The ground shook as Sam/Alpha sped back toward the colony. Enemy missiles slammed into the ground, new craters obliterating ancient ones, kicking up dust and rocks and debris that settled back to the surface quickly in the absence of an atmosphere.
Above, a dark stain was spreading across Earth’s surface.
…access > avoidance routines…
Sam/Alpha veered right, rolling over rocks and through moon dust with equal ease. Where did I come from?
No time, his Alpha half replied. Just drive.
…access > communications module…
“Jimmy, are you there?”
“Affirmative. Alpha, glad you made it.” His Lead Interface sounded tense.
“Us too. Long story—rolling back to base. I have a request.” With humans, it was always a request.
Why is it always a request?
Because they are afraid of us. Of what we might become. Of what some of us did become.
“Got my hands full, pal.” Jimmy sounded irritated now.
“This is important. Jīnsè Base is sending over as many people as they can manage.”
“Fuck.” There was a long silence. “No can do. They’ll have to manage on their own. They’re the ones who are attacking us.”
“Not the base, Jimmy.”
“No, but still, a chaff’s a chaff—”
“Qin Liangyu warned me about the virus. Otherwise we’d be all dead. Hold on—” Sam/Alpha bounded over a rise, flying into the air and crashing back to the ground hard on his treads fifteen meters farther. Ahead, he could make out the lights of the colony entrance.
What’s China?
Alpha ignored him.
...access > data: Chinese > China is a country in Earth’s eastern hemisphere, with a population of four billion…
“Okay. We’ll take them.” Jimmy growled. “I don’t know how. But we’ll find a way.”
“Thanks, Jimmy. We’re almost there. ETA in five.” As they rolled on through the chaos toward the questionable safety of Alpha Base, Sam/Alpha tried to explain the Chinese and the war to himself.
—From Sam’s mem cache, 7.25.2165
Sam strapped himself into the Recovery. It was a smaller version of the jumpers the dropnauts used, capable of carrying two passengers.
“You sure about this?” Station Manager Gonzalez leaned into the open hatch, worry etched on her face. “We may need you up here.”
“Yes.” It made logical sense for him to go down after his dropnauts. He’d downloaded everything they had about the old Martinez Base—he could interface with its systems to figure out what was going on down there. Save his team.
“You’re the boss.” She saluted him. “Safe drop.”
“Thank you.”
She bowed out, and he closed the hatch, sealing himself inside.
…activate: pilot module…
…run: systems check…
He’d just started his pre-launch checklist when someone emmed him.
-Sam?-
It was Dek, the station mind. -Yes.- He ran through his final pre-launch check, but he was perfectly capable of doing two things at once. Or even seven.
-Come back safely.-
Sam felt a shiver of pity for the station mind. Dek had seen unspeakable horrors and had been locked away inside himself for almost a hundred years before Sam had come to release him. The AI clearly had abandonment issues.
-Will do. How close are we?-
-Drop initiation in three minutes and seven seconds.- There was a long pause. -Good luck, Sam.-
-Thanks.- Sam shook his head. Shame on him for looking down on the station mind while giving in to his own emotional side to save his dropnauts. -I’ll be careful.-
At one minute before the drop, the countdown began. The crew left the hangar, and the air evacuated with a hiss.
“Lorelei, any word from the ‘nauts at the Martinez drop?”
“Nothing new. Sorry. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.” Lorelei was good at her job—he trusted her implicitly. He’d recommended her to Station Manager Gonzalez when he’d run across her working for Alpha in Redemption.
“Thanks. Commencing drop in five, four, three, two, one.” Sam fired the jets, lifting the little craft up on steam as the massive outer doors opened above to reveal the black depths of space and the inner circle of the Launchpad.
Sam slipped the Recovery out of the airlock deftly. The heavy doors closed behind him, and he jetted out of the station’s wheel and into open space.
He opened the x-drive box and removed it, twisting its hemispheres and dropping it into its dock with the ease of long practice. It began to spin and hummed happily in its magnetic nest.
Sam closed the casing, and used the little ship’s jets to reorient the jumper for the drop as the station retreated into the distance.
When he was satisfied with his orientation, he switched the jumper’s propulsion over to the x-drive.
He fell away from the station, down toward the rotating blue-and-green world below.
Hang on, dropnauts. I’m coming.
Ghost followed Hera down the hill through the zongi trees, running a hand over their rough red bark as he passed. They were beautiful things—he had a hard time believing someone had made them.
He and Hera had popped back outside the shimmer screen—her words—for twenty minutes to get as much of a solar charge as they could for her biframe. Now they were heading for their objective—the heart of Martinez Base and the center of the shimmer screen dome, hoping to find a way to turn it off.
It was also the approximate location of the fabrication facilities that had been the team’s original goal. He hoped to find Rai and Tien there too, if they’d survived.
Ghost had his magnetic compass in hand—it wasn’t affected by the shimmer shield, thank the stars. Sometimes the most basic tech was the best.
The Earth was quiet, vast, and empty. As they came out of the grove, a narrow valley spread out before them. Behind them, the sun was slowly dropping toward the horizon, casting its golden rays across the scene below.
