Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I.

  ‘Earth, before the war.’

   In the dream she was always standing in the middle of the busy sidewalk. People were everywhere and nobody paid attention to her as they walked by. The office buildings stood tall and unscathed in their old glory.

  ‘New York, before I was born. A place I’ve only seen pictures of.’

  The dream felt real every time nevertheless. Lora was wearing civilian clothes and aviator sunglasses; she was just one member of the casual crowd on a sunny afternoon. Lora was turning around, searching and soon she spotted him. It was a man in his early thirties, with brown hair and grey eyes. He stood tall in the crowd, looking at Lora with a reserved, familiar smile on his face.

  ‘I know you, but we’ve never met. I’m with you, but I don’t know your name. I know I’m dreaming, but it feels like more than that. It feels like a memory.’

  They were standing there a few steps apart, two islands in the constant flow of people. He was smiling and Lora smiled too.

  ‘How can that be?’

II.

  March 14^th, 2077.

  Lora sat up in the bed. The bedroom of the sky tower was filled by the bright light of the morning sun and through the large, wall-to-wall windows she saw the clouds, which surrounded the habitat like a lush garden. Five years had passed since the mandatory memory wipe and she was still haunted by these dreams – by the visions of a long gone world and of a man she had no recollection of ever meeting with.

  The deep blue silk bed sheet felt hot against her skin. She looked to the side; her partner opened his eyes and they smiled at each other. He was not the man from the dream; Kevin Flynn and she had been assigned together. He, just as Lora, was in his early thirties. In two weeks their mission would be finished and they would join the others. The memory wipe was meant to be irreversible, but Lora hoped to get answers to her questions once they left Earth behind for good.

  They both got out of bed and began getting ready for yet another workday. She looked at the small, framed photograph on the nightstand; it was a picture of Flynn and her. The photo must have been taken before this mission, because they were both younger and they were wearing different uniforms; in the picture Flynn was looking into the camera and Lora was leaning close to his face as if they were about to share a kiss. She had no memories of this scene, but it was the proof that they had a history prior to the mission. And of course they worked well together, but there were questions that Lora asked and he did not; things she wondered about and he would not.

  He was still on the treadmill when Lora came out from the shower and she went to the window. The remains of the Moon rose above the clouds and even though Lora had seen it a thousand times by now, it still captured her attention. The once round celestial object was now broken up to one larger and a smaller piece, surrounded by debris. The exposed core of the main piece was still glowing, decades after the explosion. The formation of a ring similar to the one of Saturn had already begun as the gravity of Earth was pulling the destroyed rock further apart. It had been half a century since the Scavengers had destroyed the Moon. Forced to leave their own dying planet, this alien race had come to take Earth. Without the Moon the Earth was thrown into chaos. Earthquakes toppled cities within hours. Tsunamis wiped out what remained. Then came the invasion. Humanity did what they had to do; they used the nukes. People won the war, but lost the planet, as it was left contaminated by the total nuclear war: most of it was now uninhabitable. What remained of humanity, had to leave the Earth. They built the MCP, the Mission Control. It was a temporary space station, before the migration to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Everyone was there now… almost everyone.

  Lora looked at the clouds. The MCP, this tetrahedral space station was orbiting Earth and it was yet to rise above the horizon. They had no contact with the people on the space station other than the Mission Control, but Lora was hoping to find her family and maybe old friends up there, even if they would be strangers to her in the beginning.

  But until their tour was complete, Lora and Flynn were there to do their job. They protected the hydro rigs, which converted Earth’s sea water into fusion energy for the new colony. The survival of humanity depended on this.

  “Coffee is ready,” he said and Lora smiled. She turned around and joined him at the table. They could not harvest anything from the ground below, because of the possible contamination and their food was rehydrated, pre-packaged meal portions. He did not have to work hard to put the breakfast on the table, but the gesture he made on a daily basis turned the sky tower into a home rather than a mere workstation and Lora appreciated it. She picked up the coffee mug and Flynn took a sip from his tea. With a piece of cereal bar in his hand, Flynn leaned over the table, which doubled as a computer screen. A video was playing there, recorded by the drones during the night before. Remnants of the Scavenger army continued to disrupt the operation; they attacked the drones at night and tried to kill Lora during the day when she was working on the ground. On the recording they could see a Scavenger through the night vision of the drone; the creature was strange, four-legged with talons. Lora had never seen one with her own eyes. There was still fight in the aliens, but she did not know why. They had long lost their technology they must have had when they had destroyed the Moon and their space vessel was gone too, maybe lost during the war. Flynn frowned over the recording, well knowing that in a few minutes Lora would leave and go down to spend one more day in the crosshairs of the Scavengers. To distract him she leaned over and took a bite from the cereal bar he was holding.

  “Thank you for the coffee,” Lora said and she went to get dressed. On the level below their living area there was her playground. Lora handled drone maintenance; here she kept her tools, guns and armored uniforms. There was also a disabled drone, awaiting for parts: it was a large, dark orb sitting there silently. The drones watched everything and it was the question of life and death to keep them operational. Flynn was Lora’s communication officer; he kept an eye on her. Mission said they were doing well; that they were an effective team. Flynn could not wait to go and leave Earth; Lora was not so sure, she was thinking as she got into her light grey uniform. She checked her handgun to make sure it was fully loaded and then put it in its holster and then she did the same with the long rifle before securing it against her back. She went upstairs and said goodbye to Flynn, who was about to start his shift in the office on the upper level of the habitat. Then she went to the enforced glass door and opened it, stepping out to the bridge which led to her Bubbleship. The morning was crisp and the wind was strong; it riffled the water in the swimming pool under the bridge. Returning to her previous train of thoughts, Lora felt he could not shake the feeling that in spite of all that had happened, Earth was still her home.

  She crossed the bridge and went to the ship. It was an elegant, small aircraft, designed to carry two passengers and all the drone maintenance tools one would need. The ball shaped cabin, a capsule of enforced glass provided almost fully unobstructed view from the inside. She got in and sat in the pilot’s seat.

  “Lora Baines, Tech-49,” she said. The computer analyzed her voice; it was a security measure to prevent the ship from falling into the hands of the enemy. The machine beeped.

  ‘Tech-49 CONFIRMED’, appeared on the transparent glass ahead. She powered up the systems and fastened the seatbelt. She tested the pedals, the blades and flaps and the gun turrets. Everything appeared to be fully functional. Lora looked at the plastic bobblehead figurine which was standing on the control panel. She had found the toy years earlier on the ground and it was against the rules for her to keep it. The figurine might have represented somebody famous and it was holding some sort of musical instrument in his hand. It was nodding approvingly.

  “Morning, Bob,” she said, before turning on the radio between the ship and the communication tower. She saw Flynn sitting at his desk in the upstairs office. “Tower, comm check. Drone Maintenance Technician 49, hydro rig support. All Bubbleship systems are green. I’m good to go.”

  “Copy, Tech-49, you’re cleared,” Flynn said through the radio, looking at her. “Be careful out there.”

  “Always am,” Lora replied.

  “No, you’re not,” Flynn said skeptically.

  “Yeah, you are right,” Lora chuckled. “I gotta work on that.”

  The Bubbleship lifted up and it made a drop toward the ground along the slender metal foundation of the sky tower.

  “All right, MCP’s coming online in thirty seconds,” Flynn said in the radio. “Relaying hydro rig coordinates now. Confirm visual.”

  She was flying over the coast. She looked at the giant hydro rigs which were floating over the Atlantic Ocean. By design they were slightly similar to the tetrahedron of the MCP, and while enormous, these machines were still small compared to the space station. The hydro rigs were fully automated, with no human personnel on board.

  “I got’em,” Lora said. “Hydro rigs are sucking seawater. You got ‘em Bob?”

  The bobblehead was nodding with a wide smile on its face. It was no doubt to be an impeccable day.

  A drone flew into her field of vision.

  “Drone 185 looks good,” she said.

  “Lora, we’ve got two drones down,” Flynn said in the radio.

  “Shit,” Lora mumbled. Back in the days weeks would pass between incidents, but with time the Scavengers became bolder and bolder. Two drones down meant she had to land two times to perform maintenance in unsafe areas. Leaving the drones out for another night was not an option, because the enemy would inflict further damage on them and without the drones the hydro rigs would have been exposed overnight.

  “Stand by, Mission coming online,” Flynn said. Lora looked at the horizon and she saw the tetrahedron rising. “And we have MCP contact.”

  “Morning, boss,” Lora said, nodding at the space station in the sky.

  “Tower 49, this is Mission Control,” a third voice joined the conversation, the voice of an older, articulate man. “How are you doing this lovely morning?”

  “Another day in paradise, Dillinger,” Flynn replied. “Uploading data now. 49 mission log. Day 1642, hydro rig support. I have two…”

  “You have two drones offline. Perimeter’s compromised.”

  “Copy that, relaying to Tech. Stand by. Lora, 166 is down in Grid 37. Linking to beacon now. You’ll go there first.”

  The coordinates appeared on the glass in front of Lora.

  “Got it,” she said. “On my way.”

  She was flying through a storm and she saw the lighting strike coming a second before it hit the Bubbleship. The aircraft lost power and it began to fall like a rock. She was pushing and pulling at pedals and arms for no avail. The ship was in freefall. The bobblehead was nodding wildly.

  “Come on, Bob,” Lora groaned. “Work with me here, buddy.”

  The clouds cleared up and she saw the ground below, a river in a deep canyon. She had about five second left before impact. The power suddenly came back, along with Flynn’s alarmed voice in the radio.

  “Tech-49? Tech-49? Lora?”

  “Copy, Tower,” she replied. The Bubbleship emerged from the canyon.

  “What happened?” Flynn asked. “I lost you for a second.”

  “Really?” Lora asked awkwardly. “Coming up on location.”

III.

  Following the beacon she flew across a dark grey desert. There was not much left of the civilization once blossoming here; ruins here and there, pieces of landmarks scattered, melted into the rocks. There was some large structure ahead, partially intact and Lora was able to make out more of it as the Bubbleship got closer.

  “There it is,” she said, watching Drone 166 in the middle of a football stadium. The stadium was in ruins: only the concrete shell remained with pieces of metal rods sticking it from it. The fallen drone was surrounded by still smoking remains of dead Scavengers. The dead aliens were blown to pieces by the high caliber rounds of the drone. “I’ve got multiple Scav kills. Drone 166 put up a hell of a fight. Got any movement?”

  “No sign of Scavenger activity,” Flynn replied. “But I’ve got limited visibility here, Lora, due to low angle of Mission.”

  “Copy that. I’m coming in hot.”

  Lora landed with the Bubbleship in a hurry, so that the aliens would not have time to spot it. She put down the aircraft about a hundred yards away from the drone. She took out her tools, a few replacement batteries and she bit down onto a chewing gum.

  “Starting repairs,” she spoke into the radio. “Watch my back.”

  “I always do,” Flynn replied. She began walking to the drone slowly, keeping her eyes and ears open. When she got to the drone, she saw that it had the exhaust port damaged, where it had sustained the single shot that had brought the machine down.

  “Tell Dillinger, their shielding is still for shit,” she said. She walked around the drone and she saw a small picture drawn on the white plastic cover. It was a figure of her likeness, with a long rifle in her hand. The figure was standing, but her head was cut off. The severed head was pictured at the feet of the figure; the Scavengers even captured her blonde locks.

  “Lovely,” Lora said. She did not add any other comment; Flynn did not need to know about this. She opened the side panel of the drone and looked inside.

  “Fuel cell’s gone again,” she said. “That’s ten.”

  “Lora, I don’t like this,” Flynn replied. “Just bring it back to the shop.”

  “Negative,” she replied, looking at a blue flower on the ground. “If I load it on the carrier, I’ll be exposed longer than if I just fix it here.”

  “Then let’s fix it and get out of there.”

  “Copy that.”

  Lora began the repairs, while she was still scanning the area. The painted sign on the top of the structure caught her attention.

  World 2017 Champions – the sign read.

  “You know,” she said. “I read about this game. It was played right here. The last Super Bowl.”

  “Please don’t tell me it was a classic,” Flynn said.

  “A classic game,” Lora said. Flynn laughed quietly in the radio.

  “Down by four,” Lora continued, looking at the gaping dark hole on the other side of the stadium. It was like a cave; anything could have been hidden there. She went on with the repairs. “The ball was on the 50-yard line. Seconds left on the clock. The ball is snapped, and the QB fumbles. Disaster. Looks like the game is over.”

  “I’m reading the whole central core off-alignment,” Flynn said. “You don’t have the necessary tools down there. And a new fuel cell is not going to fix that.”

  Lora put the new fuel cell in the drone. Flynn was right: the Scavengers intentionally damaged the core when they stole the original cell to make it impossible to insert a new one. Lora took out her chewing gum and stuck it next to the fuel cell. The cell lit up and the drone awakened.

  “But the QB runs back and picks up his own fumble,” Lora said.

  “Lora… Hold on, what did you just do?” Flynn asked. He must have seen the drone coming online from the tower.

  “There is a wall of linebackers closing in on him,” Lora was musing and he closed the drone. She had found that chewing gum under the ruins of a gift shop and she was not going to admit that she had not only kept it, but put it in her mouth. “So, he throws a long ball with no idea who is at the other end. A Hail Mary. Eighty-thousand people on their feet, watching this ball sail through the air.”

  Now that she was done with the repair, she felt somewhat light-headed, with the minty taste of the gum still in her mouth. It was something people in the stadium had eaten too.

  “Downfield is a rookie wide receiver, third string. He just leaps out of the pack. Touchdown!”

  She raised her hands in the air the way she imagined the player in the past doing it, right here. She imagined the cheering of the crowd; but when she looked around the stadium was still deserted.

  “Contact!” Flynn yelled in the radio. “West contact!"

  Lora dropped on her knee and took out her handgun in a blink of an eye. She almost pulled the trigger, looking at the four-legged, wild creature that had approached her from behind.

  “Lora?”

  “It’s okay, Kevin,” she said quietly, shaken from the adrenaline rush. “It’s just a dog.”

  She chuckled, mostly to hide her anxiousness. The dog barked. It was a mid-size mutt, emaciated, angry. It began wagging its tail.

  Drone 166 was awakening. It made a loud, high-pitched sound and began to emerge from the crater it had created upon the forceful landing. The drone could probably not tell the difference between the dog and a Scavenger, Lora realized suddenly.

  “Hey. Now, go on,” she told the dog. “You gotta get out of here.”

  The dog was barking, but it would not go. Maybe it was hoping for a treat? But it was in for something very different if it was still around once the drone fully awakened.

  “Get out of here!” Lora yelled. “Go!”

  She lifted the handgun and pulled the trigger. The loud bang was finally enough to scare the dog away. It also woke Drone 166 up. The machine jumped in the air suddenly and made a deep, threatening sound. All its cannons were pointed at Lora. She put down the gun.

  “Tech-49, Lora Baines,” she said. The drone turned away, toward the black cave on the other side of the stadium. It began scanning the hole and then it turned back to Lora. It was staring at her with its glowing, red eyes and then it shot out and left the stadium with high speed. Lora was left covered by dust. She was spitting and she rubbed her eyes.

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “166 is back online.”

Chapter Text

I.

  The Bubbleship sat perched on the mountaintop. This was a fine spot for a break: Lora could see the line of hovering hydro rigs above the ocean and she was safe here – Scavengers would not climb to higher elevations, where they would be exposed to the drones. She sat on the edge with a ration bar and a small sack of purified water. Next to her there was a piece of mortar shell. After Drone 166’s departure from the football stadium, Lora went back, dug up the small, blue wildflower and tucked it in the shell that was lying nearby. She carefully preserved the roots and put some dirt in the shell too.

  Now she took a sip from the sack and poured water over the flower. The air was clean and filled by the smell of snow and saltwater. Everything was quiet and serene; it did not look like a wasteland left behind after a devastating war, rather like a virgin territory, ready for a new beginning.

  “Two drones shot down today,” Lora told Flynn over the radio. “Ten fuel cells stolen in just over a month. These Scavs are getting bolder.”

  “Well, the hydro rigs are taking all the water,” he replied. He must have been sitting at the desk in the sky tower, watching her through the satellite cameras of the space station. “Once we’re gone, they’ll have nothing but dust and radiation.”

  “This is bullshit,” Lora blurted out bitterly. “We won the war. Now we have to leave.”

  The land at her feet was pure; the decades gone by since the fallout erased the signs of the destruction. Flynn misunderstood her silence.

  “Two more weeks, Lora,” he said. “Then we’ll be on our way to Titan.”

  “Yep,” she replied curtly and took a bite from the ration bar. “That drone is out there somewhere. We just have to find it.

  “Without a beacon, that’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” he said. She laughed and she stood up, picking up the mortar shell with the flower.

  “So we go to our ground game,” Lora said. She went back to the Bubbleship, put the flower inside and then locked the aircraft. She walked to the back, opened up the compartment and took out her ground vehicle; a foldable motocross bike. Lora set it up and got on it. She did not have to worry about the Bubbleship; without her present, the Scavs could not even open it and had she not returned from this ride, the autopilot would take the ship back to the sky tower.

  Lora started with high speed, following the tracker of the lost drone. The sign was so weak that she could not have picked it up from the air, but she was able to follow it now, that she was proceeding on the ground with relatively slower speed. The bike crossed a giant, black valley. Just when she was already halfway through, did Lora recognize the enormous vessels lying around, half sunk into the desert floor. They were ancient battle ships, washed ashore many years ago and largely rusted away by now. The tetrahedron of the space station appeared very close on the sky above the valley. The blinking of the tracker was weak, but it strengthened when she got out from the valley. Lora kept on driving, keeping an eye on the battery load.

  She stopped when the tracker began to show the drone fairly close ahead. The signature was weak as if the machine was buried or as if it had fallen into a ravine. Lora took out her rifle and looked in the scope. There was an even land ahead with scattered rock formations here and there. It was an unsafe area; the Scavengers tended to hide in caves and behind rocks. It was also getting dark; the sun was slowly approaching the horizon and that meant that the MCP would soon disappear from the sky as well. With the space station gone, Flynn would not see her anymore and he could not alert Lora of any suspicious activity in the area.

  There was a larger pile of rocks ahead and Lora positively identified the place as the source of the tracking signal. She walked there slowly with her rifle in hand. As she got closer, she could read the letters on the broken stone.

  New York Library.

  Lora walked straight to the formation. There was a sinkhole in the middle. It was wide and deep; most importantly she could hear the beeping of the lost drone from the inside.

  “Tower,” she said. “I’ve located 172… down a sinkhole. No visual, but I can hear it.”

  “MCP’s so far off angle, I can barely see you. How does it look?”

  “It’s good,” Lora said. It was not good; it was getting dark and Scavengers could be hiding behind the closest pile of rocks. But for now she could not spot any sign of them and there was a chance that the Scavengers had not found the fallen drone yet. Had Lora left now, they could locate and further damage it, or worse, they could break the tracker and steal the whole thing. “It’s good. There’s no sign of Scav activity on top.”

  “MCP is offline in fifteen minutes,” Flynn said. Lora looked at the sky and she saw the space station setting behind the clouds. “After that, you’re on your own.”

II.

  Lora was slowly descending into the sinkhole, hanging onto the cable that hung from her parked bike. She was holding her rifle with the attached light ahead to see the cave below.

  “Mission, this is Tower 49,” she heard Flynn’s voice over the radio. “Lora has located Drone 172. Engaged in recovery now. Requesting backup to her location ASAP.”

  It was indeed a library building down below, buried underground entirely. Lora first saw the chandeliers, then the shelves with scattered books. So many books! Water was flowing in a constant flow from the opening above. The signal of the lost drone was loud and clear here; the sound was echoing in the vast interior of the library.

  Lora touched down; she was standing on a wooden table. She turned around, scanning the area. There was no sign of life, no lights or any movement. At the end of the room, from where the signal was coming, she saw the round body of the drone.

