It was bleak. But it had been this bleak for her whole life, and rather than find it depressing Jess instead always felt a sense of peace looking out over this vastness of solitude.
Once upon a time, she reflected, this had been a place of life and plenty. Back in the day when everyone had argued over the impact of humanity on the planet, and how they could somehow fix the effect they were having on it.
Back in the day, when there had been lifestyles, and money, and religion to argue over. Back when they’d thought humanity ruled the world and it was humanity’s decisions that would chart the course of the future.
Everyone had thought a disaster would come someday. Almost no one had predicted that when it did, humanity would have no part in it, and no control over the results.
One after another, six big volcanos had erupted, along a crack in the planet’s crust. It was simply a matter of physics after that – debris in the air that turned into clouds, that blocked the sun, and in turn spawned more clouds, and acid rain they couldn’t escape, or block, or do anything about.
Horrifically, frighteningly fast, how a food chain can collapse. Plants, and forests, and animals and cultures, and civilization vanished in the blink of a planetary eye, reducing a fertile world to an almost barren bleakness.
Almost.
The ten percent of humanity that had survived had done so because the one great strength of their race was the ability to adapt, and adapt, and adapt again, finding new ways to live, new resources to exploit, and new patterns to fall into.
And so they had survived, and learned to live again in a hard world where needs were boiled down to stark essentials.
But they were still human, and conflict was so written into the species that even when so few were left, still, there were sides to be taken. Now, the conflict wasn’t over ideology or trade, it was over raw resources in a world where access to them meant life or death.
Was there a mind on the other side that had data they needed? They’d go take them. An invention they could exploit? Jess or someone like her would be assigned to find a way to locate and retrieve it. Was there someone who, though not useful to them, would give the other side an advantage?
Jess had killed her share of them. There was no sentiment. No compassion. Survival was as raw a master as humanity had ever known.
There could be no open warfare. There wasn’t enough of them for that. They just fought step by step, in close rooms, or dark tunnels, infiltrating labs, and invading systems. Their lives depended on the sea, and on the hydroponic stations high above, circling the world.
Jess licked a bit of the rain off her lips. It had stopped being deadly to them generations back, as their biology adapted to the new conditions and to her it tasted sweet. It dampened her hair, and the workout suit she was wearing, cooling her body down from the session she’d just completed.
Thunder rumbled overhead, and she took heed of the warning, ducking back inside the armored door and keying it shut behind her. It closed with a compressed thump, and she walked along the corridor towards the environ center.
She passed the occasional steadily moving figure in the hall, giving the brief nod of acknowledgement the contact required. Just past the major corridor that held the dining hall and rec area, she turned into one of many half rounded doorways.
It opened as her presence registered and closed behind her as she entered, the light inside altering from neutral to a soft twilight that outlined her as she stripped off her workout suit and set it on the cleaning shelf.
Naked, she moved into the rad room and it switched on, bathing her in a deep ultraviolet glow. She sprawled on a transparent chair, letting the artificial sunlight cover her skin as she touched the work pad on the arm of the chair, and called up the ops report.
The one thing they hadn’t evolved out of, that need for the touch of the sun they no longer saw. Jess rested her elbow on the chair and propped her chin up with it, relaxing in the glow as she caught up on the events of the day.
Her dream of two days past was finally fading. She’d spent a good, restful night last night, and was almost to where she was starting to feel almost normal again. The details of the failed raid were fading, along with the scar on her back from the knife.
The trust hadn’t returned though, and Jess had been silently gratified when the other ops agents had gone to the top and registered big concerns of their own as to how far they themselves could trust the tech partners they’d been given.
She knew Stephen thought she’d egged them on, and she would have, if they hadn’t come up with it on their own. If it happened to her, they reasoned, it could happen to any of them.
And that was true. The techs were all very uncomfortable, sitting together in the dining hall as the ops in residence gathered at their own, and getting faintly concerned and maybe a little suspicious looks from the rest of the citadel staff.
Not fair. Jess readily conceded. Joshua had been the first turned in as far back as anyone knew, and there was no real reason to suspect any of the other techs but they were suspected anyway.
Tough luck for them. Tougher luck for Stephen, who was now having to deal with far more than just her problem.
It was time for him, and for his boss to put the thumb down on the council, since it was their process that screwed up. Someone should pay for it.
But even as she thought it, Jess knew in her guts the finger pointing would eventually deflect fault to the four winds likely right back to them, and their group, and her.
Humanity hadn’t changed all THAT much. Crap still insistently and never-endingly rolled downhill.
A soft knock sounded at the door, an anachronistic touch that almost made her smile. “Come.” She called out, hearing the soft click as the vocal systems analyzed her response and acted on it.
The outer door opened and she saw a shadowy form enter, crossing in front of the dim light long enough for her to recognized Stephen’s tall, solid, bulk. “In here.”
He crossed into the sun chamber and sat down on the bench. He was dressed in a workout suit much as she’d been, and his hair was plastered to his head with sweat. “You up for dinner?”
Hm. “Sure.” Jess agreed, wondering what the pitch was going to be. “What’s up?”
“I’ve just had a crap filled day ad I’d like to sit across a plastic table from a good looking woman and talk about trigger ratios and forget it was a crap filled day.” He answered, with surprising bluntness. “That’s all.”
Jess looked up from her pad, watching him. He was sprawled on the bench and she read honest exhaustion in his body set. She knew Bricker had been with him most of the morning, and she knew she was probably one of the subjects of the meeting, but she read no dissembling in his face and that surprised her.
Stephan was a friend. But first and foremost, he was her superior and even though they’d grown up together, been schooled together, and been in service together for years she had no illusion of where his loyalties lay.
Ah. There were those trust issues again. She smiled briefly. “Sounds good.” She replied. “I’ve got backed up rations, want to share a liter of grog?”
His face creased into a responding smile. “You’re starting to sound like your old self.”
Jess considered that. “I'm not sure that old self still lives in here.” She answered. “But I got a decent night sleep last night so who knows.”
He nodded. “Know how that feels.” He indicated the light. “Mind if I share your glow? Mine’s being serviced.”
“Feel free.” Jess went back to her pad as he stripped out of his suit and went to the transparent lounge, dropping down onto it and stretching out. The floor and walls were reflective, so every inch of them got some of it and though a necessity, she had always found it oddly relaxing.