The Extinction Switch: Book three of the Kato's War series (27 page)

“They’re my parents, sir.”

JC raised his left eyebrow. “Oh, so we decided to bring mommy and daddy along. How nice.”

“It’s not like that, Sir. I didn’t know they were down here. My mom’s injured…”

JC’s jaw clenched. He glared first at Zara, who was still in Blake’s arms, and then at Akio. “We can go…” Akio offered.

“You’re not going anywhere!” Kassandra said defiantly to Akio. Her tone caught him by surprise. She looked from Akio back to JC.

There was silence for a long, tense moment. At last, JC nodded in Zara’s direction and said: “Take her down to twenty-nine for treatment.”

“Yes!” Kassandra said. She then covered her mouth, embarrassed.

“You’re really skating on thin ice, Nishimura,” JC said.

“Thank you, Sir. You won’t regret this.”

Kassandra accompanied her parents down to level twenty-nine. Once he had carried Zara down the stairs, Blake returned to level thirty to debrief with the rest of the patrol.

Platform 29A was half covered with blankets and mattresses. Around the edge stood gray metal cabinets containing medical supplies. “These are your
parents
?” one of the young nurses said to Kassandra.

“Yes.”

“How did they end up here?”

“Long story.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, I’m Amelia,” she said to Zara.

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Let’s get your legs taken care of.” With some effort and wincing on Zara’s part, they cut the legs of her pants. The bruises on her right knee and left ankle were already beginning to turn yellow.

“Hope they’re not broken,” Zara said.

Amelia left, and returned seconds later with a scanner about the size of a paperback book. She held it above the injured legs. Her eyes narrowed as she watched the screen. “Not broken. Good. Just bad sprains most likely.” She walked away, and returned with two beige smart bandages. Peeling the backing off, Amelia applied them to Zara’s right knee and left ankle. They conformed to the contours of the joints.

“Wow!” Zara said, her eyebrows raised. “The relief’s flooding in!”

“Yeah, they’re pretty good,” Amelia said. “Give it a day, and it’ll be like it never happened.”

----

“How long was I asleep?” Zara asked, late the next afternoon.

“Fifteen hours,” Kassandra said. She was now wearing gray sweatpants and a t-shirt, rather than her Raider uniform.

“Holy cow!” Zara said. She was still lying under a blanket on the walkway near 24C, with Kassandra sitting next to her. “I thought I’d dreamed this whole thing.” She looked around. “Where’s your dad?”

“He woke up about an hour ago. Went for a walk.”

“Oh.” Zara’s eyes widened, as she saw the X scar on Kassandra’s right forearm. “Oh my God, baby! What happened to your arm?”

“Oh, that. We all had to get one. To prove we’re part of the community here.”
“What community?”

“The Excluded. AKA the dwellers of Silo 7.”

“How did you end up here?” Kassandra related the whole story, from having been in Monte Carlo until that moment. Zara was silent for a while as she processed what she had heard.

“Hi, Mrs. Nishimura,” Annabelle said as she walked up behind Kassandra. “Remember me?”

“Oh… yeah! From Kassandra’s eighteenth birthday party! How are you, anyway?”

“I’m fine. Kassie telling you all about this place?”

“Yeah. You guys had quite an ordeal.”

“Yes we did. But so did you. Let me go and fix you some breakfast. Such as it is.”

“Yes please!” Zara said. Annabelle walked back over to the cooking area. Zara sat up, and brushed her hair from her eyes. She looked at Kassandra’s hair. “Did they make you cut it short so you can be a soldier?”

“Yes. I’m a Raider. That’s how I found you last night,” Kassandra said. “We were on a recon mission, to try and figure out the cause of the earthquake.”

“Being in the army, any type of army, is the last thing I’d have seen you doing. I suppose they made you do it?” Zara said.

“No, I volunteered.”

“
What
? My baby became a soldier by her own choice?”

“Yep. I’m good at it, too.”

“So you’re happy doing that?”

Kassandra smiled. “Yes. Honestly Mom, I’ve never been happier.”

Zara frowned a little as she took this in. “Oh…”

“You thought I’d be doctor or a lawyer, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes. I’m hoping you still will be.”

Kassandra shook her head. “I don’t think there’s going to be much need for lawyers for a while, even if that damned extinction thing isn’t used. Doctors, on the other hand…” Kassandra shrugged. “I’ll only go down that path if it’s what I
want
to do though.”

Zara looked downcast. Kassandra continued, “There is something I’m not happy about, though.”

“What?”

“I’ve killed people.”

“
What?
”

“You heard me. I’ve killed at least two directly, and probably a lot more. There was a war with Silo 6…”

Zara cut her off. “My daughter is a
killer
?”

Kassandra nodded.

“But… you’ll get locked up for life!”

Kassandra blew air out through puckered lips. “I suppose it could happen. If there’s even a government to try people any more. But, there were extenuating circumstances.”

“What the hell kind of circumstances could have justified that?”

Kassandra explained about having saved Taygete during the raid, and the fighting against Silo 6.

Zara sighed. “Well, I admire that you saved someone. After that, I guess you had to try and stop what you’d set in motion.”

“Mom, there was going to be a war with them anyway, over food. It just ended up happening sooner.”

Zara shrugged. “I’d still rather you hadn’t done those things.”

“So would I.” The two women’s eyes locked for a long moment.

Eventually, Zara’s shoulders relaxed. “It’s a different world down here, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I’m just glad you guys escaped. Mom, you shouldn’t have come looking for me. You nearly got yourselves killed.”

Zara chuckled slightly. “That happened before we even got here. Our shuttle crashed!”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.” Zara went on to relate that tale.

