Authors: Wesley Chu
“Second door to your right. Should be a cargo hold. Just grab everything.”
Levin blew through the double doors and entered a large room with cube containers stacked all the way up to the ceiling. In the center of the room, a group of men and women huddled in a circle, holding hands and praying fervently. They gaped at him as he strolled in and looked around.
“Seems I have company,” he thought to Grace.
“A couple of Neptune Divinities. I would consider it a personal favor if you tell them the High Scion says hello and then kill them.”
“A little bloodthirsty, Mother of Time? They're going to die anyway.”
“You have no idea the pain and suffering these bastards put the TIs through.”
“Who in the Holy Heavens are you?” one of the Neptune Divinities demanded, standing up.
Fortunately, he seemed unarmed, or Levin would have had to do something about it. He ignored the man and opened his netherstore container. “Don't mind me,” he said. “Really. Keep praying.”
The man took a few steps toward him and raised his arm. By now, the rest of the Neptune Divinities had noticed him as well. A woman got up and ran for the door out of the corner of his eye. The rest surrounded him.
“I wouldn't do that if I were you,” Levin said. He created half a dozen kinetic coils and began to cut the bindings holding the cargo in place. Several of the Neptune Divinities gasped as he lifted a dozen containers at once and arranged them into a single file. Then he expanded his netherstore and floated the containers in as if down a conveyor belt. More cries of alarm from the Neptune Divinities followed. Their cargo seemed to float and disappear into thin air.
One of the men made the foolish decision of trying to stop him. He charged Levin's exo shield and bounced off it as if he had hit a wall, knocking himself unconscious. The rest of the group attacked, trying to surround and disrupt his work. Irritated, Levin created a long coil and swept them to the side and pinned them to the wall.
“The most efficient thing to do is to just kill them.”
“Please, Mother of Time. Let me do my work.”
Levin ignored the cries of the struggling Neptune Divinities as he gobbled up stack after stack of containers. By the time he was done, his netherstore was twenty-six containers burdened and its levels had dipped to 64 percent. He checked his status: thirteen minutes remaining. He turned to exit the room and ran into a group of armed soldiers manning the door.
“Oh, for abyss's sake,” he growled.
“I told you,” Grace said. “Should have listened to me. Like James, you'll learn in time that I am always right.”
The squad opened fired, pinging Levin with gauss projectiles, popular in this time period. His levels plummeted 10 percent just from the initial barrage. He swore: he had forgotten that the type of exos the agency used were notoriously inefficient when it came to gauss weaponry. He dove to the side and aimed six coils at the squad of four, smashing them backward and into the corridor wall outside.
“Get moving, Auditor. You're wasting time, and levels, for that matter. The hit you just took could have held another three tons in the netherstore.”
“I'm a little out of practice.”
Levin charged forward without exo-enhanced speed, deciding to conserve his levels for the rest of the job unless he absolutely needed to use them. Two of the guards in the hallway were unconscious and the other two were just picking themselves off the floor. Levin grabbed the one closest to him by the collar and yanked him headfirst into the wall. He stepped up to the second and kicked him in the face.
He continued down to the next cargo hold and took a look inside. It was loaded with dozens of warheads. He skipped it. The warheads could be converted to power sources, but he doubted the wasteland savages had the technology to do so. The third hold contained long-term ship rations. He upended those quickly into his netherstore. His levels were dropping fast. Levin continued on through the holds, grabbing pallets of clothing in one room, and finding water filtration systems in another.
His levels were nearing 30 percent when Grace spoke up. “Wait. Backtrack to that previous room.”
Levin ducked back into a large room near the back. It was a garage filled with several vehicles, transports, and combat crafts. “What of it? We can't use any of these.”
“Grab that machine in the left corner.”
“The scout mechanoid? Why?”
“Just do as I say. You'll have to unload some of your stores to hold it. Hurry, you have only four minutes left.”
Grumbling, Levin opened his netherstore and unloaded some of the containers of clothing and arms. He eyeballed the weight of the eight-legged mechanoid with the human upper and top, and then lifted it up. It was surprisingly lighter than he had thought, though still pushing the containment field of his netherstore perilously close to its limit.
“You're going to need to unload more. Your levels are at thirteen percent.”
Levin dropped the mechanoid again and removed a few of the foodstuff containers.
“Not the food!”
“Too late, Mother of Time.”
He picked the mechanoid up again and dropped it in. His netherstore capacity filled to a hundred and his levels dropped to 6 percent. He was heading toward the exit of the ship when the gravity gave out. Several of the crafts in the garage broke free from their restraints and slid across the room. Levin was unprepared as a tank-like vehicle slammed into him. He barely got his exo up in time before it crushed him into the wall.
Dozens of floating objects began to careen around the room, bouncing off walls and smashing anything that got in their way. A transport craft collided with the tank-like vehicle and exploded, spewing shrapnel and burning debris all over the room. A cascade of smaller explosions followed.
“Auditor, get out of there. You're at eighteen minutes. If you're not out in the next forty-seven seconds, you're going to fall into the sun.”
“Can I jump back right now?”
“No. It's far too dangerous considering the ship's trajectory and spin. Get out and stabilize in open space first.”
“Easier said than done.”
“I thought you were supposed to be good. I will be very put out if you die on your first jump, Auditor. Do not disappoint me.”
Additional pressure and a critic. Great, just what Levin needed. To die on his first jump after getting thrown out of ChronoCom and breaking out of prison would be humiliating. He narrowly dodged a fiery metal beam soaked in oil that speared into the wall behind him. He oriented himself and powered on his exo, ready to punch a hole through the ship's outer hull. Then he realized he didn't have enough levels. The only way he could get out was the way he had come in.