  “I’ve got a visual on Drone 172,” she said. There came no answer from the radio as there was no reception down here. Lora slowly proceeded toward the drone, holding the rifle with the light ahead, with her finger on the trigger. She heard the sound of the running water, the signal of the machine and her own ragged breathing. She was alone; she did not know how far the other drones were. Lora climbed through an overturned table and she gasped; there was no floor on the other side and she had almost stepped into nothing. The deep seemed to be bottomless, but there was a wide, metal bar which lay across the crevice, creating a narrow bridge. Lora stepped on it, testing its stability. The metal bar was somewhat wobbly, but Lora used it as a bridge to get on the other side nevertheless.

  Pointing the gun and the lamp ahead, she proceeded. The drone was right in front of her. There was a piece of fabric fallen on it in a manner as if somebody had deliberately placed it there. That, of course, made no sense; maybe the drone had gotten shot outside and had dropped into the sinkhole to escape further gunfire, getting stuck in a curtain or some other fabric in the progress. Lora reached out and pulled the cloth aside. There was a giant globe under the fabric; the size and shape of it was similar to the lost drone, but…

  “What the hell?” she whispered. She looked down and she saw a voice recorder next to the globe; the machine was emitting the sound of a drone. This was a trap. “Shit.”

  She turned around and started to run. A moment later sharp pain hit her; a metal trap closed around her right foot. She did not have time to cry out before the trap was yanked away and she fell on the floor. The cord attached to the trap was dragging her inside the library. Lora managed to grab her rifle and rolled on her back as she was sliding on the rough floor, hitting scattered books and furniture. She aimed the gun to avoid shooting herself in the leg and she pulled the trigger twice. She could not tell if she had hit a Scavenger or the mechanism that was pulling the cord from behind a slightly ajar door, but the movement ceased. She freed her leg quickly and jumped on her feet. Lora saw movement and she was shooting; in response there came the sound of a wounded creature.  She was turning rapidly, checking the dark place with her light. The place became alive suddenly and there were too many movements, too many sounds at the same time. Something was running upstairs on four legs and Lora shot at it. She heard a loud, metallic cling; the bar she had used as a bridge to cross the large crack in the middle of the room was pulled up by the cables hanging around and then it dropped into the crevice, cutting off the escape route. Something screamed behind Lora; she turned around, shot at its direction and then she ran.

  Lora threw the rifle mid-air and the gun fell on the other side of the crevice. She landed on the jagged side, hitting the wall hard. She climbed up, holding onto the metal pieces sticking out from the concrete. Once out from the hole, she grabbed the rifle and ran to the cable which was waiting for her at the bottom of the sinkhole. She attached the cable to the belt of her uniform and the mechanism began to pull her upwards immediately.

  “Ha!” she let out a yell of relief. In the next moment she heard the loud snap from above. Somebody cut her cable. “Oh!”

  She fell on the table below. The wood shattered and she dropped her rifle. The gun hit the floor and fell into the crevice, disappearing from sight forever. Lora, almost knocked out from the impact, pushed herself up, dazed. She pulled out her handgun from its holster as she emerged. She was turning around and she saw dozens of shades moving around in the dark. She could not quite see any of them, save for the orange light on their helmets and their alien, four-legged shape, but she could tell that there was a smaller army of them down here. Somebody ran across the room behind her; Lora spun on her heels, shot at it and missed. She could hear their strange murmur. She looked up and she saw yet another Scavenger emerging from behind an upstairs door quite clearly. Lora aimed her gun at it and…

  There was an explosion and flames engulfed the Scavenger on the upper level. Lora looked at her gun numbly. She was quite certain that she had not pulled the trigger. A moment later she heard the voice of Drone 166 behind her. She looked up and she saw the drone she had fixed a couple hours before. Drone 166 was fully operational now; it was emitting loud, terrifying noises. It was scanning the interior of the library and when it finished, it let out one last, automated beep. Lora dropped on her knee and covered her head with her hands.

  Drone 166 was shooting at the Scavengers with its four machine guns. It was engaged for about thirty seconds; it was making slight turns and adjustments mid-air to get a better aim. Lora could not and did not want to look, but she heard the screams of the aliens. The air would soon be filled by smoke and the smell of burning flesh. When the drone stopped, Lora stood up. She was still shaky from the fall and the landing on the table. Above her Drone 166 was beeping again and it was staring at her with its red eye threateningly. Around them parts of the library were on fire; burning pieces of paper were flying in the air. The drone pointed its machine guns at Lora.

  “Tech-49, Lora Baines,” she said. Drone 166 came closer and it let out one more beep. “Lora Baines, Tech-49!”

  The drone began scanning her with its lasers.

  “Hey!” Lora yelled angrily. Drone 166 backed up, its machine guns returned into default position. The drone flew under the opening and shot up vertically, leaving the library in the blink of an eye. Lora stayed there alone with the burning books and the dead Scavengers. She saw a chunk of cables hanging down from the top and she walked there. She grabbed the cables and tugged at them to see if they would support her weight. They appeared to be steady. Lora sighed.

  She saw a burning book at her feet and she stepped on it instinctively, putting out the flames. She bent down and picked the book up. It was a volume with hard cover; it was still smoking, yet it was intact. Lora slid it under her uniform and she began to climb out from the library.

  It was almost fully dark when she got out to the surface. Smoke was coming out from the sinkhole and she was covered by ashes and dust. In the sparse, yellow light of the setting sun she looked around.

  “Oh, no,” she exclaimed. Her motocross bike was taken by the Scavengers. “Come on. Not my goddamn bike!”

  Lora sighed and touched the remote control of the Bubbleship on her wrist to summon the aircraft.

III.

  She put down the Bubbleship on the landing pad of the sky tower. There was still light up here, above the clouds, a deep grayish orange glow. Lora got out, got her tool bag and began walking to the habitat with a limp she could not hide. Flynn was looking at her from behind the glass with apparent concern and she saluted at him.

  She went to take a shower to get rid of the dirt before anything else. Once she felt clean, Lora was standing under the spray of hot water for a minute longer, with her eyes closed. There, without any warning she was hit by the memory of the dream from the night before… Or was it another vision? In the memory she was on the top level of one of the buildings in New York, in the city before the war. There was an observation deck on the top, filled by people. And there was the man from the dream. He was wearing the same shirt and jacket Lora always saw him wearing. He was standing at one of the binoculars and…

  Lora opened her eyes. She did not understand these dreams. By now she assumed that the man was a real person she had known before the memory wipe. But that did not explain why she always saw him in the same setting, in the ancient New York. The only answer she could come up was that her brain mixed up memories; the memory of a real person she knew and the visuals of the old city from random pictures she had seen. She had no memories of her earlier life, so that she would not disclose information to the enemy, had she been captured – but she surely waited for their arrival to the space station, to get some answers to her questions.

  She put on pants and a T-shirt and she went to see Drone 109 on the lower level. The machine was sitting there, dark and lifeless; the parts needed to fix it had not arrived. Lora sat down on a stool. She could not do anything without those parts, so she opened her toolbox and took out the items she brought from the ground. Lora took the book in her hands and opened it randomly. The pages were somewhat yellow and dirty, yet the printing was still clear and there were no missing pages. Lora was reading.

“XXVII.

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods.”*

  “Lora?” Flynn asked. She was sitting with her back to the stairs and now she held the book against her chest to hide it. It was dinnertime.

  “Yep,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”

  He went back to the upper level. Lora looked at the book again. Macaulay: Lays of Ancient Rome, the title read. She sighed. Maybe, she thought, once up on the space station, she could find some information about that city, without any hope of return, without the chance to see the site where Rome had once stood. She put the book back in the toolbox and took out the mortar shell with the wildflower.

  “How does 109 look?” Flynn asked when Lora joined him upstairs. “Can it fly?”

  “Barely. And without armor, she’s a sitting duck,” Lora replied. She was silently grinning, hiding the mortar shell behind her back.

  “Well, I’ll talk to Dillinger about that shielding in the morning.”

  “Okay.”

  “Again,” he said. He was cutting open a dehydrated meal portion for dinner. He noticed that Lora was grinning. “What, Lora Baines?”

  She showed him the flower. Flynn looked at it with blank face.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  “It was growing in…” Lora started. Flynn took the flower and walked to the glass door with quick steps. He opened the door, went to the edge and dropped the mortar shell with the flower. He turned around and came back to the kitchen table just as fast as he had gone out.

  “Come on, Lora,” he said. “You know the regulations. I know you think I’m a stickler, but you have no idea what kind of toxins could be in something like that.”

  “It’s a flower, Kevin.”

  “Yeah, that’s not the point. It’s that we are so close to the end and the last thing that we need is you putting it all at risk.”

  “Okay,” Lora replied and she walked away. There was no point for her to get upset over it. It was simply how their team worked: he had a heightened sense of danger and self-preservation which she lacked – that was why he was watching her back from the sky tower while she was performing maintenance on the ground and not the other way around. Lora had little sense of diplomacy and she needed her space; she could have never sat in the communication tower all day, dealing with Mission Control, submitting reports and reading data. She was trained to fly the Bubbleship and fix drones; he knew how to talk to Dillinger and to keep both of them safe. They were an effective team.

  “God, you’re hurt,” he said.

  “I’m fine,” she replied. “I’ll get it fixed up later.”

  “Was it the Scavs?”

  She stopped, yet she did not reply. He was already overly cautious; learning what exactly had happened in the library earlier that day would have just made him even more anxious.

  “Don’t actually, I don’t want to know,” Flynn said. He went to get the med kit. Lora sat down and folded back the leg of her pants. The skin was torn on her leg and there was a large open wound where the bear trap had caught her. Lora was rubbing her face. It was not the coming pain which was concerning her, rather that the whole incident would make their dynamics tenser.

  He knelt down and opened the box. He sprayed disinfectant over the wound.

  “Look,” Flynn said. “You like to explore and I get it. You’re curious, I’m fine with that. But don’t take any chances. Whatever you find down there, please, don’t bring it home.”

  Lora nodded. He took out the laser tool from the box.

  “This is gonna pinch a little,” he said.

  “Hit me,” she replied. He turned on the tool and Lora bit down onto his hand to silence her own scream. The procedure only took a few seconds, but cold sweat was covering her whole body by the time he finished. Flynn put the tool down and he stood up. He leaned ahead and put his hands on the back of the sofa she was sitting on. Lora placed her hands on his hips.

  “Serves you right,” he said and kissed her forehead. They both laughed.

IV.

  They had dinner in the living room of the habitat. He put a candle on the table; the night sky above the clouds was clear and full of stars. The destroyed Moon was hanging in the middle like a large, broken gemstone. Lora was wearing the same pants and T-shirt she had put on earlier; Flynn had changed to a black shirt and matching pants. He was clearly making an effort to lighten the mood.

  “Every day you have to go down there and see what was lost,” he said. “But we’ve done our job, Lora. It’s time to go.”

  “I don’t think they were trying to kill me today,” Lora said. “The Scavs. They were trying to catch me.”

  She was not sure why she said it out loud; the idea was bothering her ever since. She should have been dead, but she was not.

  “Well,” Flynn said. “They can’t have you.”

  He stood up and walked to her.

  “Come on,” he said. He walked out to outside deck and stopped at the pool. Lora was looking at him from the table. Flynn got out from his shirt and pants slowly and took a dive in the pool. She stood up and walked out to the deck. Flynn swam to the edge and looked up at her with a cheeky expression on his face. Lora would have been long lost down there without him; and she knew that. She stepped out from her shoes and sat down on the edge of the pool.

  “You should come with me sometime, before we leave,” she said.  Flynn did not respond, he was just looking up at her with the same face. “There’s a place I found I would like to show you.”

  He pushed himself up and leaned close to Lora as if he was trying to tell her a secret.

  “I’ll show you something,” he whispered in her ear. He took Lora’s arm and he let go of the edge of the pool. Lora lost her balance and she fell ahead.

  “Hey,” she said without actually trying to get out of his grip. “Hey!”

  Lora fell into the pool. The water was warmer than the air; through the transparent walls of the pool she saw the night sky and the clouds. She stuck her head out of the water, smiling. Flynn was looking at her from a few feet away with an unreadable expression. Yet again Lora wondered whether he would stick to her after their return to the space station, once they would know other people, once he would have choices. She got out from her T-shirt and threw it to the deck. Flynn swam closer and he embraced her. They kissed and Lora took a deep breath when she felt that he was pulling her underwater gently. Later that night she would dream of that pool again; they would be out there with Flynn and there would be a lightning crossing the sky. She would open her eyes underwater and instead of Kevin she would see that other man again. They would look at each other for long without running out of breath in the water and Lora would just stare at him, confused, but happy. Then he would smile at her and he would turn around and swim away. And then she would wake up.

Chapter Text

I.

  Lora sat up in the bed, panting. She was confused by the dream and for a moment she could not even tell where she was. It was dark; and then it became very bright suddenly as if she was still dreaming, as if the sun leapt up to the night sky from below the horizon. She closed her eyes against the white light; she was jumping out from the bed and was running to the window already. The sky was pitch black outside; it was the glowing mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion in the distance, which emerged above the clouds and lit up the night.

  Lora heard Flynn hopping out from the bed and he raced to the window as well. They were staring at the giant white cloud as it was growing and growing out there. A moment later the shock wave of the explosion reached them and it shook the sky tower.

  “Oh, my God,” Flynn whispered. From here they could never see the hydro rigs, but based on the distance and direction of the explosion Lora could tell that the mushroom cloud signaled the destruction of one or more of the reactors. She ran to get dressed.

  Flynn had changed too by the time Lora got ready. He rushed to the upstairs office while she was getting ready to take off with the Bubbleship. Lora had never flown at night before; it was too dangerous and such as, against the regulations. But they had to investigate the incident immediately and Lora estimated to arrive to the site approximately at the same time when the communication with the space station would resume. Until then they could only rely on the information submitted by the drones.

  “We lost one hydro rig,” Flynn said in the radio. Lora was halfway to the seashore; it was still dark and the glow of the explosion faded to yellow. He was analyzing the incoming data. “It was a six-stage meltdown from inside the core. It’s offline permanently. How could this happen?”

  “The Scavs must have weaponized one of the stolen fuel cells and got it into the suction,” Lora replied. It was a possibility she had sometimes wondered about; something she would have done, had she been in their place in the middle of a desperate guerilla war. She just did not know whether they still had the technology to actually carry out anything on this scale.

  The sun was rising and the tetrahedron of the MCP did as well. The Bubbleship arrived to the site of the incident and Lora began circling over the remains of the hydro rig. The nuclear explosion fully destroyed the gigantic structure; when the anti-gravity propulsion engine had failed, the hydro rig had fallen into the ocean. The reactor was so monumental, that large part of it was still sticking out from under the seawater. It was burning and releasing thick, black smoke.

  “Tower 49, you have put the whole operation at risk,” Lora heard Dillinger’s voice in the radio. He was fuming. Normally Flynn would put Lora on hold while he was communicating with Mission Control, but this time they were all online because of the emergency. “I need to know exactly what happened.”

  Flynn explained him their findings. Lora was circling over the water; at least the remaining two hydro rigs were unaffected by the destruction. Of course it was only a matter of time now for the Scavs to bring those down as well.

  “Tower, hold,” Dillinger said and he disappeared from the line. They must have been analyzing the event up there on the space station. A light was blinking on the control panel of the Bubbleship.

  “Tower, I’ve got a rogue signal in Grid 37,” Lora said. “Are you seeing this?”

  “Yes,” Flynn replied.

  “It’s gotta be Scav.”

  “It’s not one of ours,” Flynn said. He was working on something and when he spoke again, he sounded concerned. “Lora, the signal is being directed off-planet.”

  Lora understood his concern; the aliens were sending out a radio signal to space. Grid 37 was the same area where Drone 166 had been shot down the day before. Lora had no way of knowing whether there were more of the Scavengers out there in the universe, if there were any other vessels arriving to Earth with more of the invaders, but she surely did not want any beacon to show them the way.

  “On my way,” she said and she started toward Grid 37.

  “Tower, our logs show you are missing an additional nine fuel cells,” Dillinger’s voice came back. “Can you confirm?”

  Lora was listening silently as she was piloting the Bubbleship. Mission Control must have realized that the remaining hydro rigs were in clear and present danger now.

  “Negative, Mission,” Flynn replied. “That number is ten. Drone 172 was lost last night. 109 is combat-ready as soon as we get that shielding. We can cover the remaining rigs with the drones in the field. I’ve run the numbers.”

  “We’ll do the numbers up here, Tower,” Dillinger shot back. “I’m tasking the drones to defensive positions.”

  “Copy.”

  “Our job is to run those rigs. Your directive is to protect them. We can not afford to lose another. Do you copy?”

  “Copy,” Flynn replied. This was one of the reasons why he was the communication officer and not Lora; she was annoyed only by listening to the conversation. It was only the two of them to oversee the operation down here and they had no way of protecting the drones at night – and nobody could foresee that the Scavengers would be able to turn the stolen fuel cells into nuclear bombs. Putting the blame on the two of them was unjust and demoralizing.

  “Are you and Lora an effective team?” Dillinger asked as if he realized that he had gone too far and was trying to defuse the situation.

  “Damn right we are,” Flynn replied.

II.

  The Bubbleship was flying over a deep canyon; the walls of the ravine were lined with ancient buildings, towers from a city that had once stood here. Now those structures were fused together with the rock and surface waters rained down on both sides. As she got out of the canyon, Lora spotted the ruins of an old spire from where the rogue signal was coming from.

  “Lora?” Flynn asked. “You are right on top of it. Do you have a visual?”

  Lora was looking at the building silently. It was the same tower from her dreams; the Empire State Building. Only the top of the tower was sticking out from the desert floor and there were no other structures left to see. The landmark was heavily damaged, but it was still it, the one she kept on coming back in her dreams.

  “Lora?”

  “Yeah,” she said softly. “I got it.”

  She landed next to the building. She got out with her new rifle in her hands, well aware of the possibility of this being yet another trap. The ship locked itself behind her and Lora started walking. She could hear the sound of the beacon from the tower. There was an area outside the building, some sort of balcony or viewing dock. The metal bars around it melted, perhaps from the nuclear blast that had destroyed New York decades before. And on the dock there were the metal binoculars Lora had seen in her dreams; looking at them in real life hit her so hard that she almost lost her composure.

  She circled the building and she saw a wire leading inside. On the end of the cable, on the top of the tower there was an antenna, sending the signal to space. Lora took one more look around, but she saw no movement and there were no rocks or other objects behind which Scavengers could be hiding here. She broke the window of the room where the cable was leading to. It was dark inside; in a few seconds she determined that it was empty and she climbed in. The flashlight on the rifle illuminated the room and Lora could see that it was a gift store. There were dusty aviators on a shelf, snow globes and stuffed animals, a whole group of black, velvet gorillas.

  Finally she found the source of the beacon sound. The cables disappeared behind a metal cover on a wall. Lora opened it and peeked inside, holding the rifle pointed ahead. There was an electrical panel under the cover with something similar to a radio attached.

  “They have some kind of a repeater,” she said. “The Scavs are using the building as an antenna. Can you decrypt?”

  “It’s a set of coordinates,” Flynn replied in the radio. “Grid 17. It’s a goddamn homing beacon.”

  “Grid 17,” Lora said. She pulled out a foldable scissor from her pocket. “What the hell is out there?”

  “Nothing. It’s in the middle of nowhere. What is going on? Why would the Scavs send a signal off-planet, Lora?”

  She was standing there in the darkness. He sounded concerned… no, he sounded afraid. The possibility of yet another Scavenger spacecraft coming with a fresh army of aliens was indeed a terrifying option, Lora was thinking.

  “I’m shutting it down,” she said and she cut the electric cable with the scissor. The beacon fell silent.

III.

  The Bubbleship was in the air once more. Lora left the tower behind; with Drone 172 being lost and the rest of the drones ordered in defensive position, she had nowhere to rush anymore. She was flying toward the perimeter of the area she patrolled. As she was getting closer, an alarm went off.

  “Tech-49, check your course,” Flynn said in the radio. “You’re headed right for the border.”

