Les clicked out of his harness and moved over to the controls. He grabbed them and slightly altered the angle of descent. Then he fired the six rear thrusters.
“Everyone, hold on,” he said.
Purple flames streaked from the boosters, propelling their descent. Les grabbed the armrests and gripped them tightly. As in diving, sometimes the best way through a storm was the fastest way.
The altitude monitor ticked down and their speed rocketed to one hundred miles per hour and increasing. Les finally backed off just below Discovery’s two-hundred-miles-per-hour maximum, not wanting to risk it if they should hit a major pocket of turbulence.
The hull groaned, and the airship jolted before steadying back out again. All around them, the forces were testing the bones of the airship.
“Hold, baby, hold,” Les murmured.
He looked back at the main monitor. Forks of lightning sizzled vertically, one of them grazing the airship. Another warning beeped.
Through the last of the descent, Les thought of his boy. He had tried to bury the painful memories and remember the good times, but his heart broke for his son. Trey had served time in the brig and came out a man, dedicating his life to his people and, in the end, sacrificing it for them.
Les would see to it that he had not died in vain. He would honor Trey’s memory and avenge him.
At five thousand feet, lightning blitzed from all sides, setting off alarms.
“Almost there,” Timothy said.
At three thousand feet, Les eased off power to the thrusters and slowed their descent with the turbofans. Random flashes of lightning splashed across the skyline, leaving behind a blue residue that lingered on the retina.
“Timothy, turn on our front beams,” Les ordered.
The lights clicked on, cutting through the inky bottom of the storm. Only sporadic lightning crossed their flight path.
At two thousand feet, the surface coalesced before his eyes.
“There she is,” Les said.
The warning sensors ceased, and an eerie silence fell over the bridge. Les gave Timothy control of the ship and walked over to the windows to see the old-world coastal city with his own eyes.
Not really a city, he realized. Not anymore.
The refueling station was one massive facility on the shore, with several buildings surrounding a central tower. The piers extending out into the water were broken away, only hunks remaining where Star Grazer would have docked to fill its tanks.
A beach separated the fuel depot from the piers, but the land was too fogged in for them to see any bridges or roads leading from the docks to the central station.
He did spot a lighthouse on a peninsula not far from the main facility, but unlike the other Cazador lighthouses he had seen in the past, this one was not glowing to attract Sirens or human survivors.
“Timothy, scan for life-forms,” Les said.
“Already did, sir,” the AI replied. “I’m not detecting signs of any animal life bigger than Miles on the surface, or any exhaust plumes from the defectors. But there are some very large creatures under the water.”
“Take us lower,” Les said.
Timothy brought them down to under a thousand feet—so close, they could see some of the faded letters on the central tower. The top floor was an observation deck with shuttered windows.
“Take a look at this,” Timothy said. He switched the feed on the main monitor to a camera under the ship, and Les moved back from the windows to take a look.
What remained of the vehicle bridge from the piers to the main station lay scattered across the beach. Something else was odd down there, too.
“Zoom in,” Les said.
Timothy magnified the view, revealing razor-wire fences, and black craters where mines had exploded on the sandy beach.
“I don’t think a storm did this,” Layla said.
“Then what did?” Eevi asked. “The defectors?”
“Pardon me for interrupting,” Timothy said.
The officers all turned from the screen to look at him, but he pointed back at the screen, which flickered to another image.
“Those life-forms in the water,” he said. “They are feeding.”
Fish bobbed in the black surf on-screen. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of them—so many that it looked as if the water had a rippling white skin. But not everything down there was dead.
The camera zoomed in on a dorsal fin cutting through the water. And another.
Dozens of sharks fed on the easy pickings.
“What killed all those fish?” Layla asked.
“Oil,” Timothy said. “The refueling station appears to have sustained either an attack or severe storm damage. I’m not sure which, but the pipes have been breached and much of the fuel released into the ocean.”
Les walked back to the windows, his hands clasped behind his back.
“There is a secondary pumping station, but it’s a few miles inland,” Timothy said. “Other than that, the only other fuel outpost is in Belize, in the opposite direction from our destination.”
Les pressed his face against the porthole. He could see a road below, but getting there was going to be the problem.
“You think it was the machines that did this?” Eevi asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” Les said. “Timothy, you have the controls. Layla, you have the bridge.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
Les paused just inside the bridge door. “To the surface.”
X wondered what was hiding in the Cazador history books. The archaic society had kept pretty good records chronicling its journeys into the wastes—so many, in fact, that he still had barely made a dent.
But there wasn’t much about the raiding excursion to Rio de Janeiro other than a few pages about a ship that was deployed and never came back.
Tonight, he sat in the library, trying to find more information, something that he might relay to Discovery on the encrypted channel before they arrived in a week. It was his way of feeling as if he was helping—that and an attempt to keep his mind off the recent string of tragedies.
But how could he ignore the pointless deaths?
The battle for the Metal Islands had been costly for both societies, and while he had hoped to avoid further bloodshed, he could see now that it was impossible.
Holding the limp body of a boy who died trying to avenge his father had taken another piece of X, and he didn’t have many more pieces left to lose.
He shut the book, sending up a little puff of fine dust. The noise attracted the attention of the only other person in the library. Imulah sat at another table, combing through the archives for information about Rio de Janeiro.
Reaching over to the stacks, X grabbed the next book filled with stories of monsters the Cazadores had encountered in the wastes and human survivors they had taken captive.
The drawing of an airship helped distract him from the painful thoughts. Taking a closer look, he saw that it was the same airship the Cazadores had mounted to the roof of the capitol tower and converted into the Sky Arena.
“Imulah, come here,” X said.
The scribe walked over.
“Read this to me.”
X moved the book over so Imulah could read it from the chair beside him.
“These are the records of the airship that came before yours,” Imulah said, holding up the book. “Almost a year after the missiles and bombs fell from the sky, an airship called the ITC Jupiter discovered the Metal Islands.”
X had never heard of the ship.
“Yes,” Imulah said. “The record goes on to talk about the events that followed—primarily, a peaceful landing. The people of the airship assimilated with those who had fled here when the bombs destroyed the Old World.”