Stars Rain Down (2 page)

Jack’s train ride was quiet and fast, followed by an energetic if mechanical march back from the station and a quick trot up to the door. The apartment unlocked itself as he approached, and he was already half-stripped when the door closed behind him. He tossed his backpack aside, unzipped his jumpsuit and let it hang limply from his waist, drew his tank-top over his head and threw it to the floor. Hopping, he yanked off one boot and then the other, stepped out of the jumpsuit and left it in a damp heap. In another moment, his sponge-like boxers and socks were gone, and he collapsed on the living room carpet naked.

The air in his apartment was cool and—to Jack’s great satisfaction—bone dry. Without the television on, the room was silent save for the sound of his breathing and the intermittent patter of rain on the patio. It didn’t quite measure up to his sun-soaked dreams, but it would do. He lost track of time lying there on the floor, staring at the ceiling and listening to a world momentarily at peace.

When his phone began to ring, he was adamant about not answering it. Just let it go, he told himself. It can’t be anything important. The answering machine will get it. The second ring came and went, the third followed close behind. By the fourth, he was starting to reconsider. Before the fifth ring came, he was on his feet and moving.

He plucked the handset from its cradle. “Hello?â€

The Vandenberg airfield was in a panic the likes of which Jack had never seen before. Preflight personnel were rushing everywhere, assembling equipment at a break-neck pace and prepping the massive tranzat carriers at all five gantries. Each spear-like tranzat was flanked by ten of the orange leviathan helicopters, lined up in rows with their blades folded, and waiting to be loaded. The helicopters looked like nothing so much as oversized Easter eggs painted by a strangely unimaginative kid.

The Priority One alert had gone out to everyone: primary squads, secondaries and reserves alike. That added up to about five thousand drop-ready corpsmen lined-up in rows on the tarmac, waiting to be briefed, loaded and launched.

Vandenberg was California’s primary launch site. More volunteers would be arriving at secondary sites by the thousands, and the same would be happening at ERC launch facilities all over the globe. The amount of manpower in motion was staggering to consider.

Jack found the SJ Bravos among the sea of orange jumpsuits without too much effort, and he fell into formation. “Hey Albright, any idea what’s up?â€

Rumours spread through the Shackleton like a plague, and the crew were up to speed within an hour. They had found an alien vessel. What followed was overwhelming excitement and fifty-six astronauts trying against all odds to squeeze into an eight-man bridge compartment. Still, the Shackleton did nothing the first day but survey, traveling up and down the length of Zebra-One like a mosquito buzzing around a buffalo, scanning, observing and recording every strange feature of the artifact’s surface. Each new discovery elicited bursts of conjecture and heated debate.

Faulkland eventually banished the crowd from the bridge, but they wouldn’t be deterred. Instead, the lot of them crammed into the maximum-occupancy-twelve dining hall where they monitored progress by CC-TV and somehow managed not to suffocate.

It was a long day mapping Zebra-One’s surface, and at its end, Marcus didn’t sleep at all, nor did he bother trying. He knew from experience that he would have lain awake, running every possibility and contingency through his head. Commander Faulkland claimed that he could sleep at will anywhere in the universe, but he spent the whole night on the bridge with Marcus, staring in perfect silence at the sleeping giant just outside their window.

Meanwhile, Mason Shen sat off to the side and tried to solve the communication puzzle. When morning hours rolled around, he was still at his console and no closer to an answer. He was in contact with Ares Colony on Mars, but Earth remained morbidly silent for them as well.

“I’m about ready to give up,â€

It was pitch black inside, and the first thing Marcus Donovan noticed was something thumping all around him. One-two, it beat slowly, rhythmically, like he was trapped inside a massive water drum. He could feel it thumping in his chest, where his heart echoed the beat. One-two, one-two.

“Base to Donovan, what’s your status? Please respond.â€

“Hey, are you alive?â€

The thing that really struck Marcus Donovan about Zebra-One’s interior was the emptiness. As his team trundled down the long corridor, there were no access panels, controls or anything for a person to interact with. There hadn’t been any junctions, nor were there any markings indicating where they’d been or where they were going. He wasn’t foolish enough to expect a wall-map with a big red arrow labeled “You Are Hereâ€

As Jack and his team pressed on through the raging dust storm, he continually had to remind himself they were still on Earth. Hour after hour revealed nothing but devastation, and the once blue skies were hidden from view. All they could see was the cracked and withered land beneath their feet, while a brown fog, thick with debris, blotted out everything beyond.

The world was unrecognizable except for the fallen trees that littered the ground. It might as well have been Mars, or the ninth ring of Hell for that matter.

They followed the twisting ravine, breaking every hour for a rest that Jack kept short. He knew they had to keep up their momentum as long as they could, and cover as much ground as possible before night fell and reduced them to total blindness.

Each one was carrying dry rations and two liters of water in their service-pack, which meant food for a week and water for a day. Considering the kind of strain they were under, he didn’t want to estimate how long they’d last without a fresh source of water. In normal circumstances, their supplies would have been more than enough, but no one had ever imagined a situation like this. It was a grave oversight which Jack was paying for, and their only hope for survival lay in Nikitin’s hunch.

As they went, the cycling sound of the alien cuttlefish never ceased. Jack could always hear at least one of them nearby, moving in circular patterns. He knew from experience they were search patterns, and he did his best not to imagine what was happening every time they stopped. Each time, it was just long enough to unleash a volley of their screaming weapons before continuing on.

The ravine provided enough cover to keep them out of sight, and Jack suspected the aliens’ scanning technology wasn’t very thorough. Less sensitive than a leviathan’s by a wide margin, at least. Several times during their journey, the silhouette of one of the cuttlefish passed overhead, and each time, Jack expected it to swoop down and incinerate them, but it never happened.

