The Exodus Towers (70 page)

“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 fucker 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.