He had travelled to Vesta faster than the light from the explosion. Almost 3 seconds faster. The implications sank in. This was even bigger than refueling a chemical rocket from a gas giant. It would completely revolutionize spaceflight.
If he survived the day.
The other sentrienza crews must be freaking out. He had no time to waste.
“Let’s try not to land in the drive plume this time,” he murmured to the Shihoka. “I don’t tan well …”
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Now he had only one nuke left, against 17 sentrienza ships. Time to resupply. He jumped out of his couch, retrieved the last missile from the ammo bay with the mechanical loader arm, and deposited it in the cargo hold. He sealed his helmet and dived through the airlock into the brightly lit vacuum. Every second counted. Maybe he should’ve brought someone else along, after all. He wrapped his arms and legs around the fat cylinder and replicated it. He had seen Diejen and other mages doing this during the war. It was just fetching without going anywhere. One. Two. Three. Four … The lights flickered, the fans choked, and the cargo hold filled up with nukes. Colm scrambled around, using his own arms in concert with the robotic cargo handler arms to secure the missiles so at least they didn’t bump into each other. The Rat would have had his head on a stick for this. Colm had once been severely punished for nuking a train full of Ghosts. What would his old commanding officer think if he saw him nuking a whole fleet of sentrienza ships?
They hailed him after number 18. He picked up their signal at Vesta, where he was resting for a minute, gulping canned miso soup while he loaded his last nuke but three into the launch cradle.
“Unidentified human ship on Vesta.” That’s where they thought he was. “Are you aware that you cannot destroy a black hole?”
“Whoa! No shit,” Colm said, rolling his eyes.
“Eighteen of our ships have now been destroyed. Each of them was armed with a black hole cannon. In all cases, the containment of the black holes was breached. Thus, eighteen small but deadly black holes are now wandering freely through your solar system.”
Colm held up a finger. “Wait,” he said, and finished his soup. Tossing the can into freefall, he said, “Wandering? Nice try. In fact, all those black holes are on trajectories which will miss Earth by a comfortable margin, and travel out of the solar system without hitting anything.” He was just guessing, but space was big and all the bodies in Sol System were small, relatively speaking. Anyway, it wasn’t half as risky as not destroying the sentrienza ships would have been. “That’s what you get for being clever and coming in at a 30-degree angle to the ecliptic. I’ve got to go now. Cheers.”
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Colm radioed the last surviving sentrienza ship, just to see what they’d say. “Any last words?” he enquired.
“Spare us,” buzzed a sentrienza voice. “Please. There must be something you want.”
Colm laughed. He was floating in the cockpit, feeling a bit loopy. “I’ve got everything I want.” For a fleeting second, he thought of Diejen. No. “Oh, there is one thing I want, actually.”
“What?”
“To see you join your buddies in hell.” He loaded the last nuke. He would be happy to get rid of it. A copy of a copy of a kiloton-yield bomb was not a good travelling companion.
“Wait! Wait! We can offer you the gift of eternal life!”
“Ha, ha; not interested.”
“Your planet is already doomed! We launched our missiles after you destroyed our flagship. They are speeding towards Earth as we speak.”
“Oh yeah?”
“But you need not die! We’ll take you to Elphame. The Emperor himself will give you the gift of eternal life—”
Boom.
Returning to Vesta one last time, storing video of the last explosion, Colm remembered that the sentrienza did not lie. The lethal missiles were already on their way to Earth.
Shit.
CHAPTER 41
BACK ON THE BEACH in Scotland, five-year-old Scarlett Wilson slipped and fell over in the little waves. Drenched to the skin, she started to howl. Ted picked her up. “Oh God. We’d better head back,” Bridget said. “Kids! Morag! Ivor!”
Far down the beach, the two older children were playing an elaborate game with stones and seaweed. Meg said to Bridget, “It’s OK. You guys head back. We’ll watch them.”
“Are you sure, hen?” Bridget said, but she was already following Ted up the track. Little Scarlett was always catching colds, and in a world without hospitals, her parents fretted about her delicate health.
