Stars Rain Down

by Chris J. Randolph

  He put his hand on the father’s shoulder and said, “It’s going to be okay,” in a reassuring voice. “There’s a doctor on the way, and we’re going to get you out of here.” The father didn’t understand a word of it, but saying it made Jack feel better.

  He peeled the small boys from his legs, then crouched down and took a good look at each. Their faces were dirty and they were frightened, but they looked healthy. The younger of the two had a quivering lip, and his eyes were wet with tears. He had to be six or seven years old, and he was trying as hard as he could not to cry.

  “Don’t sweat it, buddy,” Jack said. “You’re both very brave little kids. After what you’ve been through, you’re allowed to cry, okay.” It didn’t matter that they couldn’t understand him. He tousled the boy’s hair and gave him a pat on the shoulder.

  The girl was standing in the far corner, shivering and focused on her feet. Jack had done enough rescues to know that was normal, and he also knew better than to bother her. Teenage girls tended to react better to women after trauma, and he decided to leave her be.

  A minute later, Albright came down the stairs at full sprint with her medkit in hand. She said something in Chinese and went directly to examining the infant. She raised her mask to get a better look, and Jack could see sheer amazement all over her face. It was the face of a lottery winner. Albright always had a special affinity for children, and this put her on top of the world.

  She learned what she needed quickly then took a look at the other children. “Nothing too serious,” she said as she worked, “The little guy’s just having a bad reaction to the mold and dust. Should be fine once we get him out of here.”

  Jack breathed a sigh of relief. That was exactly what he needed to hear. He was desperate for a win, and he got one. “Can you tell ‘em we’re bringing a car?”

  “Dream on,” she said. “I know how to say I’m a doctor, order the general’s chicken, and ask for the toilet, but that’s the full extent of my Chinese.”

  “That’s okay. We’ll figure something out,” he said. “We always do.”

  Hartnell stopped at the top of the steps with her arms full of cloth, water and cheap sunglasses. “I got what you asked for, chief.”

  That’s when it happened; Jack was filled with a feeling he hadn’t had in more than a week. If these people had survived, then so had others. Possibly many others. He had a reason to be there in that wasteland, and more importantly, he had something to look forward to besides another heap of corpses.

  He had hope, and it was the single most precious thing in the world.

  Chapter 18:

  The Silk Road

  Back when he first saw aliens piling up the dead, Jack retreated. His body was stuck there in the remains of China, but his head ran all the way back home to the comfort of his girlfriend’s arms, where it stayed while his body persisted on. He did what was necessary to survive, but only in a dim, mechanical daze. He was an animated corpse that had forgotten to fall.

  Then he found a family of survivors, and everything changed. The discovery filled him with a ray of hope that brought him back to life. From that point on, he was fully charged up and firing on all cylinders because it wasn’t just about survival anymore; it was about saving lives, and that meant everything to him.

  It woke all of them up.

  Nikitin and Chase returned with a delivery van which had carried more than its fair share of fish, by the smell of things. No one liked the stink, but the vehicle was spacious and all in one piece, so they spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning it up and packing it full of supplies. By the end of the night, the van was stocked with enough food and water for a month, and still had space left over for a makeshift medical bay.

  The next day, they added two more cars to their collection. The first was a minivan for the family of survivors, retrofitted with a few good layers of grating over its vents. It had all the amenities, including a plush interior and an audio deck loaded full of Chinese pop.

  The second vehicle was a beaten up and rusty old jeep that’d seen better days. Nikitin was adamant about having an off-road vehicle for scouting purposes, and the jeep was the best he could find. Or so he said. Jack suspected Nikitin had a soft spot for beaten up and rusty old jeeps, which he refused to admit to.

  On the third day, they mounted up and hit the road as the winds began once again to rise. Jack and Nikitin rode ahead in the jeep where they both took a serious sandblasting in the open air. It was worse than they’d expected, and at every stop, they layered on more spare clothing until they both looked like mummies. The extra layers made the ride survivable, if not particularly comfortable.