Ducking and pushing aside wreckage all the way, Levin shot himself down the length of the main corridor, having to fight off the bodies and debris flying at him. A woman with desperation on her face clutched at him as she flew past. He pushed her face out of his mind. It was a look he had seen thousands of times before. A good chronman had to have a short memory. It was the ones who didn't who ended up poking a gas giant in the eye.
He checked the time: thirty seconds until nineteen minutes. He wasn't going to make it. He had to try. Levin continued up the main corridor, dodging the stream of objects. Gravity had now completely abandoned the ship, its out-of-control rotation creating pressure and forces that moved every which way. Levin felt like a pinball.
Fifteen seconds.
He wasn't going to make it. What a way to go. Dying in a sun was probably the most painful death he could think of. It would be a torturous few seconds before his body burned into a crisp, his fluids evaporating in a flash once the ship around him melted and his exo and atmos shields give way.
The timer had already hit the twenty-minute mark when he reached the hatch. His levels were down to 3 percent. Even if he got out of the ship now, chances were, his levels were too far down for him to survive the trip back to the collie. Still, he had to try.
Levin punched out of the ship and was temporarily blinded by the sun's brightness. Using his AI band to show him the way, he shot himself toward the designated jump point. Even then, he knew he wasn't going to make it. He checked his levels one last time; less than 1 percent. It was over. The jump would consume the rest of his levels and then the sun would burn him up.
“Let no one say that Levin Javier-Oberon did not fight to the last,” he said, closing his eyes.
The black space in front of him began to glow yellow. There was a flash and then an upturn of his stomach, and before he knew it, the ugly collie was floating right in front of him. Levin pushed the nausea down into his gut and shot himself into the hatch. A few seconds later, the netherstore container was hooked up to the collie and he collapsed on a hard metal bunk, heaving and sweating.
Grace's upside-down head appeared. “I told you not to miss that nineteen-minute mark.”
“Your times are off,” he huffed, picking himself off the bunk.
She gave him a condescending smirk. “I'm never off. I padded them. I knew you were going to be a little incompetent the first time back.”
“I'm a little rusty.”
“Same thing, Auditor.” She felt his forehead and then checked the readings on the wall panel of the collie. “Your atmos failed before we picked you up. Your rad band managed to ward off most of the radiation, but you didn't come out completely unscathed. Fortunately, I have a rad tank you can soak in back at the All Galaxy. Until then, I recommend you rest.”
“I'm fine, Mother of Time.”
“I didn't ask you how you were, Auditor. I don't know why chronmen are always so hard of hearing.” Before he could say another word, she activated his cryo band and Levin felt darkness sweep over him.
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Elise sighed in resignation as she made a loop around the rooms that now held the key to saving the entire planet. The new lab, on the seventy-ninth floor, was easily ten times the size of her old one back at the Farming Towers, but not nearly as nice. Actually, it was downright filthy in here, but it was one of the least damaged parts of the tower. She sniffed the air; it would probably take her a week before she could get this place clean enough to work in.
Not that she had been putting many hours into her work recently. Elise had been pretty delinquent researching the cure for the Earth Plague, though she gave herself a pass, albeit just a temporary one. Being on the run tended to have that effect. The upheaval of the past several months had not only halted any progress, it had probably set her back a little. Hopefully just a little. She would prioritize her work here now that things had settled. It was the most important thing she could do for the people.
She went to the racks of testing beds that housed the various strains of the Earth Plague. Right now, six of the beds, mostly old aquariums the children of the tribe had scrounged up from an old pet store and re-purposed for her use, were intact. A few had suffered cracks from the long journey from Boston, but it wasn't anything a little duct tape couldn't fix. Four hundred years in the future, duct tape was still king. The remaining containers were an assortment of old pots and plasticware, which was appropriate, since the vast majority of her actual science equipment consisted of kitchen utensils.
She was making headway toward a cure, albeit slowly. Even now, samples LL and R3 showed promise. Bacteria levels in those two had stabilized, with decomposition of organic matter functioning as it should before the fungal taint's infection. This formula worked only on a very specific strain of the plague. It would be useless against the dozens of other identified strains of the plague. Whatever the cure was would have to be synthesized to work on the entire family of the fungus or possibly be adaptive to hundreds of different variants.
That would require the bacterial sequencer James had stolen from the Nutris Platform. Unfortunately, they were no closer to locating the machine than when she had first arrived. In fact, he had dropped the ball completely on it. Not that she could blame him. The two of them had been running and reacting for so long now they'd hardly had the chance to do any of the work that was really important. Like him finding the bacterial sequencer. Or her actually working on a cure.
Elise worried that so much of their plan hinged upon retrieving the machine. She had originally hoped that Grace and Titus could just reinvent or build new machines to duplicate what they needed. However, genius only went so far. Their specialties were too far from this field of work to bridge the technology and knowledge gap. As brilliant as they were, the work on the Nutris Platform was cutting-edge. It would take several years for them to get caught up, years neither of them had. The one time James had tried to retrieve a scientist who might have been able to reengineer the machine, he had failed.
Still, Titus 2.3 was fitting right in and had already proven his usefulness ten times over. Within the first couple of days of his arrival, he had dug up the Elfreth's stash of solar panels and hooked them up to part of the building's existing grid, meaning Elise could plug something into a socket in her lab and it would actually work. The power was limited to certain floors, and she had to prioritize its use carefully, but it still made a huge difference. The electronic equipment she had been forced to work without for the past several months was coming back online.
He also got the water purifiers working in the kitchen two days ago, and he and Grace were designing a working elevator and an analog telephone network for the building. When news of what they were working on reached the tribes, the Elfreth and the Flatirons practically deified the two old geniuses, and they both reveled in the attention.