None of this news changed that.

“Okay,” he said. “We’re leaving today. Do not … do not … let Blackfield out of his cell.”

“We won’t, I promise.”

Her voice held the hint of a buried apology that he hadn’t expected. He tried to see things from her perspective. Blackfield arriving with the crown jewel of Darwin’s space stations, and a six-kilometer-long behemoth Builder ship arriving right after that. And now these strange symbols, and matching objects within the crashed shells. She’s overwhelmed, beset on all sides with things she can’t wrap her mind around. He chastised himself for not seeing it sooner.

“Good,” he said with as much warmth and calm as he could muster. “Now, put me through to Karl. There’s a bunch of aura towers coming back from here and the camp needs to be ready for them.”
Platz Station

12.MAR.2285

A WOMAN NAMED Jenny completed the preflight check under Skyler’s watchful eye.

He couldn’t yet quite bring himself to trust anyone who arrived with Blackfield, but Tania had insisted. Jenny had all the qualifications, and as Tania pointed out, she couldn’t really be blamed for doing her duty in the midst of that attack.

She’d been aboard Platz Station when Grillo’s forces had attacked, and she’d been the one to handle the station’s move to Belém. Tania assured Skyler such an operation was no simple task. Station records confirmed Jenny’s story: a transfer to Platz Station from Midway Station after the original crew had evacuated with Zane. So, she wasn’t one of Russell’s cronies, at least at that time. She claimed to have hated the post and would have preferred to remain on Midway, Darwin’s smallest station with a crew of just four. When Skyler asked her what she did to pass the time on Midway, she replied, “Flight sims.” Her original post in orbit had been in flying construction craft and loaders in the vast interior bay of Penrith Assembly, and she couldn’t shed that itch to fly. Begrudgingly, Skyler decided he liked the woman. She reminded him of Angus.

“EVA suits are here,” Tania said from the passenger compartment below the cockpit.

He looked down at his feet, through the hatch in the floor that allowed entry to the cockpit. Tania drifted in the compartment below. “We’re about done,” he said.

The repair craft had an odd vertical layout, unintuitive at least to Skyler. His mind was hardwired to expect flying craft to be aerodynamic, but of course such considerations didn’t matter in space. From the outside it looked like a metal cylinder with six robotic arms of varying size and purpose sticking out from three bulky, square sections. The conical thrusters that guided the craft poked out in clusters of five at seemingly random sections of the hull.

“It’s going to be a tight fit down here,” Tania said. “I brought six extra air tanks, enough for fifty hours or so round-trip. We should suit up beforehand, I think.”

Skyler nodded. The craft had been designed for a two-person crew, one being the pilot, one to venture out and make hull repairs to the station. Apparently Platz had originally intended to provide every station with one, but only three had been manufactured before such pursuits became all but impossible. Belatedly Skyler wondered where he would sit during the journey. The cockpit barely provided room for Jenny. Below, the passenger compartment had been built for one person and welding supplies. Now it held Tania and six air canisters. The hourglass object recovered in Ireland had been packed neatly in an airtight case that originally housed welding gear, and which sat nestled within the craft’s robotic arms. Gray nylon straps secured it in place.

“Go get suited,” Jenny said. “I can finish this.”

Deciding he could trust her, Skyler pulled his legs together and pushed off the ceiling, drifting down to the compartment below. Tania had moved to one side to make room for him. If he positioned himself in the center of the cylinder, he could have easily reached out and touched each side with his fingertips.

A single reddish LED illuminated the cylindrical room and cast Tania in a mixture of warm glow and stark shadow. She smiled meekly at him and looked away an instant after their eyes met. He’d forgotten how effortlessly beautiful she was. Even here, with a sheen of sweat on her brow, her raven hair pulled back in a hasty bun, and an expression equal parts anticipation and exhaustion, she made his breath catch in his throat.

