The Shihoka’s drive crisped the daisies and charred the grass. The sun was rising—they had overtaken the dawn. The steam from the engine bells blew away on the wind. Colm inhaled the salty sea breeze as he dragged Dhjerga down the steps.
“Help!” he yelled in the direction of the Free Church Manse. A stern gray two-storey house, it stood on a rise amidst a windbreak of neglected pines. The smaller building beside it, with a peaked roof, was a disused Lutheran church. Maybe no one was awake yet.
But as he hauled Dhjerga across the field, Meg came to meet them, combi in hand. “Who the fuck’s that?”
“Friend of mine from Kisperet.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Death curse, apparently.”
“Okayyy.”
Colm rolled his eyes.
Meg slung her combi and took Dhjerga’s legs.
They carried Dhjerga along the footpath through the pines, to the scraggly back garden where Bridget had started planting potatoes. The back door was open. Lloyd stood in the doorway with his arms folded.
“Out of the way,” Colm panted.
He had one foot across the doorstep when Dhjerga began to spasm. He made gargling noises in his throat and kicked his legs, forcing Colm and Meg to drop him. Meg leapt back.
“Ah,” Lloyd said. “That’s Grandpa Mackenzie’s wards.” He pointed at Dhjerga in a dramatic biblical pose. “He’s got the taint of evil on him.”
“He’s sick!” Colm shouted. “He needs to lie down.”
Behind Lloyd in the kitchen, Daisy picked little Nicky up. “No, sweetheart, you cannae go out. Not yet.” All the Mackenzies and Wilsons had caught Lloyd’s paranoia. Nicky had to stay in the house at all times unless it was broad day and several adults were with him.
“And he can’t come in the house,” Lloyd said. “Take him in the church. That’s not warded. I suppose my granddad thought the Lord would protect it, but it’s been deconsecrated for years.”
Dhjerga was moaning and thrashing. Not knowing what else to do, Colm dragged him away from the house. Immediately he quieted down.
Wards? The taint of evil? Really?
Axel came out of the house and helped Colm carry Dhjerga into the church. They made him a bed by pushing two pews together face to face and laying sleeping bags on them. The sleeping bags were a fruit of Colm’s previous foraging missions with the Shihoka, as was the gas heater that Axel turned on and placed near Dhjerga. “What did you say was wrong with him?”
“Search me,” Colm said. “Hope that heater’s safe.”
“No electricity. It’s safe unless he knocks it over.”
Dhjerga was no longer moving at all. He had sunk back into a deep coma.
“I’ll stay with him,” said Sunita Wilson, entering the church. “You go on and have a sit-down. Colm. You look done in.”
“Thanks, Sunita.”
Axel said, “I’ll go move the ship.”
“I don’t think it matters anymore. Gaethla was the last of the Magistrates, and he’s dead.”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about, so I’ll move it anyway.”
Colm didn’t have the strength to argue. He went inside, sank into a chair and gratefully accepted a mug of instant coffee from his mother. Meg stood by the door, watching Axel walk towards the Shihoka.
“Hey, Meg,” Colm said, suddenly remembering. He reached into his pocket. “I found this for you.”
He held out the framed photograph. It showed Meg, aged eight or nine, with her parents.
Meg’s face crumpled as she stared at it. “Fuck you, Collie Mack,” she breathed.
“I thought you’d like it …” Colm had wanted to make it up to Meg, even though he still didn’t know what he had done.
“That’s my mom and dad.”
“I know, I—”
“It doesn’t help, OK? We need food, not family pictures! We need meds, tools—"
“I got meds—”
“I just bet you did.”
“What did I do, Meg? Please just tell me. Why are you so pissed at me?”
“I can’t believe you need to ask!”
“Well, I did bring food,” Colm muttered. He kicked his duffel, which someone had brought in from the ship.
Meg fell on her knees and opened it. “Oh my God,” she said, lifting out a box of Pocky. Her voice wobbled. “I used to love this stuff.”
Suddenly they heard shouting in the garden. Everyone jumped up. Meg was first out of the door with Colm close behind her.