  Lora looked at the grey desert ahead. A red signal appeared on the window with a large exclamation mark in the middle. RADIATION ZONE – IMPACT DISTANCE …., it read and it was counting down the meters left. The area outside of Tower 49’s perimeter was uninhabitable from the nuclear fallout. Lora had no way of knowing if there were other technicians in other clear zones, overseeing different drones and mining for more resources for the new settlement on Titan. She did not know, because she was not supposed to know; or else she could have revealed the location of those other people to the Scavengers, had she been captured.

  “That radiation will cook you from the inside before you know it,” Flynn said.

  “It’s okay, Kevin. I see it.”

  She slowly turned and began to fly parallel with the border.

  “I’m gonna do a perimeter check before I head home,” she said. “I may go off-com.”

  “Lora, we should keep in contact. Just let me know where you are.”

  The Bubbleship slowly descended into a deep canyon and the connection was breaking off.

  “Do you copy? Lora, do you copy?”

  The radio fell silent. Lora looked at the bobblehead on the control panel.

  “That’s right, Bob,” she said. “You know where we are going.”

  She was flying in the canyon; after a few miles it widened and became a long river valley. This was no longer a desert: the valley was surrounded by green mountains and the river below was crystal clear. The land was covered by grass and there were no ruins, no signs of the fallout here. The Bubbleship crossed a rocky arch which stood there like a gate; behind the arch there lay a great valley, entirely surrounded by tall mountains. Those mountains had sheltered the valley from the nuclear blasts back in the times and there was lush vegetation still flourishing down here. A forest, bushes, grass and wildflowers: a lost piece of time from the world that had existed here once. The river entered the valley and formed a lake in the middle; on the lake shore there stood an old log house.

  Lora had accidentally discovered the valley and the house about a year earlier. When she first landed here with the Bubbleship, she got enthralled immediately. The air was full of different sounds and scents; that was the first time Lora ever heard bird song. Later she found other animals too, squirrels, beavers, frogs and sometimes she saw the footprints of something larger, maybe a fox or a lynx. There were fish in the lake, otters and turtles. The valley seemed to have never endured invasion or military strike; the log house was simply abandoned, not destroyed. Its condition had deteriorated, but that was the result of the lack of maintenance throughout the past decades. It was a one bedroom log house, maybe a weekend retreat; even though the building itself was intact, it appeared that it had been evacuated back in the days and that made Lora hopeful: she liked to imagine that the inhabitants of the valley had survived and their descendants were amongst the people living on the space station now.

  Lora got her bag from the ship and she entered the house. She turned on the lights: she had salvaged the solar panels and the light bulbs during her missions and had installed them in the house later. From the bag she pulled out one of her latest findings: a tiny, velvet gorilla from the gift store of the Empire State Building. Lora put it on the top of the refrigerator. The next one was the book she had brought from the burning library; the book now joined her growing collection on the shelf, along with the aviator sunglasses, also from the gift shop. Lora dropped the bag on the old couch and looked at the shelf with the collector’s pride. Under the book there was a rack dedicated to Bakelite records. Lora bent down and touched the covers. Pink Floyd, Duran Duran, Journey… she pulled out the latter one, took it out from the paper and placed it on the player.

  She left the door open and walked out to the lake. She sat down on the shore; she could hear the music from here. She bent forward, cupped water in her hands and she drank. Lora had checked the whole valley for contaminator at the beginning and she had found none; the place was safe to stay, the water was safe to drink. Given the chance, they could have planted a garden here – everything was ready for a new start. She saw a big fish in the lake and she splashed some water at its direction.

  “Are you gonna miss me?” Lora asked the fish. She chuckled. This was the place she meant to show Flynn; but he would never leave the sky tower. Had he known that she was sitting here in the grass, drinking unfiltered water, he would have probably locked her out from the habitat out of fear of some toxins. She looked back over her shoulder and listened to the music.

“Someday love will find you
Break those chains that bind you
One night will remind you
How we touched
And went our separate ways”*

  Lora wanted Flynn to see the place to show him the world they were going to leave behind for good. She could not understand why mankind had decided to live on Titan, on that cold and dark moon, spending so much time and energy on extensive terraforming of a distant world, when large parts of Earth seemed to have recovered from the war. The Scavengers were still a threat, but they did not seem capable of surviving one real, concentrated attack. The doubt, the idea that leaving Earth was a mistake they could not correct later, was torturing Lora.

  “I’m gonna miss this place,” she said. Sometimes she imagined being offered the choice to stay instead of boarding the MCP. It would have been a real change of heart for Flynn to willingly stay here, but they could have made it work. “It would have been great… it would have been great.”

  Lora laid down in the grass and closed her eyes. The warm sunlight and the song of the birds lulled her to sleep and she dreamed of the observation deck again. She walked down the deck with the unnamed man again and they stopped at the binoculars. Lora leaned forward to look into the binocular, with the man on her side.

  “Lora,” he whispered.

  She woke up with a start. The birds were still singing, but the sun was going down by now. Lora rubbed her face. Only two weeks, she was thinking, and she would get an answer to her questions; maybe she would even meet this man on the space station.

  There was a rumble and she looked up. No… it was not a thunder, it was not a sign of a coming storm. A meteor! She jumped on her feet and raised her rifle to get a better look at the object through the reticule. The object that entered the atmosphere was not a rock; it was man-made. It looked like the landing module of a space ship; it was crossing the afternoon sky over the valley with high speed. Its three side boosters separated and fell and its three parachutes opened to slow down the landing. Through the reticule Lora saw that one of the parachutes failed to open properly and the module was descending with great speed.

  She ran to the Bubbleship and took off immediately. As soon she got out from the valley, the radio communication with the tower resumed.

  “Kevin,” she yelled in the radio. “Kevin, did you get that?”

  “Lora, where have you been? An object came down in 17.”

  “That’s the beacon coordinates.”

  “Exactly,” Flynn replied.

  “I saw it. Some sort of vessel.”

  “Lora, Mission’s almost offline.”

  “I’m en route now.”

  For the second time now, Flynn left Lora online while he was communicating with the MCP.

  “Mission, we have an unidentified object impact in 17,” he said. “It came down at coordinates sent by the Scav beacon. My tech’s en route now.”

  “Tower, we’re going offline soon,” Dillinger replied. “But drones are already mobile and executing. Have your tech stand down.”

  “Copy,” Flynn replied. “Lora, Mission wants you to stand down. The drones will handle it.”

  “That’s a negative, Tower,” Lora replied. “With the MCP offline, we need our eyes on this. I want to know this site is secure.”

  “Lora, Command wants you to stand down. The drones will handle this.”

  “I’m on site,” Lora replied. The Bubbleship arrived to the location where the space vessel had crash-landed. The remains of the module were lying in a crater it had created upon impact; burning pieces of the spacecraft were scattered everywhere.

  “Lora!” Flynn exclaimed. “I don’t have eyes on you. Command’s offline.”

  “Kevin, I think it’s one of ours,” Lora said, looking at the remains of the space module. “This thing is ancient. It looks… pre-war.”

  “The Scavs brought this thing down, Lora!” Flynn yelled.

  “There’s no sign of Scavs.”

  “Technician, this is your Control,” Flynn said. “I’m ordering you to pull out and return to the tower immediately.”

  “Touching down,” Lora said. She had never disobeyed a direct command from the MCP, but she was certain that Flynn and Dillinger were simply not in the situation to evaluate this event – it was her looking at the remains of a space module with her own eyes. Regardless of the dubious origin of the homing beacon, this spacecraft was man-made; if there were people on board, they were human.

  She put down the Bubbleship at a clear spot and exited the cabin with her rifle in her hands. It was completely dark now, but the area was well lit by the fire of the landing unit. She saw something; a human sleeping pod, designed for interstellar travel. Lora ran there and pulled a chunk of debris off of the pod. The lid of the capsule opened; it was empty. For a horrible moment an idea came to Lora’s mind: that the Scavengers had brought down an old, long dormant space ship that might have been orbiting Earth for decades now, because the aliens had figured her out and they knew that Lora would walk into their trap again. She had defied Flynn and Mission Control when she had come here; there was nobody she could blame for her own fate now.

  Lora ran to the other fallen sleeping pod. This one was occupied: Lora could see the face of a man that was lying inside with his eyes closed.  There was a NASA emblem on the lid, a Japanese flag and the name of the spacecraft… ‘ODYSSEY’. ‘K. Ishioka’, the name tag read on the cover of the sleeping pod. The lights on the capsule were on and the life signals of the occupant were clear.

  “They’re human,” Lora whispered. She was running from pod to pod; event thought the coffin-like units had fallen from the vessel at the time of the crash, they were intact and operational. There were astronauts sleeping in each capsule.

  “Tower, we have got survivors,” Lora yelled. “There are four… Check it, five survivors. They are human.”

  Lora was turning around, looking for more pods. She was somewhat light-headed from the happiness. Not counting Flynn these were the first people she saw since the mind-wipe… the first people she saw in her whole life that she remembered. Something exploded behind her and Lora turned around quickly. She had forgotten to check the burning shell of the spacecraft. She ran inside and she spotted yet another sleeping pod on the ground. Lora rushed there, looked down and she froze.

  There was the NASA emblem on the lid, next to a US flag. The name tag read ‘A. Bradley’ and through the transparent window over the astronaut’s face Lora could see the man she had seen so many times in her dreams. She knelt down slowly and she put her right hand on the lid. The man looked exactly the way he did in her dreams; the dim light inside the sleeping pod illuminated his features. A sharp sound started and Lora looked down. The chart that signaled the astronaut’s life functions turned to ‘CRITICAL’. The sleeping pods had been disconnected from the battery of the vessel during the crash, Lora was thinking, and without power the capsule was now failing.

  The shock wave of an enormous explosion shook the burning module. Lora jumped up and run out, only to see Drone 166 firing on the scattered sleeping pods. It had destroyed all the pods outside of the vessel, killing the occupants in their sleep.

  “Stand down!” Lora screamed at the top of her lungs. “Flynn, the drones are firing on survivors.”    

  “Lora, the MCP’s offline,” Flynn replied. He sounded shaken. “I don’t have control.”

  “Stand down!” Lora screamed at Drone 166. The drone turned at her and began to approach.

  “Lora Baines, Tech-49,” she yelled. The drone recognized her and flew away. It was going for the capsule lying inside the vessel, Lora realized. She ran back to the pod, and she saw that Drone 166 was already scanning it for destruction. Lora jumped in the line of fire between the drone and the capsule and pointed her rifle at the machine. “BACK OFF, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”

  Drone 166, the machine she had fixed one day earlier at the football field, kept on approaching, with its machine guns pointed at her. Lora began firing her rifle at it. The shielding of the drone was superior, but the bullets from the high-powered rifle threw it backwards.

  “Back off!” Lora howled. Drone 166 was staring at her, then its machine guns returned to default position and the drone backed up, disappearing in the darkness. Shaking, Lora went back to the pod of the last survivor and she let out a deep breath.

Chapter Text

I.

  Surrounded by the flames of the burning ship, Lora loaded the last intact sleeping pod onto the Bubbleship. The astronaut’s life functions still read ‘CRITICAL’, but Lora determined that the pod’s own backup battery would last until she returned to the sky tower with it. She chose that option over opening the pod right away, because Lora suspected that the astronaut had been in deep sleep for an extended period of time; had there been any complications upon waking him up, she would have been helpless. The med kit was in the tower and Flynn handled it better; so Lora was going to take the capsule to the habitat as fast as possible.

  The procedure of loading and securing the pod to the Bubbleship was hard and tedious. The pod must have weighted over two hundred kilograms and it had not been designed to be carried around on its own. But Lora’s problem was not the weight or shape of the pod; she had the tools to move around disabled drones, which weighed way more than this pod. She was terrified by the idea of the drones returning and ambushing her while she would be occupied with the sleeping capsule – not to mention that the crash of the Odyssey and the subsequent fire must have alerted the Scavengers as well by now. By the time the pod was secured to the Bubbleship, she was shaking and sweat covered her whole body under the uniform.

  Lora rushed back to the sky tower at the fastest speed she could risk with the extra, unbalanced weight of the sleeping pod dragging at the back of the Bubbleship. She put the ship down on the landing platform and lowered the pod onto the floor. Lora began dragging it to the door of the habitat, across the bridge over the swimming pool. The sun had already set, but up here the darkness had not fallen yet. The sky and the clouds were deep grey and the water in the pool was making waves and it was splashing up. Lora glanced back above her shoulder, surprised that Flynn had not come out to help her. She saw that he was standing behind the locked glass door with bewildered expression on his face. He had asked her, Lora remembered, not to bring up her findings to the habitat and that was exactly what she was doing; the fact that there was a human being in the pod did not seem to make a difference.

  “Open the door!” she yelled. She was at the door already and it was still closed. He was staring at her with a hostile expression on his face. “Kevin!”

  He pushed a button and the door opened. Lora dragged the pod inside and lowered it to the floor. The door closed, locking out the sound of the wind. Lora grabbed the handle over the sign that read “U.S. TECHNOLOGIES - AIRSPACE SYSTEMS – ODYSSEY” and unlocked the pod. The capsule opened up, revealing its occupant. The astronaut was wearing a thin, white suit, something that appeared to be designed for the long hyper sleep. His eyes were closed and he was shaking violently.

  “Get the med kit,” Flynn said. Lora was bent over the pod, watching the astronaut. “Get the med kit!”

  She jumped and ran to get the kit. Flynn was kneeling next to the pod when she got back.

  “This has to be reported,” he said.

  “Be sure and report that the drones killed the crew from one of our own ships,” Lora replied. “See what command makes of that.”

  She had forced herself not to think about the drones on the way back to the tower. Lora could not imagine fixing one more drone after what the machines had done after the crash; she felt relief over the fact that their mission would end in two weeks and then she would not have to see the drones again. Before Flynn could have answered, the astronaut sat up in the capsule abruptly. He was coughing violently, choking on some sort of fluid or vomit. Lora was looking at him with concern, not knowing what to do.

  “It’s breathing fluid,” Flynn said. “Just let him get it out.”

  The astronaut was coughing for long before he could take a breath. He fell backwards, exhausted, and Lora moved behind him quickly, so that he would not hit his head against the pod. He looked up at her with confused, foggy eyes.

  “Lora,” he whispered and he lost consciousness.

II.

  They moved the astronaut into the med bay. They did not talk much; there were too many questions they could not hope to answer before talking to the survivor. The Odyssey must have been launched before the war, before 2017, and it was entirely possible for the crew of a spacecraft to lose contact with Earth and not to be aware of the Scavenger attack. It was possible for the autopilot to navigate the starship back to Earth after they finished their mission and for the machine to fail to establish communication with NASA. With all the astronauts being in hyper sleep, the autopilot could have put the ship on orbit until further command, which came when the Scavengers brought the spacecraft down. But it was impossible for an astronaut, who had been in deep sleep for sixty-so years to remember Lora and to know her name, and yet he did… and Lora, who must have been born decades after the launch, remembered him as well, even if it was only his face and the strange dream sequence from the Empire State Building. Lora felt drawn to him and that attraction was more than the sympathy she would have felt for a survivor of a crash.

  She rushed to take a shower and change before returning to the med bay. The astronaut was regaining consciousness; he was lying on the medical cot with pale face. His eyes were sunken with dark circles under them. Flynn got a cup of water and brought it to the astronaut’s lips.

  “Here,” he said. “You’re still dehydrated.”

  The astronaut accepted the water and then Flynn stepped back.

  “Where are we?” the stranger asked, looking at the white medical equipment. The EKG machine was beeping fast, in accordance with his heartbeat.

  “I’m Kevin,” Flynn said. “And this is Lora.”

  Lora walked closer to the bed and the astronaut looked at her.

  “What’s your name?” Flynn asked.

  “I’m Alan,” the astronaut said, looking at Lora. His face brightened as he was trying to smile.

  “Alan,” Flynn said. “I’m sorry for what I have to tell you, but you were in a crash. Your ship came down. Lora managed to pull you from the wreckage, but none of your crew survived.”

  The astronaut looked at Flynn and then back at Lora. There was confusion on his face and fear. The EKG machine began beeping faster. Alan looked back at Flynn with apparent mistrust on his face.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You’re the only one that made it,” Flynn replied. From his voice and posture Lora could tell that he made an effort to bring the news to the astronaut in a manner that it would not crush the survivor. “I’m sorry.”

  Alan seemed to be shocked. He attempted to sit up, but his muscles failed him.

  “You’ve been in delta sleep for a long time,” Flynn told him. “Some disorientation is normal.”

  “How long?” Alan asked. Flynn looked at Lora, evidently unsure whether the astronaut would be able to handle the news.

  “Sixty years,” Lora said. “At least.”

  Alan was staring with bewildered expression on his face. His eyes became glazed and a teardrop rolled down his face. Lora felt for him: he must have left a thriving civilization behind, maybe friends and family, none of what he would ever see again. Despite of his faintness the astronaut began to get out from the bed.

  “I have to get back to our ship,” he said. He was flailing with his arms, toppling plastic bottles and vials on the shelf next to him. He then began pulling at the intravenous tube in his left arm. The EKG machine began emitting alarm sounds. Flynn put his hand on the astronaut’s shoulder and pushed him back to the bed.

  “It’s too dangerous down there,” he said. “You need to rest.”

  He was smiling. Alan was looking at him and his expression became increasingly hostile. Flynn turned away and he picked up a syringe from the table. He was going to sedate the astronaut, Lora realized.

  “Kevin,” she said quickly. They only had a few hours until sunrise, when Mission Control would be notified about the survivor – they would likely send somebody down to collect the astronaut. The thought that she would not be able to talk to Alan during that very little time they had together, felt unbearable for her. Flynn brought the syringe to the astronaut’s arm, but before he could have injected him, Alan’s hand shot out and grabbed Flynn’s wrist with surprising strength.

  “Don’t touch me,” Alan said.

III.

  They were sitting at the dinner table in the living room. Lora and Flynn were having their regular meals, while the astronaut had a cup of clear broth in front of him. Flynn determined that anything more substantial would be too overwhelming for the survivor’s system and watching Alan lifting the spoon tediously and struggling to swallow, Lora had to agree with him.

  Flynn had given Alan one of his own jumpsuits and the astronaut was now sitting there in the blue uniform. He was taller and thinner than Kevin, but Alan did not seem to care about the garment anyway.

  “Your ship’s re-entry was triggered by a beacon from the surface,” Lora said. “Do you know anything about that?”

  Alan did not reply; suddenly he appeared to be over occupied with his soup. Lora did not really expect him to know anything about the beacon, but she desperately need to talk to him, to establish some sort of communication with him.

  “What was your mission?” she asked. Flynn was clattering with his fork in a manner that Lora felt he was getting upset.

  “It’s classified,” Alan replied, looking at his cup.

  “Well,” Flynn said, obviously irritated by now, “we have no record of an Odyssey…”

  “I can’t tell you anything until I get the flight recorder from my ship,” Alan said quietly yet emphatically.

  “Alan,” Flynn said condescendingly, “a lot has changed in sixty years.”

  Alan looked at him silently and he put down his spoon slowly. Flynn smiled at him coldly and he returned to his own dinner.

  “While you were in delta sleep, Earth was attacked,” Lora said. She was almost surprised how unpleasant it felt to bring this news to Alan. “Call them Scavs. They destroyed our Moon and with that half the planet. Then they invaded. We won the war, but Earth was ruined. Everyone’s on Titan now. It’s a moon of Saturn. Or on the space station, getting ready to go. We’re here for security and drone maintenance. We’re the mop-up crew.”

  Lora’s voice was dripping with sarcasm and when she finished Flynn put his hand on hers, as he had done so many times before when she had become dubious about their mission. Alan looked at them and he went pale; he must have just realized that they were a couple.

  “You’ve lost people,” Flynn told him. “Everything.”

  Alan was staring at him silently.

  “If you want to be alone, we understand,” Flynn said. He did not tell the astronaut to stay away from them, but his tone was hard to misunderstand. Alan looked at Lora and when she said nothing, he stood up and went back to the med bay without a word.

IV.

  “The drones killed his entire crew,” Lora said. She was sitting in her workshop, in the company of the disabled Drone 109. “If I hadn’t gotten there…”

  “I want him gone first thing,” Flynn replied. This was the first time he clearly expressed his distaste towards Alan.

