Earthweb

by Marc Stiegler

  In twenty-six days humanity would make its last ditch stand against Shiva V.

  Chapter Two

  T minus Twenty-six:

  The Month of Shiva

  Years of orbital hopping had not lessened his dread of weightlessness. As the ship coasted into space and his stomach floated gently toward his throat, deep inside he just knew he was falling to certain death. He fought it by focusing on something else, anything else. Right now, he was focusing on the stars. Not a good choice. It didn't help.

  Reggie Oxenford turned from the tiny porthole filled with black space and bright stars. His gaze swept the circular room, studying the other people making today's trip. Less than a quarter of the people had that "Oh-my-God-I'm-going-to-die" look that pronounced them useless for the duration of the Month of Shiva. It raised Reggie's spirits to see the majority of the people coping so well—after all, if the upcoming Angel Two assault failed, if this Shiva proceeded on the stately course of destruction set by the first one, no one on this vessel—or anyone on the ground below, for that matter—would survive the year.

  Could he work up a good news story on this topic? Reggie dimly remembered a shuttle ride similar to this one during the Battle of Shiva II. That time, the shuttle had been almost completely full of people who had already given up. Gross World Production had fallen by eighty percent during the thirty-six days between the Angel One and Angel Six assaults. Of course, the battle with Shiva II had been a ghastly screw-up from the get-go. The military bureaucrats had sent a stream of Angel teams with traditional combat training, instead of a handful of squads prepped specifically for tackling Shiva. Over two million men in five thousand ships had died creating the covering fire for those doomed assaults. Only after Shiva had fried Montreal and almost nailed San Francisco did the bureaucrats concede failure and let MacBride take control. Reggie shuddered as he thought about how close a call that battle had been.

  The battles with Shiva III and IV had gone well in comparison. Scary and terrible though they'd been, no more cities had been turned into charnel houses. And with the defeat of every Shiva, the percentage of lost souls fell. People were, in a billion different and private ways, getting used to the idea that the world faced sudden and total annihilation once every five years. No one knew why the Shivas kept coming, though there were whole 'castpoints devoted to the analysis. People didn't let the uncertainty get to them, they just kept on keeping on, in a remarkable testament to the adaptability of the human mind and the resilience of the human spirit.

  Gravity returned as the black sky quietly turned a deep clear blue. Reggie looked down with relief. He picked out their destination easily. Kisumu had until recently been tiny, almost primitive by Western standards. Now a vast sprawl of buildings consumed the edge of Lake Victoria, marking its location. And of all the new building complexes in Kisumu, nothing drew one's eye faster than the drop port.

  The Dover Drop Port from which he had just departed could have fit invisibly into a corner of the Kisumu field. Monster rotons sat on their concrete pads. Machines and human workers alike raced to load military equipment aboard—the rotons would lift the weapons into high orbits in preparation for the deadly alien ship.

  Over a million people had relocated to Kisumu in the last ten years. Kisumu lay on the equator, and at an altitude of over three thousand feet it was the perfect place from which to launch large payloads into high orbits. Earth Defense had spotted its potential early on and had eventually transformed the place into the heavy-lift center for both Africa and Europe. Only the huge drop port at Machu Pichu competed with Kisumu in scale.

  The port grew rapidly in his window. Reggie stared fixedly at the ground as it came up to meet him. His view was scarcely altered by the commercial roton's huge copter blades as they gained speed, whirling up to a velocity that made them invisible.

  In college, Reggie had spent a semester fascinated by twentieth-century history. He'd studied the old-fashioned rockets, the V-2 and the Saturn V. In comparison to those graceful brutes, the roton spacecraft was almost disappointing in its simplicity. People back then had wanted glamour and mystery in space travel, not something that looked like it should be on your breakfast table. Undoubtedly, people had read too many science fiction novels where the spacecraft was gleaming silver or deadly jet-black.

  But rotons were simple. To make a roton, stand an egg on its end. Attach four huge blades to the fattest part of the egg, and attach a rocket motor to the tip of each blade. During take-off, the rockets didn't lift the ship—they just rotated the blades, and up you went, just like an old-fashioned helicopter. As you rose into ever thinner atmosphere, the blades tilted till the rocket motors were pointing down; only then did the ship actually travel like an old-fashioned rocket.

  During these takeoffs, the roton looked like a Rube Goldberg device compared to the ships invented in science fiction. Coming down, though, the roton was stranger still. He watched and listened to the descent of his own vehicle.

  As always, the landing was dead-quiet. The rocket motors on the tips of the blades were shut down and silent during re-entry, since the frenetically whirling blades soaked up kinetic energy during the first stages of re-entry and didn't need more boost. By inverting the angle of the blades at the right moment, the ship used that energy to push back against the atmosphere and become an autogyro. The spinning blades contained all the power needed to make the descent smooth, gradual, and even comfortable.

  A last spike of pressure accompanied the tipping of the blades to a stronger angle, and the ship settled on the ground, its journey complete. Reggie Oxenford heaved an unconscious sigh of relief.

  He glanced at the sketchy map of the drop port on his palmtop, tapped for the directions to his rented skycar, and headed off.

