The Everlasting Earth Read online

  The Everlasting Earth.

  Copyright © 2022 by L. A. Cummings.

  All rights reserved.

  No portion of this protected work may be copied, stored, shared, sold, or otherwise distributed, except under fair use practices, without the consent of the author and / or publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, objects and events are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places, objects or events is entirely coincidental.

  Book cover design by ebooklaunch.com.

  ebook ISBN: 979-8-9856153-0-2

  THE

  EVERLASTING

  EARTH

  a novel

  L. A. CUMMINGS

  CHAPTER 1

  THE OCEAN

  The storm that surrounded Lwo was constant, as it had been when the land was first named. Some three hundred years prior, after uncontrolled water and fire and shaking had all but eradicated the old civilizations, the Lords, pulling from the remnants of destruction, had managed to gather thousands together. Those that had migrated to the northern tundra - where valleys, and mounts, and glaciers, and great rocks had somehow shifted to form the beginnings of a new landscape - found hope, but little else. The first Lwoans had spent a century building and cultivating, gathering all of the resources they could find from an ocean overrun with discard to acclimate to the new environment, to its creatures, its plantlife, and its crisp, wild air. And for another hundred years Lwoans progressed, and grew, albeit modestly, in number. But the force of the storm also grew.

  For over a generation the erratic, encircling winds, which flew over the ocean, and rolled over the mountains, pushing to the land’s farthest points, had increased so much in speed that all but a few civilians had been forced into Lwo’s growing city. There, shielded by the towering buildings that had been erected around the city’s perimeter, and by the failsafe of electromagnetic energy, they could be safe and secure. They would not have to wear helmets or dense bodysuits or armor, or tread earth in heavy boots to keep from being sucked into the sky, where so many leaves and grass and dry debris violently littered the intermittent view to the sun. No. These outfittings were the trappings of the watchers, those who from the land’s very founding had been tasked with keeping safe the sky, and the ground, and the mountains, and eventually the city .

  Watchers were accustomed to their burdens, and often, when not dreading an increased threat from the storm, were proud to bear them. From the beginning, in each generation, scores of men and women had trained, from their earliest days of adulthood, to navigate the wildness of nature. In Lwo’s early years, when the first watchers had trekked to uncharted places and first learned to navigate the unforgiving, unpredictable winds, many had died. But many had also lived. And so many more civilians had lived that watching came to be seen as the greatest calling, as military service had been in the old nations. And Fits, now more than ten years in as the commander of the Watchers of the Mountains, felt the weight of this calling, especially on days such as this.

  The ocean seemed especially wild. Its waves were cresting higher, and beating upon the shore much more than they had on his last salvage survey the week before. He continued to scan through the windshield of his hovering gull, looking for a sign of the Southern Hammer out in the distance, but still seeing nothing. It was not behind schedule, but he felt a strong desire for the ship to dock early. The station at the Southern Range was a mile behind him, too far to just run if the gull were somehow knocked out of its relatively stable position and he had to jump out. As he glanced down through the clear floor panels beneath his seat, he saw the fin on the underbody, unmoved as periodic blasts of water and rock fanned around it.

  He leaned his head back, and tilted his helmet upward off of his shoulders, feeling its weight as it settled in the rounded groove of the headrest. He took a deep breath of the cabin’s air, and with his eyes unaided by the helmet’s front panel, got another look at the ocean. Still nothing. Still no sign of the great, black ship. He shook his head, and looked down, past the control handle, to the center control panel. There was a readout of the gull’s near-zero acceleration, and its minimal elevation, and its relative position to the coast and the mountains behind it. In the top of the display, in a short line, the readout of wind speed - steady near one hundred twenty-five miles per hour - blinked in red text. A rock suddenly bounced off the windshield, ringing Fits's ears. He reached back, pulled his helmet up and back down, secured it into the rounded cradle surrounding his neck, and gripped the handle. A moment later, the helmet’s display of yellow text indicated his status inside the cabin, idle and unexposed to any winds.