Dhjerga struggled up the garden path on his hands and knees. Sunita was trying to hold him back. “Must tell him,” he gasped.
“Dhjerga, for fuck’s sake go back to bed,” Colm howled.
“I didn’t come to dead that fucker. That was just—luck.”
“Some luck.”
“Came—to warn you.” Dhjerga’s eyes were glazed. Colm squatted down in front of him, afraid to miss a word. “Hope—not too late …”
CHAPTER 39
EXTINCTION PROTOCOL.
Target: Earth.
It was too much to take in at first. They all sat around the kitchen table, exchanging futile expressions of incredulity. Colm thought about how stupid it was, how he’d assumed he had got away from the war. All his repressed guilt about deserting from the Fleet came back. He had left everyone in the Betelgeuse system to fend for themselves, and now Earth was in the sentrienza’s cross-hairs.
He had forgotten what it was like to fight a foe that had spaceships.
Dhjerga had collapsed again as soon as he delivered his news. They’d put him back to bed in the church. Colm looked around at his family and friends and saw that they were all hoping it was a mistake or a misunderstanding.
Best to clear that up. He got on his computer. He knew there were a bunch of military satellites still in orbit, as they would automatically ping the Shihoka when he went sub-orbital. “Axel, do you still have Fleet clearance?”
“As far as I know.”
“Can you talk to these sats? I want to see their observation data. Everything in the outer system.”
Axel took over. “I’m in,” he said, and a few moments later: “Data dump on its way … This is gonna take a while to crunch.”
Outside the kitchen windows, across the back field, some of the locals ringed the Shihoka with their guns pointed towards the ship. Little did they know that they no longer needed to worry about Ghosts. They needed to worry about dying in a hail of fire.
Nicky toddled around the table, offering Pocky to everyone, as if he hoped that might cheer them up.
Daisy boiled water on the gas stove and made more coffee.
Colm thought: I can do this.
Dhjerga had told them what he did at Betelgeuse. He had a strange way of describing it—the tekne of space travel—but Colm knew what he’d meant. It was normally impossible to flit to moving objects, such as spaceships. But Colm had visited the Unsinkable and the Shihoka while they were moving … in the zero-gravity field.
True, he hadn’t really flitted to either ship.
He wasn’t the mage Dhjerga was.
But now, he’d have to equal Dhjerga’s feat.
He played with his coffee mug, hovering his left hand above it and levitating it a few millimeters into the air.
“Done,” Axel said abruptly. “Here are the observations.” Colm let his cup go, startled. It spilled. No one noticed. They were all crowding around the computer.
“Oh, this is bullshit,” Meg said after a moment.
Axel’s finger rested on a loose constellation of ship icons outside Jupiter’s orbit, on the other side of the solar system from the gas giant. They’d come in at an angle to the ecliptic, minimizing their in-system travel time. “Those are sentrienza ships. They’re big; like the ones that Dhjerga said attacked Betelgeuse.”
“We need to wake him up,” Meg said. “Get him to stop them.” She moved towards the door.
“No,” Colm said. “Won’t work. The
y’d have to be in the zero-gravity field, and they aren’t. They’re already here.”
A pall of despair settled over the kitchen. Axel remotely commanded the satellites to track the sentrienza ships as they burnt inward towards Earth. They must have exited the zero-gravity field just a day or two ago. “It looks as if they planned their attacks on Betelgeuse and Earth to come off at the same time,” Colm muttered.
“They’d have wanted to be sure of getting us all,” Axel said. “What about the colony planets?”
“They’re probably going to hit them, too.” Colm was trying to levitate his mug again, and failing. His concentration was shot. The little icons on the screen had a hypnotic effect. Faerie lights. Each one of them armed with microscopic black holes, which would eat Earth from the inside out, crumpling the planet’s crust, loosing stupendous flows of magma, boiling off the seas … Think, Mackenzie, think.
