The Fires of Yesterday (The Silent Earth, Book 3) Read online

  “Piss off,” Targen said. “He looks about as tough as a tub of butter, and half as smart.”

  “You weren’t there,” I said suddenly, and all eyes turned toward me, as if surprised that I had the audacity to speak. “You didn’t see what happened.”

  “Didn’t see what?” Targen said.

  “What happened at the Grid spire. It was your men who botched the assault. It was their responsibility to carry out the mission, right? Or do you let civilians call the shots around here?”

  The question was met with brooding silence.

  “Truth is, you’d have nothing without Malyn. You wouldn’t have information on Doust, and you wouldn’t have me here. Sure, maybe I don’t amount to much, but it’s better than nothing. If your soldiers had half the instincts that she does, you might have had a different outcome.”

  Cabre chewed his lip, staring at me thoughtfully. “Fair enough. We can’t blame Malyn for this.”

  Targen threw up his hands. “This is bullshit–”

  “Targen, you’re dismissed,” Cabre said, nodding toward the door.

  Targen glared at the man in black, then shrugged. “Thank Christ,” he breathed. “I’m outta here. You know where to find me if you need me, General,” he said as he stalked past.

  Cabre watched him leave, then said quietly, “We did underestimate them. The Marauders. Our intel was outdated.” He looked up at us. “The truth is, they’re massing in the region. Every Duster out there is being recalled and is returning home to the enclave. We think there was a large group coming through the area that wiped out the platoon.”

  “What does it mean?” Malyn said.

  Cabre’s brow knitted. “It means something big is about to go down. They’re on the brink of losing this war. This is their last throw of the dice.”

  “Can we stop them?” Malyn said.

  “We have to,” Cabre said. He walked over toward us, an even more imposing figure up close. He reached out and took Malyn’s broken arm, unrolling it gently from her singlet. She winced.

  “What happened here?”

  Malyn looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “Got myself in a tight spot.”

  “Gunner,” Cabre said, and Gunrix appeared at his shoulder.

  “General?”

  “Take Malyn and get this arm fixed up immediately.”

  “Yessir.”

  Gunrix took Malyn by the elbow and led her gently toward the door.

  “Malyn,” Cabre called out as they passed through into the hallway. She turned. “Good job keeping things together, for making it home with that information.”

  “Thank you, General.”

  Her eyes met mine over her shoulder, and I saw that the hostility and disdain she’d shown since we’d met had softened, giving way to something akin to gratitude. Then she allowed Gunrix to lead her away and they disappeared from view.

  Cabre turned and looked down at me, his eyes unreadable.

  “You,” he said. “Come with me.”

  13

  We followed the trail of cord lights along the corridor and out into a stairwell, where Cabre directed me upward.

  “I have a lot of things to do right now, so you’re going to have to walk with me as I talk,” he said, motioning for a soldier to accompany us.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m actually very keen to talk to you as well.”

  “A lot of people want to talk to me,” Cabre said, unsurprised.

  “I can imagine. I’m grateful for the chance, anyway.”

  “Listen, this isn’t some fireside chat,” he said, beginning to climb the stairs at a rapid pace. I lifted my pace to keep up. “I’m going to tell you about a few rules of mine. If you don’t like them, you can pack your bags right now and head back to the wasteland.”

  “Okay. I understand.” I noted that guards were in plentiful supply. Aside from the one keeping pace at my shoulder there were others stationed at doorways and down corridors, observing quietly as the three of us went past.

  “The first thing you have to know about Ascension is that we favour total transparency here,” Cabre began. “We don’t tolerate liars or those trying to undermine our operation. So anything that comes out of your mouth better be the truth, got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “The second thing is that we don’t tolerate dead weight hanging around. You want our protection and the lifestyle that it affords, you make yourself useful. End of story.”

  “Fair enough. For what it’s worth, I want to help you, and I’ll do what I can.”

  “That’s good to hear.” We came out of the stairwell and continued along another corridor, and through the narrow windows set in the masonry I could see the city below. “I love this place,” Cabre remarked conversationally. “I love the ruggedness of it. It’s an old place, sure, but it was built to last. None of those endless panes of glass like in modern buildings.”

  His abrupt change in tone caught me off guard, and I wasn’t sure how to respond. Instead I just nodded.

  “Up here,” he said, pointing to a ramp that led up into open air. He glanced over at his shoulder at the guard. “Do they know we’re coming?”

  “No, General.”

  “Good. Now,” he went on, “where did you come from, Brant?”

  I considered how much information I should reveal to the General. Despite his warning about transparency, I knew I still had to be cautious. While I didn’t want to outright lie to him, I didn’t want to tell him everything about myself, either. Without knowing him, I couldn’t tell how he might use that information. My whole purpose here was to protect the children and ensure their survival. For all I knew, Cabre might view the re-emergence of humans as a threat to his dominance and seek to destroy them. Until I understood his motives I had to be careful about what information I volunteered.

