Foresight, page 13
“It probably isn’t,” Nicholas agreed. “I’m just trying to make sense of things. I mean, I thought the world had gone crazy when the trife arrived and the war started. But this ship, Grimmel’s instructions, Luke’s death. I’d go back to flying bombing missions in a second.”
“I feel like I want to stay here and cry for the next year or two,” Yasmin said. “But that won’t do us much good. We got away from the trife. What now?”
“We need supplies and equipment,” Nicholas replied. “Food, water, a change of clothes. Guns and ammo if we can find them.”
“You don’t need to worry too much about water,” Yasmin said. “Everything we use is recycled. Even our excrement is broken down and purified. The loss is minimal. What we have on board should last a full crew at least a month, two if we stretch it.”
“That’ll help. But Grimmel wanted me to bring a contingent of Marines along for this ride. He didn’t exactly get his wish, but that’s all the more reason we need to supply them properly.”
“I don’t like the idea of relying on three teenagers.”
“Luke’s friends are good kids. But I know what you mean. I offered to drop them off near the Pilgrim launch site. They refused.”
“You can make them go.”
“I could, but what good would that do us? Grimmel wanted six. We still only have five. Anyway, we need to find a place that might have everything we need without the risk of getting waylaid by the military.”
Yasmin’s face wrinkled in consideration. “Grimmel Corp has a second headquarters in London with a full R and D lab. I have security clearance to get into any of the corporate buildings. I’m sure we can get anything we want from there.”
“What about the Royal Space Force?”
“They pulled out of the area over a year ago. The trife ran rampant through the city, but it’s been abandoned so long it should be a ghost town by now. There’s no reason for the RSF to keep an eye on it and definitely no reason for them to waste any resources there.”
“In that case, it sounds ideal. We don’t have to go right away. We can stay up here for a while, take some time—”
“No. I don’t need it or want it. We should go as soon as possible.”
“The others might need a little bit of a breather.”
“You’re in charge up here, Nick. How much they breathe is your decision.”
“How much energy do they need to walk around a building and grab things?” Nicholas said, smiling. “I’ll let the others know. Do you want to stay up here?”
“I told you, Nick. I want to lay here and cry forever. But I want to know what happens next even more, and treading water won’t save us from drowning if we never reach dry land.”
Nick slid off the rack and offered Yasmin his hand. “In that case, come on. I’ll introduce you to Dag.”
“Who’s Dag?” Yasmin replied.
Chapter 22
As Foresight descended through the broken clouds, bleeding off altitude as comfortably as possible for the passengers, Nicholas kept his eyes glued to what he could see of Europe’s mainland. With population centers established so closely together, it looked like a checkerboard of blackened ruins. So much destruction. Despite the attempted evacs, a lot of people had died here, and it was depressing as hell. Hopefully, they’d be able to find what they needed in London.
“ETA, six minutes,” he announced through the ship’s comms, alerting the others to the approach. Their plan was simple enough. Put Foresight down as close to Grimmel Corp’s tower as possible and use Yasmin’s biometric security clearance to enter the facility, grab what they could carry, and get the hell out as quickly as possible.
Nicholas had expressed concern that the building might have already been looted or destroyed, but Yasmin insisted that wouldn’t be the case. With the sheer volume of trade secrets and advanced prototypes involved, Grimmel had always kept a high level of security for his facilities. When the shit truly hit the fan with the trife, he had put the buildings into an alert status that made the bottom levels impenetrable. It was possible the trife had scaled the exterior of the building and gotten in either through the windows or the roof, but even if they had, the demons had no need of the food, clothing, and equipment Nicholas was after.
As Yasmin had explained to him and the others, the odds were higher that there were still employees locked inside the tower, living off the same supplies they wanted to take. Nicholas hoped that wouldn’t be the case. Scott, however, had verbalized his concerns about people left to fend for themselves against the trife. They often became more like the trife. Their desperation to survive even overrides their morality, removing all barriers to aggression and violence. Murder, rape, slavery, and other forms of mistreatment were growing in prevalence the more society degraded. In the wilds, it was everyone for themselves.
Nicholas kept Foresight’s descent angle shallow, banking gently in a wide spiral to keep from stressing his passengers. While he was eager to load up the starship and move forward in their plans, it wouldn’t help to make his people sick from a rapid drop. Two more minutes passed before the spacecraft entered the cloud cover completely obscuring visibility above the British Isles..
He didn’t need to visually see to fly Foresight. At least, not until they got closer to the ground. Instead, he monitored the readings projected onto the HUD, using them to navigate. Using the still-functional positioning satellites in orbit overhead, Frank had already set a marker on their destination. All he had to do was wind around it until he dipped below the ceiling. At that point he would need to eyeball a landing spot, but he didn’t expect much difficulty accomplishing that.
