The Exodus Towers

She watched in horror as the vehicle began to accelerate away, the black case that held the Ireland object still firmly clutched in its robotic arms.

Skyler floated free. He cursed into his microphone, sounding more embarrassed than outraged, still not understanding what was happening.

“She’s taking it, Skyler!” Tania said.

He seemed to be struggling to right himself.

Tania saw no alternative. She jumped.

She pushed hard with both legs and rocketed across the void of space toward the ERV, gaining quickly on it. The craft’s small conical engines fired another pulse, but the craft was not designed to maneuver quickly. Tania held out her arm behind herself and fired one long continuous blast from her own thruster, cruising past Skyler and racing toward the fleeing ship.

She misjudged her speed, slammed into the side of the craft, and bounced off. Gritting her teeth, Tania fired another quick pulse and closed the distance again. This time she managed to get a hand around one of the many rungs protruding from the craft’s hull.

Stuck now to the ship, the massive Builder vessel seemed to be the thing moving, getting farther away with each second. Tania weighed her options. Her suit’s mask showed a broken link between herself and the craft, so there would be no talking Jenny out of her act of betrayal. On top of that, the woman had closed the craft’s door, not that getting back inside would do much.

So Tania did the only thing she could think to do. Pulling herself across the craft’s hull, she went to the robotic arms and began to release the holding straps.

The craft accelerated again, but the increase in speed was not enough to throw Tania off. She tried to ignore how far they’d moved from the Builder ship. Getting back might be impossible.

A cold realization began to nag at her as she worked the winches that secured the straps. Getting back home might be impossible. Jenny had their air, and was their ride. If she left …

Out of nowhere Skyler appeared next to her. He collided with the hard black case and almost knocked it free. She heard him grunt from the impact through her helmet speaker.

“You were right,” Tania blurted. “We shouldn’t have trusted her.”

“I don’t think she’s one of Russell’s,” Skyler shot back, working the last strap. “Anyway, she’s not getting this goddamn case, agreed?”

“Agreed,” Tania said with more conviction than she felt.

Working together they freed the box and drifted away from the ERV a few meters. “Get on that side,” Tania instructed, motioning Skyler to move around to the edge of the box that pointed toward the Builder ship. The hexagon on the massive hull looked very small now.

She swallowed, aimed her arm behind herself, and fired. With the added mass of Skyler and the case, she had to maintain her pulse of thrust for what seemed like a minute before they began to move appreciably.

The ERV started to fall away from them, toward Earth.

Perhaps Jenny won’t notice we—

No such luck. Tania felt a shiver when the vehicle’s thrusters pivoted and fired again, pushing the craft in their direction. It still receded, but not as fast.

Tania forced herself to turn away and focus on the destination, the hexagon. It took a full thirty seconds to cross the distance again, and by the time they neared the door and Tania fired her thruster to slow them, her fuel gauge read just 8 percent.

She glanced back. The ERV was closing on them and showed no sign of slowing. She’s going to ram us.

Five meters from the hull of the giant ship she heard Skyler suck in a sharp breath.

“Shit,” he gasped.

“What?”

“Something’s happening,” he said.

Tania leaned out to see past him. Of the five shapes that surrounded the hexagonal patch, only one remained illuminated.

The hourglass.

Then a black line began to trace the inner edge of the hexagon. A shadow, she realized. The patch moved inward, then separated into individual sections she hadn’t noticed before. These sections pulled outward in a coordinated dance, revealing a tunnel that led into darkness.

They were heading right into it.

Tania whipped around in time to see the ERV less than fifty meters away, racing toward them with suicidal speed. In desperation she pointed her thruster at the ERV and fired. The fuel meter inside her helmet ticked down from eight to zero in a matter of seconds.

Squinting, Tania could just see Jenny’s face in the small porthole window at the cockpit. She looked as terrified as Tania felt, and then she closed her eyes.

“Too fast!” Skyler shouted. His words cut off then. He must have looked back and seen the looming form of the ERV.

And then they crossed through, into the Builder ship.

A second later the ERV slammed into the hull, too big to fit through the newly formed door. The craft crumpled against the edges of the hexagonal opening. Loose bits of material came free.

Air gushed from the broken seal of the aircraft’s single door. Tania knew instinctively what this meant. The crew cabin was not pressurized. The cockpit was. In the violence of the impact, both the outer door and inner hatch had ruptured.

She and Skyler kept drifting inward. In all the commotion Tania hadn’t even bothered to look where they were going, but it registered with her now that they were moving down a long, straight tunnel. The crumpled remains of the ERV, seen through the receding hexagonal opening, bounced off the hull of the Builder ship and floated away.

Adrift, dead.

Our ride home, Tania thought.

Chapter 53

The Core Ship

13.MAR.2285

SKYLER GATHERED HIS wits before she did. He fired his own thruster to stop their progress. They’d traveled a full hundred meters down the corridor.

“What now?” he asked.

Too stunned to speak, Tania just stared at the dark passageway, and the illuminated patch of Earth seen through the now-tiny entrance. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “That craft was our way home, Skyler.”

“Can we get another one sent out? Can we contact Tim directly?”

“I don’t know.…” Her own voice sounded strangely distant.

“Try,” he said emphatically. “Tania, snap out of it. Try.”

She found enough strength in his voice to come back from the shock of seeing the ERV crash. After a calming breath, Tania brought up her suit’s menu and tried again to connect via the ERV. The link still showed red. Frowning, she tried a different tactic and activated her emergency beacon. The suit’s transmitter would not be powerful enough, but perhaps if they came looking …

An idea hit her. Tania jumped back a menu and then entered the one that listed other comms in her proximity. Skyler’s suit showed first.

