I woke up on a bottom bunk. After my second meal of Chicken and Biscuit Dumplings with Vegetables, Mara and I had returned to the warehouse and found bedding and what she called essentials; there were even razors and soap. I was still exhausted, so I had gone immediately to sleep.
Standing up, I shuffled to the shower, where I found a towel, a bottle of some kind of liquid soap, and a set of coveralls, actual socks, and boots, like Mara had been wearing, on the bench outside. I used one of the tiny Old World razors that was incredibly sharp and had a stacked set of small blades and felt remarkably better once I was in new, clean clothes. I finished lacing the boots and went looking for her.
She was down on the main level, looking at the map covered with clouds.
“Good morning.”
“Is it morning?”
“According to the clock adjusted for drift, it is 0602 and 23 seconds,” she then made a ‘beep’ noise and smiled. “on 12 April 2624.”
“Is that the year?”
“In my calendar, what is it in yours?”
“The 22nd of April, 411.”
“Years after the war?”
“Yes. Now I wonder why there’s a day discrepancy…” She shrugged, “It’ll show up somehow.”
“What is this map?” I pointed at the wall.
“That is a GEO…Geostationary Earth Orbit…intelligence satellite…JN-94, which managed to avoid being destroyed in the war and has somehow not decayed orbit even after running out of reactant, god only knows how long ago. Most of its sensors are down, but visible light and both low and high-range IR are still working. It’s maintaining a downlink to some antenna array somewhere, and the connection from that array to here is still live. It’s not the best, but at least we can watch the weather and do this…”
The screen changed to a grayish image, and the clouds were gone; I recognized the inland seas that I had traveled past on my journey north and west.
“What is that?”
“A picture of the planet, using infrared light. It also can pick up heat sources…Like this…’ Now, the wall showed blues, greens, and oranges. “Purple is coldest; white is hottest. As you can see,“ a flashing line appeared above the Inland Sea, “Lake Michigan’s surface temperature is warmer than the outside air. We can also zoom in.”
There was a pause, and then the view started expanding as we moved closer. There was the wreckage of Chicago, with small blooms of red becoming visible. Then it stopped expanding, “As this is as close as we can get. It’s good enough to spot hot vehicles or buildings or masses of people, at least.”
“This is incredible.”
“It was. Now, it’s a relic like me…I see you found the clothes.”
“I did, thank you.”
“It’s fine,” she replied.
“So…what were you doing down here…while I was asleep?”
“First, I did need to rest as much as you do; it takes less time for me, and it isn’t exactly the same. Then I came down here…Trying to find out if there is anything left of my world…my time.”
“Is there?”
Mara sighed, “The final stone storms, as you call them…the last of the mass driver attacks. They didn’t care about destroying the environment then, but they were also unable to launch as much as they would want. This place, even though it wasn’t officially online yet, was still receiving intelligence updates through the network.”
The wall shimmered and separated into multiple views; streaks of fire passed through them.
“Now I can get data from one satellite, then…we had dozens, disposable stealth pods, high altitude UAVs, all of them watching the Hi-Siders murder the world out of spite…because they had been beaten.”
The images switched to views looking up at the sky and tracking those fiery streaks as they came closer and closer. Finally, seeing clouds of dust and fire before the images disappeared.
“When the ground-based cameras were destroyed, the communications lines connecting them were as well. Space-based networking was gone except for JN-94, that last lonely satellite,” a map popped up on the wall. It wasn’t a picture like the one I saw before with the clouds, but an actual map. There were lines and words, names of places from the Old World, like Chicago and St.Louis.
“We’re here,” a point started flashing in a strangely shaped area labeled ‘Minnesota’, “just east of Lake Superior. Where are you from?”
I looked around and found the O River and followed it East, finally arriving at the Wheeling Ruins, “Just south of…” I tried to figure out how to make it flash like she had.
“Oh! Put on the gloves and the headset, and then draw it with your fingertip.”
After doing that, I made a sloppy green circle.
“Pennsylvania? You’re a long way from home.”
“I haven’t had a home for six years now.”
“Family?”
I shook my head, “None that mean anything. I’m sure I have aunts and uncles and cousins somewhere, but I haven’t seen them. And your family was killed in a stone storm?”
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
“The ones I was still talking to, yeah.”
She looked up at the map, and now there were a lot of red dots flashing, “These are all the bunkers. Do you know which of these have been found?”
Thinking back to the Academy lessons and the news reports, I was able to point out eleven in the eastern part of the Empire, “There might have been more; news takes a while to get out to these parts.”
She nodded, and those disappeared, “And these are the ones that probably got destroyed in the final attack,” more dots disappeared; these were across the entire map now. “That leaves us with about sixty undiscovered and, more importantly, possibly not destroyed facilities.”
“Okay.”
“There may be others like me, avatars in Cold Standby; I’d like to find them.”
That made sense, “So where do we start?”
“Here,” one of the dots began flashing, “ CC-3. This was a Central Coordination Center, like an auxiliary headquarters.”
“That’s strange,” I replied. “That’s right next to Harris…”
“Harrisburg, yes?”
“Harris is the capital of the Empire and has been for over two hundred years, and it’s where the Academy is located. How could it still be undiscovered?”
She looked thoughtful, “That’s a good question…” The map switched to the low-range IR she had described, all shades of gray, and expanded to encompass Harris and its surroundings. From this view, it was easy to pick out the massive craters from the stone storms. “Damn, it got hit hard.” She stood up and walked closer to the map, “It’s possible that the shockwaves buried all the entrances. I was still getting external camera feeds until the camera failed twenty years after the final strike; it couldn’t send out the signal with the facility destroyed, so the housekeeping systems may be active in their own forms of standby.”
