Stars Rain Down (4 page)

Legacy’s factory especially had become a constant hub of activity. She quickly constructed a small fleet of utility vessels shaped like pill-bugs, which the miners called tugs and adopted as their own. With the miners as their pilots, the tugs swarmed out to assay and retrieve asteroids, feeding them to the factory complex which hungrily digested tonne after tonne of ore. This led to the construction of yet more tugs, some of which joined in acquiring minerals, while others went about repairing Legacy’s hull.

Repairs across Legacy were moving faster than anyone expected, thanks primarily to the efforts of Juliette St. Martin, whose insights into the alien technology were unmatched by any of the engineers. Legacy’s internal systems more closely resembled biological structures than they did machines, and healing her was more like medicine than car-repair. Being an exceptional physician with plenty of experience and a keen interest in alien biology, Juliette was the perfect woman for the job.

Marcus suspected Juliette and Legacy were bonding in ways he never could, and the ship all but confirmed it. She was in fact growing quite fond of the doctor, and Marcus felt a twinge of jealousy which he realized was utterly absurd. The most confounding part was that he couldn’t figure out which of the two he was more jealous of.

The rest of the team were busy adapting their equipment to Legacy by trial and error. Mostly error. The ship learned to produce compatible electrical outlets after a bit of practice, so power wasn’t an issue, but all attempts to mate their computers to her information network failed. They were forced instead to setup their systems in tandem with hers, including a comm system which she essentially ferried signals to and from. Rao likened it to visiting a cutting edge radio-telescope and then being forced to use one’s own Victorian spyglass.

As Marcus stood there in the factory watching the machines do their work, Legacy repeated a request which she’d made a dozen times already. She explained that whole swaths of her memory had faded during her eons-long slumber, and she needed new patterns to fill in the gaps. Specifically, she wanted to dismantle the Shackleton and analyze its construction. She was sure she could interface with the crew more easily if she could better mimic their technology.

Marcus had done his best to put the decision off, but she was becoming more insistent. The honest truth was that the decision wasn’t his to make, though; the Shackleton wasn’t his ship. And even though he was now a permanent resident aboard Legacy, he doubted the rest of the crew were so enthusiastic about the idea. Dismantling the Shackleton would mean total commitment, and there could be no turning back.

“Alright, I’ll ask him,â€

The old cargo plane brought them in under the cover of night. The world was just as black above as below in the absence of electrical light, and Jack had never before seen a darkness so deep or thick. So all consuming and complete. He slipped in and out of consciousness, each time troubled by the same dream. In it, he was adrift on a shiftless sea of black ink attached to an impossibly large tattoo needle which etched portraits of the dead on the world’s aging, wrinkled skin.

Jack despised when his dreams waxed poetic. Why couldn’t he have nice dreams about sunny beaches in Cancun?

After God only knew how long, the plane made a steep descent and then rumbled along a rough patch of road. When it came to a halt, the rear cargo ramp lowered and revealed the dim lights of civilization’s last gasp.

The makeshift runway was lined with hooded lamp posts which lit the ground but were invisible from above, as well as the same oil drums, stacks of crates and wooden pallets found at every small airfield. There were soldiers spread everywhere, dressed in unmatched uniforms and carrying a motley assortment of small arms.

Mashriq soldiers in red berets jogged over to the plane and ushered its passengers down the ramp. Each spoke in a different language. “Welcome to Al Saif. This the base of the sword. Exit the vehicle and bring all of your belongings with you. You will not have another chance to retrieve them. New recruits report to the registrar at the far end of the airstrip. Welcome to Al Saif. This is the base of the sword…â€

“They said ‘aboard new vessel’? Whaddya think that means?â€

When Marcus Donovan was a child, he spent countless nights staring through his uncle’s rusty old telescope at the tiny reddish speck that was Mars, all the while imagining a fantastic world over-run with jungles and weird, ancient ruins. It was a world of adventure and unending surprises where dozens of savage species warred for supremacy. Somehow, despite Mars’ best efforts to the contrary, the fantasy never completely left him.

