The Exodus Towers

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.

On the journey over he told Tania everything that had happened in Ireland.

She asked him countless questions about the dome, and the object they’d found within it. He tried four times to describe the sensations he’d felt when crossing in or out of that purple field. The words didn’t seem to do it justice, but Tania accepted them all the same.

She gave him a summary of what they’d learned of the new Builder ship. The unspoken agreement between them that made Ana a taboo subject seemed to extend to Russell Blackfield as well, and Skyler didn’t mind. According to Karl the man was still confined to quarters on Melville and had been a model prisoner so far. No decisions had been made on what to do with him in the long term. Plenty of time to have that argument with Tania after the mission, Skyler figured.

A long hour passed in near-total silence, with Skyler doing everything he could think of not to look into Tania’s eyes lest he be lost there. He felt very much as he had on a train to Italy as a naïve young man, sharing a compartment with a beautiful stranger. In the span of a few minutes on that journey he’d managed to be caught staring at her legs, and then accidentally insulting her with an observation on the current political climate. The next eight hours had been absolute torture. At least his knowledge of both Italian profanity and politics had improved.

Tania passed some time showing him how to work the arm-mounted thruster and the basics of the helmet’s onboard computer. She checked their suits again and spoke with Jenny over the intercom about their approach trajectory. Then, almost casually, Tania brought up the day Russell had ordered Jenny to move Platz Station from Darwin to Belém.

Skyler knew Tania had interviewed the woman already. He’d heard the basics of it himself. Here and now, in a tin can heading to make contact with an alien race that had all but obliterated humanity, Tania struck a friendly tone. Jenny was part of the team now, part of the crew. One of us. Her appointment to pilot this mission suddenly made brilliant, perfect sense to Skyler. She spoke freely.

“Russell had been planning something,” Jenny said. “He had his own troops aboard, and all the talk on the station was of what he planned to do with them. They gave up the pretense that you guys were all dead when half the farm platforms came back, so we knew you were out there somewhere. The activity, the soldiers … I knew he must have found you.”

“So Russell was focused on us,” Skyler said. “How’d he miss the climbers full of Jacobite thugs coming up? I mean, he’s not stupid. Not intelligent, either, but he’s wise.”

“Oh, they were expected,” Jenny said through the speaker. “We’d been waiting for them for days.”

This had been said before, but Skyler thought perhaps it was because no one wanted to admit getting caught with their pants down, least of all Russell.

Jenny went on. “Everyone knew Russell had put Grillo in charge of Darwin. Hell, Russell bragged about it. His vision and leadership laid the groundwork, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Apparently, Grillo’s men were supposed to handle station security while Russell’s were over here. I got the sense they expected to arrive at a station empty of guards, but Russell, well, you know how he is.”

“Tell me anyway,” Skyler said. He glanced at Tania. Blackfield had glossed over these particular details.

“Russell wanted to make a show of authority. I heard the orders he called down to the barracks ring. We hear everything in station ops, you see. ‘All combat squads report to the main cargo bay in fifteen minutes,’ ” she said mimicking him. “ ‘Full gear, dress to impress. Let’s make sure this lot knows who their betters are.’ ”

She went on, fleshing out gaps in a story already told. Skyler and Tania stared at each other in a silent conversation. Russell might have left out details that would make him look bad, but the meat of it he’d told truthfully. Grillo had betrayed him. He’d used the invitation to cover for Russell’s security as an opening to flood orbit with his own army. If not for Russell’s vain desire to show off his own forces, it would have been a clean coup, Skyler thought. A concentrated force of single-minded purpose, inserted straight into the heart of the station. Which is likely what happened on all the other stations, too.

Skyler reached out and muted the intercom. “None of this translates to ‘forgive and forget,’ in my book.”

Her face, just centimeters from his, showed little insight into her thoughts. Tania’s gaze held his, searched his, and Skyler imagined her tabulating some mental scorecard of Russell’s virtues or lack thereof.

After a time, Tania nodded once. Her expression changed from solemn to serious. “There’s something I need to tell you about, Skyler.”

“We’re here,” Jenny said suddenly. “A thousand klicks and closing.”

Tania started to reach for her helmet, but Skyler grasped her wrist. “Tell me what?”

