Earthrise

by Craig Delancey

  Contents

  Front matter

  Prologue

  Earthrise

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  The Predator Space Chronicles

  About the Author

  Title Information

  Craig DeLancey

  OMEGA THRESHOLD:

  EARTHRISE

  Predator Space Chronicles IV

  PROLOGUE

  “Bria, we should help,” Tarkos said.

  Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess, Tarkos’s partner in the Harmonizer Corp, leaned back in her seat and turned her four eyes toward the human. “Not our jurisdiction,” the three-hundred-kilogram Sussurat said.

  The two of them were hitching a ride on a Kirt ship visiting Earth, coming to Tarkos’s homeworld on a classified assignment. But, as the big gray Kirt ship approached the new space elevator that rose from South America’s eastern shore, the ship had dropped acceleration abruptly—too abruptly. The Kirt pilots gave only a single announcement in explanation: a police action on the space elevator’s apogee station would delay their docking. Now, in the ship’s common room, where a few humans, a dozen crab-like Kirt, and Bria lounged, silence fell as they lurched into microgravity. The humans in the room all immediately got a far-away stare as they accessed news nets, curious about the unexpected change.

  Tarkos stood—or floated, rather, into an erect posture. He simply had too much nervous energy to sit, strapped and still, in his seat. He checked what little news he could get through his minimal implants, after loading a cumbersome software package so that his Galactic wetware could read Earth’s web protocols. He chose a news feed at random, and found a grainy image of a pale, blond-haired man, dressed in a black synthetic shirt with a collar so snug and tall it looked like a priest’s habit. A ticker below the image read TERRORISTS SEIZE SPACE ELEVATOR 500 KILOMETERS ABOVE EARTH. ONE CREW MEMBER CONFIRMED DEAD.

  Tarkos watched the man, obviously in the middle of a prepared speech, speak English with some kind of Eastern European accent: “Humanity has sovereign rights as a species, but you have given up those rights to Galactic rulers. We have proof that Galactic agents are building devices in all our cities that will control our technology, and allow aliens to spy on everything that human beings do. You are not joining a Galactic democracy. You are being invaded. You—”

  “I need some real news,” Tarkos growled. He didn’t want to hear a sermon. He wanted to know what these terrorists were going to do. He switched to another feed, found New York Times Online, and read a quick update. The group called itself the Terran Liberation Front, or TLF. The elevator car that they had seized held several high-level human diplomats on their way to the planet Neelee-ornor, where the Galactic equivalent of a parliament met. These diplomats had intended to board the very Kirt ship Tarkos and Bria were on now.

  Tarkos switched back to the live feed from the TLF terrorists. The blond man droned on: “Our fourth and last demand is that the ship holding Kirt invaders must leave orbit immediately. To prove our seriousness, we will now eject one of the human traitors from the elevator.”

  “Damn,” Tarkos hissed, appalled. “They’re going to kill a diplomat. And that’s this ship, this Kirt ship, that they’re talking about, that they want to turn around and leave the sol system.” He looked back at Bria, sprawled like a huge bear in her seat. With her sitting like that, he could meet her eye to eyes, as he stood indignantly scowling at her. Her twin green eyes, with their triangular pupils, and smaller black eyes set above them, watched him impassively. She yawned—a gesture miraculously shared by her species with terrestrial mammals—and stretched, making a show of her indifference. Her long white teeth glistened.

  Tarkos had been excited to return to Earth, after three years in space. He wanted to breathe Earth air, eat Earth food, see his family, and—most of all, he now realized—he wanted to show Bria that human beings were not the savages that most Galactics, including Bria—especially Bria—expected.

  But, instead, they flew right into the middle of this.

  “Are you getting the news?” Tarkos asked.

  “I cannot comprehend human squeakings,” Bria said. They spoke to each other in Galactic. The news casts were mostly in English, a language of which Bria understood only a few words. But, Tarkos knew, Bria would be following the story. She tended to run a lot of data feeds at once. Her Sussurat brain worked far more in parallel than a human brain.

