Up The Tower (23 page)

The copbot had ejected Samson to save his life. One more to owe Partner. The copbot twitched, pinned to the wall.

“You just a whole damn bag of surprise, baby.”

Crash walked on a line at Samson. Helmet down, now. Visor burning red. Partner hacked down at Crash's blade, and Crash just stabbed him again and again. The suit almost on automatic. Hack, replace, hack, replace. The chopped pieces gathered in a pool on the floor below Partner, vibrating and searching for the suit. The armor around Crash’s stomach thinned visibly. The suit was running out of material.

“Come here, Wallop.”

Wallop did not come. He was dying on top of Ore. Her tech hand was around his neck, tugging and breaking. Crude tech job for crude work.

Not looking away from Samson and Partner, Crash called again. “Wallop! You check on Petrov.”

Again, there was no answer. Ore rolled out from under Wallop's dead body, spitting on him. She called to the blonde.

“Ana.”

They both approached Crash now, bloody. Ore's tech hand whirled. Coarse light reflected off the blonde's metal shank.

Crash turned, finally—and met the shank in his midsection. The blonde's face looked almost blissful, sickly so. Crash tried to stab her, but his suit locked up. Some manner of malfunction, maybe, from so much overuse. She stabbed him again, again, again. Weak spots were visible at many points in the armor now. Under the arms, around the torso. The suit fired out blades and shafts spasmodically, like light through a prism.

Samson got up and rushed to Ore, grabbing her. She grabbed him back—she knew who he was.

“Boy,” she said. “Boy, boy, boy.”

Next to them, Ana continued her work on Crash. Like a butcher over her block.

“Oh baby,” said Crash, dying slowly. “Baby, baby. Baby, baby, baby.”

* * * * *

A
brief interlude here, if only to comment on what I am sure are boundless objections to my portrayal of Nicolai Petrov's death.

There are rumors, of course, that Ana Konopolis and Nicolai Petrov had an affair before this time. As you probably can tell, I do not believe this particular theory. But, I will detail it here:

Ana and Petrov had been seeing each other secretly for many months before the disaster. He had wanted her to train under him as his assistant and was setting aside regular blocks of time for her. The affair that she had with Raj Petoran was little more than a ruse to ensure that aspersions were not cast on Ana Konopolis as she regularly ventured into Junktown.

But Petrov did not want her for a wife—much to the chagrin of Konopolis—and delivered her rejection through the guise of Raj. Supposedly,  Petrov argued frequently with Ana about her desire for motherhood. She was in fact pregnant at the time of the disaster—or so says the theory—and lost the child due to the aggregate injuries she suffered.

It's an interesting theory. I don't believe it, but it's an interesting theory. That's one wonderful thing about this story, or any story concerning so many fascinating historical characters: theories crop up over most anything. Petrov in particular is a hot point for historical theorists—one of the most popular being where his body wound up.

The average carry weight of your standard eye drone (also known as peep drone, eyebot, opticker) was about seventy-five pounds before it lost altitude. Earlier designs allowed for weights of up to five hundred pounds, but this sort of manufacture required more materials and also more fuel. What engineers discovered is that due to the spherical nature of the drones, they were not suited for carrying much of anything. Besides that, anything that did end up on top of it was likely not something that was supposed to be there.

Still, in other cities (obviously, those with buildings high enough), a practice developed among the youth, recorded by holowrists and SpecLenses and other such technologies, that involved base jumping off of buildings and holding onto drones for the duration of their altitude drop—to the ground, if possible. Safety precautions included parachutes, magnets, and sometimes helmets.

Nicolai Petrov had none of these safety measures. From all accounts—gathered from the database reports from various other drones in the area, as well as all rescue workers employed at that time—he lasted a good twenty seconds before being lost to the torrent of the water below. It was not, if I am to be believed, a very noble or even very appropriate end.

