Through the walls came the distant chatter of gunfire from somewhere within the facility.
“Time we were off,” Skadz said.
“Yeah. Prumble? Kelly? We need to move.”
Kelly went first, her captive prodded along in front of her at an apprehensive run. He stumbled the last few steps into the climber car and yelped when Kelly yanked him back to his feet with one powerful movement.
Skadz went in next, smartly moving straight to stairs that led to an upper deck of the tall, narrow compartment.
Sam ushered Vaughn in, making little effort now to pretend he was a true captive. If the technician hadn’t guessed already, he was unlikely to figure it out, and if he knew, well, he probably also knew that would get him killed. Regardless, the man was staring at his shoes as Kelly strapped him into one of the jump seats along the wall. Vaughn glanced at Sam, then caught Kelly’s eye as well and winked at both of them as he took a seat next to the tech.
“It’s going to be okay if we just cooperate,” he said.
The other man kept his eyes on the floor but his head bobbed in agreement. “Pray with me?” he muttered, not looking up.
Vaughn looked at the two women and rolled his eyes. “Of course, of course,” he replied to the man, giving him a gentle pat on the back.
Sam grinned slightly and caught Kelly looking at her. “Old friend,” Sam mouthed.
A Klaxon sounded, then an artificial voice announced the cabin door would seal automatically in thirty seconds.
Sam turned to make room for Prumble but the big man still stood at the control room’s exit, twenty meters from the climber. He moved awkwardly down the sloped ramp, and still had fifteen meters to cross when the door behind him burst open.
“Go!” he shouted. Then Prumble whirled and brought both assault rifles to bear, one tucked into each armpit.
A group of Nightcliff guards piled through the open doorway at the far end as Prumble’s guns began to bark thunder. Flashes of muzzle fire lit the incoming men even as the bullets tore through them. They were falling, screaming, and yet they continued to file in. Whatever came behind them, a hail of bullets was apparently preferable.
The climber door began to swing shut on its own accord. Sam stepped forward to block it. She put her shoulder into it and fought for purchase on the floor with her boots. The heavy airlock door kept moving. Silent, robotic, unforgiving. Sam shoved an arm out around the edge of the doorjamb, groaning with effort and feeling the pressure waves of Prumble’s gunshots roll over her.
Kelly grabbed her, hauled her back an instant before her hand would have been crushed.
“No!” Sam shouted, pushing Kelly away and moving toward the porthole, helpless now but to watch. She pounded her fist on the thick metal. In a clearer state of mind she would have looked for an abort button, an emergency-open lever. Later that idea would hit her. Too late.
The thick door shut with an almost imperceptible sound as pressure seals connected and the motorized latches glided into place, muting the thrum of Prumble’s twin rifles and the cries of the dying.
Suddenly the climber car lurched. Not up but to the side. The noise of violence faded. The last thing Samantha saw was the hulking form of Mr. Prumble, twin cannons gripped in two meaty hands, spitting fire and death. The desperate guards already lay dead. Climbing over them in a tidal wave of ragged limbs was a writhing mass of subhumans.
“Stop this fucking thing!” she screamed without turning, both fists now hammering the tiny round window.
A gibbering, feeble voice answered from somewhere at the back of the cramped cabin. “It’s all automated now. Only the control room can—”
“We get it, Martin,” Vaughn said. “Shut the hell up.”
Sam felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find Skadz standing next to her. His face was a grim, hollow mask. “Nothing we can do, Sammy.”
Balled fists still against the door, Sam leaned until her forehead pressed against the cool porthole glass. Black cables and industrial piping slid by centimeters away as the climber went through its departure motions.
“He didn’t have his suit,” Skadz added, voice distant and numb. “Bought us time rather than burden us. Shit. If only I’d …”
Sam turned to him, anger welling up over her grief, harsh words on the tip of her tongue. When she saw Skadz’s teary eyes, she bit down and kept her mouth shut. He’d wanted to stay behind. Needed to, if only to find some relief for the guilt he’d carried like a goddamn cross all these years. He would have traded places with Prumble in a heartbeat had the opportunity been there. Only it hadn’t. Prumble had been the last in line, and simply did what needed to be done. Selfless in the end. A hero.
