“I want to see her.”
“Denied.”
Skyler opened his mouth to argue.
“I suggest,” Russell said, “you stop there. Assuming you ever want to fly in my airspace again, or hitch a ride upstairs.”
Skyler could feel the cold stare from Samantha without turning to her. He swallowed his words.
“Give them ten minutes to get dressed and leave, or throw them out,” Russell said to his guards as he turned and left the room. In the doorway, he stopped and leveled a lewd gaze on Samantha. “You have an open invitation for a rematch, any time,” he said. “Clothing is optional, of course.”
He left the room before Samantha could respond.
Nine and a half minutes later, the Melville lifted off.
The short flight to the old airport, two kilometers away, felt longer than the trip back from Hawaii.
Samantha had not spoken a word to him since the guards had escorted them from that dismal room. She stormed out the cargo door almost before the Melville settled on the tarmac, stomping toward the makeshift kitchen and bar down at Woon’s hangar.
A stiff drink didn’t sound like such a bad idea, but Skyler decided to unload the ship first. It would give Samantha time to settle down, if nothing else.
Truth be told, he needed time himself.
“Take the night off, Angus,” he said to his pilot. “I’ll do the postflight.” He gave the craft a gentle pat.
Angus shrugged and made his own way toward Woon’s tavern, head down and hands in his pockets.
It took hours for Skyler to run through the postmission checklist. Far longer than normal. He checked each engine even as they burped excess heat and spooled down. He checked the flaps and hovering thrusters, and visually inspected each ceramic tile on the underbelly for signs of cracks or wear.
He did a thorough job. The work stood between him and a collapse into self-pity.
Satisfied with the health of the ship, he turned his attention to the cargo bay. Tania’s briefcase proved missing, of course. He had expected as much when they were taken into quarantine. Russell Blackfield would probably demand a healthy price for it, if he had any sense.
Surprisingly, the duffel bag full of other spoils remained on board. Lighter than he remembered, but there might still be enough inside to cover their spooling costs and drop rights.
Before leaving the ship, he noticed something else: a blank space, where the photograph he’d found in Japan had been. The image of a young Neil Platz, standing in front of the telescope. He wondered if it now graced Russell Blackfield’s office wall.
Platz paid for the mission to the telescope, a place he helped build. Skyler couldn’t wrap his mind around that. If a reason existed, it eluded him. None of my business, he thought, then dismissed the idea. The less he knew, the better. Part of him hoped that Platz would pull the contract with Prumble after this debacle. Life could return to a semblance of normal, minus one friend and sniper.
“Evening, Skyler,” someone said.
Skyler turned to see a fellow scavenger captain ambling past. “Kantro, my friend.”
“Heard about Jake,” the man said. “He’ll be missed.”
Skyler nodded. He didn’t want to talk about it. “I hope your day went better. Good scavenging out there?”
Kantro shrugged. “Aborted before we even stepped out. A whole mess of subs swarmed us. Newsubs, my crew is calling them. Never seen ’em so … organized.”
“Same thing happened to us,” Skyler muttered. The thought sent goose bumps along his arms. “Newsubs, eh?”
The other captain waved it off. “Maybe the bastards finally unionized,” he said with a good-natured laugh. “Seeya ’round, mate.”
Skyler wandered inside, wrestling with the idea that the subhumans might be changing. That the behavior they’d witnessed in Hawaii might be widespread, the new norm. The idea chilled him to the core.
He wound up in his room, exhausted, lying on his bunk. When he closed his eyes the mission kept replaying in his mind. Memories of Jake. Tania, in her cell in Nightcliff. His imagination ran wild. Opening his eyes proved the only recourse.
Sleep would have to wait.
He pulled the blanket from his bed and wrapped it around his shoulders, picked up the first bottle he could find, and made his way to the roof.
The meager rooftop garden smelled of citrus and soil and rain. Skyler wandered through it and took stock of the plants sprouting there. They’d have plenty of tomatoes, papaya, and bananas from the look of it. Rambutan, too, which he shunned for its strange texture. The others could eat it. He dug out a small weed from beneath the lone starfruit tree and tossed it into the compost bin before continuing to his destination: a small patch of roof at the back of the hangar.
