8

the storm

They had only a moment’s warning.  The storm came in early and faster than expected, as if their refusal to flee before its might was an affront, an insult.  So it made them suffer.

The first gust of wind hit them at over eighty mph, and it was only by sheer luck that Cole managed to twist her body in such a way that she avoided getting hit by the full force of the blast.  Luckily the initial burst came at them against the far side of the bulwark of the AX50, which Jones had moored in place with gravitational clamps and cable tethers.  The steel cube shook and rattled as specks of grit, mud and branches fanned the vehicle like a soiled tide.  Even secured the craft rocked violently and looked ready to topple.

Cole’s face burned with sharp pain, and when she wiped away a film of dirt her gloved hand came away bloody.  The stains on her hand were symmetrical, a spread pattern of fresh cuts across her face put there by the black gust.  The wind had claws.  

Goss and Rawlins both staggered, and the priest was forced to his knees.  Lee and Cole stood between them and the GX50, but the others were already on board.  

“Move!’ Goss shouted.  “Get inside!”

Cole and Lee both sped to gather their survey gear, not even considering the idea of leaving it behind.  Cole’s pack was at her feet and hoisted open, and despite the burning pain across her face and the tears brought to her eyes by airborne grime and grit she had her telemetry scanner and portable scope and theodolite in her bag before Black and Diaz were there, having run from the craft to take hold of the scientist women and forcefully haul them back to the vessel before another gust hit.

“We’re not leaving our gear!” Lee shouted, though her voice was drowned out by the sudden gale.  She was a waif compared to Diaz, and when he seized her by the waist and picked her up there was little she could do to stop him.

The din of the storm surrounded them in a brutal wave.  For a split second Cole heard voices again, the same dry and guttural calls from before, and even as Black tried to forcibly snatch her by the wrist to drag her back to the ship Cole saw fear spread across the other woman’s face, a moment of disbelief and disoriented terror, and it wasn’t only on account of the force of the wind, that torrent of freezing electric air which turned the air sour and sharp and built force along the ground as if a massive animal knelt over them and readied to pounce.  Cole’s face stung and her eyes watered, and even the slightest motion was an effort, but beneath the dirge of black wind she heard what Black heard, or something like it.

A garbled choir of disembodied voices.  Nonsense cries, no form or meaning, a gargle of pained human sounds that came from far off, deep in the storm, from the end of a great and echoing tunnel.  The cries scraped around them like a rain of glass, and Cole realized they were somehow the source of her very real wounds.  

She didn’t resist when Black again took her arm and yanked her towards the GX50.  The stench of brimstone washed over them as the gale intensified.  They felt the next gust coming, and they landed hard on the ground next to the shuttle, protected by its lee from the wind that came from the opposite side, just seconds before the next burst hit.  Goss was with them on the ground.  

Rawlins was not.  He was still too far out.

The wind lifted the priest off the ground and threw him straight back towards the water, which rippled and shook from the force of the deadly winds.  His arms and legs flailed briefly before his entire body fell up, as if he’d spread his arms and did a back-flip into the sky, only the moment his body rose more than a few feet up he was thrown like a rag doll over the water.  Debris shot into his wake like a school of razor fish, and for a moment the gale drowned out even the insane cacophony of voices that circled in Cole’s head.  Rawlins’ scream was brief before he was sucked away into blackness.

As if out of respect, the storm offered a moment of silence and the winds almost died, but moments later they roared back to life.  The survivors pulled their way into the GX50 and sealed the doors with the angry talons of the storm right at their backs. The vehicle rocked with enough force to pummel its passengers against the walls until Jones powered up the engines.

“What the hell are you doing?!” Goss shouted.  “If you try to fly we’ll be torn apart.”

“I’m well aware of that, Captain!” Jones shouted back.  “But if we can fire up the thrusters and maintain hover position we can generate enough power and resistance to keep from being thrown upside down!”

Everything shook.  The walls rattled so loud Cole thought her head would explode.  The fore window was cracked, and looked to be getting worse by the second, but she breathed a sigh of relief when the greenish-grey glow of the force screen popped into sight around them.

“You’re going to drain all of your power, Dumbass!” Diaz said.

“He’s also going to keep us alive, Pencil Dick!” Black shouted.

The space inside the GX50 had never seemed so small.  All of them were in the cockpit or the seating area, and even after Jones rendered the craft stable Cole still found herself bumping into and falling over everyone else.  Cold sweat glazed her skin beneath the now tattered environmental suit, but at last she and Lee managed to get back to the storage area, where they held each other tight and huddled in the corner, waiting for the maelstrom to claim them, or for the storm to finally come to an end.

