John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  There were long periods when nothing seemed to be happening, and we wondered if it was all over. Maybe they were regrouping for the next attack. Nobody had any idea who was winning and who was losing. There were six hours of that. We had to give Jubal another pill when we heard him whimpering back there.

  Bottom line, after eight hours of sitting in the same place and watching a lot of strang­ers trying to kill each other, we really could have cared less who won. The ideal outcome would have been if they all killed each other off. Then something hit Phobos, about a mile away from us.

  Later it was determined to be a stray missile. It made quite a flash, and sent up a plume of rocky debris. Not like an explosion on Earth, where the dirt goes up for a bit and then splashes back down. Everything just kept moving. A few seconds later we felt a small tremor jolt the ship.

  There had been a few dozen people visible on the surface around us. Now they all headed back toward the air lock, as fast as they could go.

  None of us said anything. Something pinged off the windshield. Evangeline pointed, and I saw a tiny star-shaped pit in the supertough Lexan. It couldn't have come from the explosion. Anything traveling fast enough to chip our windshield would be halfway to Deimos by now.

  "Lots of debris flying around out there," I said. You'd better believe it. Even when there was no actual shooting going on, the most spectacular display was of millions and millions of tiny particles from the explosions and the impact on Phobos entering the atmosphere and burning up.

  "Ray, go check Jubal's suit again," Mom said. "I don't trust a suit I haven't checked out myself."

  Another hour passed.

  Wars have an ebb and flow, even if they're over in less than a day, as all our invasions were. We couldn't see it at first, and never got it all straight, but at some point it became clear that the operations were moving close to the city. We had made a little more than one complete orbit of Mars, and the city had crawled back around until it was almost under us again.

  We could see it down there, getting close to morning now, but still lit up like Miami Beach or the Las Vegas Strip.

  Then there was a huge explosion, and all the lights went out.

  18

  What can I say? My heart stopped. I stopped breathing. I cried out.

  I may have done all or any of those things, but I don't remember. I remember bumping my head hard off the slanted windshield in front of us. Somehow I had unstrapped myself and just lurched up, I guess. All I remember was the extreme urge to do something. And the slowly dawning realization that there was nothing I could do.

  All the camera feeds from below had cut out when the lights went off.

  Mom had been talking to Dad on the phone. That conversation was cut short.

  Evangeline had had Elizabeth on the line. Gone.

  I had been trying to raise Travis on a frequency Mom had given me. No answer.

  Then, a flicker here and another flicker there, some of the lights below came back on. Not the big gaudy neon and laser and xenon meant to be visible from space, but just some faint glows.

  "Power station," Mom whispered. "Maybe they just hit the power station. Please let it be the power station."

  All the hotels and malls had emergency power, big banks of the same sort of batteries used to power cars on Earth. Those small, faint lights should be from hotel room win­dows and emergency lights under the Lexan-covered malls... which would mean that the hotels and malls were still there, not smoldering ruins...

  Things began to come back together in about five minutes. Alternate transmitters were dialed up, connections reestablished, reporters began breathless stories. We watched a standup from a newsman in a suit standing in the middle of a mall in front of a shattered fifty-foot pane of Lexan, hip deep in debris generated by the blowout. "No casualties to report here, Marilyn, at least not yet, though as you can see people might be down at the bottom of this mess, or possibly lying out on the surface. Everything just picked up and zoomed out of here, I had to hang on to a railing and I was lifted off my feet! We are sealed off at the moment, naturally, but we've got plenty of air. It's getting cold... I hope rescue crews are on the way... though I don't suppose it'll help anyone who might be under all this." He paused, with what sounded like a genuine catch in his throat. "We'll do what we can. Back to you in the studio, Marilyn."

  Marilyn came on to assure viewers that rescue parties were on the way, but they were spread pretty thin, what with all the other blowouts... Marilyn looked harried and more than a little frightened. I wondered where her studio was.

