Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  After that, she had been faced with no choice but to wait. So she had sat and waited for the landing cycle, patient and silent in the hold of the lumbering freighter.

  Sure enough, as they were somewhere out over the Rockies, she felt the plane starting to descend. After a while her barometric sensors told her they were at about eighteen thousand feet when she suddenly felt a clunk and a thud resounding through the plane’s fuselage, almost like the landing gear was being deployed. The plane started to vibrate with a powerful turbulence, but something was amiss. Something was clearly interrupting the airflow over the plane’s slick lines, but her senses told her it was not the landing gear. The vibration was imbalanced: it was only coming from one side of the plane, and it was coming from its front.

  There was only one logical conclusion: one of the plane’s hatches had been blown open. She bolted forward, stopping only to listen for a millisecond at the steel dividing door. No sound except the roar of wind. If there had been an accident then there would have been shouts, assuming both pilots had not been sucked out of whatever opening had interrupted the plane’s smooth lines. No noise meant no pilots. No pilots meant no reason not to explore further.

  The steel door between the cargo hold and the crew compartment smashed open like cardboard as her foot came through it, and Lana was greeted by a blast of air, and an empty cockpit. Gripping the walls against the hurricane coming through the blown-out hatchway to her left, she climbed to the gaping opening and angled her head out into the thundering blast of night air.

  Her mind raced to take in what she saw as she scanned the scene. Below and behind the plane were two dark green parachutes, dropping back fast as the plane surged onward on autopilot, but as her eyes turned toward the rear of the plane her acute pupils found the unmistakable blue flares of a flock of streaking rockets powering towards her.

  Without thought, she instantly went to leap clear, throwing herself with all her might out of the open door, but no amount of strength could get her away from the sheer power of the coming explosion. The missiles detonated in quick succession, birthing a rioting cloud of thunder and fire around the plane. They engulfed the big jet in a chorus of demonic flame, combining their fury into one terrible ball of orange-white heat. As the explosion found the plane’s jet fuel it gained new strength, and powered outward, sending fire and debris into Lana’s falling body like a thousand streaking, flaming meteors.

  Her machine mind screamed at her, alarmed at the pounding forces ripping at it. Disaster wrought on her systems as they were alternately fried and beaten, shutting down one by one. A moment later she was tumbling through the sky, the remains of her tactical systems trying to grasp the world flying by her.

  Then she saw the black jets. She saw them by their blue engine trails as they swooped in on her.

  She sensed the bullets an instant before they rammed into her, thousands of hypersonic shells battering her limbs to pieces as first one then another jet sliced at her. They made several passes as she fell, swooping and darting around her falling body like eagles picking at their prey. But as she neared the ground they stopped their attack and brought their own wild plummet to a halt. Rotating their fusion drives and angling them downward, they ignited the smaller thruster in their planes’ noses and brought the fantastic new StratoJets under control.

  But Lana had no such ability to halt her fall, and as they reared up, she continued to rocket down toward the earth, one of her legs blown clean off, her right shoulder exploded and flapping free.

  Her body slammed into the rock of the blunt hills a hundred miles southeast of Denver like a hammer, and all at once a thousand of her systems went quiet. She lay there, still and broken, in the shallow crater her impact had etched in the stone.

  Her remaining systems tried to grapple some semblance of control from her ruined hulk. One eye registered one of the black jets descending like a vengeful angel next to her, she felt the other landing behind her, and then there were two sets of feet crunching through the night to her side.

  “Princess Lamati.” came John Hunt’s voice out of the descending silence.

  A pause, and then, in a tone that matched the contained fury of her own seething rage, he went on, “As you lie here, shattered and broken at last, I am only sad that it took so long for us to finally bring an end to the cancer that is your existence.” She could hear the first hints of victory in his voice, the building satisfaction combating the frustration of months of failure.