***

The worst of it passed, though Cole couldn’t tell how long it had been since it started.  It felt like days.

The dirge of voices did not return, but the howl of the storm had been bad enough, and buried within its wailing notes she heard Rawlins’ final, piteous cry as he was sucked into the black arms of Zone 66.  

She and Lee emerged from the cargo hold and went to check the readings on the main control display.  Goss, Black and Diaz were strapped into the wall seats and had even fallen asleep while waiting for the storm to pass.  The walls still rattled from buffeting winds, which scaled the exterior of the GX50 like lonely howls.  Cole could feel the cold of the storm even from inside the craft, and though she knew they were environmentally sealed she swore she heard whispers of hard air push through the seals around the main door, which hissed like malevolent whispers.

Whispers...the voices had stopped sometime in the night, when the storm raged its hardest.  She’d expected them to rekindle with Rawlins’ death, for the choir of disembodied torment to sweep through her mind once again, and at the crescendo of that opus she knew would come the final crack of her sanity.  To her relief and surprise they never did, and for hours she and Lee huddled together and listened to the monstrous growls of the storm tear at the small craft and rock it back and forth.  Even with Jones’ precautionary measures they still might as well have been on some ancient schooner lost in the center of a raging sea, for each sharp buffet of wind that smashed against the hull sounded loud and hard enough they feared the craft would be ripped apart.  The hammering and constant motion assaulted Cole’s senses, filled her skull with a whirlwind of broken glass, and through the relentless torrent she heard Rawlins’ voice played again and again, distant enough that she could tell it wasn’t the phantom calls she’d experienced before but a manifestation of her fears made tangible, an echoing call for mercy on a world that would grant none.  

She’d barely met him, so it was little surprise to Cole that she felt little in the way of sorrow for the felled scientist/priest, but his sudden vanishing had broken down the doors that held the worst of her fears at bay.  She knew nothing of Rawlins save his profession and that he had a kind nature, and she took a moment to hope those directly affected by his death would take some solace in knowing he’d died in an effort to help humanity survive.

That doesn’t offer much, she thought bitterly.  Dead is dead, no matter how it happens.

Jones was strapped into the pilot’s seat, where he’d bravely (or foolishly) kept an eye on the storm raging right through the front viewscreen all through the night.  The shadows cast half of his chiseled face in silhouette, and when the two scientists appeared from the aft end of the vehicle Cole was surprised that he smiled.  

“You ladies doing all right?” he asked.

“I think so,” Lee said.

Cole looked out the viewscreen, or what was left of it.  Jones had turned the thrusters off when the worst of the tempest passed but kept the force-screen activated, which Cole thought was smart since the damage to the forward windows was even worse than she remembered, an ocean of fractures and flaws spread like a web of veins.  Gazing at the swamp was like looking through a broken mirror dipped in oil and darkness.

“Do we have the power to keep the force screens running?” she asked.

“We won’t have to for much longer,” Jones said, and he pointed at the scanner screens against the starboard wall.  “The storm has pretty much blown over.  Another hour and the area will be almost clear.”

“Good,” Goss said as he unstrapped himself.  “Because we still have a job to do.”

Cole ignored him and cued up the history of the storm readings.  

“That’s going to be difficult without Rawlins,” Lee said.  “In fact you could say his job was nearly as important as Cole’s…”

“I’m sure you’ll manage,” Goss said.

Lee bit down.  “He was the meteorologist,” she said.  “I’m a biologist, and Cole is a physicist.  You do understand that our fields have nothing to do with meteorology, right?  We can’t do this.”

Cole found the recording of wind speed at the storm’s onset.  Gusts of 120 mph.  Rawlins would have been torn apart.  

She tracked forward to watch how the gusts came and went and affected the velocity of the storm, and saw a curious pattern that sent something cold through her gut.  Cole switched the dial back to present time, turned on the audio and grabbed the headphones off the wall, fit the oversized rubber and metal device around her ears and sealed out the sound of Goss reprimanding Lee.

The storm was speaking, though not in the voices she’d heard before, the ones she knew were only inside her head.  Now she heard something real, something she couldn’t explain.  What was there on the airwaves shouldn’t have been possible.  It wasn’t, she knew that, but then she’d known a lot in her life that shouldn’t have been true.  

There were voices on the radio.

“Is there anyone else here?” she said, though with the noise-cancelling headphones on she could barely even hear herself speak.  She hit the touch screen to create the virtual dial so she could adjust the frequency.

Cole wasn’t sure if anyone heard her, but when she turned she saw everyone staring at her.  Diaz’s mouth moved but she couldn’t hear what he said, so she pulled one headphone off.  “What?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked.  “We’re all right here.”

