Ten Thousand Thunders

by Brian Trent

  Thunder, real thunder, shivered in the sky. The parched ground began to dimple with scattered raindrops.

  “Celeste!” Jeff’s voice came into her ear as a strained whisper. “We’ve got to hurry!”

  “Hold fast!” she said severely. “Here it comes.”

  The truck chugged out like an aged tortoise engineered for battle, lumbering onto the disused road on reinforced glasstic tires, belching noxious biofuel. The merc traders sat in the back, multiguns slung at their shoulders.

  A bird hopped out of the truck’s way, flapped its wings twice, and settled a foot from where Celeste waited. It shook rain from its beak.

  There were ways of spotting CAMOed fighters. Celeste amped her vision and ran the truck’s silhouette through a filter. No signs of a scanning array. Even the advance scouts now waiting at the road’s bend were surprisingly low-tech. Wastelanders were shrewd, dangerous folk…but they tended to see the world in provincial terms.

  Rain thumped on her suit.

  Celeste swallowed hard.

  “Allie, Jamala, hit them.”

  From both sides of the road, two columns of smoke shot forth and struck the truck’s tires. The impact whirled the vehicle into a perfect half circle, handily bursting one tire off its axle.

  The truck’s spin put the traders directly in front of Celeste. She fired three bursts, killing them before they could return a single shot.

  “North!” Jeff’s voice shouted, and every invisible muzzle swung towards the garage doors. The trading camp’s security forces shot wildly at them. Bullets whined past Celeste like hornets.

  Her entire team was visible now; the storm drew them in vibrating silhouettes of white rain-splash. One of these freakish shapes flattened out – Celeste didn’t need her augs to recognize the weapon it carried: a Greely barracuda-class heatlance. Jamala’s favored peacekeeper.

  The mercenaries at the garage burst like balloons. Jamala ejected the steaming battery – it sizzled, invisibly, on the ground in the rain.

  It was quick, brutal wetwork from there. Rajnar and Allie darted to the garage; Celeste marveled at the way their camouflaged bodies were illustrated in the downpour, as if they were a pair of transdimensional predators pushing in from a hellish nearby dimension.

  A spurt of gunfire.

  “Garage is clear,” Rajnar barked.

  Celeste killed her CAMO. She materialized as a sinewy, tall woman clad entirely in the blacked-out fiberoptic bodysuit. She removed the suffocating headmask and welcomed the cool rain on her face and neck. Her hair was dyed scarlet, tightly woven back by a mesh skullcap. The world might have called her pretty if not for the famished lines of her face, or the taut muscles beneath her caramel skin, or the hard eyes.

  Celeste breathed deep of the air, tasting gunpowder, ozone, and the stench of burned flesh. She checked her battery gauge: Fifteen minutes of CAMO power left.

  “Power off!” she said. “We may need it still.”

  The ghost shapes surrounding the idling truck appeared like black puma people. Jeff, freckled and blond, was the first to the truck. He yanked open the door and jerked the dead driver to the road. Working swiftly, he released the locks on the tarp-covered cargo. The team set to work instantly on extricating the prize.

  Jeff and Allie were already unpacking their moving straps. Onto its lightweight cushion they set the first of the missiles, the weight shared between them. Rajnar and Jamala took the second one.

  “Eighty-three seconds,” Celeste said, giving a playful slap on Jeff’s back. “Are we hot or not?”

  Jeff grimaced, his freckled, scarred face grimy with rain-defying dirt. “I’m still hot to the tune of 101 degrees. Had to do this in July, huh?”

  Celeste regarded the missile. “Scan it.”

  Jeff splayed one hand over the nanosteel shell and shut his eyes.

  Celeste was afraid to hope.

  The Earth Republic, along with the InterPlanetary Council, had done a good job of combing the birthworld for Old Calendar nukes. Their sniffer bots patrolled the Wastes like biblical angels, seeking the toxic burial chamber of radioactive kings.

  But nukes were easy to find. Other things were far more dangerous, and far more difficult for arkies to steal away.

  “I see six magnetic ventricles,” Jeff said, eyes still closed. He licked his lips excitedly. “Looking good so far. Wait a minute…there’s heavy shielding in here.”

  Celeste held her breath.

