Earthrise

by Craig Delancey

  The man put his hand over his pistol but did not draw it. “That’s three more people than you. Now, make the call. We’re going to accelerate the schedule, because of this little intrusion of having you come down here.”

  “I lied,” Tarkos said. “I don’t work for the U.N.”

  The man frowned. After a moment he said, “Well?”

  “I’m a Predator.”

  The man stepped back reflexively. “Kill him!” he shouted. “Peter, kill him!”

  But Peter did not move. He stood leaning against the window, mouth slack, clutching the machine gun in both hands with the barrel still aimed down the stairs.

  The man drew his gun but before he raised it Tarkos held up his hands and shook his head. “Wait. Just think a moment. Look at that.” He pointed out at the Earth. The blond man turned his head, and a ship shimmered into view, its chameleon field sputtering off. The ship had a dangerous, predatory shape, narrow and sleek like a mako shark. Atop the ship, a huge bear-like figure in Harmonizer enforcement armor shimmered into view as the armor’s independent chameleon field powered down. Bria stood at the very nose of the ship, near the glass wall of the elevator car, and held two long tubes, one white, the other narrow and black.

  “That’s Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess,” Tarkos said.

  “Peter, blow the bomb!”

  Again, Peter did nothing. The blond man looked over at Tarkos.

  “The white device that Bria is pointing at your colleague,” Tarkos said, “is a mono-pole magnet gun. A two thousand tesla magnetic field is pulsing through your colleague’s skull now, slamming his brain into a continual seizure, as his neurons all fire at once. He’s paralyzed. He’ll be dead in a few minutes, as his autonomic system shuts down, if you don’t surrender. Bria has already used the same technique to render the men downstairs unconscious.”

  The pale man squeezed the pistol, making it tremble slightly.

  “Please, for your own safety, keep the gun down,” Tarkos said. “The black gun that Bria is pointing at you is a visible light laser. Bria has four eyes. She can keep two on your colleague, and two on you. That wall is Galactic diamond. Bria is nearly 90 degrees to it. She can fire a laser straight through it without damage, and cut you in two. And we Predators do have implants—strange implants, as you noted. Targeting implants. Bria only needs to look at you and the gun will do the rest. It won’t miss.”

  The blond man hesitated. “That laser could drill a hole through the window. The room would decompress. That alien thing won’t take the chance. They need this elevator to speed their invasion.”

  “Look at her,” Tarkos said.

  Reluctantly, the man let his eyes again slip sideways.

  “She’s Sussurat,” Tarkos continued, “and she is a commander of the Predators. Her devotion to the lifecode is total. Absolute. Among her people, she’s a sacred warrior for life. And she thinks you’re going to drop this elevator on the Amazon rain forest. There’s no chance she won’t take, no danger she won’t confront, to prevent that.”

  The man hesitated a long moment. Then he straightened and let his shoulders drop, almost relaxing. Tarkos tensed: he knew this meant the man had made his decision. The man said, his voice again calm, “You’re a traitor. You have helped to enslave your own race. The Omega Threshold is coming.”

  He raised his pistol, turning—turning not to shoot Tarkos but rather towards the window. For a moment Tarkos thought he meant to shoot at Bria, or shoot at the crystal, both hopeless tasks, but then Tarkos realized what the pale man really wanted to do: he hoped to shoot the explosive belt on the other man, in the hope of igniting it.

  “No!” Tarkos shouted.

  But the pale man kept spinning, falling as he turned. He rotated once, and then landed on the deck and rolled onto his back. His arm, still holding the pistol, thumped down beside him. He screamed as blood pulsed from his severed limb.

  Tarkos crouched down beside him, pulling a grappling line from his suit’s belt. “Sorry,” he said. “That’s gonna hurt. But I did warn you that Bria would take the shot. Now let me get a tourniquet on you or you’re going to die.” The man passed out while Tarkos wrapped the white cord around the stump of his arm and pulled it tight.

  Tarkos stood and walked over to the man by the wall. He carefully disconnected the belt of explosives. As he backed away, Bria let the magnetic field go. The man called Peter slumped to the floor with a sigh. Like the men below, he would survive, but he would wake with a crippling headache that lasted weeks. There might be brain damage.

