Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1) (23 page)

Kissing Rebekah good-bye had been difficult. She was headed east toward the fight and I was headed to uncertainty on the exact opposite site of the planet. Seriously the opposite side: I looked on the globe and the planetary antipode for Montana was the lost isles of the Kerguelen Archipelago. Maybe they were not lost geographically, but definitely lost culturally. No one had spoken to the Kergueleni in almost four
hundred
years. Maybe they didn’t speak English anymore. I might not even make it back alive.

I straightened my dark blue Fleet officers’ uniform and entered the jet. Morgana was also in uniform and already at the controls, familiarizing herself with this model of aircraft.

“This jet will do most of the flying for me,” she said, smiling, “but I still have to tell her what to do.”

I nodded and quickly buckled my seatbelt in the co-pilot’s seat next to her.

Morgana eased the scramjet off the runway and over the Pacific Ocean, into the sunset. I could see another stream of dropships to the south, headed skyward with the remaining residents of the Seattle Isles. Another stream to the east in Kelowna. Another far to the south near Portland Heights. This was a full evacuation of the Republic to include millions of children and countless Outcasts. I wondered how they found time to freeze them all efficiently and safely into stasis.

The scramjet furiously breathed air and, once past Mach 4, the hypersonic engines screamed to life. I was pushed back in my seat as Morgana both grunted and giggled. Soon we were ripping along at Mach 11. It would only take three hours to get to Kerguelen, on the other side of the globe.

The marshal had thankfully unlocked every bit of intelligence the Republic had on the Kergueleni, which I pored over. Morgana put the jet on autopilot and kicked her boots up on the dashboard.

“You know, I heard a rumor they don’t really welcome visitors,” she said coldly.

“I know. I’ve heard the same thing,” I said, unfazed.

She frowned. “You know I’ll follow you, but I need to know what you expect.”

“I expect a cold reception,” I said, stroking the scruffy growth on my chin. “I expect I’m going to have to beg and plead for their help. I expect I’ll probably have to make amends for the sins of our fathers’ fathers, and then make promises our children will have to keep, and….”

I trailed off and stared out the window. We were flying so fast, faster than the rotation of the Earth, that the sun was rising in front of us in the West.

“Unless the sun rises in the West….” I muttered, repeating Persephone’s words, hoping there was some prophecy in them.

“What?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said dazedly, “just something…she said.”

“Pax?” Morgana seemed confused.

“Sorry,” I replied. “Don’t worry about it.

We both continued reading our digibooks on the history of the islands and of the Kergueleni people who had landed on that remote, windswept island during the early half of the Twenty-First century. For them, the writing was on the wall that the world as they knew it was ending, so instead of trying to fight against the outside forces of climate change and corrupt governments, they ran. As soon as the C-virus outbreak struck, they locked themselves away on the islands, forbidding all travel to or from the nation. The Dominion soon severed all contact with the outside world.

Apparently, during the fifty or so years the nation existed before they isolated themselves, they became exceedingly wealthy by becoming the banking and trading capital of the world. Their duty-free ports were the transfer point for oil from the Middle East, raw materials from the Americas, and finished goods of all types from Southeast Asia. The Dominion pioneered shipbuilding techniques and soon owned the world’s largest shipping fleet. A city with 50,000 people was built underground and became home to the world’s largest computing center where most of the planet’s data was stored or processed. Their list of accomplishments continued. They handled most of the international banking transactions on the planet. They built the space elevator. They built the first starships capable of interplanetary travel. They even sent the first colony ships to Mars, and beyond, to the solar system. Then they just disappeared.

A few hours had passed while reading more and more about what the Republic knew of them since “the Lockdown.” Often the Republic’s recon satellites would be “laser-flashed” as they went overhead, rendering their data collection useless. A few ships in orbit had been flashed too, just enough to scramble their optics and data collection efforts, but never any real damage. Soon the Cascadian Fleet captains just kept their ships on the horizon, out of range of the laser disruption, and the flashes ended.

An alarm rang, and the lights immediately switched to a dim red in the cockpit.

“What the hell?” I screamed.

“Incoming missiles?” Morgana yelled as she confusedly read the display.

Almost on cue, an explosion rocked our craft, lurching us sideways. Then another, this one actually doing a bit of damage to our left wing and dropping us rapidly out of hypersonic speed.

“Hold on to something,” she gritted her teeth, and pushed forward on the control stick.

The craft dropped like a rock.

“How are far out are we?” I screamed over the alarm buzzer, which she then silenced.

“We weren’t even scheduled to drop out of hypersonic for another thirty minutes,” she grimaced as she leveled out the jet. “That must have been a ship, part of an air defense picket. We’re out of range of him now, but there might be more.”

Morgana kept us at supersonic speed, just a hundred meters above the water. At this altitude—with the additional air pressure—we’d burn fuel much faster and we’d put extra stress on the wings. A few quick calculations and she slowed us to just Mach 1.71.

“The perfect balance of fast…and alive,” she laughed, flicking more switches and then resting back in her chair.

I switched the ground radar up to the main display so we could see what else was out there. The islands were approaching quickly now, and we’d be setting up the landing approach in ten minutes.

“There,” I pointed on the display, a hundred kilometers to our north.

“Shit,” she grumbled. “Another patrol ship.”

Morgana slid the accelerator lever forward and the craft rocketed forward to Mach 3.5.

“No one,” she said quietly, “has missiles faster than that, right?”

I looked out the window and could see that the wake from our sonic boom was creating turbulence on the water below, throwing up a spray a half kilometer behind us. The plane rattled and we both shook from the air turbulence at this speed: this particular jet didn’t have wings so much as it had stubby airfoils to control the trajectory of what was essentially a rocket-powered dart.