  * * *

  Jessica tossed in her sleep. Work dreams hounded her tonight, as she wrestled with strategies to lure the CEO of Bigelow's Recycling into sensible action—sensible action being the course she had laid out, naturally. No strategy in the dream gave any promise. The problem gnawed at her, a virtual piranha nibbling the lobes of her mind.

  Relief came only when the sound of her name interrupted her anguished slumber. She forced one eye to focus on the clock. It confirmed her worst fears. The autoperk didn't even have her caffeinated lifeblood ready this early.

  "Jessica," whispered the sardonic, sensual voice of the Boyfriend from Hell. Jessica groaned with fresh horror. Once she had thought herself clever for programming her home control unit to mimic him—his very voice raised the hair on the back of her neck, making her uncomfortable enough to ensure she got up and out. Big mistake. Somehow, her human pinball game always failed where she herself was concerned.

  "Ugghhh," she replied, then went back to sleep.

  But the Boyfriend insisted. "Jessica! Someone is at the door. He says it's urgent."

  Jessica groaned. "Shut up," she told her computer. She shook her head, and once again stuck a Post-it note on her parietal lobe. She'd reprogram that computer's voice today!

  Through half-open eyes she saw the pinkish glow of sunrise. That made her groan again. She wrapped her favorite tattered sky-blue robe around her and headed toward the door. Even her teddy bears weren't awake, she noted as she stumbled past them. She checked the monochrome display that showed the intruder; the straight-backed man in the crisp uniform did not look like a thug. Not that a thug had been likely in the first place—central computers were invariably wired to call security agencies at the first sign of trouble, and thugs knew it.

  With a half-hearted jerk, she opened the door. She had planned to glare at the stranger who had awakened her at this ridiculous hour, to force him into stammering apology at the very least. Her plan suffered an abrupt change, however, after one look at her visitor.

  Standing five foot eleven inches, even Jessica's friends couldn't describe her as petite. Yet she had to lean her head back to see the man's face. His snow-white hair accentuated his quiet dignity.

  The cle
ft chin matched the chiseled lines of his face so perfectly that a biosculptor could not have done better. A biosculptor, however, would have eased out the ingrained worry lines from the forehead and temples. No, Jessica concluded, this man had always looked like a Canadian Mountie. She suspected he'd make a good dance partner—Jessica had trouble finding men tall enough who could lead properly, and he just looked like the type.

  Her eyes fell to the six stars on the shoulder of his Earth Defense uniform. She wondered how long it took to acquire that many.

  "Jessica Travis? I'm General Samuels. Kurt Samuels." He held out his hand.

  She shook his hand automatically, feeling foolish in her faded old robe as she studied this GQ poster boy for the mature male. General Samuels. She'd heard that name somewhere before. If only she could remember where. She switched off her glare and gave him a small smile instead. "How can I help you?" she asked.

  The General pursed his lips. "Well, that's a long story. The short version is, I need your help to destroy Shiva VI."

  Finally his name clicked. Her eyes widened, and she came fully awake. "General Samuels! Please come in!" The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of the Earth Defense Agency entered her two-bedroom townhouse.

  "Thank you," he said as he followed her into the living room. He laughed. "I'm sorry, but you should have seen your first expression."

  Jessica pointed to a chair for her guest, then sat herself on the sofa. She wrinkled her nose and replied dryly, "Perhaps it's available on the vidcam instant replay." Had another man laughed at her like that, she'd have stored the offense for later retribution. The General . . . well, he deserved a little slack. After all, he'd guarded humanity for something like fifteen years, or ten anyway—she knew he'd been Chairman during the Shiva III action, though she was not sure who'd been in charge against Shiva II. And of course, Shiva I hadn't been defeated by the military at all.

  "You won at Angels' Gambit last night," he said, with laughter still in his blue eyes, the twinkling so bright she could have used it to light up her Christmas tree. Then the meaning of his words hit her.

  How did he even know she played Angels' Gambit? How did he know she played last night? She stared at him.

  "Did you ever wonder how Angels' Gambit could be so inexpensive even though it's a total-immersion game? Have you ever heard of anything like it, with a top-of-the-line cocoon, that you could play for two dollars?"

  Jessica nodded thoughtfully. "I confess, I wondered how they made a profit. It was too cheap to be that real."

  "Earth Defense owns Angels' Gambit, Jessica. We used it to find you."

  Jessica tipped her head back and threw the General's laughter back at him. Her laughter was just a touch too loud and too wild, however, to reflect his properly. "Okay, I'll bite. Why?" she asked, knowing that he wanted her to ask.

  The General's eyes searched the living room, from the Southwestern knotty-pine daybed-cum-sofa by the brick fireplace to the Oriental prints and undersea photos that adorned the walls. "You have a weblink in here somewhere?" He stood up and lifted her blue teddy bear off the sofa to peer under it in mock inquiry.