  The ocean’s infinite, foamy crests continued to jump along in their unstable, familiar way, and in barrages , continued to rush in and hit the beach with forces that cast hard sand and tiny stones thirty yards back to where the gull sat idling over the ground. Finally, looking far out, and after whispering a command to magnify the view through the windshield, Fits saw the Southern Hammer, a dark, floating machine two miles off the coast, swaying in wild waves that rose up almost high enough to obscure it. It was a massive body of metal, formed by two buoys and a connecting deck. It was a wonder the salvage ships could navigate the ocean as they did, even with their heavy, plunging underfins.

  Fits tapped a button on the control panel to his right, and a set of free-roaming, encircled crosshairs blinked into the windshield. They followed his eyes, and focused on the ship. Its size, distance and speed popped into view below the crosshairs, followed by the more important measures of gravity and wind speed.

  “Contact,” Fits spoke softly. He heard his voice project out from his helmet, and then heard the gull’s system chirp in acknowledgement. “Salvage ship Southern Hammer.” Another chirp and a short beep followed. A click indicated the open line.

  “Commander Fits,” a loud, grizzly voice answered. “This is the Captain. How can I help you, Sir?”

  Fits could hear the commotion of loud voices and sea noise in the background. “It’s been two hours, Captain,” he answered. “My craft’s engines are getting tired, along with me. How close are you to getting that haul you were tracking?”

  “Well, it’s perfect timing, Sir. We’re closing the nets for the last time now. Should be to shore shortly.”

  “I’ll be waiting at your anchor spot. Fits out.”

  Fits felt his breath slowing, and in the bottom of his helmet’s display, saw his heart rate decrease two beats. His nose turned up at the unnecessary, automated readout, as he took hold of the control handle with both hands, moved his right foot to the wide pedal below it, and gently pressed down.

  The gull bounced up ten feet, and he guided her out to the tall, heavy boulder at the edge of the shore. He could almost feel the winds as they whipped around the craft’s body, and rumbled through the wind engines beneath the floorboard. Normally the carved stone vanes in the engines made little noise, even outside the mountains where the winds were their harshest. But today the storm required them to work much harder. It reminded Fits to check the status of his own wind-tech. With a quiet command, his helmet brought up a basic outline of the human form, and marked each piece of his tech - one at his back, one at the side of each shin, one on each side of his waist, one at each of his shoulders, and one encircling each of his forearms. Each piece had a green status, and no speed or outside forces. Fits dismissed the information from his view as he reached the anchor point.

  He guided the gull’s nose slightly past the front of the fifteen-foot boulder, and saw that the metal-rimmed hole inside of it was unobstructed. Looking back through the windshield, he saw that the ship was now less than one
hundred yards from the shoreline. It moved in another fifty yards, and stopped. Fits moved the gull slightly to the left, and waited. A moment later, the control panel sounded a low warning tone, and he watched as the ship’s cannon flickered, and a shining, metal spear shot out. It flew perfectly through the hole in the boulder, and its phalanges splayed out as it was yanked back against the stone. The sound of the sharp, heavy clank pushed even through the walls of the cabin. The boulder, and the others like it around the mainland’s shores, had withstood generations of such use, and somehow had not yet broken. If only every rock could take so much , he thought.

  The control panel sounded again, as the ship called to Fits. “Captain here, Sir,” the man said. “Ready when you are.”

  “On my way,” Fits answered.

  He pressed down on the pedal again, and guided the gull up another thirty feet, further from the relative safety of the ground, and flew out over the water. Beneath him, water from the ocean surface splashed against the clear panels below. He checked the steadiness of the fin between them, and then looked out at the edge of the ship’s deck. The hollow track for the fin’s placement illuminated in the center panel. He held firmly to the handle as he followed the bright line, and gently eased his foot pressure, decreasing power to the engines as the gull descended toward the deck. To his right, the ship’s port side buoy reached fifteen feet toward the sky, offering protection to the crew members who were outside its cabin. There were a handful of them, outfitted in bright, yellow suits that fit close to their bodies, and bearing harnesses that linked their metal safety lines to the supporting bars running along the yellow cabin wall. Their faces were obscured by helmets with tinted panels, but a few of them waved at him with gloved hands.

