Rocket’s Red Glare

by David Hardy

  When she woke, it took a while to remember where she was. Both the infirmary and her room were in some subbasement that didn’t appear on the center’s elevator.

  There was a phone next to her bed. She picked it up, and immediately a friendly but unfamiliar female voice answered, “What can we get you, Ms. Zakaryan?”

  What can we get you? An aspirin. A large bagel with eggs. Orange juice. A half a bottle of aspirin. There were many things she wanted right then, but only one she needed. “Can I see Mr. Eddie? And the hamal?”

  “Let me see.” The woman paused. “Yes, they’re awake and can see visitors, but they’re both still in the infirmary. I’ll come get you.”

  Lucine got out of bed. She still wore her workout clothes from the day before, though they were ready to be thrown away. But today she didn’t care about neatness, just being alive.

  The door opened and the young, pretty nurse said, “Hi! This way, they’re waiting for you.” They went down a long hallway to the infirmary, and she showed Lucine in.

  Inside, Dr. Maria hovered over Mr. Eddie, smiling at what she saw. The hamal slept on a large bed behind him. The doctor turned to Lucine. “Hello, Lucine. Can I look you over when I’m done here?”

  “Yes. But can I...?” Lucine gestured to Mr. Eddie. The doctor nodded, and Lucine stepped in and hugged her new best friend. “I’m so...” She couldn’t finish.

  “I know, child. Me, too.”

  The doctor pulled a chair closer, and Lucine sat. “We... won, I think,” she said.

  Mr. Eddie smiled. “One battle. But for today, that’s enough. Do you know what this is, Lucine?” Lucine shook her head, and his smile turned into a big grin. “It’s the Underground Railroad!”

  Lucine shook her head. “You mean a subway?”

  “No, child. Sometimes even with your accent, I forget you weren’t born in America. The Underground Railroad was a secret network to guide African slaves to freedom. That’s what the hamals are, slaves of the Dahans. Some of them escaped here, and they made friends with the outcasts of our society: the homeless, the destitute...” He looked down at the chip in his hands. “The alcoholics. When the hamals’ Overseers came hunting them, some of their friends here... Well, they done the human race proud. They started building this network to shelter the hamals and guide them to hiding places in the far corners of the Earth.”

  “And we helped?”

  “We helped, at least for our buddy here. I call him Stinky.” Mr. Eddie laughed.

  Lucine shook her head. “I don’t understand. Lopez... The burglary...” She glanced over at Stinky. “And they... killed him...”

  Mr. Eddie patted her on her arm. “I know, dear, that was horrible. But it was all a lie. There was no burglary, that was just an excuse. The Dahans were hunting Lopez because they knew he was part of the Railroad, and they wanted to interrogate him. Stinky didn’t kill him, he just let him grab the razor. That brave man killed himself to keep the Railroad a secret.”

  Lucine’s head spun. The past day replayed in her mind, and suddenly it all made sense for the first time.

  Mr. Eddie continued. “And now, to thank us, they’ll get us home, and no one will ever know we were here. Or they can take you home, at least. I’ve got more recuperating to do. And then after that, well, maybe I’ll stick around a while.”

  Mr. Eddie looked at Lucine, but he didn’t ask. He was too much of a friend to ask her for what might be more than she could give. No matter what she said next, he would always be her friend. Her brother.

  But Lucine thought of Stinky and what had almost happened to him. She thought of the cousins and uncles she had never met because someone had been afraid.

  “Doctor, please... Let me help, too.”

  About the Author – Martin L. Shoemaker

  Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side…or maybe it’s the other way around. Programming pays the bills, but a second place story in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that! He was the 2016 recipient of the Washington Science Fiction Association’s Small Press Award for his Clarkesworld story "Today I Am Paul", which also appeared in four different year’s best anthologies and eight international editions. His work has also appeared in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, Forever Magazine, and Writers of the Future Volume 31.

  Performance Bonus

  Nathan E. Meyer

  1.

  “Do not touch anything unnecessarily. Beware of pretty girls in dance halls and parks who may be spies, as well as bicycles, revolvers, uniforms, arms, dead horses, and men lying on roads; they are not there accidentally.” – 1930’s Soviet Army Manual.