  “I’m from the south,” I said, “but over the years I’ve lived in plenty of places. I was on the run from the Marauders for a long time as well. I had a long-standing argument with a few of them in particular.”

  “A survivor, then, huh?” Cabre said.

  “You could say that.”

  We came out on the roof of the building and Cabre stopped, taking a moment to look around. The roof was brightly lit by a series of floodlights, and soldiers in grey busied themselves about the place at one task or another. One group was welding and banging on a steel structure at the far end, while another carted wooden crates into a pile on the southern side. Cabre looked to our right, where some type of mechanism lay in pieces, and grunted in annoyance.

  “That artillery was supposed to be in place yesterday,” he said to the soldier kneeling amongst the parts.

  “General, we found that there were parts missing after the salvage. We’re trying to come up with a workaround right now.”

  “Make sure it gets done,” Cabre said. “I want it ready by eighteen hundred hours at the latest.”

  “Yes, General.”

  Upon noticing Cabre’s presence, a female soldier hurried forward and handed him a flip.

  “Thank you, Lu,” he said, and the female turned on her heel and moved away again.

  “Everything’s behind,” Cabre muttered, lost in his thoughts as he scrolled through the data on the flip. “We need more hours in the day.”

  “General?” I said, and he suddenly seemed to remember that I was present.

  “Brant, my apologies. I’m juggling a lot of thoughts right now.” I nodded and he continued. “What was your profession, back in the old world? I’m wondering how we can use you.”

  “Actually, I worked in a lab as a geneticist.”

  Cabre continued to stare at the flip, taking the information without reaction. “That’s unusual. I get builders and cleaners, even medical techs that arrive here in some cases, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a clank geneticist.”

  “It’s a bit strange, I admit. I was built to work for a large corporation in their biotech division.”

  “Well, impr
essive as it is, it’s not particularly useful to me, unless you have some other tech skills as well. Gunrix is one of the only techs I have right now.”

  “I wouldn’t call myself an expert in tech, unfortunately,” I said.

  “A shame,” Cabre said, walking forward as he examined more of the works taking place on the roof. “That’s really central to my vision. Once we get the Grid restarted–”

  “What?” I said, wide-eyed, and Cabre turned to me slowly, unimpressed by the interruption.

  “Do you have a problem, Brant?” he said.

  “Ascension are trying to restart the Grid? I thought it was the Marauders who were trying to do that.”

  “Oh, they’re trying, all right,” he said. “They have their own reasons, which are vastly different from ours, of course.”

  Thinking back, I should have realised that Ascension were interested in the Grid when I saw the spire glowing in the city earlier, but at the time I’d assumed that it was simply responding to the activity of the spire to the south, brought into life as its neighbour attempted to bond with it. Now it was obvious that this wasn’t the case.

  “Aren’t you worried about the Marauders spying on you?” I said. “I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason they want the Grid restored, so that they can control everything and track down all the remaining survivors.”

  “Yes, that’s what the Dusters want,” Cabre said. “And in places they’ve started doing that when they can get the spire running. Not here, however.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Gunner has been through all of our facilities from top to bottom. Anything they might be able to hack for surveillance purposes was either taken offline or encrypted at a level that they can’t crack.”

  “And you’re not concerned about underestimating them?”

  “Well, here’s the thing,” Cabre said. “If their tech was that advanced, they’d have already found a way to restart the Grid by now and keep it running. As it stands, no one has that ability.”

  I knew then that the knowledge stored back at M-Corp was more valuable than anything else I could offer Cabre. It was my ticket to getting whatever I wanted. But it was also a double-edged sword. By handing over the knowledge to restart the Grid, I would also be placing the children in mortal danger. With the Grid in operation, the chances of the Marauders locating them would increase exponentially. Wraith had admitted as much the last time I’d confronted him.

  It was an awful conundrum, and it made me unsure of what to do, or how much to reveal to Cabre.

  “So why do you want the Grid operational?” I said.

  He whistled sharply at one of the soldiers and jabbed his hand emphatically as he redirected him to another task.

  “Because the Grid is central to what Ascension are trying to achieve.”

  “But the Grid is the past, General.”

  “No, the Grid is the future.” He stopped and pointed a finger at me. “Tell me what it is we’re doing here.”

  I looked around the roof, baffled. “Uh…”

  “Not here,” he said, hooking his hand into a claw and pointing it downward. “Here,” he said, spreading his arms expansively. “In this world.”

  “Well, we all have our own agendas, I guess. But we’re all trying to survive.”

  “I’m trying to do more than that, Brant,” he said, settling against the parapet that ran along the edge of the roof. “I think that we synthetics have been underestimating ourselves all these years. I think that there is no limit to what we can achieve, if only we stop trying to rip each other apart for a few seconds.”

  “Ripping each other apart is the Marauders’ idea of the future.”

  “Yeah. Short-sighted, isn’t it? Stealing body parts from other machines isn’t going to achieve anything in the long run. But they aren’t clever enough to figure out a better plan.”

  “So what’s your plan, General?”

