Extinction (30 page)

I dug out a more comfortable pair of pants, and changed, leaving my dress clothes behind.

Anna looked at me before heading back outside. I followed her to the shoreline, to the edge of where the surf stopped and retreated to the vast sea.

We sat there, Anna sitting in front and leaning into me, our legs outstretched. The surf touched our feet, cold and dark.

We’d been sitting in silence for ten minutes, when she spoke.

“What do you think about, looking at those waves?”

I took a moment to think of an answer.

“I’m...just at peace, right now. I’m not really thinking of anything.” I squeezed her arm. “What about you?”

“I don’t know. It’s amazing, though. The sea. Each wave is like a generation. The ones that come after build on the ones that came before. Even as the greatest wave recedes, another rises to take its place.”

We sat there a while longer, watching the moon make its ascent. With it the tides rose, forcing us to get up and move. I took Anna’s hand, making her face me.

We kissed under the stars and high moon, as the waves passed up the shoreline. When we broke, we walked back to the pavilion.

We undressed and lay on the bed together, and looked into each other’s eyes. I held her in embrace. I kissed her again, and we became one.

E
ven after morning dawned, we continued to sleep. By midmorning, I finally forced myself up. I exited the pavilion to watch waves crash on the shoreline.

After ten minutes, Anna came out to join me, wearing a white tee shirt and shorts. Her hair was strewn by the strong wind.

“Good morning, husband,” she said.

“Good morning, wife.”

“I had to get that out of the way.” She paused. “I’m starving. Did they leave us out here without nothing?”

We went back to the pavilion to find an ice chest set against the leeward side. We must have missed it last night, in the darkness. I opened it, finding a jug of wine, next to some of the leftovers from last night’s meal.

“Guess that answers that,” I said.

We ate and spent the rest of the morning and afternoon together. Anna and I talked, about anything we could think of. From time to time, reality would cross my mind, like a dark cloud – what I had to do, or how this couldn’t last. Anna seemed to know when this happened, because she’d go quiet.

It was hard not to find myself thinking her way. Maybe she
was
right. Maybe there
was
a way for me to survive. I only had to do my job, and in the end, I might find a way to do it without dying.

I didn’t tell Anna what I was thinking. What was important was enjoying our one day together.

***

D
usk came at last. We lay on the beach, watching the stars appear one by one – just a few, and then hundreds.

“I wish I knew what they were called,” I said.

“There’s still time to learn.”

“Do you know them?”

“No. When you grow up without the stars, you don’t really think about them.”

The remains of the sunset were just a purple glow on the west. The stars were now full, bright, and spectacular. I felt like I could watch them for hours.

Anna pointed. “Look.”

It was a bright star, moving across the sky at a steady pace.

“Skyhome,” Anna said. “It’s so bright!”

“Wish we had a telescope,” I said. “It’d be great to see it up close.”

We watched Skyhome for another minute. I turned my attention to other stars.

“It’s changing,” Anna said. “Look!”

Skyhome brightened, dimmed, brightened again.

“That’s weird,” I said.

We continued watching Skyhome – over time, its brightness dimmed.

“What’s happening to it?” Anna asked.

“A trick of the light, maybe.”

Even though I said that, I suddenly got a very bad feeling.

“Come on. We need to find the others.”

We grabbed all our things and ran along the beach, back to the shoreline on the other side of the promontory. As we ran, Skyhome brightened, soon followed by falling streaks of light, streaming downward from above.

“What’s happening?” Anna asked, horrified. “It’s gone, isn’t it? Skyhome is gone!”

I looked up at the sky again – where once there had been one bright point of light, there were now
two.

We reached the hill – the pavilion was no longer there, but
Perseus
was. Michael ran down the hill, as if coming out to meet us.

“Michael!” I said. “What’s going on?”

He stopped at the edge of the beach, staring upward as if he didn’t believe his eyes.

“Skyhome’s gone,” he said.