Another minute and Foresight broke through the ceiling, the thick shield of white and gray giving way to less dense clouds and revealing much of the city beneath them. Nicholas remembered traveling to London with Yasmin soon after they were married, one of the few vacations they had managed to squeeze in between her workload and his deployments. There was an outside chance Luke had been conceived in one of the hotels in the city, but they had been so hot for one another back then, still so into intimacy that the exact time and location was impossible to guess. Even so, it was near enough to the time that London had always held a special place in his memories.
Another small piece of him died to see it now.
While no nukes had ever fallen on London, it almost seemed as if they had. So many of the buildings were in ruin across the entire expanse. Some crumbling, some fully collapsed, nearly all of them damaged. The bridges that allowed crossing of the Thames had all been demolished at some point in an effort to keep the trife on one side, but the desolation proved it had been too little, too late. The burned out husks of long-abandoned cars lined the streets, joined there by military vehicles, each one with armor plating, tires, and treads marred by the too-familiar wounds delivered by the trife.
Garbage and dust had settled everywhere. Storefronts showed signs of burning and looting. And not a single living thing made itself apparent anywhere Nicholas looked.
In this case the lack of activity was a good sign. He slowed the starship to a relative crawl, activating the hull’s anti-gravity systems to keep the craft aloft as he adjusted course toward the target Frank had painted on the HUD. Grimmel Corp’s tower was nearly a mile east along the river, a short distance from the former United States embassy. Unsurprisingly, it had avoided the worst of the destruction. It’s nearly one hundred floors of glass remained completely intact while the structures around it had fallen into heaps of rubble.
There was little doubt in Nicholas’ mind that Grimmel had specifically requested that the RSF respect his contribution to the war effort, and later their escape, by not destroying the sites where most of his researchers and developers were hard at work.
“I’ve got a visual on the tower,” he said over the comms. “I’m opening access to the feeds.” He tapped on the left-hand control pad to activate the individual access stations in the center of the ship, allowing the others to see what he saw through the forward windscreen. “Yazz, can you confirm the target?”
“Confirmed,” Yasmin said. “It looks good.”
“Almost too good,” Nicholas replied. Like a diamond in the mud, the glass tower was a stark contrast to the city’s desolate backdrop. “I’ve got my eye on the railroad tracks as an LZ. That’ll put us about three hundred meters from the building.”
“What about the rooftop?” Yasmin asked.
Nicholas eyed the top of the building. Most of the crown was rounded, but an area had been left flat to serve as a helipad. “Too small,” he replied. Foresight was miniscule compared to the ark ships, but at half the length of a 787, it was much too large to put down on a helipad. “I could use the anti-grav to hover beside it but that would drain a lot of power we might need.”
“Understood,” Yasmin said. “Three hundred meters is still pretty close.”
Nicholas eased the spacecraft toward the railroad tracks, continuing to reduce thruster velocity and increase power to the anti-gravity plates. He scanned the wide view through the windscreen, his gaze stopping on a large, square building surrounded by a quartet of large stacks near the riverfront.
“Yazz, do you know what that is?” he asked, marking the location.
“Battersea power station,” she replied. “The stacks are from the original generation plant, but the plant itself was replaced with a quartet of tokamak fission reactors a few years back. In part to help provide enough power for Grimmel’s needs.”
“That’s a lot of juice,” Gills said. “What did he need it for?”
“I don’t know. I never gave it much thought.”
“More importantly,” Nicholas said. “After the humans left, did the trife move in? I don’t see any outside, but that shell is pretty large.”
“If they did, they probably heard us coming,” Gills said. “I’m not really in the mood to get into it with those bastards again right now. Especially since I don’t have any bullets.”
“Agreed,” Nicholas said. “I’m going to swing a little further east along the tracks so we can put the tower between us and the power plant.”
“Good idea.”
Nicholas floated the ship over the tracks at less than a thousand feet, side-slipping Foresight while keeping the bow facing Grimmel’s tower. The building rose like a glass monolith in front of them, nearly twice as high as their current altitude.
“Check all the feeds,” Nicholas said. “If anyone sees anything moving, call it out.”
He couldn’t see the central compartment from his seat, but he could imagine each of the crew members at their stations, actively flipping through the feeds on their individual displays. He continued drifting while he waited for any of them to raise an alarm. When no warning came, he cut the thrusters completely and let the ship slowly drop to the tracks, deploying the landing skids and touching down over the rails.
“Jennifer, you’re in charge while we’re gone,” Nicholas said, releasing himself from his seat and removing his helmet as he stood. He turned to face her in the co-pilot’s seat. “You remember what I showed you?”
Jennifer nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“If anything happens, it’s vital for you to get the ship out of danger. If you need to lift off, meet us at the helipad at the top of the tower.”
“Yes, sir. I’m not sure how well I can handle the controls, but I’ll do my best.”
“Frank won’t let you screw anything up too badly,” Nicholas said. “The neural net won’t allow you to crash. Besides, I have faith in you.”
“Thank you, Captain Shepherd. Good luck. Be safe.”
Nicholas nodded and left the cockpit. Dag waited in the short corridor, and he stepped over the bot on his way to the center of the craft. He didn’t need to look to know Dag followed him. The little robot really was indeed like a puppy.