  Jeff’s eyes snapped open. “Stasis field, people! This here’s the real deal!”

  For just an instant, the group stared at the missiles with glassy-eyed adoration. Then in a blink they were back to their old selves, all business, carrying the missiles into the marsh.

  The real deal! Celeste felt like skipping.

  “We should make it through the gloplands in two hours,” Allie said. “If those traders have got air support, it’ll be tight.”

  “The rain will give us cover,” Celeste said.

  “It won’t last,” Allie countered.

  “Double-time it, people!”

  Into the wilderness they went, sinking to their knees in scum-covered water. The green filth pooled around their thighs. But they moved like bot troops, disciplined (except for Jeff’s good-humored ranting) and keenly aware of possible ambush. The water was good cover; anything shy of an airhound would lose them at its rancid shores.

  Unless someone dispatched waspbots to pursue them.

  The thought made Celeste swallow nervously. She absently touched the EMP canisters at her beltline.

  “Underground,” she commanded, and the team changed direction to the large drainpipe protruding like a beheaded serpent from the swamp. It led to the old subway catacombs. Most were tribe turf. The Butcher Boys ran these tunnels and they owed Celeste a favor. She intended on collecting.

  “The really smart glops have built entire communities down here,” Jeff was saying. “This guy from Taconic, Jimmy Howard, he got lost in the underdark about a year ago. He stumbled on these weird lights. They were candles. Scanner told him they were made from the fatty deposits of corpses. And carrying the candles? The strangest glops he ever saw. Mollusks. Floppin’ on the rusted tracks in a creepy dance, candles coiled in their tentacles. They were holding some kind of Mass!”

  Jamala wiped her brown neck and shot him a glare. “Would you shut the fuck up, Jeff? I’m so sick of hearing about glops.”

  “If we get through this, I’ll show you the eyecapture Jimmy took.”

  Silent Rajnar usually lived up to his name. But at this comment he said, with considerable interest, “You’ve got a clip of them? For real?”

  “I do,” Jeff said proudly. “Swear on my family’s honor.”

  “Like that means a goddamn thing,” Jamala snapped.

  They pushed deeper into the tunnels, deliberately steering off from the main tracks and taking a maintenance shaft. Here, the tunnel was narrower and less drafty. Flames burned in oil drums, turning the maze into shades of red and black.

  Jamala and Jeff had shifted the subject from glops and were now trading insults over each other’s genealogy.

  “Quiet!” Celeste hissed.

  The tunnel branched into two equally dark paths. Graffiti plastered the mouths of each, recounting a record of tunnel defenses, turf wars, and adventurous exploits in the old subway network.

  To the right-hand tunnel, she called out, “Requesting permission to cross! Calling on past favors, Miguel!”

  “What favors, lady?” came a faraway voice.

  “Tell Miguel that Celeste is coming to collect what she’s owed.”

  There was an awkward silence. Jamala caught Celeste’s eyes and asked, all with a jerk of her head, if they should CAMO. Celeste shook her head.

  The voice called out, “Miguel’s away.”

  She l
aughed with cynical aplomb. “Away? Is that the codeword for, ‘Miguel is buried up to his neck in tunnel pussy’? Tell him to tuck in his dick for five minutes and get out here.”

  There was a painful silence. “If he do owe you, I doubt he owes all your friends there.”

  Celeste forged a smile. She had considered whether to chance a stealthy pass through the tunnels. At a flat run she knew they could scoot by the Butcher Boys’ village in under fifteen minutes before the battery on their CAMO suits died. The only quandary was they couldn’t run and stay silent, they couldn’t run with two antimatter missiles held between four of them, and Miguel had outfitted his tunnels with booby traps. He might even have waspbots set to kill anyone not of the tribe’s pheromones. Celeste had once seen a CAMO-clad merc assailed by two thousand waspbots. In seconds his outline was covered with crawling metallic bugs. They got into his eyes, mouth, and suit. By the time the swarm was stopped with an EM pulse, their stings had liquefied 50 percent of his tissues. He had poured out of his armor.

  Celeste continued the bluff. “Tell Miguel to get his skinny ass out here right now or I’m coming to get him.”