He looked around for Meg’s duffel. There it was, by the cat’s water dish. He pawed through it for the tropo bottle. He popped two tabs, washing them down with water from the jerrycan on the kitchen counter. After his weeks of sobriety, the rush hit fast and hard.
The fog of despair that had filled his mind cleared away, leaving the answer shining out like a star.
“The Shihoka!” he shouted.
“What about it?” Axel said.
Colm didn’t have time to explain. “Ghost magic plus human technology. This’ll work. I know it.” Then he slumped. “No, it won’t.”
“What? Why?”
“Haven’t got any nukes.”
“Yes, we have,” Axel said.
“Huh? No, we haven’t.”
Axel looked slightly embarrassed. “Before we left Betelgeuse, your friend Gil sent us a care package. An unmanned supply capsule. It was packed with life support essentials … and some extra rounds for the railgun. Including a couple of nuclear rounds.”
Colm gaped in astonishment. “And they’re still on board? I’ve been flying around the world with nukes in the boot, without knowing it?”
Axel eked out a smile. “I didn’t tell you in case you went and used them or something.”
*
“No,” Daisy said. “You are not going to fight the entire sentrienza navy single-handed without having breakfast. They’re two weeks away. It won’t make any difference if you sit down and have a bowl of porridge. And you may as well have a nap, too.”
Colm’s heart filled with love for his mother. He bowed to the inevitable. Exhausted by his adventures in Tokyo, he slept longer than he planned; it was getting on for evening when he woke. He gobbled a quick meal, followed by a couple of tabs of tropo. Then he asked his father to give him a bit of coaching. Lloyd silently showed him how to do the levitation thing properly—Colm had been holding his fingers wrong.
When he had it down, he crossed the back field to the Shihoka, carrying an empty mug. It had a picture of the Loch Ness Monster on the side with the legend NESSIE LIVES.
Axel was standing by the steps. He’d been checking the ship over while Colm slept. “I’ll go with you,” he said.
“You can’t.” Colm had explained what he was going to do.
“Do what you did before. Copy me.”
Colm studied his friend, taking in the lines around his mouth, the gray hairs at Axel’s temples. Were those normal signs of age? Or was Colm using him up? “No, Axel. I’m through with that. It’s black magic. I’m doing no more of it.” He tried for a jokey tone. “My dad won’t let me in the house again if I keep on acting like a Ghost.”
“Our lives are at stake!”
Colm shook his head. He didn’t know how to thank Axel for his offer, so he just said, “I’m going by myself. I don’t think it’d work with anyone else on board.” This was an excuse. If he failed, he wanted to die alone, rather than watch his family and friends die later.
He suited up and settled into the Shihoka’s cockpit. Esthesia poured rich sensory feedback into his nervous system as he ran through the preflight checks. And wasn’t it also true that he had company? Him and the ship. A perfect duo, joined at the mind. This was all he needed.
Up he went. Launch gees pinned him in his couch, while friction heat rasped at his hull, and the pressure of the atmosphere gradually lessened, until he leapt free. Relishing the liberty of freefall, Colm waggled his wings for sheer pleasure, and then cut the main drive. Vacuum prickled his skin. He stretched his sensors into the void, all his telescopic and radar and infrared eyes on stalks, searching for the enemy.
*
Back on the ground, Axel unclamped his hands from Nicky’s ears. The Shihoka’s contrail of water vapor faded into the sky. Everyone had retreated a safe distance down the track to watch the launch. Now they aimlessly drifted apart. The elder folks returned to the house to see if the vibrations from the launch had broken any windows.
Bridget said, “Shall we take the kids down to the beach?”
Axel and Meg looked at each other and shrugged. The weather was fine, for a change, and this seemed as good a way as any to spend what might be their last afternoon on Earth.
Although the water was far too cold, in Axel’s opinion, to go swimming, the Wilson kids took off their shoes and waded. Nicky kept toddling towards the waves, eager to join them. Axel pulled him back over and over, thinking of Colm, somewhere out there, hunting sentrienza ships, and being hunted by them. Why didn’t he take me? He took my ship, but not me. That’s two ships he’s taken off me without even asking.