She gritted her teeth and faced the small window. “Thank you,” she whispered to the glass. “We won’t forget.”
A stark five minutes passed in absolute silence. The climber stopped and started a few times, first turning and then lifting. Then came one final lurch upward that didn’t abate as the vehicle began to accelerate and climb toward the heavens.
Last climber out.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Belem, Brazil
1.APR.2285
The idea of breathing fresh air took time to settle in.
Leaving Mexico, Tania had been one foot into the rear cabin when she realized she no longer needed to confine herself to the dreary loneliness that waited within.
“Need a co-pilot?” she asked Vanessa at the cockpit just before the other woman closed the hatch. Vanessa grinned at that and let Tania inside.
They spent the three-hour flight back to Brazil in near-constant conversation. Vanessa shared a few tales of her time in Gabriel’s cult of immunes, stories that involved Pablo and even young Ana and her now dead twin brother, Davi. She stuck to warm stories, and a few times let the endings fall by the wayside when Tania sensed they were drifting into darker waters.
Whenever Vanessa trailed off, Tania stepped in, happy to find someone who would listen attentively to everything that had happened since the disease first arrived. She even told her new friend about the daily life and—in hindsight—comical politics that went on aboard Anchor Station both before and after SUBS broke out. She told of how she’d only been down to Earth once since the disease confined everyone to Darwin’s meager footprint, on the harrowing journey to Hawaii on which she’d met Skyler.
“Did you and Skyler have a …” Vanessa paused. “You know, a relationship?”
Tania felt her pulse quicken, kept herself quiet long enough to compose her thoughts. “I think we both had hopes, but circumstances … well, there was so much else going on.”
Vanessa said nothing.
“I’m happy for him,” Tania added, aware of how lame the words sounded and wishing she hadn’t said them.
“He’s had a remarkable influence on Ana,” Vanessa said. “I guess you probably don’t want to hear that.”
“It’s okay,” Tania replied. Please stop talking.
“She came of age after the disease took her parents, took everyone she knew except Davi. Her brother was the grounding force in her life, you know? They grew up together, riding in Gabriel’s fleet. Can you imagine going through that? At that age I was in university. You were probably studying aboard a space station, for God’s sake. Those two were riding through a demolished world with a psychopath. It’s amazing they both survived, much less escaped. They could have fled. But instead they brought Skyler to rescue us.”
And at the same time, I was agreeing—apparently—to give Skyler up to save the rest of the colony. Tania felt a familiar wave of regret course through her and this time she allowed it to run its course. The past she couldn’t change. The future, though, was another matter and there was still work to do. She let the conversation drift away from the topic, and spent the last hour of the journey learning the basics of the Helios’s navigation systems.
Vanessa guided the craft along the coastline of Venezuela and Guyana, avoiding the mountains where Doppler indicated a vicious storm. When Belem finally came into view on the horizon, the city looked like a jagged, uneven row of dirty teeth jutting upward from low, cotton-ball clouds. It was midday, hot and rainy below.
“Weird,” Vanessa said.
Tania glanced at her.
“No response from Exodus. Everyone’s eating lunch, maybe.”
A comment died on Tania’s lips when she noticed the wisp of smoke rising up through the dense clouds below. Vanessa saw it at the same moment and immediately aborted their landing approach and angled the aircraft for a flyby.
The smoke curled upward along the path of the thin, almost invisible Elevator cord. Tania followed the line upward and spotted a lone climber high above, beacon light winking rhythmically. She watched it for a few seconds until the motion became apparent: down.
As the Helios drew closer the wisp proved more like a plume. Something big was burning below, and it was right where the camp should be. She dug her nails into the armrests, craned her neck for any detail that might be glimpsed through the gray and white soup. And then they dipped in, and her view become a rushing, shifting torrent of cloud like static on a dead screen. This ended as quickly as it had started, and the city came into full view.
