The Ruins of Anthalas (The Ember War Saga Book 2) by Fox Richard

Author:Fox, Richard [Fox, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Triplane Press
Published: 2015-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

From where she stood on the roof of the apartment building, the night skyline of Phoenix wasn’t as Shannon Martel remembered it. She’d stood atop this same building many nights and looked out to see skyscrapers and the rolling dome of the Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum, all lit against the desert sky. She used to count the delivery drone running lights as they ran from fulfillment centers or neighborhood 3D printing maker factories to the millions of homes in the city.

Now, what remained of the city stood against the night sky like tombstones, silent and cold. The Xaros vivisection had touched few of the city’s skyscrapers, leaving empty buildings rotting away from exposure and neglect.

Every person in the Ibarra fleet that planned on settling the moons of Saturn found themselves rebuilding the city of Phoenix and living in and around the utility grid that survived around Euskal Tower, the center of Marc Ibarra’s once vast financial empire and where he’d hidden humanity’s one alien ally during the Xaros occupation.

Martel spotted a robot crew laying a new solar-collecting roadway to the empty city center, the forward edge of reclamation efforts. Most survivors lived in tent cities until the construction crews could renovate homes for a more permanent housing solution.

The irony didn’t escape her. With all the room in the world to live, most of humanity still lived right on top of each other. The sanitation conditions were better than the mega-slums had been in Beijing and New Delhi, but the amount of personal space was about the same. The rehydrated extruded plant-matter meals weren’t the best, but they’d have to make do until the robot farms along the Salt River were up and running.

Most of the company executives that were with the fleet had apartments around Euskal Tower, making it easier for Marc Ibarra to summon them at all hours of the day and night. These apartments were repaired and renovated first, which didn’t sit well with the average would-have-been colonist, but the executives were putting in twenty-hour days to get the city back up and running, to build Titan station and to repair the space fleet. It wasn’t as if they could spend many nights in their old rooms anyway. Martel was one such executive. She’d feigned exhaustion to get away from work for a few hours, but sleep wasn’t part of her plans for the evening.

Martel glanced at her Ubi and kept waiting. She was early, like always. The clean desert air helped her focus, rationalize what she was asked to do. She thought the days of carrying out Marc Ibarra’s dirty work had ended once the Xaros wiped out the vast majority of humanity, but he’d sent her a target packet a few hours ago with a termination order.

She’d killed for him before: The occasional corporate employee that tried to sell trade secrets to their rivals or foreign spies. Government officials that didn’t have the courtesy to stay bought after Ibarra had paid the demanded bribes. Nothing she hadn’t done for years when she’d worked for the American CIA.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.