Nexus by Robert Boyczuk (best large ebook reader txt) 📕

Returning to the storage room, she switched off her helmet lamp to save its battery. Sometime later the emergency lantern shut down, its power supply dropping below a critical threshold.

In the pitch black, the storage room didn’t seem as small; Liis found the dark comforting. Propping her back against the wall, she pulled the bulky knees of her suit as close as possible to her chest, waiting for Sav and Hebuiza to return. The toes of her boots touched the base of Josua’s cot. Every now and then she’d feel him stir restlessly, or her externals would pick up one of his low moans, and she would flick on her helmet light momentarily to scrutinize him for any signs of change. But his eyes remained sealed, his agitated movements like those of a dreamer caught in an inescapable dream.

After a time, she decided not to turn on her lamp again.

Day 1

The control stick was an unwieldy creature under Sav’s hands, the craft bouncing and juddering through the atmosphere, its engines a constant hum through the floorplates. It was dawn-an entire day had passed since they’d first set foot on Bh’Haret-and dark, tangled forest smothered the undulating hills that crawled under them. The Lyst was a narrow, black ribbon far below. Hebuiza, the craft’s only other occupant, sat to Sav’s left, his face obscured, his visor opaqued, silent.

Since they’d left the stasis facility, Sav had observed only meagre signs of civilization: the first was a flooded, open pit mine that with a tumbledown shack perched above it; the second was a resort set on the edge of a lake, a rambling white building with a tiled roof surrounded by a semi-circle of smaller cabins. The paths that had run between the buildings had been overgrown by a sea of weeds. A long, weathered dock ran crookedly into a black lake, the remains of several partially-submerged boats still moored to it. Sav circled over the buildings once, low enough to see that the roofs of two of the cabins had collapsed.

The ground continued to slip beneath the dropship with a mind-numbing sameness as the sun crept above the horizon. Sav began to feel lightheaded; his vision clouded over and the outside world became an indistinguishable green and black blur. How many hours has it been since I’ve slept? He couldn’t remember. The time before their first descent to the stasis facility was a jumble; he vaguely remembered a nap shortly before planet fall. Or was he thinking of some other time, some other place? He wasn’t sure. He decided it didn’t matter, that he didn’t care. Not about that, not about anything. None of it mattered.

Why don’t I feel more? he wondered. Where was the fear, the grief, the outrage he was supposed to feel? His world was dead.

No, not my world.

Long ago he’d severed his ties with Bh’Haret: it had become a place of hurrying strangers and unfamiliar, new buildings, no more recognizable than any of the other worlds to which he travelled. Perhaps Josua could still call it home; maybe even Hebuiza. But not me, Sav thought. I’ve been away too long.

“There.”

Hebuiza’s voice startled Sav. “What?”

The facilitator lifted a hand and pointed to the south. “Look.”

Sav stared out the windscreen, but couldn’t see anything. Long shadows of the new day obscured the landscape, pooling in valleys between the rolling hills, creating an illusion of a landscape dotted with bottomless pits.

“Just before the horizon.”

Sav still couldn’t make out anything. Was that large shadow the place where Hebuiza had been pointing? Banking the dropship sharply in its direction, he began a steep climb. The terrain seemed to flatten out, and the growing pools of darkness merged where the valleys met, obliterating any discernible features. The shadow on the horizon grew as well, Sav suddenly aware that it must be at least a dozen kilometers in length-_It’s not a shadow_. He remembered the dark smears they’d seen from orbit. The shadow continued to grow, strangely bereft of features; it lay across the landscape, an expansive black mantle covering the earth in a circular shape. Nothing grew here. A bright chime sounded in Sav’s earpiece; on the dropship windscreen the yellow skull of a low-level radiation warning appeared. A blast site.

Why? Sav thought. Out here, hundred of klicks from anything. It makes no sense.

Sav swung the dropship away from the blast site, nudging it back to its former course. He glanced at Hebuiza, but the Facilitator’s mask was opaque again. In one corner of his own visor, Sav’s status display reported Hebuiza had switched off his communication circuit.

We’ll never really know what happened, Sav thought. There’s no one left to tell. The inexplicable violence of the bomb crater was one more mystery that would never be solved.

All at once the Lyst widened out, merging with two other tributaries, and changing from a constricted thread of fast-moving water to a turgid, ambling river. In the distance, the city of Temperas loomed. From this perspective, it appeared almost normal, save for a lack of activity. If anything, it looked abandoned, not dead.

