She roared toward Earth, the ship thrumming, the controls shaking, countless ravagers before her.
They streamed across the distance, among the fastest ships humanity had ever built, so fast the hull rattled and she thought the ship would break.
The ravagers ahead saw her. Many spun toward the Saint Brendan, claws opening to expose the flaming innards.
Kemi howled wordlessly—the cry of a haunted woman, of a warrior, of a human who refused to fall—and fired her guns.
Two missiles flew out from the Brendan, leaving trails of fire, and slammed into two ravagers.
One missile barely left a dent. The second chipped a claw off the ravager, but the ship kept charging, a new claw uncurling to replace the lost one. Those claws opened to reveal swirling plasma, and fiery red bolts flew.
Kemi inhaled deeply.
I trained for this. I was born for this.
Noodles screamed.
She yanked her joystick sideways.
A fireball rolled over one wing.
She banked sharply in the opposite direction.
The second plasma bolt roared beneath their other wing.
She stormed forth, and she fired a hailstorm of bullets.
The bullets slammed into one ravager, ricocheting off claws, and a few made it into the flaming innards of the ship. Fire roared within. Kemi clenched her teeth and fired a heat-seeking missile.
She yanked back on the joystick with all her strength. The Saint Brendan shot upward, and the missile entered the fiery mouth of the ravager.
The marauder ship exploded.
Metal claws, each the size of a bus, shot out from the devastation. One claw slammed into a swooping Firebird, destroying the starfighter. Other claws hit ravagers, knocking them back. Kemi yanked on the controls, dodging more of the shrapnel, and rose higher.
She felt the blood drain from her face.
"So many," she whispered.
Earth was still far. The swarm covered the distance like locusts over fields.
And the human fleet was collapsing.
Thousands of Firebirds were flying ahead, falling fast, crashing toward Earth like comets. Each fallen ship stabbed Kemi like a marauder claw. She had flown a Firebird against the scum. She had flown these starfighters for five years, as a warrior, a guardian of humanity. She knew many of those pilots ahead. They were her friends.
And they were dying.
Here were no scum pods, weak ships made of fleshy, organic walls. The ravagers were terrors, and their spiky hulls withstood bullets and missiles. Only direct hits to their fiery mouths seemed to shatter them, but Kemi saw only a handful collapse, and even in their destruction, they blasted out claws, tearing down nearby human vessels. Human warships the size of office buildings were firing cannons, but the ravagers latched onto them like leeches, tearing their hulls, filling them with fire. A starfighter carrier was lumbering around the planet, only for thousands of ravagers to slam into it, to rip it apart. The massive ship, larger than the Statue of Liberty, tilted and plunged toward Earth, tearing apart in the atmosphere and streaming down toward the ocean.
Kemi kept flying, whipping around ravagers, dodging their attacks. Plasma blazed across the hull, heating, denting the metal, but she pulled left hard, rose higher, flew onward. Earth was close now, filling her field of vision. All around the Saint Brendan, Firebirds kept crashing down toward the planet. Warships crashed onto Earth's surface. Cities burned. Already several ravagers were making their way down toward the planet, spewing fire. Forests blazed and tidal waves washed over the shores.
"Kemi, we have to get out of here!" Noodles shouted. "This world is lost!"
"Then we'll die with it!" Kemi shouted back.
"We can't defeat them!" Noodles said. "We only have a few missiles left. We have to run!"
Kemi checked the armory. Noodles was right. They were low on ammo, and there were hundreds of thousands of ravagers here.
"Noodles, sit down and hold onto something."
"Kemi, what—"
"Hold on!" she said, reaching for the azoth engine controls
Noodles paled. "Kemi, what—are you—don't!"
But Kemi flipped the switch. She winced and grabbed her armrests.
"Kemi!" Noodles shouted.
Large warships had massive azoth engines, and they required hours to prime up. The Saint Brendan, built for speed and spying, had a smaller, faster, state-of-the-art warp engine, able to prime within only moments and create a bubble of warped spacetime around the vessel. Flight instructors always taught to avoid flying near large objects when bending spacetime, and Earth was pretty damn large.
