Darkness Falling

by Ian Douglas

  Power gone, life support gone, save for the air left in his armor, communications gone, save for an emergency SAR tracker that had already switched on automatically. The suit’s AI . . . dead.

  Dixon had perhaps forty minutes of air left in his suit. After that, he would be dead as well.

  Kilgore floated in space with a couple of dozen other Marines, half of them, perhaps, from First Platoon, Bravo Company, but the rest from other units, bits and pieces of the Tellus First Marine Division. They were waiting to get on board one of the Devil Toads from the two surviving transports, the Inchon and the Saipan. Thousands of Marines were adrift in the area, some forming a rough defensive perimeter in case the needleships—what was left of them—tried to attack, but most of them were just waiting to board one of the transports or the Ad Astra, which was a looming shadow nearby.

  It was impossible yet to guess how many had been lost, first in the wild fighting on the surface of Bluestar, then in the precipitous flight back to the Ad Astra.

  Too many, he thought. Too many good men and women lost. . . .

  “Where’s that captain?” PFC Colby asked.

  “Who?”

  “The guy who dropped in and was covering us when we bugged out. What was his name?”

  “Dixon,” Kilgore said, remembering. “Didn’t he come out with us?”

  “Last I saw he was plastering those needleships with Shurikins,” Rees said.

  Kilgore turned to look at the brand-new star burning in the distance. What the hell had hit the Bluestar to make it burn like that? Even at this distance, half an AU from the thing, the radiation was fierce—radiant heat, light, and hard stuff.

  Shit. If Dixon was still back inside that hellfire . . .

  “I’m gonna go back in there and have a look,” he said.

  “Gunny!” Captain Byrnes snapped. “Belay that! Get back in the queue!”

  “Hold my place, Skipper,” he replied. “I’ll be back in a tick.”

  “Damn it, Gunny!”

  “I’m going with him,” Rees said.

  Kilgore accelerated, flying toward the light, Rees on his tail and a litany of curses from Byrnes trailing them into the vacuum.

  Günter Adler looked out over the crowd gathered in Elliott Square, the broad, open park located in the middle of the Port Hab city of Seattle. An electronic count of the crowd numbers reported nearly ten thousand people in the square, a pretty fair crowd for such short notice.

  And they were cheering him.

  “I can admit to a mistake,” he said as the latest surge of cheers died away. “I never should have voted to join the fortunes of Tellus to those of this so-called Cooperative. I have pledged to correct this mistake, and to lead our beloved Tellus Ad Astra into a new era of independence and prosperity!”

  Again, Adler was interrupted by cheers. To tell the truth, he was somewhat disappointed by the size of the crowd. He needed to convince the population of the twin cylinders that everyone approved of him, and nothing would do that better than enormous, wildly cheering crowds. At least his electronic crowd this afternoon was pushing a hundred thousand, almost a tenth of the colony’s entire population. That wasn’t something the Cybercouncil would be able to ignore.

  “Lloyd and his cronies,” Adler continued, “have tried to silence me, have illegally removed me from my position as director of the colony’s Cybercouncil, have questioned my ability to govern based on a specious technicality. But I say to you, to all of you here in this square, to all of you watching at home or in-head, that I am fully capable and ready to serve you, the good people of this colony, and to make certain that your voices are heard!”

  He was standing at a podium overlooking the square. At his back towered a thirty-meter display hanging from the side of the Duplass Building, a display that had been projecting his image, huge and unstoppable above the crowd, but which at the moment was showing the red-ocher sphere of Wrath of Deity hanging in space just beyond the ringed disk of Ki. The arrogance, the condescension, and the outright hostility displayed by the alien Tchagar had not gone unnoticed by Tellus’s citizens, and Adler had begun making use of that. You could go only so far trying to drum up xenophobic terror by dwelling on how much the Kroajid looked like giant spiders. With the Tchagar, you had beings who not only looked like nightmares come to life, but acted like them as well. According to AI poll samples taken just that morning, something like 20 percent of the people on board Tellus were afraid or very afraid of the Tchagar, a remarkable number in and of itself for a population that had originally volunteered for diplomatic duty at the capital of an alien galactic empire.

  And that number, with Adler’s deft guidance, was certain to grow.

  “This Galaxy,” he continued, “these two galaxies, in fact, offer an unimaginably vast and rich region within which we can make our new home. There are billions of worlds here, empty because their original populations have vanished down their digital holes and pulled the holes in after them. There are titanic megastructures built millions of years ago, empty . . . again because their builders have vanished into virtual worlds of their own making.

  “Why should we battle this so-called Andromedan Dark—battle them, mind you, at the behest of alien masters who care nothing for us!—why should we fight this useless war when we can so easily find a quiet corner of the Galaxy where we can rebuild a civilization in the image of our lost Earth? Why—”

  Adler stopped, staring down at his watchers. An uneasy murmur was sweeping through the crowd. He could tell that those nearest his podium were no longer looking at him, but above and beyond him. They were looking at the giant display. Some were pointing. . . .

  Curious, Adler turned, craning his neck to look up the wall. The angle was too sharp and he couldn’t make out the image, so he pulled up a repeater view on his in-head.

