The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (8 page)

"What are you saying? Do you think you can stand against them? It's been tried before and it never works!"

"You're right. It has been tried before, but this time we have something that those others didn't. We have a secret weapon—one that will buy us time to bootstrap ourselves up to a point where we can beat them."

He needed a better speech. There was no telling how often he'd practiced it out here in front of his shining gates with a score of heavily armed men at his back, but no amount of polishing was going to make this particular pitch workable. He'd lost all of his listeners right then and there.

Even the most angry, revenge-driven grubber knew better than to provoke the Society. For decades we'd laid siege to their cities, containing the infestation that they represented. They couldn't beat us, and their plan to stand against us was exactly the reason that I'd been sent to this city.

I'd been nervous about going into the compound. I couldn't go back to the Society—not without succeeding in my mission—but even being forced to live like a grubber wasn't as bad as being unmasked as an agent of the Society. They wouldn't just kill me, they would torture me to death.

That nervousness disappeared as I heard him admit that they had a weapon they were going to use against the Society, against my home. He'd used the wrong recruitment speech for a grubber, but he'd used exactly the right one to get an operative from the Society to sign onto his little endeavor.

I stepped to the front of the crowd.

"Where do I sign up?"

Chapter 7

The foreman was thrilled. My offer to join was the first crack in the dam that had been holding the rest of the grubbers back from signing up. It took a few more minutes, but by the end, he had the pick of the crowd. He turned away anyone obviously sick or otherwise unable to work, and still had more than enough volunteers to fill out the five positions he was recruiting for.

We were escorted inside of the compound and a few seconds later the gates were locked again and there was no hope of escape. I wasn't sure what to expect after that. Back home, there would have been psych studies and aptitude tests to determine our strengths and qualifications. No matter his delusions of grandeur, Brennan didn't have access to that kind of technology and resources.

Instead of undergoing testing to determine where we would be most useful, we were taken to the dormitories and assigned a bunk and a footlocker for our belongings. I spent the entire trip trying to stop my nervousness from showing.

This was a particularly critical time in the insertion phase. The few remaining items in my waist pouch were all fairly innocuous—other than the special transmitter that was my only way to radio my handler back home.

The device had been engineered to look like nothing more than a piece of scrap metal, but that wasn't a guarantee that it wouldn't result in my death if someone saw it. Back among Piter's men there had been a chance that whoever saw it wouldn't realize what they were looking at, but this was most definitely not Piter's territory, and for all of his foolishness when it came to announcing Brennan's intention to fight the Society, the foreman wasn't uneducated.

I kept my eyes peeled on the trip from the gate to the dormitory hoping I would see a place to stash the transmitter, but didn't have any such luck. I wouldn't have been able to secret it while being accompanied by the foreman, three guards, and my four fellow conscripts, but it still would have been nice to know that I had a plan.

The dormitory was likewise no good. The foreman gave us a couple of minutes to stow any belongings in our lockers, but I wasn't stupid enough to think that anything left there would be safe. The lockers might be proof against the rest of the dormitory's residents, but they wouldn't stop Brennan's security people, and that was the first place I would look if I was one of the people he probably had tasked to find spies among his new recruits.

A few minutes after our arrival at the dorms, we headed back outside. It wasn't until we were leaving that I finally realized that the building housing the dorms was new construction. That was unexpected—to the rest of the people who'd joined with me just as much as to me.

Here in the city, nobody had the skills or knowledge required to build anything more complicated than a wooden lean-to. Back home that hadn't been the case, but we built with such quality and forethought that it was rare that we actually had to put up new buildings. Our population had been stable for more than a century and there was more than enough in the way of housing and other facilities to take care of any conceivable need.

"You've never seen anything like this before, have you?"

The foreman put the question out there casually—as though not addressing anyone in particular—but I got the feeling he was talking to me. Luckily I was able to answer honestly this time.

"No, I haven't. The fence was one thing, but this is something else. You weren't kidding when you said that Brennan was trying to do something different."

He nodded. "The other warlords don't realize just how far Brennan wants to take us. The building is only two stories tall, and it's screened behind the other buildings inside the compound so that everyone outside of our group won't realize what we're really up to, but it's been laid out so that it can grow—someday it will be forty stories tall."

I pointed towards the sky, overcome by some urge that would have made my instructors throw their hands up in disgust.

"You can screen your activities from the other warlords, but there isn't anything you can do to hide a brand-new building from the ants—not when they control the sky."

That earned me a secretive smile. "You know you didn't fool me back there, right?" My breath caught, but he continued on after only the slightest of pauses. "I know that you didn't join up because you want to defeat the ants. It's okay though. We're in the middle of trying to rebuild civilization. We have centuries of knowledge that needs to be rediscovered, everything from running a foundry to building computer processors. It's a dangerous, brutal undertaking, but it's required if we're ever to claw the ants' boots off of our neck. We'll take you for whatever reason you want to join us."

He held out his hand. "I'm Foreman Tyrell."

"Skye."

"A magical name. I hope that someday we're able to put you back up in the heavens—that's where someone with a name like yours belongs."

We'd all stopped to take in the building housing the dormitory, but now he waved everyone back into motion as he pointed off to the east.

"Sergeant, please take those two to textiles. Lexis will slot them into whatever holes she's got right now. I'll take these three down to the foundry. The rest of your men can return to their posts."

Tyrell led the three of us who were left over to a ramp that led downwards into the ground. The scale of what we were looking at was nothing less than amazing, but I should have anticipated that just based off of the fact that Brennan had decided to build an entirely new building rather than converting one of the existing office buildings.