He spread the blanket out and sat. The noise of activity along the main runway barely reached this spot. He lay down, one arm behind his head, and watched the climbers inch their way toward the planets and stars that filled the clear sky above. A crescent moon shimmered in the heat near the horizon.
He drank for Jake, first.
The quiet one, devoted to his role as sniper. Everything he did seemed to be with the goal of improving his ability. Target practice, exercise, meditation. Once, on the return leg of a mission, he’d parachuted from the Melville over Darwin’s eastern slum, the Maze, for no reason other than to see if he could find his way out. “If I’m not back by midnight, drinks are on me,” he’d said. He made it with an hour to spare, let Skadz pour him a drink, and never once bragged about the accomplishment.
Next, Skyler drank for Tania.
He tried, hard, to imagine her being treated fairly by Blackfield. He tried harder not to imagine her alone, in her own decon room, subjected to the bastard’s questions. Or worse.
The thought made him shiver, despite the balmy night. He drew another swallow from the bottle and let the warmth of the alcohol fill him from within.
For a time he toyed with the idea of going back, attempting to rescue her. But to what end? He’d never fly in Nightcliff’s airspace again, and he couldn’t exactly get Tania approved for a lift home, either. He couldn’t imagine her living in the squalor of Darwin, cut off from her gleaming space station, forever.
At some point he drifted off. When he awoke, Samantha was sitting next to him. She held his bottle, dangling it from two fingers.
“Angus,” she said with a slur, “passed out in Woon’s kitchen.” She erupted into a booming laugh, full of snorts and wheezing breaths. “Facedown! Middle of the sodding floor!”
Skyler propped up on his elbows and shook the fog from his head. “What time is it?”
“Fuck knows,” Sam said. She tilted the bottle back and took a full gulp.
“Should we go get him?”
Samantha shook her head. “Woon threw a coat over him. Probably more comfortable than his cot.”
They sat for a while without speaking. Skyler turned his attention to the night sky again. Far above, he could just make out the winking beacon of a climber. Looking lower, he scanned the checkerboard of lights, marking the few pockets in Darwin where electricity still flowed.
Lower still, he tracked along the fence line of the old airport. Shacks and tents had been erected right to the edge, a stark contrast to the weed-infested expanse within.
In the middle of the field of weeds, Skyler spotted an enormous rat, devouring some stolen morsel. He made the shape of a gun with his hand and pretended to fire at the rodent.
Samantha watched with grim fascination. “Jake coulda made that shot,” she said.
“One time,” Skyler said, “back during the Purge, Jake and I were sighting down on this crap little village near Weddell. A whole bunch of subs had overrun the place. But they were all spread out, not like that clan in Hilo. Just the two of us were out there, long recon, you see?”
He reached for the bottle and Sam handed it to him. She stretched her arms across her knees and laid her head down, looking sideways at Skyler.
“We were about a klick away, gone to ground on a hillside. Doesn’t matter. Jake, he’s studying the hell out of the place through his scope. I’m just trying not to piss my pants.”
Sam chuckled. “Scared shitless, eh?”
Skyler waved her off. “No, my bladder really was about to rupture. We’d been hiding out there for, hell, six hours. Then, all of a sudden, Jake tells me to prep the LAW rocket. He stretches his fingers like he’s about to take a shot.”
Watching him with droopy eyes, Samantha nodded.
“We’re a klick out, remember. No backup. You weren’t in the Purge, but you can guess how we immunes were used. Sent far and wide to scout things out, report their numbers and pack locations.
“Anyway, I’m about to piss myself. But I get the rocket tube up on my shoulder anyway.” Skyler gulped again from the bottle, nearly empty now. “Without warning he fires. Boom! Sounds like lightning. Or thunder, whatever the hell. I’m looking at each sub in the village, waiting for one to drop. But none do.”
“Fuck … he missed?”
“No. No, no. This is Jake we’re talking about. Suddenly all the subs turn toward the center of the town. And then I hear it.”