  Fenrir, Cassiopeia Rim World

  “All right, people,” Fallows said into the com-link. “I got a deadbeat husband and an open investigation for tax evasion waiting for this paycheck back home. Let’s get this mother done and get the hell out of here.”

  Desert and rubble stretched out under a sky bleached anemic by the pale smear of sun. From one vast horizon to the next there lay only broken history and ruin. The Tapei Syndicate had visited apocalypse on this landscape in a single, white hot flash and left it twisted, ruined. It boiled the water, incinerated the infrastructure to cinders, flash-burned shadows onto brick, and left the air foul and poisoned.

  Kali felt the heat like microwaves, harsh and unyielding as the salvage crew crowded around the bomb crater. Done up in HEV suits they communicated through internal links while the remote geo-imager cruised an area of rubble near the bottom of the depression. Sentry teams manned crew served weapons on the perimeter, scanning the polluted rubble for the slightest hint of movement or bio-sign.

  The remote rolled to a halt below the team and Tolliver started getting feedback on his display set almost immediately. He moved icons around rapidly with a light-pen on the heads-up screen, digesting the information coming to him from the tracked sensory field-robot. The geo-imager penetrated meters of dirt, concrete, and broken rubble across a variety of spectrums, analyzed the data and translated for the operator.

  Tolliver looked up. Kali and the rest of the team heard him break squelch on the intercom system in their suits. His voice was tense, excited.

  “The toaster says this is it. It matches the pre-conflict GPS coordinates as well. I think this is it," he repeated.

  Fallows looked at the narrow, cave-like opening the field remote sat parked next to. Her polarized face shield hid her frown from the rest of the team. Secure beneath her own helmet, Kali began to worry her lip.

  “Who wants to go down?” Fallows asked, finally. “No salvage, no pay. It ain’t freaking Algebra, people,"

  The group shuffled uneasily. They weren’t cowards, it was impossible to be a salvager and operate from cowardice. They also weren’t recklessly suicidal, however. There were monsters in these caves and predators hunted this toxic waste. The skill-techs were slow to volunteer and the combat-techs were all out on the perimeter.

  “I’ll go,” Kali said.

  “Good," Fallows didn’t check to see if Kali was sure. “Tolliver, help her hook into the field remote’s harness.”

  The two salvagers, bulky and clumsy in their suits with the U.S. flag prominently displayed on their shoulders, skidded down the crater incline, sliding on loose scree and the pulverized ashes of skyscrapers. At the bottom they moved quickly over to where the robot sat, squat and utilitarian next to the opening. Tolliver punched a numerical code into his wireless display and the field remote’s crane arm swung out, a length of steel cord falling loose from its winch to the dusty ground at Kali’s feet.

  Kali spread her legs slightly apart and Tolliver knelt beside her, fixing the Kevlar spelunking harness to the reinforced ankles of her HEV suit’s boots. He tugged them, checking the fit and the locks, then asked Kali how it felt.

  “Fine,” she answered. She laid her auto-carbine down, propping the muzzle up on a convenient bit of detritus.

 
“You ready?” Tolliver’s voice broke nervously.

  “Yeah,” Kali answered. “Give me your pistol,"

  Tolliver pulled his automatic with its outsized trigger guard, to accommodate environmental gloves, and slapped it into Kali’s open hand. She reached up with her other hand and hit the twin, forehead mounted illuminators on her helmet.

  “You believe they really went atomic on this city over copyright infringment? Goddamn copyright infringement?”

  Tolliver shrugged. "Ain’t the privitazation of space travel and military operations a beautiful thing?"

  It was Kali’s turn to shrug. "If classical mythology teaches us anything, it is that the hero must enter the underworld to finish their quest.”

  "You freak me out.”

  Kali ignored him and got down on her hands and knees. She felt alone and isolated as she eyed the tunnel mouth. It looked voracious. Very aware that the crew stood watching her, Kali trundled forward, ungraceful. She entered the darkness and was immediately forced onto her belly as the tunnel narrowed. Jagged points of rubble and wreckage threatened the integrity of her suit at every turn.

