Читать книгу Shattered Roads - Alice Henderson - Страница 9

Chapter 3

H124’s feet thrashed inside the hole until they found a stable spot on the rubble. Slowly she lowered her full weight onto it. With only her head above the floor of the deceased man’s living pod, she glanced one more time toward the hole at the end of the hallway. Nothing had changed.

She turned away, aiming her light down into the black. The rubble angled downward, so she slid and stumbled her way to the base of the pile, reaching a sloping floor. Dust motes hung in the air, and a thick blanket of gray covered strange rectangular shapes around the room. Stopping to listen for any sounds above, she stared up through the hole. Then she turned, playing her light over the shapes. A large desk stood against one wall with a chair in front of it. Two items sat on top of the desk. She brushed the thick layer of dust off them. The larger one was a plastic box with black glass on one side. In front of it lay a flat plastic rectangle with buttons. Each button had a letter on it, along with some other symbols she didn’t recognize. As she moved around the room, her light dancing over more strange shapes, the headlamp’s beam fell on a door. Another room? She rushed to the door. It had no theta wave receiver. She pushed against it, and it swung open, revealing another room beyond. This one held a number of large tables, each with its own sink. Posters hung on the walls. She studied each one, but she couldn’t make sense of them. One showed a series of color-coded squares with letters and numbers in them: Ag 47. He 2. C 6. Most of the poster was ripped, decaying, pieces of it lying on the floor. Another showed a diagram of a circular object with smaller circles surrounding it.

She couldn’t believe it when her light fell on yet another door. The hole in the floor hadn’t simply led to another room. This was vast. She was sure she was under one of the adjoining pods. The whole living unit building had been built on the ruins of some other structure. The place was ancient. Of that much she was sure. It smelled old, musty. She walked up to one of the large tables and wiped away dust. Glancing back at the mysterious posters, she walked across the room. A glass case on the far wall held small silver rocks. They weren’t like the landscaping rocks outside of the living pod units. These were shiny, metallic-looking. She reached inside and picked one up, finding it unusually heavy. Uneasy, she slipped it inside her pocket.

Even stranger shapes lay enshrouded in dust on a table along another wall. She brushed them off, finding equipment of some kind, but she had no idea what it was. She’d never seen anything like it, bizarre tubes of glass and metal with knobs and dials. She wondered if they powered on, so she sent theta wave signals to them. They didn’t respond. She touched the pieces, finding them clunky.

She passed into the next room. Shivering in the damp, she noticed signs and drawings covering the walls. Another desk sat against the far wall with the same ancient equipment sitting under a layer of dust, a tall black rectangle standing on its end, and a bigger rectangle on a stand of some sort. Shelves stood on either side of the old desk, filled with peculiar objects. She walked to one of the walls, her feet kicking up dust. She coughed. The signs on the wall were very thin, tacked there with rusted metal pins. She recognized letters on the page, but didn’t understand most of the words. One sign focused on an image of a huge rock pocked with holes. She walked along the wall, taking in the images when she couldn’t make out the words. The next showed a destroyed building with a massive pit next to it. An inset image showed another giant rock with a burned crust. The next few signs held images of fires consuming city blocks. She tried to read the writing beneath the images, but other than building, fire, and fell, she didn’t understand them. She’d never seen so many different words in her life. Some of them were so long, an archaic form of English. Her written instructions always came to her in abbreviated format, like today: Crps clnp bldg A pod 25. These words were long, clustered together in dense sections.

Suddenly the beeping noise returned, louder than ever. She was in the room with it. She snapped her head toward the ancient desk. A tiny red light glowed. Quickly she moved to it, afraid someone above would hear her. The beeping came from one of two little boxes next to the bigger rectangles. She sent it a theta wave command to lower its volume, but nothing happened. Then she sent an off signal, to no avail. Finally she sought out the red light, finding a dial on one of the little boxes, which she tried to push, but ultimately twisted. The beeping grew much quieter, then with a click, it went away entirely. She turned it back on, leaving the volume very low. She felt along the bigger rectangle with the glass, finding a small button. She pushed it, and it began to glow beneath the dust. Wiping it off with her sleeve, she found a blank blue square staring back at her. It was a screen, she realized—an ancient one. It didn’t hover in the air, but glowed outward from the sheet of glass, held within a plastic casing.

She moved her hands over the upright rectangle next to it, feeling for another button. She found one and pushed it. Something hummed, then the sound of a small fan filled the silence. In a few moments, the screen showed symbols, circles.

She couldn’t believe the equipment could still be turned on. But she knew the whole building had been nuclear powered for a long time. She didn’t know for how long, only that the maintenance crew for the power plant had tales going back generations. This thing must still be plugged into that power source.