  A new star, a very, very bright star, had appeared between the disk of Ki and the smaller and more distant disk of Wrath of Deity. As he watched, it grew steadily brighter . . . and brighter . . . and brighter still, until it outshone the local sun despite the fact that it appeared to be a point source, while the sun showed a visible disk.

  A data feed on his in-head told him that the light was from the Bluestar object, which appeared to have blown up. Adler sifted through this new information. There would be a way to use it to his advantage. Obviously, St. Clair’s military had managed to score a remarkable, a miraculous victory over the enormous alien threat out there. That meant that Tellus could search for its new home and hiding place without being pursued by the enemy. But he would have to keep up the drumbeat of xenophobia; they could not, they must not try to strike up a binding alliance with the Cooperative.

  Not if he, Günter Adler, was going to gain and hold power.

  Seven kilometers away, Jason Prescott brought his M-290 pulse laser rifle to his shoulder and closed his eyes. The rifle’s optics were transmitting an image to his in-head display, and he could see it best with his eyes closed.

  It took a few moments to find his target. He had to run a program that threw arrows up against the display until he could gently move the rifle, its muzzle balanced on a bipod, into proper alignment.

  Prescott was lying among the naked rocks and ferrocrete blocks of the aft endcap of Tellus’s port cylinder. The city of Seattle lay sprawled across the inner curve of the cylinder below him, two kilometers down and seven out. Straight-line distance to his target was 7.3 kilometers.

  This far up the endcap, Prescott was well above the hab’s tree line. He was also in an area that possessed about half of the air pressure present at what passed for sea level in the rotating cylinder. He wore a pressure mask to compensate.

  From here, even without the image augmentation of his rifle’s optics, he could see the enormous visual display on the side of the building at one end of Elliott Square. His target stood in front of the display’s base, behind a podium constructed of some very tough transparent materials. Steadying the rifle’s muzzle, he enlarged the targe
t’s image, and brought up the targeting reticle. Günter Adler had just turned away from his audience and was straining to see what was on the enormous display at his back.

  Carefully, Prescott centered the reticle. A five-megawatt pulse would attenuate slightly when fired within an atmosphere . . . but would retain more than enough power to vaporize the target. Five megawatts of energy focused into a one-second beam carried the destructive potential of roughly one kilogram of high explosives.

  They would be lucky to find enough of the former Cybercouncil director to bury.

  He double-checked the range by sending out a brief, weak pulse of infrared laser light, the weapon’s computer returning a precise range of 7.29445 kilometers. Close enough. He thoughtclicked an icon and the laser rifle fired.

  There was a sharp, sudden jolt, and Adler blinked back to awareness. He was in his home in the hills above Seattle, lying on a virtching couch. What the hell?

  He’d been giving the best speech of his life. He’d been down there, in Elliott Square. Unable to renew his link with the VirTraveler, he thoughtclicked an in-head icon and brought up a local news channel on the floor-to-ceiling display in his living room.

  People were screaming . . . running. Security officers were gathering at the podium that, Adler saw, had been reduced to twisted, blackened ruin. There was a body behind where the podium had been. The remnants of a body, rather, legs and a little bit of torso and not much else at all.

  His eyes widened with the realization. That had been him.

  In fact, for security reasons he’d been delivering his speech by means of a VirTraveler 990, a teleoperated robot that had been wearing a lifelike mask molded to look like his face. The effect was quite good; from twenty meters away, you couldn’t tell that you were looking at a robot rather than a flesh-and-blood human. Had he not taken that elementary precaution, his flesh and blood would be down there now, charred into unrecognizable ruin, burned and splattered all over the stage.

  “Clara!” he screamed.

  It wasn’t his wife who entered the room, but one of his sex-worker gynoids.

  “Günter! What is it?”

  “Someone just tried to kill me! Where’s Clara?”

  “In the pool, on the lower terrace.”

  “Get her. And tell the guards outside that someone just tried to kill me.” He didn’t want to show himself at any of the windows. It was quite possible that the assassins had the house under surveillance.

  Assassins? He didn’t know who the actual shooter was, but he knew who was behind the order to terminate him. Those bastards on the Cybercouncil had just gone too far.

  He’d been half expecting something like this.

  And he’d made plans.

  Lloyd and the rest of those damned assholes would pay. . . .

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The radiation levels inside Dixon’s armor were soaring. At the moment, it looked as though he still likely would suffocate before he died of radiation poisoning, but it was going to be a near thing. The fireball continued to thin and clear, but the remnant of the Bluestar object drifted a few hundred thousand kilometers in the distance, fiercely glowing with a white heat and giving off an intense bombardment of gamma radiation.

  Dixon’s armor was slowly and uncontrollably tumbling, so he could see the object only for a short time every few seconds as it swept past his helmet sensors. His eyes, he’d discovered, weren’t working; he could see only an in-head display, a feed from an optical scanner mounted on one shoulder. The images were less than satisfactory. Damage to the scanner had left it unable to do much more than separate light from darkness. He couldn’t see detail at all.

  All communications were out, the antennae on the outside of his armor melted away.