  Carefully, she inched forward, pistol held up before her at the ready as she used the elbow of her free arm and her knees and toes to propel her deeper into the accidental cavern. Behind her the gyro feeding the winch whined as Tolliver played out slack in the steel cable.

  Ten meters in, Kali rested. She breath sounded ragged, claustrophobic as it echoed through her throat-mike back into her ear-jacks. The tunnel had been created when twisted ruins collapsed in on themselves before being buried by rubble falling like snow after the initial explosion. Kali felt exposed, keenly aware that the slightest shift could bring the tubule of wreckage down around her ears. The spelunking attachment felt more like an anchor around her feet than a lifeline.

  She pushed around an elbow and the last of the ambient light dissipated behind her. Shadows cast by her flashlights fluttered weirdly as she crawled, bouncing across jagged bits of rubble and random pieces of metal while causing the dust to spiral up thickly in the beams of brilliant light.

  Kali scooted forward. She jerked suddenly at a flicker of movement on the roof inches above her, just ahead in the tunnel. The pistol came up as the muscles of her body went rigid with apprehension. The muzzle of the pistol shook slightly in her grip.

  The cockroach was big as a house cat and its carapace gleamed oily in Kali’s illuminators. It chittered at her and she saw mandibles large as sewing scissors snap open and closed. Stupidly aggressive, the bug scuttled forward. One snip of those insectile jaws could potentially severe the outer lining of Kali’s HEV suit, exposing her to a chemical soup of deadly toxins.

  She strangled a shriek of surprise and pulled the trigger twice on her pistol. The cockroach came rushing right up on the handgun as she pulled the trigger and the small caliber weapon’s report was muffled by its body. Its hold on the ceiling remained tenacious and the rounds penetrated but failed to knock it loose. The armored exoskeleton soaked up the bullets and kept them inside of it.

  Viscous, yellowish fluid splashed out from the wounded bug, splattering across the front of Kali’s faceplate causing her to flinch behind the polarized shield. She looked and saw the cockroach still hanging to the roof.

  She cursed and struck out with the butt of her pistol. It smacked into the bug exoskeleton with a thwack, the giant bug rocked back and forth from the blow but remained stuck to the tunnel ceiling. Its guts leaked out of the entrance wounds like clumps of yogurt.

  “Kali!” Fallows’ and Tolliver’s voice were frantic over the com-system. “Kali! Are you okay?”

  Suddenly Kali felt a jerk on her ankles and then she was being dragged back up the tunnel as Tolliver instructed the field remote to begin reeling her back in.

  “No!” Kali barked. “I’m fine! I’m fine! It’s just a puke-bug.” The mechanical pull at her feet cut out. “A big freaking puke-bug,” Kali amended.

  “Careful, girl,” Fallows said. “Where there’s one, there’s others.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Muttering to herself, Kali crawled forward again. Drawing even with the dangling cockroach she turned over onto her back and scooted past the dripping thing. Yellow lumps dribbled down the front of her HEV suit. Kicking past it, she rolled back over onto her stomach and continued pushing forward.

  Up ahead the tunnel dropped away in a sudden, vertical gap. Kali stuck her head over the lip, her illuminators ineffectual across the void. Kali sighed. Nothing could be simple, of course. But corps didn’t pay well for simple, and that was gospel.

  “I got a bubble here, Tol,” Kali said.

  “The remote says it’s about 15 meters down to the target. You get into position and let me know when you want me to start playing out the cable.”

  “Sure,” Kali muttered. “No problem.”

  She sighed. She was either going to go down, or she wasn’t. Put in more simplistic terms, she was either going to get paid, or she wasn’t. She scooted forward until she hung over the empty space from the waist.

  “Okay, start lowering until I say when.”

  “Check,” Tolliver replied. “Be heads-up, Kali,” he added.

  “Just like your momma, Tolly,” she answered.

  “You’re such a badass, Kali,” Tolliver chuckled.

  “Just like your momma,” Kali repeated. She grinned a tight, manic grin that would have looked like rictus if anyone were there to witness it.

