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Falling Hope, Rising Threat
After an hour or so spent searching the crashed fragment of the Ark, all five of us were satisfied that we had retrieved the only survivors of the crash. We had discovered quite a few bodies near the damaged components of the Ark, but Peeta's initial assessment that there were only a few survivors had been correct.
The few survivors we'd discovered had been near the centre of the structure, which at least explained how they had survived the crash, but none of them had been in any condition to answer our questions about what had happened, most of them suffering from broken limbs and varying stages of shock. Once Peeta and I had taken them back to the hovercraft, Prim had sedated most of them to give her time to conduct a more thorough examination, confirming that they had all suffered from various concussions as well as assorted broken bones in the impact. Based on the location where we'd found Callie compared to the other casualties, I guessed that she had been lucky enough to be near to the centre of the satellite, and had subsequently been cushioned from the worst of the damage by virtually everything else around her.
After the rest of us had returned from conducting our assessment of the satellite, Prim and Finnick had carried out a few tests on our patients and confirmed that everyone we'd rescued would recover eventually. However, they would need at least a couple of weeks in a medical facility to get back to full health, leaving us with Callie as our best source for answers about what we were dealing with. If the hovercraft's communication system had allowed it, I would have tried to arrange for Steve to participate in this conference, but radios just seemed too impersonal and we didn't have a videophone installed yet, so I had decided to get some answers now and relay the situation to my mentor in person later. Having sent a brief message to Steve to explain what we'd discovered, along with assurances that I'd give him the full story when we rendezvoused at the Avengers compound, I set the hovercraft's autopilot to take us home before I turned around to look at Callie with the rest of my team.
"Right," I said, looking at the older woman while trying to present myself as in control of the situation; this might be the first time in almost two years that I was talking with someone who didn't know who I was and what I'd done, but I had introduced myself as an Avenger to someone who knew what that meant, and I was going to live up to those responsibilities. "We're on our way back to base, and the rest of your crew have been given what treatment we can provide right now; any chance you could fill us in on where you all actually came from?"
"OK," Callie said, looking around at the five of us, paying particular attention to Peeta now that he'd removed his helmet, before she smiled and laughed softly. "I'm sorry, it's just… I grew up reading stories about the original Avengers and thinking that Earth had been uninhabitable for almost a hundred years, and now…"
"Almost a hundred?" Johanna repeated, looking sceptically between Callie and me. "I thought the old guy said everything fell apart over two hundred years ago?"
"He said that the Avengers fell over two centuries ago, Bloodaxe," I corrected her. "We can't forget that it wasn't as simple as one big conflict that shattered what civilisation existed before and Panem rose from whatever was left over all at once; we're doing our best, but there hasn't exactly been enough historical material available for anyone to be sure what happened between then and now."
"Fair point," Finnick nodded.
"So… you're thinking that the war that was originally triggered by Snow started off the events that devastated what came before, and then there were various other conflicts that led to… us?" Peeta asked.
"Pretty much," I agreed, before I turned back to look at Callie. "Sorry about that, Miss Cartig; as you probably guessed, our history books have a few gaps we're still trying to fill in…"
"Don't worry about it; it's… fascinating," Callie said, smiling slightly at me before she adopted a more curious expression. "If you don't mind me asking… who's the 'old guy'?"
"The historian and tactical consultant of District Thirteen," I replied simply; Steve's history was his own secret to share, and I wasn't going to tell it before he was here to fill in the details himself. "You'll meet him later; in the meantime, please continue your story."
"Well," Callie explained, looking awkwardly around the room as she spoke, "the exact details of our history aren't entirely clear even now- a lot of people argue that some of the public stories were just edited to make them more 'kid-friendly'- but the end result is that, some time after the start of the last major war over a century ago, twelve major satellites in orbit around Earth were able to come together as a single vast space station in order to increase our chances of long-term survival. We were able to form a government and some kind of society and culture despite our limitations, and over the next few decades, we made… well, an existence up in space."
"You survived that long in space?" Prim said, looking at Callie in awe. "Wow…"
"Tell me about it; you people deserve points for not just going nuts for being stuck together for that long," Johanna mused with a slight smile.
"Unfortunately, it wasn't that simple," Callie explained, her expression becoming grimmer as she continued. "In the last few years, limited resources on the Ark have required us to… well, we've adopted more stringent measures of population control. Under our rules, families were only allowed to have one child at a time, and any breach of regulations resulted in those who broke the rules being… well, they were floated."