As he grew older, he collected images from all the unmanned probes which had been sent to scout the red planet. The old guard of space exploration—venerable names such as NASA, Roskosmos, JAXA and ISRO—had produced thousands of images from orbit and later from the ground. They uniformly described a desolate landscape interrupted only by rocks, but Marcus’ dreams plodded on unimpeded.

When he was thirteen, his parents let him stay up late to watch the first Mars landing live on TV. Six years later during his first year at university, he stayed up for two straight days watching the Ares Colony’s daring drop from space. He failed two finals because of it. Even then, with the reality revealed on a constant video feed, he continued to believe that Mars was the most interesting place in the universe.

Now he was sitting in a conference room perched on top of the colony’s main dome, surrounded on all sides by a three-sixty view of the Martian desert, and he couldn’t tear his eyes away. It wasn’t how he’d imagined it all those years ago, but he realized he hadn’t been fair to Mars. He hadn’t accepted her for what she truly was. The stark emptiness held its own alien beauty, whispering a long story of solitude, while hinting at an exciting future yet to come.

Amira Saladin—the woman with the striking eyes who’d met them in her powered suit—was the administrator’s daughter and the colony’s chief engineer, and Marcus found her just as intriguing as the planet she called home. Considering her age, he’d normally have assumed her rank was the product of nepotism, but he’d seen evidence of her talent first hand. The colony relied on technology more than a decade past its prime, but she kept it running and upgraded to the latest spec. She could probably build a radio out of two rocks and a seashell if she had to.

Ms. Saladin had given Marcus and his team a quick tour of the facility before bringing them to the meeting room, and when she was finished, he asked her to stay. She looked confused, but with a little coaxing, she obliged.

Then they waited. Marcus would’ve hated the wait if not for the view.

Faulkland and Juliette were seated to Marcus’ left, and Rao to his right, while Ms. Saladin was half-way around the large table. Marcus thought her choice was a safe one, like taking a seat in the back of a class.

“Your father must lead a very busy life,â€

The midsummer sun was brutal. Jack Hernandez lay on his stomach, looking down the sights of a matte-black assault rifle while sweat ran off him in rivulets. He was wet from head to toe, the sweat making his weapon slippery as a fish. Fifty meters beyond the tip of his barrel sat a target in the shape of a man. A man who was mocking him. He might have imagined that last part.

Everybody else had qualified on their first day at the range, including Leonid Nikitin who hit every target with ease. He claimed he could blind a suicidal king at three hundred meters, and it was probably true. Shooting was second nature to that man, but Jack wasn’t so lucky. He was now on his third straight day of shooting, and the brass had assigned him a personal tutor as a last resort.

“Go ahead and take your time,â€

“Come back to Legacy with us,â€

Marcus Donovan was floating in the middle of his quarters. The walls were in crystal mode, as he’d taken to calling it, revealing the stars all around and the rust colored planet below. This was how he spent his down time; it was the closest he could get to the pure freedom experienced while reliving Legacy’s memory, back when she first plugged the interface into his head. He ached for that feeling, and the ache filled his thoughts and dreams. He just didn’t know how to make his longing a reality.

While rooting around inside her mind, he often tripped other memories, but they were only faded images and dim sensations in comparison. They weren’t the rich, sensory complete experience he had that first time. He literally lost himself and became her, and it was the single most transformative moment of his life.

Now, she resided permanently at one edge of his consciousness, a friend and confidante, but whole, separate and complete. There was no commingling, no question where one ended and the other began.

Sometimes, Legacy wondered why Marcus was so eager to be rid of himself. She thought Eireki were the most beautiful things in all of creation, and the desire to escape that existence totally baffled her.

Truth was that being out among the stars was all Marcus had ever wanted, though, and he just couldn’t ever explain it quite right. When it came right down to it, he wanted to be a ship. He consoled himself with the fact that for one titanic battle, he’d lived his dream. It was more than most people could say.