Dozens of lights streaked from the sky – pieces of the former sky city burning as they entered the atmosphere. I thought of all those people up there, how
I
had been there just two days before.

“We need to get everyone inside
Perseus,”
I said. “Is everyone still here? Did someone let Ashton know?”

Michael didn’t answer. From his silence, I knew something was wrong.

Ashton had been up there.

***

A
t first, we didn’t know how Skyhome fell, whether it was a chance collision with a stray piece of debris or rock, or something more nefarious. We knew it had to be something big, because the space city had torn in half.

Ashton had been up there, managing some business related to the sky city, when it was struck. Augustus had allowed him to use
Orion
to get up there.

Makara decided to go into space to survey the damage. Such a suggestion was dangerous – the amount of debris generated by Skyhome ripping apart would be huge. Makara thought there might be some clue about what had happened to Skyhome, and there was the possibility that Ashton had survived aboard the
Orion.

If Ashton was gone, I didn’t know what we’d do.

Perseus
broke through the upper atmosphere, and when we achieved orbit gravity loosened its hold. Everyone sat positioned in the bridge; Anna and I had to share a seat in order to give everyone else enough space to sit.

“Orion,”
Makara began, for at least the sixth time. “Do you have a copy?”

She repeated this for the next five minutes as we orbited around Earth. At long last, the shattered remains of Skyhome came into view above the blue curve of the planet. Most of the colony was gone, burned in the atmosphere below. Only broken chunks were left behind

“Orion.”
Makara’s voice had thickened. “Do you have a copy? This is Makara. This is
Perseus.
If anyone is alive out there...please respond.”

Silence was our only answer. Shredded metal and plastic swirled in a deadly, zero-g dance. Small remnants of the former city burned upon reentry above a blue-shining ocean.

Everyone was dead, destroyed in a single instant. It could have been an impact, but I knew the truth.

It was Askala.

“How did they get up here?” Anna asked.

No one answered, because no one knew. Maybe they had
shot
something. Was that beyond their capabilities? There were too many questions, too few answers.

“Can we track
Orion?”
Samuel asked. “Maybe they got out...”

“Orion
had no tracker,” Michael said. “Sparks removed it.”

That was that, then. The only sliver of hope we had was that Ashton had escaped on
Orion.
If he had done so, he would have contacted us by now. We had no way to track him, so we could only assume the worst.

“Doesn’t Skyhome have escape pods?” Anna asked.

“Yes,” Makara said. “They would be on the surface by now. We’d have to search out their radio signal, and I have no idea what that signal would be.”

“Only Ashton would know that,” Anna said.

In the space of two days, my world had turned upside down. The Wanderer, dead. Now, Ashton was gone, too.

“He was a good man,” Samuel said. “Wise. Knowledgeable. He knew so much, not just about our mission and the xenovirus, but about life.”

To my side, Anna’s eyes watered with tears. Makara clenched a fist, no longer controlling the spacecraft.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

The bridge was quiet for a whole minute. There was no sound, no feeling but the shock. The idea of Ashton’s being dead was unimaginable.

“Sometimes, you lose someone so important,” Makara said, “so vital, that you wonder how you’re ever going to go on.” She wiped her eyes, and took up the controls. “That’s when you have to go on.” She nodded to Anna. “Get Augustus on the line. He needs to know.”

With shaking fingers, Anna opened the frequency.

“Augustus. You there?”

The Emperor responded shortly.

“If this is about the old man, he’s here in Nova Roma at the hospital.”

Everyone in the bridge started.

“What?”
Makara yelled. “Why didn’t you call, you stupid...”

“There is no time for banalities,” Augustus said. “Please see that you come to the Imperial City within the next hour. His wounds are grievous. My surgeons are doing all they can, but he may not last the night.”

“Alright,” Makara said. “We’ll be there soon.”

“Park in Central Square,” he said. “And hurry.”

We left the shattered space city behind and ducked into the atmosphere.