“Later,” she said.

Tania closed her eyes just before the cramped compartment depressurized. She listened to her breathing inside the helmet, the soft hum of the air recycler vent near her neck.

When the cabin lost pressure she felt the suit react. Pulses of pressure rippled across her body, from painfully tight to relaxed and gentle, as if she’d received an entire massage in one second.

“Comm test,” she said.

“I read you,” Skyler replied.

She looked at him and found herself wishing once again she knew him better. He’d said so little since the fiasco with Gabriel, and she found him infuriatingly good at keeping his expression blank and distant. As a punishment for what she’d done, the lie she’d told, she felt it at once deserved and unbearable.

With a wan smile, she turned to the airlock door and pulled the release handle. A puff of condensation burst along its edge and then the door simply swung open. Just like that, Tania found herself looking out at the hexagonal patch of hull on the huge Builder ship.

Up close, the vessel’s sheer size took her breath away. Jenny had parked them twenty meters from the surface. All around, massive protrusions extended outward well past their tiny vehicle, blotting out the view of Earth and space almost completely.

A moment of vertigo fell on Tania and she gripped the edges of the airlock with sudden panic. She suddenly felt as if she were looking down, the immense towers like buildings jutting upward past her, and the ancient wiring in her brain screamed “falling!”

Tania willed herself to see the hexagonal patch as being in front of her rather than below, and the sensation faded.

“Here goes nothing,” she said, and pulled with both hands on the airlock frame, propelling herself out into open space. By prior agreement, she’d attached a towline to her suit, and once across the gap she’d figure out a way to attach it to the Builder ship.

The hexagonal area of the ship’s hull drifted toward her at a leisurely pace. The five illuminated shapes around it all glowed with the same white-yellow hue, the color of the sun. Close up now, she estimated the shapes as being perhaps fifteen centimeters square, a fair amount smaller than the strange object Skyler had recovered from Ireland. The hexagon in the middle spanned maybe four meters on a side.

Tania brought her feet up at the last second and landed on the alien hull. It felt hard as marble under her, despite her boots, which dulled the impact. Her body naturally wanted to bounce away in the lack of gravity, but Tania had expected this and pointed her hand away from the ship. She squeezed her fingers into a ball, then tapped a button on the index finger with her thumb to send out a pulse of thrust. The burst of momentum glued her to the vessel for the moment. “Touchdown,” she said.

“Nicely done,” Skyler replied. Through the helmet speaker he still sounded right next to her.

Tania removed a line hook from her belt and tried the magnetic attachment first. She placed it just outside the hexagonal patch, on the opposite side of the glowing hourglass shape, for no reason other than it felt like a wise precaution. The magnetic base clapped onto the ship so quickly it almost pulled itself out of her hand. “Connection is solid,” she said, “no adhesive required. You’re clear to join me.”

She glanced back and saw Skyler slip outside, using handholds just outside the door to keep himself glued to the side of the craft. Their cylindrical can of a ship floated against a breathtaking view of Africa beyond. The tan expanse of the Sahara in the center, a hint of Egypt to her right and Morocco to the left, both obscured by the vaulting towers that extended out from the alien ship all around her like vacant, windowless skyscrapers.

“I’m outside, Jenny,” Skyler said.

“Copy,” the pilot replied. “I’m monitoring your suits from here, and watching on the terminal. Nice view, Tania.”

“I agree,” Tania said.

Skyler climbed up to the ERV’s robotic arms, which cradled the hard black case like a baby. He set to work on the winches that held the case in place, unlatching the one closest to the tiny craft’s hull first. Then almost reluctantly he pushed away from the ERV and floated out to the end of the nearest arm.

When Skyler reached out to grab the next handhold, Tania’s breath caught in her throat.

The ERV’s thrusters bloomed to life.

Exhaust flashed from the array of cones like breath on cold air.

“Shit,” Skyler managed to say, probably thinking he’d simply overshot.

“Jenny!” Tania shouted into her headset. “Thruster malfunction!”

Even as she said the word she knew it was wrong. The thrusters had been fired on purpose, at the exact instant Skyler had no hold on the ERV. And in that same moment, the towline had gone slack, released from the other end.