as ever.
Orbital kinetics. No other explanation presented itself. That was even weirder than a nuke. And why anyone would bother to target an unoccupied rockhopper off in the wilderness was a question he could not even begin to answer.
A particularly baroque assassination attempt, perhaps? He’d always avoided politics, both the official kind intertwined with the Polity’s governance, and the unofficial kind among the Howards themselves. That particular stupidity was the shortest path to murder, in Ask’s opinion.
As a result of the strike on the aircar, the power pack was fractured unto death and being mildly toxic about its fate. Nothing his reinforced metabolism couldn’t handle for a while, but he probably shouldn’t hang around too long. As a result of the neutrino bursts, or more to the point, whatever had created them, every independent battery or power source in his equipment was fried, too.
Someone had been annoyingly thorough.
He finally found three slim Class II batteries in a shielded sample container. They lit up the passive test probe Ask had pulled out of one of the tool boxes, but wouldn’t be good for much more than powering a small handlight or some short-range comm.
The way things were going, carrying any power source around seemed like a bad idea. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do much about the electronics in his skull, except to hope they were sufficiently low power to avoid drawing undue attention.
As for the batteries, he settled for stashing them with the surviving campsite equipment he’d left back in the caves with the last working sensor suite. He retrieved what little of his gear was not actively wired—mostly protective clothing and his sleeping bag—and went back out to survey his route down out of these mountains. His emergency evac route had been almost due west, to a place he’d never visited called the Shindaiwa Valley. A two- hour rockhopper flight over rough terrain could be weeks of walking.
Not to mention which, a man had to eat along the way. Even, or perhaps especially, if that man was a Howard.
Ask toiled across an apron of scree leading to a round-shoulder ridge. He was switchbacking his way upward. Dust and grit caked his nose and mouth, the sharp smell of rock and the acrid odor of tiny plants crushed beneath his boots.
Had the formation been interrupted, it would have been a butte, but this wall ran for kilometers in both directions. The broken range of hills rising behind him had dumped him into the long, narrow valley that ran entirely athwart his intended line of progress.
Over two weeks of walking since he’d left the rockhopper behind. That was a long way on foot. Time didn’t bother Ask. Neither did distance. But the ridiculousness of combining the two on foot seemed sharply ironic. He’d not walked so much since his childhood in Tasmania. Redghost was not the Earth of eight hundred years ago.
At least he’d been out in the temperate latitudes in this hemisphere’s springtime—the weather for this journey would have been fatally unpleasant at other times and places on this planet.
He had no direct way to measure the radiation levels, but presumed from the lack of any symptoms on his part that they had held level or dropped over the time since what he now thought of as Day Zero. His Howard- enhanced immune system would handle the longer-term issues of radiation exposure as it had for the past centuries—that was not a significant concern.
Likewise he had no way to sample the comm spectra, as he’d left all his powered devices behind. But since he had not seen a single contrail or overflight in the past two weeks, he wasn’t optimistic there, either. The night sky, by contrast, had been something of a light show. Either Redghost was experiencing an extended and unforecasted meteor shower or a lot of space junk was de-orbiting.
The admittedly minimal evidence did not point to any favorable outcome.
Those worries aside, the worst part of his walk had been the food and water. He’d crammed his daypack with energy bars before leaving the rockhopper, but that was a decidedly finite nutritional reserve. Not even his Howard-enhanced strength and endurance could carry sufficient water for more than a few days while traveling afoot. Those same enhancements roughly doubled his daily calorie requirements over baseline human norms.
Which meant he’d eaten a lot of runner cactus, spent several hours a day catching skinks and the little sandlion insect-analogs they preyed on, and dug for water over and over, until his hands developed calluses.
Two hundred kilometers of walking to cross perhaps a hundred and twenty kilometers of straight line vector. On flat ground with a sag wagon following, Ask figured he could have covered this distance in less than four full days.
The scree shifted beneath him. Ask almost danced over the rolling rocks, wary of a sprained or broken ankle. When injured he healed magnificently well, but he could not afford to be trapped in one place for long. Especially not in one place with so few prospects for food or water as this slope.
The cliffs towered above him. The rock was rotten, an old basalt dike with interposed ash layers that quickly—in a geological sense—surrendered to the elements so that the material sheered away in massive flakes the size of landing shuttles. That left a wonderfully irregular face for him to climb when he topped the scree slope. It also left an amazingly dangerous selection of finger- and toe-holds.
On the other side of this ridge was the wide riparian valley of the Shindaiwa River, settled thickly by rural Redghost standards with farmland, sheep ranches and some purely nonfunctional estates. Drainage from rain and snowpack higher up the watershed to the north kept the valley lush even in this drier region in the rain shadow of the Monomoku Mountains further to the west.
All he had to do was climb this ridge, cross over it, and scramble down the other side. And he’d find… People? Ruins?
Ask didn’t want to think too hard about that. He couldn’t think about anything else. So he kept climbing.
The river was still there. He tried to convince himself that this was at least a plus.
The ridgeline gave an excellent view of the Shindaiwa Valley. Though nothing curled with the smoke of destruction, he also had an excellent view of a number of fire scars where structures had burned. There seemed to be a fair amount of dead livestock as well. A lot more animals still wandered in fenced pastures.
Nothing human moved. No boats on the river. No vehicles on the thin skein of roads. The railroad tracks leading south toward Port Schumann and the shores of the Eniewetok Sea were empty. No smoke from fireplaces or brush burning. No winking lights for navigation, warning or welcome.
Even from his height and distance, Ask could see what had become of the hand of man in this place.
He had to look. At a minimum, he had to find food. Most of the structures were standing. The idea of looting the houses of the dead for food distressed him. The idea of starving distressed him more.
He didn’t reach the first farmhouse until evening’s dusk. Ask would have strongly preferred to do his breaking and entering in broad daylight, but another night of hunger out in the open seemed foolish with the building right in front of him. A tall fieldstone foundation was topped by two stories of brightly painted wooden house that would not have looked out of place on one of the wealthier neighboring farms of his youth.
Ask wasn’t sure if this was a deliberate revival of an ancient fashion of building, or a sort of architectural version of parallel evolution.
Chickens clucked and fussed in the yard with the beady-eyed paranoia of birds. Some had already climbed into the spreading bush that seemed to be their roost, others were hunting for some last bit of whatever the hell it was chickens ate.
Beyond the house, a forlorn flock of sheep pressed against the fenced boundary of a pasture, bleating at him. He had no idea what they wanted, but they looked pretty scraggly. A number of them were dead, grubby bodies scattered in the grass.
Water, he realized, seeing the churned up earth around a metal trough. They were dying of thirst.
Ask walked around the house to see if the trough could be refilled. He found the line poking up out of the soil, and the tap that controlled it. Turning that on did nothing, however.
He sighed and unlatched the gate. “River’s over there, guys,” Ask said, his voice a croak. He realized he hadn’t spoken aloud in the two weeks he’d been walking.
