The Extinction Switch: Book three of the Kato's War series (13 page)

“Wow,” Annabelle said, as she ate and listened intently.

“Everyone has jobs,” Magana continued. “Some lead, some clean, some haul garbage.
Lots
of it. Some are Caretakers, some are Electricians, some are Farmers, and others are Defenders.”

“Does this place get attacked often?” David said, with raised eyebrows.

“No, but we’re ready just in case. Some of the soldiers are also Raiders. They go out and steal food and other supplies. I gather that’s how you found us. One of them was not quite careful enough.” She folded her arms and scowled. “If he was in my unit I’d string him up for being so careless. He broke the rules by going out alone instead of in a pair.”

Their eyes widened. “Wow…” Kassandra said, at last. “And nobody in Lyon knows about this place?”

“Nobody apart from those living in the other silos. We have an uneasy peace with them.”

----

After breakfast was wrapped up, the questions kept coming. “What is this place, and why does it even exist?” Annabelle asked.

Magana looked across at the inner silo. “It’s a service core for the city. The bottom is a zero-point power station. Above that is a vertical farm. The city is almost self-sustaining that way. There are eight such cores equally spaced around Lyon, equidistant from the center.”

David frowned. “Oh. So, why this huge air gap, between its outer wall and this one?”

Magana shrugged. “Don’t quite know. It was all built over eighty years ago. Someone must have thought it necessary.”

“What’s at the bottom?” Antonio asked.

“Trash,” she said. “Meters deep. That’s why it smells so rank. Nobody notices the odor after a while. Everyone just threw garbage over the side for decades. Then there was a lethal methane gas explosion twenty years ago. Levels one through five were damaged so badly in the blast that they’re uninhabitable. There’s an ongoing effort to cart it out before the gas builds up again.”

“JC said there were bodies down there,” Kassandra said, almost in a whisper. “Is it true?”

Magana nodded. “Some were executions, some were accidental falls, and some were suicides. They just left them there.”

The friends stared at Magana, wide-eyed. “Executions?” Kassandra said.

Magana sighed. “Mostly in the early days. There hasn’t been one in years. If it’s as bad as you say outside, though, martial law may be imposed in here. The severest penalty then would be death.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Kassandra's Calling

After lunch, Annabelle caught Kassandra’s eye. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Okay,” Kassandra said, a little uncertainly. They strolled slowly across the walkway. The mournful sound of somebody playing a trumpet echoed from somewhere below. At the halfway point, Annabelle cautiously approached the railing. She looked up, squinting. “I can’t even see the roof. Can you?”

“No.”

Annabelle’s eyes traced down the side of the inner silo, with its vertical pattern of lights, which illuminated the rings around. The walkways of the other levels, identically positioned to their own, looked almost like a wall, one sixth of the way around the circumference. The girls looked down. “I can’t get over the scale of this place,” Kassandra said.

Annabelle shook her head. “Me neither.” She turned to Kassandra. “I just wanted to see how you’re holding up.”

Kassandra’s face fell. “I’m scared to death. Yeah, we may be safe down here for now. But, if the Extinction Switch is ever used, a special kind of hell will be unleashed. There’ll be nothing left above ground. This place survives on the crumbs that fall from their tables as far as I can tell. If they go, so do we. And that’s assuming nobody invades down here.” Annabelle nodded, and pushed her blonde hair back to the right, out of her face. “I suppose my parents will be okay, since they’re in space,” Kassandra added.

“I miss my mom and sister so much,” Annabelle said, with a deep sigh. “I’d give anything just to know they’re okay. They live above ground in Paris. If the Extinction Switch were used, they wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Kassandra clasped Annabelle in a bear hug. Their embrace was long and quiet, hundreds of meters up on the catwalk. Annabelle began to cry softly.

At length, Kassandra pulled away. Grinning, she said: “Just had a thought. We’re supposed to be assigned duties. I wonder what they’ll get Antonio to do. I don’t think there are many modeling gigs to be had down here.”