  His rotation beat out a steady rhythm within his mind. Light . . . dark . . . dark . . . dark . . . light . . . dark . . . dark . . . dark . . .

  And then, suddenly, there was no return of the light. What the hell?

  He strained to see, to make out what was going on, but could not. Then something grabbed his arm and he screamed.

  He felt a heavy clunk against his helmet, and then heard a voice, a very faint voice yelling from a long way off. “Captain Dixon! Are you okay?”

  Helmet induction. If they couldn’t talk to him by radio or over his in-head link, they could still touch helmets and shout.

  “Almost out of air,” he yelled back, his voice taking on an odd hollow tone inside his helmet. “And radiation!”

  “Got the rads covered,” the voice called back. “We’ll have you hooked up to an air supply in a moment.”

  He could see movement now on his in-head . . . and make out a large, looming shadow blocking the intense white glare from the Bluestar. The shadow, he realized, bore the outline of an ASF-99 Wasp fighter. It was drifting a few dozen meters off, directly between him and the radiation source, saving him with its shadow. Dixon felt the slight tug of gentle acceleration. They were moving him.

  A burst of power surged through his armor. Airflow was restored, as were temperature control and other life-support functions. His vision sharpened up, too, with the replacement of his faulty optical scanner.

  “Okay, Captain,” a voice said through his in-head. “You read me now?”

  It was Gunnery Sergeant Kilgore. Dixon was nearly trembling with relief.

  “Loud and clear, Gunny,” he replied over the same channel. His armor was running through a list of diagnostics now. Kilgore had just slapped an emergency suit repair unit against the ruin of his backpack, and it was sending nanotechnic tendrils into and through his armor, reforging connections, effecting repairs, and granting him another few hours of life.

  Depending, of course, on how badly he’d already been burned. He was feeling a gut-churning nausea right now, and a deep chill that probably had nothing to do with his actual suit temperature. That almost certainly would be the first signs of acute radiation poisoning coming through. And then he felt a stab at his left shoulder; the repair kit was injecting him with anti-radiation nano.

  He was very much afraid it might be a matter of too little, too late.

  Lieutenant Christopher Merrick had been guided in by Rees and Kilgore. Spotting the Marine adrift in emptiness, his suit burned out, Merrick had positioned his Wasp fighter in such a way as to block the fierce radiation from what was left of the Bluestar object. Rees and Kilgore, meanwhile, were attending to Dixon. Merrick took the time to scan nearby space, looking for other Marines who might have been caught by the explosion. The search-and-rescue ships would be out shortly, but they might not be able to operate for long in this intense radiation field. If he could locate and tag stranded Marines, it might help them get picked up sooner.

  The glare from the wrecked alien megastructure made it all but impossible to see. His cockpit had dialed itself almost completely black to protect his eyes, and that made spotting something as small as a Marine in black combat armor something of a challenge. Fortunately, he had instrumentation that could do the job better than Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeballs.

  An alarm sounded, and at the same instant he actually did catch a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. Something was moving against the glare outside, something a hell of a lot bigger than a Marine.

  “What is that?” he said.

  “Nasty says it’s a piece of the Bluestar,” Captain Byrnes told him. “Maybe an escape pod.”

  “It’s coming this way!” he called.

  “Copy that.”

  “Lieutenant Merrick,” another voice said in his head. “This is St. Clair.”

  “Yes, my lord!”

  “I’ve got a really big favor to ask of you, Lieutenant.”

  Shit. Lord commanders did not ask favors of subordinates. They gave orders, and expected those orders to be obeyed. What the hell was going down?

  “Anything you say, Lord Commander.”

  “Don’t agree until you hear it,” St. Clair told him. “You have a say in this, okay?”
/>   “Yes, my lord.”

  “We see that Bluestar fragment approaching your position. However . . . be advised that we are in communication with it. We’re not entirely certain yet what’s happening . . . but I want you not to fire unless it fires upon you.”

  “I . . . I understand, Lord Commander.”

  “There’s just a chance that we can resolve this conflict without any more killing. I am not making this a direct order, because you’re there and I’m not. Use your best judgment. But give them a chance, okay?”

  “I copy, Lord Commander. Don’t shoot unless they shoot first.”

  “And I’d appreciate your telling us what’s happening. It’s tough seeing anything at all against that glare.”

  “Roger that. Uh . . . the fragment is pretty big . . . I estimate it at 120 kilometers in diameter. Mass approximately five point three times ten to the seventeen kilograms. Speed eighty kilometers per second in approach. Range now—make it fifteen thousand kilometers, and closing. . . .”

  At that speed, the thing would be on top of him in another three minutes.

  “We’re designating this object IO-2.”

  “IO-2, copy that.”

  “Can you see any surface features?”

  “Not much. Most of the surface is black and crinkly, but there are molten areas as well . . . perhaps 10 percent. No structures, no openings that I can see. It doesn’t look artificial.”

  “Any sign of enemy fighters?”

  “None, my lord. No needleships, no—”

  And then IO-2 accelerated fast and hard directly toward Merrick’s fighter, swelling in an instant into a wall of black rock and pools of molten lava. There was a jolting impact. . . .