"Floated?" Prim repeated.
"We put them in the airlocks and… and then we opened the doors," Callie said.
The five of us could only stare at that statement.
"And that was for everything?" Prim asked, looking at Callie in shock. "If someone just… I don't know, took some food because they were so hungry-"
"No exceptions," Callie said firmly. "As I said, our resources were limited-"
"So you basically put all your criminals out into space for even minor infractions," Peeta said, staring grimly at the woman we'd just met.
"Only when they were over eighteen; children who broke the law were given a chance to appeal when they-" Callie began.
"And how many people actually got let off?" Johanna asked, glaring at the woman. "How do you justify that crap-?"
"Our life support systems were running out."
The simplicity of that statement was all that we needed to be sure that Callie wasn't lying to us.
"And by life support…" I began, taking a moment to be sure that I remembered everything Steve had told me about the conditions up in space. "You mean… the Ark was losing the ability to provide oxygen?"
"Exactly," Callie said grimly. "Jake Griffin, our chief engineer and the husband of a member of our ruling council, confirmed that the Ark's life support systems were starting to fail a few months ago, but at the time the discovery was covered up as it was believed that it would incite riots and mass panic when we didn't have any viable solution to the problem. He was floated before he could reveal that information to the general population, but the council knew that it was only a matter of time until we ran out; even our best estimates showed that it would take more oxygen than we had left to repair the system to the extent that it could continue to sustain us."
"A real catch-22, huh?" Finnick smiled.
"What?" Prim asked.
"It's a phrase from one of the old guy's books," Finnick explained, smiling at my sister. "It's meant to describe a situation where there's literally no way to get out of something; the example given was that a soldier couldn't avoid participating in a suicide mission by claiming that he was insane as only a crazy person would do something like that, and he couldn't get out of it by claiming to be stable as the leaders had a duty to send a stable mind into that kind of situation."
"Ah," Prim said.
"Not a bad analogy, anyway," Johanna noted before she looked back at Callie. "So you needed more oxygen to repair the system, but you couldn't get that oxygen in time; what did you do?"
"We took around a hundred juvenile prisoners from the detention centre and sent them all down to Earth in a small dropship," Callie said.
I blinked.
"Excuse me?" I said, voicing the thoughts of my fellow Avengers as I looked at Callie. "I thought you said that you believed Earth was uninhabitable?"
"We didn't have a choice," Callie said defensively. "With our limited resources, those children were probably going to die anyway once the time came to re-evaluate their sentence; at least this way we could give them a chance at life and increase our own oxygen reserves at the same time."
I decided not to respond to that comment. Personally, however they had justified it to themselves, it sounded to me like the Ark had just decided to kill two birds with one stone by getting rid of a group of children they'd practically judged and sentenced already, but getting into an argument wouldn't help us learn what had happened more recently.
"So… I'm guessing that the original dropship with those delinquents was the first impact we detected, a few months back, correct?" I asked, looking curiously at Callie.
"Probably," Callie confirmed. "A friend of mine sent down a mechanic in a small pod a few weeks later to help the kids establish radio contact with the Ark, but… well, they weren't in time to stop us culling over three hundred people from the remaining population."
"'Culling'?" Johanna, Finnick and Prim said simultaneously, Prim clearly horrified at the statement while my fellow Victors were glaring at Callie.
"You just killed three hundred people-?" Johanna began.
"They volunteered," Callie interjected, her tone grim as she looked around at us. "We were strapped for options and honestly thought that Earth wasn't survivable, so we posted an announcement about the situation so that people could make a choice about whether they would sacrifice themselves or not… it just took slightly too long for the children to get in touch with us in time."
"Bad equipment, huh?" Peeta said, shrugging to try and lighten the awkward mood when faced with Callie's evident grief at the memory.
"To say the least," Callie said solemnly, before she continued. "As it turned out, there was a native tribe living in the area where the dropship had landed; the kids had taken to calling this tribe 'Grounders', and had already had a couple of close calls with them before we made contact. Doctor Griffin was able to offer some advice on treating some injuries that they'd sustained in their earlier encounters, but when we were planning how to get down…"
"Problems arose?" Finnick asked, looking grimly at our new acquaintance.