***

W
e made landing in Central Square around midnight. Also parked in the square was the
Orion,
surrounded by the curious citizens of the Empire’s capital. Imperial soldiers kept the peace by holding the crowds back, also clearing space for our landing.

When
Perseus
touched down, everyone rushed off-ship, Makara taking the lead. We entered the warm night and were greeted by the pressing crowd. I didn’t understand why the crowd was so agitated, until I noticed that some of the buildings were in ruins.

Nova Roma, of course, had not recovered from the attack of dragons and crawlers it had suffered a few weeks prior. The people were obviously scared and in need of a leader – but Augustus was preoccupied with Ashton – Ashton, who could very well die, if he wasn’t already dead. We’d have no idea how bad it was until we got there.

“Come on,” Makara said.

She broke through the crowd, and people shouted questions at us in Spanish. Eventually, the crowd made way, and several of the soldiers pointed in the direction of the hospital. We knew the way from our time here before. Julian, along with Makara, led the rest of us onward.

We ran through the streets. Within a few minutes and various twists and turns, we found ourselves on the lawn in front of the hospital. The building looked rougher than the last time we’d seen it; several of the first-floor windows were shattered, their curtains billowing in the breeze. An entire corner in the northern section had crumbled, creating a cascade of rubble that buried the drive leading from the front doors. Perhaps a dragon had pummeled into it. Despite this, a few windows were lit on the second floor.

“There,” Makara said.

We ran inside the building. As we burst through the automatic doors, stuck open, a short woman behind the entry desk regarded us with widened eyes. We ignored her and found a stairwell down the right-hand hallway. Black and purple blood was still caked on the walls from our fight with the crawlers. There hadn’t been time for anyone to clean up the mess we’d made.

We ran up the stairwell, bursting onto the second landing. A few rooms down was an open door, flanked by two Praetorians. As we ran toward it, Augustus stepped into the hallway. He nodded toward the door, stepping back into the room.

We entered, finding Ashton lying, bloodied and bruised, in a hospital bed. He was wrapped head to toe in bandages. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow. There was so little life in him – his pallor was deathly, and if he ever came awake, it definitely wouldn’t be as the same man.

He came alone aboard
Orion,”
Augustus said. “From what little I could get out of him, he had only survived because he was well on his way to the hangar. Other than that, he’s said nothing.”

Makara stepped up to the bedside, taking Ashton’s hand.

“Ashton. You there?”

There was no response. If it weren’t for his breathing, I wouldn’t have thought he was alive. It was unsettling to see Ashton, usually so full of life and spirit, without movement. This man, who had given me so much advice and wisdom, who had married me to Anna...

He was slipping away, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Suddenly, Ashton’s hand tightened on Makara’s. Without opening his eyes, he rasped:

“It came from space,” he said. “Not Earth.”

“What came from space?” Makara asked.

I had no idea what Ashton was talking about. If he was talking about the xenovirus, about Ragnarok, then that much was obvious. From everyone’s faces, it seemed like they were thinking the same thing as I was.

Until I realized what he was talking about.

“He’s talking about Skyhome,” I said. “Whatever ended it came from space, not Earth. So it couldn’t have been the
Radaskim...”

“No.”

It must have taken almost all of Ashton’s strength to make that emphatic answer. He was silent for a long, terrible moment, before he spoke again.

“They
came from space.
They...
they attacked Skyhome.”

Ashton’s eyes opened, so thinly that it was like looking into slits.

“See...” he said, lips now trembling. “See for yourself. Look...look to the stars...”

With that, Ashton breathed his last, and went completely still. Every muscle went slack, and I felt desperation clench my chest. He
couldn’t
be dead. An emptiness permeated my soul – an emptiness that could only be caused when someone close to you was taken away, forever.

It was an emptiness I had grown to know too well.

“No...” Anna said.

This time, I knew Ashton really
was
dead. There was no denying that fact.

Makara squeezed the doctor’s hands, her arm shaking. She placed two fingers at the base of Ashton’s neck, as if to be sure. She waited for a long time. Then, her face softened, and she shook her head.