  “Kevin…,” Lora said. “Do you have any memories before the mission? Before the security wipe? ”

  She had never asked Flynn this question; remembering was against their directives and she knew very well how much he wanted to finish the mission successfully… how much he wanted to leave Earth.

  “Our job is not to remember,” he replied. “Remember?”

  “Do you remember him?” Lora insisted. Flynn walked closer to her and he lowered his voice.

  “Lora,” he said. “That was a Scav beacon that brought him down. We don’t know who he is. Or what he is.”

  Lora looked at him, wondering. Flynn could not be possibly thinking that Odyssey had something to do with the Scavengers, could he? She could not explain why the aliens had brought down the starship, but Lora could not logically come up with a scenario in which the Scavengers would plant dreams in her head to bring her under their alien influence.

  “Let’s just get through the night,” Flynn said. “Okay?”

  They went to bed; Lora was lying there sleeplessly for hours. Her mind could not stop wandering and after a while she got out from the bed, got dressed and sat in the dark living room. She could not go to the med bay to talk to Alan, but she was hoping to talk to him once more in the morning. After that Flynn would report the rescue to the MCP, somebody would come to take the survivor away and Lora could never see him again. She could not bear that idea.

  She heard the quiet footsteps when the very first light of the dawn appeared on the sky. Alan came out from the med bay and he walked to the large window. In the dark room he did not notice Lora nor did he look in the direction of the open bedroom. He just stood there quietly, looking at the Bubbleship and the clouds at the feet of the tower. Lora stood up, making more noise than it was necessary to alert him about her presence without startling him. She walked there and joined Alan at the window.

  “You fly that thing?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes,” Lora responded.

  “What happens now?”

  “The MCP will be online soon. Kevin will report your rescue. They’ll send someone down for you.”

  “From the MCP?” Alan asked. The way he tilted his head, awaiting for the answer told Lora that he was scared.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “I need to get the flight recorder from my ship,” he said.

  “The Scavs… They move at night,” Lora said. She did not expect an astronaut that had never seen a Scavenger or what they were capable of to share her wariness, so she tried to explain Alan why it was not the best idea to fly at night. “They could be all over it by now.”

  “I need to know what happened,” Alan said. Slowly he turned to Lora and he looked in her eyes. “You need to know what happened. Please.”

  Alan knew why she was dreaming of him, Lora realized; he knew but he could not tell. Was the answer on the flight recorder or was this indeed just an elaborate scheme of the Scavs to get to her? It did not matter, Lora came to understand at last: she had been ready to die for Alan when she had jumped between the drone and the sleeping pod and if the only way for her to give him the peace of mind was to fly at night and go back to the wreckage, then she was going to do exactly that.

  She got into her pilot uniform and they left the house in silence. The launch of the Bubbleship was going to wake Flynn up nevertheless, but once in the air, Kevin had no way of bringing them back. Lora instructed Alan to sit in the co-pilot seat and she secured him. Then she took off and started towards the crash site.

  “Lora?” Flynn’s voice came from the radio just a minute later. “Lora, what are you doing?”

  “Kevin… He’s a flight officer. He wants to see his ship and secure the flight recorder. Now, you would want the same thing.”

  “Lora, I… I can’t protect you,” Flynn replied. Lora understood what he meant; not just he could not do anything for her during this unauthorized flight, being unable to monitor the area or dispatch drones in case of emergency, but he could not save her from the certain consequences either, when she would be called to account for her actions by Mission Control.

  “No, I understand,” Lora replied. “This one’s on me.”

  She turned off the radio unceremoniously. They were flying in silence, high above the clouds. Lora tried to keep their arrival in secret as long as it was possible, hoping not to alert the Scavengers on the ground. When they got to the crash site, she landed with the Bubbleship very quickly and close to the wreckage.

  Alan got out and Lora followed him with her rifle in hand. The smoking remains of the Oddysey were lit by the lights of the Bubbleship; that way the camera on the ship would transmit picture to the tower - at least Kevin would know what happened, had something gone wrong here.

  They were rushing and then Alan stopped. Lora slowed down and she saw that he was looking at the smoking sleeping pods. It was easy to tell that the pods had been destroyed by machine gun fire and that the crew had not died as the result of the crash. Alan stood there in apparent distress and then he looked at Lora. As far as Alan knew, Lora understood, she could have killed the crew herself.

  “I couldn’t save them,” she said. She could not tell if Alan believed her; he went inside the burnt out shell of the vessel and began searching for the flight recorder. Lora heard him rummaging inside as he was tossing metal pieces aside. She was standing guard outside with her gun drawn. It was dark and quiet; there was no sign of Scavengers. Then something caught her attention and Lora took a few steps to examine a broken part of equipment that was lying in the sand. It was the panel that had held the nuclear battery of the Odyssey. The metal cover had been opened up forcefully by the Scavengers that had stolen the battery. That was the reason why they had brought down the spaceship, Lora realized: they wanted the nuclear core from the vessel. If they had done such enormous damage with just one drone fuel cell, bringing down an entire hydro rig, Lora did not even want to imagine what they were planning to do with the battery of the Odyssey.

  Most importantly for the time being, the stolen core also meant that the aliens were close. Lora began retreating into the wreckage to keep out of sight.

  “All right,” she said. “It’s time to go.”

  “Lora,” Alan said excitedly and she looked at him. He was holding the intact flight recorder in his hand. “I found it.”

  A moment later he looked away, at something behind her back. Lora could hear them at the same time: the bark-like sounds of a whole group of Scavengers. She jumped ahead with her rifle drawn; if she could just force them back enough until Alan and she reached the Bubbleship, they could still make it. The heavy, synthetic stock of a machine gun hit her head from the side – a Scavenger must have come closer when she had retreated and it was waiting for her to emerge. Lora collapsed on the ground; her rifle fell out from her hands. She was going to die and there was nothing she could do to rescue Alan either. The only thing for her to do was to save the Bubbleship and with that Kevin’s life. She touched the remote control on her wrist to initiate the autopilot. The engine of the Bubbleship roared; the empty ship lifted up from the ground and flew away, back to the sky tower. The last thing Lora could see was the backlights of her ship disappearing in the black sky.

Chapter Text

I.

  She felt the crisp, morning air on her skin. She opened her eyes, but she could not see anything from the fabric that was wrapped around her forehead. Blood was still dripping from the open wound where the Scavenger had hit her; Lora could not tell if they had put the cloth around her head to stop the bleeding or to make sure that she could not see where they were going. None of those options made much sense for her; she was stunned already by the fact that she was still alive. She was lying on her side on some kind of platform, which was rocking slightly. Testing her limits Lora tried to roll on her side; immediately she felt the shackles around her wrists and ankles. The movement made the fabric around her face to slip aside and it left one of her eyes uncovered.

  The walls of the canyon were moving around them… No, they were on some sort of wagon, which was traveling through the canyon; the sensation of the rocks moving around them came from the fact that the vehicle was moving with a relatively high speed, yet in complete silence. Lora looked up and she could see a Scavenger standing above her. The alien was facing their route; its black cloak was flapping in the wind. Then another Scavenger came into her field of vision; it was standing slightly behind the other one. This one was also wearing black garment, black visors and a breathing mask. It was holding a gun, with the barrel pointed at Lora. They were humanoids and they looked slightly different from the recordings provided by the MCP.

  They did not speak and Lora made no attempt to turn around. She was hoping to catch a sight of Alan, but she could not see or hear him. Alan! Was he here on the wagon or had the Scavengers killed him at the wreckage? Both alternatives were unbearable for her. Had he just come in Lora’s life so that she could see him killed? Now she was never going to get an answer to her questions and in the last minutes of her life she had to find peace in the thought that with the Bubbleship returned to the sky tower the Scavengers could not get to Kevin: that somebody would soon go to take him to the safety of the space station. The idea gave Lora some comfort and she closed her eyes, drifting away slowly.

II.

  Lora was waking up. She found herself in a sitting position; she was sitting on a metal chair with her hands tied behind the back of the seat. She was inside a building or cave; it was dark, but there was a spotlight pointed at her face. Lora could not see anything, except for the excruciating, white light, but had there been Scavengers in the room, they could see her easily. The floor was also made of metal; the place looked like a bunker, built from parts collected from a factory.

  She tugged at her manacles to no avail. She threw herself against the back of the chair, just to find that it was bolted down.

  Somebody lit up a match in the darkness and Lora caught a glimpse of a face… A human face! There was an old man sitting in a chair just a few feet apart from her. He used the match to light up his cigar and now Lora could see him, though she was forcing her eyes and blinking against the blaze of the spotlight. It was an old man with a white beard and eyeglasses. She must have been drugged, Lora realized and she remained silent. The man put out the match and his face disappeared in the darkness.

  “I’ve been watching you, Lora,” the old man said. He was well-spoken, articulate. “You’re curious. What are you looking for in those books? Do they bring back old memories?”

  “You won’t get anything from me,” Lora replied. By now she was certain that she had been drugged and in reality she was either alone in the room or she was talking to a Scavenger. “My memory has been wiped to protect…”

  “The security of the mission. Yes,” the old man said the same words Lora intended. “You can’t have your precious memory falling into the wrong hands, now, can you?”

  Lora remained silent. She was not talking to a person, she reminded herself; they were trying to trick her.

  “Tell me,” the old man said. “Have you ever met a Scav up close?”

  Lora stayed silent.

  “Of course not. You just repair drones. ‘Don’t go into the radiation zone.’ ‘Don’t ask too many questions.’ Not part of the job description. Lights!”

  The lamps in the room turned on. They were not in a room; they were on the ground floor of some sort of industrial building. The building had either been buried or it had been built inside of a cave; there were no windows or other openings to the outside world. The bay was three stories high with passageways on each level; and all catwalks and stairs were full of people. People were standing in silence everywhere, listening to the conversation in front of them.

  “We’re not alien, Lora,” the old man said. “We’re human. My name is Walter Gibbs.”

  Most of them were younger people and all of them were wearing the same durable black suit Lora associated with the Scavengers; except for this time she saw their faces.

  “Of course,” he said, “for us, being human is a problem.”

  He reached down; next to his chair there was a Scavenger helmet. There was a voice modulator attached to it.

  “Old stealth fighter tech,” the old man explained. “Shields us from your scanners. Vocal scrambling.”

  He lifted up the modulator and spoke.

  “Can you hear me, Lora?” he asked. The device transformed his voice to the alien sound Lora had sometimes heard on the recordings the drones submitted. The man put down the modulator.

  “Keeps the drones confused,” he added. “Well, most of the time.”

  Despite of her conviction, Lora spoke. The man was implying that the drones were intentionally killing people and she could not stand that.

  “The drones are programmed…” she started.

  “To kill humans, Lora,” the old man interrupted, raising his voice for the first time. “You saw what they did to those sleep pods. You almost got yourself blown to bits protecting that man.”

  He leaned forward in his chair.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked. Lora shrugged.

  “Anyone would have,” she replied.

  “Anyone,” the old man repeated. He leaned back in his chair. “Interesting.”

  “We’re wasting our time,” a woman said in the back. She walked closer; she was wearing a black Scavenger suit and she was holding a rifle. She had short, black hair and piercing, blue eyes. Armed men and women followed her in the bay. ”The drones will track her here.”

  “Quorra thinks I’m a fool for having you brought here,” the old man said, addressing his words to Lora. He stood up. “I hope you prove her wrong.”

  Following his order two of the soldiers took Lora’s handcuffs off and they helped her on her feet. They walked downstairs in the cave. Lora saw no point of trying to run or fight; she was surrounded by heavily armed people and they were at some secret, underground location. She felt confused; she believed to have been captured by a group of people that had somehow survived the alien war. These people must have lived on Earth ever since the invasion, hiding from the Scavengers and from the drones. Gibbs had said that the drones were programmed to kill people and while the incident at the wreckage of the Odyssey could not be denied, the old man had to be wrong.

  “We were running a ground game, and losing,” Gibbs said. “So, we decided to throw the long ball. It took us decades just to crack the GPS codes. That’s how we brought down the Odyssey.”

  They walked into a small workshop. In the center of the room there was the battery of the space vessel, surrounded by stolen fuel cells from the drones. Gibbs stopped next to the table.

  “The Odyssey’s compact reactor, courtesy of NASA,” he said, pointing at the appliance. “Very hard to come by. Did you like the show last night? That was just one fuel cell. Imagine what ten of them will do, with a core of weapons-grade plutonium.”

  Lora looked at him silently. She began considering the possibility that Gibbs was some kind of cult leader. Perhaps he had survived the alien war, she was thinking, but instead of joining the survivors on the MCP, he had willfully stayed behind on Earth, along with his followers. He and his people could have disguised themselves as Scavengers to stay safe on the ravaged planet which they shared with the aliens: and their camouflage also hid them from the MCP and from Lora. No wonder the drones mistook them for Scavengers, she thought and the idea gave her momentarily relief. Gibbs could have been some madman, since he had just admitted blowing up the hydro rig the night before. Maybe he was running a doomsday cult here, Lora went on thinking, and he believed that humanity should have gone extinct following the Scavenger attack. That could have been the motive behind the attacks on the drones and on the hydro rig: Gibbs was trying to make mankind’s trip to the Titan impossible, so that they would all die on the barren Earth.

  “We have a nuke and we have a drone to carry it,” Gibbs said, looking up. Lora followed his gaze and she saw the missing Drone 172 suspended on a platform. The drone was offline. “We can’t access it. It doesn’t know who we are. But it knows you, Lora.”

  Gibbs turned back to her.

  “We need you to program the drone,” he told Lora. “Have it carry our nuke up to the MCP. End this war.”

  Lora looked at Gibbs straight in the eye. She was right, she realized: Gibbs was insane. He was not just trying to abort the mission and leave mankind stranded on the ravaged Earth with the remaining Scavengers; he wanted to destroy the space station and kill everybody on board.

  “There are people up there,” she said slowly. Quorra stepped ahead.

  “Program the drone to return to the MCP,” she told Lora. “It needs to go right to the center.”

  Lora nodded. Just a few minutes earlier she had thought she would be killed by the Scavengers; now she knew that it would be Gibbs and his cult. It did not make a difference; Lora was not going to give up on the only mission she knew and she was not going to be part of this diabolical plan.

  “Screw you,” she told Quorra. For the first time now Quorra smiled, as if she was delighted by Lora’s answer.

  “We haven’t got time for this,” Quorra told Gibbs. She pulled out a handgun, turned around and shot Lora straight in the chest.

  Lora fell on her back, hitting the floor hard. For a few moments she could not breathe; she pressed her hands on her chest where the bullet had hit her. The armor under her uniform saved her life, but the shot from the high-caliber handgun at close range got her like a blow with a hammer. She was blinking, struggling to breathe. A moment later Gibbs came into her field of vision. The old man was looking down at her and his eyes slowly softened as if Lora had given the right answer to a question, as if she had just passed a test.

III.

  “When we brought down the Odyssey, we thought it would be empty,” Gibbs said. He gestured toward the room next door. “We were wrong and with bringing down the vessel we got more than we had hoped for.”

  Lora did not reply. She had scrambled on her feet and caught her breath, waiting for Quorra to figure her mistake and shoot her in the head. But Quorra just stood there across the room with a phlegmatic expression on her face, with her hand resting on her rifle.

  Gibbs walked to the door and opened it. Lora followed him shakily. Behind the door there was a room filled with old computer parts, monitors and other electronic appliances. At a desk there was Alan working on a computer without paying much attention to the people entering the room. Lora recognized the flight recorder of the Odyssey on the desk; Alan was trying to connect the device to the computer to access the data. A little boy was standing next to him, a child from Gibbs’ cult; he was looking at the computer excitedly and he was asking Alan questions about the device.

  Lora was looking at Alan and she slowed down. He was still wearing Flynn’s jumpsuit; he appeared to be unharmed. For the first time now he seemed to be relaxed as he was working with the computers and he was answering the child’s questions. From the way he was working and talking one could tell that he was an expert in his field. Then another realization hit Lora, something she had refused to admit until this moment: that she was in love with him. It was not a sudden flare, not a new emotion; it was something she had brought with herself from before the mind wipe, something engraved into her very being. And Alan knew about it: he knew her, even if it was impossible, even if there was no explanation how the two of them could have met before.

  But Alan knew the answer – he must have known it. Had he told the truth in the sky tower, they could have figured things out instead of coming down here and being captured by these madmen. With sudden fervor, Lora stepped ahead. Alan noticed the group walking in the room and he turned to them. He took a step toward her; he seemed to be concerned. Lora was covered with dirt and her face was still bloody, she realized and that he was seeing her like this, added to her anger.

  “Who are you?” she asked furiously. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  The people around them were silent; they were all looking at them.

  “Lora, I…” he started.

  “What were you doing on the Odyssey?” she demanded. “What was your mission?”

  Alan looked at her and then at Gibbs; she was staring at him with angry face and Gibbs was waiting for him to talk as well.

  “It was a research flight to Titan,” Alan said. “My first. That’s what it was supposed to be. Six weeks to launch, deep space scanners picked up an alien object. We were reassigned to investigate. They put us all in delta. They must have woken you and Flynn first.”

  Lora was looking at him silently. She was not quiet because she had no questions; she was quiet, because what Alan said could not be possibly true. Lora could not be on a spacecraft that had been launched from Earth more than sixty years earlier. Alan had spent all those decades in delta sleep; for him time had not passed and he was still in his early thirties – Lora, who was about the same age, but had not spent time in a sleep capsule, could not have possibly met him.

  “What?” she asked.

  “That object,” Alan said, “was the MCP, Lora. The MCP was our mission.”

  “That’s…” Lora whispered. “That’s impossible!”

  She stared at Alan from up close.

  “Who are you?” she yelled. Alan moved as if he wanted to touch her face, then he pulled back. He seemed to be deeply shaken.

  “I’m your husband,” he said. Lora stood there in complete shock. “I don’t know what happened, but you’re not who you think you are.”

IV.

  They had taken the child out; most of the people also left. Lora sat in front of the computer, bewildered. Next to her Gibbs was sitting and Quorra stayed in the room as well. Alan finished wiring the flight recorder to the machine and he started to play the recording without saying anything or looking at any of them.

  There had been several cameras inside of the Odyssey; the different angles were playing on separate monitors at the same time. The pictures were showing the interior of the once intact Odyssey and a male automated voice came from the speaker.

  “Flight recorder playback for the Odyssey mission,” it said. “3 May, 2017.”

  One of the monitors blinked and a thin, elderly man appeared. He was wearing a suit and a headset. Lora, who was not in the sky tower during the day, when the MCP was online, did not recognize the launch controller, Edward Dillinger, until he started speaking.

  “Good morning, Odyssey, from your friends here at Mission Control,” Dillinger said on the recording.

  “Good morning, Mission. This is Commander Lora Baines,” the reply came from the computer and Lora gasped. It was her own voice on that sixty years old recording. A second later another monitor started playing and she saw it: she saw astronaut Lora Baines in the pilot seat of the Odyssey. It was a few years younger, but identical version of her very self. The commander was wearing the dark blue uniform of the Odyssey mission; her blonde hair was cropped short and she was wearing a headset. “Thank you for that fantastic wake-up call. Pre-rendezvous checks complete. Electrical guidance and nav systems, all good. Range behind object, 250 clicks… 12 below V-bar, closure rate 200 kilometers per hour.”

  “Copy that,” Dillinger replied. “It’s good to see you, Lora. After 39 days of sleep, sounds like you’re ready to go.”

  Lora was watching the recording numbly. Dillinger was smiling; his voice was the same as he sounded these days - it was the manner of his speech that had changed. Behind him she could see the NASA emblem and other members of the Mission Control. Alan, Gibbs and the other people that had stayed in the room, were listening in complete silence.

  “I’m ready to go,” Lora Baines replied on the recording.

  “Your next burn will bring you up level and co-speed at 50 kilometer range, where you’ll hold,” Dillinger instructed.

  “Copy,” the commander replied. “We’ll hold 50 clicks from object for sensor scan and evaluation. Targets look good. Initiating burn in 3, 2, 1… Ignition.”

  She touched a button on the control panel and the Odyssey moved forward in space.