  He switched to the native tongue of her homeland, and using the tone reserved for speaking with a servant or vagrant, he went on, “In the end you did not put up much of a fight, but then you were only ever effective against the innocent and the weak. Like a common animal, you only ever picked fights with those who could not defend themselves.”

  Lana screamed inside her skull, a broken moan escaping her limp mouth while impotent rage roiled inside her, but he did not stop. “How easy it was to kill you once we could actually get you face-to-face, so to speak. I only wish we had brought an audience along to watch you die. But after the cowardly way you lashed out at your attackers in King’s Bay, we were forced to insist that we face you alone.”

  He laughed coldly as he watched Lana’s body twitch, impulses flexing her broken limbs, a deeply ironic mimicry of the spasmic torture she had inflicted on so many of her victims.

  “Well,” said Quavoce now, as she convulsed on the ground, “we are almost alone. One person insisted on being here, even if it meant risking her life, and in the end we could not deny her this moment.” His voice returned to English and became a shout, clearly aimed back over his shoulder, at his plane still whirring with contained power not far away, “You can join us now, if you please. She is no longer a threat.”

  Lana raged at the limits of her failed, impotent body and Quavoce returned to her own tongue, now using the patronizing tone reserved for children or pets, “In the end, we could probably have just sent Ayala’s shock troops to kill you, such was the depth of your final failure.

  “But we couldn’t risk you getting away, oh no, you have caused far too much damage. So we both came. And I must say that we are both extremely happy we did.” The two men exchanged a relished smile then stared back down at her, registering her struggling systems, registering the final glimpse of fight in her one functioning eye.

  They watched as she tried to aim her laser at them, but her crippled systems could not control the beam. It was weak and wide and they both laughed.

  “There’s still some fight in this tagnol, yet.” said John, comparing her to a carrion-eating, feral pest from back home on Mobiliei; a mangy hyena at best.

  Another pathetic, stifled scream came back at them in reply, and Quavoce bent down, saying in English once more, “Princess Lamati, I am here to tell you that you represent everything that is wrong with Mobiliei. And we are going to see to it that you and your murderous, bastard allies do not win the coming war, not without a hell of a fight, at least. Because this place is not yours to own. It already has a civilization, and we are here to help them beat you.”

  “On that subject,” said John, smiling, “do you like our jets? Recognize their design at all? Three months, Lana, the humans have had only three months and they’ve already mastered fusion drives, stratospheric flight, and superconductive plating. They have eight more years until the rest of your fleet arrives.”

  Quavoce stood again and added, “And when it does, trust me when I tell you that the real Princess Lamati will be the first to die. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, we have someone that wants to say goodbye before you die. We just need to disarm you first.”

  And with that they both glared down on her and she felt the combined fire of their weaponry burning into her left eye, turning the remains of her weapons systems to liquid inside her eye socket. She tried to writhe away, then felt their hands as they bent and pinned her down. She felt the strength of their healthy, fully functional machine bodies and she longed for that strength
once more.

  Then she heard the third set of footsteps approaching. They paused a short distance away, and then stepped closer.

  “Is that it?” Lana heard a woman say, her voice lathered with disgust and repulsion.

  Lana felt as the human’s breath came close, kneeling beside her and leaning in.

  After a long silence, she heard the woman’s voice as a husky whisper, close, so close, “Can you hear me, Lana? Can you hear me inside that thick skull of yours? I’m still here. Alive and well. All your efforts, all that death and torture for nothing. Neal and I are still thriving, all the more motivated by the sickening, psychopathic bullshit we have had to endure from you.” Lana heard the woman’s voice break as emotion overtook her, “But my mother isn’t, is she, you fucking bitch?” Spittle flew from Madeline’s mouth as she spat her fury at Lana’s shattered shell.

  Madeline breathed deep, John and Quavoce watching her with infinite patience as she let her anger wash over her. After a few moments, Madeline’s eyes focused again, grief fueling her rage to a bubbling simmer behind her eyes, a focused, hot wrath in her pupils as she stared at the source of so much sadness.