  As the gull finally touched the deck, Fits looked down past his heavy boots and saw the dark, ridged surface. Sparkling beads of water flowed in every direction. Outside, a crash of water from above rolled over the gull’s roof. He locked access to the craft’s controls, stood from the pilot’s seat, and walked to the port door. He tapped the small panel on the right, and watched as the cloudy, translucent door slid in, and then toward the gull’s aft end. As he stepped forward, he felt the tech around his body activate.

  As wind pushed through the engines on his boots and waist and arms and back, his helmet panel displayed the rapid fluctuations of speed, and relative distance to every nearby object. As he leapt out, and down to the deck, he felt his hard boot soles clank and grip, and felt the strongest streams of wind pulled through his back engine.

  “Stabilize,” he whispered.

  His engines hummed as their vanes adjusted, and he crouched for a moment, touching the metal deck through his gloves, feeling the air rush all around him. He could feel the eyes of the crewmen on him. As the air settled at a lower speed through each piece of his tech, he stood, and waved at the few crew members, who were all moving toward the aft end of the ship. Behind the ship’s cabin, he could see the outline of the two-yard high railings that surrounded the massive hauling area. Another crash of water passed over the roof of the gull, and hit his back. He stepped toward the closest of the five port doors to the cabin, the door that was also closest to the forward navigation end.

  The door swung open before he could knock, and he ducked, and hopped through. His tech quieted, and the readouts in his helmet began to slow, as he stepped out of a square puddle, and up one level, to where the captain stood at the center of the room, waiting and smiling with his helmet in his hand. He was a large man, wide and nearly as tall as Fits was, but with a thicker, graying beard. Fits heard the door close behind him as he approached.

  One crewman was sitting in a chair at the front end, his helmet resting on the floor beside him as he looked out through the wide window at the battered shoreline. A projection just before the window, glowing above a control board housing a row of blinking keys and four levers, revealed an electronic map of the coastline, along with a fluctuating readout of their anchor’s tension. Fits tilted his helmet up and back, and took a deep breath. He could smell the raw, distinct scent of the ocean, and of exhausted men, but after hours of recycled air, it was somehow refreshing. He removed one glove, and rubbed his short beard on both sides.

  “Commander Fits,” the captain said with a grin, extending his hand.

  Fits walked up to the man. “Captain,” he said with a nod.

  The man’s yellow suit was dingy, and bore water spots all over. His eyes looked tired, but happy. He nodded back, and swung one arm out toward the rear of the cabin, where a station with a view to the aft end sat unattended.

  Fits followed his lead, and walked. The rear station held two flat display screens at waist level, each of them angled up slightly toward the aft window. Through the window they could see that the cargo hatch had been fully opened. A container, a twenty foot cube formed by hardened netting in a frame of steel bars, was rising up between the hatch doors. There was a lone crewman stationed at each corner of the squared container, holding on to the surrounding railing, watching as the day’s haul was brought up for examination. Their metal safety cables whipped back and forth with each wind gust, but they were steady in boots that looked even heavier than a watcher's.

  When the container stopped moving it was only halfway up, but Fits could still see that it was full. There were all types of debris - metal bottles, ambiguous panels, sharp pieces, dull pieces, and even what he recognized as ancient electronics. A watcher’s training meant holding on to what you had learned about the old, outside world, and being able to recognize it. Fits had seen more of the old world than any watcher, and more than any watcher would want to see. And each week, each haul seemed bigger than the last.

  “Nice one today!” the captain said aloud. “Yes, Sir!” He pointed down to the screen in front of the watcher, and proudly raised a thumb before going to work on the control keys in front of his own.