  “We see a good burn,” Dillinger said. “Are you reading any output from the object?”

  “Negative. Zero heat. No EMR. There’s no sign of life.”

  “How’s the rest of the crew doing?”

  “Co-pilot Kevin Flynn should be up here shortly. The rest of the crew remains in delta sleep,” Lora Baines replied. Lora was watching with lips parted as astronaut Kevin Flynn appeared on another monitor. He was wearing a dark blue uniform identical to Lora’s and he was pushing himself toward the pilot cabin in the zero gravity environment.

  “Copy that,” Dillinger replied. “You missed a hell of a game last night.”

  “What did I tell you, guys?” Lora Baines asked playfully. “No spoiler’s about last night’s game. I’m looking forward to watching it when I get back.”

  “You’re not talking about football already, are you?” Kevin Flynn asked on the recording. He just arrived to the cabin and he got in the seat of the co-pilot.

  “Good morning, Kevin,” Dillinger said. “How are you doing this lovely morning?”

  “Another day in paradise,” Flynn replied. A few minutes passed and then Lora Baines spoke.

  “Mission, we have a situation,” she said. “The last burn was spot-on to give us a 50-click hold from object, but radar range still decreasing.”

  “We’re accelerating toward the object,” Flynn said.

  “We’re going to need full OMS burn to pull away,” Lora Baines said. “Initiate now.”

  “Entering target,” Flynn said while he was working on the control panel of the spaceship.

  “Gimbals set,” Lora Baines said.

  “Target’s good,” Flynn replied.

  “Arm forward engines,” Lora instructed.

  “Engines on.”

  “Ready?” Commander Lora Baines asked. “Let’s go.”

  She pulled an arm. The next moment the space station ahead, the object that Lora knew as the MCP, where the remaining people of Earth lived, appeared onscreen.

  “Mission,” Lora Baines said on the recording, “We’re in full OMS burn, trying to back out. There’s a lot of vibration.”

  The picture on the monitor was shaking and the sound of an alarm came from the speaker.

  “We’re not getting away from this thing,” Lora Baines said.

  “Odyssey,” Dillinger said, “Telemetry shows structural overstress. Knock off the burn. Do you copy?”

  “Cutting off burn,” Lora Baines said. Dillinger’s face disappeared as the spacecraft lost contact with Mission Control. The picture was not shaking anymore, but the alarm was still on. “Mission. Mission?”

  “Mission?” Flynn asked. “Dillinger? Increased acceleration toward the object. Estimated contact within two minutes.”

  Lora Baines and Kevin Flynn were sitting next to each other on the recording. They seemed to be composed, but Lora could tell that they were going through the hardest moments of their lives… they were making their most important, final decisions. Commander Baines turned back in her seat, looking at the back of Odyssey.

  “I’m going to eject the sleep module,” she said. Flynn looked at her. “It’s programmed for reinsertion into Earth orbit. I’ll fly the Command module out if I break free. I want you back there now.”

  “Absolutely not,” Flynn replied.

  “That’s an order!”

  “Lora, no, we’re a team,” Flynn replied. Lora Baines was sitting in her seat for another long moment and then she jumped. Lora was watching the recording with broken heart. She was at total loss at this recording as was she about her own identity; she knew that she was somehow linked to the commander, but she had no recollection of this event whatsoever. Yet she exactly knew what went down in the commander’s brain in those moments. Astronaut Lora Baines knew that she was going to die: she thought they were going to collide with the alien object. The only thing in her power was to try and save the crew, hoping that the sleep module would be able to get away from the alien space station that was pulling at the Odyssey. She knew that the autopilot would bring the sleeping crew back to Earth and put the vessel on orbit – she just did not know that NASA would be destroyed by then and that Odyssey would make its circles around the planet for sixty years until Gibbs and his people would be able to bring it down.

  The commander ejected herself from the cabin and she floated back in the ship. She was moving too fast in order to be able to detach the sleep module in the very short time she was left with. On the recording Lora Baines crashed against the back of the ship violently. She pulled an arm and she pushed herself back. She flew to the middle of the ship and she appeared to be pressing herself against the wall. No, not the wall, Lora realized, watching the recording; those were the sleep pods of the crew lined against the inner wall of the vessel. The commander went to Alan Bradley’s capsule and she was looking at her sleeping husband’s face through the small transparent window of the pod for the last time in her life.

  “We’ve got to go!” Flynn yelled from the pilot cabin. “Lora! 30 seconds!”

  The commander stayed there frozen for a long moment. She spoke and her voice was so low that the microphones could barely pick it up.

  “Dream of us,” Lora Baines whispered against the glass of the sleeping capsule. She pushed herself away from the pod, forcefully enough to fly herself back to the pilot cabin. Halfway she grabbed the door of the sleeping module and closed it. The door pressurized and locked up. Lora moved again and closed the door of the pilot cabin as well, completing the separation. She then pulled the arm next to the door and pushed the large, red button, releasing the sleep module and sending it back to Earth. The recording did not stop; even though the pilot cabin was now separated, it was still transmitting to the flight recorder. Commander Lora Baines returned to her seat and she was watching the approaching alien object helplessly. A moment before the collision a door opened up on the side of the giant space station and the pilot cabin of the Odyssey was sucked in. The recording then ended.

Chapter Text

I.

  They sat in silence for seconds. Then Lora looked at Alan, who was still staring at the black monitor with the expression of profound loss on his face.

  “The MCP,” Lora said slowly. “Is not ours? It is the space vessel the Scavengers came with?”

  “The Scavengers…” Gibbs started, “they don’t exist. They never existed.”

  Lora looked at him silently. Deep inside she knew that whatever Gibbs was going to tell now, would make her universe to fall apart, but she had to hear it anyway.

  “I’ve been with NASA less than a year when that unholy MCP arrived,” Gibbs said. “I saw the moon get taken out. Right up there in the night sky. I couldn’t believe it. After that, nature took over. There’s bedrock around Chicago, so we were spared the worst of the waves and the quakes. Most people just starved.”

  He stopped, as if he was trying to give her time to process.

  “The MCP,” Lora said. “The Mission Control Platform…”

  “That’s how you know it. Based on the communication between the station and the drones, in reality it calls itself Master Control Program. A machine itself; we haven’t been able to figure out whether it had been created by an actual alien race and sent out to harvest other planets or if it is the vessel of an independent Artificial Intelligence that had built itself. We don’t know and it doesn’t quite make a difference for us.”

  Lora looked back at the dark monitor. She wanted Gibbs to be wrong, but she had just seen the video from the Odyssey’s flight recorder. She had just watched a footage that could not have been faked; she had just seen Edward Dillinger, who she had known as their Mission Control officer on a sixty years old recording. She had just seen herself…

  “I am not Lora Baines,” she said without a doubt. Gibbs looked at her with regret.

  “After the destruction of the Moon, The MCP sent troop ships down,” he said. “The doors opened and out you came. Astronaut Lora Baines. Thousands of you. Memory wiped. Programmed to kill. They had taken our best and turned her against us. No soul. No humanity. The MCP. What a brilliant machine. Feeding off one planet after another for energy. Phase Two was drones. Repairmen. Fifty years of watching those hydro rigs suck our planet dry. Then one day I saw you set down. Another drone to fix. But in the rubble that day was a book. You picked it up. You studied it. And I thought I saw a way. When you stepped in front of that drone and saved him,” Gibbs gestured at Alan, “I knew. You were in there somewhere. I just had to find a way to bring you back.”

  Lora was staring at him belligerently. It was not true; it could not be true. Despite of all the proof, she could not face the presumption of her being behind the destruction of the planet and the near extinction of mankind. She turned at Alan, who was looking at her with a mixture of shock and sadness. He had not been aware of the circumstances of the Odyssey rescue, she realized; he had not known that she had had to actually shield his sleeping pod with her own body to save him. Behind Gibbs Quorra was surveying them with an unreadable face. Lora suddenly understood Quorra’s hostility toward her; had whatever Gibbs told her been true, Quorra and all the other people at this base had watched their loved ones being slaughtered by other clones of Lora Baines’.

  “Come,” Gibbs said. Lora stood up numbly and followed him outside. There was a large adjacent room, filled with books, paintings, statues and records. There were ancient looking rugs on the floor and a large vase in the corner. There were people from the community working there, organizing the items. Alan joined them without saying a word.

  “The archives,” Gibbs said. “We preserved what we could. Here, I saved this for you.”

  He stopped next to a shelf and pulled out a scrapbook. He handed it to Lora, who opened it. The scrapbook was filled by cut outs from old newspapers, starting from the early 2010s. It documented the career of Lora Baines, starting from her rise as a US Air Force pilot, though the years as a NASA astronaut until the final Titan mission. The original Lora Baines, she learned, was born in Chicago and graduated from Boston University with a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering. Much to Lora’s shock on the photograph of the fresh graduates she saw a very young Kevin Flynn and Lora Baines standing next to each other wearing similar caps and gowns, with their diplomas in their hands.

  The title of a later article was reading “Extreme Aeronautics”.  There was a body of text next to the photo of a space diver in a pressure suit and helmet, falling toward Earth from outer space and another picture of a young, smiling Lora Baines. The text read:

“Highest free-fall

The highest free-fall record is held by Astronaut Lora Baines (USA) jumping an unprecedented distance of 136,000 feet on July 18^th, 2015.

Lora Baines remains the current record holder to this day, recently adding a new record to her roster by holding the world’s record for the longest stay on an International Space Station – 8 months, 3 weeks and 17 hours. This beat the previous record by Cosmonaut Boris Krushkin (Russia).”

  “I was sixteen when you took that jump,” Gibbs said.

  There were photos and articles from various missions and award ceremonies; pictures of Lora Baines in military uniform, shaking hands with various dignities. One of the last cut outs was from 2017, just months before the Titan Mission: on the colored print a beaming Lora Baines and Alan Bradley were walking down the stairs of a cathedral as newlyweds, surrounded by a crowd of hundreds.

  She was looking at the scrapbook, but she did not see the paper anymore. She got the answers she had been waiting for years and now she was trying to find the strength to endure the truth. To delay the fall just for a moment she focused on the book. The cut outs were fumbling in the beginning of the book as if they had been done by an unskilled hand… or by a child. The cuts became accurate in the later years. Lora closed the book and looked at the acronym on the spine. It read “W.G.” Lora looked at Gibbs.

  “You were my goddamn hero,” Gibbs said, answering the unspoken question simply. Lora gave the book back to him and she walked out from the room. She could not breathe. People looked at her as she walked by, but thankfully nobody attempted to stop her. Lora needed some air and while there seemed to be no exit from this bunker, she felt a cold draft on her face as she went.

  The air came from behind an open door, which had been left open to provide ventilation. It could have been the chimney-stack of the factory building which had stood here before; now it was an empty, small room with no roof - a few hundred feet above she could see the grey sky. Lora closed the door behind her and she fell on her knees.

II.

  Sometimes during her missions Lora had seen more or less intact buildings left behind after the war. There was not all that much left after the nuclear fallout, but sometimes she saw graffiti on the old walls and sometimes the tags read the same, making her think that they had had a deeper meaning for the people that had once lived there.

  “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds*,” the words had been. Now, in light of the revelations Lora came to understand it. For the people that had been attacked by the MCP, which had sent Earth into chaos, for them it might have been about that giant, unforgiving tetrahedron in the sky, which had come to take the resources and destroy the planet in the process. But for Lora those words were about herself; a mind wiped clone that had become the tool of an alien intelligence.

  She touched the grey sand on the ground. It could have been mixed with human ashes as far as she knew. During the five years she had spent on Earth she always thought of her coming return to the space station as being possibly reunited with friends and family. But any friends or family left behind by the real Lora Baines, had died, likely by the hands of previous clones of her, the ones that had been sent to exterminate mankind. She dreamed about meeting the man from her dreams; but that man was the real Lora Baines’ husband, the one whose life Commander Lora Baines had saved with the last willful act of her life. Now her, Tech-49, one of Lora’s thousand clones, who had spent her entire existence with killing people by keeping the drones active, ultimately betraying Lora’s legacy, had no right to be anywhere near Alan.

  The door opened and Lora looked up. Gibbs was standing there; he was looking at her with sorrow. Lora Baines had had the most profound impact on Gibbs’ life, she realized. Gibbs himself had said that Lora had been his hero; it was not a wild guess to think that the young Walter Gibbs had chosen his path based on Lora’s influence and had joined NASA following her footsteps. Later he had watched all the people he had known to be killed by Lora’s clones; and followed by that he had watched newer versions of her repairing drones. Gibbs had known the answers to his questions during the interrogation, Lora realized; he had been able to finish Lora’s answers, because he had spoken to other clones before.

  “How many technicians did you capture before me?” she asked in a raspy voice. She was still kneeling, with her hands in the sand. “How many of them you tried to convince unsuccessfully? How many clones of Lora Baines you have to shoot in the head and bury?”

  Gibbs looked at her long before speaking.

  “Too many,” he replied regretfully. Lora stood up slowly.

  “Do you know what happened to the real Lora?” she asked.

  “I don’t. We know that the MCP has the technology to clone people and even to supply said clones with a personality based on Commander Baines’ and her co-pilot. But you must know, even if the commander is alive on the space station in some form, even if the MCP kept her in order to create new clones, she is likely beyond saving by now.”

  Gibbs stepped back and gestured for her to join him inside. Lora followed him back to the room where they had watched the video from the flight recorder. Alan was there, along with Quorra and the child. Alan was answering the little boy’s questions, but he seemed to be distracted. They all looked at Lora when Gibbs and she entered the room.

  “I will program the drone to carry the nuke up to the MCP,” Lora said. “But only after I got Flynn out from the habitat.”

III.

  There was a moment of baffled silence before Gibbs objected.

  “Lora…,” he said. “You must understand… You are an anomaly. You were programmed to be loyal to the MCP and you were able to escape the programming. Your officer did not interact with anybody outside of the habitat, he has no reason to do the same. You can’t save him.”

  “He did not have to stay on the Odyssey. He could have escaped in the sleep module; he could have lived. He died with Lora out of loyalty. I owe him to go back for him,” she replied.

  “Your officer is not co-pilot Kevin Flynn,” Gibbs replied. “He is a brainwashed clone of him. The bound between you and him is something that the MCP implanted in both of you.”

  “I understand that. But without me, without a technician the MCP has no use of him, a communication officer. Do you know how much time he has left now that I am gone?”

  “No,” Gibbs said.

  “I will bring him here. When he is safe, I reprogram the drone and we will end the war.”

  “Lora,” Gibbs said. “The MCP already knows that something is wrong. There can be a drone waiting for you at the habitat, ready to take you out. And if not, your officer’s programming is against leaving the tower. If you ask him to do so, he can kill you in self-defense. If that happens, we lose all hope. We won’t get a chance like this again.”

  “Let me go,” Lora said. “Get the drone and the bomb ready. Please, trust me. We will be back soon.”

  “She will never come back if you let her go,” Quorra said. Until that moment she was standing at the wall with arms crossed. Gibbs looked at her and then back at Lora.

  “What are you planning to do?” he asked.

  “I’ll go to the Empire State Building. I’ll use the same antenna to contact the tower you used to bring down the Odyssey. He will dispatch my ship.”

  “You are risking all our lives,” Quorra told Gibbs. “Everything.”

  “I’ll go with her,” Alan said suddenly. Everybody in the room looked at him surprisedly, but he offered no further explanation. Gibbs slowly nodded.

  They walked through the bunker to a smaller entrance. It was hidden under a large table of rocks and it opened to a grey desert. Lora’s stolen bike stood there, accompanied by two armed men. Gibbs walked there and he stood next to the bike for a while before speaking.

  “I’ve been to your… radiation zones,” he told Lora. “If you’re looking for the truth, that’s where you’ll find it.”

  He took out Lora’s handgun from his pocket and gave it to her. One of the armed men gave her back her rifle. She took the guns and she turned to Alan.

  “You can’t come,” she told him. “My ship can carry only two people. Flynn will come back with me, I know.”

  “I will come to you to the Empire State Building,” Alan replied. “I need to show you something. Then you go alone.”

  “You do that,” Quorra said quickly. She appeared to catch the opportunity to follow them and keep an eye on Lora. “I’ll bring him and the bike back.”

  Lora slowly nodded. She did not want Gibbs to change his mind about letting her go back to the tower and so she agreed on their terms. She got on her bike and waited until Alan sat behind her.

  Lora drove through the grey desert with high speed. She felt Alan’s hands on her waist; in the beginning she was driving carefully to avoid throwing him off of the bike, but after a few miles she felt that he was comfortable with the vehicle and the speed. He must have ridden a bike with the real Lora Baines in a similar manner, she realized and she found the idea comforting.

  They traveled through a great basin and came across the half-buried remains of the Manhattan Bridge. Lora felt Alan’s hands tightening on her waist for a moment as he must have recognized the remnants of his lost world as well. About a mile away from the Empire State Building the bike ran out of fuel and from there they walked in silence. When she parked the bike Lora could see the vehicle Quorra was following them with in the distance, but Lora did not mean to wait for her and ask for a ride.

  Walking downhill they caught sight of the building. From the way his breath hitched Lora could tell that Alan was once again in shock. She wished she could show him something better, something more than this destroyed world; but she had nothing else. They walked and Lora felt strange; this was the first time in her life that she was walking on the planet without her gun in hand, without waiting for a Scavenger to pop out from behind a rock.

  She climbed inside the abandoned gift store. In the dark she went to the cables, pulled them out and began to transmit a Morse code. Lora expected Flynn to be scanning all frequencies; he would pick up the signal right away. Using the code she was telling him that she was fine and asked him to dispatch the Bubbleship. After five minutes Lora was sure that Flynn had gotten the message and she stopped.

  She found Alan standing outside at the binoculars. His hands were resting on the metal and he was looking through the lens as if he was seeing the once majestic city on the other side. Even though the details were different from her visions – they stood in the middle of a desert instead of way above the city, they were alone and Alan was wearing Flynn’s jumpsuit instead of his casual outfit -, for Lora it was still something right out of a dream.

  “I’m going back for Flynn,” she told him. “If you came here with me to tell me not to… I don’t care if my loyalty toward him is the programming of the MCP to keep us under control. I’m going back for him.”

  Alan looked at her softly.

  “I know,” he said. “I understand your reasons. And whatever Gibbs told you about being programmed… He might be right, but he doesn’t know that you and Flynn had a relationship back at the academy. That was years before we met.”

  Alan looked at her, with his hands still on the binocular.

  “We were here,” he said, changing subject. “I asked you to meet me here. You called this place the top of the world. You could probably tell I was nervous that day. It was right here, Lora.”

  She looked at him with conflicting emotions. She knew he was telling the truth; but he should not have spoken like that, not to her. He had been here with Commander Lora Baines, with a hero. She, Tech-49, was a clone… a curse to mankind. Yet she could not find the strength to stop him. From his close proximity the vision she had seen so many times before came back with a stunning intensity.

  “I said, look through here and I’ll…”

  “… show you the future,” Lora finished the sentence with him. She stood there, stricken by the memory. “And you held up a ring.”

  She remembered as if it had been her standing here that day, she remembered being tricked to look through the binocular. She remembered seeing the city, the buildings and some strange, sparkling object coming into the view. She recalled the rush of happiness upon realizing that Alan was holding a ring in front of the lens.

  Alan reached to the neck of his jumpsuit and he pulled out a simple chain he wore around his neck, something Lora had not noticed until then. There was a gold band on the necklace, the way an astronaut would carry a ring in space. Of course it was not the ring from the vision, not Lora Baines’ diamond engagement ring, but Alan’s own wedding band. Lora reached out and held it in awe.

  “And I said…”

  “Yes!” Alan said. He seemed to be delighted and sad… so sad at the same time. “You said yes. There you are!”

  He embraced her and Lora let him; but she felt tears welling up in her eyes. Lora Baines was dead and the fact that she, Tech-49 could recall some of her memories made no difference. She was an impostor, barely better than the drones that were hunting people. Alan, who had lost everything and returned to a barren Earth, was trying to hold onto her, because she was the only thing that was left of his wife – and she was too weak to tell him this, too weak to push him away.

