Excelsior (19 page)

“Well, since the wormhole is still open, there’s no rush. Are you sure you want to send an update?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“We already know that our probe data fell into enemy hands. Whatever we send now could be intercepted or leaked to the enemy as well.”

“So encrypt the transmission and keep it short on details. All the Alliance really needs to know at this point is that we made it here safely, the wormhole is open, not shut, and we’re on our way to Wonderland to assess the planet’s habitability. Oh, and tell them about the David Davorian Belt and how to avoid radiation damage for future missions.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Let me know if there are any other interesting developments.”

“Yes, sir.”

Alexander ended the call and settled back against his cot.

Doctor Crespin had stuck around to eavesdrop. “Sounds like good news, Captain,” he said.

“The best.” Alexander couldn’t help grinning. He was going to see Caty again! Maybe in just a few short months—from his perspective anyway. From hers, two and a half years would have passed. That wasn’t an insignificant amount of time, but it wasn’t a whole decade either. Now he regretted giving her permission to move on without him. What if she’d already moved on?

“You may as well get some rest, Captain,” Doctor Crespin said on his way out.

“I’m not tired.”

“Maybe not, but your body needs time to recover.”

Alexander sighed. “Yes, Doc.”

“I’ll have one of the nurses bring you your dinner.”

*

387 Days Ago - April 11th, 2790

(Earth’s Frame of Reference)

The passenger compartment was full of dirty, shell-shocked faces. Caty had been expecting to see sick and injured people, but the ones rescued were all like her—more or less intact. People eyed her with unblinking stares, and she eyed them back. She clutched her pack of survival gear to her chest like a teddy bear—her a shield against the world.

From the air the devastation was immense. Caty looked out the window and felt ill. There were mountains of debris and rubble in all directions. LA was a wasteland all the way out to the smoke-clouded horizon, and there wasn’t a single shred of anything green.

Caty shuddered and turned away. The pilot came on the intercom and told them they were going back to the shelter now to drop them off and re-fuel before continuing their search. Relieved sighs and exclamations bounced from one passenger to another. Then someone came back into the passenger compartment to ask if any of them were natural-borns and to raise their hands if they were.

The rescue worker said something about radiation sickness being more likely if they were natural-born. Caty scanned the dirty faces around her, her gaze flicking from one person to the next. They all had colorful eyes and hair—but that didn’t mean much, hair and eye color could be changed with retroactive treatments. Catalina had opted for those treatments herself; she’d been born with brown eyes and hair, but had later changed her eyes to blue and hair to blond. More telling (and impossible to change after birth without surgery) were the passengers’ exaggerated feminine and masculine features. Skin tones ranged the gamut, but all of them were stunningly beautiful, and that could only mean one thing: they were all geners. Besides her no other natural-borns had been rescued. Maybe that was just an unfortunate side effect of the fact that geners had the money to afford shelters in their homes and so-called degenerates typically didn’t, but Caty wasn’t too sure.

“Ma’am?” someone asked close beside her ear.

Caty flinched and turned to see who it was.

It was the rescue worker. “Are you a natural-born?” he asked.

She nodded without thinking.

The man smiled and went back into the cockpit. Then the pilot announced that they would be arriving at the shelter in Irvine soon. Irvine… Caty thought, trying to picture it on a map.

Smack in the middle between the blast craters in LA and San Diego.

Twenty minutes later as the van hovered down, Caty saw a vast field of tents and camp fires. So much for shelter. More like a refugee camp. Still, it was better than nothing. The van touched down with a muffled thump and she rose to her feet. She was eager to get out of the cramped passenger compartment. She dragged her pack over to the doors at the back of the van. She was first in line. No one else seemed to be in a hurry to get up.

The doors slid open, and a rescue worker came up behind her, ushering her out and down the ramp. “Head to the circus tent for processing,” he said, pointing dead ahead as they descended the ramp.

Caty dragged her pack, nodding agreeably as they went. It was hard to miss the big red and white pinstriped tent. “I guess it’s too much to ask for someone to hold my hand,” Caty said.

“I have to get back out there,” the worker replied.

Caty nodded and started down the ramp. Everywhere she looked she saw dirty, bleak faces turn to stare at her. None of them were wearing hazmat suits, but at this distance the fallout wouldn’t be too dangerous. She was relieved to see that all of the people in the immediate area seemed to be natural-borns even though everyone in the van had been a gener.

The discrimination was just in her head, then.

Caty turned to thank the worker, but he was already climbing back inside the hover. The ramp retracted back under the van and the doors slid shut. A few short seconds later the van hovered up, generating a wicked wind that whipped dust into her face and forced her eyes shut. Then the wind died down, and she opened her eyes to see the hover roaring away into the distance, already a dwindling speck against the slate gray sky.

Something felt wrong about that. Caty turned back to the camp with a frown, feeling suddenly alone and vulnerable. She caught some of the refugees glaring up at the hover van as it left, and her bad feeling grew stronger. Suddenly she realized what was wrong. The van had left her here, but all the geners were going somewhere else. Somewhere nicer, maybe?

So much for all the implants and retroactive treatments to make her like them. Natural-born still meant degenerate to them. Caty frowned. Hefting her pack off the ground, she slung it over her shoulders and walked up to the nearest person in the camp—a man with a scraggly brown beard and an unruly mop of hair to match. He was handsome in a rugged way, but not nearly enough to be a gener.

“Hello, I’m Catalina de Leon,” she said.

The man tore his gaze from the sky to regard her. “Dahveed,” he said with a strong accent. “Hablas espanol?”

She nodded. “I speak Spanish, but it’s better not to up North. Raises too many eyebrows.”

