They bowed to him as they entered.
Chapter 38
The Azores
14.JUL.2284
“THERE!” VANESSA SAID.
Skyler brought the aircraft to a hover. He leaned forward in his seat, straining against the belts, to see where she pointed.
Below, the ocean met a thin line of rocky shore. Cliffs separated the vast sea from a wall of foliage that ran inland to the mountains.
“I see it, too!” Ana called from the rear cabin. She’d traded places with the older woman four hours earlier, and slept most of the time since. Skyler hadn’t the heart to wake her when the Azores first came into view. She needed the rest, and with the cap level dwindling he found he wanted Vanessa as his co-pilot, just in case. Ana didn’t need to know that part.
He’d been flying parallel to the shore for hours at low speed while the others all looked for signs of where the aura towers might have made landfall. With each passing minute, and the corresponding drop in the Magpie’s already limited cap level, he’d been close to giving up hope. The aircraft had not been configured for international trips.
After the long flight over a seemingly endless sea he couldn’t imagine how the towers could have made it this far, and he had resigned himself to picturing them resting on the seafloor, surrounded by bioluminescent creatures as alien as the towers themselves.
Yet Vanessa had it right. The path was difficult to see at first. This part of the island had been used for agriculture, and the straight edges of the old fields were still obvious even in the current overgrown state. Trees and plants almost completely obscured the towers’ line now, too, after so much time. But it was there. Wider than the roads or the edges of cropland, a laser-straight swath of clear land ran inland until it crested a hill and disappeared over the other side.
“Mark it,” Skyler said as he turned the craft to face land. He glanced at the cap level. “Zero-point-five percent. We need to find a place to charge up; this hovering will burn through that in ten minutes. Somewhere other than Lagoa.”
The screens in front of Vanessa were configured with maps and the associated tools to manipulate them. She’d become pretty adept at working those views since the aircraft had come into their possession.
Lagoa had been Skyler’s first destination when they’d reached the island. The small town was only a short distance from their estimated place of landfall.
From the air, though, it appeared to be dead. Not a single light graced a window or beacon tower there. He had little hope a mini-thor existed in the glorified village, but with dusk rapidly approaching he’d decided to look for the towers’ path first. Lights would be easier to spot after dark, anyway.
“Ponta Delgada is the largest nearby,” Vanessa said. She tapped a location to the west, just a few kilometers down the beach. Her fingers danced as she zoomed and panned the map. “We could fly along the tower path, to the north side of the island. Ribeira Grande is there. Not as large, but larger than Lagoa.”
Skyler could see the first city she mentioned out his window. Or rather, the dark silhouette of it against a rapidly dimming sky. “I don’t see any lights in Ponta Delgada.” He didn’t see any purple glow or mysterious clouds, either. The others had probably noticed this, too, and he knew they’d be thinking the same thing he was: The journey might be far from over.
He felt Vanessa staring at him, waiting for his decision. “North,” he said after a few seconds.
When the aircraft crested the island’s spine, his heart sank.
The island was utterly, completely dark.
And the tower group’s path carved a perfect line through forest and city alike, straight to the north shore until it disappeared over a cliff edge beside the ocean.
“Our trip is just beginning,” Skyler muttered.
A scratching sound woke him.
He turned and propped himself on an elbow. The others still slept, and only the barest hint of light filtered in through the window on the cabin door on La Gaza Ladra’s starboard side.
His back ached from sleeping on the floor, despite the cushion of a sleeping bag beneath him. Pablo snored softly from his place on the floor at the back of the cabin, while Ana and Vanessa were two unmoving forms in the reclined passenger chairs.
The scratching noise again. Like dead tree branches scraping against a window on a breezy night. It seemed to be coming from the same door where morning light crept in through the porthole window. He staggered to his feet, stifling a yawn and grinding a fist into the small of his back to chase away the pain there.
His view out the small round window was southerly, over the same rise they’d flown across the night before. From this low angle, the tower group’s path was easy to spot through the island’s dense foliage. Easier still where it reached the edge of the city, carving an avenue-wide line straight through houses and buildings alike.
