Pain Bringer (The Constant War Book 2), page 23
The receptionist stepped through the partition. Fairhaven looked toward the brunette.
“Mrs. Fairhaven?” said the nurse.
Startled that the brunette hadn’t been called before her, Fairhaven fumbled with her wrist comm and a few knickknacks she had pulled out to pass the time, once again drawing a condescending glare from the brunette. She walked over to the receptionist. “It’s Miss.”
The receptionist tilted her head back, looking down her nose at Fairhaven’s belly. “Right. Miss. If you will, follow me, please.”
They walked labyrinthine corridors, egg-white walls, smelling of fresh paint. Or maybe the doctor’s office always had a chemical smell. The receptionist opened a door marked Room 3 and placed her medical chart in a plastic bin.
“Someone will be with you in a minute.”
Fairhaven nodded and entered.
The room was similar in shape and size to the ultrasound room. However, this room was brightly lit and devoid of medical equipment. In fact, it was devoid of most everything. In the middle was a table with blue padding with a strip of sanitary paper pulled across it. A one-piece cabinet-countertop unit was shoved into the corner. A faucet in the shape of a fishhook jutted out of it, looking like it had never been used before. Medical posters with cartoony infographics and bisected views of human anatomy decorated sparse walls, faded and off-white from time.
Fairhaven considered standing until the doctor arrived, so that upon his entrance, he’d be confronted by crossed arms and a stern expression. But standing upright for extended periods of time was doing a number on her back. Delicately, she raised herself onto the padded table in the middle of the room. After a few ticks of the clock, she began to swing her legs.
The wait gave her time to think—to wonder why doctors had an exterior waiting room, if they were just going to direct their patients to a smaller waiting room in the back? What was the point of an appointment if your arrival time only triggered your wait? She liked contemplating these problems. It was better than thinking about her health or her child or what she was doing at the doctor’s office or the myriad potential problems associated with any of those things.
The door creaked open. The same nurse that had administered her ultrasound entered. Her head was down, her focus buried in a medical chart. She looked up for a second, then back at the paperwork in her hand. “Miss Fairhaven.”
“I thought the doctor was going to see me,” said Fairhaven.
“No need. Not for this.”
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it? I mean, if it was something major, I’d be talking to the doctor and not you, right?”
The nurse scowled. “I am perfectly qualified to assist you with your medical condition.”
“Is it my dumbass cervix?”
“Incompetent. And no.”
“What is it, then?”
The nurse recited a practiced speech, looking through Fairhaven, as if she wasn’t standing right in front of her. Bedside manner didn’t appear to be her strong suit.
“From most expectant parents,” said the nurse, “we take DNA samples to look for abnormalities in the child. Complications that we can adjust or plan for before birth. We took samples from both yourself, and a Mister Brent Wilkins. We cross referenced your chromosomes with that of your child.”
“Okay…”
“We discovered an anomaly.”
“I don’t understand. Is something wrong with the baby?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what exactly is this about?”
The nurse fidgeted with her hands. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and minced her lips, avoiding eye contact with Fairhaven.
If the nurse didn’t answer her, like right now, Fairhaven swore to God that she’d punch her smack dab in her stupid mouth.
“Spit it out already.”
“The baby is not his.”
Part Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Though Char was riding high in the Painbringer, euphoric bliss eluded her. Information bombarded her synapses, beamed directly through the inputs in her spine, but she hardly gave them second thought. Call it nerves, or excitement, or—she didn’t know what—but her mind dwelled on what the next few minutes held in store for her. For Heaven. For the whole of humanity.
The Painbringer was hunched over to fit inside the mecha dropship. Despite the cramped confines, the dropship was only a quarter full. Normally, Tigerclaws would be packed in shoulder to shoulder. Marines would squawk, psyching each other up for deployment.
Except now, it was eerily quiet.
The MSRVs were situated in the back of the dropship. Of course they were. It was standard procedure to let the combat mecha, the Tigerclaws and various artillery mecha, take the brunt of fire should they be deployed into direct combat.
But they weren’t deploying into combat.
They were deploying into worse.
They were deploying into Earth’s atmosphere.
Through the MSRV’s canopy, Dr. Scott fidgeted in the cockpit. Char stared at him, hoping he would make eye contact, but he kept his head down. His shoulder swiveled and occasionally a hand came up into view. He was still going over systems checks, making sure everything was copacetic before deployment.
Char glanced at the other MSRV and ran directly into Marcia’s gaze. Great. Got the attention of the wrong one. She looked away.
With a thought, the Painbringer’s systems were checked. Everything was nominal.
For the Painbringer anyway.
Char wasn’t keen on being so far away from Dr. Scott.
She was front row center. The entire platoon was situated between her and Dr. Scott. They could not have planned it more perfectly if they had intentionally tried keeping them apart. Or as command liked to put it, to keep personnel from fraternizing with one another. That was the word they used. Fraternizing. Unfortunately, front and center was the only position for the Painbringer due to its abnormal and non-uniform stature. At least she’d be the first one out of the dropship. The first one to break atmosphere and touch down on a planet she’d never actually known.