  They still stood there, sharing an embrace when the empty Bubbleship suddenly and stealthily arrived. It was hovering in line with the observation deck, with its cockpit camera pointed at them, transmitting the image straight back to the sky tower.

Chapter Text

I.

   Lora took off with the Bubbleship. She looked down to the ground and she saw Alan watching her ascent.

  “Kevin, I’m coming in,” she spoke in the radio. “Do not report to Mission until I get back. Do you copy?”

  There came no answer and Lora repeated the question. The radio remained silent. Lora pushed the aircraft to its limits in order to reach the habitat as quick as it was possible. She could just assume that Flynn refused to answer because he had seen her and Alan sharing an embrace. Obviously, Flynn had no way of knowing about the events that had led to that moment; but he knew that Lora had been taken by the Scavengers and yet she lived. For him the aliens were still real: and he had just seen Lora holding Alan, whom Flynn suspected to be the tool of the Scavengers.

  The sky tower was hovering above the clouds in the bright light of the sun and for one last time Lora looked at as she had used to see it, a tiny island of peace on the ravaged Earth. Then the moment passed and the ship landed. Lora opened the door and jumped out to the pad in a hurry. From there she could see Kevin standing behind the closed glass door of the habitat, looking at her.

  She rushed across the bridge, to the glass. Flynn was standing on the other side with a cold expression on his face. He seemed to have no intention to let Lora in.

  “Kevin, open the door,” she said. Suddenly Lora wished she had had time to make herself presentable; now, that she was standing there in her once light grey uniform which was almost black now from the dirt and the smoke, with the fabric torn in the front by Quorra’s gunshot and with blood still trickling from her head wound, she must have looked like a maniac to Flynn.

  “Stay away from me,” Flynn said. He sounded disgusted. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “It’s not safe here,” Lora said. She was whispering; she was keeping her voice low to hear if a drone was coming, she realized. “We need to leave, now.”

  “It was always him, wasn’t it?” Flynn asked.

  “Kevin,” she said. “He’s…”

  She fell silent. He’s Lora’s husband, she meant to say – but that statement would have made no sense to Flynn and it would have just further aggravated him. And she could not say it anyway, because it would have been an admission, that Alan had nothing to do with her. She just stood there quietly; but her feelings must have been written on her face, because Flynn stepped closer to the door and touched the control panel.

  Lora expected the door to open and when it did not happen, she understood that Flynn established radio connection with the MCP.

  “Mission, this is Tower 49,” he said.

  “Go ahead, 49,” Dillinger’s voice answered immediately from the loudspeakers inside the habitat.

  “No,” Lora whispered.

  “I’m having a problem with my technician,” Flynn said, looking in Lora’s eyes through the glass.

  “No,” Lora said. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You have to listen to me.”

  “She found a survivor at the crash site,” Flynn continued. “He’s impeding her abilities and she is unfit for service.”

  Lora placed her fists on the glass. Everything was happening as Gibbs had predicted it; Flynn was protecting the mission, the only way of life he knew.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Kevin,” Dillinger replied. “Are you still an effective team?”

  Lora was banging on the glass. Flynn wanted to punish her for putting their retirement in risk; but in his mind the worst case scenario must have been the both of them being decommissioned two weeks earlier than it would have happened anyway, for their eventual failure did not erase five years of hard work.

  “Kevin,” she was yelling. “Open the damn door, Kevin!”

  “No,” he said, looking straight in her eyes. “We are not an effective team.”

  The door opened with a loud click. He stepped back and Lora lowered her arms. They were both surprised as none of them opened the door. The floor shook mildly as it did sometimes when the wind was strong outside.

  Lora stepped inside with her hand reached out at Flynn. He was backing away from her.

  “Please,” she said. “We have to go now.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you, Lora,” he said. By now he appeared to be honestly terrified.

  “There’s a place I know,” she said. “We’ll be safe.”

  “I’m going to Titan,” Flynn said. His programming was against leaving the habitat, Gibbs had told Lora, and while she was wary about revealing much of the truth to prevent Flynn from attacking her, she had to get him out from the tower promptly.

  “There is no Titan,” she said, proceeding at him. “They lied to us.”

  “Just stay away from me,” he said and he turned away from Lora. There was a shadow appearing outside of the window he was facing, a dark orb ascending slowly, stealthily. The shaking a minute before had been Drone 109 unlocking itself and the outside gate of the service bay opening upon the MCP’s order, Lora realized. The MCP had opened the door of the habitat so that Lora could enter and while she was trying to convince Flynn to leave, the MCP had taken control of the partially disabled Drone 109 to kill both of them.

  The drone fully emerged and now it was in line with the living room. Its machine guns were pointed at Flynn and Lora through the glass and it made the distinct sound drones emitted before engaging. In the moment of understanding Flynn turned back to Lora with sheer panic on his face.

  “Lora…” he whispered. She pulled her handgun faster than she remembered ever doing so and began firing at the drone. The bullets breached the window and hit the drone, pushing it off balance. The drone was already firing at them, but it was pushed to the side just enough for the machine guns to sweep the outer walls of the tower instead of leveling the living room. Lora ran to the window to take an aimed shot. She was unable to hit the exhaust port, but Drone 109 had no shielding and one of her shots disabled it. The drone fell and disappeared from sight under the clouds; the sound of an explosion came from down under a few seconds later.

  Lora turned back. Flynn was kneeling on the floor, with his hands pressed on his ears. He seemed to be shocked, but he was otherwise unharmed. Lora put her gun in the holster and she went upstairs to the office. She looked at the control desk with all its lights and numbers. She did not know what to look for. A moment later the STANDBY sign disappeared and Dillinger’s face appeared on the console. He looked exactly the way the original, long dead Edward Dillinger had done back on Earth sixty years before.

  “Hi Lora,” the MCP said. “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure.”

  “What have you done?” Lora asked. She heard Flynn joining them in the room. He was listening quietly.

  “Drones are unreliable,” the MCP said. “Sometimes things go wrong.”

  “Go wrong?” Lora asked. “You tried to kill us.”

  “I know, it’s unfortunate,” the machine replied. Dillinger’s face was pixelating as the AI was trying to convey its message by using the limited footage it had with Dillinger’s voice and appearance. “Lora, we want to bring you in. I’ve been authorized to tell you that you are both cleared for departure to the Titan. Bring your communication officer and the survivor up. There’s a lot of interest up here. We can debrief, then anything’s possible. It’s time to come home, Lora.”

  Lora looked at Flynn, who was standing there, stunned. Lora reached out at him and this time Flynn took her hand. They ran downstairs.

  “Lora?” Dillinger’s voice came from the console from behind them. “Lora?”

II.

  The Bubbleship took off from the landing pad. They were both quiet; Lora was trying to figure which way to start in order to avoid the drones which must have been on their way to the habitat and next to her Flynn was sitting in silence. In the distance Lora saw a lightning; there was a storm in the area.

  The ship shook violently. Lora looked out and she saw the drones 166, 171 and 180 chasing them in formation. Lora looked in the direction of the storm again.

  “Hang on,” she told Flynn. She changed the course of the Bubbleship and flew straight into the heart of the storm. The dark grey clouds fully surrounded them and raindrops rolled down on the outer case of the aircraft.

  “Lightning,” Flynn said.

  “That’s the plan,” Lora nodded. Flynn gasped, but he said nothing, just braced himself in his seat. She saw the lightning coming a moment before it actually happened and she diverted the ship. The drones, which were following them closely, flew in the path of the electric discharge and suffered direct hit by the powerful lightning.

  The Bubbleship descended rapidly and came out from the clouds. Behind them the drones were in free fall; two of them recovered and continued the chase, while one fell to the surface below like a rock and exploded upon impact.

  Lora piloted the ship in the canyon below.

  “We need cover,” she said.

  “There,” Flynn pointed at a cave behind a waterfall. Lora pulled the ship into the cave quickly; the Bubbleship was hovering mid-air behind the waterfall as they were waiting for the remaining two drones to pass. This canyon was one of the things Lora was going to show Flynn, had he agreed to visit the planet and now that they were here within different circumstances, she felt a new admiration toward her communication officer. Now that the programming of the MCP was falling apart, Flynn was listening and adapting and became rather similar to the original Kevin Flynn, who had once chosen certain death out of camaraderie.

  The two drones flew by and the Bubbleship burst out from the cave, following them. Lora took them under fire with the machine guns of the aircraft and the drones were beeping wildly. Even though they both suffered direct hits, their shielding saved them from destruction. Their machine guns flipped over their round bodies and began firing at the Bubbleship.

  They were exchanging fire without inflicting noticeable damage on one another; Lora’s aircraft and the drones had the same type of shields and none of them managed to land a critical shot. She was focusing on shooting at the drones and the Bubbleship brushed a rock, breaking off huge pieces of stone. This gave her an idea and when she saw the drones flying across under a bridge of rocks, instead of aiming at the machines, she fired at the stone. Great chunks of rocks fell and hit the drones, triggering the self-destruction mechanism of one of them.

  The remaining one drone - Drone 166 -, changed tactics and rammed its own body into the Bubbleship on Flynn’s side. The capsule cracked and Flynn cried out in fear. Lora looked ahead and she saw what startled him; the canyon ahead of them was closing, the ancient buildings standing too close to each other, leaving only a small fissure open in between. Lora flipped the ship to the side and they shot through the crack, brushing the edges of the wall on both sides. They lost sight of Drone 166.

  “Are you okay?” Lora asked.

  “No!” Flynn exclaimed. The canyon ahead of them was wide once more, but Lora lifted the ship out to the surface nevertheless. As soon as they emerged from the canyon, the radiation zone warning appeared on the glass immediately. They had come farther than Lora thought and now they were flying straight at the border.

  “Don’t worry,” Lora said. “We’re staying out of there.”

  She changed course, but immediately they collided with Drone 166, which had been following them. The drone rammed itself into the ship once more, this time fully fracturing the passenger cabin. Lora tried to pilot, just to realize that she lost control over the Bubbleship. The aircraft was heading into the radiation zone without her being able to stop it.

  “Are we going to die?” Flynn yelled.

  “No!” she shouted back angrily. In that second the Bubbleship lost power; the engines stopped and the warning disappeared from the glass. They were about to crash. “Maybe…”

  “Lora!” he exclaimed. Drone 166 was flying at them from the left, on which side the armored glass had broken off fully after the last impact. Just one shot and they would both be dead. Lora pulled her handgun and took aim; she had time only for one shot. She pulled the trigger; she could not even tell if she succeeded, because the drone flew straight into them for one last time.

  After the impact the drone fell like a dead bug and the Bubbleship was about to crash-land as well. Lora reached up, pulled the release arm and ejected the passenger cabin from the ship. The cabin was ejected upwards, while the rest of the ship crashed into a sand dune and exploded. The parachute of the cabin opened, slowing them down. When they hit the ground the cabin came to a sudden rest and Lora lost consciousness.

III.

  Lora woke up in a light shadow and it took her a moment to realize that the parachute got wrapped around the capsule at the end of the fall and the fabric was now shading them from the sunlight. Next to her Flynn was turning his head as well; aside from the confusion, he appeared to be well.  Lora pulled off the parachute and got out from the capsule. They were in a sandy desert, somewhere in the radiation zone. It was quiet, except for the sound of the fallen Drone 166 which came from behind the dunes. The drone was emitting those noises, waiting for maintenance.

  “Son of a bitch,” Lora murmured. She bent down to get her rifle from the capsule; she could not wait to get to Drone 166.

  “Wait here,” she told Flynn and she started at the sand dune from behind she could see the white smoke of the drone emerging. Lora ran uphill. It was a strange, new experience to run in the sand. For now she could not feel the effects of the radiation, but she was going to get out from this place with Flynn as soon as she took Drone 166 out of its misery.

  On the top of the dune she stopped. From this vantage point she could see that they were in the middle of a desert with no other landmark in sight. In front of her, in a small valley between the dunes the fallen drone was sitting in a crater. The thick, white smoke was coming from the distress smoke signal devices the drone dropped all over the area before it had crashed to make it easier for the arriving technician to locate it.

  An aircraft appeared over the dunes unexpectedly and it descended next to the drone. A Bubbleship! It was the exact copy of Lora’s lost ship. The pilot got out and began to take a toolbox out from the ship.

  “Who is it?” Lora whispered. She took out her rifle and looked through the visor; but the white smoke in the valley was thick and she could not see the pilot. Then the stranger walked to Drone 166 and began assessing the damage. The pilot did not know that the drone was killing people, Lora realized and they were going to perform maintenance. She jumped on her feet and started to run.

  She was running downhill on the dune, toward the drone and the technician.

  “Hey!” she was yelling. “Wait!”

  She was flailing with her arms as she was getting closer, trying to get the stranger’s attention.

  “Wait! Hey!”

  Finally the other technician noticed her; the stranger turned away from the drone and looked at Lora’s direction. The white smoke was getting thinner, and Lora could see that the technician was pulling out a gun. She stopped, raised her own riffle and pointed it at the stranger. In the blink of an eye they were standing across each other, pointing their rifles at each other. Lora looked at the stranger’s face and her heart skipped a beat.

  It was another technician; another clone of Commander Lora Baines. She was about the same age as her, Tech-49; she was wearing an identical light grey uniform and she was pointing a rifle at Lora, which was the exact copy of Lora’s gun. The other technician was not beaten up like her, but something was different about her… she was wearing a scarf. In direct violation of the directives, the other technician was wearing a scarf, which she must have salvaged during a mission.

  They were staring at each other for long seconds. Lora could tell that the other technician was just as stunned as she was. Just now Lora understood why Gibbs had told her to go to the radiation zone to find the answer. Gibbs told her, that there were other clones of Lora, but he did not hit her with the whole truth: that there were more technicians on Earth at the same time. Until now Lora assumed that they were sent one after another… that there were only three hydro rigs. But this, seeing another technician meant that there could be dozens of other clones right now, and if there were, that meant that they were protecting other hydro rigs or other reactors, which were collecting resources from Earth at the same time. It meant that this place, the radiation zone was not necessarily damaged by the nuclear fallout – it was there as a border between areas guarded by different technicians, a line they could not cross, so they would not meet each other and would not discover the truth.

  “Drop your weapon!” the other technician yelled. Lora could tell that she was terrified. Would not she, Lora would have been scared, had an exact copy of her walked by when she was trying to perform maintenance just a day earlier? Lora lowered her rifle and threw it on the sandy desert floor, followed by her handgun. There was no way that she was going to kill another clone of Lora; another version of herself, who did not know what she was doing.

  “It’s… it’s okay,” Lora mumbled. She started slowly at the drone.

  “Don’t move!” the other technician yelled. Next to them Drone 166 was whirring loudly in its crater. It was coming back to life; maybe it was not fully operational, but it was going to kill both of them, had it awaken.

  “We have to shut that drone down,” Lora said. She was talking and gesturing softly to avoid startling the other Lora. The other technician looked at the drone and then back at Lora.

  “Stop moving!” she ordered harshly.

  “Lora!” Flynn yelled. Lora looked there and she could see him running downhill on the dune. When he got closer, he noticed the two Loras standing across each other and one pointing a gun at the other one and he stopped, confused. Lora looked back at the other technician, and she saw that she was also staring at Flynn, dumbfounded. Another technician meant that there was another habitat… and it meant another communication officer. This technician, Lora understood, must have left another version of Kevin Flynn behind in the morning when she had left for work and now she was astonished to see him here. It was an idea, a situation which could drive one mad, Lora agreed, but for now she was thankful for the chance to get the other technician by surprise.  She lunged ahead and grabbed the technician’s rifle in an attempt to take it away. She hooked the sling around the other technician’s neck and choked her until she let go off the rifle. Next to them Drone 166 was about to come to life. Lora dropped on her knee and shot at the drone from up close. The panel which hid the battery inside the drone fell off. Before Lora could have shot at the exposed battery, the other Lora punched her in the face and swept the rifle out of her hands. The technician pulled her handgun; Lora grabbed her hand and pushed it aside. The technician pulled the trigger instinctively, but the bullet went into the desert. They were fighting viciously; they were equally strong and they had similar combat style. After a few seconds Lora was able to take the other technician in a choke hold. In just moments the other Lora was fainting from the lack air.

  “It’s okay,” Lora whispered soothingly. She was holding the other clone while she fully lost consciousness. By then Drone 166 was whirring loudly and began to emerge from the impact crater.

  Lora let go of the other technician and she ran to Drone 166. Without attempting to harm the machine in any other way, her hand shot out, reached into the exposed belly of the drone and yanked out the battery. The drone powered off and fell back on the sand lifelessly.

  Lora looked around, panting. She could not see Flynn.

  “Kevin,” she said. Then she saw him. He was lying on the sand at the bottom of the dune with a large patch of blood on his shirt. “Kevin!”

  She ran there. The bullet the other technician had fired had not gone in the desert. Flynn suffered a stomach wound, a potentially fatal injury. Lora was turning around frantically, looking for help. The Bubbleship! If she could start the aircraft, it should have been able to find its way back to the other habitat where they must have had another med kit.

  Flynn was barely conscious; he was going into shock from the blood loss. Lora dragged him into a small cave next to the dune, so that he would not be exposed to the burning sun while she got back.

  “Hold on,” she told him. “Just hold on.”

  She ran to the ship. The door opened up automatically when she got there; the computer was not able to make a difference between the technicians. Lora looked at the back of the ship, where the number 52 was painted. Then she looked at the real Tech-52, who was still lying in the sand, unconscious. 52… Did that mean that this clone had been sent after her, that there were two more clones between them and who knew how many before and after them? The thought was maddening and Lora forced herself not to deal with it now. She jumped in the Bubbleship and closed the door.

  “Lora Baines, Tech-52,” she said.

  ‘Tech-52 CONFIRMED’ appeared on the glass. The aircraft powered up and Lora took off immediately, setting the ship on course for Tower 52.

Chapter Text

I.

  The autopilot took the Bubbleship straight to Tower 52. The aircraft was flying over snow-covered mountains to the habitat, which sat perched atop the highest peak. At the foot of the hill there was a giant river; while there was no vegetation at this high elevation, the surroundings of the habitat were of earthy colors. The tower was held up in the air by a massive metal pole similar to the one back at Tower 49, except for this foundation here was significantly shorter. Tower 52 had been built on the top of a mountain, an already secure location and there was no need of a higher rise to ensure the safety of the crew.

  Lora was watching Tower 52, bewildered. She was stunned by the events of the last couple of hours and she was very much aware of the possibility of encountering another clone of Kevin Flynn inside this habitat. As the Bubbleship was descending onto the landing pad, she looked at the upstairs office through the glass and she saw that it was empty. On the outside wall of the tower the number 52 was painted in yellow.

  The ship landed and Lora got out without hesitation. She had no way of knowing if the MCP could track her here and if there would be drones on the way to hunt her down already. Quickly, but cautiously she entered the habitat. The interior of the living area was the exact copy of Tower 49, except for the brownish yellow color scheme of this place. Lora went straight for the med kit, hoping to stay unnoticed, but very well knowing that the communication officer would come to meet her, to see why his technician came home in the middle of the day: she knew it, because back in Tower 49 Flynn would have come to see her as well.

  She stopped. She was still alone, but something caught her attention and it made her freeze on the spot. On the table in the living room there was the photo Lora and Flynn kept in Tower 49; the exact replica of that photo. But that was not the truth, Lora realized: the original photo of the real Lora Baines and Kevin Flynn had been on the spacecraft Odyssey and it had fallen into the hands of the MCP when the alien intelligence had captured the two astronauts. This picture here, just as the other version in Tower 49 was a copy of that image, a mere detail in the grand plan. Lora was staring at the photo with silent rage.

  Gritting her teeth, she moved. She grabbed the med kit and she was on the way back to the Bubbleship.

  “Hey!” Flynn exclaimed and Lora stopped. “There you are!”

  Lora stood silently. Coming downstairs from the office there was Kevin Flynn; another clone of the long dead astronaut. 

  “What happened?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

  Lora had wiped her face clean during the flight, but she could not hide her scratches and her uniform was still covered by a thick layer of dirt.