Meg stalked up and down, stepping from stone to stone, with her combi slung on her back. This was her way of coping, being constantly on the watch for danger. She said to Axel, “Do you think this would be happening if we’d let Emnl have Nicky?”
“You aren’t saying we should have—”
“God, your expression. No, I’m not saying we should hand him over, or that we should have handed him over. I just wonder if that has anything to do with it.”
“It can’t have,” Axel said after a moment’s thought. “These orders must’ve come from the Gray Emperor. Elphame’s supposed to be 20,000 light years away, after all. Even the fastest sentrienza drone couldn’t do that in less than four Earth years. So we’ve been under a death sentence all that time. They must have initiated the extinction protocol as soon as they found out about CHEMICAL MAGE.”
“Your goddamn dad,” Meg said. “And the Rat.” Pause. “My dad, too.”
“They were trying to save Earth.”
Further down the beach, the Wilsons were skipping stones. Bridget was winning by a mile. Fifteen skips, twenty, thirty, her stones flew like little spaceships.
Meg followed Axel’s gaze. “She’s one, too, isn’t she? Bridget.”
“It’s genetic,” Axel said. He picked Nicky up and lifted him into the air. “We’re just normal human beings, huh, buddy? Nothing wrong with that.”
But was he a normal human being, with his implant stabilizing his moods, smoothing out his emotional reactions?
On an impulse, he disabled it. If this was to be their last day on Earth, he wanted to experience it without a technological barrier in the way, just as himself.
CHAPTER 40
SCUDDING AROUND EARTH, COLM identified his targets and ranked them in order of priority. There were twenty-one ships on their way in from the zero-gravity point. Three heavy cruisers the size of the Ruddiganmaseve, and the rest were even bigger. They hadn’t reached the asteroid belt yet.
But they were coming fast, making no attempt to be stealthy. Of course, the sentrienza thought the Fleet had abandoned the system.
They didn’t know Earth had one ship left. Just one.
And even if they could see the Shihoka in its low orbit around Earth, they’d never think it could hurt them. That little thing?
To be honest, Colm wasn’t sure this was going to work. But there was no point dithering. He loaded the railgun, using esthesia to place the first nuke in the launch cradle with the robot arm. He armed the launch circuits.
He magnified his composite view of Target #1 as much as possible, until the image of its plume broke down into pixels.
Then he stuck his Nessie souvenir coffee mug between his knees, extended his left hand, and levitated it.
In freefall, it was easy.
The mug flew in a circle around the cockpit, like Gaethla Moro’s bullet had flown around that nightclub in Tokyo, Nessie winking from its side.
And Colm flitted.
Hot plasma washed over the Shihoka’s hull. Colm screamed in pain as esthesia reported damage to his forward heat shields.
Jesus God, I’ve flitted right into the end of their fucking drive plume!
Not the middle of it, or I wouldn’t be feeling anything.
Fuck fuck fuck that fucking hurts!
The pain short-circuited any temptation to hang about and line up his sights just right. He mashed his right forefinger on the firing button, sent the Nessie mug on another flight around the cockpit, and flitted again, this time to a ‘safe’ power source he’d identified in advance, a fab complex on the large asteroid Vesta. Like all of humanity’s outer-system outposts, Vesta had been taken over by Ghosts who had then starved to death or died because they could not work the life support systems. So the fab complex was a coffin, but its solar arrays were still working, feeding power to its giant storage batteries. The Shihoka landed right outside the plant, so close that the ship’s nose smashed through the end of a long wall of solar panels. This ship-flitting was a dicey business. Colm multi-tasked for dear life, muting the feedback from the scorched heat shields, assessing the damage, and—finally—reviewing the last few minutes of footage picked up by his external cameras.
There it was, 3 seconds in.
“Boom,” Colm whispered, smirking triumphantly at the flash on the screen. “Got him right up the arse.”
His nuke had not just disabled the sentrienza cruiser, it had vaporized it.
“And then there were twenty.”
The Nuclear Druid Page 23
