Together, the four of them walked through the charred airlock into Homebase.
What met them inside was total destruction. The airlocks had been vaporized, the rooms and equipment torn apart. The Ghosts hadn’t destroyed the power station yet, because the lights were still on, but sparks sputtered from torn wiring and smashed electronics. No room had been left untouched. Even the plants in the conservatories had been ripped up by their roots.
There were splashes of blood on the walls and over a dozen Ghost bodies littering the floors of several rooms. Nonna and Dre had clearly put up a fight, but of the two eldest Eves, there was no sign.
Then they entered the room that housed the Mind of Eve. The computers were shredded and sparking like mad, their torn surfaces splattered with red.
“Misha, Shar, get behind me,” Eve whispered. She raised her weapons – disruptor in one hand, the egg-shaped device in the other.
Growls and snarls and wet, smacking noises were coming from behind one of the destroyed computer banks. Eve and the noah had started to creep around the corner when Shar brushed against the edge of one of the computers and dislodged a torn faceplate. It fell to the floor with a loud clatter.
Shrieks erupted. Half a dozen Ghosts leapt up and over the computer bank, claws extended, bloodied maws filled with sharpened fangs. Misha screamed. Eve, Shar and the noah fired. A blinding light flashed and the wall beside Eve simply disappeared. Eve turned to see an enormous Ghost holding the missing weapon from the noah’s ship in one massive, blood-soaked paw. The Ghost pinned its savage gaze on her and pointed the weapon again.
“Get down!” The noah shoved Eve and the girls to the floor just as a second blast took out the spot where they’d been standing. The noah hit the ground in a roll and came up firing. His laser enveloped the last Ghost, vaporized it in an instant.
The ensuing silence was broken only by the sound of sparking wires and Misha’s muffled weeping. The noah stood up and began a final sweep of the room. Eve and the girls started to follow, but when Eve caught sight of a bloody femur stripped of flesh lying on the floor where the Ghosts had been congregated, she gasped and grabbed the girls, holding them against her body so they could not see.
“Noah . . . is that . . . is it . . . ?”
He rounded the corner. She heard him take a deep breath, and knew what he’d found.
“No.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “Oh, no. No.”
“I’m sorry, Eve.” He pointed his weapon and fired one last time, vaporizing the remains of her oldest sisters. Then he returned to gather them all into his arms. “I’m so sorry.” And he held them all until their tears were spent, then gently guided them out of the ruins of their home into the rover, and drove them back to his ship.
Once he closed the door and re-established a breathable atmosphere inside the vessel, Eve helped the girls out of their biosuits and tucked them into the noah’s berth, staying with them until their tears ran dry and exhaustion dragged them into sleep.
She walked back to the front of the ship. The noah had tidied the worst of the mess and was standing with his palms flat against the walls of the ship. Glowing light flowed from his palms and tracked along the walls, and as she watched, the damaged surfaces began to repair themselves.
He took his hands from the wall and turned to hold out his arms. She went to him without hesitation, surrendered herself to his embrace, and let her tears flow.
“What are we going to do?” she whispered when the storm of grief finally passed. “Homebase is destroyed, and without it, we can’t stay here.”
“No, we can’t stay here, but I know a place where we can go.” He stroked her hair, kissed her tear-
dampened face, and held her tight. “If you are willing, Eve, I will be a noah – your noah – one last time.”
“The girls and I have decided on a name for you.” Eve cast a teasing smile at the beautiful, golden-haired man sitting in the pilot seat of the noah’s spacecraft. The wide vidscreen before them showed the video feed from the ship’s cameras as they descended to the lush, green-and-blue planet the noah had said would suit them as their new home.
Two weeks had passed since the destruction of Homebase and the deaths of Nonna and Dre. Although sadness for their lost loved ones still frequently overwhelmed Eve and her sisters by surprise, resulting in sudden bouts of weeping, they were finally beginning to laugh again. The resilience of the human spirit was fighting back against despair.
“Oh?” the noah asked. He arched a brow, magnificent blue eyes twinkling. “I thought you’d already settled on Euphie.”
“That was just for fun, silly,” Misha chided, her grin so wide Eve wondered why it didn’t split her cheeks.
“We chose an Old Tongue name for you,” Eve said.
“Yeah, you’re always saying how you’re done being a noah and are ready to be just a man,” Shar added. “So that’s the named we picked for you.”
“Adam,” Eve said. “It’s the Old Tongue word for man.”
“Adam.” He rolled it around experimentally on his tongue, then nodded. “I like it. Very well, Adam it is.” He leaned over to plant a lingering kiss on Eve’s lips.
With a quiet hiss, the landing gear deployed and the spacecraft lowered itself gently to the ground.
Adam punched a few lights on the command console, and the side door opened with a slow whoosh.
“Eve, Shar, Misha, welcome to your new home.” Adam held out an arm, escorting the three out of the ship and onto the sweetly fragrant grass that grew in abundance beneath the magnificent branches of the forest trees. “I call it Eden.”
Written in Ink
Susan Sizemore
“I wasn’t in a post-apocalyptic mood when I got up this morning.”
“Too bad, cause that’s where you’re going today.”
“I knew that when I was issued this charming outfit of jeans and hoodie as my ensemble.” Frannie settled into the TC and got comfortable before she looked back at her controller. “Why the Ruin Times?”
“You’re supposed to ask ‘where’, which often gives a clue to ‘why’. Even better, you’re supposed to sink into the mission file.”
“If I do the homework all by myself there’ll be no reason for you to have a job.”
“You are not as amusing as you think you are, Lady of the Elite.”
Frannie frowned at the use of the title, as the controller knew she would. She might be an Elite, but she worked for a living. She could see her reflection in one of the TC’s blank screens and knew she certainly didn’t look like an Elite. Physical perfection attracted too much attention in the places where she spent most of her time. She had brown hair and brown eyes and skin tone, and features that were altered slightly depending on where and when she went. Today she just looked like herself.
She didn’t need physical disguises for a visit to the grungy, grubby, post-apocalyptic past where nobody wanted to live, let alone go.
Frannie sighed. She punched the file into her wrist implant, closed her eyes and got on with finding out the specs of the mission.
Oh, Lordy, it looked like the Starshine Group was at it again. Someone was supposed to get killed. It had to happen. She needed to stop an attempt to stop the death while at the same time observing – the records didn’t really say much more than that this death ended the beginnings of a proscribed movement.
Proscribed meant that the scholars had decided that this was one of the points in time that absolutely couldn’t be fiddled with.