  Deacceleration kicked in. The ship slowed at about half a gee. Tarkos’s feet sunk to the floor, heels pressing down.

  “Try a translator program, Bria. We have to do something. Earth has only a few ships that could ascend to five hundred kilometers and then hover. But you and I have one. And our ship has stealthing.”

  “We are Predators,” Bria said, using the slang but more common term for Harmonizer Corp members. “A human matter. Domestic. No lifecode violation.”

  Tarkos groaned in frustration. But he knew Bria was right. As Harmonizers, their jurisdiction covered lifecrime—things like specicide, or harm to endangered ecosystems, when these acts occurred or were threatened on planets that had joined the Galactic Alliance. Earth had been invited to join the Alliance but had not yet done so; in fact, the referendum on whether to join the Alliance was being held in a few weeks. Throwing a human being out of an airlock and into vacuum was barbaric, it was clearly a crime, but it also was not a lifecode violation.

  Tarkos let his focus change, switching his attention back to the news feeds coming in. One showed an illustration of the space elevator, not to scale, as it rose up from the coast of Brazil. Cars were going up and down the twin strips. HUMANITY’S GREATEST ENGINEERING PROJECT ENDANGERED the ticker read.

  “Hey,” Tarkos said. “Wait a minute.” He switched back to the feed showing the TLF terrorist’s speech, still rambling on: “And if these demands are not met, we will destroy the elevator.”

  Tarkos turned to Bria. “You know how you’re always saying we wrecked Earth?”

  Bria closed her top two eyes, a Sussurat expression meant to convey that Tarkos had shamed himself. “Human-caused specicide is infamous. Across Galaxy. Especially for its velocity.”

  Tarkos flinched but forced himself to keep to the point. “And you know that our Amazon is one of our last great forests?”

  “It is known that seventeen percent remains.”

  “Well,” Tarkos said, “if they blow that elevator car, and the explosion cuts the halogene elevator cable, then the elevator is going to crash right down on that seventeen percent that remains.”

  The pupils of Bria’s green eyes dilated as she thought about it, three sea-green membranes turning and slipping back. Tarkos watched her slowly rise, muscles rippling under her short, glistening fur.

  “Serious potential lifecode violation,” Bria said.

  “Yep.” Tarkos was already walking across the room. “I’ll talk to Earth’s police, and ask the Kirt to open the bay doors. You heat up the ship and put on your armor.”

  Usually Bria balked when Tarkos tried to take charge, but this time she only blinked all her eyes at once, the Sussurat equivalent of a head-nod, and loped from the room.

  _____

  One hour later, Tarkos stood atop the elevator car. The broad square surface of the elevator’s top was so large that Tarkos could not shake the feeling that he stood on the roof of a narrow building, a single tower on the equator that stretched all the way into space. He paused a moment to take in the view. Behind
him, the broad, flat strip of the up-channel of the space elevator seemed to reach to the stars. He couldn’t see the other parallel strip, behind this one, that held the down-channel cars, but he knew it was there. And before him, the soft blue horizon of the Earth curved through the stars. Home.

  He couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride. He’d seen far more impressive engineering feats out in the Galaxy, including many space elevators. But this elevator was Earth’s. This was homegrown.

  We finally did it, he thought. We finally made our first individual steps towards the stars, instead of just always hitching a ride on some Kirt or Neelee spaceship. Sure, we’d bought a lot of Galactic technology to do it, but in the end Earth had built it on her own.

  He sighed. Time to get to work. At his feet, the engineering access airlock on the top of the elevator car was as narrow as a barrel. He keyed open the hatch. The airlock wasn’t much more than a meter and a half tall. He climbed down inside, crouched, and pulled the hatch closed. It banged on his helmet as it locked down. Harsh LED lights glared at him as the airlock sealed. It made his visor turn dark. He lifted his foot, knee pressing into his chest, and, after a moment’s hesitation, stamped on the floor.

