Earthfall

by Joshua Guess

  In Norse mythology, Valkyries are the choosers of the slain. They show up above a battlefield and pick who will die. There was a moment during my atmospheric entry when I regretted giving the old girl that name. Like it was just asking for trouble.

  Then again, it was perhaps more apt than I had any right to expect. Valkyries chose the slain, sure, but afterward Odin’s beautiful handmaidens ferried the souls of men to Valhalla. If you’re gonna go, why not die handpicked for glorious paradise?

  In that sense, the name was perfect. I hated to leave her behind, but I wanted to be as far away as possible when the scout ship found me. The Val had delivered me safely, and I wanted to return the favor by not letting her be found.

  ***

  I was exactly 6.34 kilometers away—Jax was counting—when the scout ship appeared overhead. The wind of its passage ruffled my hair, which was my cue to slip the helmet back over my head. Much as I wanted to keep enjoying the weirdness that was Earth, I wanted to prevent a bullet to my head more.

  The ship slowed as it passed. I went to one knee as it stopped in a hover about a hundred yards away. I brought my rifle up, strap still looped around my body, and aimed as the scout ship rotated in the air to face me. If the pilot was at all concerned, it didn’t show. The ship didn’t fly away or fire at me as I sighted on it.

  Jax did a fast scan with the pitiful sensors in my helmet, then took control of the servos in the arms of my suit. I did the majority of the aiming, but Jax was a computer after all. Better to let him managed the fine detail work.

  The scout ship ran twenty meters from tip to tail, with an oblong shape reminiscent of a teardrop. It was armored in the strange white material all Gaethe construction used, something like a blend of ceramic, metal, and stone but not actually any of them. My little gun could not have looked impressive, much less threatening, and that was okay with me.

  I pulled the trigger, sending off the electrical impulse to fire.

  A steel-clad slug of osmium erupted from the barrel moving at frightening speed. The compensation system worked well enough to keep me from breaking something when the horrific force of the recoil hit, so I was still upright to see the impact.

  Jax made an educated guess where the primary propulsion system was located, apparently a good one. The slug hit, sending up a fountain of shrapnel and vaporized hull, and the scout ship fell out of the air like a bird hit with a stone. Relief washed over me at the sight. The other possible target was the power system, which would have released super-heated plasma in an uncontrolled wave. Not a nuclear explosion since the Gaethe utilized fusion reactors as well, but more than enough hellish inferno to hold my interest.

  For a few seconds I was at a loss, not sure what I was supposed to do next. I wasn’t a rule-driven machine by any means, but shooting an enemy bird out of the sky after crashing my own wasn’t in any of the contingency plans. I decided to make sure the pilot couldn’t follow me. If my guiding ideal was survival, the last thing I wanted was a pissed-off Gaethe catching me.

  I kept the rail gun in my hands as I moved. My suit enhanced my strength and protected me, but in a close combat scenario I stood virtually no chance of winning.

  I didn’t have any illusions about the impact killing the pilot. I mean, my ship is the technological equivalent of a horse-drawn cart compared to what the Gaethe create, and I survived. The scout ship was bound to have systems to protect the pilot from serious injury or death. I was keeping my fingers crossed for a broken leg or something, because I was only going to get one more shot with the rail gun in enough time to matter. The thing was so hot in my armored hands that I could still feel the heat through them. The next shot would be within the cool down window—which Jax helpfully displayed on the inside of my helmet—and would trip the safeties, shutting it down.

  I slid to a halt halfway to the downed ship. A grinding filled the air, eerily reminiscent of the noises of Ceres as parts of its stony structure expanded and contracted from temperature change. Hastily dropping to one knee again, I raised the rail gun just in time to watch a seam form in the outer hull of the Gaethe ship.

  I mean just that—one second there was an unbroken section of hull, the next a door is outlined in it. A big door. A portal large enough to send a chill through my guts, a reminder that the enemy was not only alien and more advanced, but perhaps the first species in thousands of years to be higher on the food chain than human beings.