  “We’re still here, Lana, or Princess Lamati as I hear you are called.” Madeline laughed derisively into Lana’s prone face. Though it was blind and mute against the barrage of hate facing it, she saw the twitches and spasms of Lana’s frustrated fury. She saw them and knew Lana could hear her and the knowledge filled her like a warm medicine.

  But nothing compared to the feeling of justice Madeline felt as she hefted the drill she had brought with her. It held a bit made especially for this occasion. A drill bit Madeline would keep in a box on her desk for the rest of the war, as a symbol of their fight, of their victories, and of their losses. Forged of diamonds set into a carbon nanotube bit, it was the hardest substance on earth, harder even than the armored skin of the Agents, and with monstrous satisfaction, Madeline pressed it into Lana’s eye.

  “Ready, Lana?” said Madeline in a mockingly sweet voice, “I am going to kill you now. Me. Madeline Cavanagh. I am going to drill your fucking brains out. Are you ready for that?

  “I hope not.

  “I hope you know the depth of your failure.

  “I hope that you know that you have achieved none of your goals by coming here.

  “I hope you know that everything you have done has only fueled our determination to beat you, and driven good people like John Hunt and Quavoce Mantil to our side.

  “They stand with us because of people like you.

  “Do you see it now? Do you, Lana? We will survive … not in spite of you … but because of you.”

  And with that she leaned into the drill, leaned in with all her weight, and squeezed the thick, plastic trigger. The drill whirred to life, a rending whine in the night, echoed by a warped scream from Lana’s lips, and a mountainous shriek of frustration inside her mind. Lana tried to writhe, to escape the drill’s incessant surge as it cut through the back of her eye socket and began to encroach on her mind.

  But she was pinned down by relentless strength.

  Lana Wilson was broken.

  Lana Wilson was beaten.

  And, as the bit turned her brains to twisted debris, at last, Lana Wilson was dead.

  Part 3

  Chapter 25: 1979 va

  Cold. Black. Limitless vacuum.

  Above: a dark void riddled with a billion sparks, white flares too tiny and bright to bring into focus, too distant to perceive.

  Below: a seemingly vast orb, bright blue-white, green, swirling vortices, weather, life. Impossibly beautiful, driving awestruck wonder into the most cynical of minds.

  The Earth.

  Vast, all encompassing. Yet minuscule. Only a spec in our own solar system, completely invisible beyond. Its very fragility and scarcity making it the most prized and valuable entity imaginable. Its stable sun; its temperate, breathable air; its vivacious life; all making it the most precious of oases in the vast, black desert of space.

  But what a dichotomy of resource. For while the Earth is, in and of itself, the most precious of jewels, its inhabitants spend lifetimes fighting to claim metals and precious stones that are abundant everywhere else in the solar system and beyond. For the sun’s countless other astral satellites are riddled with the noble elements, exotic gasses and the very minerals and crystals that countless men have died to extract from our little orb.

  It is another irony, of course, that the same warm embrace holding Earth’s inhabitants safely on its surface makes bringing Earth’s limited resources out into the vacuum astonishingly difficult.

  And so, the solution is obvious. In order to build anything substantial in space, you need raw materials. If you do not want the vast cost and effort of taking them from Earth’s surface, you are left with the Moon and the host of asteroids that have what are referred to as ‘near-Earth’ orbits, circling the sun at the same safe distance that we do.

  For even with the completion of SpacePort One, Terminus One, and the tenuous tether that links them, movement of materials on the scale humanity needs in order to build a full-scale battle fleet remains prohibitive.

  The four tethers that had finally been connected between Terminus and SpacePort One were now moving people and equipment into orbit at a rate of two hundred tons per month, fifty times the hauling capacity of the defunct Space Shuttle program. And at a thousandth of the cost. They were the bootstraps.

