Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1) (24 page)

We drove to a large white building. It looked as if it had been carved out of a single piece of steel and glass, and I couldn’t tell where the steel ended and the glass began. It was like something out of a fantasy world. A huge white spire stuck out from the top of the building, turning to glass at the top. Maybe this was the control tower. Maybe this was the base command post.

The vehicle stopped and the doors were opened. We shuffled out and the guards followed behind us. More armed guards, in the grey and black camo, were waiting.

A woman in a seamless black uniform, with a black beret, stood with her arms folded behind her back and her legs spread shoulder width. She had a gold star on each collar. She snapped to attention as we approached her.

“I am General Olivia Skygard,” she said, “Commandant of Defense Forces Center, Kerguelen Field.”

I saluted in the manner of our Fleet, and she returned the gesture.

“I am Commander Pax Faustus, commanding officer of the ground forces of the Republic of Cascadia.”

She seemed puzzled.

“But you’re a human. A real human. How can this be?”

“Things have changed, and drastically, I’m afraid. My pilot, Lieutenant Morgana Dell, and I are here on a diplomatic mission to ask for your assistance.”

“Of course, I am not qualified to make such decisions,” Skygard said, “but I will arrange a meeting with our chairman for you.”

I had read about the unique Kergueleni form of government. All residents of their Dominion had to serve the government for two years, then they could become “Citizens.” A chairman was elected by a majority of the Citizens every six years, and he appointed a Board of Directors. Everything was merit-based here. Service begat more responsibility, which begat more service. Wealth and influence still existed, but they got you nowhere unless you had served the people faithfully.

She motioned for us to follow her inside, and we did, stepping off of the blustery tarmac and into a pleasantly warm, clean building. It had wide, airy halls and tall ceilings. Atriums filled with greenery, skylights, and plants were everywhere.

“This building is beautiful,” Morgana whispered.

I nodded. The offices all had windows that seamlessly and flawlessly blended into the walls. From a closer viewpoint, now, it appeared as if the walls and windows were all made from the same material. It was fascinating metallurgy.

Marshal Burnham had been right: the Kergueleni were years ahead of the Republic.

The general spoke with a male aide in that same sing-song language again, and the aide ran off.

“You will sit here, please,” she said in somewhat broken English, pointing at some chairs, “and I will keep you company until Chairman Winterfall has decided what shall be done with you.”

“You don’t speak English as a first language?” I asked, resting into a surprisingly comfortable leather chair.

“No,” General Skygard smiled softly. “Common, as we call it, was inefficient and filled with contradictions and words with multiple meanings. In the mid-2200’s, a professor at Aeterna National University developed a beautiful and efficient derivative of Common which we call Kergueleni. But, Common was used by most people on the globe in the early 2100’s, and so most of the books and art we salvage from the Wastes was written in Common, and most of the survivors we find in the Wastes today still speak it, so we’re required to learn it in academy. All Kergueleni people speak Common, Kergueleni, and at least two other languages fluently. It’s required.”

“You all speak four languages?” I chuckled. “That’s incredible.”

“We may prefer isolation, Commander, but we aren’t savages,” the general laughed, the slightest hint of an accent creeping into her words.

“Well your language is beautiful,” I stated. “It’s almost like singing.”

“Inflection is very important,” she nodded. “Putting pitch on certain vowels or consonant clusters is indicative of the tense. Speaking Kergueleni is easy, but mastering it takes some practice.”

The aide came back into the room, whispered something to the general, and then rushed out again.

“It appears you’re going to be meeting the chairman over at the Citadel. You’ll be taking the Government Metro. Please, follow Specialist Silverlake.”

We rose from the table, and she snapped to attention, pounding her right fist into her right shoulder, her face losing all trace of pleasantry.

“Until we meet again, Commander Faustus.”

“Until we meet again, General Skygard.”

We were joined by four armed guards and escorted down another corridor to a stairway that led underground. At least two stories. We found ourselves in a bright white tunnel that stretched off into a pinpoint of light in either direction.

Morgana and I stood silently, still cuffed in these strange metal rings. A train, looking like a silver bullet, quickly approached from the right, which I surmised to be north.

There were no lines separating wall from window, and definitely no creases that could possibly have been doors, but sure enough the wall of the train opened and we stepped inside. Their materials were cut so precisely that even the doorframe of a train was imperceptible. I was really impressed.

We accelerated on a magnetic track to hundreds of kilometers per hour, and then immediately started decelerating again. The train quickly came to a halt, without jerking a single one of us.

“This way,” the specialist said, motioning toward the platform as the doors swung wide.

The specialist was much less talkative than his boss, the general. He silently marched across the platform to a staircase. As we stepped onto it, it began moving. It didn’t look like an escalator—we had those in Cascadia by the hundreds. It looked just like a staircase, and yet it moved.

Morgana was smiling broadly, as perplexed by the mechanics of it all, as I was.

When we reached the top of the stairs and stepped onto the landing, the stairs stopped moving, appearing to be just another staircase.

This building didn’t appear new or made of any sorts of advanced metals. In fact, this building was made of stone walls and polished marble floors. It looked old—
much
older than it should have been. The Kerguelen Dominion was only four hundred and fifty years old, and yet it looked like this building had stood for a thousand years or more. The vaulted ceilings stretched stories and stories above us. Our footsteps echoed through the hall, with bright windows to our right and intricate stone reliefs on the walls to our left.

We stopped at a doorway flanked by two men in blue capes, wearing black, plumed helmets reminiscent of ancient Sparta. They wore black bodysuits underneath, and had gloved hands and heavy boots. They held black spears in their right hands and, in their left, black shields emblazoned with a bird on it.