I'm already a refugee, Kemi thought. Here's to breaking every damn rule in the book.
Ravagers flew toward the Brendan from every direction, blasting out plasma.
With blue fire, the azoth engine kicked into life.
Spacetime warped around the ship.
The curve of the universe caught the charging ravagers. Claws bent, then snapped off. Plasma flowed across the bubble. A dozen ravagers shattered.
The Saint Brendan shot outward.
Kemi switched off the azoth engine.
She had flown in warped space for only a second, maybe two.
They had destroyed a dozen ravagers. The Saint Brendan now hovered well beyond the moon, millions of kilometers from Earth.
"Kemi, damn it!" Noodles shouted, looking green. "You could have torn us apart. Bending spacetime next to Earth's gravitational pull! Really! Is that how your mother raised you?"
"I destroyed a dozen ravagers, maybe even twenty," she said. She gazed back toward the distant Earth. From here, it was just a blue dot. But when she zoomed in her viewport, she could see the lights of battle, the human fleet overwhelmed.
Earth falls, she thought.
Kemi lowered her head. During her exile, she had tried to warn Earth of this menace. She had leaked all the information she had—the information Ben-Ari had retrieved, had gone to prison for—only to be dismissed as a kook, to be smeared in the media as a conspiracy theorist. She had secretly approached old comrades, fellow pilots, had urged them to listen, had tried to enlist them, only to flee when they threatened to call the military police. Kemi had tried to fight. She had failed.
And now humanity fell.
She winced, remembering the prison she had seen in the demilitarized zone. The webbings covering the walls. The marauders in the shadows. The piles of corpses. The man screaming as the alien sawed open his skull. Now this terror had reached Earth, right here before her, and she could not stop it.
But I can still fight, Kemi thought. I can go down with Earth. I'm done hiding.
She prepared to reactivate the azoth engine, to fly back into battle, to take down as many ravagers as she could before they shot her down.
"Wait," Noodles said, catching her wrist.
She looked at him. A scrawny young man, his glasses thick, his frame small. A cocky man, a genius, a narcissist, yet now he was pale. Now his hand trembled as he held her wrist.
"We have to go back," Kemi said. "We cannot abandon Earth, not while we can still fight, still fire our last missiles, still take down a few enemies."
Noodles stared at the distant planet and cringed. "Look, I agree about sacrifice, victory, saving the world, all that stuff. I've read Tolkien, and I'm all Team Frodo here. But we won't do any good charging into a suicide mission."
"So you'd have us linger in this ship forever?" Kemi said, eyes burning. "The last two humans, floating for all eternity in darkness?"
He managed to crack a shaky grin. "While I'm indeed tempted to remain trapped here with you forever, the last human man and woman forced to procreate—repeatedly, one would assume, and with much vigor—there's a better way. Well, no, not a better way, because nothing is better than that, but . . . Oh damn my honor! There might still be a way to win this war."
Kemi shook her head. "How could you joke at a time like this?" She looked back at Earth. Through the
magnified viewport, she saw more marauder ships invading the atmosphere, making their way down to the surface. Barely any human ships still fought. Her tears splashed the controls. "Oh, God . . . Our home. Our home is falling. My parents . . ."
Noodles gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder. "Don't worry, Kemi. The marauders don't want to exterminate us like the scum did. They just want to eat our brains! They'll probably just farm us like cattle."
She reeled toward him. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
"No, but it does give us time," Noodles said. "Time to find help. Remember how I said I'm Team Frodo? Well, maybe right now, we need to be Team Aragorn. We just need some help from the undead."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Kemi said. "Is this Space Galaxy again?"
Noodles groaned. "Space Galaxy? Damn it, woman, have I taught you nothing? Space Galaxy is the classic science fiction show that, tragically, only ran for three seasons between 2053 and 2056 before those geniuses at Red Fox Entertainment decided to cancel it. Cancel it! Can you imagine? Canceling Space Galaxy! This all happened because bean-counting execs don't appreciate creative integrity. Thank goodness they're still making the movies, but—"
"Noodles!" Kemi said. "For chrissake, you seem more upset about a century-old program being canceled than Earth falling. Get to the point!"