  “That’s it, keep insulting my family while I dangle your ass up over a pit underground.”

  “Can the stand-up you two. Stay sharp, Kali,” Fallows barked.

  “Yes, boss,” the two answered. Private contractors weren’t union.

  “Red Sentry to Fallows.” A new voice, tense, cut in.

  “Go ahead, Eaton,” Fallows said.

  “I got perimeter breach on my 3 0’clock.”

  ○●○

  “What do your sensors say, Eaton? Skells?” Fallows demanded.

  “Too far out, too much interference from broken terrain and background radiation. The forward observation pods are only reading movement, but what else would be out here?”

  Kali felt drops of sweat pop out across her body, fat as bullets. If a Skell band hit now she was incredibly vulnerable. Tolliver kept slowly playing out the cable from the field remote, waiting to see what Fallows’ call would be. Kali wanted to scream out for him to stop, goddamn it, but she bit her tongue. Below her she began picking images out of the dark.

  “Roger," Fallows said. “Kali, you got the target yet?”

  “I got a mountain of rubble in this cavern coming up.”

  “Right. Keep going. Eaton, you stay sharp. You get discernment on the breach you give us the heads-up.”

  “Roger. Eaton out.”

  Kali felt blood rushing to her head, filling it until it felt like an over-inflated balloon. She thought her temples might just burst open under the pressure. If this had been a military operation they would have hauled her back up at the first sign of potential trouble, Kali knew. She also knew this wasn’t a military op and the bottom line was the bottom line. Entrepreneur or mercenary, whichever you preferred, Kali thought, it all shook out the same; bottom line, baby, keep it in the black.

  “Oh, shit,” she whispered.

  “What!” Fallows snarled. “What is it?”

  Tolliver cut the feed and Kali came to a halt, suspended in midair. Below her she could make out a mound of rubble rising as high as a house. From the top of it, like a knife sticking out of a wound, a mag-lev car jutted out. The doors at the exposed end were shut tight.

  As Kali swung slowly back and forth about two meters above the transport container, the lights of her illuminators cast wild shadows back and forth across the wrecked vehicle and the mountain of rubble that entrapped it.

  Giant cockroaches, mandibles snipping in quivering hunger, scurried across every surface, numbering in the thousands. It was a nest.

&nb
sp; “The target is in the middle of a roach nest,” Kali whispered.

  Fallows’ curses were like thunder breaking.

  ○●○

  The big bugs scurried and scuttled, shiny carapaces catching the light from her headset illuminators and reflecting it in oily, scintillating arcs. Their numbers were so improbable that their hissing communiqués, clicking jaws, and curious feet were readily discernable even through the dampener of Kali’s suit helmet. Fear made Kali’s stomach cramp, her throat close tight around rapid, shallow breaths.

  If she went down into that pit and fumbled, then they would be on her in a heartbeat. They would feed without mercy, strip her suit, and then her flesh, in seconds. She looked around her, tried to tell how far out to the sides the walls of the unnatural cavern were. It was impossible.

  “Tolliver,” she asked. “Can the remote resonate the dimensions of this cavity? Can it tell me if it’s safe to use a flash-bang?”

  There was a pause, much too long for Kali’s peace of mind. When Tolliver answered his voice was anything but assured.

  “I don’t know, Kali. Not to the degree you need me to. I think you’re too deep.”

  “Jesus Christ, Tolliver!” Kali bit back her outburst. She sucked in a lungful of sanitized air, forced calm on herself. “Tolliver, I need you to try. If I go down to breach the door now, I’ll, I’ll be dead, do you understand? Tolliver, do you understand me?”

  “I, I under – hold on, Kali.”

  “How we doing out there, Eaton?” Fallows asked.

  “We got movement. The topography is too broken for a good numerical assessment, boss. No ‘eyes on,’ yet. If it’s Skells they’re hanging back. Maybe a random party, not trig to us.”

  “Whatever, Eaton. Random my ass. If there was a band in ten klicks of here when the shuttle touched down their scouts would be all over it. Keep me posted. Do any other sentries have breach sign?”

  “Blue, negative.”

  “Gold, negative.”