Annabelle chuckled. “His physical fitness is non-existent, and he has almost no clue how to relate to people.” She shook her head. “He’s not gonna last. I don’t know what they do with people who can’t or won’t work.”

“He’s gonna have to give up his pretty boy ways pretty damn quickly,” Kassandra said. Annabelle nodded, sniffing and wiping tears away with the back of her right hand. “I’m sorry,” Kassandra said.

“For what?”

“For ever introducing him to you. He’s got the hots for you so bad.”

“Oh, I know he does.”

“He started hanging out with me for
me
,” Kassandra said, pointing to herself, and giving Annabelle an eyebrow-raised mock look that said
keep your hands off my man.
Annabelle chuckled. “But then when
you
came along,” Kassandra continued, “I was cast aside.” She threw her hands up in mock indignation. “Cast aside!” Both girls laughed. “Just think,
you
could have been his girlfriend!”

“I’d have taken a bullet for you,” Annabelle said. “Taken one for the team!”

The lights from the central silo, dimmed by the distance, reflected from Kassandra’s twinkling eyes and cast shadows in her grin-induced dimples as she looked out into the near-darkness. “This is the happiest I’ve seen you since this whole thing started,” Annabelle said. Kassandra nodded. “We’ll make it through this. You and me, kiddo,” Annabelle said, after a short pause.

“Kiddo? You’re only a year older than me,” Kassandra said, still gazing out from the bridge.

Annabelle shrugged. “Yeah. But, I guess I’ve always thought of you like the little sister I always wanted.”

Kassandra smiled. They were quiet and contemplative for a while, as they leaned over the handrail. “You know,” she said at length, “I kind of want to be a Raider.”

Annabelle looked quizzical, as she turned to Kassandra. “Why? It sounds super dangerous.”

Kassandra’s smile had changed to a mischievous grin, as she turned to face Annabelle. “That’s
why
I want to do it.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. I’ve lived my entire life in this cocoon of riches.” Kassandra’s voice now had an edge of anger. “Anything I ever wanted, it’s mine. I have my own warp spaceship for Christ’s sake. But, I’ve never had to work for anything. Never had to sacrifice. Climbing down successively lower rungs of society like this is showing me a side of life I never knew existed.” Her eyes were now narrow slits. “I don’t want to be this way anymore, ‘Belle. There’s so much more to me than being a rich party girl.”

Annabelle nodded. “Well, if that’s what my kid sister wants, I’ll support you in it.” She smiled. “I think the biggest danger sometimes isn’t what we face on the outside, but in never finding out who we really are.”

----

“You want to do
what?
” JC said. He still wore his white t-shirt, and now also sported a camouflage ball cap. He then began to laugh, and laugh, until he was almost beside himself. Kassandra withered as she stood before him on level thirty. “I almost thought you said you wanted to be Raider for a minute there!”

Kassandra lifted her gaze from the floor, and stuck out her chin. “I do, sir. I’ll do anything required of me. Please at least consider me.”

“My, oh my,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “You haven’t even been here forty-eight hours, and you want to join the most elite rank of the Defenders.”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked Kassandra up and down. Her build was slender yet womanly, and her height average. Her eyes spat defiance. His gaze met hers. She didn’t flinch. “You know,” he said, “being a Raider was easy, or should I say easier, even a week ago. Gathering food for this place is now damn near impossible, with rebel forces having locked down much of the city now. You’ll have to fight. You will be chased and hunted down like a rat, with a fifty-kilogram pack on your back. They’re taking no prisoners up there. I’ll be surprised if we don’t lose half our Raiders in the next couple of months.

“Well, you’re the least bad of the sorry crew you came in with. The standard of physical fitness required is extremely rigorous. Show me you can climb sixty meters of knotted rope in one hundred and twenty seconds and we’ll talk.”