“Not you,” she said.  “Is there someone else on Earth, near Zone 66?”

“There shouldn’t be,” Lee said.  “Everyone was evacuated during the Exodus, and anyone left behind would have to be dead by now from exposure.”

“The better question,” Diaz said, “is what the hell you’re doing on the radio.”

“Just because she figured out how to use it and you can’t is no reason to get sore, Diaz,” Black laughed.

Cole shook her head and started to put the headphones back on when Goss stepped over and forcibly took hold of her arm.

“You’re not authorized to use that,” he said.  His grip was painful, and she figured out quickly it wasn’t worth trying to struggle, as he was clearly much stronger than she.  But she didn’t remove the headphones.  “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

She stared at him, more surprised perhaps than any of them that she wasn’t intimidated, at least not at that moment.  There were much bigger things to worry about.

“You should hear this,” she said.  All eyes were on her.

“You should step away from there,” Goss said sternly, and with one hand he started pulling her back, slowly but surely, but before he drew her far she reached up and pulled the headphones free so the frequency she’d heard drowned the ship’s speakers.

Through the ear-splitting static and crackle of a white storm, drastic interference that sounded like broken glass, came the unmistakable sound of a voice.  A woman’s voice, garbled and distant and barely discernible through the growling static.  Her words were a mess, so scrambled they might have been in another language.

“What the fuck?” Diaz said.  

Goss stared at the screen, then released his hold on Cole to make room for Jones, who came scrambling over to work the dials and fine-tune the frequency.

“I can clear this up,” he said, and he looked at Goss.  Goss drew a deep, possibly angry breath.  He grit his teeth and looked down at the ground, then up at Jones.  He nodded, handed the pilot the headphones, and glared at Cole before he pointed at her and Lee.

“You already have a job to do,” he said.  “We’ll take care of this.  Focus on prepping this site for the Bridge.  We’ll deal with...whatever this is.”

It took Cole a moment to process what he’d said.  Lucky for her Lee was more on the ball.

“I thought we were to determine if the site could be prepped,” she said.  “And as you might recall, our preliminary findings were a resounding ‘No’.”

“And I’m telling you,” Goss said sharply, “to re-evaluate your data.  More than once, if necessary.”  The look he gave them was as cold as ice.  “Are we clear?”

Cole and Lee stood stunned.  

He’s ordering us to falsify our findings, she realized, and a black cloud opened in her chest.

“Do you understand what will happen if we try to build a Bridge in a Zone that’s unstable…?”

“Do you understand,” he said, “that as you are under military jurisdiction you will get your skinny ass out of my sight and get to work?  And if you can’t get your shit together and figure out how to move on your own accord, I’ll have Black escort you.”  He let that sink in a moment.  Cole’s fear regarding what she’d heard over the airwaves suddenly melted.

He’s insane, she thought, but reconsidered.  Like most soldiers he was just acting under orders.  The Republic wanted a Bridge...this Bridge...and they were going to get it, one way or another.

Lee was about to say something, but Cole took her by the hand and turned her about.

“Let’s go,” she said, and though the other woman didn’t want to budge Cole pulled her along to the back of the craft and the cargo area, where what was left of their gear waited for them.

“What did you hear?” Lee asked when they were out of earshot of Goss and the others.  “Over the radio?”

Cole hesitated.  She’d told Lee some of her personal history, but not all of it, and she didn’t want to lose credibility with the only friend she had out there, a million miles from home, trapped by an aggressive father-figure who’d force her to do a job that could have catastrophic results, at gunpoint, if necessary.  

“There’s someone else here,” Cole said.  Lee’s eyes widened.

“You’re serious?” she said.

“You heard it yourself,” Cole said.  “That wasn’t radio static, or a stray signal.  It was a distress call, and it came from nearby.”

***

“What the hell are we going to do?”

The air outside was ripe and damp and smelled of the guts of a forest.  What terrain they had in the area -- the swamp grass, the small stones and gnarled trees that were just barely visible against the impenetrable shadows that grew like cobwebs in Zone 66 -- had been scattered and blown across the stone face of the island they’d parked the now filthy GX50 transport on.  Everything was damp and oily and reeked with enough rot that it made Cole’s eyes water.

“I don’t know,” she said.  “But I can’t build a Calabi-Yau Engine here.  The magnitude of that storm was bad enough…”  She looked up at the wall of shadow that loomed over them.  It was like staring at a rip into space, especially now that it was daylight, and the rest of the world stood in such stark contrast to the unnatural manifestation.  At least a hundred feet high and across, the seething border looked like one could fall into it, a hollow pit trapped in mid-air.  “Have you ever seen anything like it?” she asked Lee.