He’d landed on the rooftop pad at a luxury resort in the hope such a high-end place would have paid the extra cost for a mini-thor, or a stake in one at least. But the place was dead, just like the rest of the island, apparently. He’d kept his fears to himself, that they were stuck here, but Skyler had no doubt that by breakfast time this morning one of the others would voice the concern.
A face appeared outside the window.
Skyler fell back in surprise, stumbled, and landed on his back.
The gaunt face in the round window snarled and Skyler saw thin, ragged fingers clawing at the glass, leaving dirty smears behind. The subhuman had wild beady eyes and rotten teeth. Its brown hair hung in matted clumps around a beard full of unidentifiable bits of dirt and food.
Vanessa stepped between him and the door. In the back of the cabin, Pablo stirred and got to his feet. Ana slept.
“Stay back,” Vanessa said, her hand on the cabin door’s rotating handle. She gripped it and coiled herself.
“Wait,” Skyler said. “There might be more.”
“Get your gun, then.”
Pablo stepped between them, looking over Vanessa’s shoulder at the anguished face outside the window. He had a pistol in his hand and nodded to the woman. “Open it. Cover your ears,” he said, his voice a dry rasp from sleep.
Vanessa dug in her feet. “On three. One. Two.” She pulled the handle on the third beat until it was upright and threw her shoulder into the loosened door.
Skyler watched through Pablo’s legs as the subhuman fell when the door struck it, a motion mirroring Skyler’s own stumble. The animal tried to remain upright by running backward in a kind of controlled fall. Pablo gave Vanessa a half second to crouch and cover her ears before he squeezed off two shots into the creature’s chest. Little eruptions of blood sprang from each side of the sternum, and then the sub toppled over the edge of the roof, gone as quickly as it had appeared.
The tiny cabin rang in a high-pitched scream. Skyler hadn’t thought to cup his own ears. “Close the door!” he shouted, his own voice sounding a kilometer away.
Vanessa reached for the handle, then paused. She said something to Pablo and he replied, but Skyler couldn’t hear them. It was like listening to a conversation in an adjacent room through the wall.
The woman stepped out onto the landing pad and stood very still.
Pablo moved to the open doorway and waited, frozen in place.
“What’s wrong with you?” Skyler asked.
The tall man turned and pressed a finger to his lips. Skyler climbed to his feet. He glanced back at Ana, half-expecting to find her upright with her hands clasped to stinging ears. The girl had turned over and was still sleeping like a babe.
The bright hum in Skyler’s head began to fade. He listened at the door with Pablo while Vanessa stepped farther from the craft. “What is it?” Skyler asked, careful to keep his voice low. “I can’t hear anything.”
“That’s just it,” she replied. “Nothing. If the gunshots riled others, they sure are quiet about it. And this one is the first we’ve seen.”
“Weird,” Pablo said.
“The population collapsed, maybe,” Vanessa said. “It’s been almost seven years.”
“We shouldn’t let our guard down, in any case,” Skyler said. The tranquil, dark island had a way of lulling the senses. Until Skyler had seen that twisted face on the other side of the glass, he’d all but forgotten about subhumans.
I’m getting rusty, he thought.
Ana stretched and woke only when there was the smell of food. Preservall bacon and imitation eggs, scrambled over a camp stove on the rooftop by Pablo. Vanessa handled coffee while Skyler stood on top of La Gaza Ladra’s fuselage and scanned the city around them with binoculars.
“Good morning,” Ana said from below him.
He smiled and waved to her.
“See anything interesting?” she asked a minute later, a steaming mug in her hand.
“I do. Can you look up an address on the terminal for me?”
He rattled off the information as he read it from the side of a long-abandoned utility truck. A logo on the door indicated the local municipal power company, and an address was stenciled below it.
While she searched for the place, he studied the path of the tower group. A perfect line of collapsed buildings and crushed automobiles ran straight through the beach town. He followed it to the water, adjusting his zoom along the way.