  The room was now eerily silent. Tarkos looked out at his Sussurat partner, where she stood in the near vacuum of high Earth orbit. Behind her, the moon was rising over white clouds billowing above the Atlantic. It seemed to Tarkos, for a moment, that the mighty Sussurat stood astride his world.

  “Bria?” he said into the helmet radio.

  “Yes, Tarkos?”

  “Welcome to Earth.”

  CHRONICLE IV:

  EARTHRISE

  CHAPTER 1

  Margherita Calvino put on the space suit, which took a long time because the suit was too big and it shifted around and slipped off her shoulders every time she reached for the helmet. The suit was made for an adult. Months before, she had folded and tucked the sleeves of the arms above her elbow, and then taped them down with big gray swathes of dirty duct tape. She had done the same for the pants, folding them above the knees. The gloves were stiff and her fingers barely reached to the first knuckle joint. It took a long time to get a decent grip on the helmet, squeezing it between both hands, all while trying to keep her back straight so the suit wouldn’t slip off a shoulder. She carefully lifted the helmet down over her head. Fortunately the seals found each other and locked automatically.

  She tottered into the ship’s airlock. As the air cycled out, she stood very still, a habit acquired so that she could balance the huge oversized helmet on her shoulders. Otherwise, it would fall forward or back, and obscure her view. Her thin body was lost inside the lumpy material, and she surely would not have been able to walk in the suit and with its massive backpack, were it not for the negligible gravity of the asteroid. She looked at her reflection in the mirrored wall of the airlock.

  “I look like a monstrous, silvery sack,” she said.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Margherita?” her ship asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Open the door.”

  The door parted onto a dark room of roughly hewn metal and stone. The suit chimed, a reminder that she now moved through hard vacuum. She jumped down out of the ship, and bounded over to the airlock exit from the bay. It was a Rinneret airlock: round and low. But the button to open the door was nearly 160 centimeters off the floor. She had to stretch to punch it.

  She stepped through the airlock and inside the asteroid, and followed a familiar path through dark tunnels lit only dimly by pale violet lights that—to human eyes—cast a useless glow. She stopped before a round door. Again, she had to jump to hit a black button by the silvery metal airlock frame.

  After a long time, the door slid aside. Black prialps tested the air around the door, and then two huge black eyes loomed into view. A Rinneret. The Rinneret, her only contact among these people. The creature took a step into the hall, revealing the front of its black centipede body, as wide as the girl but three meters long. Before the creature could protest, the human girl said, “Listen, Nine-Four-Rock-Cutter: I am going to die if I do not get these amino acids.” She transmitted a message to it, listing the chemicals. She kept the space suit on, even though the air pressure here was sufficient and she could have used an oxygen mask. But she didn’t want to struggle with the thick, low-oxygen atmosphere of the Rinneret, which she could breathe but which always gave her a headache even with the mask. Besides, Nine-Four-Rock-Cutter stank.

  The old Rinneret had only recently acquired the name Nine-Four-Rock-Cutter, after being Nine-Five-Rock-Cutter for many years. His rise of a single step in the wealth hierarchy of th
e mining profession had not been earned, however. Rather, his nearest rival had died, automatically advancing him in the profit rankings, and earning him this new title. Still, for a few days the old monster had seemed swelled with self-satisfaction, as he crawled around his apartments in the asteroid.

  The dark cave of iron was carved in an asteroid given a spin up till it felt like a fraction of an Earth gravity here at the periphery. The old Rinneret had lined his personal chamber with a material that looked like dirty felt, and the ragged ends of the material lay over the threshold of his door where he stood and stared at the tottering girl, his compound eyes inscrutable.

  But Margherita had learned long before to interpret Rinneret body language by the motion and position of their many appendages. Nine-Four-Rock-Cutter was both frustrated, as shown by the nervous twitching of the small digits on his many lower arms, and intrigued, as evidenced by the reaching and pulling motion he made with his lead arms. Frustrated, no doubt, because the human girl now asked for something; the Rinneret had reluctantly crawled out of its sleeping nest to face her here, and it wanted to be compensated. Intrigued, because the human girl was proving to be a good investment, of which it might hope to profit even more.

