The Exodus Towers

Zane shook his head. “Uh, no, that would only make me feel more like an invalid. Describe the station. This room. I like to think I remember it, but since I can only see it in my mind now …”

She nodded, realized he couldn’t see that, and said, “Sure. Of course.” Tania glanced around. “The carpet is a lush red,” she said.

“Neil’s fingerprint.”

“Yes, he did love his red floors.”

Zane chuckled. “Sorry, go on.”

“You’ve two paintings hung on either side of the door. I’m not familiar with either, but they’re both lovely. One depicts a mountain pass with a caravan crossing it. Elephants and footmen, that sort of thing. Forgive me, I’m terrible at this.”

“No, no. Go on, please.”

Sighing, Tania described the second painting, the doors themselves. She avoided the topic of his desk as long as possible, covered in gifts as it was. Eventually it was the only thing left. “A number of people stopped by with well-wishes for you and left tokens on your desk. Flowers, mostly artificial, of course. Someone even left chocolates well within their Preservall date.”

“Oh, now we’re getting somewhere. Crack them open, will you?”

Tania could imagine the doctor’s reaction if she came in to find Zane eating anything, but she found herself moving across the room. The red box of candies was heart-shaped, with some Portuguese written on it that she assumed professed undying love on Valentine’s Day. A scavenged object, of course.

Zane’s terminal slate lay under the red box. A tiny LED on the surface of it winked on and off, an indication of waiting messages. “Looks like you have electronic well-wishes, too,” Tania said as she tucked the red parcel under one arm and picked up the slate.

“Oh?”

“I could read those to you,” she said. “Zane the invalid.”

He grunted a laugh. “All right then. Bring it over here so I can thumb it.”

She set the chocolates on his bedside table and guided his cold hand to the slate, placing his thumb on the small scanner.

Zane waited for the chime and spoke a word, “Byzantine.”

The slate unlocked.

“Chocolate first,” Zane said.

She opened the box by feel alone as she scanned the message list. At least fifty people had sent get-well messages since the day Platz Station arrived. Mixed with those were hundreds of automated messages the station had filled his inbox with despite his long absence. No one had had time to turn them off. The realization made Tania wonder if Zane’s access to the station computers still worked. If so, they could access archived footage from the security cameras and check out Russell’s story.

They could go back further than that, she realized, and watch the assault that killed Neil. Or even further, and simply watch the man go about his daily routine.

She handed Zane a chocolate and he popped it into his mouth like an eleven-year-old would. Tania couldn’t help but giggle at the expression of pure joy on the man’s face as he chewed.

When her attention returned to the screen, the list of messages had scrolled back to the first one in the list, the oldest message there.

From Neil Platz.

Tania sucked in a sharp breath. The tablet dropped from her hands and slapped against Zane’s leg.

“What is it, Tania? Is someone here?”

“No,” she said, fetching the slate. “It’s … there’s a message from Neil in here.”

“From Neil?”

“Dated the same day he …”

Zane grew still. “Read it to me, would you?”

Tania swallowed. “The subject is ‘A secret I can’t take to the grave.’ Still want me to—”

“Yes,” Zane said. “It’s not like I can do it.”

He knew as well as she did that the terminal could be set to audio mode, and handle the task and even be controlled by vocal commands. Zane wanted her to hear whatever it said.

Tania cleared her throat, and read.

no time - enemy @ door

builders came before darwin el. sandeep and i found ship 2238. he destroyed it before we could truly learn. spare tania of that—

She froze, staring at her father’s name, the ramifications of the words falling on her like an avalanche. They knew? Neil and her father knew of the Builders and kept it secret?

“Keep reading, dear,” Zane said quietly, placing a reaffirming hand on her arm.

His voice broke her trance, and she read on, her hands shaking.

spare tania of that. sandeep had noble intent, died for it. u need to know: 6 builder events total. incoming is 4, not 3 as others think.

goodbye brother

Tania set the slate down on the bed and wept.

With each racking sob a new revelation hit her like a hammer.

She felt Zane’s hand reach for her shoulder, pull her down to lie next to him. He held her as tight as his frail state allowed, and she buried her face against him to cry.

Her mind blotted out the stream of implications that popped like brazen fireworks. She focused on the face of her father, his easy smile and bright eyes. During her childhood he’d been absent more often than not, always off on some mission for the Platz family, for Neil. Despite his frequent and long ventures, however, he never failed to make her feel loved.

She’d been nine years old when the Darwin Elevator arrived. Until now it had never seemed odd that her family lived in the fledgling city at the time, that Neil’s vast estate encompassed Nightcliff, where the cord would make landfall. Neil and her father had been working there for years, building an empire together. Desalination plants, aerospace engineering, manufacturing. All the things they shared passion for, all based in Neil’s beloved Australia.

Neil used to tell a story in interviews. She remembered the first time she’d heard it. Neil and Sandeep, sitting together, opposite an interviewer. The woman had asked why they chose Darwin to base the massive expansion of Platz Industries, the company Neil’s father had built into an empire. “We flipped a coin, actually,” Neil had said. “Heads, Australia. Tails, India. I won, obviously, and thought the Northern Territory would be perfect. Close to Malaysia, close to China beyond. We needed materials and brainpower.”

“Why not just build in Kuala Lumpur, or Singapore?” the interviewer had asked.

Neil sat forward. Her father, Sandeep, had been uncharacteristically blank during the exchange. She’d always assumed it was because he’d lost the coin flip, the chance to base their family in his homeland.

“Money,” Neil had quipped. “You wouldn’t believe the tax breaks we were given.” Then he’d laughed with the interviewer. Sandeep had only smiled.

He’d only smiled because he knew the real reason Darwin had been chosen.

