Кейт Форсит - Relics, Wrecks and Ruins - Anthology of Speculative Fiction Short Works

“First things first,” she says. “Need to get out to that wrecked plane.”

“Plane’s fucked,” he says.

“Doesn’t matter.”

She takes the lead. He dawdles, kicking stones and bits of metal. Not listening, but she’s still talking, banging on about not being where she thought she was.

“Think I’ve figured out this place,” she tells him. “One of those off-the-grid white elephants knocked up during the decade of big fire. A relic of the New Cold War—the kind that doesn’t make it into history books. Back then they did what they had to do to make up budget deficits. Sold off slabs of useless, barren land to any bastards keen to pay for it.”

Darkness falling, chill nipping at his bones.

“Drug lords, terrorists… Wouldn’t get away with that today, of course—Jesus. Where did all this twisted metal come from?”

“Rockets,” he tells her.

She trips and swears but rights herself. “Well, I suppose there could be old space hardware. Ancient British missiles. Black Knights and Blue Steel… that sort of thing. Brits used to test their nukes out here—did you know that? Early days of the space race and all that.”

No point in arguing. He pushes on and reaches the smashed-up Hercules ahead of her. Doesn’t look like much in the fading light.

“All right, this is far enough. Now we get to work,” she says, short of breath, swigs on the canteen again. “Find me a bunch of fist-sized stones and scraps of metal.”

He watches Jude trace huge numbers and letters in the sandy dirt with a stick.

“My tag,” she tells him, smugly. “Kind of like a secret code. Military algorithms will pick it up via satellite, even if my ministry has written me off for dead. Which they might well have done—a month spells a long time in politics, let alone kidnapping. I’m heavily insured, so someone will be pushing for a rescue once my tag is scanned and verified…”

Kanye’s only half listening and he doesn’t look up and he most definitely doesn’t glance to the place where that train was heading. He slams down rock after rock in draining light as another explosion shakes the camp behind them.

His dad will fix it… his dad should have fixed it… his mum should never have left in that Hercules. If she’d stayed, his dad would never have got so angry. He’d never have shot the plane out of the sky.

“So, I’m guessing you grew up in all this junk,” says Jude as she places rocks inside the letters.

He doesn’t answer.

“Kanye, what’s your dad been doing out here?”

He shakes his head too vigorously, stares at the ground and not her face. Walks away to collect another rock.

“He’s been taking care of you—that’s something. Loads of kids out there with no mums and dads”

Kanye slams his rock down hard.

“Why don’t you tell me about the trains? Where they’re from and where they’re going? Gotta say, I’m surprised to find a functional line out here.”

He stares into darkness. “Used to run through regular. Locked up tight, never stop, just push on through.” He slams another rock down on the line.

She places one not far away from his.

“We used to try and guess what was inside,” he continues. “Food and stuff, ya know. Good stuff from the coast, maybe. Kind of stuff used to drop out of the sky.” He pauses to relive the memory. “Everything was different when I was a kid. Better—ya know?”

Jude nods. “Oh yeah, you got that right.”

He searches for another rock.

“So, what happened? You followed the train?”

Kanye nods. Clutching a rock, he flicks his gaze in the direction of the tracks.

“And?”

He smashes the rock down, straightens, dusts his hands on his pants. Swallows. “Astronauts making people push yellow barrels into the ground. Cranes swinging big blocks of cement.”

“Astronauts? Are you sure?”

“In space suits. Like on TV.” Shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear it. “People off those trains were sick. Infected or something. Astronauts kicked ’em over the edge, down there into the pit with all the barrels.”

Jude’s been hanging on every word, a rock gripped tightly in her hand. She drops it, rummages through the big coat’s pockets. Pulls out a torch, slaps it against her palm a few times to get it going.

“I was saving this until we really need it, but… oh my god…” The beam cuts through darkness, moving as she moves. “Jesus… Kanye, those big shapes over there. They aren’t junked planes or old British rockets.”

She hurries from one mess of metal to the next, like she’s looking for something specific. “These look like Dongfeng ICBMs, Kanye. They’re not ours—and they definitely shouldn’t be here. None of this should be here.”

She kills the beam and backs away from the missiles. Stares up at the night sky, as if it might hold answers to her questions.

“My dad says…” His words are drowned out by a rising rumble loud enough to shake the ground. Wind tears at their hair and clothing as a long, cold shadow falls across their faces.

The moon hovers, impossibly big and low. Through streaming tears, Kanye’s vision skews. Not the moon, but the underbelly of a Hercules. Smudgy images dance across its surface. All gray and white, like dead TV static.

Jude is laughing, waving and jumping, but he can’t hear anything she’s saying. He clutches the gun against his chest. His lucky boots are white with churned up sand.

Because the Hercules is not a Hercules—it’s a Chinook with tandem rotors, bright lights flooding stronger than the sun. Sets down and the back end opens, spills astronauts pointing guns and barking orders.

Jude is screaming. Kanye backs up until he’s pressed against the broken plane that holds his mum’s burned bones. And it’s not his uncle’s Smith & Wesson clutched against his chest at all, but the plastic Hercules stuffed with special treasures: the seashell, feathers, lipstick, unknown soldiers and faded photo all tossed, tumbled and mashed against each other.

Aracai rose to the surface as the fishing boat sped away, motors whining softly. The surface of the Atlantic was dimpled with waves that lapped softly, as if the sea were slightly perturbed. The stars shone so brightly they throbbed, and the moon was in its dark phase, but light from the Arab colonies there created a bright band that slashed across the moon’s equator like a gathering of rogue stars.

He dove beneath the water and followed the backpack dropped by Escalas’s contact twenty meters to the ocean floor. The sea here was alive with sounds—the crackling of snapping shrimp, the eerie bellow of a grouper, the chiming sounds of baitfish. Though the sea was dark, Aracai’s night vision was excellent. He’d been engineered to see in infrared, so many creatures seemed to emit a soft glow.

He followed the backpack down to a place where rocks were covered in splotches of anemones and starfish, all gray shapes in the night, and began circling it, swimming on his side, watching it as if it were some strange creature that he dare not approach.

He made a soft whistle, “Here,” and in moments two more mer swam up, hugging the sand. Like Aracai, they were both nude. Dulce, his young wife, had hair of amber, and his… mentor, an old mer named Escalas, whose streaming white hair was held back by the silver circlet of the mindlink around his head, swam near and circled the backpack, too, but he did not watch the pack. Instead, he swam on his side, deep-set eyes watching Aracai.

He knows what is in the pack, Aracai thought. That’s why he brought us here. And now he is waiting for me to pick it up…