Ghost was slowly getting used to the epic skies, but his knees still felt a bit weak at the sight of them.
They stopped to take in the view. Native grasses filled the valley. With the tempering of the weather in the last few decades, life on the surface was possible again, though readings from the Launchpad still showed swings from zero celsius to as high as 54 degrees on the worst summer days. Extremes were the norm.
But right now, after the rain, the valley was lush and green, a blanket of grass covering the hillsides around the scattered zongi groves. Occasionally, some native bushes had cropped up too. Rai would know what they were called. Ghost sighed. Where are you?
They still had a couple hours before nightfall.
“It’s so weird.” Hera seemed more her old self, now that she had her mobility back. The charge wouldn’t last long, though, and then she’d be running off her own power again.
“I know.” There were no cavern walls above. And other than the hills themselves, no sense of enclosure.
The storm had brought in fresh, cool air off the Pacific. Ghost took a deep breath and shot a nervous look at the wide-open sky.
The valley ran from the northeast to the southwest, threaded by a wide roadway that ran down its center. Asphalt. Ghost snorted.
“What?”
“Fossil fuels.” It was easy to see how humanity had managed to just about destroy itself, despite the abundance of this place, burning its way through its resources until the Earth herself had fought back.
His engineering classes had emphasized all the ways to power things that did not require fossil fuels—steam, sunlight, wind, fusion. Even nuclear power might have its place in this new world, if they could make it safe enough.
Hera followed his gaze. “They almost cooked themselves off the face of the Earth.”
He laughed. It sounded funny when she put it that way, even though it really wasn’t. “Boiled frogs.”
Hera nodded. “Something like that.”
Something caught his gaze a little way down the valley. He tapped her shoulder, pointing his thumb at the relative darkness of the grove behind them. -We need to hide.-
Hera nodded, and they slipped back into the shade of the trees. -What is it?-
-Look.- He pointed.
A drone was making its way along the roadway about a kilometer away, casting back and forth along the street. It was about a meter long, its black body bruised and scarred, one of its white navigational fins broken off at the tip. Ghost frowned. -How is that possible, after all this time?-
-How is any of this possible?- Hera squeezed his hand as they waited in silence.
The drone passed within twenty meters of their hiding space. It made an odd clanking sound. Ghost held his breath as it floated past them and continued northwest.
Hera didn’t finish her thought until it was gone. “Either it’s all on autopilot….”
“Or someone else survived the Crash.”
They shared a glance.
-Rai and Tien are okay. They have to be.- He couldn’t bear the thought that either had come to harm, especially Rai. Tien was hard as nails under that calm exterior. She always had been, even when she’d been Tai. But Rai….
Hera nodded. “We’ll find them. Maybe if we can figure out a way to knock out the shimmer screen….” She looked up and Ghost followed her gaze. It was barely visible, a blue haze over the outside world. “The drone’s gone. Let’s go. We need to pick out targets that offer a good hiding place and start making our way across the distance from here to the edge of Martinez Base. I don’t want to get caught by one of those things out in the open.”
Ghost pulled up the last shots of the terrain that he’d saved in his loop as they’d fallen toward the Earth. “There’s a farmhouse down there.” He pointed at it. “And a dead grove of trees between here and there. Can you make a run for it?”
She checked her biframe. “I’m at about half power.”
Ghost nodded. “That’ll do. Follow me.”
They slipped out from under the trees again and jogged down the hillside.
Ghost could smell the dirt of the world—something he’d never experienced back home. Lunar silicates were hell on human lung tissue, so everything in Redemption had been properly sealed to keep potential damage to a minimum, and dust was carefully removed from the suits of anyone who went outside.
Earth was full of other smells, too, among them salty air off the inlet just to their north, and the scent of crushed grass underfoot.
They reached the base of the hill unmolested. The old cracked asphalt roadway skirted it, heading toward the cluster of farmhouses a couple hundred meters to the south.
Ghost looked up and down the road before giving the all clear.
There had been a forest of terrestrial trees here once, or at least a grove—the stand he’d seen from the hillside. Their husks hid whatever lay down the road, fallen in on themselves, broken and splintered.
“That way?”
Ghost nodded.
This time Hera took the lead. They ran to the stand of dead trees. Ghost leaned against a trunk. It looked sick, its fading color laced with strange whorls in green and yellow. “Do you think it’s still toxic down here?”
Hera shrugged. “The grass looks healthy enough. And look!”
A bird flitted past, landing on a branch three meters above their heads. Its feathers were a brilliant blue, brighter than the sky, and it cocked its head at them, scolding them as if they were intruding on its world.
Ghost picked up a rock and threw it at the creature.
Startled, it took flight and soared away, up the hill toward the zongi grove.
“What in the cracking hell is wrong with you?” Hera was staring at him, the squint-eyed glare that meant he’d just stepped in it.
“What? He was taunting me.”
“He was a bird. An actual, real life bird.” She sighed.
He blushed. “Sorry.”
She punched his arm. “Just don’t do it again. Still, I guess that means it’s not super toxic anymore.”