"To say the least," Callie said grimly. "To cut a long story short, Diana Sydney, one of the councillors, had spent some time representing herself as a voice of our 'working class' so that she and her followers could take control of our remaining dropships, leaving the rest of us to die-"
"How many could you have saved?" I interrupted.
"All our dropships together could only save around a quarter of the remaining population of the Ark," Callie clarified grimly, before she sighed in frustration. "And the damn coup didn't even work; Sydney's forces got control of the dropship, but it wasn't properly disconnected from the Ark before it was launched, and as a result, not only did it crash-land, but the Ark's remaining power supply took serious damage."
"Let me guess," Johanna said grimly. "You lost every last dropship and life support was now completely screwed?"
"That's almost being generous," Callie acknowledged. "We were down to around half the population we'd had when we sent down the first dropship, but with all our resources exhausted and life support on its last dregs of power… the only way down now was to use the Ark itself and hope we'd survive."
"How?" Peeta asked, the nurtured engineer in him curious about the science of Callie's story despite our knowledge of the personal costs.
"Chancellor Thelonius Jaha realised that it could be possible for us to land by using the Ark itself as a dropship," Callie explained. "As I said, the Ark was originally composed of twelve different satellites that came together to increase our chances of survival; Chancellor Jaha concluded that we could reactivate the old thrusters and push the Ark back into Earth's atmosphere while we used the various satellites to land once again."
"Bit of a risky manoeuvre, surely?" Finnick asked. "I mean, I doubt those things were designed to land…"
"We knew when we started the procedure that only a few of us would actually make it to the ground," Callie said grimly. "Hell, I was already fairly sure that my allocated section was one of the ones that would just crash and burn… but I had to stay hidden for various reasons."
"You were hiding?" Finnick asked. "Why?"
"I was a close friend of Doctor Abigail Griffin, Jake Griffin's wife," Callie explained. "After her daughter was one of the children sent to the ground in the initial dropship, we realised that some of the council were more interested in keeping humanity alive even if it meant having to sacrifice hundreds of people without giving them a choice, so… well, the man I was involved with at the time was one of the main proponents of that plan…"
"So you thought it was best to drop out and work out what to do in private," I said, looking thoughtfully at our new acquaintance for a moment before I shrugged. "Well, I've tried to do that myself once or twice; we all make poor decisions sometimes."
Callie nodded at me in grateful understanding, before she sighed and looked around the hovercraft at the rest of us.
"Well, that's my story," she said. "We spent almost a century in space trying to survive and prepare for our return to Earth, but it cost us most of our people just to make sure that anyone managed to get down, and we started a war with the first people we met…"
"Talking of that war… seriously, how could we not have known about any of this?" Peeta asked, looking at the rest of the team in shock. "I mean, we've been active for months… and all this was going on just a short distance from us?"
"We never looked at the east coast," Johanna said, her tone bitter as she looked over at the armoured Avenger. "We've been too busy rebuilding Panem for the last few months, and Snow probably figured it wasn't worth looking around here because he was certain everyone was dead…"
"It would fit," I noted, nodding in acknowledgement of Johanna's assessment. "Steve told me once that the east coast was the location of two of the most major cities in America when the wars began; Snow would have made it his priority to bomb an area like that, or at least make sure that they were destroyed, before he made his own move."
"Snow?" Callie asked.
"The adversary that brought us together," I clarified, looking back at her with a grim stare. "He was a superhuman psychopath who thought he had the right to take control of the planet because of what had been done to him in the past, and had spent most of the last century posing as a discreet ruling family; once we learned the truth, we managed to destroy him in our debut battle."
"Ah," Callie said, before she looked at me more curiously. "You haven't been a team that long?"
"We're good, but we've only been in action for a few months," Peeta said, looking solemnly at Callie. "If you'd like, I can fill you in on what's been happening on Earth from our perspective?"
As Callie nodded in agreement, I turned back to the hovercraft controls while Peeta walked over to a corner of the room to explain Earth's history to Callie.
I wasn't worried that he'd reveal anything he shouldn't to her- Peeta might have been the last of the 'field team' to be recruited, but I knew that Peeta understood the value of the Avengers better than Finnick or Johanna- but I had to wonder how Callie would react to our own perspective on what Earth had become since the creation of the Ark…
AN: To those fans of 'The 100', hope you didn't mind the info-dump, and I can assure you that we will be returning to some of the more familiar characters in the next chapter or two if all goes according to plan…