“Yes, sir. I won’t let you down.”

“I don’t want to see you again until you can prove yourself.”

“Yes sir.” Kassandra spun on her heel, and headed for the stairs. Once she was on the way down to level twenty-nine, she broke out into a broad grin.

----

Kassandra looked down over the edge of the walkway of level eighteen, segment F, into the depths below. She grasped a knotted rope, one of several that dangled from somewhere far above. Taking a deep breath, Kassandra climbed up the handrail, until she was balanced precipitously above the drop. The rope already bore some of her weight. She moved her hands down slightly until they found a knot, and then pulled her whole body out, finding another knot with her feet. The rope swung out from the bridge, suspending Kassandra over the void. She looked up, and was preparing to climb, when two girls seemingly flew in out of the darkness, one either side of her, landing nimbly on their feet on the walkway.

“Whoa! What?” Kassandra stammered. The girls were identical, aged around twenty, with short, glossy brown hair, and dark green uniforms. They unclipped their harnesses and let go the ropes they had swung in on, which fell straight again.

“Oh, hi newbie,” the one on the left said between deep breaths. “Didn’t mean to scare ya. I’m Taygete, and this is Asterope. We were just rappelling. Defender training.”

“Oh. I’m going to try and become a Defender,” Kassandra said, clinging onto the rope for dear life.

“Your sixty-meter qualification?” Asterope asked.

“Yeah.”

“Here, come back on the walkway for a minute,” Taygete said, grabbing Kassandra’s rope and pulling it in towards the handrail.

Kassandra awkwardly got her feet back on the rail, twisted around so that her weight was balanced on it, and then hopped down next to the girls. “Kassandra,” she said, offering her hand. Both girls shook with her. Kassandra squinted. “Aren’t your names like…”

“The stars of the Pleiades?” Asterope said.

“Yeah.”

“Yep. The Seven Sisters. Except there are only two of us.”

“So… you survived an encounter with JC?” Taygete said.

“Only just. He was about to throw us off the railing our first night here.”

“Oh yeah, I heard about that,” Asterope said, half-chuckling. “Like five days ago now.”

“It’s not funny! He was really going to do it!” Kassandra said, indignantly.

“He wouldn’t have,” Taygete said. “Although I do sometimes wonder if he has a screw loose. Why do you want to be a Defender?”

“I want to be a Raider.”

Taygete raised her eyebrows. “Wow… okay. Your sixty-meter is only to get you into training. It only gets tougher after that.” Kassandra nodded. “And once you’ve been put through the mill, you have to do your AVA to become a Defender,” Taygete continued.

“AVA?”

“Think about what the letters look like,” Asterope said. “An up arrow, a down arrow, and then another up arrow. You go up two hundred meters of stairs, ten levels in all, rappel back down the same distance, and
then
climb back up it by rope. All in under thirty-five minutes.”

Kassandra’s eyes widened. “Oh…”

Taygete nodded. “Yep. Welcome to the jungle, newbie. See you around.” The sisters walked off, laughing, towards the center ring.

Asterope looked back over her shoulder. “If you want to look us up, we’re in 32E.”

“Okay,” Kassandra said, uncertainly. “Ugh,” she muttered, when they were out of earshot. She climbed back up the railing, grabbed the rope again, and began to climb.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Desperately Seeking...

“We’re out of here in thirty minutes, Dad,” Zara said, having met Kato in the hallway of the first class section of
Revenant
. “We finally got a docking slot at the ETI, for just long enough to disembark.”

Kato twisted his mouth to one side, and thought for a few moments. “Well, okay, honey. Just be careful.” He shook his head. “Everything’s coming undone very rapidly.”

“I—we—
have
to find her,” Zara said, defiantly. Akio, standing to her right, nodded. Kato sighed, and hugged Zara. He then turned to Akio, and awkwardly made a move to hug him. Akio reciprocated, and they embraced.