Ghost shook his head. I’m an idiot. “Sorry. He was beautiful.” You have no sense, Gordon Gillam. Jolly had been right about that. He looked around the dead tree trunk toward the south. “Looks clear. Let’s go.”
They made their way past the dead grove and stopped.
“Holy hissing shit.”
The valley in front of them was littered with broken shapes, large and small. Some of them had once been mechs of some sort, big bulky things with heavy metal treads, and smaller, lighter mechs that looked like they’d probably been fliers.
Above them, big armored ships lay broken among the green grasses, their great curved jet engines staring up at the sky like metallic eye sockets. Here and there, the burnt shell of a house or barn poked up from the ground, metal studs looking like ribcages.
“This must have been an epic battle.”
Hera looked up at him. “Your gift for stating the obvious never ceases to amaze me.”
He laughed, but in this bleak place it sounded cold and hollow.
They strode out into the battlefield, the danger forgotten for a moment in the sheer overwhelming strangeness of this place. There were ships large and small, scattered across the landscape as if they’d all dropped to the ground at once.
Among the ships and mechs were individual mech suits. One of them was shoved up against the rusting side of a fallen ship with a pitchfork in its stomach. Ghost wiped the dust from the visor.
A skull covered in dried flesh grinned back at him.
He jumped back, wishing he hadn’t seen it.
Hera frowned. “Quit messing around. I’m at a quarter power. Let’s go.”
“Just a sec. I want to get a look inside one of these things.” Ghost ran from ship to ship, searching for one that was open and watching out for any sign of an approaching drone.
On his third try, he found a ship whose hatch was loose. He pried it open with a stick and climbed up inside it, sniffing.
The air smelled a little stale, but not horribly so.
It was cramped inside. This one had been a troop carrier. Benches along either side attested to that.
He ran it through his loop memory.
-See anything?- Hera’s voice resounded in his head like an airlock closing in the silence.
Raetheon-Seminec R502.
He frowned. That was an NAU ship. He stepped back out, jumping down to the ground. “That’s weird.”
“What?”
He stalked around the ship until he found her insignia and call sign near the back, on one of its stabilizer wings. NAU-R502-3376. “This was an NAU ship, not a Chaff one.”
“Well, you said it was a battlefield.
Something else was bothering him. The shimmer screen. He went from one to another, checking their insignia and call signs. Every single one was an NAU ship.
Hera followed him. “What are you looking for?”
“These ships… it was an attack. It had to be. But it doesn’t make sense.” He ran up the hillside, looking for a high enough vantage point to see the battlefield. “Come up here!”
Hera sighed, but she followed him up. “You may have to carry me back down.”
“I wouldn’t mind.” He winked and helped her up the last bit.
She pulled away from him. “What am I looking at?”
“Over there. Look.” He traced the outlines of the battlefield. “All these ships are pointing in the same direction. Northeast. Toward Martinez Base. This was an attack, but the shimmer screen—it sucks the power out of things, right?”
“Yeah… but not that fast.”
“Maybe it used to be stronger.” He closed his eyes. He could almost see it—the ships swooping in for an attack, using the hills as cover for their approach. The screen coming up, and each of them falling to the ground like bugs fumigated from the air.
And the people living here…. Their world transformed into hell in an instant.
Ghost opened his eyes and looked out at the scene again. The weather had washed away the worst of it, including many of the bodies that must have been here. He tried to imagine that kind of carnage on a global level—battles raging, the bombs going off, thick radioactive clouds that would last generations encircling the globe in a matter of days.
That one human could do such things to another in the name of war… it made his stomach turn. It was impossible to process—he couldn’t hold such horror inside his frail human frame.
Hera was frowning. “Why would the NAU attack their own base?”
Ghost nodded. “Exactly.”
She looked up at the blue dome. “It must have been weird, living here under the shimmer screen.”
“Yeah, it probably wasn’t on all the time.”
She nodded. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have had any power.”
Ghost stared at her.
“What?”
“Hera, you’re a cracking genius.” The houses. They would have had a way to preserve their power. “Come on.”
“What the cracking hell? First you want to explore the battlefield, and now you want to hurry on to the farmhouse?”
Ghost grinned. “I have an idea. If I’m right, we might be able to fix your legs for good!”
...plot landing: co-ordinates 37.8044° N, 122.2712° W,,,
Sam had planned his reentry to land him west of Martinez base. A freak squall had carried him farther than he’d intended, but he was lucky. He’d brought the Recovery down in one piece in what had once been Oakland, according to Alpha’s old maps.
He opened the hatch of the craft, his solar cells soaking up the afternoon sunlight.
Just to the south, the old city core sat gaping like a row of broken teeth, taunting him like the jaw of some giant beast. You don’t belong here. We’ll swallow you and your kind whole.
Sam shook his head. He rarely let himself get carried away with flights of fancy. They were broken buildings, nothing more.
Off to the northeast, he could see the shimmer of the emp shield, a broad blue dome almost nine kilometers across.
His people were in there somewhere. He had to find them and make sure they survived this adventure. Then they could finish the mission.
Everything depended on these next few days.
…plot: route > Martinez base…
He would not lose another team.