  The door swung down and shifted subtly to become a ramp, outlining the pilot. I breathed out carefully, not letting my first in-person look at a member of the Gaethe species overwhelm me.

  It stood just over three meters tall, half again my own height. Its shoulders were disproportionately broad, its frame heavily muscled. It had the smooth gray skin of one of the Gaethe racial groupings. Many on Ceres correctly pointed out the similarity to the skin of terrestrial sharks, which made sense considering the Gaethe were a partially aquatic race. The smoky gray lightened to more of an ash on its front, and to nearly white on its face and neck.

  I aimed for the center mass, praying to any God who would listen for a little help.

  In the split-second before I finished firing, the Gaethe leaped out of the way. My shot went through the empty space and did some spectacular damage to the inside of the ship, judging by the sound of it.

  I scrambled to my feet, throwing the useless gun to the side. Half a ton of angry fish barreled toward me at full speed, and I pushed my survival suit for every watt of power it could give me. Intellectually I knew running was a fool’s game. The giant creature steadily gaining on me was massive, but it was also spry. Gaethe physiology was pretty interesting—some of my own altered DNA was inspired by it—but at that moment I didn’t much care why something so big could corner like a jungle cat.

  Jax fed me video from the rear-facing camera on the back of my helmet, which was nice in that it gave me a decent view of my impending death. I ran at full speed toward a copse of trees, hoping to slow my pursuer down by slipping beneath the branches. In case that didn’t work, I grabbed the knife strapped to the side of my supply pack. It seemed like a pitiful, almost pointless weapon against something like the Gaethe chasing me, but it was what I had.

  I was at the edge of the trees when the thing lunged forward with a burst of speed and dove at me. I was caught off guard, and wasn’t able to react quickly enough when it snatched at one of my ankles. A hand with two fingers and two bilateral thumbs made a fist the size of bowling ball around my calf, the ceramic of my armor crunching to dust and the metal bending.

  The Gaethe—a male, judging by the smooth ridges formed on the backs of its forearms—had a lot of momentum as it grabbed me in that twisting fall. All of which was transferred to me.

  I was yanked off my feet and cracked like a whip, my armor going rigid in an attempt to protect me. Then the Gaethe swung me bodily again, this time aiming for a nearby tree.

  Pain like nothing I’ve ever felt before filled my entire universe. I was distantly aware of a musical, two-tone babble that I understood to be Gaethe speech. The recognition was momentary, however, as the torso of my suit shattered and twisted along with a bunch of my ribs. My left arm broke in a couple places, it being between me and the tree, and the pain redoubled as I fell to the ground.

  My leg was still in the monster’s grip, though the Gaethe’s urgency seemed to have died down. It began dragging me along rather than kill me outright, which seemed like a pretty shitty way to behave. Every stone and fallen branch jostled me, sending waves of pain through lancing through my body. Time stretched out as I prayed over and over for it to end.

  I expected to die. Hell, I wanted to die, it hurt so much. It says something about my state of mind that when I heard the voice, for a few seconds I genuinely thought it was an angel—or maybe my Valkyrie—come to take me away.

  “Hey, asshole!” the voice said, distinctly feminine and amplified. “Step away from him and put your fucking hands up!”

  I was pr
etty sure angels didn’t swear that much.

  Eleven

  My suit injected me with a stimulant and pain medicine. Whether or not the combination was a good idea, Jax did it anyway. My power supply was damaged, which meant my highly advanced mobile armor was on its way to being a very complicated prison.

  The drugs hit me instantly, making me almost too alert. The Gaethe craned his head to take in the sight, and even laying on the ground was barely a wide enough angle for me to do the same.

  A few meters away, a gleaming black figure stood. It was humanoid and obviously a piece of technology, though my first impression was not of a machine. I knew it was one, but the lines and shapes of it were that of a heavily muscled human being. Lines of black cable flexed in tiny fits and starts much as a person’s would as they moved. It was like an anatomical drawing of the musculoskeletal system rendered in charcoal by Da Vinci’s hand.