Wilkins and Fairhaven flanked either side of her. They’d already run systems checks long before they stepped foot inside the dropship. Faces, stone facades. The mark of trained soldiers. Mentally prepared for the task to come. They had envisioned it. Ran operations and orders over in their heads, time and time again, so that when it came to the real thing, everything would be automatic. Second nature.
Char cocked her head. Fairhaven looked like Thanksgiving stuffing, shoved into her mecha. Her tiny frame used to make the Tigerclaws look downright roomy. Now, Char wondered how she could even squeeze into the cockpit.
What was she even doing out here?
At any moment, she could burst.
“Should we add a tummy to your mecha?” asked Wilkins. At first, Char thought he was speaking to her. But she was only caught in the middle.
Fairhaven rolled her eyes. “Why on Earth would you ever do that?”
“I don’t know. To match?”
Her weight shifted ever so imperceptibly. The whine of servos gave away her movement.
“You know, make an armor-plated tummy,” Wilkins continued. “You’d look amazing.”
“So that my mecha would look pregnant?”
“Yeah.”
Char bit her lower lip and held absolutely still. Maybe they wouldn’t notice her, right smack dab between them if she didn’t move a muscle?
“Do you have any idea how stupid that sounds?” said Fairhaven.
“Well, sorry, queen of cool. I just thought it would be neat.”
Fairhaven shook her head. “Of course you did.”
Behind them, six Tigerclaws were arranged in semicircle, attached to a metal arm in the middle of the dropship. She didn’t recognize most of the pilots, but they looked young. Not quite as young as her. But almost.
The dropship lurched and Char was thrown against her harness. She grabbed the metal stay wires for support, and settled back in place, as the reciprocal force of reverse thrust slowed to constant velocity.
The dropship doors peeled back like petals on a flower, exposing the mecha to vacuum. A harsh beam of sunlight illuminated the dropship interior. Canopies tinted black, obscuring her vision of the pilots inside.
This was it.
The moment they were waiting for.
Earth filled up her entire view.
Hydraulics whined in her ear. The deployment arm whirred, extended, and presented the mecha to the cosmos like a gift to the stars. AI with a British accent counted down from fifteen.
When it hit zero, a red icon on her canopy HUD disappeared and a green circle took its place.
“Let’s do this!” Char rocked forward in her harness and clicked her heels together. The Painbringer’s engines ignited. Boot thrusters spat fuel.
She cleared the dropship quickly, making room for the mecha behind her. Wilkins and Fairhaven free-floated. Half a dozen more Tigerclaws fanned out behind them in hexagonal formation. Engines crackled on, fiery orange plumes blooming from their backsides. Two bulbous MSRVs were left behind in their wake.
White bursts of steam shot out of the dropship. It began spinning like a pinwheel, climbing into higher orbit, on rendezvous with Heaven.
But Char wasn’t sticking around.
The Painbringer cracked the atmosphere. When friction’s fiery plume dissipated, the first thing Char noticed was the remnants of blue-green algae blooms covering large swaths of what had been known as the United States of America and Canada. Vortexes of long-dead red tide swirled in the oceans, some of the detritus flotillas as big as the neighboring continents.
Earth wasn’t just devoid of life.
It was hazardous to it.
Char hadn’t experienced Earth in person. She was too young to have been born on its surface. All her knowledge was gleaned second-hand from history classes hovering miles above on Heaven. The details of humanity’s past always felt distant and detached, as if Earth, and living on its surface, had not been a part of her own history, but a fairytale instead.
A fantasy.
Looking down at Earth in real time, she felt differently. Wisps of clouds rushed past the canopy. Outside, an atmosphere as deadly to her as the vacuum of space raced past, invisible death hidden in every breath.
She’d been taught that rising carbon dioxide levels had given Earth’s top scientists of the time cause for concern. Great minds, as lacking in hubris as Heaven’s creator Thomas Martelle, had been convinced that science was the only solution.
They gathered at a world summit in Paris, deciding the planet’s fate in minutes. In truth, it had been decided long before the summit—decided on the whims of popular opinion and perception. Humanity put their faith in developing a new technological system to reverse-engineer the rising carbon dioxide levels.
And had doomed itself.
Char bit her lower lip, thinking of Earth, her past, her present, and the future that could have been. Instead of living amongst the stars, she could have been raised on good old terra firma. It saddened her that some of humanity’s mistakes could no longer be rectified, no matter how big the consensus supporting the initial solution had been.
The irony of it all was that the Earth beneath her was oxygen rich.
In that regard, the scientists had been successful. But without life on Earth, such success seemed hollow.
Thanks to the manmade biochemically engineered algae blooms converting carbon dioxide to oxygen at a factor a hundred times greater than natural flora, the carbon dioxide dilemma was promptly rectified.
And just as quickly, humanity was screwed.
A byproduct of the algae strains was a neurotoxic chemical deadly to any species that made a habit of breathing oxygen. The scientists knew this ahead of time, of course they did, but were confident it would not present a problem.
Like their assumptions about anti-grav, they had been wrong.
Very, very wrong.