  Somebody began a delayed feed of the events of a few minutes before. At first the camera was rock-steady, aiming at the sky, then everything shook, the cameraman seemed to drop the camera. It lay there on its side for a moment, and we could see a fireball moving sideways across our screens. The reporter was just short of babbling. Her voice shook with adrenaline.

  "Holy shit!... uh, there's been a major explosion... Jim, did you see... um, looks like something hit the ground, I repeat, something hit the ground, something big hit the ground about five hundred meters from... Jim, I don't know the town from... is that Bur­roughs High? Ah... Marilyn, it looks like one of the invader ships came down not far from Burroughs... that's right, it's Burroughs High... it just fucking crashed, came right over our heads... I don't know where that fireball came from, nothing will burn out here, in fact I'm fucking freezing..."

  The cameraman and the reporter were hurrying toward the low domes of my recent alma mater. They cut to a live feed. The reporter was still breathing hard, but had estab­lished herself with a smashed dome in the background.

  "It appears that a large piece of debris scored a direct hit on the Burroughs High School gymnasium. We can only pray..."

  I had a lump in my throat. I had no real affection for the place, I was glad to see the last of it. All I cared about was deaths and/or injuries. We watched and listened and surfed all possible news sources, and so far there were no confirmed reports of casualties. But we all knew it would take a while.

  Then there was an image of home.

  "I'm standing outside the historic Red Thunder Hotel, the sun is coming up, and the full extent of this disaster is becoming more apparent. As I speak, rescue crews are mak­ing their way through the Red Thunder and all other hotels, going room to room. As you can see, this building took a heavy hit. I've counted six major breaches, and some other windows appear to be blown out..."

  In the pale pink dawn of early morning, I could see what he was talking about. Something had hit the north side of the tower at the third, fifth, and tenth floors. There was a piece of twisted, smoking metal sticking out of the side like a broken harpoon. Smoke was coming out of the top of the building. Nothing will burn in the thin carbon dioxide air of Mars, so I couldn't figure it out at first. Then I had it.

  "That stuff must have been very hot. If it punches through someplace, and then the emergency systems seal it off; it could start fires on the carpets or beds."

  "It can't burn long," Mom said. I couldn't see her face very well through the helmet, but I thought her eyes looked red. Evangeline squeezed my hand tight.

  "They're all in the shelter," she said. "Isn't that what your Dad said?"

  "That's right. The shelter should be okay. They'll be okay in the shelter."

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and almost jumped out of my skin and suit at the same time. I twisted, and saw Jubal floating back there, staring fixedly at the windscreen. How long had he been watching?

  "All my fault," he said. There was no particular emotion in his voice. It was just... dead. Hopeless. "All my fault."

  I was about to reassure him that it wasn't, but then thought better of it. I saw Mom turn and stare at Jubal.

  "What do you mean, Jubal? Because you ran away?"

  He looked puzzled. The amount of drugs he had in him, I was surprised he could talk at all.

  "No," he said, at last. "I had to do that, me. I had to take the stuff away
from them before things got worse."

  "So what do you mean?"

  Jubal just shook his head. Then he sighed and gestured to the window.

  "All this, it gotta stop. It gotta stop."

  Mom studied him a moment. Then she asked a question that would have been non­sense, asked of anyone but Jubal. "Can you stop it?"

  He frowned. He started to shake his head, then frowned again. He opened his mouth to say something, stopped himself, and let his breath out, slowly. I had the creepy feeling that Jubal was thinking, in his own special way. I say creepy, but of course it was also wonderful. It's just that you never know what's going to come out of that box once you open it. You know there will be good stuff, but there's likely to be bad, too. But if anyone could deliver a miracle here, Jubal was the one.

  "The killing, it has to stop," he said, finally. "No more killing."

  An hour later the space-traffic control center judged the area within fifty thousand miles of Mars was reasonably clear. The advisory said that combat operations seemed to have ended, and most battle debris had either impacted or left the area.

