Samael's Fire (6 page)

Jake was right about people getting off planet. Once word spread that the Emperor was coming up, orbit was going to be crammed.

“I’ve never seen a ship like this,” she said.

“It’s a prototype. I call it the Mikemobile. Trying to promote the idea that it’s mine. The designers call it an orbit runner. One of Tesla’s real successes.” Mike pulled up a menu on the console and pointed at the word
 
hydroponics.
 
“Push that.”

Char pushed
 
hydroponics.
 
They rotated and backed away from the station.

“It runs on a charge off the solar net, the same power source for the hydroponics annex. This thing will go till it falls apart.” The com voice said
 
course acquired,
 
and the Mikemobile eased backward, picking up speed.

“You’re piloting your first ship.” Mike ran his hands through his hair and blew out a deep breath. “Ah, Char. Being governor of the Imperial Space Station wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds. I’m glad you came.”

Governor, cripes. That explained the
 
Your Excellency
 
stuff. And the bodyguards. No wonder the best table in the Blue Marble had been conveniently available. But what did he mean,
 
wasn’t
? Was he going to lose his position?

“Shíb dài!” Mike’s curse stopped her from asking the question. A mid-sized shuttle swerved just past them into the space they’d cleared. “That ship would lose its data link if I wasn’t preoccupied.”

The pilot could have kept twice the distance from the orbit runner, and Mike would still have taken offense. Even swearing, Mike wanted everything proper. No
 
shib, shibad, shibadeh
 
for him. You could count on him that way, but you could also count on him never bending, always insisting on the rules. Char could see why Sky dragged her feet when he proposed.

The offensive shuttle moved toward the docking bay they’d exited. The bay door was almost closed, but a portal beside it slid open and a ball shot out toward the incoming ship. The ball opened and expanded into a net that spread over the shuttle’s hull. It covered the observation windows and its sunflower logo.

The shuttle lit up with electrical arcs emanating from the net. Like vicious living lightning, the arcs darted about the ship’s exterior. The pilot’s windows blew out, and the vacuum of space sucked a stream of objects out of the ship. Including people.

A middle-aged woman slammed against the bubble canopy in front of Char. Her eyes were open. She stared through a cascade of curls with the same surprised expression Tyler had had. Char and Mike both shrieked. The woman was still alive—no. She shifted. The back of her head was missing. The body slid over the canopy and floated away.

“What the hell was that?” Char said through sobs and chattering teeth. Shibadeh, the world
 
was
 
coming to an end.

“The guys in logistics call it an electric blanket.” Mike’s voice was flat, emotionless. He rubbed the back of her neck, but it only made her feel worse.

“No, I meant why?” Her eyes stung. “There were people on that ship.”

“They might have been DOGs,” Mike said. “That shuttle was ordered not to dock. Approaching the station was a hostile act.”

The supposedly hostile shuttle went dark, its sunflower logo illuminated by natural light. It drifted, dead in space.

The hydroponics annex was a rectangular monolith the size of a football field in synchronized orbit about ten minutes out from the Imperial station. The Mikemobile linked to the annex, acquired docking data, and glided into a bay large enough for a supertransport.

Coming out of the airlock into the control room, Char was bombarded by the smell of green growing things. Still shaken, she closed her eyes and filled her lungs with the sweet air, grateful for the small measure of comfort it gave. Now the faces of two dead people haunted her, Tyler and the woman from the sunflower shuttle.

Two out of ten million.

“Will you do that to Jake and Rani when they come back from Vacation Station?” She followed Mike to the docking bay’s control panel. “Wrap the
 
Space Junque
 
in an electric blanket?”

“The Emperor’s son and daughter are not terrorists. The
 
Junque’s
 
data links are cleared for all Imperial docking bays. They’ll find a place.”

The sting of Mike’s sarcasm was blunted by that other thing: Rani was the Emperor’s daughter.
 
I love all my sisters.
 
Jake’s sister. This shouldn’t make Char so particularly happy. But it did.

They took a Ppod to the other side of the annex. Char used the hand anchors to keep her feet on the floor. Entering the main communications center, she experienced the same disorientation as at the Blue Marble. This time she looked up at the world through a broad-spanning window in the ceiling.

They were dayside, crossing Europe and coming up on Asia with the earth perpendicular to the ceiling. Or was the ceiling perpendicular to the earth? It made her dizzy. In the corner, the Imperial station drifted into view.

A bank of computer screens along one wall monitored crops in the annex’s growing areas. The agronomist had left a supplemental compad on the desk. When she pushed the switch, the screen beside it came on tuned to an entertainment channel. He must have it on a timer, because
 
Terra! Terra! Terra!
 
was playing, muted with Chinese captions and set to record.

Char let the cheesy soap opera play on. Maybe she’d find out what happened to that baby.

At first blush, nothing seemed out of order. There were tomatoes, soybeans, all kinds of greens, corn—yellow squash, her favorite. And purple onions.

It looked like every crop was enhanced with micronutrients. It was a fantastic rig.

She indulged in a little self-pride. The micronutrients had been her idea. She and Brandon had lobbied hard to have that included in the project. Once accepted, Brandon went into geek-maniac mode until he worked out the Best Efficient Practices for the system. He would have been ecstatic to see this.