  “One-Human female,” the Rinneret said. “These are expensive.”

  Because the Rinnerets recognized she was too young to participate in the ranking market to earn a name that expressed her job and her ranked earnings at that job, this temporary name referred only to her status as the sole human in Rinneret space. Living among the Rinneret, being called only by this title, sometimes she forgot her real name. It had been—it was, she reminded herself as often as she could—Margherita Lorenina Calvino.

  The Rinneret spoke in his native language. Margherita understood much of the language, but often Rinneret would speak at a pitch above human hearing. She used her suit’s translationware to convert over to English, to be sure not to miss anything. But she answered in Rinneret, making clicking and gargling sounds.

  “No. Nope. No. No they aren’t,” she said. “They aren’t expensive.”

  “We have already reached an agreement on your food supplies,” Nine-Four-Rock-Cutter said, changing strategies without pause. “Why should I help you?”

  Ah, Margherita thought: now we’re talking. Now begins the real conversation. She’d learned through much hardship and misunderstanding that this question—why should I help you?—was the most common phrase that the Rinneret spoke when talking to one another. For a Rinneret, the question stood in place of saying hello. Margherita knew better than to plead mercy. She had to get to the numbers.

  “I will die without these. You own thirty-six percent of me. You’ll lose it all, your whole stake, if I die. How about that?”

  The Rinneret was silent a long time. Finally, it said, “I can purchase foods—Rinneret delicacies, very expensive, very over-priced—that contain these amino acids. But I demand an additional one percent share.”

  Margherita had expected this. As a refugee among the Rinneret, she had been forced to sell off shares in herself, as all Rinneret did, in order to receive aid or help of any kind. All Rinneret children, when they reached an age of about fifteen human years, had to sell shares of themselves to their parents, or anyone else willing to buy, in order to purchase shelter, food, or further education.

  But her situation had been desperate. Stranded among the Rinneret, far from Galactic civilization and farther still from Earth, she had no friends, no money, nothing of value. She had only herself and her broken ship. She had been forced to sell shares in herself again and again, at bargain prices. Now, she had only three percent ownership in herself left. She was what the Rinneret called a highly-leveraged-entity. She couldn’t lose another sliver, or she’d have no hope at all of ever buying a majority share of herself back. She’d be sold out, a complete slave instead of a partial one. There were such beings among the Rinneret, and they were considered the lowest of the low. They were called unnameables, because they had no share of themselves left and so could not be listed in a naming market. And there could be no greater indignity for a Rinneret than to lose one’s public role in the market. To the Rinneret, the market was civilization.

  For a moment, Margherita imagined the polar bears that her ship had shown her in old recordings the previous night. She imagined two—no, seven—of them here in this chamber with her and Nine-Four-Rock-Cutter. They’d take up all the space left. They’d be strong from Earth gravity. They had teeth and claws and fur. They could crack a Rinneret in two, before eating him. They would eat him quick. Then they’d lick their paws.

  But she didn’t say this. Instead, she said, “No. No, because I have something better. I know of a stake of nickel that is totally left all alone. No one has cracked a hammer at it. But I can get it. I know where it is. And I will lead you to it. The stake is yours, I waive my finder percentage and retain only my three percent prospector’s portion.”

  “Two percent, pending agreement.”

  “Done,” she said. “If you pay the claim fee.”

  “Expected utility?”

  “More than four hundred credits. Possibly much more.”

  “Agreed, in exchange for one year’s supply of these amino acids.”

  She carefully held up two fingers, the thick glove of her suit barely separating to form a V. Her helmet tottered as she did it, but she managed to keep the Rinneret in view as she said, “Two years supply, and I waive any share of profit in excess of one hundred credits.” She didn’t expect the nickel deposit to be worth anything like 5,000 credits, so limiting her two percent share to a hundred credits was really just bravado, meant to intrigue Nine-Four-Rock-Cutter with the image of a huge return.

  “Agreed,” the old Rinneret clicked. “Pending confirmation and payment. Where is this stake?”