It still wasn’t enough.

He watched the stars and identified constellations for a while, until Legacy told him Amira Saladin was awake and inside the factory. The fact that Amira had trouble sleeping wasn’t surprising. Most people had some difficulty their first night aboard, thanks to the heartbeat rhythm audible throughout the ship.

“She’s in the factory? That’s a good sign,â€

With their training complete, the Bravos became a full-fledged combat cell with Jack in command. They kept their ERC jumpsuits, whose colors had faded to dull brown during their long months in the dirt, and they added desert-camo ponchos as further protection against the late summer sun.

Charlie told them their first mission would be a warmup, requiring nothing more than basic competence. These types of missions were assigned to separate the wheat from the chaff. Successful cells moved on to greater challenges, while failures would either be drummed out of the organization, or simply swallowed up by the sands.

Their assignment turned out to be just as simple as Charlie suggested. The Bravos were to head into the Gaza Strip to search for spare fuel cells, and conduct routine reconnaissance along the way. It was known territory with plenty of cover, and screwing it up would require real effort.

The resistance always moved at night. During daylight, alien forces were everywhere, their cuttlefish flitting through the air and long-legged walkers stalking the land. But at night, the alien forces dwindled to scattered foot patrols, and mankind made their moves. The darkness became their last refuge and final domain.

No one knew why the alien activity dropped off after sunset, but there rumors and theories flew around in abundance. Most claimed the alien vehicles were a combination of solar powered and cold blooded. Jack meanwhile found a good chuckle in thinking the invaders were afraid of the dark.

Nikitin had his own theory, based on the pet bird he had as a kid. The bird was a parakeet named Mister Whistles, and whenever the sun was up, Mister Whistles would tweet and twitter non-stop. But if someone so much as dropped a blanket over his cage, he’d go silent as a whisper. Lights out birdy. Nikitin called it the “alien parakeet theory,â€

A couple minutes past sundown on the Gaza Strip, the sky was blue-grey and the last shred of light was in its death-throes when Jack heard the jeep’s horn in the distance. There were two quick honks and then silence. A cattle call.

The three exterminators at the far end of the street reacted immediately. The two rhinos made short, deep grunts between each other. The jackrabbit’s long pointed ears pricked up, then it pointed one of its long, clawed fingers across the fields to the East.

The exterminators conversed for a few, then turned and headed to investigate, with the jackrabbit bounding out ahead and the rhinos lumbering behind. They disappeared into the distance, and several seconds passed before a rifle shot rang out, followed by a pained and plaintive cry.

Jack and Albright hit street-level and scurried from cover to cover, Cozar and Hartnell meeting them along the way. They moved down one side of the street with their weapons at the ready, and returned to the three story building that’d previously been their camp.

There, they found Nikitin on the top floor with his back against the wall, next to the hole that had been his lookout. “Stay down,â€

The tent’s interior was dim in the spare sunshine that managed to seep inside, and Jack was looking down at his gauze-wrapped hand. Six weeks had passed since the fight, and the roasted skin never stopped itching and aching. The burns could have been a lot worse, he admitted, but he was still short a hand. His good hand, even.

He made due. He started carrying a forty-five caliber handgun and learned to shoot left-handed. That hand felt damn near useless and learning to aim reliably was a struggle, but after a bit of practice, it started to come around.

He stretched his burnt fingers then made a fist, and had to grit his teeth against the pain. He had no room to complain, though. It took the surgeons a week to dig all the shrapnel out of Nikitin’s side, and he was still in a med-tent somewhere recuperating. With a little luck, he’d be back on the frontlines soon. Rebecca Hartnell didn’t fair as well; she got caught in direct fire that night, and one of the rhino’s autocannons took a fist-sized chunk out of her shoulder. She survived, but it was a safe bet her left arm would never work quite right again. Despite her best protesting, she was taken off active duty and given a desk job in the armory.