Desert Stars (45 page)

Joy and relief washed over
him like a warm summer rain. It was the
Bridgette One.

* * * * *

Mira reached up and
covered her mouth, squinting against the dust kicked up by the
returning starship. Behind her,
Shira
coughed,
while Lena and her husband squinted and waved the air in front of
their faces.

Jalil practically sprinted to the
ship, reaching it just as the hatchway opened and Michelle stepped
out. He turned back to them, eyes lit with an urgency born of
desperation.

“
Everybody in!” he
shouted, beckoning to them. “There’s no time to lose!”

Mira glanced over her shoulder at the
rest of her family. To her surprise, they stood completely still,
staring in confusion. Overhead, another flare lit the sky, bathing
them in pink and white light.

“
Did you hear me?” Jalil
shouted. “The world is ending—we have to leave!”

“
We’re not going anywhere
in the devil’s caravaneer,” said
Shira
, putting
her hands obstinately on her hips. Mira’s stomach fell, and her
legs went weak.

“
There’s no time to
argue,” said Tiera, running forward. “Come on, let’s
go!”

All eyes turned to her
father, but Sathi glanced sheepishly at
Shira
, as if
looking for some direction.
No,
Mira thought to herself.
Please, not now.

“
What are you waiting
for?” Jalil shouted. “There’s no time; we’ve got less than ten
minutes before—”

“
We’re staying right
here,” said
Shira
. “This is our home, and no
tricks from you are going to get us to abandon it. Right,
girls?”

Mira took a step forward, feeling as
if someone else were controlling her body. She took a deep breath
and broke into a run.

“
Hey!” her mother
screamed. “Mira! Come back here!”

Before
Shira
could stop her, she was back in Jalil’s arms, trembling with
fear and joy and a hundred other racing emotions.

“
Jalil! How dare you steal
my daughter! Mira, come back at once!”

“
Mother!” Tiera shouted
from the hatchway, ignoring the others. “Come on!”

Zayne looked from Tiera to Sathi and
back again, hesitant to be the next to step forward.

“
Zayne!” Jalil cried,
letting go of Mira. “Mother, please! Let’s go!”

With tears in her eyes,
Zayne came forward, stumbling over the rocky earth. Tiera ran
forward and helped her to the shuttle, while
Shira
shook her head and clucked disapprovingly.

“
We don’t have any more
time,” Jalil shouted, his voice growing hoarse. “Can’t you see?
Everyone who stays behind is going to die!”

Mira glanced desperately from face to
face. Her eyes met Rina’s, and her sister ran forward into her
waiting arms. Surayya came next, but at a shout from their mother,
she stopped and hesitated midway.

“
No!” Mira cried.
“Surayya, don’t—”

“
Come back at once, young
woman!”
Shira
screamed, anger screwing her
face into an ugly sneer.

Surayya glanced over her shoulder at
the camp before giving Mira a sheepish look. “I’m sorry,” she said
running back to the rest of the family.

“
No!” Jalil shouted,
slamming his fist against the shuttle with a fury that made Mira
take a step back. “No no no!”

“
Rina,”
Shira
yelled. “You get back here right this
instant!”

“
No,” Mira said, holding
onto her little sister as if to never let go. “Don’t leave, Rina.
Please don’t leave me.” Rina tensed, but she made no move to run
away.

As Jalil continued to
shout, Mira looked up and bit her lip to keep the tears from
welling up in her eyes. Her family stood motionless by the
camp—Mother, Father, her sisters. Another silent explosion filled
the sky, making their shadows dance even as they stood as still as
statues. The two younger ones, Majd and Alia, glanced from her to
Mother and back again, confused and scared.
Shira
,
however, shot her a look as cold and unyielding as any that she’d
ever seen.
Come back to me,
her expression said,
or
you are not my daughter.

Mira’s hands shook and her legs felt
weak, but she stayed with Jalil. This was her decision—a decision,
she realized with some surprise, that she’d made a long time
ago.

“
Please,” Jalil pleaded,
his whole body shaking. “Won’t you let me save you?”

“
No,” said Sathi, his eyes
large and sad. “This is our place, Jalil—our home. If you cannot
understand that, then you are not my son.”

Jalil bit his lip and nodded, tears
spilling out of his eyes. “Then this is goodbye,” he
whispered.

He turned his back to them
and helped Mira climb up the ladder. She stopped midway to look one
last time at her family, knowing somehow that she would never see
them again. Surayya was crying now, while Amina looked on with
folded arms, shaking her head. Alia and Majd hugged their mother’s
knees in fear, while Sathi stared on with an unreadable expression
on his face. And
Shira
—she didn’t dare look her
mother in the eyes.
I’m sorry,
she wanted to call out, but she knew it wouldn’t
do any good.

She climbed through the open hatchway
and into the narrow passageway beyond. As she stepped into the
cabin, her vision clouded over and she fell to her knees. The floor
rocked underneath her as the shuttle lifted off, and Tiera helped
her up and strapped her into a seat. The faces of those left behind
flashed across her minds eye, burning their last expressions into
her memory. She knew that they’d haunt her forever.

She closed her eyes and gripped her
armrests as her stomach lurched under the terrifying pressure of
the acceleration. Through the walls, the whine of the engine filled
her ears, but that wasn’t important; it would pass. Jalil had come
for her, and from now on, they would be together. That was all that
she had anymore—that was all that mattered.

* * * * *

“
There’s a lot of debris
in orbit,” said Michelle, all her attention focused on her
instruments. “We’ll be lucky if we make it out of this
alive.”

