The Forgotten Prince Page 8

  She flipped a switch on the side of the metallic casing. Nothing happened. She frowned, cocked her head to the side, then glanced up at John and Tim, like she expected them to know what was wrong.

  After a moment her eyes widened and she clapped her hands together. “Oh, yeah!”

  Without explanation she turned and disappeared through a small door behind her.

  John’s eyebrows went up, and he glanced at Tim with a questioning smirk.

  Tim shrugged. “What can I say, she’s particular.”

  “I heard that,” Bella called back. She appeared a second later, carrying a small cluster of wire. She tossed it down on the table, and opened the side of the device.

  “Michael’s damn lucky this one’s about done, or he’d be out of luck.”

  She set the panel aside and began installing the wire.

  John gazed around the workshop. “You’ve got a pretty nice setup here.”

  It reminded him of the Lincoln’s machine shop. He’d only been inside the shop twice, and after the second time, he’d been told under no uncertain terms was he allowed to enter the space again. The Union’s engineers were a finicky bunch; he guessed Bella would fit right in with them.

  “Thanks.” She grinned. “It’s taken me years to collect all this stuff. This is the only place I’ve been able to have it all unpacked and out.”

  She finished installing the wire and replaced the panel. “Just need to make a few last minute adjustments and this’ll be good to go.”

  Tim carefully moved a box of parts from a stool in the corner of the room and sat. “Yeah, who are you going to get to test it?”

  She glared at him. “What are you trying to say?”

  “Nothing, nothing at all. I’m sure it’s fine.”

  “Well, dummy, it is fine and,” she pointed the screwdriver at him, “I’ll test it myself, since you’re too much of a pansy to.”

  “Hey, I’m not a pansy. I just like having all my body parts connected.”

  John stepped up to the table and pointed as Bella pulled the unit’s back plate off. “So, tell me, how does this thing work?”

  Bella’s face lit up. Behind him Tim swore and said, “Oh, great, now we’ll be here all day.”

  “Hey, at least someone appreciates my work,” she told him, then smiled at John.

  “It’s fairly simple, actually. The main unit here,” she tapped the box, “generates a field that changes gravity around the wearer and based on how the wearer moves their body, shifts gravity around them, allowing them to move around like they are weightless. I based it on some Old Tech we found back when we first started fighting. ‘Course it took me a while to make it work.”

  Tim chuckled. “Yeah, and few broken bones.”

  Bella shushed him. “All scientific advancements comes at a price. And it healed up nicely, thank you very much. Doc does good work.”

  She waved her arm around, emphasizing her point.

  “So, you all have been together for a while then?” John asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Bella said. “Since the War. Actually, Wendy started putting us together before Hook took over everything and we were some of the first to take up the fight against him.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Let’s see,” she counted on her fingers. “Wendy, Maggs, Pan, Tom, Tim, me, and Marb. They found the Doc right before Hook managed to take power. He was pretty messed up when we found him.”

  “Irving?”

  Bella nodded. “Yeah, he doesn’t look it, but Doc is one tough guy. He’d been shot twice and was beat up pretty bad. He was in a coma for a week, and when he woke up, he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten that way. He was pretty lucky. Once Hook decides you’re not worth keeping around, death is usually a given.”

  “Wait,” John held up a hand. “You’re saying Irving worked for Hook during the war?”

  “Yep, took Wendy almost a year to trust the guy. We never did find out why Hook tried to kill him. Then again, that psycho doesn’t function on the same level as the rest of us, so I guess he really didn’t need a reason.”

  “It’s a good thing too,” Tim said. “I’m sure a lot of us wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Doc.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It was just a broken arm, stupid. It wasn’t anywhere near life-threatening.”

  John crossed his arms. “So, why all the fighting? What started the war?”

  “The only thing worth fighting for in this world,” Tim said, “Dust.”

  “So, what, it’s like a drug or something?”

  “No, it’s not like a drug, it’s the drug.”

  John sighed.

  This twenty questions stuff is really getting old, he thought, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

  “That really doesn’t tell me anything. People fight over all kinds of drugs back home. Hell, they fight over just about anything to be honest.”

  Tim frowned slightly, rubbing his chin. “Hmmm, how do I explain this?”

  He chewed on his lower lip for a moment, then continued, “The dust is everything here; it’s in the food you eat, the water you drink, even the air you breathe. Everyone here is touched by it.”

  John rubbed his jaw. “Well, great, that tells me everything I needed to know, thanks.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Look, I don’t know all the technical stuff. Michael can explain it a lot better than I can.”

  Tim paused again, then said, “What we call Dust is actually a mineral found in the rings around the planet. The mineral filters through the atmosphere and is absorbed by everything on the surface. Course, it took years to figure this out. The First Ones didn’t start experiencing the effects until they’d been here a few years.”

  “First Ones?”

  “Sorry,” Tim waved a hand through the air. “The First Ones were brought here from your world; from Earth. No one really knows how many there were, but the consensus now-a-days is a few thousand. Maybe even tens of thousands. Not that it really matters much anymore.”

  John almost knew what the man was going to say before he even asked the question, and he already didn’t believe him. “What do you mean, brought here, brought here by who? Why?”