  “Asteroid seven-ten-seven-nine-eleven,” she said. She had grown quick with the base-twelve math that the Rinneret used.

  The old Rinneret threw up all its primary arms: a sign of disgust and disappointment. “That stake has been explored and abandon by Eleven-Ten-Rock-Cutter!” It reared back in complaint. “He reported it is barren. And, he still has claim.”

  Margherita smiled, a wasted gesture. “Eleven-Ten lied. He never filed claim. He can’t afford to. He just wanted to keep the rest of us off the trail while he saved up enough credits to pay the claim fee.”

  Nine-Four-Rock-Cutter slowly settled forward, his big eyes focusing closely on the young girl’s helmet. He rubbed his spiny hands together in an involuntary expression of delighted greed.

  “We have an agreement?” she asked.

  The old Rinneret clicked, its black arms pulsing in undisguised glee. “We have agreement.”

  _____

  “It worked,” Margherita said, after she climbed back through the sighing airlock and into her ship. Or half a ship: the front nose section had been sheared off in laser fire. The emergency airlock had sealed the ruptured cockpit and the main cabin had, amazingly, held pressure for the Earth year that passed since the attack.

  She pulled off the suit helmet and, partly from relief to be back inside the ship with its comfortable atmosphere and light and temperature, and partly from relief to have accomplished her aim, she did a little dance, the big space suit sloshing about her as she moved.

  “Excuse me?” the ship said. It said that a lot. It didn’t really understand much. But Margherita had to talk to it or she’d go mad. She set her helmet down carefully in the ship’s closet. She loosened the collar of the suit, but didn’t bother to open the sealed strip along the chest. The loosened collar left her enough room to shimmy out. She lifted the puddled silver suit and piled it on the helmet. She reached down in the suit and pulled the small Galactic hyper-radio from the inside suit pocket—a cylinder not much larger than a pen—and held it tightly in one hand. The radio had been the last thing her mother had given her, before leaving the ship. “Keep this with you,” her mother had said. “I have to see what happened to
your father. But I’ll call you. I’ll call you as soon as I get out there.”

  But she never had called. Her mother had gone out the airlock, hoping to find their father floating in the debris outside. He had been in the cockpit when the ship had been cut in half. But her mother had never radioed. She had not come back.

  Now Margherita turned the radio on, listened a moment to static—the roar of the hyperspace side of the big bang—then turned the radio to silent and clipped it to her threadbare shirt. The radio would turn itself on if any strong signal came through.

  She stopped to stare a moment at her reflection in the closet mirror: her dark eyes, bloodshot and tired, inspected the ragged ends of her black hair, cut crudely with a knife by her own hand to a length just above her shoulders. Then her gaze settled on the scar over her cheeks. The scar seemed never to fade, and always surprised her by its angry red color. She knew it looked ugly, a shining welt that stretched across her entire face. Another Rinneret, Eleven-Ten-Rock-Cutter, had cut her face with his claws, last year, during her short time at a Rinneret school. She touched the scar thoughtfully with the tips of her fingers. She wouldn’t let herself cry because of it again. She’d cried enough, since her mother had disappeared.

  Instead, she was going to get revenge on Eleven-Ten-Rock-Cutter for having scarred her like this. She was going to take from him the asteroid he had dreamed to claim for himself.

  “I’ll show that stupid bug,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” the ship asked.

  She closed the closet door and turned to inspect the little cabin of the ship. The endless treading of dust from her boots had left black prints on the white floor and smeared the lower walls of the long cabin: a graphite trail penciled from the airlock to the closet to her bed and from there to her desk. Hundreds of gray fingerprints grimed the white switches and the edges of her cot. Two of the four ceiling lights were out, making the room a pale echo of the dark caves outside. The whole place looked, she knew, quite shabby compared to when she had first entered it, with her mother and father, two years before. But the nuclear pile in the back of the ship still throbbed with energy and provided the power needed to recycle the air, process her food, keep a constant temperature, and run the computer. She always sighed with relief when she arrived back in the ship, after leaving the dim black and blue caves of the old Rinneret’s asteroid. It pleased her just to stand without a spacesuit, in light that human eyes could see, in air that did not make her gasp and sweat.