  He waited in silence, listening only to his own breath. This was the most dangerous moment, when the men below decided whether to start shooting, or maybe even set off the explosives they brought with them—or whether to hear Tarkos out. The suit he wore had a crude interface, and he opened it up, waiting for someone to turn the elevator’s network back on and call him.

  He stamped again.

  “Who are you?” a voice asked.

  Tarkos thought he recognized the voice: this would be the blond, pale man in the video. He considered it a bad sign that the voice was dead calm.

  “My name is Amir Tarkos. I’m only here to talk.”

  “We said we’d blow this elevator if anyone approached.”

  “Yes, you did. But we couldn’t know if you’re keeping your other promises unless someone came here to see that the hostages are unharmed. I am not armed. I’m in an emergency suit, with just a few minutes of air. Please let me in.”

  “How’d you get here?” another voice shouted. This voice sounded on the verge of panic. “Huh? Huh? How the hell did you get here?”

  “I was dropped from the mid-point station,” Tarkos lied. Bria had set him down using their small ship, a Predator Cruiser. “And used a rocket pack to slow. I only want to see the hostages, and then I’ll report that they’re well. The Kirt ship has already left.”

  There was a long, silent pause. Then, to his relief, the airlock began to cycle. His suit pressed against him as air pumped in and rose to room pressure.

  “Just pressurize the air lock and blow him into space,” the nervous voice said. Tarkos realized that they had left the channel open, indifferent to the fact that he could hear them now as they talked to each other.

  “Maybe I should,” the calm voice said. “But I’m curious. It seems like they would have to get some kind of assurance about us. It makes sense. And they’ve been asking to send someone down. I’m not surprised they finally just did it.”

  The hatch below dropped open unexpectedly. Tarkos fell the two and a half meters to the floor.

  “Uff!” he coughed, as he crumpled onto the carpet. Gravity pulled at nearly a full gee at this height. It was a hard fall.

  “Get up,” the calm voice said.

  Tarkos slowly managed to stand, hand on his hip. “That hurt,” he said. He hobbled once, then straightened. He looked around. Before him, the cafeteria of the elevator car, forming the whole third floor, stretched to tall windows. He’d studied the elevator car’s schematics, and he knew that below this floor lay a common room surrounded by second class cabins, and below that the first class cabins with their floor windows offering a view of the retreating Earth.

  One long wall of the cafeteria was crystal, facing out at Earth’s horizon and the stars beyond. There were many small tables scattered around the floor, as if it were one big informal café. The chairs were dispersed randomly, and coffee mugs and trays of food had been abandoned on many of the tables. A crowd had left this floor in a hurry. A single child’s shoe, pink with fresh white laces, lay on the floor before Tarkos. Narrow screens along the wall behind him displayed advertisements interspersed with passenger instructions, casting flickering colors over the polished white ceiling.

  The man with the calm voice stood before Tarkos. It was the man from the video. Tarkos had expected him to be here, since in the video the empty cafeteria formed the backdrop for his speech.

  The man looked even more pale in person than he had in the video. His blond hair was nearly white. His dress echoed his severe, ascetic calm: black pants and shoes to match his black shirt. The other man, shorter and darker, was dressed like a loud tourist in a red shirt and yellow pants, but he held a plastic machine gun that he aimed at Tarkos. The barrel shook as he twisted his big hands on the gun’s two grips, now slick with sweat.

  “I’m going to take my helmet off, OK?” Tarkos asked.

  The blond man nodded. Tarkos lifted the helmet and set it at his feet.

  He breathed. And, for a moment, he almost swooned. He hadn’t expected it, but the elevator smelled like home. Not his mother’s house, but just Earth. Earth air, Earth food, even human beings. He hadn’t realized how much he had missed it. Even here, standing before two men threatening him, for a moment he felt a surge of something like joy. But it passed abruptly, when the blond man spoke.

  “You a cop?”