  “As to the why, who can say? As to the who, well, no one knows what their true name was, but our name for them is the Graft. Some say they brought us here to experiment on us, others say bringing us here was the experiment. I think they were planning on invading Earth and wanted a place where they could study us before launching their attack. But, like I said, no one really knows.”

  “Maybe they just wanted to be friends,” Bella said with a hint of sarcasm.

  Hundreds of thoughts raced through John’s mind: UFOs, abductions, Roswell, little green men. His mind started making connections to several unbelievable events; things that didn’t make any sense to him back home, but if what Tim said was true, they made perfect sense now.

  “So, what happened to them?”

  “Also a mystery,” Tim answered with an apologetic frown. “They left. Abandoned everything overnight. They’d spent years building up the city and infrastructure. Hell, practically a whole other civilization for all their human subjects. Then one day they just up and vanished. Didn’t even bother turning off the lights.”

  “And what? Life just went on? Why didn’t people just go home?”

  “The Wars. Fighting over the control of the Terminus, not to mention the Dust. If you can control those two things you can control the world.”

  “Wait, I’m confused. If the Dust is so good for humans, then why does everyone call it a drug? Those Dusters we ran into didn’t look healthy at all.”

  “Yeah, well, what can I say? For every good thing, someone can find a way to pervert it. Cut with the right ingredients, the mineral produces a drug that basically allows people to live their dreams. The drug produces almost life-like hallucinations; it brings the images straight from the person’s subconscious.

  “In its basic mineral form, dust is harmless. In fact, it
boosts immune systems and somehow drastically slows the aging process. Compress it enough, it becomes an injectable solution and targets the pleasure centers of the brain and produces a kind of euphoric state.”

  “Let me guess,” John said, already knowing. “There’s a catch.”

  “There’s always a catch. Like anything, the more you use, the more it takes to find the good high again. After a while, coming down out of your self-induced paradise leads you straight into hell. I hear it’s pretty painful. Not to mention the light-blindness.”

  John’s eyebrows went up. “The goggles?”

  Tim nodded. “Causes ultra-sensitivity to light. Most Dusters don’t leave their Enclaves until dark and even then they don’t like to travel too far away from home. Hell, I’m surprised they’re able to walk around at all, with all the shit they take and it’s damn hard to get off. You have to bring them off slow. Most cases take a few years. Some, well, some get stuck on a medicine drip and never come off it.”

  “So that’s why Michael didn’t want Doc’s meds? Because of the Dust?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly the same thing, but Michael doesn’t make distinctions between good and bad uses, he’s against any using.”

  A familiar voice startled them. “It’s a hell of a thing not to trust yourself or the people around you.”

  They turned to face Tom, leaning against the doorframe in the entrance to the workshop; arms crossed over his chest.

  Tim shook his head. “You know, sometimes, brother, you really say some dumb shit.”

  “All the time,” Bella added.

  Wendy appeared next to Tom in the doorway, and an uncomfortable silence fell over the room. John thought he could cut the tension in the air with a knife. She stepped past Tom and into the workshop, never taking her eyes off him.

  John let out a sigh and took a step toward her. “Look, I’m sorry about before, I didn’t know. I didn’t mean anything by what I said.”

  Wendy shot Tim an angry glance. He immediately threw up his hands defensively. “Hey, whoa, now, I—”

  She ignored him and turned back to John. “You mentioned a name before, how do you know that name? How do you know about us?”

  “You mean P—”

  Tim coughed loudly into his fist. “Nothing.”

  John glanced at Tim, whose face seemed to say, please don’t, then shifted his gaze back to Wendy. He tried hard not to focus on the long scar that ran down her face, again thinking the innocence of the story he knew didn’t do this place any justice. He knew telling this woman her story was nothing more than a fairy tale wouldn’t go over well.

  In the end, he simply laid it out as accurately as he could. He told her the story he knew as Peter Pan, trying his best not to mention Pan by name. He stuttered once or twice, and even once let it slip completely. Wendy’s stern expression never wavered.

  He told her about the Portal opening up in front of him and how he had been pulled through and just how thankful he was that Michael and Tom had found him and helped.

  When he finished, the tense silence returned and everyone waited to see how Wendy would respond. She stood silent, staring at nothing, almost like she was in a trance.

  Finally, she said, “I don’t know that I trust you, Mr. McNeal, but at the same time, I can’t dismiss everything you say as false. I can’t fault Michael for bringing you back here either. We have rules, and whether I like it or not, those rules have served us well over the years. I’m not about to discount them.”

  She pointed to the pulser strapped to his leg. “I assume you’re skilled in firearms and combat?”

  “I can fight, yes. My expertise is flying, but we are required to maintain proficiencies in small arms.”

  “You can fly?” Tim asked, obviously intrigued.

  “Oh, geez, not another one,” Bella moaned, rolling her eyes.

  “I’m a fighter pilot back home,” John said.

  If Wendy was impressed, she didn’t show it. “There is a lot that I don’t understand about this, but I have talked it over with Michael and we both agree that the best way to handle this situation is to keep you here. So, for now, I’m going to put you under the supervision of Tim, here. You will report directly to me, and until you prove different, I am prepared to trust that everything you have said so far is true. Please don’t make me regret that decision.”