The thought gripped him between two conflicting sensations of guilt. One for the rift that had formed between him and this remarkable woman, and one for the injured young lady he’d left on the ground in Belém. Ana. She’d flown into something approaching a rage when he told her he would be going up the Elevator, and ultimately onto the alien ship. Given her condition, her situation, she’d argued with an almost admirable vehemence. She was still in the infirmary, awake though sedated. Her injuries were extensive: internal bleeding, bruised ribs, and a fractured lower vertebra. Or as Ana growled, “a hell of a backache.” When Karl knocked and announced it was time to board the climber, Ana had finally accepted that he was going. She kissed Skyler’s forehead and said, “Come back to me, Sky. I miss you already.”

Skyler swallowed and forced himself to keep Ana’s face in the corner of his mind’s eye, like an overlay on a terminal screen. But when Tania glanced back up at him, the terminal in his mind crashed.

“Suits are out on the deck,” she said.

“After you,” he said, and gestured to the open airlock door.

The white EVA suits were top-of-the-line. Tight auto-fitting elastic garments with heavy black ribbing woven straight into the fabric like mechanical veins. Skyler assumed this was to combat the effects of being in a vacuum, somehow. A few of the station crew waited nearby to help them into the complicated outfits. Tania, either already briefed or just used to wearing such things, shed her own blue jumpsuit without hesitation. Underneath she wore a skintight blue exercise outfit that left so little to the imagination, Skyler found himself glancing away in embarrassment.

“Something wrong?” Tania asked.

“Um, no. You look different, that’s all. New exercise routine?”

Tania blushed slightly. “Combat training, per your suggestion. Self-defense, firearms. I’m getting pretty good at Krav Maga.”

Skyler studied her anew. He’d tried the Israeli street-fighting technique years before and found it too fast, too brutal. Fifty hours, he thought with dread, and tried to conjure his overlay picture of Ana.

He still wore the clothes he’d arrived in. Black cargo pants and a long-sleeved gray shirt. His boots he’d left in a locker on the climber. At the behest of the waiting helpers, Skyler stripped to his underwear and let them guide him into the spacesuit. He felt self-conscious at first, standing there in his briefs, Tania a few meters away. Then he shrugged and grinned at his own childish behavior. Here he was, about to embark on a spacewalk to study an alien ship firsthand, and he was worried Tania might gawk at his bum. A minute earlier he’d gawked at her. He wondered if the only thing that separated him from someone like Blackfield was that he didn’t blurt out every primal thought running through his brain.

The process took half an hour. First the skintight suit went on. Despite the rigid wires running under its surface, the suit provided surprising mobility. Next was a hard-shell vest, not unlike body armor but much lighter. One of the helpers explained the suit used counterpressure to combat the effects of vacuum; he hooked up a series of gas lines from the vest’s back to connectors above Skyler’s elbows and knees.

“What’s this bit?” Skyler asked, gesturing to the protrusion on his right forearm. To him it looked like a gun built right into the suit.

“Maneuvering thrust,” someone said. “Point in the direction you want to go away from. Yes, away. Sounds weird but it’s really intuitive when you’re out there.”

The comment made him wonder once again just what the hell he was doing here. Certainly there must be five hundred people in the colony better qualified for such an undertaking. If objections had been raised, Tania had settled them all before he’d even made the climb up from Belém. She wanted Skyler on the mission, and that was that.

Finished with her own suit, Tania came to him and tapped a sequence of buttons on the small control pad on his left forearm. Skyler felt each section of the suit tighten to the edge of pain, then relax again, as if the whole outfit were one big blood pressure cuff.

“Time to go,” she said when the diagnostic was finished.



On the journey over he told Tania everything that had happened in Ireland.

She asked him countless questions about the dome, and the object they’d found within it. He tried four times to describe the sensations he’d felt when crossing in or out of that purple field. The words didn’t seem to do it justice, but Tania accepted them all the same.