  It was also head and shoulders taller than the alien about to kill me. Call it five meters.

  The Gaethe let out a startled cry, a high-low harmonic without a need for translation. ‘What the fuck?’ is surprisingly universal. To his credit, the Gaethe pilot didn’t lose his cool. Instead the thick open vest he wore undulated at the edges and extended in a snap to cover his exposed arms even as it closed and crept up to do the same for his arms. Malleable fabrics using flexible circuitry were one of the advancements humanity hadn’t been able to replicate. My suit was a pale imitation of the thin, tough armor sliding into place over the enemy pilot.

  “Let him go,” the giant machine boomed again in a slightly husky female voice. “Everyone can walk away from this.”

  “Only I walk away,” the Gaethe said in accented but clear English, that same dual tone in the words. He blurred toward the giant machine, massive fingers ripping away a large section of my leg armor. I watched in horror as the deceptively fast alien leaped nearly his own height in the air and slashed with the ragged leaf of metal. My one shot at escape evaporated before my eyes, the robot barely beginning to react by the time its head was nearly severed.

  The Gaethe landed and drove one of its tree trunk legs in a reaping motion. The pilot’s expectation must have been that the massive damage to the neck of the machine would have staggered it or at least prevented it from responding. I know I expected it.

  Both of us were wrong.

  The robot might have been slower than the Gaethe, but it wasn’t a huge degree of difference. The thing ignored the damage, head wobbling as it nimbly danced away from the second attack. Shadowy debris rained from the wound as it slammed its own huge fist down into the startled pilot. The blow caught the Gaethe right on the long bone of its upper thigh—is it still a femur when it’s in an alien’s leg?—and a sound like a gunshot rang out as it snapped.

  Whatever fight the pilot had in him evaporated instantly, replaced by deafening and wordless howls of agony. Memories of my early flight training rose up unbidden, a ghostly echo of my own badly broken arm flashing through my body. Weird as it was, I sympathized with the poor bastard.

  I though the machine would perform a coup de grace, but the killing blow never fell. Instead the thing straightened, tilting its head back in place. I watched as the damage began to knit closed.

  “Come on,” the robot said to me. “He’s not chasing anyone. We need to get out of here.” It put out a giant hand to help me up.

  “I don’t know if I can stand,” I said. “I’m pretty messed up.”

  The robot paused for a moment, considering. Then it knelt and scooped me up in both hands with gentle precision. A second later, I, Mars Cori, an interstellar scout pilot, was being carried like a newborn child across the vast black fields of sand.

  I was pretty okay with it, to be honest.

  The scenery moved by very, very quickly. I realized with a sharp pang I’d probably lost my ship for good. You’d think my worries would have been more immediate, like the broken bones screaming for my attention, or at the least the seriousness of being trapped twenty light years from home with no way to leave. No. I pined for the broken vessel I’d come here in. I knew it was an inanimate piece of technology, but logic didn’t enter into it.

  “We’re almost there,” came my rescuer’s voice, the volume much more tolerable. “I’m going to have to put you down in a minute. I don’t know how badly you’re injured, so you might want to get yourself ready.”

  “Sure,” I said. Then a little louder, as the external speaker on my helmet was shut off to conserve power. “Where are we going, by the way? I ask because I’ve never seen a giant robot in its natural habitat.”

  The machine laughed. “It’s easy to forget you’re not from here. It’ll make more sense when you see it for yourself.”

  We slowed, though there wasn’t anything especially interesting about the location. The rippling hills were overgrown with trees and brush, though a crumbling town could be seen in the distance. When I was set on my feet, the ground was hard. I realized after a moment of confusion that I was standing on the remains of a road.

  Jax’s feed from my suit went red as soon as I had to stand under my own power—engaging the suit was draining the last trickle of energy. I popped the releases holding my supplies in place, letting them fall into a pile. I took a big step backward and did the same for the suit itself. I removed the storage drive after letting my gauntlet clunk to the asphalt, then emerged from my survival suit as if it were a cocoon.