  She heard footsteps slapping the hard concrete. Miguel emerged from the gloom. He cut an attractive figure, a puff of black hair on his chin. “So what’s this crazy shit about me owing you? I owe nobody.”

  “Assassin job with the Disaster Chief.”

  “You hated that pigfucker too.”

  Celeste’s grin was a flash of white teeth. “I hate lots of people. Doesn’t mean I kill them all. Give me free passage here and we’re even.”

  Miguel studied her face. “What’s in the bags?”

  “Candy.”

  “The kind you chew, or the kind that pops?”

  “The kind that’s eyes-only.”

  Miguel’s smile didn’t fade, but his eyes remained as lustrously feral as a wildcat. In the Wastelands of North America, life was short and fortunes were made or lost in an instant. The Butcher Boys were nothing special in the grand scheme; there were bigger fish in the rubble up north or down south. But he was no dummy, either. The Butcher Boys had been around for thirty years, and they had managed to expel some iron competition from the tunnels in this grid.

  “You want through, I get to see up your skirt.” He shuffled past her and approached the covered missiles. Her team members started to recoil, but Celeste tapped a quick “Cooperate” command to them.

  She came up behind him just as he was pulling the tarp off one of the missiles. Miguel’s eyes were hard, fascinated, and merciless. The torpedo-shaped object was small, slightly bigger than a Davy Crocket artillery shell. The difference was in the contents: if Miguel had his mechanics open the thing up, they would find something very different amid the dissected framework of guide-beam and gyro control. The entire length of the missile was filled with suspension traps for the devastatingly destructive, absolutely priceless, material within.

  Miguel walked to the other tarp, lifted it, and scratched his head. Celeste held her breath, counting on him underestimating the value here.

  “Some people come looking for these?” he asked at last.

  “No one’s missing them yet.”

  “There was some attack on the other side of the marsh a couple hours ago. Any chance these tarts came out of that?”

  Celeste struggled to keep her composure. How the fuck did he know about that? Quickly, she said, “An attack in the gloplands? Say it ain’t so!”

  Miguel was silent a long while. He peered at the tunnel behind them.

  Finally, Celeste sighed sharply. “You know what, Miguel? Go to hell. We came here to avoid all that filthy water and to see an old friend. You gonna harass me? I’ll just make a grand tour through the gloplands. And I promise to remember this shit.” She started marching back the way they’d come.

  “Hold up,” Miguel called. “No need to be rude. You can pass this way, babe. Last thing I want is to disappoint you.” He clapped her affectionately on the back, kissed both cheeks, kissed her lips, and let her into the tunnel, through the checkpoint.

  Celeste lost a little color when she saw not one, not two, but three emerald green waspbot-nests bolted into the ceiling. In the dark, their crawling metal bodies glittered.

  Jesus.

  “What about the glops, Celeste?” Jeff complained.

  “Shut up!” Jamala countered.

  They were through.

  Chapter Three

  Night Train, Tomatoes, Corpse

  They called it the Night Train not only because it was the solitary tunnel-route to Luna’s farside, but also because it was entirely underground. Gethin’s window seat was black the whole way, with intermittent pale lights marking maintenance hatches and walkways in the blasted-out Lunar crust. It reminded him of his youth spent riding the industrious PRT network in the London enclave, where if you lived in the stalks of the arcology (as the Bryces did) you always took the shuttles, escalators, or inclinators to access other levels of that human hive. You spent your life in a honeycomb of tunnels that might as well have been the moon.

  Gethin had the chance to eat during the forty-minute Night Train route – the stewardess brought him a chilled cup of plum tomatoes, cheese cubes, and rice cakes. It was fascinating to eat again. Like never before he was aware of the primal savagery of consumption. The tomatoes popped into his mouth like Aztec hearts, his tongue feeling them over with a wet swipe, his teeth crushing them so the juices squirted out in gory ribbons. His tongue tossed the pulverized mass down the hatch, and Gethin noted how it fell, outlining his esophagus, reaching his belly. His digestive juices were frothing for something to destroy. He washed the mass down with another coffee.

  Then he checked the rest of his messages.

  There was an email from a repatriation company, promoting their services in helping secure a new home, job, and any training he might need. Gethin deleted it without reading past the header.