She gave him a summary of what they’d learned of the new Builder ship. The unspoken agreement between them that made Ana a taboo subject seemed to extend to Russell Blackfield as well, and Skyler didn’t mind. According to Karl the man was still confined to quarters on Melville and had been a model prisoner so far. No decisions had been made on what to do with him in the long term. Plenty of time to have that argument with Tania after the mission, Skyler figured.

A long hour passed in near-total silence, with Skyler doing everything he could think of not to look into Tania’s eyes lest he be lost there. He felt very much as he had on a train to Italy as a na?ve young man, sharing a compartment with a beautiful stranger. In the span of a few minutes on that journey he’d managed to be caught staring at her legs, and then accidentally insulting her with an observation on the current political climate. The next eight hours had been absolute torture. At least his knowledge of both Italian profanity and politics had improved.

Tania passed some time showing him how to work the arm-mounted thruster and the basics of the helmet’s onboard computer. She checked their suits again and spoke with Jenny over the intercom about their approach trajectory. Then, almost casually, Tania brought up the day Russell had ordered Jenny to move Platz Station from Darwin to Belém.

Skyler knew Tania had interviewed the woman already. He’d heard the basics of it himself. Here and now, in a tin can heading to make contact with an alien race that had all but obliterated humanity, Tania struck a friendly tone. Jenny was part of the team now, part of the crew. One of us. Her appointment to pilot this mission suddenly made brilliant, perfect sense to Skyler. She spoke freely.

“Russell had been planning something,” Jenny said. “He had his own troops aboard, and all the talk on the station was of what he planned to do with them. They gave up the pretense that you guys were all dead when half the farm platforms came back, so we knew you were out there somewhere. The activity, the soldiers … I knew he must have found you.”

“So Russell was focused on us,” Skyler said. “How’d he miss the climbers full of Jacobite thugs coming up? I mean, he’s not stupid. Not intelligent, either, but he’s wise.”

“Oh, they were expected,” Jenny said through the speaker. “We’d been waiting for them for days.”

This had been said before, but Skyler thought perhaps it was because no one wanted to admit getting caught with their pants down, least of all Russell.

Jenny went on. “Everyone knew Russell had put Grillo in charge of Darwin. Hell, Russell bragged about it. His vision and leadership laid the groundwork, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Apparently, Grillo’s men were supposed to handle station security while Russell’s were over here. I got the sense they expected to arrive at a station empty of guards, but Russell, well, you know how he is.”

“Tell me anyway,” Skyler said. He glanced at Tania. Blackfield had glossed over these particular details.

“Russell wanted to make a show of authority. I heard the orders he called down to the barracks ring. We hear everything in station ops, you see. ‘All combat squads report to the main cargo bay in fifteen minutes,’ ” she said mimicking him. “ ‘Full gear, dress to impress. Let’s make sure this lot knows who their betters are.’ ”

She went on, fleshing out gaps in a story already told. Skyler and Tania stared at each other in a silent conversation. Russell might have left out details that would make him look bad, but the meat of it he’d told truthfully. Grillo had betrayed him. He’d used the invitation to cover for Russell’s security as an opening to flood orbit with his own army. If not for Russell’s vain desire to show off his own forces, it would have been a clean coup, Skyler thought. A concentrated force of single-minded purpose, inserted straight into the heart of the station. Which is likely what happened on all the other stations, too.

Skyler reached out and muted the intercom. “None of this translates to ‘forgive and forget,’ in my book.”

Her face, just centimeters from his, showed little insight into her thoughts. Tania’s gaze held his, searched his, and Skyler imagined her tabulating some mental scorecard of Russell’s virtues or lack thereof.

After a time, Tania nodded once. Her expression changed from solemn to serious. “There’s something I need to tell you about, Skyler.”

“We’re here,” Jenny said suddenly. “A thousand klicks and closing.”

Tania started to reach for her helmet, but Skyler grasped her wrist. “Tell me what?”

“Later,” she said.