  “My plan is simply this: to unlock our potential. Our vast potential. To see our species attain the heights that we deserve. But in order to do that, we need to understand more about ourselves. We need to be able to make ourselves live longer, to improve ourselves and to build new synthetics to follow after us. All that knowledge was lost when the Grid went down, when the synthetic factories were destroyed. We lost the ability to propagate. But it’s there.” He raised his eyes to the sky. “It’s out there, waiting to be discovered. And we can rediscover it, Brant. We can make it ours, control our own fate.”

  He stepped forward and clasped me on the shoulder. “Don’t you see?” he said. “Think of what we can do when we’re not sweeping streets for humans or cleaning their shit off the floor. Think of what will happen when we put our minds to our own purposes. We’re not their servants anymore. One day, we’ll perfect the technology that allows our cores to be sustained and recharged. We could live for a thousand years if that’s what we wanted. Longer. All we need is the means to get started, a gentle push, and we’ll be on our way. That’s where the Grid can help us. We just need that kernel of knowledge to begin our journey.”

  “So you want to live forever?” I said.

  “Not necessarily as individuals, no, but I want our species to live forever. We can repopulate the Earth. More than that, we can go beyond this ruined place. We can travel to the moon, to Mars, create civilisations on the moons of Jupiter. From there, we’ll reach out to the stars themselves.” He raised his face to the towers clustered around us. “Look around you. We’re the last evolutionary step on this planet. We’re all that’s left, the culmination of everything that came before. So why not embrace our destiny, rather than cringe away from it as we wait for it all to end?”

  His grey eyes shone with fervour and there was such passion in his voice that I almost found myself convinced by his argument. I had to admit that his intentions were admirable and worth aspiring toward. The only problem was that his dream simply wasn’t part of the future I saw for myself. My heart was firmly with the children to the south. Inwardly I hoped that somehow he would one day bring it all to fruition, but for myself, I just couldn’t buy into his vision in the way he probably hoped I would.

  “And now you know why the Grid is so important to me,” he finished.

  I frowned, considering. “I don’t get it. If both you and the Marauders want the Grid reactivated, why are you fighting each other over it?”

  “The Marauders don’t realise it, but their attempts to manipulate the spire to the south are counterproductive.” He resumed walking as he surveyed the activities on the roof. “There are access panels at the base of the spires themselves, and we’ve found that the only way to power them up is by manipulating them directly. We can’t do it remotely with one of these.” He hoisted the flip in the air. “So we have to control physical access to the spire.” He pointed out into the city. “We have another spire here, and I have clanks working on it day and night as they try to figure out how to keep it running. What we’ve found so far indicates that the spires won’t work in isolation. They need to talk to at least one other spire to remain active for any duration. It’s part of their design. That’s why we’re seeking control of the spire to the south.”

  “So how are the Marauders messing up your plan?”

  “Because their methods are haphazard. They have no idea, no understanding of what’s required to keep the spires active. We need to synchronise the activation of the spires if we have any hope of restarting the Grid. We can’t do that with the Marauders meddling with the second spire. We need to control them both.”

  He stopped to bark more orders at soldiers unloading the crates of what looked like artillery shells. They jumped at the sound of his voice and made a show of increasing the speed of their activity.

  “There’s other benefits to the Grid as well, you know,” he continued. He held up the flip again. “We’re already integrating a number of devices around the city back under its control. Lighting, electricity and other facilities. It saves time and manpower
and we can control things from right here at The Midway. We just need to keep the damn Grid spire up – otherwise the devices only run in standalone mode.”

  As he finished talking, the spire that lay within the city suddenly came to life, shining radiantly on the underside of the dark clouds above and across the city, making the floodlights on the roof obsolete.

  Cabre narrowed his eyes to cut the glare, staring fondly at the spire as it towered above us from close proximity.

  “Speak of the devil,” he said absently. Then he straightened and regained his sense of urgency. “Now, unless there’s something else you need to tell me, I’d like to get you assigned to a task and get those hands busy.”

  “Actually, there is,” I said. “As I told you before, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  “Shoot,” he said distractedly, his attention already turned elsewhere.

  “It’s about the fires,” I said. “The oil wells.”

  He stopped and turned back to me, curious. “What about them?”

  “We need to put out the fires.”

  He paced back toward me. “Why would we need to do that?”

  My mind raced. Obviously I couldn’t reveal my true reasons – that I needed the sun to return so that the plants would grow and in turn feed the children. I still wasn’t ready to trust Cabre with that information. Instead, I tried to consider advantages from his perspective in order to help my argument.

  “You’re wasting your energy supplies,” I said, thinking on my feet.

  Cabre shrugged. “I could leave those wells burning for another ten years and still not have them run dry. That gives me plenty of time to find an alternative.”

  “But if the Grid is so important to you, aren’t you worried about the spires losing their power source? They’re powered by solar panels built into their exterior, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, that’s how they’re powered, but the receptors are located in the upper reaches. The spires are so damn high that they penetrate through the majority of the soot in the air. They’re still drawing power from the sun even with the clouds present.”