The aide spoke with the guards, who nodded, and then we passed through the doorway.

In there, was a man. A single man. He was bald with a short beard, and sat at a long, ornate conference table. The room smelled delicious.

“Commander Faustus,” he said, standing, and smiling. As I approached, he took my hand and shook it, uncomfortably.

“Mister Chairman,” I replied, stiffening a bit.

“And Lieutenant Dell,” he said, grabbing Morgana’s hand as well. “It’s a pleasure to meet you both. Here, have some coffee and pastries.”

Another aide brought cups of a steaming, acrid smelling beverage and plates of tantalizing, brightly colored cakes.

“How do you take your coffee?” she asked Morgana and me.

“Um,” Morgana said confusedly, “with my…right…hand?”

The chairman laughed. “Just leave the cream and sugar for our guests, and leave us.”

“Oh, but before you leave,” he called to her, “let’s take these things off. No way to treat our guests.” He pointed at the cuffs.

A black-helmed guard came in from the outside and pressed his thumb to the metal ring on my wrists. The cuffs opened. There was no visible thumbprint reader. No hinge. They just opened. The guard released Morgana similarly, and then strode out the door, his cape billowing behind him. We took our seats at the table.

“I’m sorry for the manner of your reception,” the chairman said, politely, “but we really don’t want outsiders here. They bring vileness. And I thought we’d made it absolutely clear to the Republic that if they stayed out of our airspace and didn’t spy on us, we’d be happy to leave them alone.”

The smile on his face dropped abruptly. “So why are you here?”

“Sir,” I said gently, making a direct and unwavering eye contact, “we came here because we have no choice.”

I explained about the zombie hordes. About how they’d gone from a mindless pest to a concentrated army. About the Reverend. About Persephone. About the virus. About the evacuation.

The chairman’s face didn’t change expression once. He didn’t ask any questions. He just let me spill the beans. I finally started running out of things to say, and just stared at him.

“It’s interesting times,” he said quietly, shifting in his chair, “when the machines pick a boy to save the planet. When they abandon their homeworld.”

He stared for a moment off into space, rubbing his hand on his bald head, then stroking his beard.

“Why you?” he asked me.

“I still don’t know for sure,” I said. “They said they needed someone to lead their biologic division. But that was before Cheyenne Mountain. Now I’m leading the whole damn thing and they’re watching from a distance as they pack up everything worth a damn and shipping it to Mars.”

“Peculiar, indeed, Commander Faustus,” the chairman said pensively. “And now you tell me that our only rival on this planet is leaving it for good, and that’s most interesting news.”

“Rival?” I asked, startled.

“Oh yes,” the chairman nodded. “We’ve been imprisoned here for centuries. We’ve never been allowed to expand too broadly or restore too much normalcy in our relations with the outside. There’s always been ‘intervention’ on the part of the Republic. A sunk ship here. A lost aircraft there. A curious meteor impact that was too precise. And we’ve never been able to prove a thing, but it was always far more than coincidence. Too opportunistic.”

I stared at him, stoically, waiting for him to continue, because I had nothing.

“You know they stole all our achievements from us,” he scolded. “The space elevator was ours. We fought against the Colombians on behalf of the Ecuadorians in 2042 and were given the Galapagos to build our elevator. We built the Low-Earth Station. We built the Geosynchronous Station. We built the first base on Luna. We built the first temporary colony on Mars. We built our island nation to be powerful and influential so we could get off this rock called Earth when the shit hit the proverbial fan. And then when the virus broke out, like we knew it would, we were trapped here. We never abandoned anything. We withdrew our forces to defend our lands from the onslaught of invaders who sought refuge here. We sank ship after ship and shot down hundreds of jetliners. For decades we were just trying to protect our borders. Our plan to ride out the apocalypse only worked for the number of people we had on the island at the time, and any amount of refugees or any exposure to the Plague would have compromised that.”

He cleared his throat and leaned in toward me.

“We gathered up every relic and every artifact we could find. We stored up supplies. We built all the components to build world-ships and send our population to Mars for a new start. And then when we got back to our elevator,
you
were there.”

“
I
was there?” I asked, sarcastically.

“No of course not
you
specifically, but your ancestors. Your father, for all I know. Republic forces, claiming sovereignty over
our
lands and our greatest technological achievement to that date. And then you stood on our shoulders and reached for the stars and kept us imprisoned on this planet. We fought to take back the Galapagos. Twice. Robot warriors annihilated our forces. We fought bravely and had technological superiority but you had the main deterrent—your goddamned starships. MAC guns, I was told.
Poof
! Our base on Agalega was vaporized to prove a point. We were told if we ever raised a finger against the Republic our island would be sent to the bottom of the rising seas. And so here we are, four
hundred
years later, having accepted our fate.”

He paused.

“I can’t say it was the worst thing to have happened. We’ve mastered cold fusion in a way that you could never imagine. We’ve made metallurgy an art form, as you’ve likely seen from our buildings and aircraft. We’ve perfected language. We’ve developed our own version of the ‘enhanced form’ but ours is still human. We’ve extended the natural human life-span to one hundred and fifty good, quality years. And we’ve learned everything about the known universe by spying on you.”

I looked at him puzzled. “Excuse me?”

“You forget that it was some of our scientific minds that fled the old world. They built the first tachyon-communications array in Colorado, yes, but they built the second one here. We’ve been listening to everything anyone has ever transmitted back from the far reaches of the galaxy for centuries now. Including learning about your father, the great Herodotus Faustus, the first man to step outside the Milky Way galaxy by navigating a wormhole to the edge of time itself. Brilliant man. It’s shame he’s in the scrap pile with the rest of your kind.”