  “That bogey came across the border and then I lost you,” he continued, confirming Lora’s assumption that the drone and her own fallen ship had fully crossed the radiation zone during the chase and had entered the area overseen by the crew of Tower 52. Flynn was looking at her expectantly.

  “False alarm,” Lora whispered, with the med kit in her hand. Flynn sighed as if he did not believe her. “I should get back out there.”

  “You come all the way home and I don’t get a kiss?” he asked. He was so similar to the Kevin Flynn Lora knew, the one that was dying in the desert out there: he even had the same tendency to pretend to be ignorant to keep the peace. He stepped to her and kissed her on the forehead lightly. But he could wake up, Lora was thinking, he could shake off the programming just as the other Flynn had done so, had he seen the truth.

  “What’s going on up there?” Flynn asked, touching her temple.

  “I was thinking,” Lora said, “Why don’t you come down with me? To the surface? We could go right now.”

  Flynn was looking at her with the same incredulous expression that Lora’s partner had used to make upon the same suggestion.

  “Now?” he laughed.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you serious?” he asked and for a moment Lora thought he would agree and come with her. The possibility of saving not one, but two clones of Flynn seemed to be within reach for a second.

  “You won’t believe what’s down there,” she whispered.

  “Lora… You know the regulations.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we not do this again? I’m done talking about it.”

  “Okay,” Lora answered. There was no time for her to try to convince him to escape; and from their conversation she understood that Tech-52, Lora Baines’ other clone was on the same route as she, Tech-49. They were all awakening; they both understood that something was wrong with the world – they both tried to take their communication officer to Earth. Given that the crew of the Tower 52 was apparently a younger set of clones, Lora was certain that the desert encounter would push Tech-52 toward the right direction. This officer here would be saved; just not by Lora.

  He smiled and he went back to his office. Lora stood there for one more second and then she rushed to the Bubbleship and she was on the way back to Flynn momentarily.

  II.

  Lora was sitting on the lakeshore. The stolen Bubbleship was parked not far away. It was late in the afternoon; Lora had never seen the valley before at this time of the day. Normally she would be on the way back to the tower at this time; but now she could never return to there. What would happen to the tower now? Maybe a new set of clones would arrive and they would start their assignment, overseeing the area Lora had once patrolled.

  She heard footsteps and she turned around. Flynn came out from the lake house with slow, cautious steps. His wariness must have been prompted by the strange, new environment; he was looking around as he walked. When Lora arrived back to the desert cave with the med kit, he was still conscious, lying there in the pool of his own blood. Lora extracted the bullet and closed the wound with the equipment on the spot, before even trying to move him. Tech-52 was gone when she came back; maybe on the way back to her habitat afoot.

  Lora took Flynn back to the lake house. She chose this location over Gibbs’ bunker because of its proximity and because she wanted a chance to be alone with Flynn before the inevitable meeting with the human residents of Earth. She put him in bed and then she went to change and clean herself up. She put on a dress that she found in the wooden chest of drawers while she was waiting for her uniform to dry. She had put a jeans and a flannel shirt next to Flynn’s bed for when he would wake up and now, that he was standing there on the porch, he was dressed in those items. For a moment Lora felt as if they were living the life she had sometimes envisioned for themselves; she imagined that the MCP was a real space station, carrying the rest of humanity, now on the way to Titan and that Flynn and she was allowed to stay on Earth as a recognition for their achievements. But the moment then passed and they stood there quietly; they had only a few hours left before having to return to the bunker to send up a nuclear weapon to the MCP.

  “This is the place I meant to show you,” she said simply. He was looking at her and slowly his eyes softened. She told him everything; about the Odyssey, about Gibbs and his people and the MCP. He did not intercept while she was talking and his face was unreadable. But the mere fact that he listened showed Lora how far he had come from who he had been just one day earlier.

  “Are you certain?” he asked when she finished. “Could they trick you?”

  “No.  There is a tape from the flight recorder. It could not be faked. And you saw the other clone too.”

  “What will happen now?”

  “When I get back I will program the drone to carry the nuke up to the MCP. If we can destroy it, the remaining drones will be easy to take down. And then we stop the hydro rigs so that they don’t consume more seawater.”

  “Are they… The people will let us live?”

  “For now they need us. After that… We will see,” Lora said.

  “And the others?”

  Lora knew he was talking about the other clones. With the MCP gone, there would be dozens, if not hundreds of confused clones of Lora Baines and Kevin Flynn around the world, not knowing what to do. One could lose their sanity just by thinking about it and Lora, for now, chose not to.

  “I don’t know, Kevin,” she said.

  “And Alan,” he said suddenly. “He is your husband!”

  “He’s Lora’s husband,” she said after a moment of silence. “I’m not Lora Baines.”

  “But you love him,” he said. It was a statement, not a question and suddenly Lora understood why Kevin Flynn had been Commander Baines’ copilot on Odyssey – and why the MCP had had him to be Lora’s backup while she would be roaming the deserted Earth: because he would always be there to save her and the mission. For that Lora did not reply; it would have been unjust with Flynn and the five years he had looked after her.

  “Do we have to leave today?” he asked. Lora looked at him. They both had had a very long day.

  “How about we go in the morning?” she asked and he agreed. It got dark and they went inside. Lora turned on the lights and once again she imagined themselves living here, sitting down to the table to have dinner – she envisioned the family they could have. They went to bed and they made love as if they touched each other for the first time; they held each other as if there would be no tomorrow for them.

III.

  She woke up early in the morning. The air was clean and crisp. Lora put on her uniform somewhat reluctantly. She found herself wary about leaving, even if there was no choice whatsoever.

  “Good morning,” Flynn mumbled. He was still in bed and he was looking up at her with a smile on his face. Lora tried to smile too.

  “I wanted to spend the rest of my life here,” she said.

  “You still can,” he replied, but he was not smiling anymore.

  “I have to go. Those people need my help.”

  That, of course, was not entirely true. Sure, they needed her: but had she run, had she tried to build a life while the MCP was still out there that would have meant letting Alan down as well. And the drones; sooner or later they would locate this hidden valley. But most importantly, hiding would have meant betraying Lora Baines’ legacy and all the other clones with that.

  Flynn got up and embraced her.

  “We’ll come back when it’s over,” he said. “Promise me.”

  “We’ll come back when it’s over,” she echoed with a light smile. But she could not promise.

  They took the Bubbleship to the bunker. Lora landed with the aircraft near the back entrance and they walked. They were almost at the metal gate when Lora heard a loud click from behind. She turned around and she saw Quorra standing there with a handgun pointed at her face. Flynn looked at Quorra surprisedly; she was the first human he saw in his life aside from Lora.

  The gate opened and Gibbs walked out, followed by two soldiers.

  “You had me worried for a second,” Gibbs told Lora. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

  “Well, I had to prove her wrong,” Lora said, nodding at Quorra. Quorra made a face and she put her gun away.

  “You look like hell,” Gibbs said.

  “You should see the other guy,” Lora replied. Gibbs laughed, figuring that Lora was referring to another technician.

  “If I had told you what you’d find out there,” he said, “you would have thought I was crazy.”

  Gibbs turned to Flynn and he introduced himself. They shook hands and they went inside.

  In the workshop Drone 172 was waiting for them on the platform. Somewhat to Lora’s surprise – or to the contrary, not surprisingly at all -, she saw Alan next to the drone. Alan’s face lit up when he saw them entering the room; he looked at them curiously, but he did not approach them as if he did not want to distract Lora. When she walked to the drone she saw that Alan had gotten it ready for reprogramming. Without delay she entered the new commands and then she opened up the machine. Two of Gibbs’ people came, rolling in the repurposed nuclear battery of the Odyssey. The bomb was glowing with a purple light. Lora lifted in and placed it inside the drone.

  She went back to the front and entered the coordinates, the return route to the MCP, where the bomb would detonate once inside the space station. Lora touched the switch and turned the drone online. The sound of the machine filled the workshop immediately; in the small space the metallic wailing was deafening. The drone started struggling against the wires that held it in the air. The machine guns of the drone were unloaded, yet the people in the room stepped back, not knowing what to expect from the machine.

  “Watch it!” somebody yelled. The soldiers were pointing their rifles at the drone, ready to take it down, which would have rendered all the previous efforts pointless.

  “Give it some space,” Lora said loudly. “Come on, you’re making it nervous.”

  She was standing right in front of the machine, which was still trying to get out from the harnesses. It was beeping loudly.

  “That is one pissed-off weapon,” Gibbs said. Lora began approaching the machine slowly. She remembered, how many times she had fixed this drone throughout the years, just so that the machine could go out and slaughter people. The drone looked at her and it stopped struggling. She put her hand on the machine and it became still.

  “No,” she said. “It’s just a machine. I’m the weapon.”

  She stepped back and looked at the drone. Gibbs, Flynn and Alan joined her.

  “Ah,” Gibbs said. “I would love to be there to see that thing’s face when this goes off.”

  “That would be a one-way trip,” Lora said.

  “Yeah, but it would be worth it.”

  Gibbs looked around. Lora followed suit; just now she noticed that the workshop was full of people that were watching her reprogramming the drone and planting the nuke inside. There was awe on their faces; had their plan worked, this day would be the start of a new era for mankind. Lora looked at Flynn and Alan that were standing next to each other. With the lies out of the way there seemed to be no resentment between them anymore.

  “Welcome back, Commander,” Gibbs said to Lora. Flynn and Alan looked at her. And she smiled.

Chapter Text

I.

  They began hauling Drone 172 to the entrance of the bunker. The people were following the repurposed mini excavator which was carrying the drone; they all seemed to know it very well that their lives depended on the success of the mission. There was only one Odyssey, only one nuclear battery large enough to harvest and carry out such attack – and had they failed, the MCP would easily track Drone 172’s route back to the cave.

  Lora was walking slowly. She saw no reason why the drone would be interrupted, why the mission would fail, but she was only cautiously optimistic. The MCP had been powerful enough to catch by surprise and capture NASA’s best astronauts, to take over Earth and to clone and reprogram people to its liking. It was only the matter of time for the MCP to see this attack coming and it was possible that it was too late already.

  Lora looked at Gibbs and Flynn that were following the drone. Just one day after leaving a life built on lies behind, Flynn appeared to be genuinely happy to see the MCP being destroyed. With the deception gone he changed too, with the chaotic goodness that might have belonged to the original Kevin Flynn, resurfacing in his manners and actions. Had they lived… And why would not they? People could hold a grudge against them, but Flynn and Lora could still be a major asset for humanity. If nothing else, they could go out, find and convince all the other clones about the truth and make them join the resistance.

  She felt light tugging at the sleeve of her uniform. Lora turned there and she saw Alan pulling aside from the group quietly. Lora followed him out from the crowd to a smaller room. They were alone and it was quieter there with the sounds from the outside filtered out. Alan seemed to be anxious and Lora instinctively knew why he pulled her aside. They had separated at the Empire State Building, where Alan had tried to convince her that she was in fact Commander Baines, his wife, and then he had seen her returning with Flynn one day later. He still refused to cope with the fact that the real Lora had died long time ago.

  “I’m not her,” she said without hesitation. Any delay would have been too tempting; it would have corrupted her, she would have given in.

  “But…” he said.

  “The Commander is dead,” Lora said. She pointed at the number 49 on her uniform. “Did Gibbs tell you what this means? I am Tech-49. Yes, it means that there were 48 before me and god knows how many after me. I saw Tech-52, she is also an exact copy of Lora Baines. If I am your wife, is she your wife too? Because if your answer is yes, man, I hope you are available on a timeshare basis, because you are in for a ride.”

  Alan looked at her and Lora saw that tears welled up in his eyes. She had been harsh to cut the scene short and kill all his hopes at once; but she just did what the original Lora would have done so, likely delivering the message in the exact same way as the commander would have done it, she realized.

  Alan composed himself and he took one step back. He cleared his throat and then he looked at Lora.

  “You know what you told me once?” he asked. “You said when it was all over, we would buy a house on a lake.”

  Lora stood stunned. There was no way for Alan to know about the lake house. Did she, she was thinking, did she choose to keep the lake house as a getaway place upon discovering it, because the real Lora would have wanted the same?

  “We would grow old and fat together,” Alan said. “And we would fight. Maybe drink too much.”

  “Real romantic,” Lora said sarcastically.

  “And then we would die and be buried in a meadow by the lake. And the world would forget about us. But we would always have each other.”

  “I remember,” Lora admitted. The Commander would have lied, she knew; the real Lora Baines would have denied remembering in order to spare him the suffering.  She hesitated for one moment. “I’ve loved you as long as I can remember. I don’t know how else to say it. But this does not change the facts and…”

  Somebody screamed outside and she stopped. There was another scream and then another one.

  “Stay here,” she yelled and she ran out from the room.

II.

  The first thing Lora saw as she stormed out from the room that the large metal gates of the bunker were open. The excavator with Drone 172 stood there in the middle and people were running. A moment later she spotted the three drones flying straight in the cave from outside. The drones must have been waiting out there, probably hidden behind a rock and they attacked when the door opened. The gates were heavy metal plates and they could not be closed fast enough when the drones appeared.

  “Spread out!” Lora yelled, taking her rifle out immediately. There was a machine gun mounted on the excavator with a shooter behind it; he fired at the drones, but was taken out right away by drone fire. A moment later all three drones were inside the bunker, shooting at people indiscriminately. Lora could not see Flynn or Gibbs.

  She fired her gun at the closest drone; the machine flew by undisturbed, taking out half a dozen people in a matter of seconds. There was heavy gunfire inside of the cave; most of it belonged to the drones, but a good part of it came from the ancient, pre-war rifles of the resistance. Lora ran after the drone, firing at it without a pause. The drone made a circle inside the cave, hitting the metal wall twice in the process. When it came closer again, Lora took another shot at its exhaust port, but she missed and the machine slammed into her. The collision sent her flying in the air and she hit the ground hard.

  As she was scrambling on her feet she saw Gibbs climbing behind the machine gun turret on the excavator.  He began shooting at one of the drones, which returned fire and smoke filled the cave. A moment later the machine gun and the drone both went silent and Lora could only hope for the best for Gibbs. She was chasing the second drone and she saw Quorra and her people trying to ambush the third one.

  The drone came out from behind a metal pole with high speed. Lora jumped aside to avoid yet another bone-crushing collision; she rolled on the floor and aimed her gun at the drone. The machine was hovering above her, ascending fast to get access to the next floor to continue the slaughter there. Lora pulled the trigger and the drone shook. It let out a loud, agonizing screech and it flew straight into a tunnel. Lora jumped on her feet and followed it, keeping it under fire. There was a moment of silence and then a bright flash at the end of the tunnel; the self-destruct mechanism of the drone had been triggered. Lora began to run in the opposite direction to escape the shockwave. The last thing she felt was the force of the explosion hitting her and slamming her against a wall.

III.

  She woke up to the smell of smoke. She opened her eyes and she saw the fire; small piles of rubble were on fire all around the cave and there was ash in the air. Then Lora saw Quorra standing over her. Lora moved; there was no part of her body that did not hurt, but at least she felt all her limbs and nothing seemed to be broken. Quorra reached out to help her out with unusual sympathy. Her face was darkened by the smoke and when Lora got up, Quorra silently nodded at her. Quorra must have seen her taking out the drone, Lora realized, that caused her change of heart.

  Lora looked around. The bullet ridden remains of the second drone were lying deeper inside the bunker; it had gotten trapped in a small place, exposed to gunfire. The third drone fell closer to the entrance, next to the excavator which had been hauling Drone 172. Lora and Quorra ran there and they saw Gibbs lying next to the machine gun turret. He had shot down the third drone during the attack, but he had suffered several gunshot wounds in the process. Flynn was kneeling next to him with the med kit in his hand. Lora touched Flynn’s shoulder when she got there.

  “I’m fine,” he said without looking up. He must have found Gibbs first and he had run out for the med kit immediately. Lora heard hurried steps from behind and a moment later Alan joined them. A few kids were following him; the children he had sheltered during the attack. She looked at Drone 172 on the excavator. The drone was burnt out; it had been shot and its circuits had burned out. Lora could tell that it was beyond repair and it was never going to fly again. One of Quorra’s men opened the drone and they saw the nuclear bomb inside. The light of the bomb was blinking, but the device itself was intact.

  “The drone,” Gibbs whispered. “Send the drone.”

  “It’s gone,” Quorra replied. Gibbs sighed. Lora looked at Flynn, hoping for him to be faster with the med kit.

  “I thought we had it,” Gibbs said, resigned. “I really did.”

  He coughed.

  “I can take the bomb myself,” Lora said. They all looked at her.

  “Eh,” Gibbs replied. “You know it will swat you like a fly.”

  “Not if we all go,” Flynn said.

  “Shut!” Lora exclaimed. But it was too late and now they were all listening to Flynn.

  “The MCP told you to bring the survivor and me up,” Flynn said. “So bring us up.”

  They stood silently; the words were so simple, so unassuming as if it did not mean that the three of them would go on a suicide mission under the pretense of surrendering to the MCP, but smuggling the nuclear device to the alien space station in reality.

  “No,” Lora said. She had offered to bring up the bomb herself; but she was not going to take the only people she had ever loved with her. She was also not going to undo Commander Baines’ legacy with bringing Alan into the grave.

  “We’ll go together,” Alan said in a neutral voice. Lora turned around and walked out without offering any further argument. She went to help around the bunker, to put out the fires, tend to the wounded and clean up the ashes. The death toll of the attack was devastating and so were the consequences; that even with their victory, now it was only the matter of time for the MCP to send more of the drones.

  About two hours later Flynn came looking for her. Lora put down the bucket of water she was carrying and looked at him as he approached.

  “How is he?” she asked. They both knew she was talking about Gibbs.

  “He’s dying,” Flynn replied. He looked tired. “His wounds… He will not last long. He wants to talk to you.”

  Lora nodded and she followed him.

  IV.

  She closed the door behind her quietly. She went to look for Alan; when she could not find him with the kids nor with the clean-up crew she figured that somebody had already told him to get prepared. Instinctively she went to the archives and she found Alan there. He did not notice Lora and at the door she stopped for a moment. Alan was standing there, looking at a painting on the wall. In the scarce light he looked very young, very handsome. Lora started and she walked to him. She looked at the picture; it was a painting of a field, with a farmhouse and a shed in the background.

  “It reminds me of home,” he said. His voice betrayed him; contrary to his composed posture, he was actually terrified.

  “Ready?” she asked and he slowly nodded. Lora escorted him back to the computer room. Two technicians were securing the nuclear bomb inside one of the sleeping pods which had been brought to the bunker after the crash of the Odyssey. Quorra was there too, overseeing the preparations. She nodded at Lora and she left the room with the two technicians.

  Alan was looking at the pod and then back at Lora.

  “The Bubbleship can accommodate two people,” she explained. “I can only take you in a pod. This way we can also smuggle the bomb to the MCP.”

  He did not respond, he just went pale at the answer. Just now he understood that seventy years late, but he was still going to die in a sleeping pod – that Lora was going to put him to sleep now, that he was going to spend the trip to the space station locked together with a nuclear bomb and that likely he would die in the blast without ever waking up again. He uttered no word; he was ready to die without a single complaint.

  Lora held his hand while he got into the capsule. She could not not notice the way he was trying to avoid touching the bomb in the pod. She was silent; anything she could have said would have betrayed her and the fact that she was raging inside. Ever since Lora could remember Alan, she had been hoping to meet him upon her return to the space station; hoping that he was waiting for her up there and that they would have a life ahead of them on the trip to Titan and after that. But it was merely a lie: there was no space station for them, no Titan and instead of a lifetime Lora had only this one minute with him.

  Alan sat down in the pod and he went motionless for a second. He seemed to be resigned; everybody he had ever known was dead, his world wiped out for good and for all he knew now he was going to be blown to atoms in a nuclear explosion in a matter of hours.