The path vanished at the edge of a cliff, at a point where it jutted out from the rest of the shore. In the bright morning, Skyler had to squint as dazzling flashes reflected off the dark blue water. At the base of the cliff, a narrow beach made entirely of rock took the brunt of the ocean’s wrath.
There were shapes on the beach, lying in the surf or draped across the larger rocks. Piles of trash, or maybe sea lions? Skyler zoomed farther and focused.
His gut clenched. “Guys,” he said, “I found our missing subhumans.”
Bodies littered that patch of gravel. Drowned and bloated things once, the subhumans were now so many piles of rancid meat, not even fit for seagulls to pick at. Skyler figured they had tried to congregate around the towers as the group crossed the island, or followed in their wake, blind to the cliff’s edge and the vast ocean the towers plowed into. The beings usually had a good sense for self-preservation—Skyler had even seen them swim on a few occasions—but these must have been so enthralled by the activated towers that they simply fell to the rocks below like lemmings, or perhaps the tide was in and they drowned. Hours or days later they washed up onshore by the dozens. In a weird way Skyler admired the efficiency with which the towers had killed the beings.
The address he’d spied turned out to be an office complex, full of dead terminals, decaying bodies, and more mold than he’d ever seen. The windows had been left open to the humid air for six years, and lizards scattered when he stepped inside. Nothing useful would be found there, and more to the point there was no power.
A day passed, then a week, without any more encounters with subhumans. No one spoke of it aloud, but Skyler could see the fear on all their faces of being stuck here. Or rather the acceptance of that possibility. The fear, he thought, might well be his alone. Pablo certainly wouldn’t mind spending the rest of his life on a quiet island. Vanessa probably wouldn’t, either. Ana, Skyler thought, would just take whatever cards were dealt her, and in her youth probably would think it would be a good life. He knew she was too restless to be happy somewhere like this, though.
Each morning Skyler woke two hours before sunrise and set out to search the surrounding neighborhood for a building with power. Three times he found lights, only to discover the source to be isolated, cap-powered installations. Security floods, a child’s night-light, that sort of thing.
Pablo found a few solar panels on a nearby roof and managed to rig them up to charge La Gaza Ladra. A well-intentioned project he’d undertaken while everyone else had been out searching, and Skyler took care to praise the effort before letting the man know it would take roughly four years to get a full charge from the source. Still, he didn’t disconnect them. If they found nothing else, at least they might get enough of a charge in a few months to be able to fly to one of the other islands in the Azores chain.
One day Vanessa returned from scouting with a slate computer in hand. “Still has a charge,” she said as she handed it to Skyler.
“We can’t siphon it into the Magpie,” he said.
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be thick. Read it.”
Intrigued, Skyler glanced at the screen. The island’s daily newspaper was on the display. The article in the center of the page caught his eye. “Council upholds policy against thorium reactors,” read the headline. His heart sank. He scanned the paragraphs below. Talk of mitigating risk to the island’s fragile ecosystem. Sensational and unfounded rants against the possibility of nuclear meltdown.
“We’re not going to find any power here, are we?” Vanessa asked.
He sighed, and against his better judgment tapped the option to continue reading. The reporter listed quotes from various islanders about their mistrust of nuclear energy. A holdover, he knew, from fears that began with the earliest forms of the technology, when reactors would fail every few decades, usually due to some act of nature. Once a particularly disgruntled French worker had sabotaged the planet deliberately, leaving an uninhabitable zone in Western Europe that made earlier accidents look like child’s play.
“We’re going to be here awhile,” Vanessa said. “Aren’t we?”
Frustration boiled within Skyler. Granted, that old tech was dangerous and irresponsible. But the backlash, if the history books had it right, was beyond ridiculous. A century and a half of willful ignorance toward the best energy source imaginable. The West shot itself in the foot, allowing China to pioneer pebble-bed technology first, then thorium. And finally miniature thorium reactors that could run unsupervised for a thousand years, and power a few modern skyscrapers. While Europe and America struggled to attach a solar panel to every roof and burned every last drop of oil, China and the developing world suddenly had no energy problem to speak of. Then came ultracapacitors, and the ability to store all that power.