  To my surprise, the robot did the same. It started as a sort of fuzziness at the edges, like the thing was a drawing beginning to smudge. Then it began to melt, flowing from solid matter into the ever-present black sand surrounding me. Within seconds what had been the machine was a low hill of inert grit.

  A woman stood to one side of the pile, definitely human. She was tall, nearly six feet, and had light brown skin. She wore an unfamiliar uniform and a sly smile which crinkled her dark eyes at the corners. She leaned on the barrel of my rail gun

  “Where’d you get that?” I said stupidly, pointing at the weapon.

  She hefted it. “Grabbed it while I was sneaking up on you and that pilot. Which was after I found your ship.” Her eyes darted across my discarded armor. “We’re going to need to take all of that stuff with us. Can’t leave any clues behind.”

  I laughed bitterly. “My ship is going to be a bit of a clue we were here, even wiped clean.”

  “That’s already taken care of.” She moved next to me and carefully took some of my weight by lacing an arm around my torso. “Let’s get you inside while I clean up, and I’ll explain everything on the way.”

  “Inside?”

  She nodded, then pointed.

  A section of black sand in front of us parted of its own accord, moving in solid masses like two sides of a hidden door. Considering the wide stairs leading into the earth the movement revealed, I guess they actually were hidden doors.

  “I’m Rinna, by the way,” my rescuer said. “Rinna Gianopoulos. Captain of the defense forces at Bravo 2.”

  “Captain?” The only captains I knew were of the ships back home. Then I remembered through the haze of pain and drugs that the term applied to military rank as well as title. It was like hearing someone call themselves a Duke or Viscount; I knew the terminology, but the UEE didn’t have military ranks. “I’m Mars Cori. I’m a pilot.”

  It sounded lame, but I didn’t have it in me to care.

  Rinna helped me down the stairs and through a narrow hallway, then lowered me into a frayed chair bolted inside a cramped compartment. It looked like the inside of a ship of some kind, only one so small it qualified as a torture method.

  “Just relax while I finish up,” Rinna said. “Ten minutes and we’re home free.”

  Two trips later, the pieces of my armor were stowed beneath the seats along with my survival gear. Rinna plopped down across from me and did something to a control panel. The interior of the capsule brightened considerably.

  The light shone on something I had missed,
a narrow band of metal circling Rinna’s forehead and tightly-bound hair. It wasn’t a solid piece, but it took Jax a few seconds to spit out an analysis based on what I could see. The thing had bumps Jax took to be sensors, almost invisibly thin wiring running around the outside, and raised sections that were probably microcircuits.

  Also, Rinna was striking. Her hair turned out to be a dark brown rather than black, her narrow face accented by high cheekbones and a bold nose that wasn’t beaky. She had full lips and bright eyes, the latter of which regarded me with a mixture of concern and amusement.

  “So does this thing move?” I asked. “I thought we were going somewhere.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “It’s been moving since I shut the door, actually. We’re accelerating slower than I’d usually allow because of your injuries, but even now we’re moving at seventy miles an hour.”

  “It’s only been thirty seconds,” I said. “What is this?”

  “One of the best-kept secrets the American survivors have,” she answered. “A maglev transportation system running all over the eastern half of the continent. We’ve been working on it for decades. I can explain the details if you like.”

  I shook my head. I actually was curious to know how such an enormous project had been hidden from the Gaethe, but the exhaustion and pain were weighing on me. “Tell me later. For now, I’d like to know what you did to my ship. Then where we’re going and how did you make a big suit of armor out of that stuff all over the ground.” I had a hundred other questions, but they could all wait. Assuming I didn’t die or anything.

  “Your ship is safe,” Rinna said. “I arrived with a team, and they stayed behind to move it into another transport tunnel. It’ll reach Bravo 2 after us. The cargo lines run slower. See what I did there? I slipped in where we were going.” She grinned at me. “Before you ask, Bravo 2 is one of the communities we use as a base for preparation for peeling the Gaethe off this planet.”