He heaved a sigh. "Right. Back to The Lord of the Rings. When the orcs were ready to destroy Minas Tirith, the noble Aragorn took the paths of the dead. There he summoned an army of ghosts to fight on his behalf. With their help, he vanquished the forces of the dark lord, and—"
"Noodles, enough!" Kemi said. "Speak English."
"I found something," he said. "It was a year ago. Back when Ben-Ari had me hacking into the military and Chrysopoeia Corp mainframes. At the time, I laughed about it. I thought it just an urban legend. A myth. But over the past couple years, between binging on All Systems Go! episodes, I've been doing more research, and I might be onto something here." His eyes lit up. "A legendary, ancient fleet. A ghost fleet. Ghosts, Kemi! Just like Arag—"
"Noodles!" Kemi reached back to the controls. "Enough ghost stories. We have to fight. We—"
He grabbed her wrist again. "No! Listen to me, Kemi. The military has been studying this. They've been taking it very seriously. The HDF has—or had, if the marauders already destroyed it—a secret base in the Oort Cloud. From there, two light-years away from Earth, they've been scanning the skies for this legendary ghost fleet. And some sources say they've already pinpointed its location."
It was Kemi's turn to groan. "A ghost fleet, Noodles? This isn't time for your stories."
"This is real, Kemi!" He wouldn't release her arm. "Okay, I don't know if a bunch of floating sheets with eye holes are hovering out there. But according to the data I collected, there is an ancient, derelict fleet thousands of light-years away, farther than humanity has ever flown. They say it's over a million years old, that this fleet was built when Homo Erectus was struggling to figure out how to bang two stones together. And they say that for a million years, that fleet has hovered in space, lost, waiting to fight again. They call it the Ghost Fleet, just a story soldiers tell, a story of alien spirits haunting the halls of those ancient vessels. But the HDF took this very, very seriously. The top scientists in charge of the project believed the fleet contained terrible weapons—weapons far more powerful than humans, scum, or even marauders possess. If we can find this fleet, we'll have the power to destroy the marauders' armada."
"Sure, no problem," Kemi said, hearing the weariness in her voice. "We'll zip across the galaxy, find an ancient ghost army, and save the world." She grabbed Noodles and shook him. "Are you even listening to yourself? You sound like some conspiracy theory nut!"
He shook himself free. "Well, if I'm a nut, so are a thousand alien civilizations. For years, aliens from across the galaxy struggled to find the Ghost Fleet, to gain its power. They all failed. It's a vast galaxy, and nobody could pinpoint the Ghost Fleet's location."
Kemi leaned back in her seat, feeling deflated. "And I suppose you'll tell me you have the coordinates."
Noodles shook his head. "No. But I know somebody who does. Somebody who worked in the Oort Cloud. Somebody who studied the Ghost Fleet with the best researchers of humanity. Kemi, darling, we need to find the only person who can help us now." He hopped into his seat and placed his feet on the dashboard. "Do you know the way to Manila?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Lailani had parked her mobile school in the shantytown, ready to distribute books to the children, when death rained from the sky.
For a year now, she had been coming here, bringing hope to the most hopeless. For a year now, she had relived her childhood, living in the filth, the despair, the wretched disease, living among the lowest on Earth. But now, a woman, a veteran, a teacher, she lived here not to suffer but to alleviate suffering. To build. To heal.
The day had begun like any other. Lailani loaded books into her wagon; a new shipment had just arrived from her church overseas. Some days she loaded books into her rowboat, for many streets here were flooded, had become rivers clogged with debris. Other roads were alleyways, labyrinths that snaked through the hovels. She wore sandals, shorts, and a sleeveless shirt that revealed the tattoos on her arms: a dragon, denoting her strength; a rainbow, symbol of her heart; several stars, counting the scum she had killed in the war; and finally, flowers around the wrists, hiding the scars of her suicide attempt at age sixteen. The flowers were the most dear to her, for they symbolized beauty from despair, a rebirth of life, and that was her mission here. To bring such rebirth to those who suffered like she had.