Within moments they crossed the outskirts. The city passed beneath the dropship, a colourless, low-slung clutter of squat grey buildings crowded onto the alluvial plain. Most of the structures had flat or only slightly canted roofs; on almost all of these grew thick, tangled gardens of gnarled green-grey bushes and short, stubby trees. The city’s twisting thoroughfares were mostly empty, a few dark vehicles neatly parked along their length; occasionally, Sav would spot a car or truck abandoned in the centre of a wider avenue. In the shipyards to the south a dozen supertankers sat patiently in their slips, looking as if they were ready to sail.

It wasn’t until they were over the city proper that Sav began to see the effect of the panic that must have followed the disease: in areas the buildings had been reduced to burnt-out shells, many of the taller structures now dark-grey skeletons. Occasionally, they passed over scorched circles, like craters left by explosions, in which nothing stood. When Sav dropped the ship down to a lower altitude he could see a creeping decay was also well underway. Black holes gaped with the jagged remnants of shattered windows; flat roofs shimmered and sagged beneath pools of undrained water; wind and rain had faded once-bright exterior colours into a uniform dull, flaking grey; dying weeds, some the size of small trees, had fissured the roads and sidewalks, filling every unpaved yard with a sea of mottled brown.

Thirty years.

Sadness constricted his chest; but it wasn’t for the dead of Bh’Haret, whom he regarded as strangers, but for himself. He felt cheated. When he had signed on as a longhauler he had happily cast off a past that had held nothing of value for him. With the money and stasis bonuses he earned he planned on returning one day as a rich man. Rich enough to build the life he’d always wanted-and to transcend his role as an overweight, awkward and unloved man.

Now, that was impossible. Sav felt as empty as the city below.

“The hospital.” Hebuiza made the announcement with no enthusiasm.

“Yeah, I see it.”

A few kilometers distant, near the mouth of the southern branch of the river that trisected the city, was a complex of interconnected buildings, all stories higher than the surrounding ones. The largest building was distinguishable by its architecture and colour, constructed in a style popular nearly a century earlier. Twenty-four rows of identical arched windows were separated by vertical red brick piers. On the side facing them, a broad drive swept up to this building; the roadway was packed with vehicles parked in a haphazard fashion, several off the drive itself, on what must have once been a front lawn. Sav spotted the black square of a landing pad on the roof of the tallest building. He swung the dropship towards it.

They passed directly over the scene at the front entrance. Sav could now understand why the vehicles had been scattered the way they had been. Several of them were blackened shells; others were badly damaged. And the front entrance of the hospital had been barricaded; on the rubble and nearby walls were the unmistakable scars of laser blasts. It had been the scene of an intense fire fight.

Sav lifted the ship abruptly over the lip of the roof and then dropped it gently onto the landing pad. He killed the engines.

Hebuiza turned; he’d cleared his visor and Sav could see his eyes were narrowed, his lips pursed disapprovingly. “I told you this would be a waste of time,” he said. “There are other places more important than this hospital.”

“Josua needs our help.”

“You should be concerned with our survival, not Josua’s.”

Ignoring him, Sav clambered out of his seat and moved to the back of the dropship. From a small locker next to the hatch he pulled out a rolled sample bag and stuffed it into a pocket on the left leg of his suit. He unsealed the door and dropped to the gravel roof of the building. To the right of the pad was a small brick structure with sliding glass doors that were half-ajar; behind this Sav could see an elevator and to its left another door that probably led to a stairwell.

“There will be nothing of use here.” Hebuiza’s voice sounded smaller; he was still be in the ship, the hull plates interfering with his signal. Without turning around, Sav began walking towards the entrance. Gravel crunched underneath his boots.

“Our time could be spent more productively.”

“No,” Sav answered. He’d reached the glass doors, but the opening was too narrow for him to squeeze through in his bulky suit. He jammed a shoulder inside the opening and tried pushing them apart.

“You saw the mess out front. It will be the same inside.”

The doors didn’t budge. I guess its the laser again, Sav thought.

“I will not be coming.”

The high-pitched whine of the dropship’s engines filled Sav’s helmet; a gust of air buffeted him. He turned his head. The dropship’s hatch was sealed.

The engines roared and exhaust blew up a small storm of dust, scattering gravel to the side of the pad.

“Hebuiza!” Sav shouted, wiggling free of the doors. Under his feet the roof vibrated. He tried to move towards the ship, but the thrust pushed him back against the glass doors, pinning him. Small stones rattled around him, ricocheting off him and the door. The dropship lifted from the pad. It rose half a dozen meters in an unsteady wobble, then regained its equilibrium.

“Wait!”

“I will be back in three hours,” Hebuiza said over the howl of the engines. “That should be plenty of time for you to collect whatever you need.”

“Don’t be a fool! You don’t know how to pilot that thing!”

“I’m a quick study.”

“Come back! I’ll take