  The jeep scouted ahead by a paltry fifty meters most of the time, while the others trundled along behind them with their headlights on. It was slow going at first, but roads proved to be in excellent condition and they picked up speed. They traveled two hundred kilometers in that first week, and Jack suspected they could cover more ground if they wanted to.

  They stopped to check for supplies and survivors at every settlement and the search was well worth the effort. They found plenty of both, and their small group sprouted into a motorcade. Survivors started coming out to meet them, drawn out of hiding by the sounds of car engines and human voices shouting over the roar. The motorcade swelled into a mass migration in time, their population numbering in the thousands, in a puttering line of cars that stretched across a kilometer of road.

  Every influx brought another handful of orange jumpsuits, stocked up and ready for duty. Many spoke multiple languages including English, and they found constant work translating. The local guides were also plentiful, although each one delivered the same morbid warning: don’t bother with the cities. There was nothing to find there but death.

  They traveled for more than two straight months past the ruins of towns whose names Jack would never know, at the foot of the great mountains to the North which they only saw in silhouette. Always headed westward, they passed from China to Myanmar, then along the northern border between India and Nepal, and finally through Pakistan where they met up several more groups like their own.

  As they neared the end of Pakistan, they finally caught sight of a city. Where Peshawar had been, there was a black and still smoking petrified forest, with a thick layer of shattered concrete lining the ground and the twisted steel skeletons of buildings standing in for trees. A power capable of such total destruction was unthinkable. They skirted the edge of the ash heap faster than common sense might have suggested, and as they headed for the mountains, no one bothered to look back.

  In single file, they entered the Khyber Pass, which Jack had once heard described as a knife-wound in the mountains. The words hadn’t meant much to him, but they were all too appropriate once he saw the steep gash as if the earth had simply been sliced away. The pass had been used by armies since the beginning of time, and he wondered how it would be remembered from then on, having carried so many survivors away from that terrible destruction.

  As they emerged on the other side of the mountains, the travelers saw the most wonderful thing they’d ever seen. After more than two months in dust-choked twilight, they could finally see the bright blue sky again. They were back on Earth.

  At the other end of the pass was a village built of sand-colored stone which rose up out of the landscape like a natural formation. It was part of the land, and Jack wondered if that was what had spared it from the onslaught. The village was whole, intact and full of people, and along the road stood a handful of soldiers in desert camouflage with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. For the first time Jack could remember, he was glad to see soldiers. Overjoyed, in fact.

  With the fish van behind him, Jack pulled the jeep over and killed the engine, then he peeled off his gas-mask. He took one giant lung full of clean air. Fresh, reasonably dust free air. He held it as long as he could, and the feeling was amazing. As he took the second deep breath, he heard Nikitin doing the same beside him.

&nbs
p; In another moment, he pulled off all his extra layers and tossed them in the back seat, until he was down to just the jumpsuit. He felt naked, and he was quickly struck by how bad he smelled.

  “I was starting to worry the whole world was choked up with that cloud of shit,” Nikitin said. “Would you look at this, though. It didn’t even make it over the Hindu Kush.”

  “Unbelievable,” Jack said as he stretched. He felt the overwhelming urge to curl up on the nearest rock and take a long nap. To sun himself like a lizard.

  A soldier marched up to the jeep. He was a young man, a couple years younger than Jack, but moved like a seasoned veteran. The markings on his uniform were Mashriq Coalition, a union of middle-eastern nations that was had helped found the United Earth Organization. The Mashriq Coalition was always fighting separatists somewhere in its territory, and one could always any given soldier had seen his share of action.

  “More orange jumpsuits?” The soldier said in disbelief. His English carried the slightest trace of an accent. “Every time we think we’ve seen the last of you, more come through that pass with another pack of refugees. They’ve all been Chinese and Indian, though. Where are you from, my friends?”

