Kyle West - Extinction

Skyhome brightened, dimmed, brightened again.

“That’s weird,” I said.

We continued watching Skyhome — over time, its brightness dimmed.

“What’s happening to it?” Anna asked.

“A trick of the light, maybe.”

Even though I said that, I suddenly got a very bad feeling.

“Come on. We need to find the others.”

We grabbed all our things and ran along the beach, back to the shoreline on the other side of the promontory. As we ran, Skyhome brightened, soon followed by falling streaks of light, streaming downward from above.

“What’s happening?” Anna asked, horrified. “It’s gone, isn’t it? Skyhome is gone!”

I looked up at the sky again — where once there had been one bright point of light, there were now two.

We reached the hill — the pavilion was no longer there, but Perseus was. Michael ran down the hill, as if coming out to meet us.

“Michael!” I said. “What’s going on?”

He stopped at the edge of the beach, staring upward as if he didn’t believe his eyes.

“Skyhome’s gone,” he said.

Dozens of lights streaked from the sky — pieces of the former sky city burning as they entered the atmosphere. I thought of all those people up there, how I had been there just two days before.

“We need to get everyone inside Perseus,” I said. “Is everyone still here? Did someone let Ashton know?”

Michael didn’t answer. From his silence, I knew something was wrong.

Ashton had been up there.

At first, we didn’t know how Skyhome fell, whether it was a chance collision with a stray piece of debris or rock, or something more nefarious. We knew it had to be something big, because the space city had torn in half.

Ashton had been up there, managing some business related to the sky city, when it was struck. Augustus had allowed him to use Orion to get up there.

Makara decided to go into space to survey the damage. Such a suggestion was dangerous — the amount of debris generated by Skyhome ripping apart would be huge. Makara thought there might be some clue about what had happened to Skyhome, and there was the possibility that Ashton had survived aboard the Orion.

If Ashton was gone, I didn’t know what we’d do.

Perseus broke through the upper atmosphere, and when we achieved orbit gravity loosened its hold. Everyone sat positioned in the bridge; Anna and I had to share a seat in order to give everyone else enough space to sit.

“Orion,” Makara began, for at least the sixth time. “Do you have a copy?”

She repeated this for the next five minutes as we orbited around Earth. At long last, the shattered remains of Skyhome came into view above the blue curve of the planet. Most of the colony was gone, burned in the atmosphere below. Only broken chunks were left behind

“Orion.” Makara’s voice had thickened. “Do you have a copy? This is Makara. This is Perseus. If anyone is alive out there…please respond.”

Silence was our only answer. Shredded metal and plastic swirled in a deadly, zero-g dance. Small remnants of the former city burned upon reentry above a blue-shining ocean.

Everyone was dead, destroyed in a single instant. It could have been an impact, but I knew the truth.

It was Askala.

“How did they get up here?” Anna asked.

No one answered, because no one knew. Maybe they had shot something. Was that beyond their capabilities? There were too many questions, too few answers.

“Can we track Orion?” Samuel asked. “Maybe they got out…”

“Orion had no tracker,” Michael said. “Sparks removed it.”

That was that, then. The only sliver of hope we had was that Ashton had escaped on Orion. If he had done so, he would have contacted us by now. We had no way to track him, so we could only assume the worst.

“Doesn’t Skyhome have escape pods?” Anna asked.

“Yes,” Makara said. “They would be on the surface by now. We’d have to search out their radio signal, and I have no idea what that signal would be.”

“Only Ashton would know that,” Anna said.

In the space of two days, my world had turned upside down. The Wanderer, dead. Now, Ashton was gone, too.

“He was a good man,” Samuel said. “Wise. Knowledgeable. He knew so much, not just about our mission and the xenovirus, but about life.”

To my side, Anna’s eyes watered with tears. Makara clenched a fist, no longer controlling the spacecraft.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

The bridge was quiet for a whole minute. There was no sound, no feeling but the shock. The idea of Ashton’s being dead was unimaginable.

“Sometimes, you lose someone so important,” Makara said, “so vital, that you wonder how you’re ever going to go on.” She wiped her eyes, and took up the controls. “That’s when you have to go on.” She nodded to Anna. “Get Augustus on the line. He needs to know.”

With shaking fingers, Anna opened the frequency.

“Augustus. You there?”

The Emperor responded shortly.

“If this is about the old man, he’s here in Nova Roma at the hospital.”

Everyone in the bridge started.

“What?” Makara yelled. “Why didn’t you call, you stupid…”

“There is no time for banalities,” Augustus said. “Please see that you come to the Imperial City within the next hour. His wounds are grievous. My surgeons are doing all they can, but he may not last the night.”

“Alright,” Makara said. “We’ll be there soon.”

“Park in Central Square,” he said. “And hurry.”

We left the shattered space city behind and ducked into the atmosphere.

We made landing in Central Square around midnight. Also parked in the square was the Orion, surrounded by the curious citizens of the Empire’s capital. Imperial soldiers kept the peace by holding the crowds back, also clearing space for our landing.

When Perseus touched down, everyone rushed off-ship, Makara taking the lead. We entered the warm night and were greeted by the pressing crowd. I didn’t understand why the crowd was so agitated, until I noticed that some of the buildings were in ruins.

Nova Roma, of course, had not recovered from the attack of dragons and crawlers it had suffered a few weeks prior. The people were obviously scared and in need of a leader — but Augustus was preoccupied with Ashton — Ashton, who could very well die, if he wasn’t already dead. We’d have no idea how bad it was until we got there.

“Come on,” Makara said.

She broke through the crowd, and people shouted questions at us in Spanish. Eventually, the crowd made way, and several of the soldiers pointed in the direction of the hospital. We knew the way from our time here before. Julian, along with Makara, led the rest of us onward.

We ran through the streets. Within a few minutes and various twists and turns, we found ourselves on the lawn in front of the hospital. The building looked rougher than the last time we’d seen it; several of the first-floor windows were shattered, their curtains billowing in the breeze. An entire corner in the northern section had crumbled, creating a cascade of rubble that buried the drive leading from the front doors. Perhaps a dragon had pummeled into it. Despite this, a few windows were lit on the second floor.

“There,” Makara said.

We ran inside the building. As we burst through the automatic doors, stuck open, a short woman behind the entry desk regarded us with widened eyes. We ignored her and found a stairwell down the right-hand hallway. Black and purple blood was still caked on the walls from our fight with the crawlers. There hadn’t been time for anyone to clean up the mess we’d made.