Origins (The Wasteland Chronicles, #2) (19 page)

Is that...a spaceship?

I had little time to be surprised. The monsters regained their focus and closed in as the ship descended and hovered above us. Anna sliced a couple crawlers open as they neared, and the rest of us fired into the braver ones edging closer. A porthole opened on the ship; a synthetic rope ladder descended.

“Go!” Samuel said to me.

I hopped on, scrambling upward to make room for the others. Anna came after me, then Makara. Finally, even with only one good arm, Samuel hopped up, forcing his legs up the ladder.

The ladder was unwieldy, swaying back and forth in the bitterly cold wind. My vision darkened.

Anna pushed me up from behind.

“Go, Alex!”

I forced myself up the ladder. I didn’t have any strength left. The cold was sapping it out of me.

It was all I could do to hold on as the ship lifted up from the ground. The monsters below closed around where we had been standing, howling at seeing their prey escape.

The birds, however, could not be so easily avoided.

The ladder began retracting into the ship, carrying all of us with it.

Just hold on...

We neared the porthole. Finally I entered it and was inside the ship. I fell onto the cold deck. I was freezing cold. The others pulled themselves through and piled next to me. Samuel entered last, and then the porthole slammed shut.

In the pitch black, the engines of the spaceship roared. We were moving upward.

***

I
lay on the deck, shivering and cold. The ship hummed beneath me. I heard the rush of wind outside.

There was a heaviness all over that I couldn’t explain. I realized that it was Samuel’s jacket.

“We made it?” I asked, shivering.

“Yes,” Samuel said.

“I guess we’ll meet him soon,” Anna said.

As we sat there in the dark compartment we had entered, no one said anything. We only shivered and huddled together for warmth. The gunk on my clothes and skin had frozen from being outside for a mere two minutes.

A nearby door hissed open. We all turned toward the light. But no one appeared.

Then the man’s voice came from the intercom.

“Come on,” he said. “Step inside. It’s warmer in there than the cargo bay. Welcome aboard the
Gilgamesh.”

The intercom clicked off.

“Is this really a spaceship?” I asked.

“Looks like it,” Samuel said.

“Did you read anything about
that
in your Black Files?”

“Nope.”

Warm air gushed out of the door. That was enough incentive for me to stand on unsteady legs and make my way forward. The others followed me. I stepped into the light, and the door hissed shut behind.

The surfaces were all gray. The corridor we were in led straight forward. From somewhere to our left came a low hum – the engine, probably. The bridge would probably be to our right.

We walked forward, unsure of our surroundings. The corridor was narrow. We passed an open door that led to a couple of bunks. We passed a circular table against the wall, went through a small kitchen. We entered a narrow corridor. Ahead were controls, LCD screens, and a pilot’s seat. Above the rim of the seat was a head of wild, white hair.

We entered the bridge. The man remained seated. We stood there, shivering and cold.

None of us said anything. Ahead of the ship, it was dark. I couldn’t see the land or mountain below.

The man swiveled in his chair, revealing his wrinkled face, sharp blue eyes covered by glasses, and thin lips. Long white hair descended to his shoulders. He wore khaki pants, a long-sleeved green shirt, and a thick brown vest.

“My God, you could have at least cleaned up a little before coming in here.”

No one said anything. We were cold, exhausted, and had nearly died a dozen times in the past hour. We weren’t exactly in the mood for humor.

“As you might have guessed, I am Dr. Cornelius Ashton. You can call me Ashton; not quite as bad as Cornelius. And this is the
Gilgamesh
– one of several advanced spaceships built by the U.S. government during the Dark Decade. S-Class. It runs on a prototype miniature fusion reactor. It has a titanium and carbon nanotube hull – light as a feather, stronger by many factors than steel. It can carry up to twelve crewmen, and as far as I know, it is one of four spaceships operational in the world – or out of this world, if you prefer it.”

“And where are we going, in this spaceship?” Samuel asked.

“You must be Samuel,” Ashton said. “You look just like your father.” The man turned to Makara. “And you must be little Makara. Not so little, anymore. You were probably too young to remember me. And you two, I don’t know.”