The missile alarm cried out again, and the air radar display showed the warhead closing in on us. At a kilometer out, it detonated. You would think at that range, it wouldn’t have done much.

You would think.

Instead the force of the explosion sheared off the tail. Ripped it clean off. My ears rapidly and violently popped with the decompression of the cabin.

“I’ve lost rear stabilizer control. Can’t trim it for some reason,” she yelled over the roar of the wind through the open cabin behind us. “Shit, Pax, I’m not good enough to land this thing.”

“You don’t have a choice,” I screamed back.

The jet was decelerating rapidly now. It was designed to ride the front of a sonic shockwave, and now that it had lost a good part of its aerodynamics, the drag was slowing it down and ripping pieces away.

“There,” I pointed out the window, ”see the runway?”

We could see the island and the runway of the airfield. She started the landing sequence, wherein the stubby wings extended to increase lift and the landing gear descended.

Little black shapes were lifting off from the runway. Dozens of them.

“Are they-” Morgana started. “Are they launching fighters?”

“Just land this bird,” I pleaded. “Please.”

The black shapes grew closer. Soon they were ripping past us. They looked like some kind of giant, mutated, black butterflies. Delicate but almost sinister. I couldn’t see the pilots or any weapons, but they circled us until we were on approach.

“Why aren’t they shooting?” Morgana asked, to no one in particular.

The runway was coming up very quickly through the windows of the cockpit. We could see the bright lights of the city and the giant glass spires, but I don’t think either of us was worried about those.

“Kerguelen Tower,” she called into the radio. “This is Cascadia Two-Two-Three on a diplomatic mission. Requesting permission to land.”

There was no reply, but we saw the black butterflies flitting about us again, staying in formation with us.

Morgana repeated herself into the radio. This time a tinny voice replied, in perfect English:

“Cascadia Two-Two-Three, you are cleared to land on Runway Thirty-Two L, but be advised, your left landing gear is not deployed.”

Morgana brought the system status screen up on the display and it showed the gear was deployed. She retracted the gear and it still showed as deployed.

“Well, this is going to suck,” she grumbled, deploying the gear again, then retracting it.

“We’re going to do a belly landing,” Morgana said, looking at me sheet white. “I did this in the simulator one time. It rarely ends well.”

I nodded and she eased the plane in. The front canards gave a little bit of rudder-like controls, but at slow speeds this plane had very little maneuverability. It jerked and yawed and pitched with every gust of wind.

The altimeter slowly ticked down absolute altitude above sea level and the relative altitude to the ground.

We were now coasting above the runway, four meters off the ground.

She deployed what was left of the aerobrakes.

Three meters. Two meters. One meter.

Then a screeching, scraping sound I can’t even describe. The plane skidded straight on the runway for a moment, then the left wing stub caught the tarmac and we spun like a top, careening into the grass. Mud and plants flew up over the windshield as the nose dug in. We jerked forward in our seats one last time, and finally stopped.

“That could have gone,” I gasped, “a lot worse.”

“We were just shot down,” she groaned. “I don’t want to know what ‘worse’ is.”

I rubbed my stiff neck and did a quick mental checklist of my body parts. Everything was there, didn’t hurt too bad, and was in working order. Morgana seemed equally relieved.

I unlatched my seatbelt and walked back toward the door of the plane. I could see out the gaping back hole of the aircraft, and wanting to avoid the mess of wires and twisted metal, I pulled on the side door handle and the door swung wide into the breezy Kerguelen air.

The first thing I remembered was the smell: it was like rotting seaweed, but sweeter and more dank. The next thing I remember was looking around and seeing the rusted hulks of ancient jetliners as far as the eye could see. Then, I saw the military.

They were clad in black and grey camouflage, surrounding the jet with guns drawn. At least I assume they were guns: they didn’t look like anything we had in the Republic.

I heard voices speaking in a language I could hardly understand. It sounded like English but was significantly different. It was like singing, almost, as the vowels rose and fell like notes. Maybe yodeling was a better comparison. I didn’t have much time to think about it.

“Get down!” a man’s voice shouted, without the sing-song accent. “Hands on your head!”

I did as I was told, hopping down from the broken aircraft and then laying in the sweet, smelly grass. Morgana, poked her head out the door.

“You too!” the man yelled again, and she did as she was told.

Once we were down on the ground long enough to be soaked through our clothes, they finally came over and put metal rings around our wrists. The rings seemed to be held together by some magnetic force.

“You will come with us,” a uniformed woman said sharply.

We were led, firmly but gently, to a waiting vehicle. It was like a car, but it had no wheels. It hovered above the ground, quietly humming, and it didn’t even rock or move as we stepped inside.

Two armed guards followed us in.

“Where are you taking us?” I asked politely.

No reply.

“Do you speak English?” I asked.

One of them laughed, and the other smiled, but they said nothing.

I decided not to press my luck with their good nature and remained silent as we crossed the runway and passed what I assumed was the ancient air terminal.

When Kerguelen had been at its prime, they had constructed a massive airport to handle all the traffic from across the globe. When they had locked everything down in 2103 at the onset of the major C-virus outbreak, the planes had apparently just been left to rot. We passed dozens of massive jetliners—some as big as small starships. Then we crossed another runway.

Here we were surrounded by dozens of those black butterflies. They were clearly fighter jets of some type. They daintily landed vertically on the tarmac—just like a Republic dropship—but there was something graceful about the way their wings changed shape and folded as they landed.