Layla smirked. “You asked me if I trust you, Tin. Now I have to ask you the same thing. Do you?”
She sat down at the desk and held out her hand for the paper.
“You know I do.”
He handed her the credentials, and she sat down at the monitor and placed the paper beside the keyboard on the desk.
“Good,” she said as she typed, “because I’ll make sure this shit ain’t traced. Deborah taught me a few things over the years.”
Michael pulled up a chair beside Layla as a list of files popped onto the screen.
“Some of these are Captain Ash’s personal logs,” Layla said, glancing up.
“They all look like they were saved at the end of her life.”
“Yeah… and these aren’t all her recordings. Looks like a few of these videos were retrieved from the restricted archives.”
Layla played with the bottom of her braid—a nervous habit that made her look more like the girl he remembered from their youth. “This is some heavy stuff. Treasonous stuff, Tin. We could get in a lot of—”
Michael put a hand on her knee and leaned over to her. “We’ve reached the bottom of the rabbit hole. You can leave if you want, but I’m finishing this.”
Layla cracked a half smile and turned back to the monitor. “Well, okay then. I always wanted to get shot out of a launch tube without a chute.”
She typed in several commands, and a moment later, a familiar voice came from the speakers—a voice that flooded Michael with memories both warm and painful. He had spent over five years living with Maria and her husband, Mark. Losing them both within two months of each other had been tough. Captain Ash had finally succumbed to cancer, and although it wasn’t logged as Mark’s cause of death, Michael believed he had died of a broken heart.
Layla had helped him get through the darkness back then, but the feeling of intense sadness returned at the sound of Captain Ash’s scratchy voice. She spoke of the ship and her dream for its people. She told the story of Captain Sean Rolo of the airship Victory, and his discovery in Africa. She listed possible locations to scavenge in red zones that the Hive had never explored: bunkers, silos, and cities underground.
As they listened to the logs, the cracking in her voice grew progressively worse—the cancer spreading from her throat to her lungs. By the final recordings, the once-commanding voice of Captain Ash was barely more than a hoarse whisper.
“What’s this?” Layla asked. She clicked on a video marked with the white ITC logo: a scraper with a star over the top.
A male narrator began telling them about the advent of the ITC airships, as well as of the underground cities Captain Ash had spoken of. This was new information to Michael, but it still didn’t explain why the captain had sent him to read about genetic engineering in some ancient library book.
“ITC thought of everything, didn’t they?” Layla said. “Shelters in the sky and underground? It was as if they knew what was coming.”
“Captain Ash did say these airships were the ones that dropped the bombs that started the war,” Michael said, motioning for her to go back to the previous screen. “What haven’t we seen yet?”
“There are a few more videos here, and one last recording from Captain Ash.”
“Play that first,” Michael said.
She clicked the file and took Michael’s hand. They sat there, hand in hand, listening to her final words. For several minutes, she spoke of the dream she’d had of a habitable place on the surface, a place to make a new home for humanity. Even though her voice was raspy, Michael picked up on the trace of sadness as she admitted that her dream would never come true. Her final words broke his already aching heart.
“Our future is no longer in the sky,” said Captain Ash. “Our future is underground.”
“Underground?” Layla said. “Like under the Hilltop Bastion?”
Michael massaged his temples. “I’m not sure.”
“I don’t understand. Why take us on this scavenger hunt just to tell us her dream changed from living on the surface to living underground in one of these communal shelters? Why not just tell you that from the beginning, in the note she gave you? And why wait until we got a radio transmission from the surface?”
“Maybe she feared that Captain Jordan wouldn’t tell anyone the truth, and this was her contingency plan. He never did share her dream of finding a place to put down.”
Layla paused to think. “But what about the stuff Janga found? I’m not seeing anything like that here.”
Michael continued massaging his forehead, trying to think. Nothing was making sense.
“Every ITC facility is located in a red zone, including the one in Hades,” Layla said.
“The same one that X helped blow up ten years ago?”
“That’s my guess.” Layla studied the screen and then pointed. “The Hilltop Bastion is on this list, along with twelve others. Looks like we’ve already searched the areas where communals eight, two, and ten are, right?”
Michael read over the locations. He never forgot a dive, especially one that resulted in a death. “We lost some good men and women on those missions.”
“Yes, but look at the pattern, Tin. All these dives had two things in common.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “What two things?”
“Sirens and ITC bunkers.”
“You think there’s a connection?”
“Maybe, but I think there’s a third part of this puzzle that we’re missing.”
She turned back to the screen and looked through the other files.
Michael tensed as he heard footsteps approaching. If someone came in now, how could he and Layla possibly explain what they were doing? They would end up in the stockade with Janga. The footsteps passed, continuing down the corridor without slowing.
“Don’t worry,” Layla said, “I told you, we’re safe… Wait. What’s this?”
She had highlighted a file labeled XR.
She clicked on it, and an error message popped up. “Says it’s corrupted.”
“Can you fix it?” Michael asked.
She shrugged one shoulder. “I can try.”
Michael stood and paced behind her as she worked. He felt trapped in this tiny room. Worse, the questions wouldn’t stop ping-ponging inside his skull. What hadn’t Janga told them? And why had Captain Ash sent him on this posthumous wild-goose chase?
The computer speakers began to play a recording in a smooth baritone voice.
“To protect the human race, ITC is at the forefront of genetic engineering and modification,” the man was saying.
“I think I got it,” Layla said.
Michael walked back to the desk and sat. A warehouse packed with gray capsules appeared on the screen.
“Are those coffins?” she asked.
“No, they’re cryogenic chambers.”
Long cords stretched across the floor, and icy mist drifted through the room. The camera panned up, but where he expected a ceiling, there were towers with hundreds of the capsules. The feed showed a pair of scientists in space suits, working around an open capsule at the bottom of one of the silos.
A new image came on-screen, and this time the scientists were gone. Two young women stepped out of the chambers. One by one, more tubes opened, and a crowd of naked young adult humans gathered in the middle of the room.
“Holy shit,” Michael said. “They grew humans?”
Layla couldn’t speak.
“Do you remember what the governor of Hilltop Bastion said in her transmission?”
“Something about not being able to keep them back much longer, and to send support.” His eyes flitted to meet Layla’s as she said what he was thinking.