“We have to go down there,” I said. “It’s the only thing we’ve seen so far. Maybe we can get some answers there.”
“Shouldn’t we check Trans-Angeles first?” Chase asked plaintively, a hint of panic in the question. “It’s the largest city in the world. There’s got to be somebody…”
“There isn’t,” Vicky declared flatly, the first words she’d spoken since we left FTL. Her face was expressionless, the cold mask she wore in combat, and I doubt anyone else could have read the pain she hid behind it. “There’s no one down there. If there were, we wouldn’t be able to miss it. And…” finally the façade broke for just a heartbeat, the catch in her voice giving evidence to what she really felt, “… the Underground would be uninhabitable without power. There’s not enough ventilation. None of the other levels could get water without the reactors and the desalinization plants.” The mask slipped back into place and the set of her jaw hardened. “If things broke down here like they did everywhere else, the entire city would have to be evacuated within a week or everyone would wind up dying of thirst or asphyxiation. The same thing would happen in any of the megacities. Someplace isolated, with a small population might be the only area we’ll find survivors.”
We were strapped into our seats or I would have taken her in my arms, the rest of them be damned. She’d just realized she’d probably lost her entire family, and the fact that it had likely happened a couple years ago wouldn’t make it easier to deal with. But that would have to wait until later.
“Woj,” I told the Tactical Officer, “feed the sensor readings to the Helm.” I nodded at Yanayev. “Take us down.”
“You two going to use your suits as shuttles again?” Nance wondered, cocking an eyebrow in curiosity.
I stared at him for a second, not because it was a bad question but more because he’d shown no reaction at all to the probable deaths of billions of innocent people. The isolation on board the Orion for several years with few stops planetside hadn’t been good for Rafael Nance. Maybe he needed to see this firsthand.
“No,” I decided. “This ship can land. I think it’s about time you landed her.”
[ 5 ]
Among the death and destruction and despair of my travels across the galaxy, there had still been beauty. I’d seen spectacular vistas, raging rivers, canyons unimaginably deep, mountains that had extended nearly out of the atmosphere. Yet even among the grandeur of those alien landscapes, the abrupt ascent of the Teton mountains from the snow-covered splendor of the valley below stood out, a natural beauty that was uniquely of Earth.
The remains of a road ran through the valley, cracked and broken, overgrown from disuse, and irrationally amid the apocalyptic revelations of the last few hours, I felt a deep sadness that the magnificence of this place had been abandoned, seen only in photos and videos by all but a few.
This was once Grand Teton National Park in the old United States of America, Jim informed me. Visited by millions of tourists every year before your Sino-Russian War.
It wasn’t my war, I reminded him as the Ellen Campbell cruised just a hundred meters above the valley floor. I’m not Chinese or Russian.
More yours than mine. After the war and the Crisis that followed due to the disruption in your economy, most of the populations of North and South America and western Europe were relocated into the megacities and the road systems were mostly shut down. The national park system was abandoned.
I knew all that, of course, or I would have if I’d spent a moment thinking about it, because it was buried inside the computer files. It was still sad.
“How far are we from the reactor?” Chase asked, obviously not as appreciative of the view as I was.
“Just a little farther,” Yanayev murmured.
“Twenty klicks,” Wojtera replied more helpfully. “Southeast. But to find a landing spot that’ll fit this thing, we need to circle around another ten. Past the old city.”
The Ellen practically crawled through the valley, slower than the groundcars of centuries before, past the ruins of what had once been Jackson, Wyoming, back when there’d been such a place. I knew all about it now that I’d bothered to check the files in the headcomp. It had been a playground for the ultra-rich, a tourist magnet back when tourism had been a thing, but all that had been abandoned after the war.
Decades later, a few top-level executives from the Corporate Council had taken possession of some of the larger and more remote ranches and refurbished them, using them as vacation getaways. Where we were headed was one of them, according to the maps, a ranch owned by Corporate Council royalty dating right back to the beginning—Patrice Damiani. I’d heard of her, of course. All of us down in the Underground knew about the gods who lived in the towers. We envied the Surface Dwellers, but for the Corporate Council types who occupied the spires as far above the Surface as it was above the Underground, there was no point even in envy or avarice. That life was beyond us.
Now those towers were just as lifeless and hopeless as the Underground. Maybe Patrice Damiani had made it back to her ranch after whatever disaster had befallen the cities. Maybe she’d come out and yell at us to get off her lawn.
There were bison in what was left of the town, picking at the grass that had overtaken roads and parking lots where it wasn’t covered by the fresh snow, and I felt a conviction that if we waited long enough up here, I’d see wolves move in to hunt them. Instead, we kept moving, past the town and over the bare foundations where suburban houses had once stood. Entire neighborhoods had fallen to a fire decades ago, maybe a century, because the trees had regrown around them, leaving only bare stone as a testament to the money that had allowed them to live here.
Something moved under the evergreens, a gray against the snow, too distant to make out.
Coyote, Jim informed me.
Fitting. The coyote had been the avatar of the trickster god among the indigenous peoples of this area, and surely this had been the greatest trick of all—on us, flung far afield into the outer galaxy in an effort to save our civilization, only to return to find it destroyed. On the human race as a whole, perhaps. We’d reached the stars, fought two wars for our right to control them, yet something had ripped it all away at the height of our power.
“That’s the source,” Woj said.
It wasn’t pretentious, I’d give Patrice Damiani that much. She hadn’t turned the old ranch into a castle or a Swiss chalet, she’d just set her designers and construction crews into making it the epitome of an old west ranch, as imagined from watching old movies. The main house was two stories, at least two thousand square meters on the interior not counting the guest houses, the barns, the corrals and, of course, that fusion generator buried underground and covered by what looked like an innocuous work shed.
And unlike every other building we’d seen, this one was intact. And in use. Horses stared up at us from the corrals, whinnying in terror at the massive cylinder floating in the morning sky. People tried to calm them, half a dozen men and women dressed in work clothes that wouldn’t have looked out of place back when this place had been built the first time.
“That pasture,” Nance directed, pointing a few hundred meters north of the ranch house at four hectares of open fields, lush and white with the early spring snow. “Take us down there.”
The order was almost a grumble, and if Nance hadn’t argued with me—much—about landing the Ellen on the ranch, neither had he seemed happy about it.
“It’s not natural,” he’d declared sullenly, “for something this size to land.”
Yanayev, on the other hand, positively beamed at the challenge, squeezing the Predecessor starship between the trees at either side of the field and bringing us down as gently as a down feather. I didn’t even know we’d landed until she nodded at me, hands coming off the controls dramatically.
“You want to come?” I asked Vicky softly as I unstrapped from the seat.
“Try to keep me away,” she said, then gestured at her uniform. “Suits?”
“No, I think we’ve freaked these people out enough for one day. Probably better if we demonstrate that we’re human.” I nodded at the spray of snow still settling back to the ground in the wake of our landing. “We’d better grab jackets though. You too, Captain Nance.”
“What?” he asked, eyes going wide with confusion.
“I’d like you to come along for this.”
“Why?” Nance demanded, and I wondered if he was going to go all the way through the Ws, but laughing at him didn’t seem appropriate under the circumstances.
“Because this is important enough for you and Nagarro to be in on it,” was the only answer I’d give him.
Of course, the real one was that he needed to be off the damned ship and breathe real air before he totally lost touch with reality, but there was no tactful way to say that in front of the crew.