Due to the enormous nature of the disaster, tracking down single corpses and identifying them was a monumental project, one undertaken and abandoned many times over the course of the last hundred years. Bodies were buried by rubble, flooded over by the river, burnt by fire and explosions, and entire catalogs of records for the Midwest were lost in less than a single day.

Aurora Franken, whose studies of Petrov are some of the most widely cited information we have, had this to say:

This was an important man. His writings and their derivatives were responsible for nearly three-quarters of post-collapse considerations of security, economics, technology, and humor. I suspect many of you read this story purely to discover more about him. But with so much already written on the subject of this great man, I am ashamed to say that there is little I could add to the discussion. Any expansions of his character that I may have created, I hope, were kept in tune to those who knew him (all of whom are no doubt quite dead at this point, but at any rate, I have little desire to invite the fury of ill-reputed and under-represented ghosts into my home).

Petrov was one man; again, one of the most important of his time. His body is all but lost, despite its many graves. Regardless, his effect is still felt to this day, and still there are treasure-seekers dowsing through the forests of Oklahoma to try and scrounge up his body. For someone like that to have an effect on you and I and our contemporaries, you can imagine the agony and fury of all the families at this time after the course of this disaster, trying to find out what happened to their loved ones.

Perhaps you can also imagine, then, the painstaking process of discovering more about the tragic story of Ana Konopolis, the disreputable past of Ororo Castelle, and the hitherto-unknown boy who somehow tied all these threads together.

* * * * *

A
na’s terrible day was about to end. She had decided.

She could decide all sorts of things. She had decided to kill two men already, and they were dead, and she was alive.

So her day was going to end and that’s all there was to it.

On the ground across from her, the boy from the robot was saying something stupid.

“I can fix you,” he said to the metallic shell, all busted and cut open. “Don’t you worry, Partner. I can fix you.”

Clearly the boy was insane. Ore tugged at the boy, trying to bring him up. This must have been Ore's brother, Samson. Their severe faces, their somber eyes.

The robot wasn’t going to be fixed. Even Ana could see that. Ore could too, no doubt.

“Crash kept talked about an escape pod,” said Samson. “I think it's there. Can you check?”

Ore did, rushing into the small alcove where the pod was stashed. Chrome layered around the entrance. She came back out, moments later, shaking her head.

“It's got no power.”

“Dammit!” said Ana. “Do we not get a single break?”

“Hello?”

The voice came out from Victor's skeleton, forgotten at the other end of the hall.

“Hello?” Mike called out. “I heard fighting,” said Mike. “Is there still fighting?”

Ana curled up the ear to her body, stepping out toward the staircase. Ore had picked up her backpack—or Victor's backpack—the one with the data slab in it. Ana watched her intently. Hearing Mike’s peculiar garbled voice, Ore came closer.

“No,” said Ana. “It’s all done.”

Skeleton in hand, Ana walked to Ore. They stood in front of the stairs.

“All right. Goddammit, that's good. I’ve got news for you. There’s good and bad.”

“Of course,” said Ana.

There was hardly any other kind. News coming in was ever a string of coins with two sides, like some absurd necklace, and Ana could always see both sides to all of it.

“The shares are all goddamn arranged. It's official for all of you, okay?”

The news pushed over her like cold air. Maybe it was just the cold air from the open window. Either way, she trembled. A share was a fortune. A fortune’s fortune—the kind of richness that men on the top of the world killed each other to get more of.

And it would be hers.

And Raj, somewhere, was buried and burned and drowned and smashed, and good goddamn riddance. She laughed at the thought.

“There’s three of us,” said Ore. “Or four, I guess. Four of us to account for.”

“Sure,” said Mike. “I’m sure there are. The problem is with the goddamn rescue. There's only room for one of you on the chopper coming in.”

“What?” Ore asked, snatching the ear from Ana.

“They couldn’t just circle without picking anybody else up,” said Mike. “Everything is crowded. It's a whole goddamn mess. There’s room on the next chopper coming in, but it’ll be another fifteen minutes.”