None of the other warlords would have ever considered digging down into the earth beneath us, but if they had, the entrance to their mine would have been barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Brennan had created a ramp that was large enough for two vehicles to move down it. He was building for the future in ways that stirred something inside of me that I hadn't anticipated.

We walked for five more minutes along the main shaft before coming to a heavy iron door. Tyrell pointed at it.

"If you'll do the honors, please, Skye? I'm afraid that these old arms aren't as capable as they once were."

I nodded, somewhat taken off guard by the admission of weakness from someone who seemed to wield the power of life and death over significant sections of Brennan's domain, and grabbed the large wheel that served as a locking mechanism.

I'd expected it to be nothing more than a little sticky—probably as a result of not having been lubricated in years. After all, he'd asked a seventeen-year-old girl who looked like she'd spent significant chunks of her life not getting enough to eat.

I'd been wrong. The locking wheel was poorly machined and I could feel metal grinding against metal as I tried to turn it. One of my companions, the burly twenty-year-old guy, laughed and said something dismissive.

Under other circumstances I probably would have backed off and asked for help, but this was still a grubber domain. No matter how progressive Brennan might seem, there was still one truth that reigned supreme. You couldn't appear weak.

I clenched my jaw and slowly increased the force I was using until the wheel finally broke loose, spinning enough to release the locks on the door.

Tyrell patted me on the shoulder as he walked past, leading us into the foundry. "You're surprisingly strong, Skye. I think I chose well bringing you down here. You'll need to be strong to survive underground."

Chapter 8

Saying that I was going to work in the foundry wasn't quite true. I was actually working above the foundry—a fact that kept me up more nights than I wanted to think about.

The city was powered by a mix of generation sources. Wood, wind, solar, gravity-fed turbines from water captured on the roofs of buildings more than a hundred stories tall, it was all in the mix, but none of it was very plentiful.

I knew from my pre-mission briefings that the solar and wind generators were all the better part of a hundred and fifty years old, and with every passing year the city's generation abilities dropped. Old age claimed many of the panels and windmills, but the biggest cause of the loss was bombing runs like the one that had been used to cover my arrival.

The Society was in a tough position. We wanted the grubbers to become self-sufficient enough to realize that the teachings of the precepts were a better way to live, but we also couldn't allow them to become a threat to our way of life.

If they directed their efforts towards redeveloping solar technology then we wouldn't be forced to continually bomb them. Instead they continued to focus on building better ways to kill us.

Good old-fashioned wood-burning power generation was very much within the capabilities of all of the grubber cities, but that posed a different set of problems. It was obvious to even the least informed individual back home that the grubbers couldn't be allowed to roam freely over the face of the earth.

The Desolation had taken place precisely because the various countries had been allowed to attack each other with a host of weapons capable of raining down destruction from half a world away. The precepts were clear that no group could be allowed to threaten the survival of our world in that manner again.

Even if that hadn't been the case, their cities were toxic dumps—letting them range more than a day or two beyond the edges of the urbanized areas would just allow the contamination to spread.

That meant that our drones and snipers picked them off whenever one of them stayed outside of the city after dark, which in turn meant that there wasn't a lot of wood coming into the city for fuel purposes.

What fuel did make it into the city was fought over for use as building materials and to provide warmth in the winter, and only if there was any surplus did it then make it into the rudimentary generators that powered critical machinery like the fire suppression systems.

It was no wonder that the warlords on the edge of the city were the most powerful. They were the ones who controlled most of the food production and all of the lumber trade. It was ironic. From what I'd been told, just two hundred years ago agriculture had taken a definite back seat with regards to the creation of wealth, a trend that had been progressing for centuries before that.

Now everything had reversed. All of the warlords were fabulously wealthy compared to the average grubber, but the value of the human lives controlled in the inner territories was completely eclipsed by the wealth generated by the farms and lumber operations on the edge of the cities.

Brennan's compound was different. There was an array of priceless solar panels stationed on the top of his headquarters building, but they had primarily been used to bootstrap him up to the compound's current method of power generation, a large, two-stage geothermal facility.

The first stage drew heat up from several miles below the surface of the earth and converted it into electricity, which was then used to power a small foundry buried several hundred feet underground. The second stage involved harvesting the waste heat off of the foundry and using it to generate additional electricity. That was where I was stationed, along with two of the other workers who'd joined up on the same day as me.

Back home a facility like this would have been fully automated so as to ensure that no human life would be lost in the event of a disaster, but I hadn't seen a working computer since I'd landed inside the city. Instead, Brennan and his foremen were using barely trained men and women to keep the geothermal plant running.

Each stage of the process was fraught with danger. Brennan had managed to drill down far enough that the temperatures in each of the main shafts was more than hot enough to boil water. The individuals in the first stage were responsible for regulating the flow of cold water to keep the generator operating at peak temperatures. That regulation was done by way of old-fashioned valves mounted on more than a dozen different pipes, and a round-the-clock watch had to be maintained to make sure that the temperatures didn't rise to dangerous levels.

The foundry was dangerous simply because they were working with metal that had been heated to a temperature measured in the thousands of degrees. Unlike normal foundries, this one was underground, which meant that there wasn't any easy escape for all of that heat.

Instead, the heat emitted by the molten metal was absorbed into the rock walls around the foundry and then shunted away with cold water piped in from above. The hot water rising back to the top of the loop then ended up in the second stage of the geothermal power generation facility.