  To his amazement the second email was from Lori, blinking for attention; Gethin hastily buried it, knowing he didn’t have the time for such personal matters now. But feelings rose in his throat, anyway.

  Anomaly. It was the reason he had gone to Mars. The IPC wanted him to investigate reports of subterranean Martian cities – as in alien cities – which of course proved to be absurd. Gethin had climbed down into the lava tunnels with local archaeologists as his guide. One of them was Lori. Twenty-four years old, less than half his actual age, cool and mysterious. Bemused by his mission. Unimpressed by his recounting of Earth’s mighty arcologies, technologies, virtualities.

  They made love within the week…a mile down in the redworld’s underdark.

  The investigation took two months. When it proved to be just another tribute to humanity’s superstitious, belief-driven nature, Gethin let himself be persuaded into applying for a teaching post at Olympus University. Thinking back, he couldn’t believe it now. Athens on Earth was his home, its university his life. His impulsive decision was incredible, shocking testament to how beguiling Lori could be. Waist-length dark hair, her freckled pretty face, the mischievous flash of her smile, the impish bedroom eyes…

  Her youthful optimism.

  That was really it, wasn’t it? Gethin looked young but he felt ancient, listless, oddly cornered in his Earthly life. Lori Gossamer Ambermoon exuded the fresh aura of someone not jaded by the dazzling distractions of the birthworld. Her youth – in mind, spirit, body – sucked Gethin in as if to a singularity’s gravity-well. His adopted Athenian culture still quoted the timeless truism of Sophocles: A girl’s glance working the will of heaven…merciless Aphrodite! The Greek goddess was still at work, playing the harp strings of the double helix with wicked skill.

  He and Lori married, opting for a standard ten-year contract without children. It took Gethin only an hour to realize his mistake. At the wedding reception, he met her people – family,
friends, colleagues – only to discover that maybe he really had found an alien civilization: the Martian colonists themselves.

  Mars was the one and only consideration in Martian colonial life. Despite being a frontier people, Martians scoffed at the larger universe. Rolled their eyes at his ‘Earthly’ values of science, art, and self-improvement. Aren’t you scientific? he’d counter, pointing out the vast terraforming projects they were involved in (oh! Don’t dare call it terraforming! It was Marsforming!) And to that they’d reply: Ours is the science of the practical. We use it to make things grow and prosper, while Earthers wield it like a flashy toy to see how much noise and color it will produce. Gethin was even willing to concede there was truth in that observation, if not for the fanatical extent the Martians took their argument. Their zealotry vibrated into the very coffers of their language; they spoke Terran to outsiders, and Quenya and Sindarin – the invented languages of ancient British writer J.R.R. Tolkien – among themselves.

  Gethin realized with dawning horror that he had been pulled into a cult. A cult on a planetary scale.

  Life at Olympus University was just as bad. It seemed impossible to form any meaningful relationships within a culture so pathologically independent. His only solace was spending time with offworlders who were on Mars for a short stint. Then he would miss Earth painfully. The blue of Earth! Day by day, he felt like his eyes were being burned out by the merciless rust deserts of the Red Planet.

  And Lori was the worst eccentric of all. She’d be gone for months at a time on geological excavations. She’d return like a passing comet, flaring bright and beautiful but cold and fleeting. Soon enough she’d be gone again.

  The only people Gethin truly got on with were the steel guilders he met at Carter Concourse, about forty minutes west of the Olympus campus where he sometimes trekked just to vary his surroundings. The Concourse was a commercial mecca as large as an airport, set amid a jungle of meticulously tended gardens. The steel guilders took over an entire wing of the facility for their lunch breaks, laughing, swearing, drinking, conversing in their tight-knit gaggle with the kind of camaraderie usually found in army barracks. They were not born-again fanatics like other Martians, but plebian realists who labored at the practical alchemy of metalworks: everything from gratings, girders, and fasteners to ship hulls, engines, and shielding. They were frontierists who still seemed to realize that there was something beyond the frontier. A universe that glinted at the edges of humanity’s narrow yard. Not so surprising, perhaps, given that many of them pulled lengthy rotations in the light orbits of Phobos and Deimos. You could see more of the universe from those lofty perches than planetside isolationists who toiled in dirt and dark.