  But if we could mine even a single asteroid the size of a football stadium, we would be harnessing a mass of more than two million tons. Moving such an asteroid into orbit would bring more raw materials into play than ten SpacePorts could in a hundred and forty years.

  And the average asteroid is made up of massive amounts of frozen oxygen and hydrogen, huge amounts of iron, silicon, and carbon. Not to mention a host of precious metals such as platinum and gold, in quantities the largest Earthbound mine could only dream of.

  And so, once the SpacePort was completed, and Terminus One was in permanent, attached orbit, the ever-growing number of scientists involved in Neal’s various programs had devoted their collective genius to the possibility of harvesting one or more of the host of asteroids in near-Earth orbit. There had been dissenters in the debate, members of the team who decried the idea as too far-fetched and risky. But in the end, the astrophysicist in Neal had argued them down, and the decision had become not whether to go after an asteroid, but which one.

  So the Hubble telescope and its various cousins around the globe had been tasked with studying the band of orbit that might yield a suitable target. Madeline, in her wisdom, had long since tasked a team with proposing a series of vehicles that could go after the meteor they would eventually choose, vehicles whose capabilities now defined the size and distance parameters of the search.

  There were many candidates, the band of space in question is proverbially littered with them, but one in particular stood out, a recently captured comet, leashed by the sun’s gravitational well to become Asteroid 1979 va.

  It was vast, it was close, and it was getting closer, because in nine months, Asteroid 1979 va would reach its aphelion, and come within four million miles of Earth, but a hop and a skip in intra-stellar terms. At only ten times the distance between the Earth and the Moon, this was an opportunity that could not lightly be missed.

  Plans were made, the resonance manipulators in Japan were put to work once more, and a crew was sought.

  - - -

  It had been two months since the final demise of Lana Wilson, and in that time a ship had grown in space. In geosynchronous orbit, the two Orion crew modules that had made up the core of Terminus One had grown into a massive hub at the end of the space elevator.

  Attached to them by a series of cables and a flexible corridor barely a meter across was the first spaceship of a new age, the first to be constructed totally in space. It was the first machine that was designed never to touch down on Earth’s surface. And the first designed to use th
e esoteric device that had allowed the Mobiliei to exceed the seemingly unbreakable speed of light. Translated from the Mobiliei language that spawned it, the device was the Accelosphere, the ship was called, simply, New Moon One.

  Still thousands of miles below this new ship, a Climber rode one of the tethers up from Rolas Base. It carried materials, fuels, and the final component of the new craft.

  Amongst its crew was one of the pivotal minds of Neal’s blossoming team, on her way to oversee the final stages of the construction of her brainchild. The cabin was menial, consisting of only the basic amenities needed for the elevator’s operators to live on the two-week-long ride up the tether to the Terminus.

  They were in the process of building a larger passenger compartment that could be fitted to the Climbers for transporting greater numbers of people, but for now, the focus had been on moving materials for their all-important first project. This was her first ride on the vehicle. She did not mind the inconvenience.

  A couple of weeks after completing the elevator’s first operational climb, they had sent a fully constructed crew module into space for attachment to the growing Terminus station, and fifteen engineers and astronauts had gone with it. It had then been followed by various pieces of the ship they were constructing and the equipment needed to form those pieces into a cohesive whole.

  Finally the true meat of the craft had been hauled up in eight long missions, the eight vast engines that would propel the ship around the sun to catch up with its quarry. Eventually these engines would be detached from each other and arranged around the surface of the asteroid to manhandle it into Earth orbit.

  But now the final component of the ship approached, the massive subspace wormhole generator that would form a great sphere around the ship when it was at its most vulnerable, snapping it out of normal space and allowing it to drive forward at phenomenal speed, using first the Earth’s and then the sun’s primal grips to slingshot the ship after its intended target. Birgit was travelling with this final component: the Accelosphere Generator.