Unlike anti-grav, no amount of spinning would fix the problem.
Rubbing salt in the wounds, there had been no need to tamper with nature’s balance in the first place. Mother Earth already had things in check.
The natural algae blooms thrived in warmer climates and at higher carbon dioxide levels. Their natural oxygen output was already abnormally high. The neurotoxin byproduct killed off oxygen-breathing species, which meant that should the blooms become too populous, the oxygen supply would naturally fall and the algae blooms would die out, allowing for life to once again return.
A perfect symbiosis.
Only, the blooms man had created made the cycle too fast.
Technology was too good. Man mass-produced the process, amping it up to speeds that normally took hundreds of thousands of years. Instead, the improved version made it happen in a matter of decades.
Even now, half a century out, the algae blooms were dead, but it would still be several millennia before humanity could once again safely return to the surface. And that Earth would be barren and devoid of life.
Science had made a mistake.
And everything paid the price.
“Down there.” Dr. Scott’s voice crackled over the comm. “The signal is coming from somewhere on the west coast.”
“What the hell is that?” Char thumped the canopy glass. “It looks like purple cottage cheese.”
Below them, the buildings looked like they had caught some sort of virus. In the spaces between the buildings, and climbing up their sides, the landscape was covered in bubbling purple rock-like formations, stretching out to the ocean.
“Was that us?”
“No,” said Dr. Scott. “That’s definitely not manmade.”
“Then what the hell is it?”
“We’ll just have to go down and find out, shan’t we?”
As they neared the coastline, miles of evidence that life and Earth did not agree with one another was piled on the shore. Sea life had come to the shores to escape, only finding death.
The beaches were free from the purple cottage cheese landscaping. Apparently, the tide kept a thin ribbon of sand clear of the strange infection. Despite a normal Earthly appearance, the beaches had issues of their own.
They were lined with bones.
Mostly mammalian—whales, dolphins, porpoises, the occasional sea lion. These creatures swam to the edges of the ocean, desperately trying to escape the algae blooms. When escape failed, they beached themselves onto the shores praying for a breath of fresh air.
A shoreline of death and decay.
The question on Char’s mind wasn’t how had Earth gotten like this.
She knew.
They all knew.
The big question was—how could anything actually be alive down here?
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Painbringer gently touched down, settling into sand. A soft landing by any standards and outright abnormal by Char’s.
The canopy raised. The dark tinted view was removed, revealing Earth in full color. A vibrant teal ocean. A warm yellowing sun.
Char unhooked from the Painbringer’s support harness and carefully detached the input jacks running down the length of her spine. With the connection to the Painbringer severed, her own thoughts tried to fill the void. Quickly, she realized the absence. Noticed the very needed, wanted, and desired crutch that did the majority of her thinking for her. All she had to do was react.
Now, like Earth, she was cut off from everyone.
From everything.
In front of her, the ocean stretched to the horizon as far as she could see, a stark contrast to Heaven. Beautiful, in comparison. On Heaven, visibility barely extended beyond a couple hundred meters, if that. A blunted upside-down view of chrome walls and faux castle aesthetics. Down here on Earth, the view stretched unobstructed forever.
Waves crashed into glistening white sands and withdrew with a shush. Even without the Painbringer measuring exact decibel, it was surprisingly loud to her ears, like a fierce beast eternally roaring at an unseen enemy that was quick to apologize for making the racket in the first place.
At school, in history course vids, the ocean always appeared soothing and serene. But hearing it in person gave Char a perspective and scale that the vids were incapable of capturing. An unfathomable amount of water churned, generating immeasurable chaos and noise.
She wondered what else would upset her expectations.
No one had been back on Earth since the Exodus. Not officially anyway. There were always rumors of smugglers and thieves—modern-day tomb robbers—attempting to raid a lost civilization. But they were just that—rumors.
When people went to Earth, they never returned.
Generations before her time, people joked that the moon was a harsh mistress. From personal experience, the moon had nothing on Mother Earth.
Char checked the seals and valves on her pressure suit, something she should have done before opening the canopy. The tiniest slit in her suit, the smallest exposure to atmosphere, and she’d be dead before she even knew anything was wrong. Einhorn would have reamed her out for getting sloppy in his matter-of-fact know-it-all way. Her father would have simply shook his head in disappointment, nothing else needing to be said.
But she was breathing. And alive. So the seals and valves appeared to be functioning optimally. Two thumbs up for technology.
Char climbed out of the cockpit and sat on the protruding nub at the front of the Painbringer. It was a design choice that made the mecha look like it had the blunted nose of a prize fighter. She let her feet dangle over the edge, slowly kicking them back and forth.
A moment later, the Tigerclaws landed behind her. Dr. Scott’s bulky mobile mecha lab eased into position, its legs splitting, setting up a temporary base camp. Marcia landed beside him, and similarly deployed her MSRV as well.
Wilkins and Fairhaven circled, making sure the area was clear, before finally settling into docked positions on the beach. Wilkins rushed over to Fairhaven, hopped up the two handholds, popped her canopy, and offered her a hand out of her mecha.