Meg shaded her eyes, watching Morag and Ivor. “When I was their age,” she said wryly, “I was usually glued to a screen.”
“Me too,” Axel said.
“If Colm fails—if the black holes hit the planet—do you think we’d notice?”
“If the missiles entered the atmosphere near here, we’d probably see them. Like meteors.”
“But if they hit on the other side of Earth, we wouldn’t even know it.” Meg shivered. The sentrienza doomsday weapons might be devouring Earth already. She did not have confidence that Colm’s crazy plan would work.
Unnoticed, Nicky toddled towards the overturned dinghy that lay on the beach.
Axel grasped Meg’s shoulders and rested his forehead against hers. “You’ll survive,” he said quietly. “Colm’ll bring the Shihoka back, whether he pulls this off or not.”
“So we should just take off and leave everyone?” She recoiled, outraged at the idea of leaving the Mackenzies and Wilsons, who’d been so kind to them.
“Not everyone. Just me.”
“Axel!”
“Colm won’t leave his family behind. But I’ll make damn sure he doesn’t leave you and Nicky.”
“It’s your ship!”
“It’s OK, Meg. I know you love him.”
She shook Axel’s hands off, shocked. “He doesn’t give a damn about Nicky.” Her shock was profound and internal. It came from the realization that she really, truly did not love Colm anymore. Perhaps she’d stopped loving him on the day Bridget dragged him in from the beach on Isle Martin, a drugged-up, half-drowned mess. She’d been furious with him, but only now did she understand why: her anger had been the death throes of her long, stupid crush on Collie Mack. Now she knew that he would never be what she wanted him to be, because what she wanted him to be was … Axel.
*
Nicky, still unsteady on his feet, toppled forwards and caught himself on the side of the overturned wooden dinghy. Sun-bleached barnacles pricked his fingers. He made a face, but did not cry. Instead, he staggered around the dinghy, exploring.
The gunwales of the dinghy were buried in the shale. He could not get inside it. But around the other side of the keel, there was a ragged hole in the boat. The lower edge of the hole came up to Nicky’s waist.
The faint smell of rotted seaweed wafted out of the hole. It was impenetrably dark in there, in contrast to the sunlit beach. But down there in the darkness, something gleamed blue.
Entranced, Nicky reached into the hole.
Far away at the other end of the beach, Morag and Ivor continued their game of castles.
Much nearer, but on the other side of the dinghy, Meg and Axel stared at each other, emotions running high.
*
“If you leave me,” Meg threatened, “I’ll shoot you.” She gripped her combi’s stock, swinging it around between them like a metal barrier.
“I’m letting you go!” Axel said. “Isn’t that what you want?”
“No! I want to be with you!”
“Why? I’m a failure. I’ve failed at everything, up to and including saving Earth.”
Meg suddenly recognized the darkness in his eyes, the pinched inward set of his face, and the tone of merciless self-examination in his voice. She had not seen this Axel for years. Had thought he’d gone away forever. “Oh, dammit, Axel. You’ve disabled your
implant again, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. If this is it, if it’s all ending, I want you to know the truth about me. You deserve to know who I really am.”
“I already know who you really are! Jesus! I should shoot you for being so fucking stupid!”
Axel hesitated. “Am I being stupid?”
Meg lifted the strap of her combi off over her head. Her fingers automatically safed the gun as she laid it down in a hurry.
“Yes,” she said.
“Oh.”
“But so am I,” she said. “I have been. Really, really stupid.”
He looked at her bleakly. “When you met me, I was working for Dad’s corporation. I had fuck-you money. I guess I seemed pretty slick. You didn’t know you were actually getting a screw-up with a defective brain. That’s not stupid. That’s just unlucky.”
“Nope,” Meg said. “When I first met you, you were flying a gunship into a hot zone to rescue people you’d never met. That’s the guy I fell in love with.” Dammit, she was choking up. “And that’s who I see in front of me right now.”
“I don’t deserve you.”
“You know what they say, Axel, when you’re in a hole …?”
