Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(32)
He was almost back at his own habitat when he crossed a section of Sector Two he hadn’t wandered through before. One of his bands signaled an alert. Alarmed, James scanned the area.
“Smitt, something is wrong. Jump band just triggered a warning. The chronostream here is frayed. Someone recently jumped into this zone.”
TWELVE
SUNKEN CITY
The explosion kicked off the morning with a thunderous boom that rocked the entire platform. Sometime between when he had dropped Elise off at her habitat and sunrise, Sector Four’s hydro plant had overloaded and obliterated the sector, crippling the entire city. Unfortunately, Sector Four was the central hub that housed the main foundation that kept the city together. Years of careful planning fell apart within a matter of minutes.
Soon, the connecting modules frayed as the supports for the facility were thrown off balance. Entire buildings, some almost as tall as skyscrapers, toppled into the ocean. Fires broke out across the adjacent platforms.
James rushed out of his habitat and saw Sector Three crack down the middle, splitting what used to be the cafeteria in two, dumping buildings and throngs of people into the ocean. All around him, masses of screaming people fled toward Sector Five to try to escape on transports.
James powered on his exo and waded through the injured and the dead, mentally blocking out the grim sight. The air was filled with the sounds of a city dying, not unlike when he had worked a salvage through the razing of Carthage, or the rape of the Copernicus Luna Colony during the early days of the Warring Tech period.
James didn’t think a platform this large could sink from one explosion, even if it had occurred at a critical structural point. The sinking must have been the result of either criminally negligent engineering or an unfortunate coincidence. James wasn’t a big believer in coincidences.
An entire group of people running in front of him disappeared under a toppling building, their cries for help drowned by the screech of tortured metal. Another group was swallowed by the ocean when the platform below them gave. Everywhere he ran, the loud crack of metal tearing followed. James pushed the people out of his mind and continued on. The past was already dead. He was only witnessing the last moments of a historical replay.
A lighting tower squealed and collapsed as he passed underneath. If his exo hadn’t been at full power, it might have killed him. James brushed it aside and continued to an underwater test lab on the lower level of Sector Two where the first mark, a subparticle filterer, was located.
Abandoned and unmanned, the lab tilted at a fifteen-degree angle. Water was pooling at one corner of the room. He waded waist-deep through the hallways until his AI band identified the mark, a series of intricate machines connected by tubes and filters in a mostly submerged room. James cut the connections from the floor, ripped the cylinder and the machines out of their foundations, and placed them in his netherstore.
“Great abyss, Smitt.” James watched as his power levels dipped. “This thing weighs a couple of tons. It’s draining the netherstore faster than anticipated. I’m not sure if I can store all three containers and still maintain enough power for a jump back.”
“Make do, James. Reduce power to some of your bands if you have to.”
James ran out of the teetering building and sped toward the second mark. Within minutes, his levels were down to 94 percent.
James sped past several groups of people clinging to whatever they could grab for dear life. Others were still futilely trying to reach the transports in Sector Five. He wanted to yell that none of the ships on Nutris would escape the doomed platform. He wanted to tell them to make peace in their last precious moments alive.
James could have sworn he heard a woman’s voice calling for Salman. If he actually had, he knew who that would be. Elise Kim was the last person he needed to see right now. He pushed her out of his thoughts and refused to turn around.
The building housing the next mark still had people running around inside. James ignored them as he hurried against traffic toward a giant circular room used as one of the main testing labs on Nutris. He burst into the room and saw two scientists working frantically to dislodge a strange-looking machine from its base. There was a large crystal floating in a glass cylinder at the nexus of an array of machines connected by meshes of strange metal thongs. Several glowing needles attached to circular hoops rotating on axis points surrounded the crystal. James worried that this fragile-looking thing might break if he tore it out of its base.
“Thank Gaia!” one of them shouted, looking his way. “We have to save the bacterial sequencer. Help us get this on the cart.”
“You two get out of here!” James shouted, pointing at the door. “The whole place is going down.”
The other scientist shook his head. “The sequencer is the key to saving us all. It’s more important than our lives. We have to save it.”
James’s clenched his fist. This he hadn’t expected. He powered on his exo, ripped the entire contraption off its supporting pins, and floated it toward the waiting netherstore. The two scientists stared at it, mouths agape. Then they looked at James’s glowing hand.
“How did you do that?” the first scientist said, stunned.
“Get out of here before the platform sinks!” James yelled, expanding the netherstore container and pushing the machine inside.
The second scientist stared as the sequencer disappeared into the opened black mouth of the netherstore. “You’re … you’re stealing it! You can’t. You don’t know what you’re doing.” She lunged at James.