  She laughed in spite of her tension. "Not in the living room." She waved her hand. "My office." Jessica led the General down the hall to her office, awkwardly unable to think of anything to say. Fortunately the hall was short.She flipped on the wallscreen as she entered the room, then realized with horror what a shambles her office was. Her central server stood agape in the corner, its wires streaming in wild disarray across the floor. Plug-ins stood naked on the motherboard–its case lay halfway across the room. She'd been working on a CPU upgrade the other night and hadn't gotten around to cleaning up yet. Not the image she wanted to present to this man. Granma would chew her down to her toes if she found out that Jessica had brought General Samuels into this wreck of a place.

  Jessica rolled her spare chair over next to her desk, letting the General sit down. She grabbed the trackball and set up an anonymous connection to the Web—she wasn't going to log in with her permanent identity if she was going to turn control over to the General. She offered him the trackball.

  The General cleared his throat apologetically. "Actually, Ms. Travis, it would be easier if you could slave the screen to my palmtop. I have all the information here," he explained. "Is that possible?"

  "No problem. Call me 'Jessica,' by the way." She popped a window on the screen, set its capabilities so it could access the Web but not her server, and turned authority for the window over to the infrared port on the General's palmtop. A picture of another tall, handsome man appeared there, with pale skin and dark curly hair. She recognized him immediately, both from the onscreen photo and as the avatar in Angels' Gambit. "Morgan MacBride?"

  "That's right, Jessica.' The General tapped his chin with his finger. Jessica just bet women went for that cleft. "He's the best-known person on Earth today. Ten billion people recognize him at a glance. Morgan MacBride, savior of Earth, honored by more people than Jesus Christ, Buddha, or Mohammed. He's the private citizen who, after all the fleets of Earth had been destroyed, took four ex-Marine buddies, snuck a partially stealthed roton into Shiva's docking bay during the fireballing of London, and blew the damn thing to kingdom come. He couldn't quite save Washington, but he saved everybody else." The General's eyes glittered suspiciously as he summarized the well-known tale. Then he blinked; the fleeting window into his soul snapped shut. He shook his head as if to clear it. "But, Jessica, there's a problem with this picture." The window split; in the second half of the window another man appeared.

  Every feature of this man's appearance seemed out of sync, a complete integration of contradictions. The tan skin of his face, neck, and hands had the texture of creased and battered old shoe leather. Yet his huge–even grotesque–chest and shoulder muscles marked a physical strength seemingly impossible in a man who appeared that old. Liver spots formed an irregular pattern across his smooth bald head, another sign of age and fatigue. Yet the man's eyes burned with youthful though dark intensity. Those eyes looked familiar. She looked just at the eyes for a long moment. Then she looked back at the other picture. The eyes were the same. Her breathing stopped for a second as she stared at Kurt Samuels. "Morgan MacBride," she whispered.

  The General nodded.

  She looked back at the new picture. Curiously, for all his physical deficiencies, he was not unattractive. Despite the blemishes and the wrinkles he was a legend, and she could see why. He reminded her of the Beast from childhood tales, who did not even look human, but whose sheer strength and passion gave him character that the smooth-skinned twenty-something Ken—or even GI Joe—dolls she knew could never achieve. Still, he looked older than she'd expected. "I'd heard the rumors that he was dead," Jessica muttered, "But I never took them seriously. I didn't realize . . ." She thought back to her childhood memories of Shiva I and the aftermath. She looked again at the photo of MacBride taken just after his return to Earth. "He can't be more than fifty years old!" she exclaimed.

  The General agreed. "You're a bit high . . . he just turned forty-eight. But we still have a problem." His stylus danced across the surface of his palmtop, and new information filled the window of her wallscreen.

  It was a medical report. The General spoke as she read. "Morgan has a couple of strikes against him. First of all, he is genetically predisposed to rapid aging. Secondly, he took a whopping dose of radiation when Shiva self-destructed during his escape." He pointed at the report. "You can read the consequences for yourself."

  Jessica scanned the list of medical jargon. It set forth a veritable feast of physically fatal indicators. Three different forms of cancer had metastasized in MacBride's body before being pummeled into remission. A brain tumor the size of a pea underwent regular inspection for signs of growth. His left kidney operated at fifty-three percent efficiency, and his right kidney was on its fourth replacement—Morgan's immune system had rejected each of the first three within weeks, despite advanced cloning techniques. The prob
lems with his heart had names she had never heard of before, but they looked bad. Half a dozen doctors swore that a heart transplant for a person with such a history of systemic rejection was going to be fatal.

  The feeling of panic from last night, as she watched the disastrous assault on Shiva V, came back to her. "Oh, God! He's been the Controller against every last one of them!"

  The General's voice became a whisper. "That's right, Jessica. For every Shiva since that first one, we've sent out at least two Angel teams. Angel One has always been run by the brightest, fastest combat controller we could train. No Angel One team has ever succeeded. Starting with Shiva III , we've always had Morgan run Angel Two. As you just said, no Shiva has ever gotten past him."

  Jessica felt lightheaded. "He's the only one who can stop them. What are we going to do?"

  The General's eyes commanded hers. "You're leaving with me, Jessica Travis." He looked around the room, at the clutter and the comfortable chaos. She could see that he knew this was not merely her house, but her anchor. "I don't think you'll be coming back." Jessica knew what he meant. The house might remain her possession, but it would never again be her home. She rose in response to the General's order.