The words Sentry System appeared at the top of the screen. Below them was a bright yellow circle. The third dot read Earth. She’d heard an old man in the laundry facility once talk about how there were more planets than theirs, perhaps as many as nine. But this diagram showed smaller objects among the planets. Three of them were flashing red and black, two small dots followed by a very big one. As she stared at the moving diagram, the flashing triad moved ever closer to Earth, crossing into its orbit. The three smaller dots collided with Earth. A series of numbers flashed across the screen: Fragment 1: 3.7 km. 0.00002 lunar distance. COLLISION CERTAIN. Torino Scale 9. Regional Damage. Fragment 2: 3.2 km. 0.00031 lunar distance. COLLISION CERTAIN. Torino Scale 8. Regional Damage. Fragment 3: 942 m. 0.00014 lunar distance. COLLISION CERTAIN. Torino Scale 8. Regional Damage.

The animation continued. The big dot missed the earth and continued its loop around the sun. It wheeled around, repeating its orbit. Once again it entered Earth’s trajectory, but this time they collided. A series of numbers read: Main asteroid: 9.2 km. 0.00011 lunar distance. COLLISION CERTAIN. Torino Scale 10. Global Climatic Catastrophe.

The diagram changed now, zooming in to the little dot that was Earth. As the detail increased, drawn outlines appeared on the earth, forming different shapes. She thought they might be the profiles of the lands. Then the animation showed exactly where the first two fragments would hit. A large portion of one of the landmasses bloomed red. Then she saw where the main object would strike on its next swing around the earth. As it struck the planet, a red circle bloomed out from the area of impact. It swept outward, covering the entire earth.

She looked at the dates on the collisions. The first fragment was due to hit in two months, the main asteroid the next time it swung around the sun. She brushed off a lump in the dust, finding a plastic oval with two buttons. A wire ran out from it, plugging into the upright metal box. She clicked on one of the buttons, and the diagram with the circles vanished. The beeping stopped at once. She stared at a black screen with a blue icon that read Previous Impact. When she moved the oval, an arrow moved on the screen. She clicked on the icon, and several small images appeared. She hovered over one of them, then clicked the button again. Something new filled the screen: a movie. It was just like the videos she could create on her personal recording device, but instead of emanating on a floating display as it did on her PRD, it appeared on the glass screen itself.

A woman was standing before a burning building, smoke billowing upward, the sky filled with black ash. The woman’s voice came from the beeping device: “Since the catastrophic disaster on the mining asteroid Free Enterprise was first reported, we have been dreading this day. As underfunded government space agencies raced unsuccessfully to prevent the impacts, this nightmare has become a reality. Several fragments of the asteroid have landed here in Chicago, destroying a huge part of the downtown area. Residents have evacuated as more debris is expected to fall. Critics blame the current administration for not granting NASA enough funding to track near-Earth objects.”

H124 could hear strange wailing noises in the background, mechanical and haunting. Flashing lights reflected off the building, and she could hear people screaming.

“More fragments fell north of this location, causing a factory to catch fire and burn down several city blocks.”

The movie finished.

She clicked the little button on the hand device, and the video played again. Now she clicked on a different image on the screen. Another movie opened. A man stood in front of more burning wreckage, the blackened shell of a building behind him. She heard his voice coming through and adjusted the small dial so it would be quieter. “The fourth of the huge fragments has devastated downtown Chicago,” he said. “These are just small parts of the asteroid that have broken off after the catastrophic disaster on Free Enterprise. Scientists at NASA are now saying that the asteroid and its remaining fragments, far larger than the ones that have crashed here, have been knocked into an unknown orbit. NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab will have to calculate their new trajectory before we know if these disastrous pieces of space rock will endanger our planet in the future. Though from what we’ve been told by our Washington, D.C. affiliate, while this has certainly been a devastating day for the city of Chicago, scientists have at least eighty years—possibly as long as two hundred and thirty-two—before the main asteroid and its larger fragments pass this close again.”

The movie stopped, and she watched it again. She didn’t understand a lot of the words the man and the woman had said. Chicago? Asteroid? NASA? Washington?

She clicked on the other image, and the animation opened again, showing the orbits of the planets and the flashing dots. She now knew what she was looking at. Those eighty years—or two hundred and thirty-two—had elapsed, and these things were coming fast.

She whipped out her personal recording device. The room’s technology was so old that she couldn’t find a way to pair her PRD with the screen itself, so she had to settle for just using her camera. She filmed the animation, then the two movies.

Plugged into the upright machine was a small metal-and-plastic device. It glowed along one side. She found several more in one of the drawers. On one end of each device was a shiny metal plug. She grabbed all of them and pulled the other one out of the machine. Something beeped when she did. In the drawers beneath the little devices was a small binder full of gleaming discs. She put that in her bag as well.

She was just figuring out how to detach the machine itself when she heard shuffling on the floor above. She froze. She guessed that someone was coming down the hallway that led to the dead man’s living pod. Only two people would use that hallway: another cleaner or one of her employers. Maybe they were checking up on her progress. If they found her down here . . . She shuddered. She slung her bag over her shoulder and raced through the doorways back the way she’d come.