“If the entrances are buried, how do we get in?”
“After 400 years of erosion and sedimentation? I don’t know. I do know I can find the entrances, and I make it up from there,” she paused and looked at me. “I do know I am going to need your help. My world mostly died four hundred years ago, and this one is very new and strange to me. I need a guide.”
“Me?”
“Before I became an avatar, I was a counter-intelligence agent for the Army. I can spot assholes and scum, and you’re neither. I need help, and I‘m very sure I can trust you, Bonchance Magellan.”
There was only one answer, “Okay, but it’s a long trip. It took me years, but I was moving back and forth looking for work.”
“I think there are probably some things here that will help.”
_____________________________________________________
The next week was spent searching for and unpacking items in the warehouse. There were clothes, weapons, tools, and parts. Taking the elevator all the way down led us to ‘SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT’, which contained rooms with a giant ICA charged by geothermal power, shielded cables, a water and waste treatment facility, heating and cooling systems, and other things, along with a complete machine shop that made the best ones I had ever heard of look like trash. There was also an electrics…which Mara insisted on calling electronics…shop, and something called CNC and Additive Manufacture, which had four large white cabinets with windows showing tool and stock holders in two of them, and the other two containing large flat plates with frameworks on screw jacks above them.
The elevator going up to the level marked ‘OP’ brought us to a large room with windows cunningly concealed from the outside by what looked like stone surfaces. There were various visual enhancers here, including some of the advanced cameras that could see otherwise invisible forms of light like the high- and low-range infrared and ultraviolet, along with amplification of the smallest fragment of visible light to turn the darkness into day.
There were other devices as well, something called millimeter wave radar, seismic detection, and more.
“This is a very remote facility,” I said as something had occurred to me.
“It is.”
“Why is it so complete?”
“Why waste the resources on a place so remote like this during a war, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Well, all the building and fitting was automated, and buried under the collapse in the warehouse are the heavy construction drones that were used. Materials were easy enough to make from scratch; we couldn’t make everything, but we could do a hell of a lot from what we had. Polymers, most alloys…most things. So, resources for most of this were no problem, and neither was manufacturing. We had warehouses of a lot of this stuff already, because there always was a war or a threat of a war or some politician wanted to make sure a friend got a contract, so new stuff had to be bought, and the United States is huge. Even using all the mass drivers, they couldn’t hit everything all at once. Once we saw what was happening, we started playing a huge shell game, moving resources and goods around. The second part was that we thought we were going to lose, so we scattered as many of these as we could so we would have operation centers and bases to launch a guerilla war. It’s why I was assigned here as an infiltrator, after all.”
She went to the table in the center of the OP, and glowing images started appearing in three dimensions, “Radio from the southeast…AM band. Hold on, millimeter’s got something, sending up a drone.”
A small glowing triangle appeared in the air above the table, which now had a rough terrain map of the area. Next to the triangle, a window appeared with a view from above. Reaching over to the window, Mara stuck her fingers in opposite diagonal corners and pulled it out into the size of a large tea tray. From above, we were looking down at a column of twenty men; we could count them; along with two covered ox carts.
“Any ideas?”
“Raiders…marauders. That flag with the bones?” I pointed at it. “That means they’re with the Dark Land Warriors nation. Bad business…” Looking closer at the image, I started. “Slavers!” now I was pointing at a cage cart. The bars had been covered over with canvas, but there was no mistaking that shape or the two socs walking next to it.
“Really?”
“Not much law out here.”
“Fine.”
Standing, she headed for the elevator and went straight to the armory; grabbing a heavy cloth vest, she slid a plate into the front before picking up a rifle and a pistol and the boxy magazines they used.
“They’re very dangerous; they have socs…two of them.”
“Socs? What’s a soc?”
“Like people, but stronger, faster, tougher, great senses, and very hard to kill. I got lucky taking one down when I first found this place.”
“Well, I have some advantages, too,” she flashed me a smile.
“Fine,” I took the vest and plate she handed me and repeated what she had done with the plate as well before looking at the rifles. They seemed similar enough to the latest Imperial designs I had seen, being magazine-fed cartridge weapons. The controls looked similar, too, except for an additional position on the safety, a few more buttons near the trigger, and one near the base of the grip that could be squeezed with the trigger hand. I slid extra magazines into the loops fitted to the vest.
“You’ll need this too, she handed me a thick pair of glasses and pressed a button on the side. An orange message flashed, ‘SYNCHING’ then ‘SYNCH ENABLED’.
“Testing testing…can you hear me?” Mara’s voice sounded like it was coming from inside my head.
“Uh, yes?” her lips hadn’t moved.
“Good, we have comms. The switch on the lower right, the little dial? That controls vision enhancement. The one above it and then the switch on the rifle right in front of the trigger? When both of those are pressed at the same time, it will pair the rifle with the optics. Do it now.”
I did, and now there was a ghost-like image of whatever the rifle barrel was pointed at.
“Hold down the button on the grip with the heel of your hand and rest your finger on the pad next to the trigger or on the trigger itself to fully activate the aiming system.”
I did that, the gunsight view sharpened to full solidity, and a small red dot appeared in my vision between a set of curving yellow lines. When I released the pressure of the heel of my hand, the image faded back to ghost-like.
“That should be all you need. Keep it safed for now.”
We entered the elevator, and she pressed the button for ‘SURFACE’.