“That would Alex, and Anna,” Makara put in quickly. “And Lisa...Lisa is gone.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Ashton said. “We don’t have much time, in any sense. I can explain it all later. Right now, we need to get home.”

“Home?” Samuel asked. “What do you mean, home?”

“You don’t know about it yet,” Ashton said, “but you will. This place was known to only a few on the surface. I was one of the few, among the President and others – before they all died.”

What place was this man talking about?

He pressed a button on the dash.
“Gilgamesh
...take us to Skyhome.”

A deep, computerized male voice responded. “Destination: Skyhome.”

The ship shifted below us, aiming upward.

“Strap yourselves in,” Ashton said. “We’ll be there in mere minutes.”

“Skyhome,” I said. “Is that a space station?”

“Yes. The Skyhome Program was the other side of the coin from the Bunkers. The government planned to build more – but funds ran out, so Skyhome was the only one to be completed.”

By this point, we had strapped ourselves in. The ship paused. The floor vibrated beneath me, intensifying. Finally, we were pointed at a 45-degree angle upward.

“Here we go,” Ashton said.

The ship moved as I was pushed back into my seat. Someone screamed – either Anna or Makara, I couldn’t tell. Suddenly, there were stars as we broke through the clouds. Just as I was on the verge of losing consciousness, the ship slowed. The stars grew in intensity. A minute later, I was floating upward in my seat, restrained only by my seatbelt.

We had escaped not only Bunker One, but Earth’s gravity. Sickness came over me, but I had already thrown everything up down below.

Down below;
it seemed strange to think those words. The ship pointed downward, away from the stars. The surface of our planet curved below – dark, shaded in night, surrounded by an aurora of violet blue. Straight ahead was the moon, unbelievably bright and clear without any atmosphere to mask its grandeur. Stars studded the black void, steady and eternal in their myriad thousands.

No one said anything as we took in the vista. So much had happened that it was hard not to believe it was all a dream – the dreamlike quality enhanced by the fact that none of us had weight. When I was young, I thought I would go my whole life without ever riding in a car, much less a plane. Now, I was flying in a spaceship. Surreal did not even begin to describe it.

Ten minutes later, a shape formed in the distance. Three rings spun around a large central hub. Branching out like giant arms were solar arrays, capturing unfiltered sunlight to power the station. Flecks of green colored the windows of one of the spirals – plants being grown?

“There she is,” Ashton said with pride. “Skyhome.”

I never thought I would see anything like it. We were going there, and I wondered if it would be our new home. Would we stay there? Would we be safe from the xenovirus, or would it touch us here, too?

Out there, in the black void of space, maybe not even all that far from us, our doom lurked. We knew what was coming after us, and the knowing somehow only made it worse. I had no idea how we were going to stop this, or even if we could. Maybe Ashton had a plan. But first we would have to rest, recoup. God knows I needed a hot shower that would last for eternity.

All these questions would remain unanswered...at least for a while. Even as I beheld the wonder of that floating city, I couldn’t help but feel sick at what we had learned: that Ragnarok truly was only the beginning.

T
here was nothing to do but wait.

We had been in Skyhome for a full month, and it had taken me a week just to get used to the dizzy spinning of the stars from the three rotating rings. The fact that we were here, in space, never ceased to be mind-blowing.

Beginning in the Dark Decade, NASA devoted all of its energy to the Skyhome Program. Skyhome 1 was the only one to ever be completed. It had taken ten years, hundreds of launches, and billions of dollars just to get it livable. Skyhome was designed to be self-sufficient, but in the rare case that a spare part or supply was needed, the
Gilgamesh
could easily travel between Skyhome and one of the Bunkers.
Odin,
a second, smaller ship, was also docked in Skyhome’s hangar.