  “Lora,” he whispered. She looked at him and suddenly she knew what Commander Baines must have felt before ejecting the sleep module of the Odyssey; the love and the urge to protect him overwhelmed her the same way it had happened to Lora Baines seventy years before. Alan reached out at her and Lora stopped pretending; she leaned ahead and kissed him on the lips. She knew that it was wrong; she was not the real Lora, not the hero, just a tool in the hand of an alien entity, responsible for the near extinction of mankind. For Alan it made no difference and when she lowered him into the pod the petrified expression disappeared from his face. Lora felt tears burning her eyes; it was a stolen kiss, the first and last they would ever have, but it was everything she had ever hoped for throughout the years she had been dreaming of him.

  Alan was lying in the pod as if in a casket, holding her hand. His eyes were wide open, looking up at Lora. As far as he knew, she remembered, this was the last conscious moment of his life. She gave him an encouraging smile and she spoke the words the real Lora would have spoken.

  “Dream of us,” she said and she let go off his hands. Alan nodded and he watched silently as Lora lowered the lid of the pod over him. The pod activated and began to pump anesthetic vapor in the capsule, putting him to sleep momentarily.

  Lora was kneeling there, watching the chart indicating strong life signals. She told herself that she was just checking to see if he was really asleep; but in reality she was suspended in the same moment where Commander Baines had been when she had pressed her body against Alan’s sleeping pod on the Odyssey, well aware of their imminent, final separation. She remained there until a few minutes later the technicians returned.

Chapter Text

I.

  “Ready for space?” Lora asked. They were sitting in the cabin of the Bubbleship, outside of the bunker. Flynn nodded silently; he appeared to be almost absentminded. The sleeping pod with its live cargo and the nuclear bomb was secured to the bottom of the ship. They were alone in the open; after the devastating drone attack they could not risk exposing themselves once more, especially not for a farewell which would have been conflicted at the best anyway. As far as most of the survivors knew, Lora, Flynn and Alan went on a suicide mission to destroy the MCP – but at the same time Tech-49 and her officer were the tools of the hostile alien intelligence, responsible for the death of countless human beings. Or that was what Lora was thinking, until she noticed the looks that the survivors exchanged upon learning of the mission. Even Quorra appeared to be doubtful over the plan, to the point that she objected when Lora and Flynn were about to leave.

  “Program the ship to return to the space station on its own,” Quorra said. “You can send it with autopilot, can’t you?”

  Lora and Flynn, who were attaching the sleeping pod to the ship, looked at each other.

  “The MCP would know,” Lora said. “And if it takes out the Bubbleship, if it destroys the only bomb we have, there won’t be a second chance.”

  Quorra did not argue; she must have known that there was no other way, but she also did not leave until they were ready for the launch. Lora felt that she was waiting for some sort of last words or advice before their final goodbyes, yet she did not know what to say. Somewhat to her surprise Flynn turned to Quorra when they finished with the capsule.

  “If it all goes well,” Flynn said in a casual voice, “Look out for the crews of the other towers. With the space station gone, they will be lost. Just remember, they don’t know what they are doing. We did not know what we were doing.”

  Quorra nodded, but she did not move.

  “If there was another way…” she said.

  “There is none,” Flynn replied. He looked up at the sky, where the tetrahedron of the space station was hiding behind the clouds. “This is ours.”

  Lora stood behind while they spoke, not actually surprised by the conversation. Flynn, who had spent the past few years with keeping peace, just went out his way so that Quorra would not feel guilty over letting them leave for this trip, from where there was no return. Quorra looked at Lora, nodded quietly and she went back to the bunker.

  “Ready,” Flynn replied. Lora turned the engines on. The bobblehead figurine she had placed on the control panel was nodding at them with a wide smile. There were no sentiment that could have made a difference, yet Lora found herself echoing Quorra.

  “If there was another way,” she started, just to meet Flynn’s almost devilish smile.

  “Lora,” he said. “We have waited for this day for five years.”

  She understood him suddenly; she could now see the outrage behind his composure. Lora had been focusing on the devastating impact the MCP’s arrival had had on Earth and humanity; the betrayal toward the two of them was really nothing in comparison. But then, Flynn was right: they had both waited for this day for long, the day they had envisioned as their reunion with their families and friends and their departure from the lost Earth.

  The Bubbleship lifted up from the ground and they began their journey to the MCP. Lora pushed a button and the aircraft got sealed up against the vacuum of the space. She did not have to worry about the sleeping pod; the capsule was attached to the battery of the ship. It had been designed to keep its occupant safe even if the pod itself was exposed to the conditions of the deep space, in case an asteroid pierced the hull of the carrier spacecraft.

  The ship escaped the stratosphere in a matter of minutes; it turned all dark around them and the stars emerged against the black background of space. The tetrahedron of the MCP was orbiting Earth in the thermosphere; its giant mass became more and more intimidating as they got closer to it. Below them the planet was glowing like a gemstone. From the distance none of the damage caused by the war was visible; Earth seemed to be whole once more. Above the continent a massive cloud formation swirled.

  “Tech-49,” Dillinger’s voice came from the radio unexpectedly. “I have you on approach.”

  Flynn and Lora looked at each other. Lora pushed down the button on the radio transmitter.

  “It’s a busy morning, huh?” she asked.

  “I’m picking up a second passenger, Lora,” Dillinger said. His voice was… pleased. The MCP enjoyed having them at its mercy once again.

  “Another day in paradise, Dillinger,” Flynn said. His façade was excellent; one could not tell what was on his mind.

  “And the third passenger…” Dillinger said.

  “It’s Alan Bradley,” Lora said. “The survivor from the crashed module."

  “State your intention,” Dillinger said. The mass of the space station filled the view ahead of the Bubbleship.

  “Deliver my communication officer and the survivor, as requested,” Lora said, well aware of that the MCP could be analyzing her voice to see if she was lying.

  “Proceed to entry,” Dillinger said. A triangle shaped door opened up on the wall of the space station; the same hole that had once sucked in the pilot cabin of the spacecraft Odyssey.

  “Tech-49, enter at headway speed,” Dillinger said. Lora was looking at the bright white light that was coming out from that hole. There was nothing natural, nothing human in that light. Coming to this place was supposed to be going home for Lora and Flynn; during the years leading up to this moment she had imagined this as a clean, friendly space with hydroponic laboratories, theatres, large rooms for gatherings – she imagined people living up in here, that would be waiting for the return of the Bubbleship. She had pictured them watching the arrival and then approaching the docked ship with happy smiles on their faces. Lora had no recollection of the inside of this monstrous creation, but she remembered the recording; she knew that there was no life here.

  “Entering at headway,” Lora said. Next to her Flynn was sitting with the same noncommittal expression on his face. The Bubbleship floated inside the space station, into some sort of outer hangar.

  “You buck up, Bob,” she whispered at the bobblehead to calm her nerves. “Don’t go all shaky on me.”

  Flynn put his hand on hers; in this last moment of privacy she took his hand, brought it to her face and kissed it.

  The gate behind the Bubbleship closed and another one ahead opened; the ship flew inside the space station. Behind the thick outer layer there was a vast empty space and another black wall ahead. There were drones docked on the surface, sleeping in their round pods. There were hundreds or possibly thousands of drones here and watching them made Lora imagine at last, how many towers could be all over the world with technicians overseeing their assigned areas. According to the sensors of the ship, there was no atmosphere here. Halfway between the walls the Bubbleship powered down unexpectedly. The control panel went dark and the engine stopped; only the lights of the cabin remained. The ship continued its flight on the course Lora had set, but she was no longer in control. Two drones dislodged themselves from their rack on the wall and they floated to the Bubbleship. Once they lined up with the ship, they turned aside and pointed their cannons at the cabin. Had they opened fire now, Lora and Flynn would have been dead in an instant and the unarmed nuclear bomb inside the pod would not even be triggered.

  “Lora,” Dillinger said, “I can’t help notice your respiration and heart rate have increased.”

  Lora exhaled slowly. Flynn had gotten used to the tactics of the MCP throughout the years and he managed to remain calm, yet Lora was angry at herself for not being able to control her body more effectively and potentially revealing their real mission by being noticeably anxious.

  “I’m just excited to finally meet you, Dillinger,” she said.

  “There’s been a pattern of insubordinate behavior recently,” the MCP said. Now, that it did not matter anymore, the AI was no longer careful about masking its voice and at points it did not sound like Dillinger at all.

  “Yeah,” Lora whispered, looking at the drone on her left. “I feel bad about that.”

  ”Voice analysis indicates that you are lying to me, Lora. Tell me why you are here. You have five seconds.”

  The drones on the two sides of the Bubbleship emitted loud, threatening sounds and they prepared to fire. Lora took a quick breath and then she spoke the only truth she knew.

  “I want Alan to live. I want our species to survive. This is the only way.”

  She was looking straight ahead, expecting the machine guns to open fire, to tear the cabin apart and end this desperate, last attempt of humanity to break free from the MCP.

  “Proceed to landing,” Dillinger said. “Atmosphere provided.”

  The control panel powered up and the engine of the Bubbleship restarted. Another triangular gate opened up on the wall ahead and the ship entered. This wall was thicker, like an inner shield and when the Bubbleship crossed through the opening, the gate closed behind. There was another empty space inside and yet another tetrahedron hiding in the middle. A gate opened for the third time and the Bubbleship entered.  This time when the gate closed behind the ship, the drones were left out. It was dark and empty inside, except for a column of glowing red light in the middle. Lora looked to the side, expecting to see more drones attached to the walls, and what she saw there made her heart skip a beat.

  There were people curled up in fetal position in incubators attached to the walls. There were thousands of people sleeping in those pods; they were all adults and… Lora blinked. Those were not thousands of different people, but a thousand clones of only two people: Lora Baines and Kevin Flynn, the two NASA astronauts captured by the MCP. These were the new operators that would be programmed and sent down to Earth later. There they would occupy a tower, fixing drones and protecting hydro rigs without ever being aware of what they would really be doing – and this circle would continue until there would be no useful resources and no life left on Earth. Lora looked at those sleeping figures, all the other Loras with their blonde hair swirling around their peaceful faces and the Kevins that looked so similar to her officer. Slowly she turned at Flynn, who looked at her with quiet determination.

  There was a platform in the middle, right in front of that red light. As the ship approached, Lora could see that it was a spinning column, glowing with red light. There was nothing else in sight, so Lora put down the ship onto the platform.  She felt the gravity inside the space station, which was similar to what one experienced on Earth. According to the sensors there was air inside the core, pressure and temperature, suitable for humans. She opened the cabin; the MCP slowed down its spinning and then it stopped.

  “Welcome home,” Dillinger’s voice said. Lora and Flynn got out from the ship.

  “Lora, you are doing the right thing,” the MCP said. Lora and Flynn were unloading the sleeping pod from the Bubbleship. Lora was not looking in the direction of the red light; she was trying to make sure they put the capsule on the black floor smoothly.

  “I don’t know what you are or where you’re from,” she replied without turning around, “but I’d like to tell you about something I read.”

  She and Flynn exchanged a quick look and Lora saw deep concentration on his face. They placed the pod on the floor in a manner so that she would hide it from the MCP until the last second; and they acted along in order to give the impression that they had indeed come to surrender.

  “A story from Rome,” she continued. “A city you destroyed. It’s a classic. There was a guy, Horatius, held the bridge alone against a whole army. And what Horatius said was, ‘How can a man die better…’”

  “You don’t have to die, Lora,” The MCP replied. “Kevin doesn’t have to die.”

  That remark prompted Flynn to look up at the red light.

  “Forget it, mister high and mighty Master Control,” he said. The MCP remained silent, distracted over the fact that Flynn talked back at him for the first time ever.

  “Everybody dies, Dillinger, “Lora said, with her hand on the latch of the sleeping pod. “The thing is, to die well.”

  She pulled at the handle and opened the pod. The thunderous scream of the MCP filled the space immediately.

  “Lora,” it howled. “That is not the survivor you promised me.”

II.

  Lora walked through the corridors and entered the room silently. There was a woman standing next to Gibbs’ bed; she held a cup to his lips. Gibbs looked at Lora and the woman left. Lora walked closer to the bed. Gibbs was pale; he appeared to be very weak and old. Lora felt genuine sympathy for him, but that did not make a difference in what she had to tell him.

  “I can’t do it,” she said. Gibbs was watching her peacefully without trying to interrupt. “I’m not taking Alan to the MCP. Sure, he would go, but I am not taking him. I said I would bring the bomb and I will do it. I understand that I can’t do it without Flynn. I wish I could. But I can accept going with him, because we’ve been in this together and because I saw what the original Flynn had done. He knew that staying with the commander would be his death, but he would not leave nevertheless. But Alan… Even if this means the failure of the mission, even if the MCP sends here a hundred drones tomorrow… I’m sorry. I’m not taking Alan there.”

  “Commander,” Gibbs said softly. “You don’t have to.”

  She found herself protesting against everything he said; she had accepted the fact that she would have to carry the bomb to the MCP on her own, but everything in her rebelled against the idea of taking others with her - to take Flynn, even though he was not going to let her go alone; to take Gibbs, who insisted replacing Alan, regardless of the fact that Gibbs was dying anyway. Gibbs tore her argument apart in a matter of minutes with his perfect logic; he had already worked out the details to use the sleeping pod to deliver the bomb and to disguise the identity of the third passenger.

  “How are you planning to keep this from Alan?” she asked. “He’s not going to let us walk out from here with the bomb.”

  “You put him in the second salvaged sleeping pod,” he said. “And he stays. For better or worse, all will be done by the time he wakes up. That will be easier for everybody.”

  Lora nodded slowly. Quorra was also included; she was deeply saddened over Gibbs’ decision, but she knew it very well that he was not going to live anyway. When the time came, Lora put Alan to sleep in one of the unused sleeping pods from the Odyssey. Once he was asleep, Lora opened the pod briefly and the technicians removed the bomb from the capsule. It was then placed in the second pod, in which Gibbs lay down.

  “Is this going to work?” Flynn asked when they secured the pod to the Bubbleship next to the bunker.

  “It could,” Lora replied. “The MCP will likely not able to recognize the third person inside the pod until we open it, and it will be too late after that.”

  “That is not the survivor you promised me,” the MCP screamed when Walter Gibbs sat up in the pod.

  “No,” Lora said menacingly. “It’s not.”

   Flynn helped Gibbs to stay sit upright. Gibbs had wanted to see the MCP going down so much that he had asked the technicians to adjust the sleeping pod and he had spent the flight in a light slumber instead of drug induced sleep. Now he was sitting there with an expression that was nothing short of a grin, looking up at the red column of the MCP. Lora reached into the pod to arm the bomb. While she did so, she thought of Alan, who had been left behind in the bunker in the other capsule. Lora asked them to program that pod to wake up the occupant a day later to save Alan from the waiting, from the worry and that what-ifs. What she had also done was to slip a map to the lake house in Alan’s pod when they removed the bomb.

  “What Horatius said was, ‘How can a man die better’”, Lora said. In the distance the gates opened and two drones rushed in. The MCP must have summoned them when it realized that it had been tricked. The drones were now flying toward the platform with maximum speed. Lora was almost ready with the bomb. “Than facing fearful odds.”

  She looked up at Flynn who was watching her quietly. He knew that Lora was going to get the bomb armed on time, without a doubt. Lora lifted the detonator and offered it to Gibbs. Flynn helped him to be able to hold the device and Gibbs put his hand on the trigger.

  “For the ashes of his fathers,” Lora said. Gibbs looked at her with awe in his eyes and when Lora looked back at him she saw the young Walter Gibbs, who had once made scrapbooks of his idol; the child, who had gone on an adventure with his heroes and was now about to defeat the monster. “And the temples of his Gods.”

  Lora placed her hand over Gibbs’s fingers on the detonator. Behind her the drones were emitting loud sounds as they were approaching and she could tell that they would be within range in the matter of second. She looked at Flynn who was smiling at her. At the end of their tour they had reached home after all.

  “I created you, Lora,” the MCP raged. “I am your God.”

  Lora scoffed, but she did not respond; the MCP did not deserve another second of her time. She turned back to Flynn and Gibbs.

  “Well,” she said. “Here goes nothing.”

  And she pushed down onto the trigger.

III.

  Earth, after the war.

  In the village they heard that a new Bubbleship was on the way to the valley and by afternoon all the kids were running around excitedly. They kept on looking toward the entrance of the valley, from where the ships usually entered the canyon and during the breaks between classes they sat down on the porch to watch the sky. It was during the last class when Alan saw Quorra coming; she sat down outside to wait. That was how Alan knew that the ship was about to arrive; Quorra always made sure to be there and welcome them when they came.

  He let the class go a few minutes early. They were in the lake house, which they had located six months ago, after discovering the map Tech-49 had left behind. Following the map the survivors found the valley, where now a small village of log houses stood. Alan had gotten to keep the old house, though it took only a few weeks after their settling that they brought in chairs and tables and Alan began to teach. Among Gibbs’ people there were hunters, folks that knew the land or how to build log houses, but none of them had ever received formal education and many of the younger people could not even read.

  Alan walked out to the porch. Part of the lake in front of the house was untouched; farther from the village they had separated a bay with nets where they were feeding and harvesting the selected fish. Around the village there were the field, where the villagers were growing potatoes, legumes, barley, cabbage and carrots. They had electricity from the generators and from the windmills and they had the vehicles they had used during their days in the bunker.

  “Hey,” Quorra said. Alan sat down next to her.

  “From where are they coming?” he asked. One of the first things the villagers had done in the valley had been to set up a radio antenna and to begin transmitting messages to the tech crews all over the world. They had had no way of knowing whether those messages would be heard, whether the other clones of Lora and Flynn would listen and come… But they came.

  “New Jersey,” she said. Alan nodded. So far they had six crews coming in, all from the surrounding coastal states. They came in disbelief, some in shock – but once learning the truth, they were eager to help. They all left, some to find other survivors, some to locate other technicians and others to figure a way to access the now stopped hydro rigs, so that people could use the giant power cells located inside. Once they found out how to tap those batteries, Alan calculated, their entire lives would change.

  They waited. It had been six months since Alan had waken up in the bunker, just to find out that he had been tricked into staying behind… into staying alive. Tech-49, Flynn and Gibbs, who had taken Alan’s place, had all died in the nuclear explosion which had wiped the MCP off of the sky, an event that had taken place while Alan had been in deep sleep. He felt such agony over the news that he wished he had been on the space station when the bomb had gone off; at the same time Alan knew that they had had simply no other choice. Lora, the woman Alan had known was never going to let him get hurt and as for Flynn, even if he had needed a reason on his own, this had been a great opportunity to pull yet another horrible prank on Alan. For Gibbs, Quorra told Alan later, it had been also out of question to let him die, not just because Alan was the only thing left behind after Commander Baines, but because of the service he could be of his people. Considering that Gibbs was dying at that time, the decision was not a hard one for him.

  He was watching the water. Quorra never quite explained why she came to welcome the technicians every time. When they arrived, Quorra made sure that they knew people were not blaming them for serving the MCP and that they understood how important they were for the survivors. To Alan’s relief – or disappointment? – none of the six Loras he met after Tech-49 remembered him; none of them looked at him with recognition in her eyes, none of them froze when he introduced himself.

  But Lora – Tech-49? – came to Alan in his dreams every night and in the days as memories. He often wondered, had he haunted Lora’s hours the way she haunted him now? Alan once overheard the villagers talking whether the clones had souls and if they had, did all the clones have the same soul? Later he came to think that if they had soul, they were made of the love they shared. Undimmed by time, unbound by death. Lora Baines had once brought war to Earth, just to become the savior that overthrew the enemy and now returned to be of help at last. With the MCP gone there would be no more clones coming, but the already existing ones would be around for long, ushering people into safety, collecting batteries, flying those Bubbleships and laying down their lives for other people the way Lora Baines had done it so many years before. And Alan could not help but wondered if there would be a Bubbleship coming in one day with a technician, who had heard the summoning call on the radio the night before. He wondered if there would be another Lora coming one day, landing on the lake shore as if she had done it before. Lora would look around and she would see Alan waiting on the porch. There would be recognition in her eyes and she would smile the same way as Lora Baines smiled when she came home all those years before when she entered the place they shared and she saw Alan waiting for her.

  “It’s coming!” a little girl exclaimed. “They are coming!”

  Quorra and Alan stood up; they walked downstairs and watched as the Bubbleship landed in the last lights of the afternoon.