  John had a feeling he’d just been drafted. He’d been pulled away from one war to be dropped into another. The only difference was this war seemed like a personal one. Whereas, the one he’d left had been political. He felt no real connection to either; back home he was only a number, and here, well, he wasn’t really sure where he fit in.

  There was so little that he knew about this world, and most of what he did know, he didn’t understand. But he did know people and even after only being around them for a short time, he knew couldn’t just stand by and watch them struggle.

  “Thanks,” John said, finally. “I’m not sure what all I can bring to the table, but I’ll do what I can.”

  Wendy opened her mouth to answer, but a beeping interrupted her. She frowned and snatched the small com from her belt. “What is it?”

  She cocked her head and she put a finger to her ear.

  A second later, she said, “Okay, we’ll meet you at Harry’s in five.”

  She clipped the small unit on her belt and turned back to John. “Don’t thank me yet,” she warned. “This isn’t a game, and if you decide to stay, I accept no less out of you than I do out of any of these people here right now. War is coming to Neverland, Mr. McNeal, and our fight is going to be a long a bloody one. Don’t make me regret it.”

  “I won’t.”

  Tim lifted his chin toward Wendy. “What’s up?”

  “Carter’s back,” she answered, then turned and left the workshop.

  ELEVEN

  Harry’s, John found, was a dimly lit room packed full with display screens and input consoles. Every screen displayed different information, from video feeds to scrolling lines of unreadable data and status. A constant hum reverberated around them. The amount of raw computer power displayed had to rival the command and control center of John’s old ship, the Lincoln.

  As with everything else John had seen in the hideout, everything looked pieced together and temporary. Cables were spliced together, computer casings were patched and pieced together with what whatever they could get their hands on.

  Thick bundles of cables snaked through and around stacks of computer equipment, all arranged around a raised platform in the center of the room. Recessed lighting in the ceiling shone down on two men standing with their backs to the entrance, both of whom were oblivious to the new arrivals. One sat in a chair, the other leaned over his shoulder shaking his head.

  “No, no, no, Carter, it doesn’t work like that,” the standing one said. “You’ve got to wait for the link to sync up.”

  The man sitting in the chair threw his arms into the air. “This antique piece of shit is worthless.”

  “It’s not,” the other man argued. “You’ve just got to have little more patience.”

  Wendy approached the platform and crossed her arms. “Harry.”

  “There see,” the man standing pointed at the terminal in front of them and slapped the other. “I told you. Just a little patience is all you need.”

  Wendy tried again, this time a little more forceful. “Harry.”

  Both men turned. The one Wendy had addressed as Harry straightened and smiled. “Oh, hey, Wendy.”

  Something rattled across the floor, and Tim cursed. “Geez, Harry, would it kill you to pick up every once and a while?”

  Harry, a tall, gangly man, waved his arms around and rocked his head back and forth. Shoulder length, auburn hair flapped around wildly. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a few days. “Oh, right, sorry about that, I’ve only been keeping the damn Regency bugs out of the system for three straight days, let me tell them to hold on a minute while I tidy up.”
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br />   Bella whistled and pinched her nose. “Geez, Harry, when’s the last time you washed?”

  The man stomped off the platform. “You know, I don’t get any respect around here.”

  He waved a finger at the siblings. “Some of us don’t get the luxury of just sitting around waiting to be told what to do, you know. Some of us have to be proactive.”

  Bella opened her mouth to protest, and Wendy held up a hand.

  “Later,” Wendy said. “What do you have?”

  The man sitting in front of Harry turned in the chair. He opened his mouth, as though he was about to say something, only to shut it again when he noticed John. He frowned and nodded. “Uh.”

  Wendy waved a dismissive had. “He’s fine, Carter. What is it?”

  Carter raised an eyebrow, hesitated for a second, then said, “Okay, well, you’re not going to believe this.”

  He turned back to the computer terminal and continued working. Every now and then, Harry would correct him and point to something on the display. After a few seconds, the four screens in front of them blinked to life, forming a single image.

  A massive cityscape sprawled out along the coast for miles. Tall skyscrapers reached into the clouds in tight clusters, covered in marker lights and colorful signs. The scene reminded him of Las Vegas, only several times larger.

  Countless landing pads extended at all angles from the tall modern structures. Flying craft of all shapes and sizes filled the sky in not-so-orderly flight lines through the city; a very different environment from the one he’d experienced so far. Everything looked clean and much more advanced than anything he’d seen so far. Which begged the question, why did most of their equipment look so old and patched?

  After a few seconds of watching the feed in silence, Wendy said, “Okay, so what are we looking at?”

  “Give it a second,” Carter said, then pointed to the right side of the screen. “There.”

  They all watched as several ships flew into view, there must have been a hundred of them, from small skiffs to large frigates. It was hard to judge the scale, but John guessed several of them were five or six times the size of the skiff he’d flown in earlier. As the swarm of the ships flew over the city, several dropped out of the loose formation and descended into in the city below.