The
Gilgamesh,
as well as the
Odin,
had been constructed during the Dark Decade, along with two other ships. It was clear that launching rockets into space was inefficient – an advanced, reusable spacecraft was necessary. During the 2020s, huge advances were made in fusion power. These advances made it possible to equip the four under-construction spaceships with a fusion drive. Though the drive was massive, the enormous amount of energy produced was more than enough to make up for it. And to refuel, the ships would not need complex rocket fuel, a commodity that would not have existed for long post-Ragnarok. All they would need was hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe.

Unfortunately,
Gilgamesh
and
Odin
were the only ships that were operational. The other two,
Orion
and
Perseus,
were still docked in Bunker Six, a massive complex not too far from Bunker One. Of course, it was covered with the Great Blight, so getting in and liberating the ships was extremely risky. Skyhome just did not have the manpower to do it.

In that first month at Skyhome, we all got the chance to think, finally. We ate fresh fruits and vegetables, and there was even chicken. The Outer Ring, the largest of three, was entirely devoted to food production. The plants produced oxygen, and the humans and animals in turn produced carbon dioxide. All water was recycled within the closed environment, and there was plenty in reserve in case something went wrong. And of course, the sunlight provided more energy, both for electronics and plants, than Skyhome would ever need.

Living in space, however, brought two great risks, and Skyhome had so far been spared from both. The first was radiation. While Skyhome had normally adequate radiation shielding, a sudden solar flare would douse the station with unhealthy levels of radiation. It would fry electronics as well as anyone exposed to the harmful rays. There was also the threat of stray rocks and debris striking the station. Skyhome had a tracking system that monitored space debris orbiting Earth, but the system wasn’t perfect. There had been a couple times in Skyhome’s history where its occupants had to do an emergency EVA to change the course of debris on a crash course with the station. If good-sized debris hit, it could poke a hole large enough to depressurize the station in minutes.

Hits by smaller debris were a somewhat common occurrence. Usually, the pieces were not large and fast enough to go through the station’s shell, but if they were, there was a system in place within Skyhome that detected leaks. After the leak was discovered and pinpointed, it was a simple matter of covering the whole with resin until a more permanent repair could be implemented.

While living in space might seem as if it was safer than the surface, this was far from the truth. Solar flares were never a question of “if,” but “when.” And one day, a big rock or piece of space junk could hit the station and end it.

But for now, Skyhome operated, and within its three rings people lived and worked. It was strange, seeing so many people again. About eighty lived here. The entire community had reacted to our coming with a mixture of fascination and fear. The citizens of Skyhome treated us in much the same way as a Bunker resident would treat a Wastelander. None of them had seen anyone who had lived and survived on the surface. We had been the stuff of speculation, and even legend.

After the fall of Bunker One, Dr. Ashton and several Bunker One refugees had managed to pilot the
Gilgamesh
to Skyhome. There were already survivors from Bunker Six living on the station, who had used
Odin
to escape. Sadly, none of the survivors knew Samuel or Makara.

After a week of our presence, a week of nothing but eating, sleeping, and showering, the people of Skyhome grew used to our presence and asked us countless questions about living on the surface, life in the Bunkers, and what people were like below, all of which we answered. In turn, I learned about life here. I liked tending the plants, most of all. They grew lots of different fruits and vegetables: potatoes, carrots, corn, wheat, tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce, cucumbers, apples, bananas, even lychee and dragon fruit, the lychee becoming a personal favorite of mine. There was enough to feed Skyhome’s population, and there was capacity for more growing space should the population increase.

We had countless questions of our own to ask of Dr. Ashton, from how he had contacted us in the first place, to what to do about the coming invasion. The doctor said that resting and regaining our strength was more important for the moment. None of us argued with him there.

After the first couple of weeks, though, Anna was stewing. She practiced her forms, much as she had done before heading to Bunker One. Though we had nothing but time up here, she had somehow grown more distant from me. I think the journey to Bunker One had taken more of a toll than she let on.

If Anna had grown a bit more distant, Makara had grown light years away. She was still reeling from Lisa’s death. Bunker One had been more than we all had bargained for, and it had cost us all something. But it cost Makara the most of all. Any attempt of mine to talk to her ended with her brushing me off. It got to the point where I just stopped trying, and ended up getting involved in my own activities.