Ore let out a gasping little laugh. “This building is going to be part of the damn river in fifteen minutes.”

They could almost hear Mike’s shrug. “I'm sorry.”

Smiling still, Ana tossed the metal skeleton down. Ore called for Samson. Laughter burst out from Ana’s mouth, unstoppable.

“What’s funny?” asked Ore.

“You are. You think you’re going to put him on the chopper, don’t you?”

“Well, why the hell not?”

Ana shook her head, waving the rib.

“So close.
So close
. All my life, I've been
so close
. And you think I'm just going to stand aside for you? You think I'm just going to let you
go first now?
”

She lunged at Ore with the rib. Ore tackled her. They rolled into one another, Ore fending off Ana's stabs. Finally, Ana grabbed Ore's pack and tore it away—but it ripped open. The precious dataslab landed in the pile of slabs that Petrov had dropped.

Ana rushed at the pile, snatching the one she thought she needed, and then sprinted to the stairs. It would have been easy to stab Ore in all the ruckus—Ana had been gracious not to do that. She was a
good
person.

Laughing, she rushed to the roof, breathing in the smoky cold air of the day. She could hear sirens, chopper engines, water rushing, the roar of fire and the wind. The endless cacophony of disaster rolling into her. She was on top of The Tower, and soon, the rest of the world, all by right. She had earned it.

There was no telling from which edge the chopper would come. She sprinted after the flashing, spiraling lights that she saw at the far end of the roof, hoping they held her salvation.

What she found was a broken signal tower hanging off a balcony.

“...No.”

From the other side of the building she saw the hoverchopper fly up, twin engines trying to close in the distance. She saw Ore and Samson arguing about who would get in—and the copbot pushing Samson forward.

“No!” Ana screamed.

A trick! A foul trick! They had known—they somehow how
known
where she would go. It was all a plan by them, all a conspiracy, and—

The Tower shifted and groaned again, an antenna dropping. The hoverchopper dove down to avoid it.

None of them had made it on. They shifted and argued, staring down at the edge. It looked as though Ore was hurt.

Good. Good, that was all good. If Ana would die here, they all would.

The top of the Tower began to crumble—the antenna lifting up had ripped up some part of the foundation, ceiling caving inward. A tremor of rocks broke apart at Ana's feet. She ran, and the Tower roared beneath her, shifting. Steam blew up and knocked her aside—and she was flying through the air. Flying off the Tower entirely.

Everything spun. Ana screamed.

And then she landed, hard, into the open hold of the hoverchopper. Returned from its descent. It sank several feet, but righted itself almost immediately.

Someone in a white jumpsuit emptied out a vial on Ana's broken, bloody body. A cast sprang up from the liquid, fixing her straight. The hoverchopper lifted up. She could see Samson and Ore on the rooftop, despondent, defeated. Ana laughed and laughed, watching them grow smaller, watching herself get closer and closer to safety.

* * * * *

T
he Tower fell, but like any big institution, it fell slowly. Every second it had more lean to it, and before long the building would lean past that threshold of meters, centimeters, millimeters necessary to break all the way down.

Ore, Partner, and Samson had retreated back down to the top floor, the rest of the roof too unstable to stay on. They had minutes to live. Samson knew that his sister only had minutes to live, and still that was more than he had known in a long time.

“I'm sorry,” said Ore. “I should have fought her.”

“It's all right.” Samson shook his head. “Enough fighting. Enough ugliness, like you said.”

They held hands. They could not stop. In their palms was Samson’s acorn. Ore showed him how she had kept it, this whole time. A puddle of blood gathered at their feet from Ore's wound. Shrapnel had bounced up into her body from when the antenna broke and fell.

“I'm hungry.” Ore patted her stomach. Her shirt was wet, and she splattered red blood down. “There any food around here?”

“I have a suggestion,” said Partner.