Kassandra spontaneously hugged Zara. “I couldn’t have wished for a better mom and dad. Speaking of which, here he comes.” Akio came striding along the catwalk, having come from the center ring. Kassandra stood up and hugged him. “It’s good to see you Dad.”

“You too sweetie. Our even having found each other blows my mind. The chances must have been one in a hundred million. And this place! it’s enormous!”

“It sure is.”

“Looks like it sustained some earthquake damage though, like the streets outside.”

“Yeah.”

Annabelle returned with metal plates of celery sticks and gray dumplings made from fried NBH. Magana also came over and introduced herself.

“Guess who’s also down here with us?” Kassandra said, once they were all sitting down and eating.

“Who?” Zara said.

“Antonio.”

“Oh yeah, I remember him too.”

“He got the early shift on garbage shoveling duty,” Magana said, half-chuckling. “The guy can’t catch a break!”

“At least he made it down here,” Akio said. There was silence for a while as they ate.

“At least everyone down here is safe from the Extinction Switch,” Zara said.

“That’s about all we’re safe from,” Magana said. “We used to live a pretty comfortable, if basic, existence. Now, we can hardly find food, and the NPRF’s out for our blood. We’re pretty sure they’ll find this place.”

“All they have to do is look at the plans for the city’s infrastructure,” Annabelle chimed in.

“We’ll have to leave here regardless of who’s in control out there,” Magana said.

“Where would we all go?” Annabelle said. “The other silos like this one are all occupied, and they’re no better off than we are.”

“Plus, how do we move three hundred and fifty people?” Magana said. “Especially without being seen. We have a life here. The community’s been here for forty years. Half of us were born here, myself included. A good number of us have never actually been outdoors.”

“Wow,” Akio said. “I can’t imagine that somehow.”

Magana shook her head. “I can understand why Lord August doesn’t want to leave. We might not have a choice though.”

“Why?” Zara said.

“We’re only getting twenty percent of the food we used to from raids. We used to have about two weeks’ reserves, but it’s now down to almost nothing.”

“What about the fighting?” Annabelle said.

Magana shrugged. “We’ll have to chance it I guess. We’ve lived off the scraps that fell from the table of the city above. Since there probably isn’t a city anymore, this place is now untenable. It’s either starve or take our chances getting out.”

----

Kato stood with Alexei Korolev on the bridge of the
Revenant
. The white room with its smooth, rounded surfaces, maintained constant Earth-level gravity. The entire front half was taken up by a view of the ever-changing Earth, 3,000 kilometers below. The large ship was now only half-full with passengers, with some having elected to head to the planet below now that ISI’s own transport interchange was complete.

Revenant
had warped to a high orbit after saying goodbye to the
Arcadantera
. Kato and Korolev had only talked about one thing for the past two weeks: the impending destruction of Vesta. The two men looked towards the back wall. It showed a view of Vesta from a telescope parked fifty million kilometers away, which was as close as anyone dared go. The disc of the asteroid was just visible, with a fuzzy outline. “Won’t see a damn thing,” Kato said. “No blinding flash of nuclear destruction. Nothing. The first we’ll know is when
Arcadantera
reappears near Earth and gives us a report.”

“We may never find out for sure what happened,” Korolev said, “Apart from hopefully never hearing from that despot again.”

“We can always make a new gravity map once it’s deemed safe to go there again,” Kato said. “The inside will have changed considerably. Nine hundred and fifty megatons will do that.”

“Six minutes out, six minutes back, five minutes to deliver the payload. Seventeen to twenty minutes total. That’s all the time
Arcadantera
should take,” Korolev said.

“Mmm.” They were silent for a while, watching the blank screen expectantly as the mission clock counted up. Fifteen minutes had elapsed. The smile on Kato’s face grew wider and wider. At twenty minutes it started to fade.

At twenty-five minutes he began to frown. “Okay, they should be back by now,” he said.

The clock ticked over to thirty minutes. “I don’t like this at all,” Korolev said. “I’m starting to think the worst.”

Kato sighed. “Me too.”

A box began to flash in the corner of the screen, alternating red text on a while background. URGENT BREAKING NEWS. Kato commanded the report to open in an inset box. “This is ENN America. A situation beyond belief is developing. Much of Europe has simply gone dark. Nobody is reachable from Sweden, Norway, Great Britain, and France. We’re trying Germany and Italy now.” The gray-haired male newscaster had tears in his eyes. “The unthinkable may have happened again. We’re hoping against hope that it’s just a widespread communications failure.” He paused for a second. “Wait, telepresence networks are still online. The cameras are showing very disturbing pictures. We will not be broadcasting them. People everywhere are dead or dying. It seems the massacre from space, known as the Extinction Switch, may have been used again…” Kato clapped a hand over his mouth. With a last look at Korolev, he fell on the spot.

Korolev just stared at the screen, his eyes wide in disbelief. Then turned to his left and crouched down. “Kato! Kato!” He slapped his face.

Kato’s eyelids moved as though he were deeply asleep. Then they opened again. “No! Tell me it isn’t so, Alexei!”

Tears ran down the normally stoic Korolev’s face. “Say it isn’t so!” Kato repeated. Korolev’s mouth opened as though he were about to say something, but no words came out.

The newscaster droned on. “View of public spaces in Europe’s major cities are confirming the worst. The dead and dying must already number in the billions. Meanwhile, aircraft are taking off, landing, and flying as though oblivious. It is highly likely that they contain no more passengers…”

“Zara and Akio! And Kassandra!” Kato cried. His wailing echoed around the bridge. His tears soaked the carpet, which rippled red in response. Korolev knelt over Kato and put his arms around him.

A map of Europe, Russia, and North Africa was shown. One by one, more countries turned red: Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, and Spain. An awful red number below it counted the suspected casualties: five billion, six billion, seven billion.