“What? Hear what?!” Sam asked.
“Church bells.”
“The fuck?”
Skyler smiled at the memory. “Jake hit a bell in the church tower, size of a teakettle, from a klick out. The sound drew ’em like a swarm of cockroaches.” He shivered, visibly. “I can still hear their screams. Not like yesterday. These were desperate, angry. The confused early herd in dire need of thinning. Anyway, the damn things poured into the old church at the center of town, through the doors and windows. And then I understood.”
“Tell me!”
Skyler grinned wide. “I could see them, climbing the church tower, through a couple of small windows along its height. Tripping and falling over each other to find a fresh kill up at the bells.”
“Oh, shit,” Sam said, reaching the conclusion before he told it.
Skyler nodded. “I put a rocket into the base of the tower. The blast was terrific, but, Sam, when that tower collapsed …”
“Jesus,” she whispered.
“Had to be at least fifty of them in there. The way he told the story, it was my heroics. But that’s bullshit. He shot a bell from a kilometer away and sent those things to peace. One bullet.”
“Efficient,” Sam said.
“Maybe three crawled away, all broken and twisted,” Skyler added. “Jake didn’t even waste bullets on them. ‘No need,’ he said.”
“The man was smooth, I’ll give him that.”
With a grunt, Skyler nodded. “Best part? We’d finally found something a church was useful for.”
Samantha laughed from the depths of her belly. Guilt, driven by sorrow, eventually restrained her mirth.
Skyler lifted the bottle to the sky and drank half the remnants. He passed the remainder to Sam.
She poured it on the roof and hurled the empty bottle at the rat in the darkness.
Chapter Eighteen
Platz Station
30.JAN.2283
The Klaxon wailed so loud Neil found it hard to think straight.
In every corner, in every room and hallway of the vast station, his staff suffered the same obnoxious noise.
EVACUATE, EVACUATE!
The synthetic voice boomed in between the long, droning alarm. The whole thing sounded like a parody, Neil thought. Something out of a bad science fiction movie from the golden age. Whoever designed the emergency systems had a sense of humor, that much was obvious.
He flipped the switch from “test” back to “normal.”
“Let’s hope we never have to listen to that again,” he said into the handheld microphone. A few among the gathered staff laughed politely. Most shook their heads or worked their jaws to clear strained ears.
“Right,” Neil said. “On that horrific note, I’ll turn things over to my brother, Zane, for the evacuation rehearsal.” He glanced right.
Zane stood close, an amiable grin on his jolly face, hands clasped in front of him. The dark blue business suit he wore matched his eyes. Though he was only two years younger than Neil, his hair still retained a lot of its original sandy blond color. The staff loved him, probably because he was perpetually in a good mood. He’d never shown the business acumen that Neil possessed and had long ago been regulated to simpler tasks—running charities, keeping the family home in order, and, after the disease forced them to relocate to orbit, managing the day-to-day operations aboard Platz Station.
Zane took the microphone. “It’s been a year since our last drill,” he said, “and in light of recent events, my brother has asked me to hold these more often. Perhaps he’ll reconsider after that wonderful serenade.”
Nervous chuckles from the audience. The appearance of a subhuman in orbit had everyone on pins and needles. Continued outages of the climbers, however brief, only fueled the growing unease. Neil offered the best smile he could muster. “I leave them in your capable hands,” he said under his breath, and stepped back.
His brother launched into the details of the evacuation plan. Leads for each level were named, exit points reviewed. Neil listened to all this as he walked. He took his time, offering casual nods to everyone he passed. He saw excitement in their faces, despite the general anxiety. The evacuation rehearsal made a convenient diversion.
“This drill will simulate a hull rupture on the Earth-side levels,” Zane’s voice said over the address system. “As such, we will evacuate via the topside climber port.”
Exactly as Neil suggested. A masked order, in fact. He cared little about station safety procedures. What he wanted from all this was a crew fresh with the knowledge of how to move up the Elevator, on a moment’s notice, to Hab-8, in case trouble came from below. From Nightcliff, from Earth.