She wrapped her arms around him, rising on tiptoe to kiss his mouth. He froze for a second, then opened up to her. The world shrank to their embrace. Warts and all, this was the man who loved her, who she loved. She faced it. Accepted it. So this was what it felt like, not being detached from her own emotions. Pretty damn good.
Suddenly, Axel stiffened.
“Nicky,” he said. He wrenched away from her.
*
Nicky reached into the hole in the dinghy, trying to grab that fascinating blue gleam.
It blinked at him. There; gone. Blink. There again.
Peek-a-boo.
Nicky giggled, and reached further into the hole.
The stones next to his tiny sneakers shifted with a quiet clatter.
The toe of an enormous, salt-scalloped boot squeezed out from underneath the boat.
*
“Nicky!” Meg screamed, sprinting after Axel. How could she have let him wander off? Where was he?
Axel rounded the old dinghy that lay on the beach. “Nicky!” he exclaimed in relief. “There—”
There was a crunching sound. Axel threw himself headlong at the far side of the dinghy.
Meg crashed into him, just as Nicky’s legs and feet vanished into the hole in the side of the boat.
She thrust her arms into the hole, while Axel tried to lift the boat. They lost a few seconds like that, working against each other, screaming at each other, and then Meg added her strength to Axel’s. They dug their fingers into the rotting gunwales and heaved the boat onto its side.
A hollow in the shale held a mat of kelp and bladderwrack, which swirled in blackness like water, shrinking, vanishing. Meg saw her son’s face in the seaweed, his eyes huge, his mouth stretched into a soundless wail. She fell on her knees, reaching for him. Her hands touched icy cold … nothing.
She clawed at the stones, screaming.
Nicky was gone.
CHAPTER 42
COLM TRACKED DOWN ALL the missiles heading for Earth. They each had a power source, of course. It took a lot of energy to contain a black hole. They seemed to show up great on his infrared scans, and only after the first dozen or so did he realize that actually they didn’t. They were not radiating heat, after all. He was ‘seeing’ them on the screen the way the Ghosts ‘saw’ power sources without screens, because esthesia made the Shihoka into an extension of his body.
Oh, well; whatever works.
He took the Shihoka alongside each of them in turn. He was out of nukes, and the nukes had been so heavy he could not bring any conventional rounds, so he just EMPed each one with the charged particle cannon.
They were still in the asteroid belt, 3 AUs from Earth. At this distance, hitting a target the size of a planet required flawless trajectory control. With their electronics fried, the missiles would not be able to point themselves at Earth. They’d fly harmlessly out of the system.
After number 50, he fell asleep in the cockpit. Woke, panicked, looked at the time, calmed himself down, drank canned coffee from a Tokyo vending machine, and went back to work.
After number 113, he ran another infrared scan and found … nothing. That was it. He’d sorted all of them.
Time to go home.
He flitted the Shihoka to Aldrin Station in LEO. The Fleet had left the lights on, and water in the storage tanks. He used that to top up the Shihoka’s reaction mass tanks. He also on-loaded 50 freeze-dried kgs of Pink Slime, the long-haul emergency foodstuff, just because it was there. Then he spent a few hours exploring the station. He had passed through here on multiple occasions during his Fleet deployments. Now the concessions were stripped bare, the holos gone, the halls empty of the cheerful clamor he remembered. The air smelled stale and the artificial gravity was off. Rubbish floated in mid-air. On the walls, posters still displayed Human Republic flags and slogans. Colm drifted around aimlessly, thinking about the dead.
So many dead.
Catching himself getting morose, he snapped himself out of it. Time to go home.
He returned to the Shihoka, undocked from the refueling stand, and pulsed the attitude thrusters to separate the ship from the dead space station. Then he flipped the ship like an Olympic diver coming off the board, and plunged down towards Earth.
*
“Well, that’s that.”
Colm took off his helmet, and coughed. The vapors from his landing mixed with misty rain. Only one person had come out to meet him: his mother. Daisy Mackenzie stood bareheaded in the rain, her face drawn.