After more than three hours and fifteen kilometers over broken terrain, Nikitin’s hunch panned out. The dry ravine met a live river, knee deep with fresh water. Another hundred meters on, they could just barely make out the shadow of a settlement. They’d made it.

Jack motioned for a huddle. “Me and Nicotine are gonna scout ahead. The rest of you, break out purification kits and refill your packs, then find somewhere to setup camp. Gather brush for camouflage while you’re at it. If the village is a bust, we’ll overnight here. Got it?â€

The Copernicus Observatory hurtled around the Earth, completing each lap in just over an hour and a half. Phileas Fogg would have been positively green with envy. Under normal circumstances, the station’s suite of multi-wavelength active and passive scanners would be staring out away from the bright blue globe, penetrating into the depths of the darkness beyond, but this wasn’t a normal day.

Copernicus continued on at its dizzying pace, but the lights were out and the three technicians charged with babysitting it had forgotten all about the stars. Instead, they hung around in silence, together watching the fate of their planet while trying not to think too hard about their predicament.

The invasion had been carried out with frightening efficiency. Strange discs arrived from out of nowhere, jammed all frequencies, and then bashed everything in orbit apart. The only possible explanation for Copernicus’ survival was that the station was powered down during the attack. Whether the invaders thought it broken or had simply failed to notice it was up for debate. Either way, none of the three men aboard was in any hurry to flip the generators back on.

The next phase of the attack happened while Copernicus was on the other side of the world. The station came back around, streaking over Europe and then the Mideast, and as it approached Pakistan, the crew caught sight of twin mushroom clouds reaching high into the sky. Two objects had struck with unimaginable force, one in India and the other in China, leaving vast craters and dust clouds that swelled up and swallowed the entire continent.

After that, nothing could surprise the crew of Copernicus. The invaders torched the orbital launch centers which ringed the equator, removing any ability to mount an offensive in space, and then they bombarded population centers all around the globe. Their communication cut off, cities everywhere were hit completely unaware, with coastal regions receiving the brunt of the punishment. They erupted into short lived balls of blue flame that left nothing but charred ruins and the immolated bodies of the dead.

Human civilization was annihilated in three hours, before even one alien bothered to set foot on the ground. Then, with the ashes of empires still smouldering, the seven vessels made planetfall in Africa and South America.

The action was over by the eighth hour, and with the atmosphere recyclers turned off, the air inside of Copernicus Observatory was getting stale. All three crewmen were suited up but refused to don their helmets. Without radio communications, being sealed up would be too much like being alone, even though none of them had spoken in hours.

Sometime after it was over, Marco Esquivel broke the silence. “So,â€

The members of the Shackleton Expedition were having the time of their lives. It didn’t take them long to master Zebra-One’s unique method of transportation, and soon they were flitting about and mapping the ship’s internals faster than they ever could have dreamed. There was a specific approach that proved most effective: an explorer pictured the entire vessel in their mind then focused down to their intended destination, and the ship took care of the rest. Once a person had been to a location, though, all they needed do was picture it again and off they went. The system was learning.

A third of the group were especially talented, able to pick up the process in under a minute, and were then able to get around effortlessly. Most of the rest could navigate the ship after a half-hour of practice, and a few needed a couple hours, but precisely two simply couldn’t get any response at all. One of them was the cantankerous Professor Caldwell, and the other a young miner named Terrel. Both tried well into the second day under mounting frustration, but the ship wouldn’t take them anywhere. Zebra-One otherwise reacted to them normally, providing light and displaying the electrical pattern when they touched the walls, but they were both eventually forced, rather embarrassingly, to travel with someone else who could operate the transit system.

Doctor St. Martin latched onto both men and became their permanent tour guide in return for a chance to study them in detail. She very badly wanted to understand how the transit system and its psychic interface worked, and she believed that the two men’s inability to use it might hold part of the answer.

It was also discovered that any of the irises could be opened from the inside with a thought, similar to how one operated the transit tubes. From that point on, the stream of personnel on and off the giant alien ship was constant. Teams worked in rotating shifts, composed of everyone aboard the Shackleton except for a skeleton crew of three who watched from outside. That crew included Mason Shen who finally allowed himself to get some sleep, only to immediately return to the communications puzzle the next morning.

There were never fewer than five people aboard Zebra-One at any one time, including Marcus Donovan and Commander Faulkland, who each felt compelled to stay following their first incursion. They claimed to be quarantining themselves to avoid infecting the rest of the crew, but no one much believed them. In truth, each man was in his own way enamored with the strange alien vessel, and it would have taken a platoon of marines to drag them away.

Exploration began in a handful of key areas. They were all hollow cavities detected during the years of scanning, which the Gypsies deemed most likely to hold important systems. The team targeted the smallest ones first, and each cavity offered wonders stranger and more perplexing than the last. There was a great vaulted arcade with a ceiling lit in every color of the rainbow and columns curved like a ribcage. There was a dank cavern full of organic structures that looked like fruiting fungi, and a branching network on the lower decks that was best described as a swamp. One of the most mystifying was a perfectly circular room with concentric rings of clear water set in the floor. Professor Caldwell suspected the room might have had religious significance to the natives, but it was more a hunch than anything. No one else had a better idea.

There were also areas that were less mysterious. They discovered several large cell-like networks of rooms that were undoubtedly living quarters, each complete with its own sleep area and not-unfamiliar waste collector. The quarters were clustered around evenly spaced dining halls, while small recreational parks were always nearby.

Much of the forward fifth of the craft was full of rod-shaped structures connected in series, starting very large and getting progressively smaller and more numerous as they approached the bow, all focused on the huge cavity at the front of the vessel. Debates erupted over the purpose of that cavity, with many hoping it was a scientific array, but quietly suspecting it was a weapon.