  Jack was glad to hear they weren’t the first group, and he guessed they wouldn’t be the last either. “Pacific States Alliance,” he said, “San Jose. Our tranzat went down over Szechuan province, and we’ve been hoofing it ever since.”

  “You’re quite a way from home. Tell me, can anything kill you oranges?”

  “Nothing yet,” Nikitin said with a smile and they laughed. Jack could always count on Nikitin for bravado, if nothing else.

  “So, where do we go next?” Jack asked. He was trying to recall the local organization from his last trip to Afghanistan. “Is there a refugee camp in Jalalabad, or do we truck all the way to Kabul?”

  The soldier laughed again. That couldn’t be a good sign. “You’re a rare one, to be so optimistic after a march through hell. There is no Jalalabad or Kabul. The entire Mashriq is in ruins. The whole world, if what I hear is true.”

  Jack hoped he’d somehow misunderstood the soldier. “Come on… The UEO must be coordinating something.”

  “Perhaps I was not clear. The UEO is gone, friend. Everything’s been burnt to ash, and there’s no one left to run anything. There are only refugees like you and me.”

  Jack felt like he was on the receiving end of a cruel joke. “Everything? Europe? North America?”

  “Everything. A pair of Blade Valkyries just returned from North America, and they say its the same there as everywhere.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Nikitin said.

  “Where do we go?” Jack asked again, but it was hardly a question. He closed his eyes and saw the ghosts of his life back home, a life that was already dead and gone. His beautiful Jessica was there in the pale light of an approaching storm, waiting for him to come home. Waiting for him to ask a question to which she’d already said yes. She told him that she would always be there waiting for him, and he refused to let the promise go. He had survived against all odds, and she must have survived too. Somehow.

  When he opened his eyes, the ghosts were gone.

  “You have two choices,” the soldier said. “The first is to head for the North, as many others have. There are rumors of enclaves sprouting up in Russia around their Ark. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear the same about the other two, but who knows.”

  The Ark Project had been started a couple decades before, but never totally finished; it turned into such a massive boondoggle that folks wondered if the GAF was running the show. The Arks themselves were huge underground shelters to be used in the event of a planet killer asteroid, each designed to hold a few million people indefinitely. They were located far off the equator to maximize their distance from potential impact zones, or that was the official story, at least. Jack always thought their locations suspect, likely influenced by politics and money. There were three, one each in Russia, Canada and Australia.

  It made a lot of sense to try and reorganize there.

  The soldier pointed out across the thousands of cars coming through the pass. “That’s what I would recommend for most of them. There’s life there, and maybe some kind of future.”

  “And the other option?” Nikitin asked.

  “Join our struggle and give the infidels hell. I know that most of you oranges are hard set against violence, but perhaps the situation is different now? I can see that you are survivors, and I’m sure your skills would find use.”

  “What struggle?” Jack asked. “You said everything’s gone.”

  The soldier laughed yet again. Jack was starting to think that he and the soldier had very different senses of humor. “You are so fast to lay down your arms, American. Your people have never been invaded, have they? You see, in my world, invasion is all we’ve ever known. It is our entire history. First the Greeks, then the Indians, the English, Soviets, Americans, and Indians once again. This land has been invaded a thousand times already, and it will be invaded a thousand more. When the smoke clears and these invaders are gone, who do you think will remain?”

  The soldier’s rhetorical question was met with silence, and he smiled.

  “They have taken Africa as their own, and we will force them out however we can. The Mashriq is our front-line, and soldiers of every flag are united in the struggle. Mashriq Coalition, your Blade and Carbon corporations, and more Mujahidin than can be counted. UEO and separatists standing together… isn’t that something? Soon, the oil will begin to flow, and the war will truly begin. Of course, we could always use more help.”

  More help. That phrase made it sound so innocuous, like they needed an extra hand raising a barn or passing out fliers. Still, Jack knew the soldier was right. This wasn’t a petty political disagreement. It wasn’t a conflict of ideologies. The enemy was here to exterminate the human race, and resistance was the only option.

