jeriendhal | Final Resting Place

From an attempt to write a short story for an upcoming collection, that unfortunately didn't go much further than this.

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"Are you sure about this one, Veg?" I asked. Virginia glared at me from across the planning table, the topography map of the Northeast Remains laid out between us, yellowed printouts from the Archive, the old ink barely legible, laid like oversized playing cards on top it. Outside, through the open window, I could hear oxen braying as their teamsters urged them forward, drawing plows to dig out the canal leading to New Ellicott. Progress, and it would help the community grow, though it wouldn't be finished in my lifetime. Fifty miles is a long way to dig without Old World tools, even with Hopetown's resources.

"I'm sure, Mike," she replied, running her hand through the tight curls of her closely cropped black hair. Veg looked harried, as if she hadn't been sleeping much. I couldn't blame her, if the find was as good as she claimed.

"You were sure about the Columbia dig," I pointed out. "Eight months and about a thousand coin we put into that one, and in the end all we found was scrap and rust. The Reclamation Council wasn't happy about that. More to the point, they weren't happy with me."

"I'm sure about this one, Mike," Veg said feverently. "I'm sure. I think it's a shelter. Maybe the Shelter."

"Bull," I replied.

Instead of arguing, she stepped over to the windows and latched them shut, blocking out the noise from the street, and our voices from prying ears. Everybody wanted a lead on new reclamation projects. Sure you could wildcat on your own, and maybe get lucky. Only places like Hopetown or New Ellicott's reclamation councils had the resources to maintain decent Archives, so they could search scientifically and methodically for Old World artifacts that might prove useful in rebuilding tech that was lost in the Impact. "It's the Shelter," Veg insisted. "The one the Old World government built to try and preserve what they could, what they thought mattered." She pointed to the printouts on the table.

"The Shelter is a myth. Yeah, every few years someone finds some old canister where people tried to hide and survive, but most of those are out West, and they don't often have anything that's useful."

She pointed to the printouts on the table. "It's not a myth. These are work orders, supply lists. Most of it is mundane, what you'd expect for any building site. Concrete, rebar, steel, and so on. But then there's this." She picked up the delicate paper with a hand protected with a cotton glove, holding it up for me to read.

"'RTG, 10 kwh" I read, then shook my head. "It's just an acronym, Veg. There are hundreds of these from Old World papers, but without context it could be anything."

"I've got context!" she said triumphantly. Veg opened her pack lying on the floor, pulling out a large, relatively thick, Old World book. The kind called that were referred to as Coffee Table books, though how you could use one as a table was beyond me. Cosmos read the cover. She opened it carefully, turning to a particular set of pages. A spindly Old World machine, which I recognized as one of the spacecraft that used to fly above the sky, was diagrammed on one page. I squinted down at it, reading the labels carefully. Then I spotted what she wanted me to see. "RTG - Radio Thermal Generator," I read. I blinked. ""Generator'. Wait, a power source?"

She nodded. "Used to power the machines that flew above the sky, when they went too far for the sun panels to work. Some of them could work for decades. Possibly long enough for the Shelter inhabitants, if there were any, to ride out the Impact. But if it wasn't inhabited, then it might have been used to maintain an environment that would preserve whatever was inside for even longer, maybe even until now."

I was starting to see why she'd closed the windows even on this hot day. If this was real, if the Shelter was real, it could a prize bigger than even the Archive. "It's good, Veg. Tempting enough to pry more resources from the Council, I'll admit, but it's useless without a location."

"It's here," she said, pointing to the topographic map. "The work order included military coordinates. It's all… right… here…"