“
Just do your best,” said
Jalil, staring out the forward window as they climbed into orbit.
Below, the rust-red desert gave way to an unending sea of dark
glass—the domes. A few explosions still occasionally flared in the
distance, but immediately around them the sky seemed blessedly
clear.

“
Nash, are you there?
Nash, do you copy?”

“
I copy.” Nash’s voice
came over the radio, distant and fuzzy. “Establ… ing data
link.”

Michelle nodded and hit a series of
keys on her computer. Though her face was pale, she kept at her
work without faltering.

“
Anything I can do?” asked
Jalil.

“
Nope,” she said. “Just
hang in there.”

He nodded and glanced over
his shoulder at Mira and Rina, Zayne and Tiera. With the other
seats unoccupied, the cabin felt horribly empty. Sathi, his
father;
Shira
, his half-mother; Surayya
and Lena, his older sisters; the two little girls with the looks of
terror on their faces—he’d reached out to them, and they’d rejected
his help, even with the world burning all around them.

Why?

He bit his lip and turned back around.
The shuttle dropped for a second, making the women cry out in
terror.

“
Don’t worry,” said
Michelle, making some adjustments to the controls. “Everything’s
fine—just give me a few minutes.”

Jalil nodded. Outside, the arc of the
horizon glowed dark red as they passed into the night.

“
I’ve established line of
sight,” Nash’s voice came over the speakers, clearer than before.
“Course is good—watch for debris, though. There’s a lot out
here.”

Jalil looked towards the surface and
saw the wreckage of a spaceship light up as it fell through the
atmosphere towards the domes below. As the flames engulfed the
derelict craft, the pieces crumbled and split apart, streaking
brilliant white against the darkness.

“
Hameji forces are moving
in,” said Nash. “We’ll have to pull the same stunt we did at
Karduna. You copy?”

“
I copy,” said Michelle.
She gripped her control stick a little tighter.

Above them, a ship flashed into
existence as it jumped into orbit. Jalil caught his breath; it was
a Hameji mass accelerator. The engines came to life as the giant
machine of death prepared to slag the planet below.

“
What’s going on?” asked
Tiera. She peered over Jalil’s shoulder at the scene out the
window. “Is that one of the Hameji ships?”

“
Yes,” said Jalil, his
legs turning to water. Outside, the engines on the mass accelerator
began to flare.

“
No. No.
No!
” Tiera screamed,
pounding her fists against the back of Jalil’s chair. Together,
they watched as the mass accelerator fired. The asteroid burst into
flames as it hit the atmosphere, smashing into the black expanse of
a dome seconds later. As the blast exploded upwards, it sent up a
giant plume of debris that ripped through the underside of the sea
of glass, shattering it into a million shimmering
pieces.

Jalil’s breath caught in his throat.
He thought of Raya Dome, billions upon billions of people crammed
into a city that stretched from horizon to horizon and up through
the pillars that held up the sky. All of those people, dead. The
thought made him sick.

“
You’re coming in too
low,” said Nash. “Hold your velocity—I’ll slow down to
compensate.”

Off in the distance, Jalil
caught sight of the
Bridgette.
It was angled nose upward, with the shuttle bay
facing them. Judging from her size, the ship was perhaps half a
kilometer away, growing closer with every second.

“
Coming in,” said
Michelle, every muscle in her body tense. “Steady, Nash—we’ve only
got one shot at this.”

“
I hear you, ‘Chelle.
You’re doing a fine job. Just bring her in a little more to
port—”

Tiera cried out again. Another giant
meteor shot past them, smashing silently into the sea of glass.
Shards and splinters twinkled and glittered as they broke apart,
the shockwave extending like a giant ripple out towards the
horizon. As Jalil stared in horrified fascination, the entire
structure broke apart and collapsed, falling in on the bottled
world inside.

“
What’s going on?” Mira’s
voice came from behind him. Jalil looked up and saw her floating in
midair, gripping the edge of the cockpit partition in fear with her
hair and clothes adrift in the weightlessness. She stared at the
scene before them with wide, frightened eyes. Jalil unfastened
himself from his chair to help her back down.

“
It’s the end of the
world,” he said softly. “The destruction of the world by
fire.”

“
Babylon,” Mira
whispered.

“
Almost there,” came
Nash’s voice over the intercom. “Less than a hundred meters to
go.”

“
I see you.
Steady…”

“
Look!” said Tiera,
pointing excitedly. “Is that—Lord of Earth!”

Jalil glanced in the direction that
Tiera was pointing. Out on the horizon, a giant white spire jutted
out of a gap between domes. He recognized the ivory tower at
once—the Holy Place, the Sacred Shrine, the Memory of Earth, the
Temple of a Thousand Suns. All around it, clouds of grimy brown and
gray spilled out of the wounded landscape, gushing out of the
shattered domes like blood from a hundred severed
arteries.

As they watched, a flaming black
meteor shot through the sky, crashing into the base of the temple.
Mira gasped, and Tiera cried out in horror. For a heart-wrenching
moment, time slowed to a stop, as if history itself had come to an
end. As the shock wave rippled across the landscape, the tallest
spire of the temple shuddered and collapsed into the cloud of
death. Within moments, the plume completely engulfed the temple,
blasting the holiest shrine of mankind into dust and
ashes.

“
Almost
there—now!”

Jalil’s stomach lurched, and the walls
seemed to collapse in on him. For an instant, he lost all sense of
orientation as the universe inverted itself and reality flipped
inside out. He closed his eyes and gasped for breath, pulling Mira
close.

A moment later, he opened his eyes and
found himself staring at the magnificent starfield of deep
space.

“
Wh-what happened?” Mira
asked, holding onto him for dear life.

“
We’re through,” Jalil
whispered, letting out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.
“It’s over—we’re safe.”