Flames engulfed a section of slums near Camp Exodus, leaving a row of charred homes closest to the wall. The fire had started there, Tania noted, and spread north in a cone. In the heavy rain the licking tongues of yellow were almost totally obscured by thick smoke. The tendrils rose black and oily in places, paper white in others and mixing into a gray morass that seemed to become one with the heavy storm clouds that clung overhead.
Bright flashes of light caught Tania’s eye, rapid winks from the perimeter of camp. A few years ago she would have not understood, but now she knew muzzle flashes when she saw them. These crackled along the wall of Camp Exodus as if someone had set off a string of fireworks.
Vanessa brought the aircraft in low over the camp, keeping the speed above 150 kilometers per hour and maintaining a safe distance from the invisible thread of the space elevator. She banked steeply as they flew over, giving Tania a clear view of the entire camp from just a few hundred meters up.
Within she saw people running, ferrying supplies back and forth to the defenders on the wall. A crowd huddled around the medical tent, another by the tower yard where Tania knew the munitions closet to be.
On the wall, every few meters, were colonists facing the erratic onslaught of subhumans that poured in from the city and even the rainforest to the east. Bodies of those shot trying to approach the camp were everywhere, and a few even lay within.
Tania craned her neck to take in more details as the Helios slipped out over the river and began to turn for another pass. “It’s safe to land, I think,” Tania said. “We’ve got to help them.”
“Copy that,” Vanessa said. “Switching to verts.”
The note of the electric motors changed as thrust was redirected out the tiny vertical ports. Vanessa spun the craft about. As the camp came back into view, Tania glanced down at the swollen river below. People were swimming toward camp amid bodies floating limp, arms outward. Not people, she corrected herself. More subs. Just like in Colorado, they were of a sudden single-minded purpose, only here it seemed to be to get to the Elevator and not the alien object in the Helios’s cargo hold. What then? And what had triggered their sudden, all-consuming goals?
She made a sudden, frantic study of the camp, looking for the Magpie. Were they back already? Prize, or prizes, in hand? There were no other aircraft within the walls that she could see, but maybe they’d been forced to complete the journey on foot, or by truck. Tania tried the radio again while Vanessa focused on lining up Helios with the colony’s single landing pad. Again no response came.
“If anyone can hear me please respond?” she pled. “We need to know if the landing site is safe.”
Silence. Then, a crackle. A thud. “Tania?”
“Karl,” she said. Relief spilled out into the name, perhaps a little disappointment, too. She’d hoped for Tim. “Karl, thank God.”
“When we saw you fly over we realized we’d left the comm room empty. Really sorry about that.”
Tania gripped the transmitter tightly. “Can we land?”
“It’s safe for now, far as I know anyway. I’ll send a squad over there just to be sure. You saw the subs, I take it?”
“Hard to miss,” Tania said.
“Fucking-A.”
“The same thing happened in Colorado.”
A slight pause. “Then you succeeded, too?”
“We did.” She fought to keep her voice level. “Skyler’s back, then?”
“No,” he replied. “It’s just that the Elevator did that twang-effect twice, so we knew both objects had at least been recovered. There was a weird shock wave after the second time a few minutes later. Came from the east, where Sky went. Scattered birds from every tree. I’m afraid all’s quiet, otherwise.”
She couldn’t imagine what would cause that, but the fact that it hit here from that direction certainly implied Skyler had done something big. “Right, okay. We’re almost down. Hold the fort, huh?”
“Count on it.”
“Is Tim with you?”
A pause. “He went up, last night. Zane needed a break.”
“It’s okay, I understand.” She clicked off and shared a glance with Vanessa. The subs were attacking despite the presence of an object. Tania felt a now-familiar ripple of fear at the thought.
“Do you think they’re trying to get up the Elevator?” Vanessa asked cautiously. “To the other ones, I mean?”