  I started casing the ship slowly away. Traffic was tight, as everybody else who'd been grounded for all that time hurried to shove off and get back down to find out what had happened.

  There were still no phones. We called Dad and Elizabeth and Evangeline's family every five minutes: "We are hard at work to restore your phone service to the high stan­dards you are accustomed to, so please bear with us!"

  "So what do we do now?" I asked.

  Mom looked troubled. There were several things that needed to be done, and it wasn't possible to do them all. We needed to get away from there, far away, with Jubal. We also needed to get to the surface to find out what had become of our families.

  "I guess we still need to get out of here," she said. "Evangeline, what do you want to do? This isn't your fight."

  I could see she was torn. She wanted to know about her family, but she also wanted it to be her fight. She wasn't part of our weird family, which included Jubal and Travis... but I was pretty sure she wanted to be. Before she could answer we got a phone call, just sound, no picture, that changed everything.

  "Kelly? Can you hear me, Kelly? Ray, Evangeline, anybody who can hear me, please pick up."

  "I'm here; Manny," Mom shouted.

  "Oh, great. Ah... I'm okay, I've accounted for all the Redmonds. Are you guys doing okay? We haven't been able to get any news from Phobos."

  "We're fine, Manny. I don't think anybody got hurt. Where is Elizabeth?"

  "I don't know, hon. I've got calls out, but things are very patchy. I don't know how long this connection will last. I'll let you know as soon as I know anything, of course, but I'm pretty busy here with damage control. There are five dead so far –"

  "Oh, my god!"

  "– don't know if they were guests or staff, it's sort of... well, they were in a room that got hit. I'm getting reports of dozens of deaths and some injuries... just a minute, some­thing coming in on the other... on the other channel here..." There was a long silence. "Okay. Okay, ah, Kelly, Elizabeth's been hurt. I don't know –"

  Buzz. Pop. Hiss. And then silence.

  The silence didn't last long. Mom went into Emergency Mother mode in a heartbeat. Maybe two heartbeats.

  "Ramon, give me the code for your airboard."

  I gave it to her. "But Mom, you've never flown a board."

  "How hard will it be to find a boardhead willing to fly yours?" She was already out of her seat and headed for the air lock.

  "Hang on, Mom," I said. "We're about a quarter mile away. I'll bring –"

  "No time for that. I'll jump. Evangeline, do you want to come with me?"

  "No, ma'am. My family is okay. Ray will need some help."

  "Good girl."

  "Mom!"

  She stopped, half into the air lock.

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "Go north. You should hear from Travis soon. He said he'd be able to find us. Don't boost too hard or too long. If you haven't heard from Travis in... twenty-four hours, turn around and head back. I'll have something organized by then.

  Remember, Travis doesn't know we have Jubal. He doesn't know anything except that I sent out an urgent message. Use high encryption when you talk to him, until you're together."

  And with that, she closed the door behind her. I know I should have been flattered, and I was, believe me. I was also scared half out of my wits. Suddenly I wasn't just the driver of a silly little shuttle. By the laws of space travel, I was the captain of a deep-space-bound ship, crew of two, one a girl even younger and more scared than me, one a helpless child-man genius that the most powerful people on Earth had proven themselves willing to kill innocent people to get back.

  I could feel it when Mom shoved off, since the shuttle started a slow yaw away from Phobos. I canceled that vector and added a little more, and we rotated until I could see her, hoots toward us, moving away at a clip that was maybe a tad too fast for my liking, but not alarming. I saw her rotate to bring her heels toward the surface, saw her knees bend to soak up the landing without pushing herself back into space, saw her use tiny spurts of her suit jets to move her along the surface, not touching, until she reached a group of people hanging out around their boards. She turned and waved at us. She was very small at that distance.

  Everything suddenly looked very small, most especially my little ship. Soon, even Mars would look small.

  "Well, I guess we'd better get going," Evangeline said.