“All that time,” Tania said to the ceiling. “They knew about Darwin the whole time. Forty years. They must have … God, they must have found the Builder ship when they were practically kids. On their first mission together.”

Zane said nothing. He’d hardly reacted at all, in fact.

She whirled on him. The vagueness of his gaze still made her uncomfortable. “Did you know about this, Zane?”

“No,” he said, numb. “I always chalked it up to incredible luck. Neil had always been lucky. A gene I didn’t inherit, or so I thought.”

Somewhere deep within Tania a coldness began to grow. She tried to ignore it, then to willingly banish it, but the cold festered and grew. Neil knew all along. “He knew the whole time,” Tania said aloud. “Neil. He knew about Darwin, he knew about the disease.”

“Hold on—”

“He knew that billions would die and yet he did nothing.”

“No,” Zane said. “No, I refuse to believe that. Neil was a ruthless entrepreneur, granted, but he could not have stood by and let something like that happen.”

Tania barely heard him. “My mother went to India to fight the disease. My father went, too. Neil could have stopped them.”

“Stop that, Tania. Stop it now.”

“He let them die to protect … to protect …”

Zane gripped her arm. “We don’t know what happened, Tania. We don’t know what they knew. You’re speculating.” He practically spat the last word, and began to cough.

She thought back to her conversations with Neil in the years after the disease. He’d encouraged her to explore the theory of more Builder events to come. In fact, the more she thought about it, all the key ideas on how to approach the problem had come from him, though he’d always voiced them as offhand comments or random musings. He’d left it to her to form the theory to the point where she felt like it had been her own.

Of course. He had to. If he’d admitted to knowing the Builders’ timetable, he admitted to prior knowledge of the space elevator in Darwin. Worse—far, far worse—the disease. Without knowing how much Neil knew it would be unfair to assume he could have done anything to save lives. In hindsight he’d clearly known to buy the land in Nightcliff, to form the vast Spaceworks division of Platz Industries. It stood to reason, then, that he’d known something about the disease. And yet Tania couldn’t think of anything Neil had done, overt or covert, to save his friends, his family. He’d allowed her mom to go to India to study the illness. And her father …

The lack of details around the circumstances of his death hung in her mind like a black hole.

… He destroyed it….

He’d gone on a mission to one of the old, pre-Elevator space stations. Emergency repair work in a time when half the world had died or gone mad. And then the station had been destroyed. An explosion, a freak accident. No survivors.

… He destroyed it….

Why? Why not tell the world, Father?

Tania could think of only one reason why her father would destroy the first evidence of alien intelligence: guilt. He and Neil had sat on the information for decades, judging by when the Platz operations began to expand into the Northern Territory. They’d profited immensely. They’d hidden the greatest discovery in history from all of mankind.

… He destroyed it….

“What are you thinking, dear girl?” Zane asked, his voice a whisper full of gravel.

She squeezed her eyes closed to wring out the last of her tears. The mental hurdle cleared her mind. I’m thinking what I’d say to Neil, and my father, if they were still here. She decided Zane didn’t need to know that, after all he’d been through. “Six events,” she said. “This ship approaching is the fifth. Which means …”

Zane gripped her shoulder, then patted it. “One to go.”

“One to go,” she agreed. Her dreams of late were of skies filled with thousands of Builder shells, encircling the Earth like Jupiter’s rings, arriving yearly, then monthly. Daily. Hourly. Long after she’d died of old age they kept coming, until they blotted out the sun.

One to go, she thought. At least this will all be over soon. A year from now, give or take.

“You won’t,” Zane said, then paused. “You won’t tell anyone, will you? About Neil, I mean.”

“I’m not sure yet,” Tania said honestly.

Chapter 48

Cappagh, Ireland

Date imprecise

“GO NOW!”

His second shout broke through Ana’s daze so completely that he could see the transformation occur. In the time it took to blink her eyes, Ana hardened. A level of concentration, of intent, absent an instant before, flared into her eyes and the set of her jaw. She took one glance down, pivoted, and leapt down to a ledge a meter below her. Then again to another.

Skyler followed, grinding his teeth with each ache and complaint his body threw at him, unable to match Ana’s pace. Below, he saw her reach the point of the sloped column base where she could half-run, half-fall the rest of the way, and then she pulled to a halt, suddenly unsure where to focus her wrath. The shifting red shapes reacted to her presence, fanning out again, darting with dizzying speed across her field of view.

The one prone red smear had still not moved since Vanessa fired into it. The object that had snatched up Vanessa, at least the one Skyler guessed had done so—they all looked the same to him—moved differently than the others. Erratic, as if broken or maimed.

Skyler reached the slope and bounded down the incline. He yanked his ice axe from its belt loop and hefted it in his right hand, making a straight line toward the object that had struck Vanessa. In the corner of his eye he saw Ana glance toward him and begin to move his way.

The red object loomed in front of Skyler, still dancing about in impossible, abrupt movements. Suddenly it was right in front of him. He roared and swung down.

Skyler’s axe hit the shape with no result at first, as if he’d hit nothing but air. Then a resistance slowed the axe blade, and he felt as if he’d just swung down on a giant pillow. At the point his blade stopped and should have rebounded, Skyler saw the red-hued morass curl and conform around him. With an alien pop, the field surrounded and then consumed him, just as the dome had done when he entered.

Just before becoming enveloped, Skyler saw the red shape bulge and something dart out. He saw enough to register Vanessa tumbling away before he was inside.

And then he understood. These were pockets of time, or, rather, fields identical to the dome itself, only much smaller and on a different clock.

A subhuman stood scant centimeters away. Blood trailed from the corner of its mouth, and it held a patch of Vanessa’s shirtsleeve in one clenched, black-coated fist. And though his former opponent had just dived aside, the creature already had turned itself toward Skyler, coiled, and swung.