Sofia walked at her side, a rosary hanging around her neck. Her blond hair was tied into a ponytail, and weariness filled her blue eyes. She had grown up in poverty too, hiding from the Russian tanks in the rubble of Ukraine, orphaned and hungry. For the past year, Sofia had marched steadfastly at Lailani's side, a fellow soldier in this new war, as much a sister-in-arms as those troops who had fought with Lailani against the scum.
"We'll head east today," Sofia said, helping Lailani wheel the wagon of books.
Lailani caressed Sofia's cheek and kissed her lips. "Hope into despair."
Sofia smiled, and for a moment, all her weariness and heartache faded, and true light filled her eyes. She repeated their mantra. "Hope into despair."
They rolled the wagon into the shantytowns. Visible from here, only a few kilometers away, rose the skyscrapers of Central Manila, a hive of concrete and glass and industry. But all around that glistening center, spreading for many kilometers, rotted the slums, a hell where millions of souls withered away.
There were no true houses here. The millions of poor collected slats of wood, sheets of corrugated aluminum, and scraps of tarpaulin, erecting them into crude shelters two or three stories tall. The wood rotted. The metal rusted. The scraps of cloth fluttered. Through slits in these sheds peered the eyes of children—eyes too large in their gaunt faces. Children. Children everywhere, millions of them, peering from behind wood and metal, running naked on the streets, splashing in muddy puddles. With no birth control here in the shantytowns, the children filled the alleyways, crowding the slums, often dying from hunger or disease, ending up in the brothels, or sold to foreigners.
The stench of human waste filled the air, and trash piled up on the streets. Jumbles of electrical wires crackled overhead, thick as tangled spiderwebs, bringing intermediate power to the shelters, enough to heat the scraps of food collected from the trash heaps, to try and kill the bacteria, to boil the water collected from the dirty rivers. The garbage piled up everywhere, mounds, hills of it—wrappers, human waste, dead animals, all filling the hot, humid air with its fumes. One could barely see a shred of road, just water and mud filled with the waste of this place.
And everywhere—the millions, crammed in, covering the streets, dressed in rags, hungering, praying, begging. Here was the densest place on Earth, sixty thousand p
eople crammed into every square kilometer—a density beyond what human sanity could endure. There was no privacy. No place to hide from the searing sunlight, the stench, the crowds, the agony. They sat on the mounds of trash. They stood pushed against crude, crumbling structures of rusted metal and scraps of wood cobbled together. Babies, millions of babies, squealed in the squalor, doomed to grow old in this labyrinth, to live and die and rot here. Lailani knew. She had lived this life herself.
These people have no hope, she thought, walking among them. They are alive but they are in Hell.
And into this hell, Lailani and Sofia came. They brought no prayers. They brought no charity. They would hand out no crosses, no food, no coin.
They brought books.
"Tita Lailani!" the children cried, running toward her, barefoot and hungry but grinning. "Tita Sofia!"
Lailani smiled and patted their heads. Sofia handed out pencils and notebooks. The children gathered around. Lailani set up the chairs, and the children sat, eager to learn.
And Lailani taught them their letters, taught them to read simple words, to write, gifted them books to practice with. There were no schools here in the slums. These children would never be allowed into the city center, never have the funds to pay for education. But as Lailani taught them to read, she dared to hope, to dream—that someday these children could leave the slums. Could find work in the city center or abroad. Could come back here like she had, could continue the cycle.
There are millions of children here, she knew. And thousands more are born every day. I cannot save them all. But if I can save a few, then my life is worthwhile. Every child I save is worth more than a hundred scum I could have killed. Here is my true battle, my true nobility.
She was practicing writing letters with a young girl, a tiny little thing in a blue dress, when the skies cracked open and the fire rained.
Lailani looked up, and her heart shattered.
Her eyes watered.
No, she thought. No. Please, God. Not again.
Earth Fire (Earthrise Book 4) Page 27