“So Rani is Jake’s sister?”

“Half sister. Different mothers.” Mike cut off the alarms at the com station in the center of the room. “My mother was their private tutor. Didn’t Sky tell you?” He sounded hurt. “The three of us were raised together.”

Sky had said Mike’s family was attached to the Imperial household, but nothing more.

On the soap, the mother of the baby was speaking earnestly to the unbeknownst-to-him father. She looked away forlornly. He, apparently, was suffering great anguish. A headline crawl ran along the bottom of the screen.
 
DOGs admit North American strike.
 
Char glanced up at the earth.

“Oh, god.” Her knees went weak, and she leaned on the desk. In the middle of old China, a new mushroom cloud was in full bloom. A brilliant flash went off over Asia’s east coast. New Korea. She felt like she was going to throw up.

The panel at Mike’s left hand blinked. “Do we need to go back?”

Mike ignored her and the com board too. He was focused on the Imperial station, now framed in the center of the window. Two ships on the perimeter sparkled as if covered with firecrackers.

The soap crawl continued.
 
China accuses New Korea of nuclear attack. Threatens retaliation.
 
“I think they’ve already retaliated,” Char said. A new mushroom cloud climbed into the air where the light had flashed.

Electric blankets shot out of the Imperial station portals catching some ships while others pulled away. There was no surprise on Mike’s face.

“Did you know about this?”

He glanced at the flashing com, but he didn’t respond to it.

Char pushed the lit-up button and the com burst to life, the operator frantic. “Repeat. All Imperial channels: DOGs have boarded the station. Repeat. Defenders of Gaia are attacking the Imperial Space Station. This is not a drill. All Imperial—ah!”

A scream and a few grunts. Someone said
 
no.
 
The signal was gone.

Maybe ten ships were dead in space outside the station with electrical arcs dancing on their outer hulls. Another twenty had slipped past the blankets and rammed the station, blowing out entire sections.

“You knew. You knew this was coming when you called me down to the … the
 
Mikemobile
.” She could barely get the word out of her mouth. Frivolous. Disgusting. “There’s nothing wrong with hydroponics. You just wanted to save your own skin.”

A cargo transport headed toward the Blue Marble’s see-through floor. In relentless slow motion, the transport plowed through the barrier.

“All those people!
 
Excellency.
 
You were supposed to keep them safe, and you abandoned them.” She covered her eyes. She’d reached her dead body quotient for the day.

“Shíb, Char.” Mike finally said something. “It’s going to crash.”

What? The transport had already crashed.

But he was talking about the station itself. The DOG ships must have been carrying bombs. Simultaneous explosions had knocked the station out of its orbit.

It was getting smaller.

Not smaller. Farther away. They stared at the ceiling in stunned horror. It took less than ten minutes for the Imperial Space Station to enter the atmosphere, ignite into a fireball, and disappear into the Pacific Ocean.

The annex slipped into nightside like it was creeping under the covers. In the darkness, glowlights lit the floor, giving the room the feel of a techno-fairyland.

“I had to.” Mike slumped into the chair at the console beside the monitor, blank now. No signal. “I had to save you, Char. For Sky. I couldn’t fail her a second time.” He searched her face. For what? Did he think she’d give absolution?

“Why didn’t you tell Sky you were governor of the ISS?”

“I met her during a site inspection. I’d been separated from my entourage without a compad, and she found me wandering, lost in a corridor down in the bowels of
 
Tesla
. I told her I was a tech assistant. I don’t know why. I guess I liked how she was nice to me. To
 
me.
 
Not the governor. She shared her sandwich with me and we talked. Or she talked. She could go on about tidal power and photovoltaic arrays.”

Oh, Sky.
 
Char fingered her pendant.

“She had to get back to work. Said she was avoiding the official visit and all the damn poobahs. I’d already fallen for her. I couldn’t tell her I was the biggest poobah in the group.”

“So you kept lying to her, even after you asked her to marry you.”

“I was going to tell her. But things got so complicated.”

Right. Char walked the room, rechecking the data on the crop monitors, her mind racing. There were worse places to be stranded than where they grew all the food. Water shouldn’t be a problem either, for a while—this was hydroponics, after all.

She sat down beside Mike, the burst of adrenalin fading.
 
Please let Jake and Rani be alive.

Who was she pleading with? People believed in gods once, people who weren’t crazy either. But when an orbiting city hurtled to the ocean in flames and your fellow creatures set off the last remaining nuclear devices, you had to be pretty sure there was no god.

Seeing angel clouds was as close as Char would get to divinity, and that was fine.

She looked up at the perpendicular earth. It was full dark, a hint of the sun’s corona on the horizon. There didn’t seem to be enough lights on the surface.

How long had she been awake? Up here she had no sense of time, with the constant cycling through dayside and nightside. The computer clock read 2242. Was that based on Greenwich Mean Time? Not that knowing would change anything.

Mike was of no use. He stared into something that no longer existed, the extent of what he’d done sinking in. He would have to live with all that death. His bodyguards. The sad servers in the Blue Marble. The wine steward. She could muster no pity.