The first sign that something was wrong was the water.
Not that anyone in Continuity Facility K-17 had ever seen water fall from the sky, or gather in rivers, or shine beneath a sun.
Water came from pipes.
It came warm for washing, cold for drinking, sterile for the infirmary, mineral-rich for the hydroponics decks. It came because the machines beneath the Vault had made it come for one hundred and ninety-eight years.
Then, one morning, the taps coughed.
By midday, the lower habitation ring had no pressure.
By evening, the Steward-Marshal summoned the engineers.
The Hydrological Management Core sat behind three metres of armoured glass in a chamber no one had entered in generations. Its casing bore the crowned dragon of old Drinax. Tiny amber warnings crawled across a diagnostic screen.
Royal Engineer Mara Vey stared at them for a long time.
“How long?” asked her father.
Steward-Marshal Elian Vey was sixty-three years old and had spent all sixty-three beneath rock.
Mara swallowed.
“One hundred and fifty days.”
Nobody spoke.
The Vault had survived bombardment. Famine. Fire. Two generations of internal violence. A fungal blight in the eastern hydroponics galleries. The Great Fever of 118. The reactor shutdown of 163.
It would die because of a control board the size of a dinner plate.
“We can repair it?”
“No.”
“Rebuild it?”
“No.”
“Substitute another processor?”
Mara shook her head.
“The reclamation plant was designed around this architecture. We could fabricate most of the surrounding systems. Not this.”
The Steward-Marshal looked through the glass at the old machine.
“What does the inventory say?”
Mara had already checked.
“There were six compatible units on Drinax.”
“Were?”
“Two here. One failed eighty-seven years ago. One was installed in Royal Civil Defence Complex T-9. Two were transferred to orbital facilities.”
“And the sixth?”
Mara hesitated.
“Royal Palace.”
The room went very still.
The Palace had been dead for two centuries.
Everyone knew that.
Everyone in the Vault knew the story.
The Aslan came. The cities burned. The atmosphere poisoned. The King died. The surface became the Burned World, where nothing human could live.
It was why the Door had never been opened.
Steward-Marshal Vey folded his hands behind his back.
“Then we send someone to T-9.”
Mara looked at him.
“Father, if the external contamination readings are accurate—”
“They are.”
“The sensors are nearly two hundred years old.”
“They are accurate.”
“You don’t know that.”
For a moment she thought he would rebuke her.
Instead he looked tired.
Very tired.
“One person,” he said. “One suit. One mission.”
Mara understood.
Not an expedition.
A sacrifice.
* * *
The outer door had not moved since the reign of a king whose portrait still hung in the Vault schoolrooms.
Motors groaned.
Dust fell like grey snow.
Mara stood alone in a pressure suit while three hundred people watched through internal cameras.
The Door opened.
Sunlight entered K-17.
For several seconds Mara could not move.
She had known, intellectually, what sunlight was. The archives contained images. Educational simulations reproduced it.
None had prepared her.
It was too bright.
Too large.
The sky was blue.
Not black. Not orange with poison. Not boiling with radioactive clouds.
Blue.
Mara stepped outside.
Wind touched her suit.
She began to laugh.
Then she began to cry.
“Engineer?” came her father’s voice over the radio. “Report.”
Mara looked across a valley of broken stone and twisted metal.
There were plants.
Sparse, thorny things pushing through ash-grey soil.
Something moved in the distance.
An animal.
Alive.
“The surface is habitable,” she whispered.
Silence.
“Mara.”
“The surface is habitable.”
Another silence.
Longer this time.
“That is impossible.”
“I’m standing on it.”
She walked ten kilometres before finding the tracks.
Human tracks.
Fresh.
* * *
They found her before she found them.
Six figures appeared on a ridge, wrapped in dust-coloured cloaks and patched survival gear. Their rifles were ancient but very real.
One wore a respirator fashioned from parts that belonged in a museum.
He pointed his weapon at Mara.
“You come from the Palace?”
She froze.
“You know the Palace?”
The stranger tilted his head.
“Everyone knows the Palace.”
Mara’s heart began pounding.
“The Royal Palace?”
He laughed.
“Floating Palace, yes. King Oleb’s cloud-castle.”
Mara stared at him.
“King... Oleb?”
The man lowered his rifle slightly.
“You’ve hit your head?”
“I am Royal Engineer Mara Vey of Continuity Facility K-17.”
The stranger’s expression changed.
Not recognition.
Fear.
He looked past her toward the buried entrance in the hills.
Then he made the sign of the Dragon.
“The Door,” he said.
The others murmured.
One backed away.
Mara felt suddenly cold despite the heat.
“You know the Vault?”
“My grandmother told stories. Her grandmother told her.”
He pointed toward the hills.
“The rich hid under the mountain while Drinax burned.”
* * *
Three days later, a starship descended from the sky.
Mara had seen starships in archive footage.
This one looked like a knife.
Long, predatory, graceful despite its age, its down-swept wings cutting through the haze as it settled onto the plain.
The Vespexers scattered before its landing blast.
Mara did not.
The hatch opened.
Armed Travellers descended first.
Then came a woman in fine clothes, carrying herself with the easy certainty of someone raised among power.
Princess Rao of Drinax.
Behind her came a broad, magnificently dressed man with a beard, a sword, and an expression of delighted disbelief.
King Oleb.
He stopped ten metres from Mara.
Mara stared at him.
He stared at her.
Neither spoke.
Finally Oleb spread his arms.
“Well,” he said. “You took your damned time.”
Mara did not smile.
“By authority of the Royal Continuity Charter,” she said, “identify yourself.”
The Travellers exchanged glances.
Rao closed her eyes briefly.
Oleb’s grin widened.
“Oh, I like her.”
Mara held out a data wafer.
“We require a Hydrological Management Core HMC-4. Our current unit will fail in one hundred and thirty-eight days.”
Oleb took the wafer but did not look at it.
“How many people?”
“One thousand one hundred and twelve.”
This time, the King’s expression changed.
The humour vanished.
“A thousand?”
“Correct.”
“Engineers?”
“Yes.”
“Doctors?”
“Yes.”
“Technicians?”
“Yes.”
“Teachers?”
“Yes.”
Oleb looked toward the hill.
Behind Mara, the outer Door had been opened wider.
Figures were emerging cautiously into daylight.
Children first.
Then adults.
People shading their eyes against a sun they had never seen.
Rao stepped beside her father.
Neither spoke for a while.
The Vespexers stood apart from the Vault dwellers.
Two peoples of Drinax.
One had survived beneath stone.
The other beneath the open sky.
Neither looked pleased to see the other.
Mara watched Oleb.
“You are the King?”
He straightened.
“King Oleb XVI of Drinax.”
“Our records do not acknowledge your dynasty.”
One of the Travellers coughed.
Rao looked suddenly fascinated by the horizon.
Oleb stared at Mara.
Then he began laughing.
He laughed so hard he had to wipe tears from his eyes.
Mara was not amused.
“Your Majesty?”
“Oh, this is magnificent.”
He turned toward the Travellers.
“Find their water chip.”
One of them raised an eyebrow.
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Oleb pointed toward the Vault.
“There are a thousand Drinaxi down there who remember how civilization works.”
Then he pointed toward the Vespexers.
“And ten thousand up here who remember what it costs when civilization fails.”
His smile returned, but there was something harder beneath it now.
“Get me that chip.”
Rao looked at him.
“And after that?”
King Oleb gazed at the open Door beneath the dead hills.
At the people stepping into daylight after two centuries.
At the old kingdom walking out of its grave.
“After that,” he said, “we decide who Drinax belongs to.”