  “I work for the U.N.” Tarkos said. “I used to be a peacekeeper. I was the only person that they had at the station above who was maybe a little qualified.”

  “Peter here would like to kill you,” the blond man said, gesturing at the man with the machine gun. “Peter is also wearing a belt of explosives. So we’re blowing this elevator if we do not like your behavior.”

  The one with the machine gun lifted his shirt using his thumb and forefinger, still gripping the machine gun with his other three fingers. Underneath, neat square packets wrapped in black plastic ringed his narrow belt. Tarkos was relieved to see that, unless they had antimatter in there, the explosives were likely too small to damage the elevator strip itself. They could only destroy the car, the debris of which would do minimal damage as it fell, burning, into Brazil. Well, he thought, I’ll apologize to Bria later.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Tarkos said. “No need to shoot me. No need to blow up the elevator. The Kirt ship has left. Brazilian police are working on your other demands. I just need to see the passengers, then I can tell ground control that you’re legit.”

  The blond man pulled a black metal rod from his pocket, and pointed it at Tarkos. He stared at virtual screens reporting the rod’s output. “You’re not transmitting anything. No radio. You don’t have many implants. Just a few... strange ones.”

  “I’m not here to spy on you,” Tarkos said. “I’ll even need to use your phone to send the message.”

  “OK.” He put the rod back in his pocket. “This way.”

  Tarkos followed him to a stair by the window that led down to the lower deck of the elevator. The man with the machine gun backed up to the crystal wall, to keep a clean aim on Tarkos. Tarkos eyed the pistol at the blond man’s hip, then the other man’s machine gun, and finally the belt of explosives.

  “Your guns are plastic,” Tarkos said. “The explosives are without metal too? Plastic and other organic circuits?”

  The blond man frowned. “Shut up.”

  “Just professional curiosity,” Tarkos said. “I wondered how you got them on the elevator.”

  He looked down the stairs. At the bottom, an emergency airlock had been closed. He descended the steps and peered through the narrow glass window on the heavy door. It was only wide enough for one person to gaze through it. The blond man watched Tarkos as he pressed his face against the glass. Beyond, people sat despondently on chairs in a room li
ke the one above. A boy with freckles and brown hair, sitting at the table nearest the door, looked at him hopefully, and asked some question. But Tarkos could not hear through the thick airlock window, and he had not been able to read the boy’s lips.

  He leaned to the side. There were two men with plastic pistols in their hands standing to the right. Both were young, but wearing suits with bright ties, no doubt their attempt at camouflage among the passengers. They stood with their backs to the window. Tarkos looked at them, and then at the window behind them. He held up his gloved left hand, pressed it against the window and gave a thumbs up. His head shielded the gesture from the view of the two men behind him. The two guards looked at him, however, and frowned at this, wondering what it meant, but then, as Tarkos watched, one, then the other, crumpled to the carpet.

  Tarkos turned quickly away and started up the stairs, talking loudly to mask the muffled shouts of surprise coming through the airlock door behind him. “I counted twenty-two people. I assume the other passengers are in their cabins. Except for the one that you murdered. And these remaining people are sealed in?”

  The blond man nodded.

  Tarkos looked at the man with the machine gun, the one the blond man had called Peter. Peter leaned still against the glass, and his eyes stared straight ahead, saccading erratically. He did not blink. His mouth hung open, slack. He looked to be in a trance, if not paralyzed. But the blond man had not noticed.

  Tarkos walked across the room, weaving through the chairs as he went.

  “Stop,” the blond man said. “Where are you going?”

  Tarkos turned. The man had followed him part of the way, as he hoped. From the perspective outside the room, the three of them would be spread apart, three separate and well-spaced targets.

  “There are four of you,” Tarkos said. “We’ve checked the manifest, and were able to figure that out.” He said it like a statement, but he was hoping to trick some confirmation from the blond man.

  “What is this? Are you going to make that call, or try to talk tactics?”

  “I saw the two others below.”