Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(20)

“What is this?” she asked as he stepped fully into the room. “Why didn’t I just leave it alone?”

The spare suit followed behind, and Eshton sent it commands to stand sentry at the hole separating the tunnel from the space he and Beck now shared.

They were not the only people in the room.

Nestled against one side of the spherical space was a long cylinder composed of brushed metal. It jutted out from the wall like a spear, its top side bearing a small rectangular window. Though the polymer was thick, Eshton could see the outline of features through it. A man in early middle age. The glowing readout lights set into the side of the cylinder all burned green.

“Beck,” Eshton said, “I need you to trust me right now.”

Her face snapped toward him. Though his voice was modified by the suit, who else would call her by name? “Eshton? What...no. I don’t want to know. We’ll just pretend this didn’t happen. I don’t need to know what this is.”

Eshton took several deep breaths, then made a decision. He keyed the exit sequence and felt the armor open, then stepped out. “We’re way past that, Beck. Now all we can do is damage control. I need you to listen to me very carefully. If you do what I tell you, it could save your life. This is deadly serious business.”

“Could save my life?” Beck spat acidly. “I told you, man, I don’t need to know anything. Just do whatever you have to and I’ll tell Carl you came in and shut all this down.”

He walked over and took a seat on the floor in front of her. “That won’t work. To understand why, you need to know how important the man in that tube is. There are people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill you if they knew you’d seen this. You don’t have any good options, but the best one is playing ignorant. The only way you can do that is if you understand exactly what the stakes are.”

Guilt stabbed through him as he spoke the words. They might be true in other circumstances, but Eshton knew full well how the sequence of events to follow would unfold. She was panicked enough to not fully think through the situation. As he had said, this was him trading on the trust between them.

“Okay,” she said, not meeting his eyes. Then she spoke in a small voice. “I don’t want to die.”

The irony was that Eshton’s lie was meant to give her the best chance of survival. By filling her in on the details, it would put her on a course that might save her. It was the only one he knew that could do so.

“Remember when I told you how much of our technology came from the surge to move off Earth? How the competition to reach higher created all sorts of new technologies?”

Beck nodded. Her eyes drifted toward the man in the cylinder.

Eshton took another deep breath. Once he spoke the words, they couldn’t be taken back. Knowledge had potential energy until it was shared, a gravity that only became active once nudged into other minds. “One of those technologies allowed people to be put into stasis. It was still new when the Collapse started. Imperfect. Unreliable. But it was the only way to send people on long voyages through space. Sleeping, needing no food or water, never aging. Locked in place until someone woke them up. When things started getting bad, someone made the decision to toss the dice. The old government gathered scientists, experts on the Fade, and buried them away in places like this. Some members of the Deathwatch have been searching for them for a long time. I’m one of them.”

Beck’s eyes widened as the implications landed. “The man in there has been here for a hundred years?”

“Longer,” Eshton said. “We’ve found two others, but both of the systems failed decades ago. The document from the old world listing their approximate locations shows no others on this side of the continent.”

He could see the gears begin spinning up to speed in her head. The fear began to evaporate, replaced by skepticism and curiosity. “Why not just access this place from whatever tunnel they used to build it?”

Eshton swept a hand around the room. “Do you see a door? They used drones to fill it in once the sphere was done and the stasis pod installed. Only a small air exchange vent reaches beyond this room. Even the power conduits between here and the power station are buried. It was all hidden so well that we never even found the vent on the surface.”

Beck frowned. “Did...did the whole Rez get built here just so you could look for this? Is that why there’s a mine in the first place?”

Now that was something he hadn’t expected her to work out. “Yes and no. The Rez was planned for this location before we even knew there was a stasis pod here. Or that they existed at all. The power station made it too good a location not to build here. The mine was always part of the Rez design. All we did over the last few years was nudge the work orders so vertical shafts would slowly be added in the directions we wanted.”

Beck shook her head. “That’s...I don’t know how to even put it. You’re telling me the Deathwatch managed to shift people and work and who knows how many thousands of tons of earth just to get closer to this?” She waved a hand at the room.

“Yes,” Eshton said. “The Inners are different. Out here there aren’t any politics. No factions. What you need to know above everything else is that someone high in the Protectorate knows about the stasis chambers as well, and doesn’t want them found.”