  “Should you decide to join us, there is an airfield south of Jalalabad that we use. Transports leave everyday. They will take you to our forward base.”

  Jack closed his eyes again, but before he could see the ghosts of his past, his decision was already made.

  Chapter 19:

  The Distant Shore

  Midday on Mars. The sun shone brightly, but a sandstorm was brewing on the horizon, hazing the line where dusty ground met rusty sky. Somewhere over that horizon lurked the biggest mountain anyone had ever seen, rising thirty kilometers into the emaciated sky, but no one would ever believe it was a mountain while standing on it. Its body stretched over an area the size of France, with a grade nearly as steep as a wheelchair ramp.

  Amira Saladin was a teenager the first time she made the trip with her parents. They pointed at the ground and told her she was on the peak of the tallest mountain in the solar system. At the time, she didn’t believe a word of it. Fifteen years and more than a dozen return trips later, she still found it difficult to believe. It was a let down, actually.

  She eyed the approaching storm with a touch of annoyance. “Just another beautiful day on the Arcadian Plain.”

  Kazuo Nagai’s voice came in over her headset. “Cry me a river, Sal. You love it out here. I know it, and you know it. Now stop working your jaw and gimme a hand with this.”

  She estimated an hour or more before the storm would hit, time enough to get their work done with ease. She was also pretty sure she outranked Kazuo, so she kept moving at her own leisurely pace. At least, she thought she outranked him. As she watched the coming storm, she wondered if anyone really understood the GAF chain of command.

  Sal turned back toward the wall of the Ares Colony, where Kazuo was impatiently holding up a half-tonne composite steel panel. His powered environment suit, called a MASPEC, made him look like the bastard offspring of a man and a forklift, and the forklift had more dominant genes. Sal made a mental note to do something about the suits’ aesthetics once she got all the bugs worked out.

  She marched over and
grabbed the other end of the panel, and together they carried it to the side, revealing the bare innards of the atmosphere processor beneath. The compartment was full of ducting and jumbled wires. She hated electronic spaghetti. “Remind me to chew out whoever left this mess. It’s like they never heard of cable ties.”

  “Probably your father’s work.”

  “Shut up.”

  Kazuo flicked on his shoulder lamp and hunkered down in front of the compartment. “Which board is it?”

  “Jay five. The rack with the bright red error light.”

  “I’m color blind, Sal. I’ve told you at least a hundred times.”

  “And it’s funny every single time,” she said without malice.

  Kazuo selected the screwdriver attachment on his wrist tool, and went to work on the screws which held the circuit board in place. “Tell me something interesting about Mars,” he said while he worked.

  Sal pulled the replacement board out of her pack. “Alright. Did you know that in ancient times, Mars was inhabited by a race of intelligent tiger-lizard men?”

  “Is that so?”

  “Absolute fact. Although their civilization collapsed, a few of them survived into modern times, and around the turn of the century, they assisted human efforts to explore the red planet by wiping off the rovers’ solar panels at night while the machines were powered down.”

  “Amazing,” Kazuo said. He handed her the burnt out board, and she gave him the replacement. “Now, what exactly is a tiger-lizard man?”

  “They’re basically like normal lizard men, but with jaunty stripes and cheerier attitudes.”

  Kazuo gave the replacement board a healthy nudge to make sure it was properly seated, then went about screwing it in. “That makes some crazy sort of sense, I guess. Wait… Last week, didn’t you tell me Mars was originally colonized by little green men with fat heads? There are shenanigans afoot.”

  Sal gave the faulty board a quick once over, looking for any obvious signs of failure like a burnt capacitor, but there weren’t any. She’d have to take a closer look in the lab once they got back. “No shenanigans. The little green men, the Quazlpacti as they were called, were the first to colonize Mars, and they brought the tiger-lizards with them as pets. Unfortunately, they didn’t foresee the mutagenic plague which, in a fit of poetic justice, turned them into docile pets and the tiger-lizards into their cruel masters.”