Just below his entry, she saw the ERV listed. Its entry blinked red. “That’s something, at least,” Tania said.

“What?”

“The ERV’s automatic emergency beacon is transmitting. Maybe Tim and the others will pick that up.” She had no doubt they would, in fact. The real question was if they could do anything about it in time.

“How long until we know?”

Tania met his eyes. “Going to be awhile, I’m afraid. We should … we need to conserve our air, Skyler.”

He nodded grimly. Then he shrugged, as well as he could in the semi-rigid suit. “I say we accept their invitation and go in.”

Tania studied him to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. “What if this is a launch tube, or the barrel of a gun? We can’t just—”

“Sure we can,” Skyler said with a shrug. “It’s why we’re here. I don’t want to just sit here, do you?”

Tania turned back and stared at the tiny patch of space at the entrance of the long hall.

“Besides,” Skyler said, “who makes a launch tube that opens from the outside?”

His comment struck Tania as trite, yet she couldn’t deny the underlying desire to keep going. They were here to explore, to try to discover the purpose of this impossibly large spacecraft parked almost exactly between the two elevators.

Whatever the Builders were up to, she thought, the answer must be within.

One event left, according to Neil’s message. Clock’s ticking. She reminded herself to tell Skyler about that little bit of news as soon as they departed for home. She’d tried and stopped herself a half-dozen times already, still seeking some way to explain it without making Neil Platz sound like a monster. She owed her old friend that much, at least.

“All right, then,” she said. The heads-up display inside her helmet tracked her eye movement, and she used a button woven into her left glove to activate the bright lamps on both sides of her helmet. On a whim, she also accessed the intersuit menu and chose to display Skyler’s health vitals just below her own on the main view. Seeing his steady heart rate there, and his aggregated overall anxiety level at well within the norm, gave her a small surge of confidence. She placed his remaining oxygen level next to her own and swallowed. She had six hours; he had seven.

“I’m about out of thrust,” Tania said to him.

“No problem,” he said. He began to aim his arm in the direction they’d entered, then hesitated, fidgeted.

“You okay?” she asked.

He flashed a thumbs-up. “Wish my brain would stop changing which way is ‘down,’ but other than that I’ll be okay.”

She pointed at the side of the hexagon they floated against. “Let’s call this down for now, agreed?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

She helped him guide the case. Part of her questioned the need to lug the thing around until they knew what it did, or anything about it, really. But it had opened the door, that much was obvious, and somehow it just seemed prudent to keep the object close. She didn’t want to let it out of her sight any more than she wanted to let Skyler leave again.

The tunnel, or hallway—whatever it was—stretched on for another hundred meters. The walls reminded her of the shell ships over Darwin and Belém: dark and uninteresting after years of study.

After another sixty meters or so the tunnel ended abruptly at a wall. Tania helped Skyler ease the plastic case to a stop and gave him a questioning look.

“Maybe we missed a junction?” he mused. “Can’t imagine how, but—”

A sudden, faint purple light cut his words short. They both turned to face the wall; only it wasn’t a wall anymore. The surface retracted like an iris. Multiple plates slid out from a central point, allowing more and more purple-tinged light to flow into the tunnel.

Tania’s breath caught in her throat as she took in the room beyond.

There were ten walls, each perhaps ten meters wide and soaring at least a hundred high. Nine walls were black, etched with the same geometric patterns that covered the aura towers in Belém. The last wall glowed with intense, deeply saturated purple light that rippled and shimmered just beneath the surface in waveforms of dizzying complexity.

Bathed in the purple glow, she took in the whole room, looking at it all without looking at anything specific. The ripples of colored light along the glowing wall produced a discernible pattern. The waves, though chaotic and shifting, gravitated upward toward the top of the room. Tania glanced up at what she thought of as the ceiling.

The surface was not flat like the floor. Instead it had deep channels that ran inward to a central, beveled hexagonal mass. At first Tania thought it glowed purple as well, but then she realized the surface was made up of thousands of tiny bumps that caught some of the light coming from the one glowing wall.

Tania stared in total amazement. All the danger of their predicament melted away, and all she could think was how much she wished Tim and the others were seeing this.

Skyler pointed at the lit wall. “Look there,” he said.

Exactly halfway up, a circular gap in the light had formed. The circle grew as they watched, forming a dome-shaped indentation perhaps three meters wide and equally deep.

“Help me with this,” Skyler said. He gripped the black crate by one handle and undid one of the two heavy latches.

Unsure what he intended, Tania flipped the other latch, and together they carefully opened the lid, not wanting to make any sudden motions that might cause the object within to float free.

She half-expected brilliant purple light to flow out of the case as the lid came up, but nothing happened. In fact, the vaguely hourglass-shaped object within no longer emanated any light at all.

Skyler leaned over the case and pushed his hand in between the object and the foam packing that surrounded it.

“What are you doing?” Tania asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he replied, and glanced up at the dome-shaped indentation.

Tania didn’t think anything here merited the term obvious, but she found herself helping Skyler nonetheless. Together they eased the hourglass object from its foam cradle and then pushed off the floor to drift upward with it.

Skyler offered her a thin smile.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said.

“Last time I knew that,” he said, “was when I knocked on your door in Anchor Station.”

The offhand comment hit her like a splash of ice-cold water. A sudden avalanche of memories flashed across her mind: the flight from Darwin, the news of Neil’s death and the subsequent realization that Zane had survived. The first time she’d walked among the aura towers in Belém. The thrill of defeating Gabriel followed too quickly by the shattering of her friendship with Skyler.

If only she could go back to that moment when he’d knocked on her door. Roll back the clock, make better decisions. If only she could have left her own self-doubt in that cabin and emerged from the beginning as the leader they all wanted her to be.