“No,” Lee said as she turned and craned her head to look up.  “But this is only my second Bridge-building expedition.  On my first there was some sort of magnetic well that kept dragging our equipment to the Zone’s core, so our Engineer tried to build the Engine nearby, with the idea we’d transport it to where it needed to be.”

“Did it work?”  Cole unzipped her environmental suit -- every reading they’d taken indicated the air was still safe to breathe, and no toxins had been detected.  In the wake of the storm it was hot as hell, and as she peeled the suit away from the tank top she wore underneath she felt like she was removing a second layer of unwanted skin.  

“Don’t know,” Lee said, and she shuddered from the memory.  “He got shot by terrorists before he could finish.”

Cole nodded.  “That’s why I’m here.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask...except it’s really none of my business…”  Lee followed suit and removed her environmental suit, revealing a similar black tee and stretch pants beneath.  Cole could only imagine if one of the men were watching, and if the two of them would wind up on the web back home.  If they made it back home.

“We’re both here,” Cole said.  “You want to know why I was off the radar.”  Lee nodded.  “I was dismissed from my active position and lost my Engineer’s license because I had a mental breakdown during the colonization effort of Zone 23.”

She knelt down and opened her pack to pull out the telemetry scanner.  

“What sort of breakdown?” Lee asked, her voice suddenly skeptical.  

Cole didn’t raise her eyes.  “I thought my dead mother was trying to kill me,” she said.  “So I sabotaged the mission.”  She stood up and looked at Lee, whose expression was somewhere between fear and disgust.  “There were deaths involved, but they weren’t because of me.  But before you lecture me about how many lives could have been saved by a new colony…”

“I don’t lecture,” Lee said.  “I’m not Chinese.”

“...the Zone was bad, and the Engine would have failed anyway.”  She looked to the hazy horizon, then up at the wall of shadow.  “Just like it will here.”

An understandably awkward silence followed.  Lee broke it after a hard gust of hot wind pushed their hair East and sent momentary goosebumps up and down Cole’s exposed arms.

“Are you...better?” she asked.

“That depends on who you ask,” Cole said.  “I’ve been in therapy and on heavy medication ever since it happened.  So there’s that.”

“That’s something,” Lee nodded with as cheerful of a disposition as she could muster.  She stepped close, and busied herself with folding her environmental suit so it wouldn’t look like the two of them were having a long conversation.  “I don’t think Goss is going to take ‘No’ for an answer,” she said.  “Which puts us in a bad spot.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Cole said.

“I have a couple of ideas,” Lee answered.  “Three, as a matter of fact.”

“Overachiever,” Cole said.  She brushed her hair back from her face.  She was so thoroughly covered with sweat she doubted she’d ever get clean.  She glanced at the ship and saw Goss watching them through the cracked viewscreen.  It would only be a matter of time before he sent Black out to inspire them to get to work.  “Shoot.”

“We contact Republic command directly,” Lee said.  “Tell them Goss is acting crazy, and if we build the Bridge we’ll cause serious problems.”

Cole nodded.  Debris flitted in the distance, ash and soot tossed into the sky by the wind like long-dead birds.  “Could be he’s actually doing what they told him to do,” Cole said.  “In fact, I’d bank on it.  And that means they won’t exactly care.”

“What if we contact the media?” Lee said.

“That may shed some light in the long run, but it won’t help you and me much.  Plus you have to consider it could draw some unwanted attention, and I’d rather not be assassinated today.”

Lee nodded.  They shifted nervously.  Cole smiled and waved at Goss.  They were already past any point of subtlety -- he doubtless knew they were discussing their situation, and how to get out of it.

“Option Two,” Lee said.  “We find the source of your distress call.  It might be someone who can help.”

“Yeah, think about that,” Cole said.  “Who the hell would be on Earth’s ruins and in need of help?  At best, it’ll be a crashed or stranded ship, and I don’t think they’d be much use against Goss and his guns.”

“And at worst?” Lee asked.  

“Bandits, raiders, some psycho...maybe Black Sky terrorists…”

“Ok, ok, I get it,” Lee said.  “Way to piss on all of the parades.”

“Sorry, it’s a gift,” Cole said.  “But I’d love to hear your last idea.”

“No,” Lee said.  “You won’t.”

The door peeled open and slid to the side.  Black stepped down the retractable ramp, gun held before her and a freshly sour attitude on her face.  “Let’s go,” she called.  “Social hour is over.”

Lee nodded at Black, then gave Cole a look.

“Thanks for telling me what happened at Zone 23,” she said.  “I’m glad you’re all better.  It would be awful if that ever happened again.”

Cole nodded, hint taken.

Next Chapter: Mother