“What’s wrong, Mam? You look like a wet weekend.” Colm laughed uneasily. “It is a wet weekend …”
“Did you win?”
“Yes! Earth’s safe!” Colm grinned. “I tried to radio you, but the Ka-band wasn’t on, I suppose. Is it broken again?”
“No, it’s not broken.”
Colm hadn’t expected a tickertape parade, but a smile wouldn’t have been out of place. “Well, we’d better get in out of the rain.”
He started towards the house. His mother walked alongside him. The compressed shape of her mouth struck fear into Colm’s heart. She looked the way she used to when Lloyd was being a bastard, but worse than that. She looked the way she had when Lloyd murdered Sprite, the family cat.
“Mam, what is it?”
Daisy stopped under the pines. “Colm, is there something you haven’t told us?”
“Is it something I did?”
“Apparently so,” his mother said meaningfully.
“Apart from saving Earth?”
At last she smiled. “Aye, you did that, didn’t you? I’m so proud of you.”
“All in a day’s work.”
“No need to be modest.” She stretched up and kissed him on the cheek. But her smile vanished as quickly as it had come. “I’d better tell you before we go in. Nicky’s missing.”
“What? Nicky? How did that happen?”
“They took him down the beach and I suppose they took their eyes off him for a moment.”
“I thought he wasn’t allowed to set foot outside.”
Daisy shrugged. “He’s their child, not mine. Or so I thought.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t, either.” Daisy searched his face. Then she sighed. “All right, you don’t want to talk about it. I respect your privacy, Colm. I always have. But I’m warning you, your father’s going to bring it up. And I don’t want you walking out on us, like you always do.”
“‘Like I always do’?” Colm objected, weakly. He had walked out on them, hadn’t he? He’d run away to space. But he was back now. “What’s Dad going to bring up?”
His mother didn’t answer. She crossed the back garden, treading heedlessly on the lumpy rows where they had planted potatoes.
Colm followed her into the house.
>
Meg sat at one end of the kitchen table, sagging over an untouched mug of instant coffee. Everyone else stood around awkwardly, except for Lloyd, who sat in his usual place by the hearth with Mickle on his lap, seemingly asleep. That was odd enough but Colm scarcely registered it. The atmosphere of dread and sadness overwhelmed him. Meg glanced up at him, and looked away again. She seemed … frightened. Meg? Nothing scared her …
… but the loss of a child. Yeah, that’d do it.
Colm crossed to her and hugged her shoulders. “I’ve heard what happened, Meg.” It was like hugging a rock. “I’m so sorry.” He mutely asked the others with his eyes: What did happen? How do you lose track of an almost-two-year-old on the beach? Jesus, he didn’t drown, did he? That wasn’t what Daisy had seemed to be saying. He’s missing …
Axel spoke. Leaning against the wall with his arms folded, he looked ten years older. “The Magus took him.”
“Ah, no,” Colm said.
“He was under that old boat,” Lloyd said, speaking with his eyes closed, his jowls resting on his chest. “These two idiots didn’t notice. Weren’t paying attention. To their own child.”
Axel’s jaw clenched. Meg started to cry silently into her coffee. Colm wanted to hit his father for gratuitously hurting her, on top of what she was already going through.
But then Lloyd went on: “Except he wasn’t their own child, was he?”
Daisy gripped a chair-back and rolled her eyes to heaven. “Will you shut your trap?”
“I’ll not,” Lloyd blustered, opening his eyes. “It needs to be said, and if a certain woman—” he jerked his chin at Meg— “had seen fit to tell the truth much earlier, this would never have happened. Aye, greet your eyes out. This is your doing more than anyone’s.”
Colm exclaimed, “Fuck’s sake, Dad, leave her alone!”
Lloyd stared at him with a crafty gleam in his eyes. “Maybe you should have left her alone.”
Oh, no, Colm thought. Oh, no.
Axel said, “Meg? What’s he talking about?”
Meg shook her head. Her elbows were on the table, her fingers driven through her hair, the heels of her hands over her ears, as if she could shut them all out.
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