  “I suppose you could say that,” Fits replied.

  “Boy, it seems like it never stops for us. No, Sir. I doubt the Roamer and the Maw are having this kind of luck on their ends. Their founders picked the wrong coasts.” The captain let out a hefty, but short laugh. “What do you think, Sir?”

  Fits sniffled once. “I long for the day when salvage ships are no longer needed.”

  There was no response, but Fits ignored the man’s silence. Instead, he focused on his screen, as bright, green lines ran along a rendered image of the container, showing the shapes of every piece, large and small, that had been hauled in. Near the bottom of the image he saw a blinking, red light, indicating heat, heat that could be biological. Large fish, some dangerous and some dying, were not uncommon in salvage hauls. They often found their way with ocean waste to the doors at the bottom of the containers. Fits would normally have let it go, would have simply let the captain release a small amount of the haul to free the creature, but then there was another red signal.

  “I see it, Sir,” said the captain, before Fits could call it out. He hit a button beneath his screen, and radioed out to the crewmen on the deck. “Lower that container. We got a couple of fishies in the middle.” Two of the crewmen waved back at him.

  Fits watched both screens as the container went down, eventually getting its bottom half back into the waters below. It was shallow near the coast, but there was still enough water for the haul to loosen and begin to float. The screens showed the large and small pieces moving about, as the tide pushed through and around the container. But the red lights remained. Fits watched for another two minutes. The crew looked back at the cabin. The lights remained.

  “Must wanna be eaten, these two,” the captain said, and then let out a full-bellied laugh. Behind him, his helmsman laughed along.

  “You know I can’t allow you to take them inland,” Fits said without looking at him.

  “Yes, Sir. Just a joke.”

  “Right. Raise the container, Captain. All the way.”

  “All the way!?” the captain yelped. “The sorters aren’t ev
en here yet. You go digging before they come and I could lose half of what we pulled.”

  Fits leaned away from the screens, and turned, and stared into the man’s eyes. “I’ve been doing this much longer than you have been a captain. Two signals in such proximity that will not descend means that two creatures are trapped. We have a balance to maintain with the ocean. Do you want to interfere with that balance?”

  The captain lowered his head, and grumbled, and then shook his head. “No, Sir.” He turned back to the station, and radioed out to the crew again. “Raise it up to deck level, set the posts, and prepare to open the gate.” The crew stared back through the window, all of them hesitant, and confused in their very demeanors. There was a short click at the panel as one of them attempted to respond, but the captain interrupted. “Now, men! Watcher’s orders!”

  The crew swiftly went to work. Fits watched as the container began to rise again. A few tense minutes later, the sides of the cube were fully exposed. Each of the crewmen retrieved long, metal bars, and in pairs, set each one at an angle, with one end hooked to a corner post of the cube, and the other attached at a hole in the deck. When all four bars were set, they waved back to the cabin. Fits put his gloves back on, and made sure both were secure. He reached back, and pulled his helmet up and back down over his head, and made sure it secured around his neck. Then he turned to the captain, who quickly donned his own helmet and gloves, and then led the way to the nearest port side door.

  The water and winds hit them both hard. As the captain secured a metal safety cable from his waist to one of the bars along the cabin wall, Fits felt the winds passing through all of his tech. He walked behind the captain, slowly at first, but then began moving in a steady stride, as each of his engines compensated for the various forces pushing through them.

  As they approached the container, Fits could feel the eyes of the crewmen. Their agitation seemed to push even through their bulky headgear. He quickly ordered his system to discard the blinking heat signatures that identified each of them. They were not ordinary Lwoans , after all, who might need saving from the high forces of the winds over the ocean. And they were not a threat, not a handful of sailors against a commanding watcher. The only threat was to the creatures who had somehow become ensnared in the resources necessary for creating comfort on Lwo. The only threat was to the system of life, however chaotic it was, that still lurked beneath the ocean’s surface.