  "Yeah." Still I did nothing.

  "Off we go."

  "Into the wild black yonder."

  We looked at each other.

  "Okay." I eased the control stick forward and felt the acceleration build up.

  By any rational standard, one random bucket of space should be pretty much like every other bucket: empty. Say your bucket is a cubic AU – Astronomical Unit – about 90 million miles on a side. Same difference as if it was a bedpan. Just space, nothing there, no matter what size your sample is.

  What is so hard to communicate to people who haven't actually been out in it, is how big "outer space" is. Say we had enough energy and potato chips and Dr Pepper and oxygen to last us for a few centuries, and accelerated in the direction Evangeline and I were going – or any direction at all, picked at random – until we were almost at the speed of light. Say we were passing through cubic AUs at the rate of about one every eight minutes – which would seem like fractions of a second to us, because of the relativistic time dilation. AU after AU after AU we intrepid explorers would have this to report:

  Nothing there. (Actually, a few molecules of hydrogen in a cubic yard, a speck of dust too small to see, maybe ten molecules in size, in every cubic mile. And that's in the dense parts of interstellar space.) We could continue on and on and on until all the food was gone and the ship was filled to the ceiling with poop, and be far, far around the curve of the universe before we had a reasonable chance of hitting anything.

  I mean anything: a piece of gravel, an asteroid, a planet, a star.

  We could fly out of our galaxy and take a long time before we hit another... and fly right through that as though it was almost all empty space, which it is.

  So logically, going north or south of the plane of the ecliptic of the solar system, where all the matter is, shouldn't be any different than following the well-traveled space-lanes between the big globs of matter where we make our tenuous homes. Just a little emptier. Just a little farther from everything that is familiar.

  Bullshit. It was spooky. Every second took us farther away from all that was safe and familiar. It was, I'm a little ashamed to admit it, a deeply superstitious feeling. With every second that we accelerated, that distance increased.

  That's right. Accelerated. If it had been up to me, I'd have got up to a certain speed and then shut down the drive. Coasted until Travis contacted us. But as soon as we started boosting, at what a Martian would call "one g
ravity," a strange thing happened. Jubal got better.

  He came walking up behind us, bouncing a little too high like an Earthie, but he had a tentative smile on his face. He removed his helmet.

  "Hey, this ain't so bad," he said. "I feel kinda light. Kinda funny."

  "It's one Martian gravity, Jubal," Evangeline said. "A little less than .4 gee."

  "Yessum. I figgered. I kinda like it."

  "What about your... ah, claustrophobia," I said.

  He looked around.

  " 'Bout the size of a school bus," he said. "I been on a school bus, me."

  Evangeline and I looked at each other. Shrugged.

  "We are on a spaceship," Evangeline said. "I thought you didn't fly."

  "Never have," he said. "Mebbe it be gettin' on that thing scare me so."

  I'd never thought of that. Maybe it was just weightlessness he couldn't tolerate. Maybe he'd even get used to that. People do.

  So that's why we were boosting constantly. It was no problem with a bubble drive. We'd run out of food and water long before we ran out of fuel. There was a problem, though, if we were to rendezvous somehow with Travis. Boosting for a while and then shutting down would have put us on a straight line at a constant velocity. Travis could get to us a lot sooner. Constantly accelerating, our speed was constantly increasing, and we'd be much, much farther from Mars when Travis started his search, which would make it much harder.

  In fact, it would have been impossible, except for one thing I had thought of and called in to Mom just before we were getting out of the radio range of the shuttle and the GPS satellite web around Mars. I told her I'd be riding the axis. I mean, really riding it. I got the ship aligned so that if you drew a line through the Martian north and south poles and then extended that line north, you'd find me within a hundred yards of that line even if we were 100 million miles out. It took me a while, but the computers were easily able to cope with that degree of accuracy. Even at a billion miles, we shouldn't stray more than a mile from that line.