A killer puppy.
The others were all standing when he arrived, waiting expectantly. Nicholas looked each of them over. They looked exhausted. He doubted he looked any better. “You all know the plan.”
“Yes, sir,” Gills said. He picked up his rifle despite its lack of ammunition, propping it over his shoulder like a club. “It’s better than nothing.”
“Come on,” Nicholas said, leading them to the ladder to the lower deck. They descended quickly, and Nicholas activated the control panel to open the forward hatch and deploy the ramp. “Dag, take point.”
He wasn’t sure the robot understood him until it scooted between his legs to the edge of the extending ramp, riding it down to the railroad tracks. A light mist hovered over the ground, the overcast skies adding another level of dreariness to the destroyed and deserted landscape.
Dag stepped off the ramp and advanced about ten feet before turning around, waiting expectantly for Nicholas and the others to follow.
“How does he know where we’re going?” Gills asked.
“It might be interfaced with the ship,” Yasmin replied. “I’d need more time to review its programming to determine for sure.”
“We’ll see about that when we get back,” Nicholas said. “It looks like we’ve got a straight, easy shot to the tower. Let’s get in and out before we can get in any trouble.”
“Copy that,” Gills replied.
Chapter 23
It only took a few minutes for Nicholas and the others to reach the tower, stopping in one of the alleys between two of the many damaged residential buildings that surrounded the area. It took a moment for Dag to realize he had stopped, and the small robot spun its head around before walking backward to their position.
“It looks clear,” Gills said, joining Nicholas in sizing up the approach. A fair share of abandoned cars, rubble and broken glass lined the street between them and the rear of the Grimmel corporate tower. The windows of the building began about fifteen feet above ground level, with a garage tucked underneath and a ramp leading down into it.
“It does,” Nicholas agreed. “I’m also looking for a path through the debris. If we can find a cart inside, it’ll be easier to make a single trip.”
“A truck would be even better.”
“We’re not likely to find one,” Scott said. “Most survivors made off with the larger, heavier vehicles early on. Easier to push smaller cars out of the way and easier to hide from the trife in the back.”
“If they took any trucks from down there, they took them before the fighting,” Nicholas said. “Or there would be a path cleared through.”
“Some of the debris looks like it might have been blown down from rooftops by a storm,” Yasmin said. “It doesn’t look as though it's been on the ground for long. I actually stayed in that apartment there.” She pointed toward one of the buildings, above where the sloping roof had partially collapsed, having sloughed down onto the street like an avalanche. “I was here for a conference four years ago. It was a nice apartment.”
“There may be a better route in and out on the other side,” Scott suggested.
“Closer to the power planet?” Briar said. “No, thank you.”
“We don’t have confirmation that there are trife inside.”
“We also don’t have any guarantee there’s a better way in,” Nicholas said. “The density of the surrounding buildings made it hard to spot a clearing from the air. Our best bet is to get into the tower and check the front from there if we can.”
“Sounds good to me,” Scott said.
“Dag, we’re headed for the garage. Pick the easiest route.”
Nicholas still wasn’t sure of the small bot’s capabilities so he didn’t expect much of a result from such a generalized instruction to pick the easiest route. But Dag didn’t disappoint, running out through the debris field and picking its way around the worst of the rubble and garbage. The group trailed behind it, Gills and Toast splitting to the flanks and keeping an eye out for interference, trife or otherwise.
They reached the ramp to the underground parking area without incident. A barrier of thick steel bars blocked their entrance, score marks from trife claws visible as rusted scars across the metal.
“Someone was in here at some point after the gate came down,” Scott said, running his finger along one of the deeper gashes. “A slice like this, they had to be just on the other side of the barrier when the slick got cut off.”
“It could have been someone already on the run when the trife cornered them,” Yasmin said. “They saw the closing gate and ducked inside.”
“Makes sense,” Scott agreed.
“Can you open it?” Nicholas asked.
Yasmin nodded, crossing to the security panel on the left side of the garage. Unlatching and opening the hardened cover revealed a touchpad and biometric scanner beneath. “Let’s hope the building still has power,” she said as she touched her thumb to the scanner.
A green light flashed on the panel. Mechanisms that hadn’t operated in a while creaked and groaned, and something cracked loudly enough that it echoed across the street, causing Gills and Toast to stare back the way they had come.
“Could we make a little more noise?” Gills said. “That would be perfect.”
That gate started rising.
“Dag, I don’t suppose you have a light?” Nicholas asked, peering into the garage. The visibility from the dim spill of sunlight only covered the first fifty feet of the space.
A light appeared at the top of the robot’s head, quickly intensifying until the beam stretched across the floor of the garage. Dozens of cars were still parked inside, covered in a thick layer of dust and ash that had blown in from outside. Nicholas didn’t see any footprints or disruptions to the sediment, confirming no one had passed this way in a long time. While the debris outside was too thick for the smaller vehicles to navigate, maybe they could find a larger truck inside after all.