David snorted. “True that. You can get away with it I suppose.”

Caty cocked her head. “Get away with what?”

“Speaking English. Pretending to be a gener. You’re pretty enough to fool them.”

“Well, I’m not trying to fool anyone.”

David’s brow wrinkled. “You should try to fool them. You might live longer that way.”

Ice trickled through Caty’s veins. “Live longer? What do you mean?”

“You don’t know?”

“I just arrived.”

Another snort. “Supongo que yo debo orientarte entonces. Mira—aqui, somos sus perros.”

“How’s that?”

“You’re really going to stick with English?” David sighed and shook his head. “They make us go out, no suits, no protection. They use us like dogs to find other survivors and bring them in.”

“But the ones who rescued me were—”

“Geners rescuing geners. They must have thought you were one of them, but then figured it out later. Like I said, you can pass for one, but me?” David shook his head. “I was picked up by a rusty old street bus. The driver was a Mexican. All Latinos on that crew. We find ours and they find theirs, but there’s always a guard with us to make sure we pick up any geners we find. No one’s really looking for us.”

“Then why are there so many people here?” Caty jerked her chin to the field of tents.

“They need to conscript rescue workers somehow. The more of us they rescue, the more of them they can find, but as soon as we stop finding geners you can bet we’re going to fall through the cracks and straight into hell.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“No? Go talk to the warden.”

“The warden?”

“That’s what we call el jefe aqui. Go tell him you don’t want to join the crews. Then go get your rations for tomorrow. You’ll get a liter of dirty water and a bag of saltine crackers. Go back tomorrow night and tell him you changed your mind. You’ll get four liters of clean water and enough food to keep you from dreaming about it all night. Either you join the search or you join the search. Only children get a full ration if they don’t go.”

“What about the sick and injured?”

“Don’t have any. We gather them up and call in the hovers to get them, but who knows if they actually rescue the natural-borns. Anyway, point is, this is a work camp, and they only rescue us because they don’t want to risk their own lives out there looking for each other.”

Caty frowned. “No suits?”

“No.”

“What about the radiation?”

“It’s bad, but no one’s going anywhere close to the epicenters yet, so you’ll be okay—at least for the next ten years while the cancer grows. Suppose cancer later is still better than starving to death now.”

Caty blew out a breath. “I guess I’d better go volunteer then.”

David nodded. “Deberias.”

“See you.”

Ten minutes later, Caty was standing in front of Warden Theodore. She didn’t bother asking him to check if conditions were as bad as David had indicated. Despite David’s obvious resentment toward geners, he had no reason to lie to her.

After promising to join the search effort, she was given two cans of corn, three cans of beans, a can-opener, a spoon, and a four-liter jug of water. They were about to give her a pack and bedroll, too, but she explained that she already had hers, so all they did was assign her a tent number. They told her to follow the white numbers spray-painted on the ground until she found 5097, and then report for duty tomorrow morning with the bell. Five o’clock sharp.

Caty made her way up the rows of tents until she found hers. A teenage girl with black hair tied up in a bun sat outside the tent beside a dying fire, scraping beans out of a pot with an old rusty spoon.

“Hi,” Caty said.

The girl looked up, then back down into her pot.

“I’m Catalina,” she said.

“Rosa,” the girl replied.

“Pretty name. Fifty ninety seven is your tent?”

Rosa nodded.

“Me, too. Guess we’ll be getting to know each other. I just arrived.”

No answer.

“You here all alone?”

Rosa got up from her tree stump stool and breezed by. “Voy a dormir.”

Catalina frowned. The sun hadn’t even set yet. Wasn’t it too early to go to bed? Rosa climbed inside the tent and zipped it up after her. Caty sat down on the tree stump and regarded the empty pot. It wasn’t clean, but something told her that was too much to ask for. Her stomach grumbled. She hadn’t eaten yet. Picking up the pot, Caty shrugged out of her pack and found a can of beans she could heat up. The can-opener didn’t work very well, but she managed to get the can open and pour the beans into the pot. Then she stoked glowing orange embers into the pale gray sky until the fire was radiating enough heat to make her cold beans hot—lukewarm actually, but she was too hungry to care.

She drank a few cups of water with the meal and soon she needed to use a bathroom, but she hadn’t seen any facilities, and it was already too dark to walk around and look for one, so she waited until it was fully dark and then found a patch of grass between her tent and the neighbor’s. She’d grown used to using grass and bushes for a bathroom ever since leaving her shelter, but usually not with thousands of potential spectators nearby.

That night Caty slept beside the glowing coals of the fire, out under the stars. She lay awake listening to people cough inside their tents. There was too much smoke in the air from all the forest fires. Caty’s throat itched, too, but she muffled her own coughs, not wanting to draw attention to herself. Every now and then she heard someone walking between the tents, the gravel crunching underfoot, and she remembered the shadowy man at the Seven Eleven.

Caty cringed. Best to keep quiet.

“You’re pretty,” the dead man’s words echoed inside her head, making her skin crawl. She’d never even seen his face, so it was easy to imagine a monster rather than a man.

That had been her wake-up call. Now she knew better than to trust other survivors.

Unfortunately the rescue workers had confiscated her Berreta. It was probably better they didn’t let refugees enter the camp armed, but Caty felt naked without it. She was beginning to wish she had pretended to be a gener—or dead. It might have been better if they’d left her at the Seven Eleven.

Someone screamed nearby.

There came a piercing silence, as if the entire camp had woken up and stopped coughing so that they could listen. Caty’s heart thundered in her chest. She lay frozen on the ground, wanting to get up and run for her life, but too scared to move.